[RETRO GAMING] Remember Perfect Dark?

Perfect Dark was first released in 2000 for the Nintendo 64 and gained widespread praise for its incredible gameplay, stunning visuals, and intelligent artificial intelligence. It's still considered the gold standard for first-person shooters today, Laptop Mag noted.

Perfect Dark is a sci-fi spy shooter about an alien conspiracy. It featured a cool, powerful heroine, an ambitious single-player narrative, and the most extensive multiplayer experience on the Nintendo 64. Nintendo Life held that it still holds the record for Rare's highest-rated game on Metacritic, with an average score of 97.

However, despite the game's critical and commercial success, it only received one sequel in 2005: Perfect Dark Zero.

How Was Perfect Dark Created?

In the Nintendo 64 tie-in of a two-year-old Bond movie, GoldenEye 007, developer Rare and Pierce Brosnan's digital avatar conquered the console shooter market. Rare and Nintendo relinquished the Bond license to EA after some time, which, as per Nintendo Life, turned out to be a blessing in disguise because it allowed them to exercise their creative muscles without the constraints of a license. And this is how Perfect Dark was born, a game that turned out to be larger, badder, and better than GoldenEye 007.

Game Plot

According to Nintendo Life, the game's setting is in the year 2023, with Joanna "Perfect" Dark, a promising new agent with the R&D/espionage firm Carrington Institute, being dispatched to the dataDyne Corporation skyscraper to examine a strange signal transmitted by a company insider named Dr. Carroll. Jo discovers that Dr. Carroll is actually a little AI robot with knowledge on a dataDyne plot involving reptilian Skedar aliens once inside. Jo travels from the streets of Chicago to the Area 51 bunkers and even onboard Air Force One in order to unravel the plot.

In addition to the single-player story, the game supports two-player co-op as well as the Counter-Operative mode, which puts one player in charge of a random grunt sent out to thwart Jo's mission. The enemy player has the same basic weapon set and health as the stage foes, and when killed, he or she respawns as another enemy until Joanna completes the goal or dies.

Nintendo Life noted that Perfect Dark was once excellent, and it turns out that it is still amazing, despite the fact that the genre has altered significantly since its release in 2000. It's a simple game, but that doesn't mean it's easy, and it'll take some getting used to for people who haven't used a three-pronged pad in a long time.

A Reboot of the Game

According to Games Radar, Perfect Dark is slated to be announced in 2020 for Xbox. However, the release date for the sci-fi game is still a few years away. The Initiative was established in 2018, and the studio has spent years putting together a team for their secret agent thriller for Xbox and PC. The Perfect Dark reboot is still in the early phases of development, despite being announced in 2020.