The latest installement of Rare Ltd.'s making-of series "Rare Revealed" is a long look at Perfect Dark, one of the seminal works in first-person shooters' breakthrough on consoles near the turn of the century.
Following their success with GoldenEye 007, an instant and all-time classic, the GoldenEye development team at Rare went back to work on another shooter, which became Perfect Dark.
A crucial development in Perfect Dark's history is that Rare was "dramatically outbid" on doing an adaptation of the next James Bond film, 1997's Tomorrow Never Dies. That freed Rare to work on a completely new concept, which would use things that didn't fit with the Bond canon — certain weapon characteristics, a female protagonist, and extraterrestrial enemies.
All of that became Perfect Dark, which launched in 2000 on Nintendo 64, and was rereleased this summer on Xbox One as part of the Rare Replay anthology. The original Perfect Dark was followed by the sequel Perfect Dark Zero, an Xbox 360 launch title in 2005, and a high-resolution remaster of the original for Xbox 360 in 2010.
And what became of that Tomorrow Never Dies game? It landed with a thud. It was a PlayStation exclusive published by Electronic Arts in 2000, and it disappointed GoldenEye fans by switching to a third-person perspective and dropping multiplayer.
For more from the "Rare Revealed" video series, see this one about Dream, a never-released pirate-themed role playing game that became the basis for Banjo-Kazooie.
