Coming from a Gamescom where Xbox was mainly focused on well-known titles coming out fairly soon, it looked like we’d be waiting a while for a further update on some of the bigger and more mysteriously shrouded upcoming Xbox games. However, every now and then we get a little surprise – and that was the case with Perfect Darkwhere Xbox’s Matt Booty briefly condescended to talk about the highly anticipated reboot at a PAX West panel.
Booty, who is the head of the now sprawling Xbox Game Studios portfolio of development houses and games, spoke of how any reboot of the Perfect Dark franchise should be treated “very carefully”, noting that features like these “don’t always age well”. And you know, Booty is right. But the next thing he said is curious – and for my money, it’s wrong.
“What I think is super cool about Perfect Dark, what’s super cool about Joanna Dark, is the super agent fantasy, the spy, the Bourne Identity kind of James Bond stuff there,” Booty explained.
“That’s always a cool meme that people want to lean towards — but again, we need to make sure this comes out the right way, so I’ll just stick with ‘very careful.'”
Wrong is probably unfair. I think everything Booty says is correct… but it’s only accurate for about half the original Perfect Dark. Or, to put it another way: Perfect Dark is a spy game and it’s supposedly about a female James Bond. But that’s only part of the story, both literally and figuratively, and every reboot of the franchise has to embrace the original to channel what made it so beloved.
I’m talking about Perfect Dark, of course, which is a bit weird. It’s not just Bond or Bourne, and it’s been like that from the start. The game’s opening sequence takes place on a futuristic flying vehicle that zooms through a neon-lit futuristic city straight out of Blade Runner. Your mission is to rescue a mysterious doctor from the clutches of an evil company – but when you discover the doctor, he’s not a person at all, but rather an advanced AI encased in some kind of flying laptop. Perfect Dark is full sci-fi.
It’s also a camp like hell. From the visits to Area 51, where you rescue Elvis, a wisecracking ‘grey’-style alien, who later goes on to wear a star-and-striped vest. Soon, Perfect Dark feels as much Halo as GoldenEye, with Agent Dark finding himself on hostile alien spaceships, eventually launching an attack on the hostile alien homeworld. Nothing is held back.
Don’t get me wrong: Espionage is a big part of Perfect Dark. I also think the traditional spy-driven missions are the best in the game. The opening trio of DataDyne HQ missions is excellent, as is protecting your boss Carrington from an attack on his private villa. Chicago remains my favorite, defined by a highly exploitable level design, a thick rainy atmosphere with unforgettable music and Jo sneaking around in a Deckard cosplay trench coat.
But none the less, all of this is just part of a wider game, and I’m really writing a lot about what makes Perfect Dark a great game – and a better game than GoldenEye, don’t bother saying otherwise – the breadth of it. It uses the espionage and espionage stuff as a springboard to a broader, more immersive story – elevating itself beyond just a Bond clone with a different starring role. At the time, I think that was the point – Rare probably wanted to both summon their new hero and differentiate it from Bond and their work on GoldenEye – and the full-fat sci-fi setting and otherworldly shenanigans allowed it to do just that.
This is of course not all. More importantly to me, this Perfect Dark reboot isn’t just another Tomb Raider-esque aggregation of currently popular trends, but rather explores the structure of the original game (particularly its open yet manageable, multi-objective missions) and finds a way to successfully adapt that in modern game design. The closest recent touchstone is, of course, IO Interactive’s excellent Hitman reboot series – and that studio is now working on Bond – so it looks like the futures of Joanna and James will remain intertwined.
What we’ve seen so far from the new Perfect Dark is interesting. The trailer, while CG and short, depicts a clear sort of world state. The planet is ravaged by terrible weather and natural disasters, and humanity is now crying out for help from the mega-corporations that probably caused the problems in the first place. We see hints of drone surveillance, we glimpse a laptop rifle (itself representative of PD’s brilliant weapon-alt-fire modes), and secrets are whispered as a camera zips through an obviously top-secret lab. So far, so good.
However, all of this could just be a science fiction story for the foreseeable future and remain relatively grounded. I can easily see a version of this game playing this relatively fairly, as a darkly cautionary sci-fi story about the combination of the ongoing climate apocalypse slow-burn and the unchecked power of corporations, ironically funded by goddamn Microsoft. We’ll find out something like, shock-horror, the corpos actively accelerated and incited disasters to expand their sphere of influence, and all that. I really hope it’s not just that.
While it wouldn’t come as much of a surprise as in the original game, where the alien influence really comes from left field, I really hope these companies mine their technology for climate change solutions from beyond Earth, or even hatch secret deals with nefarious aliens behind them. the screens. This is the schlock I want to see. It’s a core part of what Perfect Dark is to me. It was largely lacking in Zero, being a prequel, and it was honestly one of my bigger issues with that game’s story.
So yes. You’re right, Matt Booty – one of the cool things about Joanna Dark is the super spy fantasy of it all, and about her being an answer to 007. But that’s only part of the appeal of Perfect Dark – and some of the camper elements, although today may not be as sexy on paper as the late nineties
ies, are an essential part of the series’ identity. I hope they stay in the reboot.
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