Perfect Dark Turns 20 – The ultimate story behind the N64 success that outperformed James Bond – Functionality
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© Nintendo LifeHow are you GoldenEye 007?
In the summer of 2000, 20 years ago this month, Rare submitted his response: Perfect black, a sci-fi spy shooter focused on an alien conspiracy. It featured a cool and competent heroine, a solo campaign filled with ambitious ideas and the most complete multiplayer experience on the Nintendo 64. To date, it has stood out as the highest rated game in Rare in Metacritical, scoring an average of 97. So how did the team not only follow, but beat GoldenEye 007? For Martin Hollis, game director for the first half of development, the crucial decision was to stay away from Britain's most famous fictional secret agent.
"The first question was," Did we want to make another Bond game? "And Nintendo did offer that option, but it was very easy to ship," Hollis tells us. "Personally, I was not interested in making another game in this universe, we had spent enough time, three years, basically, in the Bond universe for my taste."
The first question was, "Did we want to make another Bond game?" Personally, I was not interested in making another game in this universe, we had spent enough time, three years, basically, in the Bond universe for my taste.
David Doak (yes, the scientist we all shot in the facility) adds: "We were pretty close. There are only so many things from the Soviet era that you can handle. And at that time, we were competing with things like Turok, and everyone had carte blanche to do whatever they wanted with villains and weapons, etc. If we did another Bond game, it would be like the second album and people wouldn't think we really innovated. "
The team didn't want to give up everything they had accomplished with GoldenEye 007, of course. For most of them, the James Bond shooter was the first game they created. They had developed a new engine, so it made sense to build on that and create a new title along the same lines, with similar gameplay and the same "centered weapon", as Hollis said.
Right from the start, Perfect Dark was designed as a spiritual successor to GoldenEye, aiming to complete the game in just one year. In theory, the main effort would be to build new levels that work with the technology of the previous game. But the ambition of the team grew over the course of the project, and many GoldenEye systems were improved and revised.
"Perfect Dark was like the sequel to GoldenEye, and it's still difficult to make one," recalls Mark Edmonds, who led development at the end. "Can you do better than the first one? It should be easy, but overall, it isn’t the case. So everyone had the mentality" What can we do to improve this that GoldenEye? "There were a lot of ideas for new features and everyone thought about what could have gotten into this game, but they didn't.
Spy-fi
The team had read a lot of science fiction at the time and posters of films like Nikita adorned the walls of his office. This inspired both the decision to make a science fiction shooter and another with a female role. The team was ready to build on the conspiracy theories surrounding the aliens, drawing on things like X files
But the game should remain somewhat punished. This was partly due to the surrounding context (Perfect Dark events should take place in 2023, just around the corner for us), but they were also derived from GoldenEye technology running in the background. The James Bond game was designed to be realistic and it still felt in Perfect Dark. Part of that is why most weapons still use bullets instead of lasers or other fantastic sci-fi tropes, with fairly obvious exceptions such as FarSight X-ray vision.
© David DoakGoldenEye also partially fueled the decision to make Perfect Dark a spy shooter. While the team ended up with Bond and his universe, the gameplay possibilities offered by being a secret agent were too enticing to be overlooked. "When we got to the end of GoldenEye, we had created a set of non-combat gameplay features like stealth and stealth," says Doak. "And we realized there was a lot of potential out there, but we didn't have time to go back and do more at GoldenEye. At the start of GoldenEye, sneaking was not really one of the main mechanics of the game, apart from the fact that it could trigger alarms. It became a game mechanism when we started developing the level and found that it worked. "
There was also a lot of admiration for the years 1998 Metal Gear Solid, making it clear that there was an appetite for a more secret shooter. Duncan Botwood, who helped shape multiplayer for both GoldenEye and Perfect Dark, reveals that the team wanted to do more with gadgets, a wish that would eventually lead to data binding, plus CamSpy and its variants .
Of course, the problem was that if it weren't perfect by the time we finished it, we would really be preparing for a fall.
"With GoldenEye, we used the devices very superficially because we were building something very quickly," he says. "It was very like throwing something at the object and that's it, goal achieved." We wanted to explore what other things we could do that were not related to weapons and that could help us do other things. We were trying to expand the player repertoire, let they expressed themselves in a way that was not limited to shooting.
"There are games that could do that, but often they don't, and I think they are less because of that, even if I still love them." Shooting is good when you do it well, and many games do it well. But if that's all you do, longevity becomes an issue, and I don't think it's very helpful for the player to do it. As a player, I prefer to do something else. "
The original job title was Secret operations, but it has evolved over time Extraterrestrial intelligence and finally Perfect Dark. Brett Jones, who built and animated most of the character models and led the motion capture efforts, says it was accomplished through a highly scientific process: the team wrote many descriptive words, many names and pasted them on Behind the door in different combinations. They tried hundreds until they found one that felt good. "Of course, the problem was that if it weren't perfect by the time we finished it, we would really be preparing for a fall," laughs Jones.
Introducing Joanna Dark
With Bond out of the picture, the team set out to create a new spy icon. Determined to have a female role (but also aware that a certain Mrs. Croft was still the most prominent example of a video game heroine), Doak says that there was a real push to conceive someone who was "not a" breast and ass "."
It has been said in the past that Joanna Dark was inspired by the historical figure of Joan of Arc, but Doak admits that this is not entirely true. "I think that's what sounds good. I don't remember if Joanna Dark or Perfect Dark came first. I think Joanna came first, but if I remember correctly, the Jeanne thing d & # 39; Arc was a kind of renovation. Joanna Dark looked like a good name, then "Ooh, it looks a bit like Jeanne d & # 39; Arc. It’s pretty good. "Unlike that, it fits back."
Defining Joanna Dark was Jones' first task on the project. In an effort to move away from female heroines with central sex appeal in her design, she aimed for something more utilitarian. "We all appreciated Ghost in the shell and Sylvester Stallone Judge Dredd movie, a lot of influence from them, "he says. "We were strongly influenced by the first things in anime. Even Joanna's costume is almost directly snatched from Ghost In The Shell. In addition, the leather suit was inspired by Ms. Peel's The Avengersand the dragon robe really used the dragon's design of Murderous Instinct.
© Brett Jones“For Joanna, we also got a female motion capture artist named Laurie Sage. She came one day and we did most of her business at that time. She was just the right size for Joanna Dark, rather short and petite, so we actually had a woman who captured female movement, rather than Duncan Botwood jumping (in high heels). "However, Joanna Dark was not inspired by Sage but on a much more famous face.
"It was entirely based on Winona Ryder," admits Jones. "I collected images of faces, I had a huge collection of reference images and we chose it." She had this great pixie haircut and achieved the look of what we wanted Joanna to be. "
The game leader was not the only celebrity-inspired character. His boss Daniel Carrington was based on James Robinson Justice, known for films ranging from The arms of Navarone at Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. NSA director and secondary villain Trent Easton was inspired by Titanic actor Billy Zane, while the mysterious Mr. Blonde was based on Götz Otto, who played Tomorrow never go dead henchman Mr. Stamper. Finally, the President of the United States. United States was inspired by Babylon 5 star Richard Biggs, who happens to be friends with Jones.
There were more humble origins for other characters. The main villain Cassandra De Vries' bodyguards relied on the promotional girls used in the E3 game ad. Jones designed a costume suitable for the show and then applied it to the game. Even the girls' faces were used for bodyguards. Jonathan, another agent from the Carrington Institute, also came from E3: he was a man who had given Jones several Star Wars T-shirts as part of the internal team competition to see who could get the most merchandise from the show.
Drawings about the future
Jones' efforts to design original characters point to one of the biggest challenges the Perfect Dark team faced: creating a new universe. Freed from the restrictions of the Bond license and supported by the confidence gained by the Rare administration, the crew had complete creative freedom.
"It was huge and intimidating," says Hollis. “Creating a new universe takes a lot of work. There is a lot of material and details to complete. The authors say this: you end up creating a lot of background material for your characters and that doesn't really happen in the final cut. We have created so much that it is not really visible in the game. We did not want long and elaborate scenes, as it is really about action. "
We have created so much that it isn’t really visible in the game. We didn’t want long and elaborate scenes, because it’s really about the action
Jonathan was a great example; It was originally Jonathan Dark, Joanna's brother, Jonathan Dark. Likewise, Velvet Dark, the second cooperative character, mostly Joanna in a blonde wig, was also supposed to develop more as a character, but, as with Jonathan, this was left on the floor of the courtroom .
Even the aliens weren't as developed in the game as they were behind the scenes. Botwood had given villain Skedar a deeper backdrop to sympathize with, explaining that his planet was collapsing, hence his ruined appearance in the final mission. Meanwhile, the alien ally Elvis originally had even more quirks. "Elvis went through so many iterations because he was originally a much bigger Elvis fan," says Jones. "I had him in blue suede shoes, and he was anglophile, so I have pictures of him in Union Jack vests. But we were facing all kinds of copyright issues, so we had to alleviate the problem a bit. "
Some team members recognize that, in retrospect, they as well a lot freedom. The game has expanded far beyond its original scope, making compression on an N64 cartridge difficult (more on that later). Chris Tilston, who eventually became the lead designer, points out that unlike today's games, Perfect Dark "had no producer to tell people when to stop."
"The rare administration was quite practical, as they could see the progress of the team and Tim (Stamper, co-founder of Rare) was very supportive," he said. "I'm sure behind the scenes, he was doing everything he could to protect the team from any outside pressure. Mark Edmonds was probably the front door to stop the chaos. He said, “ Maybe we should finish this a little bit first, but even he finally joined when he designed and planned all the multiplayer challenges after our expansion of six months. It was a highly collaborative, ego-free environment, and when someone had a good idea, it was incorporated fairly easily, making the development environment unique. "
Botwood agrees: "It was a pretty organic process from there, and it was also quite democratic. No one said, "I'm the creative director, let's do this and that." The team structure was relatively flat: Martin was definitely in charge, but everyone was very knowledgeable and had their own ideas. The GoldenEye and Perfect Dark teams are two of the most collaborative I have ever worked with. "
Weird was a weird place to work in one way or another, they always seemed to be a little weird about credits.
Edmonds explains that this is part of the reason that there were no job titles in the end credits (or, in fact, in this very function). Since they all contributed to many aspects of the game, regardless of their specialization, it was unfair to label them by such limited means. There was also another factor, a continuing quirk of the study.
"Weird was a weird place to work in a way, they always seemed to be a little weird about credits," says Edmonds. Perhaps because they feared that people might have their names in the credits under certain titles, the recruiters suddenly tried to contact this person and steal it from another company. I don't know if that was the real reason. But most games didn't have credits specifying what people were doing. I know it was a problem at GoldenEye. However, you can almost infer from the names what people have done. "
Jones, for example, was credited as a "bodybuilder" because he literally built all of the characters and creatures, and managed their animation. Chris Darling, who designed many weapons, has been listed as a "weapons specialist".
This resulted in problems for a team member. Beau Ner Chesluk, who actually programmed the credits, had to provide Nintendo with an official identification to verify that his name was legitimate: his working title of “ Guns and Visual Orgasms ''. combined with his first two names which looked like “ boner & # 39; & # 39; this raised suspicion in Japan. More interestingly, Chesluk reveals that the first collection of names in the credits always appears in random order. It was a team consensus; Since everyone played an equal role in the design of the game, random would be more fair than alphabetical.