New Rare Video Reveals The Making Of Perfect Dark
Right on the heels of Rare’s video revealing once and for all what the mysterious “Dream” video game was all about, the company put out another video on Christmas Eve detailing the making of their 2000 Nintendo 64 FPS Perfect Dark.
One of the questions fans have always had is why Rare dropped the Bond license after Goldeneye 007 was such a big hit. This is finally answered in the video: after development on Goldeneye wrapped, the first inclination was to make a Tomorrow Never Dies game, but while it was in pre-production, they started getting all sorts of ideas they couldn’t use if they stuck to the movie’s plot. “I wish we could have more futuristic gadgets. What if this was in the future?” “We should put in a part where you control a female character.” “Hey, what if there were aliens?”
Around this time their contract with MGM had to be renewed, and Rare wound up being massively outbid for the Bond license, which was now ten times as valuable thanks to Goldeneye 007. This was actually a relief for the dev team: now they could make the game they WANTED to make!
In the end Rare had created such a big game that it simply wouldn’t run on the N64. Then the Expansion Pak entered the picture and they were able to fit in most of what they planned by requiring it. (A similar situation happened with Donkey Kong 64 six months earlier, but that was due to a glitch they were never able to fix.) One dropped feature was the use of Game Boy Camera to texture-map faces into the multiplayer mode; this was seen in prerelease screenshots, but erased out of fears people would slip unsavory images into the game.
These facts and more were revealed in the video released December 24. Check it out below!