It was never meant to take as long as it did. As far as the GoldenEye team were concerned, Perfect Dark should have come out a year or two after their seminal console first-person shooter, a quick-fire follow-up to one of the greatest games ever made. But it wasn’t long before trouble knocked on the door of Rare’s countryside farmhouse in Twycross. First, Martin Hollis, the genius programmer who led the GoldenEye team to stardom on the Nintendo 64, left the company at which he had become a legend. His acrimonious exit set off a chain reaction that led to the Free Radicals – Dr. David Doak, Karl Hilton, Steve Ellis and Graeme Norgate – walking out soon after to form their own studio. Those who remained were left to pick up the pieces. Struggling to cram a game bursting at the seams with ambition into the Nintendo 64’s tiny memory limit, the developers of Perfect Dark achieved what once looked impossible: the highest-rated Rare game of all time.
20 years after Perfect Dark was released, I asked 10 of its chief creators, as well as then Nintendo of America producer Ken Lobb (Rare co-founders Tim and Chris Stamper could not be reached), what it was like to make. Perfect Dark was a visual feast when it launched in May 2000, pushing the N64 so hard it required the console’s 4MB expansion pak for everything but a stripped down multiplayer. Its Blade Runner-influenced graphics and sound, its super cool spy heroine Joanna Dark, and its X-Files-inspired story won plaudits from N64 owners and reviewers – despite the shocking framerate. Though it seemed Rare could do no wrong in the ’90s, with N64 mega hit after mega hit seemingly effortlessly spewed forth from the company’s secretive headquarters in the English countryside, developing Perfect Dark was anything but easy.
“Turmoil is the only way I can describe it,” says Duncan Botwood, a game designer who was part of the original GoldenEye team and who stayed with Perfect Dark until the bitter end. “There was turmoil everywhere.”
Here, in the Perfect Dark developers’ own words, is the behind the scenes story of how Rare’s troubled shooter became a masterpiece.
Let’s Play Perfect Dark – Late To The Party Watch on YouTube
MARTIN HOLLIS (team lead): From my desk, I had a call come in from Simon Farmer, head of production at Rare, to ask if we were interested in doing a sequel. You know, straight up. We thought about this for a day or two, and we replied to him to say no, and that was the last we ever heard of doing a Bond sequel. I’m surprised in retrospect because Nintendo made so much money from the game you would have thought they would have put more pressure or at least made more encouraging noises towards Rare to try and persuade them to do a sequel in the same line so they could have a similarly financially successful second product.
But after myself and the team saying no, I didn’t hear anything more about it, and they respected our choice to make a different style of game.
DAVID DOAK (lead designer): The team went to the set of Tomorrow Never Dies, although by the time we went to the set, we had decided we didn’t want to do it. It was where the Harry Potter World place is now. There’s a shanty town thing in Tomorrow Never Dies. Brosnan and Michelle Yeoh were there that day. We didn’t get to meet them. We were just some scruffy oiks standing off-set. I remember very clearly, they were shooting this scene while we were there. It got to five o’clock or something, and they were trying to get some sequence done, and it wasn’t getting done. We were watching it, and at some point some guy who was some kind of lighting representative or something, just said okay, right we’re closing the set, because it was going home time. We were like, fucking hell, games don’t work like that! You go home when it’s done. It was them just going, it’s union rules. Time to go. The thing that closed the set on that day was not a director. It was some guy saying, my guys have to go home.