Whatever Happened to Perfect Dark?

It's incredible how in it's time this stood up to Golden eye and in my opinion surpass it without the backing of a renown franchise name.

Perfect Dark Remaster on X360 is still THE BEST Perfect Dark Exp. Ever

Perfect Dark on N64 is still my favorite first person shooter, for many reasons. The endless multiplayer options and settings, co-op, counter-op, the challenges, tracking for character stats and rankings in multiplayer mode, unlocking cheats, great levels, perfect difficulty, multiple exits and entrances on levels, different perspectives on different difficulties. The main issue with the game is just that there are more escort missions than is ideal. Otherwise, it's wonderful. I'm not really interested in trying Perfect Dark Zero, but I enjoyed Perfect Dark on Game Boy Color. Anyway, nice video. I gave a thumbs up.

PD Zero was actually a really fun game at launch. 32 players online on 360 was dope, the game modes were fun. IT played clunky as hell, but really fun infected mode.

Buying the expansion pack specifically so I could play this was 1000% worth it! So many hours I played this game.

I wish Rare could have the IP back at least as a show of “return to form” but the original Rare has been long dead and buried for 20 years. Once all the original creatives and staff left including leadership, it’s just a name and a logo owned by Microsoft

Damn it.. the series is living up to it's name... First Perfection... then darkness.

A fun Fact: Joanna Dark was originally supposed to be voiced by Estelle Ellis, Fans Star Fox Adventures fans know her as Krystal. However they changed the Voice Actress.

Hopefully more news about the reboot comes out, would love to hear more good news about it. The original Perfect Dark was and is one of my all time favorite video games ever made, and the soundtrack was just fantastic! Great video!

Greatest FPS of all time. I played countless hours with my friends growing up and I now play with my 2 sons to this day more than 20 years later. Top 3 best games of all time in any genre.

I think something that's not considered in the conversation is that GE/PD/TS2 form their own 'subgenre' of shooter. I call this subgenre a 'Gauntlet Shooter', and I feel it has a LOT of untapped potential as an idea. Allow me to explain: What makes a Gauntlet Shooter? On its face, the core feature of 'Gauntlet Shooter' is that of expanding levels based on difficulty. You are incentivized to play on higher difficulties by being given more raw things to do - the amount of places you can physically go increase, as do the goals, giving you more actual challenges. For example, in Timesplitters 2 the first level works as follows: Easy - Go from one side of the facility to the other, and leave Medium - Go from one side of the facility to the other, fight your way BACK through zombies, and leave Hard - Go from one side of the facility to the other, fight your way BACK through zombies, and fight a helicopter on the top of the dam, and leave. The Second feature, to help facilitate challenge, is that you DO NOT GAIN HEALTH BACK. Unlike games of yore where you could restore health, and later games where it just recharged, a 'Gauntlet Shooter' has constantly draining health as you get injured, with no way to restore it. You DO get armor, but unlike most games (where you still lose health, but fraction of the damage goes to the armor), armor in a Gauntlet Shooter acts as your health. This makes the game much more stringent about resource management and not getting shot. To balance this, you have a collection of other small features. 1 - as difficulty increases, more physical enemies appear (rather than just changing their numeric damage values), presenting more actual opportunities to be killed. Enemies don't get tougher, rather more enemies appear to fill out the expanded level. 2 -ALL weapons are projectile based, not hitscan. This allows both you and enemy alike, to successfully dodge anything shot at you. 3 - Weapon aiming is decoupled entirely from the camera - this allows the player to perform extremely tricky shots while maintaining maximum speed. 4 - Head and limbshots are special because of the decoupled gun aiming. Limbs cause the enemy (in most cases) to stagger, and headshots ALWAYS kill. 5 - Enemies stagger a bit upon noticing you, and on easier difficulties, before firing. **This was more of a balance feature for the low framerates back in the day**, but, it serves as a balance to orient the decoupled aiming camera. The core gameplay of the Gauntlet Shooter is thus a resource-management game that rewards good players with more things to do rather than trinkets. Levels become a 'gauntlet' in which you must manage your health and plan out how you will approach every room. Extremely skilled players turn each level into a dance of precision, pulling off incredibly difficult one-taps on enemies as they move around at the speed of Doomguy. This is an extinct subgenre that NEEDS to come back.

The simple truth is, those who were invested in and cared about Perfect Dark left Rare shortly after making Perfect Dark and those remaining didn't care for the IP at all, not to mention what made things worse is they had no idea how to make a fps, that knowledge went with the guys who left; Rareware consisted of multiple teams who were all semi-isolated from each other as the company expanded dramatically in a period of only 4 years from roughly 30 people to over 80 employees. All had their own separate game engines which they all wrote from scratch and they all individually owned, which came back to haunt Rare after the Microsoft buyout resulting in half the team quitting. At the time there were five teams at Rareware who between them shared the same artists and composers, but were completely separate designers and programmers: The FPS guys (who also contributed the shooting sections of Banjo-Tooie), the Banjo-Kazooie team who were working on Banjo-Tooie and Dinosaur Planet, the Diddy Kong Racing Team working on the Mickey's Speedway USA game (who also did the racing parts of other games), the handheld team who did the handheld versions and finally the new guys who were all put together into their own team and they had just finished Donkey Kong 64 and had started working on Conker's Bad Fur Day. The GoldenEye engine which was further refined then reused for Perfect Dark was owned by it's programmer and he left along with the other programmers who worked on Perfect Dark and Golden Eye as well as a couple of the artists and a designer. Those who were left behind mostly consisted of the OG guys who made the platformers, the racer guys and the new crew. None of them had any experience making FPS games. Microsoft bought Rare for Perfect Dark, they expected them to make Perfect Dark for the Xbox, despite the fact the Perfect Dark team left during production of Dinosaur Planet and Microsoft was completely unaware of this because the owners of Rare intentionally kept this little fact a secret from Microsoft to aid the sale. (Most of the devs were also kept in the dark about the sale, they for the most part had a good relationship with Nintendo despite all the bs rumours online.) Those guys went on to make the Timesplitter games and they took the engine with them and used it for Timesplitters. So Rare was left with an IP and no technology to present that IP while Microsoft was breathing down their necks to make another Perfect Dark game as quickly as possible to release on the Xbox. That never happened, because they had to start from scratch, the game took 5 years to make and never ended up releasing until the end of the Xbox's lifecycle so instead it was redesigned late in the development to instead be a launch title for the Xbox 360; Despite having ground-breaking 32 player multiplayer which was very fun, it simply was dwarfed by the popularity of Call of Duty and Halo and simply couldn't compete.

They were also working on feature where you could take a picture of your face with the Game Boy Camera and put it on a character in the game. It was scrapped for the final release. Good video. Earned a sub!

just stumbled across this a bit ago, really good video, well written :)

Perfect Dark reboot better hit just as hard as the first game did. There's no excuse at this point LOL. I just hope they don't screw up the story and keep what we loved about the original. As long as they keep the extraterrestrial forces in the game, I'm sold.

Just hope Microsoft does the next Perfect Dark justice. I remember seeing steelbook copies of the collectors edition PD Zero going for less than $5 back in the day. Microsoft could barely give that game away. But then they gave us the excellent remaster on XBOX LIVE arcade. So there is hope. Now that the hype has died for Halo & COD it would be a great time to bring back Perfect Dark.

Glad this video randomly came across my feed. Great idea for a channel by the way. And also seeing a video on Perfect Dark. Wouldn’t pass that up. Good stuff. Subbed.

If it's live service, I'm not touching it

It is insane to me how many gameplay features and options were available for this game that still to this day have not shown up again in AAA FPS titles. I have played this game about as much as all other games combined because its options and replayability are still unmatched.

Subscribed, what great content about IPs from my childhood!