Perfect Dark Series - Development

Development

Rare began development on Perfect Dark in 1997, shortly after the release of GoldenEye 007. The development of the game was led by Martin Hollis, who explained that they rejected the prospect of working on the GoldenEye sequel Tomorrow Never Dies "without hesitation", as the development team felt they had spent too much time immersed in the James Bond universe. Using a modified version of the GoldenEye 007 game engine, Perfect Dark made its debut at E3 1998, but it was not released until May 2000 due to its troubled development cycle. The game was accompanied by a handheld game for the Game Boy Color, released shortly afterwards.

Perfect Dark's critical and commercial success led Rare to begin development of a prequel for the Nintendo GameCube titled Perfect Dark Zero. The development of the game was led by Chris Tilston, who previously worked on Killer Instinct and the original Perfect Dark. In September 2002, Rare was purchased by Microsoft, and its development was subsequently transferred to Microsoft's Xbox. As the game was still far from completion, it was then decided that it would be released as a launch title for the Xbox 360 in 2005. The overall development of the game took five years to complete.

Rumors about the development of a direct sequel to the Nintendo 64 game began to circulate in 2007. According to Indian site GameGuru, the supposed game would apparently introduce a morality system where the choices players make would branch the storyline and the plot would be unveiled entirely through the player's perspective without cutscenes. In 2011, it was revealed that a new title, called Perfect Dark Core, was in development at one point, but was ultimately canceled. The game was intented to feature a more realistic atmosphere than its predecessors, with a "smoking, flirting" Joanna Dark. In 2012, Chris Seavor, who was in charge of project, mentioned Deus Ex as inspirations for the game. According to him, "It wasn't as narrow as something like Call Duty, where it's like, walk, cutscene, walk, cutscene. It was definitely going to be, you could go over here and do this over here, or you could go over here and do this over here. And then it would bottleneck down to something that would then take you to the next bit. It was very much about missions and storyline." He also said that the game would feature several parkour mechanics, including jumping from walls. He commented, "we had that really good. There was a really nice feel to it. So you could fight like that, and then there was the more traditional gun shooting." The game was in development for nearly a year. It was canceled since Perfect Dark Zero did not sell as many copies as Microsoft had hoped, leading them to prioritize the development of the Halo series.

In 2009, it was announced that a remake of the original Nintendo 64 game was being developed by 4J Studios, the same studio that previously handled the Xbox Live Arcade ports of Rare's platform games Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie. The remake was under development for roughly 11 months and was exclusively released as an Xbox Live Arcade game in 2010.