This Week in Retro: Perfect Dark [2000] (Patreon)

May 22, 2000: Rare's spiritual sequel to GoldenEye 007 lives up to its name

by Diamond Feit

"Perfect is the enemy of good" is how I always heard the saying, and while Wikipedia backs me up here, I know I've also heard slight variants on this maxim such as "perfection is the enemy of success" and "done is better than perfect." However you phrase it, though, the message remains the same: It is better to complete a task than to obsess over improving it forever. I also choose to interpret it somewhat literally, believing that it is bad form to identify anything as "perfect", because such a state is impossible. To me, that's like declaring your brand-new boat is "unsinkable." However, I am willing to make an exception in the case of Perfect Dark, the best first-person video game I have ever played.

In 1997, Rare's GoldenEye 007 for the Nintendo 64 had been a genre-defining hit, successfully adapting the already-popular first-person-shooter genre for a home console with a controller rather than a home computer with a keyboard. Even though the game arrived two years after the eponymous film, it was the most popular game on the N64 that didn't star Mario (according to director/producer Martin Hollis, it was the top-selling N64 game in the US, period). Since 1997 had also seen the release of a brand-new James Bond film, the easy move would have been to use that film as a template for a game sequel, However, as Hollis told NowGamer in 2010, "We were all pretty sick of the Bond universe by the time we were finished" (Rare lost the license regardless). Instead, the GoldenEye 007 team created an original game starring an original character, and the results were even better than their previous effort.

All James Bond films are science-fiction, even the really old ones, but Perfect Dark leans even harder into the genre with a distant futuristic setting of 2023* and lots of hi-tech gadgets. I know Mr. Bond has a few devices he swears by which have yet to materialize in our reality (my wristwatch remains tragically laser-free), but his gear has nothing on Joanna Dark’s equipment. Bond had body armor, Dark has a full-body shield that looks like it came from David Lynch's Dune. Bond had a sniper rifle, Dark has a rail gun with an x-ray thermoscope that shoots through walls. Bond had an assault rifle, Dark has a "laptop gun" that can serve as a machine gun or be deployed as an auto-firing sentry. In fact, every weapon in Perfect Dark has a secondary fire mode, ranging from "pistol whip" to "self-destruct" to "activate cloaking device."

Losing the Bond license cost the developers an element of brand recognition, but it allowed them to create an original story about whatever they wanted. With Perfect Dark, they veered hard into "aliens." Joanna Dark is a secret agent (of course) who uncovers an interstellar conspiracy wherein two warring alien races, the Skedars and the Maians, are pursuing ancient technology found on our planet. As the monstrous Skedars work with a mega corporation in a plot against the President of the United States, the smaller Maians aid Dark and her team to foil the Skedars and save both of their homeworlds in the process. The absurd excesses of the plot work to Perfect Dark's advantage; where GoldenEye 007 needed extra stages and battles superfluous to the film's story in order to become a more fulfilling video game, Perfect Dark is so bloated with setpieces and antagonists it never would have fit into even a three-hour film. 

There is a clever economic aspect to Perfect Dark though, as players revisit certain areas in different contexts. The very first mission sees Dark infiltrating a skyscraper to access an underground lab; once contact is made with a captive in Mission 2, the third mission is an escape from the same area seen in Mission 1. The game also features an explorable hub area where players can practice using the varied weapons and gadgets of the game in-between missions. The space is conspicuously large given its simple purpose, but that's because it serves as a full stage later in the game when aliens storm the facility.

Singing the praises of the core single-player campaign* is fine, but the real reason GoldenEye 007 sold so well was its multiplayer mode, which took full advantage of the Nintendo 64's four controller ports. Perfect Dark outshines GoldenEye 007 in that regard, too, thanks to the addition of AI-controlled "Sims." While GoldenEye 007 had different rule sets, there could never be more than four characters on a map, and they always had to be in competition. Perfect Dark allows up to eight variable-difficulty-and-behavior Sims to be added, and they can be pitted against the humans or against each other. I wholeheartedly preferred Perfect Dark's multiplayer for this reason: It allowed me to create scenarios where my friends and I cooperated to defeat hordes of Sims rather than hunt each other. And when my friends weren't around, I could practice the scenarios myself. If you've never picked off dozens of clueless computer cronies with an alien sniper rifle as they haplessly try to storm your hideyhole, I highly recommend it.

*Perfect Dark also includes multiplayer options for the main campaign: Two players can cooperatively play the entire story mode, or one player can try to outwit the other by controlling a series of random enemy combatants to stop the other from completing their mission.

As a semi-sequel of sorts, there is a general sense of familiarity throughout Perfect Dark. The basic structure of the game draws heavily on that of GoldenEye 007, and Perfect Dark even contains several weapons and a few multiplayer stages taken directly from its predecessor. Yet with so many new ideas thrown into the mix, to say nothing of graphic improvements afforded by the additional RAM provided by the Nintendo 64 expansion pack, "it's just GoldenEye but better" hardly seems like a worthy reason to pass on Perfect Dark.

Despite its merits, Perfect Dark never measured up to its legendary predecessor either in reputation or sales. At least some of that disparity can be attributed to the decline of the Nintendo 64 as a platform; in 1997 the console was still relatively new, but by 2000 the PlayStation had firmly grabbed the spotlight (with the PlayStation 2 already out in Japan), and Nintendo's glory days of the NES/SNES seemed like a distant memory. However, Perfect Dark is one of the rare Nintendo 64 games that remains available to play on modern consoles thanks to an Xbox 360 remaster in 2010 which is backwards-compatible on the Xbox One (upscaled to 4K, no less).

I suppose just as Joanna Dark is no James Bond, Perfect Dark cannot usurp GoldenEye 007 in the hearts and minds of video game fans. Yet whether the year is 2000 or 2020, I know which game holds up better to scrutiny. Perfect Dark just has more of everything, expanding on what worked in GoldenEye 007 and fixing what did not; calling it a "spiritual sequel" feels dismissive when it enhances and improves so much of the gripping gameplay formula that the developers at Rare—not Ian Fleming or the Bond film producers—created. I know there was a Perfect Dark prequel as an exclusive Xbox 360 launch title, which no one liked, and these days you can't turn on a game console or open Twitch/YouTube without seeing first-person shooters everywhere, but I'd still like Joanna Dark to get another chance at stardom. Make it low-polygon, call it a "throwback," but I believe the mission-based first-person sci-fi shooter still has potential. I don't want to shoot 100 strangers on an island, I want to shoot 300 dumb-as-nails Sims with my friends using alien rayguns. And I bet I'm not the only one.