Retronauts - 692: Perfect Dark

Episode Date: May 25, 2025

Celebrating 25 years of Rare's other groundbreaking first-person shooter for the Nintendo 64, Diamond Feit, Kevin Bunch, and Cara Ellison share their mutual affection for Perfect Dark. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts 

This week in Retronauts, Bond, bunk, bork, dork, dark. Hello, welcome back to Retronauts, and welcome to episode, oh, let's say, 692. I'm feeling generous, because today we're talking about perfect, dark, perfect. Did I put an extra tea in there? Maybe I did. That tea is for quality. So we're here today with one returning guest and one first time Retronaut's guest. How exciting.

First of all, I am your host, Tim today, Diamond Fight. joining me in the United States regular returning trick contributor. This is Meet Sim Kevin Bunch. Oh, Kevin. Be kind yourself, Kevin. You're not a meat sim. It's one of those mornings, you know. And joining us from the first time in the actual United Kingdom.

Yes, I'm here in Scotland. I'm Kara Ellison. I have been a narrative designer for a while, but you might also know me from writing about video games as well. Wonderful. Thank you for joining us, Kara Ellison. Thank you so much. So if we're talking about Perfect Dark,

that means we must talk about the Nintendo 64. So I'm very curious, if everyone here, were you there on the ground floor? Did you have your own Nintendo 64? Was this something you only played at Friends' houses? Kara, what if we start with you, please? Yeah, so we saved up, what was me and my younger brother,

and we saved up, I remember, for about six or seven months of pocket money. just to be able to buy a Nintendo 64. And when we bought it, we could only afford one game, which was Ocarina of time. Okay, okay, fair. And then when we had played that to death,

I remember we went, that was the era of Blockbuster video. And you could go and you could borrow games from there. So I think the first thing that we did might have been to rent something like Golden Eye or Perfect Dark. And after, I think we definitely played Golden Eye first, but Perfect Dark was kind of my favorite. I think once we had played Golden Eye to death, we started playing Perfect Dark. And then eventually we got secondhand copy of both of them.

So, yeah. Excellent. How about you, Kevin? So I remember also saving up to get Nintendo 64 for, yeah, about half a year. I only managed to afford it because people gave me a bunch of money for my birthday. And yeah, my first and only game for quite a while was, what, Star Fox or something, but Gold and I, I remember renting quite a bit from Blockbuster and the local shop Video Castle. and a couple of my friends who had N-64s had gotten that as well.

So we played that one to death just constantly. And when I heard that perfect dark was coming along as a sort of spiritual successor to Golden Eye, I was extremely excited because it just sounded cooler and just about every way. And it was, as it turned out. Yes. Well, I was definitely there. I had my Nintendo 64 when the Nintendo 64, launched. And so me and my friends play a lot of games on that system, including Golden Eye. So yeah,

similar to you, Kevin. Like, I heard about a new game that was supposed to be like GoldenEye, but it was an original character. I was like, okay, sounds great. And so I bought that one, and I know we played a lot of it amongst my friends. But I also enjoyed playing a lot of it by myself because of the certain multiplayer options that they added to this game that were not in GoldenEye, which we will talk about in a few minutes. But yes, since we've mentioned it more than once, we should probably say out loud that to get to Perfect Dark, we do need to talk about Golden Eye. And I must say, I am surprised as anybody, I could not find a record of a Retronauts episode about Golden Eye. So someday, someone else maybe, or me, we'll have to make that happen. But for now, just a brief explanation of what Golden Eye was. It was an 1997 video game developed by Rare, published by Nintendo, produced and directed by Martin Hollis. The screenplay was credited to Dr. Dennis Doak. I've never figured out.

Is that a joke? Like, is he actually a doctor? Or is it just something they joke around with because he, like, worked in science? I don't know. Sounds like it's not a joke to me. I remember, I'm certain that Martin Hollis in person has said that name to me in full. So it doesn't sound like a joke to me, but then I don't know. English names are all kind of funny, aren't they?

Okay. Well, let's assume, let's assume that he's actually a doctor and that his credits are entirely serious. Also, the music for that game by Graham Norgate and Grant Hercope. All these names are relevant later, so just, you know, write them down somewhere. It's all right. Take your notes. Yes, well, or I'll share them later. I have a lot of notes for myself.

So this game comes out in 1987. Now, you'll notice the movie, Golden Eye, came out in 1985. That's a two-year difference. This game took, that game took a long time to make. It went through very ups and death. The multiplayer in particular, I know, was sort of a last-minute edition that said, oh, this might be fun. And, yeah, it was a lot of fun. It kind of, like, sold the game probably an extra a million copies.

But at least on the surface level, and, you know, the upfront set, the selling package of, here is a game based on Goldenai. You get to play as James Bond. You get to go through all the locations in the video game. The developers actually went on set and, like, took pictures of the actual locations. They met some of these actors. they did all this work they created a game that very much

captured the spirit of the movie even though they had to add a lot of extra scenes because otherwise the game wouldn't be long

enough but it's fine it all it's all came together they get some good ideas and one of the best ideas I thought for that game

was the mission based gameplay it's not just you start here you go here and then you finish a level it's always like

okay go over here and make sure you disable this switch before you get to this exit or make sure you destroy a camera or else you'll be spotted.

And depending on the difficulty level, each each level at three difficulty levels, that would increase the amount of tasks you had to complete. So maybe on the most basic level, it's like, no, no, just get to the end. Whereas on the top level, you actually go and access other locations and destroy a computer or bug someone or karate shop someone. Like, the long list of things you had to do to get to the end of the level. And I thought, you know, the more I played the game, the more I was just super into it. Because, you know, previous to that point, you know, I'd played, you know, lots of doom, maybe a little bit of quake.

And that was just very much, you know, just shoot and kill and you win. But now it's like, oh, no, no, no, you need to think about what you're doing. And please be careful because, you know, technically speaking, James Bond is a spy. I know, he's not really very good at spying. But he's, you know, it's on his business card, at least. I love when as secret agents, like, introduce themselves with their full real name. Yeah, absolutely. That's what James Bond does.

He goes to parties. He says his name is James Bond. Sometimes he pretends he's a banker or whatever, but come on. Come on. Get real. Half the time he's telling everyone he's a spy anyway. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's...

Infosec is not his bag. I mean, I... Shooting, you know, dozens of... I have my own theories about how James Bond specifically reflects this kind of English imperial identity, where essentially he doesn't have to cover up who. he is because the British Empire thinks of itself as being so powerful. It doesn't have to cover up anything. It just has sheer, you know, this raw power behind it that every, everyone who's foreign, quote unquote, foreign has to kind of obey. And I think that really feeds into,

you know, like the ideas of James Bond. I'm a big James Bond nerd, unfortunately, as well. But I think what's really interesting is that I think the perfect art tries to remove itself a little bit from that stuff simply because it's not, it's trying to differentiate itself from James Bond, right? So I think that's interesting. Yes, okay. Well, we'll bring that up again later when we talk about the character of Not Bond in the Peripard Dark. Not Bond. Yes. Well, again, I don't want to give way to a thing, you know, I'm teasing the audience for later. I do love the level difficulty arrangement with the missions.

That's such good design. Yeah. And it was very, I haven't, I don't think I've really seen it too often emulated in other shooters. It hasn't been back, has it like that kind of style of complexity. I really love it as well because it really did, like, you know, encourage me to replay every single level. Because then, you know, you play the first sort of layer of it. And then you're like, oh, I wonder what the more complex version of it is. And then you'd go back and play that.

And obviously, also you're improving in skill as well. well when you're playing through. So actually, it is a really nice encouragement to keep playing over and over. So I think that that game ended up feeling like it had a lot of depth when not necessarily the truth. It's like still the same mission, right? So yeah, it's really clever. Yeah. And adding that to the whole unlocking Cheats aspect of things that basically encouraged you to learn how to do these missions on these different difficulty levels, and also now you are going to have to try and speed run it, too, if you want to get these really, really fun cheats.

So those were all really – I like how that all feeds together, and, you know, Perfect Dark pulls that, spoiler alert, just as much from Golden Eye. Mm-hmm. Absolutely. But, yeah, Golden Eye, huge hit, huge hit. According to Martin Hollis, they sold 8 million copies, which was the biggest – the biggest title in the U.S., globally speaking, only Mario 64 and Mario Kart are bigger. So, you know, essentially it's the number one game in America, and globally speaking is number three.

That's pretty remarkable considering how, you know, most Nintendo games are like, you know, Mario and Zelda and maybe, you know, maybe if you're lucky you get a Metroid. But no, no, no. James Bond, Gold and I, huge on the Nintendo 64. Lots of people buy this game. So obviously, everyone said, well, great, let's do a sequel. You know, I have a quote here for, from Ken Lobb, who was rare's producer at Nintendo. And Ken Lobb said, once Golden I-O-S7 was near and finished, some of the Mario Club, the internal debugging team, testers to Japan fell in love with the game, and they became proponents for Perfect Dark early on as well.

So, Rare are making friends in countries around the world. They're getting in good with Nintendo. Everyone loves them. Everyone loves James Bond. So great, let's make a sequel. There's one catch. Just one catch. they don't own James Bond.

They don't. Nintendo doesn't own them. Rare doesn't own them. Hell, at this point, I think Amazon owns James Bond, which is just the worst case scenario, but at the time, at the time, whatever, they were owned by, you know, I guess the Broccolies, maybe? I'm not sure.

Eon Productions? Yeah, so the Broccoli's until recently had a pretty significant control of James Bond. And that's evident by the fact that most of the people who have worked on James Bond films up until Gold and I were majority British or English specifically. And I think what's interesting about Golden I specifically is that it was written by an American. The screenplay was written by an American, which I think shows in the story. But yeah, what's interesting to me, though, is that I'm surprised that the broccoli themselves didn't see how lucrative it would be to give rare another shot. at James Bond specifically at that time. I guess they thought, oh, well, let's farm it out to the

highest bidder. I'm not sure if you have any information to bite that diamond, but I feel like that that's a surprise to me that they didn't go, oh, we'll immediately give you a shot at another game, you know? Well, we get two different stories, honestly, if you look into this. From Ken Lobb, for example, Ken Lobb says the opening bid from the license holders was far more than we paid as a minimum guarantee for Golden 9-O-7. So it sounds like they wanted some more money on, you know, the licensing end. Of course. But meanwhile, Martin Hollis says we spent a lot of time in the Bond universe and really

we had just had about enough of that. Oh, well, he's being diplomatic. You know what Martin Hollis is like. Yeah, you kind of assume. You kind of assume that if they could have made another James Bond game, they would have made one. But officially, he denies that. And Nintendo's like, well, they want more money.

so we don't know for sure, but it sure sounds like they would have made a sequel if they could have, but they did not. I mean, so I know Martin Hollis fairly well, I think. And I think that Martin Hollis is the world's biggest James Bond fan. So it's hard for me to imagine him turning that dying. I think maybe he's right that maybe the team were fed up of it. Maybe Martin wasn't, but the team might have been like, oh, we want to make something else. So I think that makes sense. I'm going to say if you're making something licensed, you're a lot more constrained on what you can do with that and what sort of setting you want to do, the story, what you portray. I remember when I talked with Lawrence Schick about this old Tarzan game, he wrote or designed back in, what, 84, Tarzan was not allowed to die in it. So he had to like design this game around that constriction. Yeah. So not having to do that. probably pretty nice, at least from a design perspective.

I also remember Martin saying that one of the biggest influences on him as a designer was when Miyamoto got upset with him for introducing such a bloody game. At Miyamoto, apparently, I think there's like an anecdote, maybe online, or maybe Martin told me himself that like he met Miyamoto. And Miyamoto was like, you should be able to see the bad guys like wake up in a hospital bed after you killed them or something like that because he was really distressed about how gory this game was. And obviously, if you watch it now, it's not quite as gory as you remember.

I mean, I guess it was very realistic for the time. And part of that is because, you know, when you shot someone, they would immediately hold the area of the body that you should. shot, which actually was a motion capture, which was, I think, probably the first time that any game had done that, I think. That might be an exaggeration, but it was one of the first times that anyone had actually bothered to motion capture, you know, something like that, and put it in a game, which is why it felt so amazing at the time, I think.

But, yeah, so apparently it was the reaction that Martin got at the time, apparently was that he felt shames for introducing that level of violence. to people, especially kids, right? And so, and it wasn't the audience. It was actually his fellow developers, I think, that were like, wow, this is a really violent game. And so I think that he was starting to have second thoughts around about that time, about the type of games that he was making.

Well, certainly, as you'd expect from a James Bond video game, especially a multiplayer, like, if you get got, then you get the classic blood going down the screen, which I guess is a lot of blood. um there's like some blood in the game when you shoot people but not that much um i do know that there was a quote that i read that apparently because of that note that they got which i think was a real note i think that's they decided to make sure that the opening and the end of the game played out like movie credits to sort of emphasize that oh this is just these are all those actors you know playing the movie you know which they don't do for perfect arc because this is not a

movie this is uh this is real you know this is a real story of of humans and aliens Yeah. I mean, I think the perfect art does have a little bit more of a fantastical feel to it, obviously, because it has aliens in it, and it's very much a story-based rhymed aliens. But it's also kind of, it is quite gritty in the type of tone and environmental art that they use. And I don't know. I mean, it is a very, very silly story compared to the Golden Eye one. I do feel like the Golden Eye had to adhere to the idea of James Bond and the James Bond license, but they did go like a lot more whimsical for Perfect Dark because they could. I'm probably because someone on the team was really into aliens. I just get that vibe from it. Someone had been watching a lot of X-Files and Independence Day. It was the time of like weird alien movies. Yeah. When did Halo come out? Maybe Halo or something like Halo had a bigger influence. Some people, people then, you know?

I know Halo came out in 01, but I want to say they first announced it from, what, 99 at Macworld? Right. There was a Halo buzz. There was a Halo buzz, but Perfect Dark beat it out to release by quite some time. Okay. Yeah. So, yeah, I guess, well, I guess aliens have been a thing in games anyway, but I, I'm thinking

to myself, like, when it came out, it had that kind of, like, 2000s-ish, like, cheesy, shlocky aliens vibe, you know, where there's lots of, like, silly little aliens running around in games at that time. And I don't know, it seemed kind of a wave of games that were, at least when I, like, looking back, I remember it being that era of like colorful alien type creatures. Absolutely. I mean, I don't know if they were in the games or not, but certainly South Park had a lot of aliens in it. And they had a very specific, specific kind of alien, you know? Yes. That I think you get to see in Perfect Dark, because Perfect Dark has.

two flavors of alien, the sort of small, possibly cute, and the big scary kind. So, yeah. The era when your conspiracy theories were about space aliens and not, you know, everything. Yeah. I think they should have kept making perfect darks, if only because it could have been an IP that you could do a lot with, Especially if you imagine instead of making James Bonds, for example, they had made perfect dark movies, it probably would be even more successful than like the Mission Impossible kind of IP today because I think that there's so much you can do with conspiracy theories, especially in this era where, you know, everyone started calling everything fake news and blah, blah, blah, and there's a lot of like truthiness and all that kind of stuff. I think this particular IP could have really gone lots of places. And it's a shame that, I don't know, I guess rare is quite a small studio anyway.

So, you know, it would be hard for them to maximize on things like that. But I'm just, like, sad that it, like, I guess Perfect Dark, the brands went in a way that I didn't appreciate in the later years. So I'm, like, sad that no one ever made anything good outfit, you know? Yeah. Yes. Well, that's definitely a big part of the Perfect Dark story is that, you know, what happened to Perfect Dark? We will get there. We will get there. But first, let's talk about how we get from James Bond to Perfect Dark.

Because, let's be frank, they didn't change that much on the surface level. You know, we've got a British male secret agent, and now we've got a British female secret agent. Yeah. You know, so on paper, not that much. Again, Bond, Dark, the names aren't even that different. but I have a quote from Martin Hollis who said, I thought women were underused in video games

Dr. Doak said that they had a poster of La Femna Kita on the wall and they were looking at it for a long time and that probably influenced them a little bit you know, it's a really good poster you know, she's got a gun, she's got short hairs, I recall, on the poster, so why not? And according to animator Brett Jones,

Dr. Doak came up with Joanna Dark because it was based on Joan of Arc aka Jean Dark, if you say it in French. To which point, I would also say that in 1999, you also had that really big budget Luke Bisson, Joan of Arc movie, starring his former wife, girlfriend, Mia Jovovich at the time, that became a whole thing between them. Yeah, that was kind of a mess.

But again, Joan of Arc awareness was pretty high at the time. So why not? Why not make a little pun while you're at it and create a character called Joanna Dark? I never heard that story, but I love it. Yeah. And plus, like, I don't think that you should underestimate how massive Lara Croft was at that time as well. Oh, absolutely.

Yes. And she is a British aristocrat as well. So, I mean, I'm making an assumption about Joanna Dark. She doesn't seem very aristocratic, but she does. So I think the thing that's underappreciated by an American audience is that to a UK audience, when you have a particular type of accent, it indicates a particular type of. class in the class system. And I think that has been eroded over time because the recent Tomb Raider games have confused that a lot. And she has a very upper class accent, but they've tried to give her a more like lower to middle class background, which doesn't, like, it doesn't

really fit very well with the kind of origin that she's had, she has. So I think what's interesting with Joanna Dark is that she does also have quite a genteel accent. So to me, that indicates that they're actually cribbing a little bit from the Lara Croft's kind of fact story as well, which I think is actually very intelligent of them. So in designing Joanna Dark, we can basically credit three different people to sort of give her the look that we can, and the personality that we can think of. First of all, as you mentioned, Cara, there was, there was, they were due mocap. So the mocap was performed by Laurie Sage, who they said fit the profile.

Now, they did point out that a lot of the mocap done behind the scenes was just, you know, one or two guys doing basically all the characters. So I think at one point they had a man do it anyway, but then they decided, no, we should probably have a woman do this. So Lori Sage was that woman. I mean, that's surprising to me because to me in my brain, the mocap from Golden Eye is really, really similar. And in the playable character sense, is really similar to perfect art.

I'm guessing that they couldn't reuse any of that for, lots of reasons, right? So they had to get it done again, but it's really interesting to me because I always read Joanna's bodily movements as being super similar to James Bond, but maybe I'm crazy. Well, maybe they showed Lori the old animation's like, oh, try this, Lori, and that's what she did. Yeah, maybe it's true. Facially, Jones says that they completely based Joanna Dark on Winona Ryder, who was, you know, very popular at the time. She certainly had the pixie haircut that you see on Joanna Dark, so it makes sense to me. That's interesting because, I mean, obviously, I always imagine Winona Ryder as being

quite a short actress, and Joanna always really tall to me. But, like, again, that's such a, like, memory version of playing the game. Maybe she isn't very tall. Maybe, like, all of the other characters are taller than her. I don't know. But it's, like, an interesting idea, but, like, game designing for heights, like, does it change your experience of playing it if you were to play it as a shorter person?

Like, I don't know. It's an interesting thought. You know, Joanna's just, all of her shots are forced perspective when she's with other characters. So it's like the Hobbit, or Lord of the Rings. A good one. We'll say that. But speaking of voice as an accent,

we can credit Evelyn Novakovic, who provided the voice for Joanna Dark. Now, Evelyn worked in the rare music team, and as she put it, you know, because she was on the music team in the department, being asked to help out with vocals was just par for the course. If you played any rare games, I think we can all agree. You can tell that they do a lot of the voices themselves. So it makes sense they would just have someone in the studio already. Well, you're a lady. You can be Joanna Dark.

All right, great. Now you mention it. Yeah, I don't seem a little amateurish in retrospect, because I, now. Now it's my job, right, to direct dialogue and to cast voice actors and all that kind of stuff. And now I think about it. Yes, Joanna Dark did come off as like a low-budget recording situation. And I feel, I feel, um, nostalgia about it. Like, I don't feel sad about it.

I feel like it kind of gives it something, you know? I feel like she did a better job, like, getting the character's personality. across than what they wound up doing with Perfect Dark Zero. So I cannot complain too much about it. Yeah. Yeah, it was kind of the style at the time. You know, you have a bunch of studio employees doing all the voices. Well, I can't speak.

Lord knows. I was the voice of, you know, if you punch a lady on the street in GTA4, I was the voice of someone screaming. Or if someone goes on, if a woman goes on fire, It's like a one in ten chance that it's me screaming. So that's, I guess, I guess that was happening then. I mean, I think that was 2007, well, like 2007, maybe. So still happening in 2007.

My goodness. I knew you were in the Assault Android Cactus. I did not realize you were in the GTA universe. Yes. I'm also the voice of the pirates in Void Bastards because they couldn't find a Scottish person. So I wrote all these Scottish characters. for that game, and then they were like, oh, could you do the voice as well?

We'll get your IMDB updated here with the GTA knowledge. Gotta play void bastards. I've been meaning to play that forever. Anyway, as you might expect, it happened again. You know, Golden Eye arrived two years after the movie,

and Perfect Dark, again, took a lot longer to complete than they expected. We have a quote from Martin Hollis who said it was supposed to be made, be a one-year project or 18 months. Ken Lobb described the first several months as being filled with

crazy aspirations of what they could do with a bigger cart or what if could be online. It was not online, listeners. It was not online. And another quote from Hollis who said, the original plan was that we would be able to knock out a sequel in fairly short order using the Golden Knight engine.

That very well-meaning plan melted away over the course of time under the influence of the ambition of the team. And at one point, Lobb said there was a plan for late 1999, but we really didn't count on that. Right. I mean, I think honestly, the way that my Nintendo 64, like, chugged whenever there was an explosion in perfect dark really gave the sense that they had overreach, but in like a good way. I think they had tried to do so many things at that game that were really exciting conceptually. and they pulled them off, but they did like a low budget version of each of those features. And I think it really comes across as being, like, reaching for so far.

And so it was so ambitious. And I think that that's why it's exciting. It's that you can see what they wanted to do with it. And it was struggling to get there. But what they did release was like an incredible achievement, I think, personally. And the way it played was just. just, like, you did crave more. It seemed to me, when you finished playing that game,

it seemed to me like it implied a perfect dark two and three and four, because there was so much there to, like, just conceptually, they were just reaching into that, like, place where it was exciting at the time, anyway. Then we got two prequels. Yeah, I liked how hard it. It pushed the system except when it kind of overreached too far. I remember doing a four-player multiplayer match where we had too many explosions and the game just like chugged so hard that it locked up and just stopped.

We just sat there for like 30 seconds. Like, I don't think it's coming back. Yeah, it was like a slideshow to play. But I mean, actually that became like a high shrewles tactic over time, right? Is if you really wanted to stop someone else, like if you were in a one-on-one, you just like grenade and grenade and grenade so they couldn't even walk forward without like you know they couldn't see anything because there was nothing you know so there's a lot there where I would especially me against my brother 1 v1 honestly we spent ages and ages grieving each

other just with like the way that the features and systems worked I remember especially like if you had the rail gun it was a nightmare because it 1v1 if someone got the rail gun first it was all over for you, you know, what was it called? Like, far sight, maybe? Was that? Farsight, yeah. Yes. So essentially, I mean, I actually end up using the limitations of the N64 to actually play that software against anyone who's playing me. I think that was actually kind of cool. Hey, I mean, it's like the Matrix. Once you understand how the system works, then you can, you know, use it to your advantage. Yeah. I mean, there was, I don't know if you guys would ever refer to it. it this way because I guess in the UK we would refer to it a screen d'ar. Did you ever place? Did you

ever do screen dar on your friends? Basically, I have never heard that term. So basically, not the phrase, though, tell me. So we used to call it screen dar, but you probably did it is essentially you could figure out, especially in Golden Eye, but like, and you're playing like locally with a bunch of friends. You could just look at someone else's section and figure out where they are on the map if you know it well and then just go there and kill them. And And so we used to call it screen dar, and like people would be screaming at each other, like, you're screen darring me, you're screen darring me. Stop looking at my map. You know, it was like, it was a banned tactic in my house often because everyone was really upset if you did that. And so if you got caught screen darring, you'd be ejected from the room for, you know, a minute or something, you know, so it's just like, I think, I think for me it was like an interesting, like, those couple of of games are really interesting simply because you could, I guess, implement house rules on them because they had these limitations that you were always, like, kind of thinking about and looking at.

Absolutely. That was absolutely a thing for us. I, you know, now that you say it, I don't know what we call that phenomenon, but it was definitely, it was a factor, you know, in certain, in certain game modes where you had to try and find the other players. Yeah. Yeah. I've been spending the past, like, 30 seconds, like, what did we call that? I remember we had a term for. It was just screen watching. That seems very anti-climactic. Maybe it's just cheating. Like, oh, you're cheating by looking at my screen? I don't know. I remember we, uh, we, like, set up a weird arrangement with like a blanket and a standing

lamp to just like run it through the middle of the TV. It's like there. Now it's a team game. You can't see what the other person's doing over there. Go nuts. Well, speaking of going nuts, the team did have some troubles in the midst of making perfect dark, and the first such trouble was when Martin Hollis left rare in September of 1998. According to Hollis, he said that his four-year contract was ending, and they offered him an extension for another four years, but he didn't want to sign up for another four years, so he decided to go his own way. I bet if they'd gotten the gold knot or the James Bond license again, I bet he would have stuck around. Possibly. Wait, but then when did Perfect

Dark come out again? How long did they spend? 2000. 2000? 2000. So it was like, he spent a good two years to light him. Yes. Yeah. And more, because in early 1999, Dr. Doak, Norgate, art director Carl Hilton, and second unit director Steve Ellis all leave, and they form

free radical design, who of course makes time splitters that also comes out in 2000 for the PS2. Oh, damn. So it came out against Perfect Dark. That's crazy. More or less, more or less, yes. Wow. Now, since all these people contributed to the game, they do all end up in the final credits, but obviously they had to find new people to take over the

project, you know, in the lengthy period it took to actually complete the game. Programmer Mark Edmonds is officially the leader of the project after Hollis leaves. Grant Kirkhope, we mentioned earlier, who did work on Goldeney. He takes over for Norgate in Perfect Dark, but both musicians have work in the final game. According to Kirkhope, his favorite tune in the game is Chicago Stealth. It's also a good name for a song, Chicago Stealth. Chicago Stealth was a great track, I remember. And in general, Rare just starts gathering other people who work at the company or even hiring outsiders to get more people into the project to just finish the damn game at some point because it does take quite a long time.

Again, eventually it releases in May 2000, so almost three years after Goldenhye. And, you know, fairly late into the N64's life. Quite late. Because, you know, this was post-Dreamcast. The PS2 was coming out very shortly, and I think most folks were ready to sort of put the N-64 in the closet or shuffle it down to, like, a basement TV and ignore it for the foreseeable future. I mean, we had saved for such a long time that we actually used our N-64, like, way past that. I feel like our N-64 was never out of use. I feel like, I think in America where maybe, maybe the hardware was slightly cheaper,

it might have been more common to just buy a new console every so often. But I remember, like, it was very expensive for us in the UK to buy this kind of stuff. So we probably got a lot more usage out of it after Perfect Dark, honestly. And I remember by the time it was in my final year at high school, God, when was that? That was like, I can't remember now. but essentially we were just getting over the N64 then because we had a bunch of people bring in their N64s because they had bought a new console recently and they'd leave the N64 in the common room that we had for like the fifth and six years which is like the final year

in Scottish schools where in between periods you could go there and play a video game or whatever and people were cool with leaving your hardware in there. And, you know, you know, high school kids are. They want to vandalize it. So I think to me that indicates that that was actually the time that people in the UK were abandoning the old technology and then buying something else. But that was like way past 2000. That was, you know, that was more like 2005 probably. So it was quite a while until we abandoned that kind of stuff.

Well, at the very least from Nintendo's side, they didn't seem too concerned. about it. Again, we have a quote from Lobb, Ken Lobb, who just said, Golden 9-O-7 kept selling. So from their perspective, they were okay with waiting, which is good news. That means the team had the, you know, had time to finish what they wanted to finish. But yeah, programmer, I hope I'm getting pronouncing his name right, Bonair, Cheslick, at Rare. They said that the N64 was getting towards the end of its life, so every week they didn't ship would have meant sales lost. Because, yeah, May 2000, by that point, the PS2 is out in Japan.

It came out, I think, in the fall that year in the U.S., and I assume the UK as well. But, yeah, as far as Japan was already concerned, they already had it, the PS2. Man, the PS2 era was the greatest era, and I missed it completely because we couldn't afford one. So it was, I think I was like halfway through university before someone let me play their PS2, which was a real time for me because I had, like, you know, all the Resident Evil's, by that point, we're, like, on the PS2. So I was, I was fully in the Resident Evil era. But it was late for me, because I was still playing that S-64 until, like,

like, maybe, like, yeah, maybe until maybe 2004 or something, the S-64 was, like, that was my era. So, yeah. You know, PS2 didn't have perfect dark. I'm just, I'm just saying. Right. That was a strike against it. I wonder, though, if they had ever made a PS2 perfect dark, like, that hardware,

would have been great for a Perfect Dark game. So let's actually talk about the release and the actual game properties. We've reached this point in this era. As we said, Perfect Dark, May 2000. One of the very important points of the Perfect Dark release is the fact that it ended up requiring the use of the little expansion pack. Now, when I say require, I'm fibbing, because it doesn't require it, but if you don't have the expansion pack, there are a lot of functions of the game that are inaccessible to you, and that includes the single-player campaign. So if you don't have the expansion pack, I think basically you're limited to some multiplayer modes on certain maps, but not other maps.

So that became a big selling, actually sort of a negative point against it, at least early on to the advantage, because you had to know going into it, oh, you better get that pack. Otherwise, you won't be able to take advantage of all the game that you want to play. I remember at least in the U.S. it shipped with a little, like, chart on the back, showing, like, what you could or couldn't do without the pack. And it was like, the one side that had the pack, like, was everything was checked. And the no pack side was like, um, two, three things. Like, it's, it's pretty barren. Yeah. Yeah, it was, it was, I remember when this game came out, I finally had to buy an expansion pack.

And, uh, yeah, I mean, they had a whole shelf of them. Nobody was really, uh, after them unless you really wanted to upgrade, uh, your Star Wars game. Yeah. Again, I remember my brother had to save up for the expansion pack because we'd be very, needed it so bad. So we had a couple of games, you know, without it, and it wasn't great, but I think you could still play grid on multiplayer, which is my favorite level, multiplayer level in Perfect Dark.

That was my favorite because it had the elevator in the center, and then you could like basically set it to spawn, like, infinitely spawn all of these enemies. And then you could get an elevator. The doors would open. and you would shoot every single AI time, then the doors would close, and then you would go up to the top, and then you'd do the exact same thing again.

And then when you ran I-O-M-O, all he had to do is do a little like Ui, from out of the elevator, back into the elevator. I didn't even just do that for hours, and it was wonderful because it's like that, there's a really nice thing that John Romero says about games, where he says most games are actually about cleaning up. and they're about cleaning

and basically it's about making order out of a chaos and he's like if you invite a player into place to clean up they find it really rewarding so that's what that's what grid was and doom is the same thing right where it's like all you're doing is cleaning a level of the mess that's in there and that's all you're doing in grid is you're cleaning up

so it's very therapeutic to just clean up grid for like six hours grid is a wonderful cleanup level. I love that description for doom. Yeah. No, it's like, yeah, you know, that's true. You don't think about it, but like, I think that John Romero, I think he wrote this article where it's basically he puts end domestic terms.

And I think that's such a nice way of thinking about it because everyone finds, to a certain extent, everyone finds order very therapeutic, right? Like that's something that's very rewarding to human beings is order. And, um, and the idea that the designer makes a, mess for you to clean up is super interesting. But I think about that all the time now. With all of my games, actually, that I work on, I'm like, oh, could we clean this up? Could we make order? Could we make order? Some kind of chaos here, you know?

Apparently, they did try on the Nintendo side to push to get the extension packaged in with Perfect Dark, but the problem was it had already shipped out with Donkey Home 64 the year earlier. So they didn't want to pack it in again with a different game. So, yeah, if you wanted it, you had to buy it separately. which may have impacted sales. Yeah. Which is a missed opportunity because, from what I understand, Donkey Kong 64 didn't actually need the expansion pack.

Like, they just kind of bundled it because they wanted to move units. Maybe they made too many and they're trying to get rid of them. Yeah. Anyway, due to the original story and having this, you know, agency and Joanna Dark and aliens, I one thing that I think I really enjoyed it before dark at the time was how much it leaned into science fiction concepts and sort of exotic architecture and a futurism that I thought was super cool to me at the time. Very surprised, by the way, researching for this episode Apparently, the original game takes place in 2023, so we missed it.

Oh, down. We've got to go back. We got to go back. But yeah, the big picture here is that Joanna Dark works for something called the Carrington Institute, a research center. But the research they do is actually working with aliens. And by aliens, I mean the cute little gray kind. Because the bad guys in the world, dated on industries, they're. They work with aliens, but these are the big, scary kind who disguised themselves as people,

but are actually, like, really big bruiser types, you know? And between the two companies, warring with each other, espionaging each other, stealing secrets, kidnapping doctors who are actually like little robot heads with wings on them. It all comes together, and, you know, the final level of the game, you actually get to go out of space and take the fight to the aliens, which is pretty exciting. even if the alien planet itself isn't that impressive, you know, considering what you've been gone through it to that, at that point, it's fine, it's fine, you know, it works. It's kind of like the final level of half-life or whatever.

You're like, oh, it's brown, I'm here. It's really difficult. It's boring. But it's fine. You know, you're thinking to yourself, this should be like the most fantastical thing I've ever seen. But it's not. It's just a bunch of corridors with sand. It does. It does fascinate me. It's like this game starts off as like this very

cyberpunk noir thriller sort of thing. And as you keep getting further into it, it becomes more and more just like super 90s action movie pastichees. I'm like, oh, now you're fighting in Area 51. Now you're fighting on Air Force One. Yeah. Now you're under the water. Now you're on an alien ship. It's like, it's like, okay, you have a progression here. And it works, like, while you're playing it, just like, okay, yeah, this is naturally what I would do. I would naturally be going into outer space and blowing up the aliens, you know, leader. But then you look back at the beginning of, like, I started this whole game, just like breaking into high rise. Yeah. I mean, I think for me, Indiana Jones is a good kind of template for all of

this because Indiana Jones has that kind of fantastical kind of element to it, right? But they leave it as this kind of little flavor that you, you know, and they kind of tease it and they don't let you see it until like right at the end. And when it does happen, it is a kind of like amazing spectacle. And they do it really well in Raiders of the Lost Art, for example. but then you've got in, you know, in perfect dark, I think they, like, show their hand a little too early, and a lot of that fantastical stuff intrudes too much in what is already a really cool universe.

Like you say, that cyberpunk thing is a lot cooler than, like, super 100% alien stuff, right? And so there's a part of me that's a bit like, obviously now I find all of this. really informative because I'm a narrative designer and I think about you structures all the time in stories and how you keep people interested and keep people's attention. But like, I think I learn a lot from like showing your hand too early and keeping things a mystery is actually my main kind of, um, the main way I think that you maintain a player's interest, right, and their attention. And so I think a lot about that kind of stuff where I'm like, oh, actually they probably should have kept

the alien stuff to a minimum. And the cooler thing about all of this is it enables you to have all those cool alien weapons, but not seeing as many aliens actually might have been much more exciting. And maybe the aliens are co-opting

human agents to do a lot more of their bidding. So I think that's kind of what I learned from it, I think, is that they showed their hand a little bit too early. Yeah, I could see that. For me, I think it all kind of works because of Joanna Dark

and the fact that she's like she's just such a cool character like a grinding influence or something yeah like you know she kind of sells everything just in terms of you know the voice acting and the motion capture and just you know how she's sort of

handling all of these things that are going on she's like yeah of course aliens sure yeah and for me that kind of makes it work in a way that, you know, the prequel, the Perfect Dark Zero, does not, because she does not have the same sort of weight to her. So when things are happening, it's like, oh, well, okay. Yeah.

We're just doing that now. I think you're speaking to, like, this thing that happened around about DSX, where people started wanting quite grounded, quite adult, quite complex characters. And they start asking for, you know, when you apply for a writing job, they started asking for these, like, gritty, grounded,

realistic characters that speak the way that they would in an HBO drama, and they start asking for, like, a lot more kind of seriousness in the way that you, or, or, I guess, it's like a kind of realism style of writing. And even though, like, not a lot of that gets into games, because games are so, I mean, for lack of, of a better word, stupid a lot of the time.

And a lot of your grinded gritty writing doesn't actually get into the final game. I think what's interesting is that, like, they did manage to maintain that in the first perfect arc. And you're right, like, the, the, anything that came afterwards did not maintain that level of grit and seriousness. And probably because, um, whenever you're designing, like, systems of play, they are kind of silly and they look ridiculous. And you have to start, like,

catering to that instead. So there's a lot of ways in which that might have changed over development, but personally, I prefer that grittiness. I like being catered to as a person who wants more complex adult stuff to happen in games. And it's a shame to me, at least, that a lot of games don't dip into that in a way that I find useful. I mean, obviously some games do. I do think, like, Harvey Smith has made a majority of those kinds of games, but at the same time, I'm always like, you know, why, why do we have to continue to try to remove sexuality from our games, for example? It's always a disappointment to me. Like, I think we should have more ways that you can express romantic relationships and sexuality in games. And, um, which is interesting,

right? Because, like, uh, you still don't get that really in goldenite, even though James Bond is pretty much a sex simple, and obviously didn't make systems based around like anyone sleeping with anyone in golden eye. But like, there's a sense that, you know, there could have been a little bit more of that flavor, even in the narrative. So I think it's interesting, you know, I did speak to Martin Hollis actually about this and he said, yeah, like, you spent like a really long time iterating a systems of violence and not iterating on systems of relationships between human beings, and so it's easier to do violence in games, and that's actually just the way it is, and that's sad, but there you go.

Well, scoring points in the silly category, I do appreciate the fact that when you look at the faces of all the people in Perfect Dark, you can tell that a lot of them are just the development staff, you know, I think some of them, I think some of the faces are in Perfect Dark are just the same from Golden Eye again, you know? Yeah. I'm pretty sure even the employees who left, like Doak, probably in there somewhere, you know? Well, isn't it true that, like, the, the gun club is just named after Catlop, and I always,

I always, I always, I always assumed that that's a funny joke because no one likes the club and it's actually the worst gun. So, I mean, I'm sure in the office it was a source of much amusement. Actually, in Perfect Dark, there's one guard in Pelagic II who has Miyamoto's face. Oh, well, I think that's probably because of that little. anecdote that I told you about, right? Like, where they probably did get in trouble for Miyamoto for being so violent. But he probably was a pretty big fan of the games.

I remember seeing that particular garden, like, wow, he kind of stands out. Yeah, I think you get a good look at him in the sort of the opening cinema of the level. So if you can start the level, you'll see a guy walk by the camera. I was like, hey, is that? Yeah, it is. It is. That's him. Also, there was a contest winner at some point, which, like, to get fans, to get fans, to get

their picture in the game, and apparently because the winner was black, they actually got some black people into the game, which the staff was very excited about because Rare said they had no black staff at the time. So that was just a boon for them. It's like, oh, great. Now we can have black people in the game because the contest winner. Wow. Okay. Real 90s energy there. Yeah, like some real 90s, England's energy. Thank you. One of the coolest things I think about Perfect Dark, which you don't realize what it truly represents it when you first play the game, is that you start the game and you're in like this office space, and the menus are like a little, like, laser thing in front of your eyes, like the Dominion used on their ship in D-Space 9, and, you know, you do all your menu stuff, you can play the single-player game, play multiplayer game, whatever you want, but you're allowed to close the menu, and you just get to walk around that space. And this space is the Carrington Institute where you work.

And there are lots of rooms you can go into. There are like tutorials for different gadgets. There's a shooting range where you get to like, you know, take aim with different guns that you've used. And if you get really high scores, you unlock extra weapons for multiplayer mode. And that includes guns that they brought back from Golden Eye, but just like with different name. Like, I believe the clob returns, but they don't call it the clob. They call it something else. Like they'd have renamed it.

But still, it's very clearly the clob in design and usage. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's so interesting to me. There's two things in there. The first one is, I love a dietic menu. Don't you guys think that like it's the most neglected thing in games? Because it's so, it gives you such a great narrative flavor of the game. It makes you feel like you're in this world. It can do a lot for your world building. A digestive menu or like a diet, a set of, like, you know, things that you can, uh, you can change accessibility or you can, or you can like, you know, uh, change the controls or change the audio or, or whatever. If you put it in this amazing kind of digested kind of menu, then you're getting this like really exciting experience of world building as you're also like changing a lot of things that are normally really mundane. Um, and I really love that. And I think I keep, you know, thinking, you know, it is a silly expense to some studios, but like there's a part of me that's

just like, that's so amazing. You know, everyone always remembers, for example, I think it's like the pitch black game has like a kind of weird digestive menu. It's like a Rubik's Cube or something. I can't remember. It's like a weird one. And then, you know, anything that has like an in-game kind of world for its menu is just so exciting. And especially the Carrington is. itself was just cool to wander around. But the other thing I was going to say is that mundane style, non-fantastical, but just very mundane settings are also really unusual in games. You know, there's this idea that this is where you work happens in half-life as well,

but you start out like, you know, just where you work. This is your every day. This is who you are. This is where you work. Like, you get to know your character just by getting to walk around that kind of very mundane space. And I don't think that it was until like maybe something like gone home came out that I started to realize that playing a video game in a non-fantastical space is deeply unusual because everyone else wants to make it, you know, like in space or like dungeons and

dragons. And it's like, no, no, no, all games are space or dungeons and dragons. Can't we have a space that, like, has fantastical elements, almost like, you know, there's magic, there's magic there, but, like, it's in a normal mundane space that you might live in as a real person. Like, there's parts of it, uh, magical realism is like, ask what I'm getting at. So there's a lot there where I think that they've really maximized this idea of world building by making this like mundane Joanna dark office where she spends all her, her days, right? And she's like, this is where you normally work. And you're like, oh, you know. That whole, like, hub area threw me off the first time I played this game.

I remember, now that we're talking about it, I remember, like, getting out of the menu and, like, wait, I could just, like, walk around. How do I get back into the menu? What's going on here? Because, like, if I remember, you have to go up to, like, the computer to access your, you know, your mission menu and whatnot. And, yeah, it was, it was a cool concept. I love that later in the game, you actually have a level in that space. So it, like, rewards you for, you know, familiarizing yourself with her workspace and figuring out where everything is. And also, that might be one of the most fun missions in the game.

It's like, oh, okay, now I have to go help my coworkers that I have been hanging around with. It's very, very, like, well put together that. And, you know, by extension of that, you know, talk about mundane spaces. Like, the first level of the game is you invading, you know, data-to-nine headquarters, which is basically like a skyscraper. And it's got some futuristic elements to it, but it is basically an office space. Like you go through,

like you open regular doors. There are desks and things sitting around. And, you know, soldiers like barricade themselves behind things, but it's basically like an office space. And that makes the second level where you're in the basement, which is like where all the secret lab stuff is, that makes it that much more exciting. Because like, oh, I fought my way all the way through down this,

you know, rather to, typical office building, and now I'm in the secret science lab, and now this is where the cool stuff happens. And then in the next level, you fight your way back up out of the building to get to the roof again and escape. I think that, I thought that was brilliant. And it's also a great way to just make the best use of the same space. Like, oh, I went down here, and I got to fight my way back up and get through the vents again and find the elevators again. Like, it's, I thought it was fantastic. You know, we already have, we already have the building. So, like, we already made that space. We just have to move some objects around.

to make it more interesting and you go wild. And I think as well, what's actually really hard to explain or to advocate for inside of Game Studio is the fact that it's hard to argue for that mundane space because everyone's like, no, no, no, the excitement should be at 11, like all the time, for everyone, all the time. We have to impress the player. We have to keep their attention, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, okay, but the way you keep a player's attention is that thing that I was mentioning

before, where you keep the mysteries in your pocket. And basically the way that, like, you should make a story is to create an expectation that something amazing is going to happen. And you can only do that if you provide contrast. So making that, like, mundane space, you're creating an expectation in your player that something amazing is going to happen after that mundane space. And that is true, right? You get to see the cool laboratory stuff, right?

But like, it's really hard to argue for that mundane space in a studio because they're always like, no, but I want to see the cool thing now. The player has to see the cool thing now. And I'm like, no, no, no. If you were not creating the expectation of the cool thing, they won't feel the cool thing. They'll just be like, this is normal. this is a normal this is normal for this game it's like no no no no if the expectation is actually the pleasure in the story and when you're when you're feeling that expectation that's the

enjoyment when you get the reward you no longer feel enjoyment anymore and so it's really hard to explain that so i think they did a really good job of perfect dart of providing this expectation whether or not they they really come through is obviously a different story, but they do use those mundane spaces really well. Like the Chicago level where it's raining outside and you start outside, I remember thinking, this is so cool. I wonder what I'm going to see here. And you get those like security bots and stuff. It's so cool. It's a great level. In between the two, you're in what, a coastal villa and it feels like someplace that a very rich person would, you know, live and hang out, which is exactly what it was. Yeah. And I love like,

When you're, like, fighting through his, like, personal bedroom and bathroom and his, his, I want to call it a pantry, but it's where he keeps all his drinks. There's a wine cellar, right? Isn't there a wine cellar? Yeah. Yeah. That's the word I'm looking for. Yeah. So it's, yeah, his pantry.

Yeah, it's a great experience the way they put that together. And I will say. And even Air Force One, if I remember, right, like, you go through, like, the kitchen part of the plane where they keep, like, like, you keep, like, like, you. the supplies and whatnot. Like, even when they're getting a little more fantastical, they're still trying to ground it a little bit. Yeah, and I will say that a lot of that mystery that I was describing earlier is really emphasized by the score, like the music that they have composed for it. Because I personally, I think the Golden Night and Perfect Dark Sign tracks are some of the best of all time of any video game. And because they really underscore the type of the moods and what you're supposed to feel.

and they also provide momentum for you to like push through the level. Especially when you know you've got like something like the Golden Ice soundtrack will do like this kind of cool 007 beat. But then whenever it's getting really intense, they'll speed it up to twice the speed. And that beat will propel you through that like final quarter of the level. And I honestly think that that kind of thing, the fact they can do that is like honestly a kind of a tribute to the composers and the designers, but I think, you know, like the Chicago track that we were talking about previously, like it really feels moody and it provides that kind of gloomy, at noirish kind of vibe that makes you feel like you're there. And I think that really helps you feel like you're

part of this cool world. So, yeah, that also provides that kind of cool mystery that even if you're in a mundane space, you feel like you're somewhere else. You know, not to get off a topic, but I was thinking just, I wonder if this sort of idea of having a regular space and building expectation for like something exotic, I wonder if that fuels a lot of Silent Hill. Because in Silent Hill games, you spend a lot of time walking through a regular town. I mean, it's run down, but it's like, it's still like a regular town. Like you'll still like a bakery or whatever. But then, you know, maybe an hour later you walk by and the whole thing's like made of like,

you know, fleshy, like, you know, nets and things and like, you know, broken glass everywhere. Like, oh, now this place is, now this place is dangerous. Oh, boy. Yeah. I think, I think there's a, you know, that feeling of the uncanny where, you know, and you see a space that you recognize, but it has unrecognizable things encroaching into it. I think that definitely Japanese developers, like, maximize that kind of, like, symbolic kind of encroachment on, like, you know, and feelings of, like, the uncanny. I think they are like specifically really good at it because I think they're a lot more comfortable than Western developers are with symbolism. Especially obviously in Silent Hill,

you've got a lot of really famous symbolism that they use to tell you exactly what's happening, especially in your own character's mind where, you know, you go into the famous like empty swimming pool and there's like an empty pram there or like, you know, something that's supposed to hold a baby but doesn't. You know, there's all sorts of things there. I think they're a lot more comfortable with doing that I wish that we could do in the West. But people in the West are really not comfortable. And especially in Game Studios with it using symbolism to tell people stuff.

Because what they want is for the Playtaster to come back and be like, I got the story immediately. You know, like, I know what's happening. I can write it down. And that's really depressing to me, obviously, because I'm a storyteller who's much more interested in mystery and having people figure out by themselves. But yeah, like you're right. There's this really nice way that you can use a mundane recognizable, kind of normal kind of environmental storytelling and then have weird stuff come in that shouldn't be there because you recognize it shouldn't be there. So, yeah, Perfect Dark is definitely using a little bit of that as well. I'm just remembering the Simpsons bit where Hooper's like, it was symbolism.

He was angry to the actor just like gutting down the precedent. in a movie. Well, speaking of guns, let's talk about the many weapons of Perfect Dark, because one of the big innovations they added to the engine from Golden Eye is the fact that every gun now has an alternate fire form. And some of this stuff is very simple. I think one of the important ones is from the very first level where, you know, obviously Joanna goes in there, she's got her, you know, she's got a handgun. You can shoot with a handgun, of course. That's what handguns do. but the alternative fire mode

means she just knocks you out with a gun and they require you to do this because part of the way you access the secrets to her lab at the bottom is you just to like find a data down executive and knock her out. If you kill her

her key doesn't work anymore so like you have to learn how to do the alternative fire mode or switch weapons to punch or whatever but you have to knock her out and not shoot her and then you get her key and then you can exit the level and that happens early on too So if you get it wrong, you start over, but like you don't miss that much progress because

you just, oh, I'll try to try again. Yeah, it's like the third door you find. Yeah, yeah. It's definitely early on. But of course, as the game goes on, you get more and more exotic weapons, including alien stuff. And so the secondary fire stuff gets really out there, you know? Like, obviously there's like, you know, machine guns that have like grenade launchers or

I think there's an assault rifle that you can basically turn into a grenade and throw it and it'll just blow up. My favorite, you know, I think I speak for a lot of people. My favorite is a laptop gun, because the laptop gun is a really cool machine gun. And then if you put alternate fire mode, it just becomes a turret. You just drop a turret anywhere you want. I look, okay, you got my back. You got my back laptop gun.

I'll be over here now. Thank you. There's one that, like, has, like, a cloaking function that makes you invisible, but it, like, drains your ammo count, which was an interesting choice. Yeah. And all of these ideas were, like, the coolest thing. I think I'd ever thought of in a game. I mean, it was so cool to play a game that had these, like, really cool ideas about what you could do.

And, like, no one has really, I don't know if anyone has been really innovating on, like, that kind of, like, because, like, now you've got, like, first-person shooters and they're, they're fine. But they don't have that kind, because you had this, like, alien wrapping on stuff, you could do whatever you wanted, like, the ammo that, like, dissolves into your gun is cool. even though it's kind of silly, there's like an element of it that's like really fun and like interesting and, you know, the weird side effects they'd apply to this stuff. Like all of it was great because it was so inventive. Yeah, I'd like that this changed that from Golden Eye, like that actual reload animations because GoldenEye is just like, oh, the gun drop down, now it's reloaded, like, like some sort of light gun arcade game. But here, you know, you see Joanna, like, popping the ammo clips in, however that works.

And, yeah, like the alien guns just sort of, they seem sticky, which is really fascinating to, like, watch. Yeah. They do, they do seem like they should be sticky. Like an unpleasant thing to hold. Yeah. And the other thing I really appreciated at the time, which is going back to, like, what Martin Hollis said, about, you know, women protagonists being fairly rare, is that the hand, is recognizably a hand of a woman, right? And that, it was, like, really weird to look at when you were younger.

I mean, even with, like, a bunch of games that had come out at the time, I think there, maybe at the time there was a, I think 1999 was something like the, um, the game for another movie, um, the fifth element. Did that come out around then where you could play as Leloo? but essentially like it was still fairly rare and I remember looking at this like because you know you play doom like the entire childhood that you have and you're like this gruff man and then all of a sudden you see this like really slim fingers in front of you of like Joanna Dark and those like little slim kind of long fingers in the glove and you're like oh I'm a woman now and even just the hand was weird to look at because the gender swap was so strange because you've never experienced it before. I don't know. It still sticks in my brain because I remember when we played alien isolation for the first time still being surprised that there were women's hands doing things in front of me. Like the first person knew, it just was, it's still shocking. And I don't think it should be. It's like weird to feel that way still. You know, it's like kind of an unusual feeling. But yeah, and really cool to see like a woman reload in front of. I don't know. There's something cool and sexy if I don't. I mean, it's certainly great compared to the alter. alternative where I'm thinking of like the Jurassic Park game that came out, what was like 98 trespasser, where it's like the lead character is a woman and you literally have to like look

down at her body to like see your health bar because like it was represented as like a tattoo on her chest. Like, oh no way. I know that. That's really, I mean, that's, that's very inventive of them, certainly. I just had a flashback by the way to the fact that there was like a competition back then, you know, that you were saying about competition to get into the game, but there's a competition back then. So they were being Turok out, and they said if you name a kid Turok, you know, you could be, what is it? You could be in a game or something.

I can't remember what the prize was, but it was very funny. And so apparently there were at least five or six babies that year born called Turok. So there you go. I wonder if you're listening now and you're called Turok, write us in. Absolutely. We definitely want to have on the Turok episode. Yes, all Turox all the time. But, Kar, you mentioned it like 40 minutes ago, but I have to call it.

Yeah, my other favorite gun was the Farsite, which is basically an alien sniper rifle that lets you shoot people through the walls. I mean, it's so overpower. Yeah, that's like the alternate fire mode is like it would zoom it would like home in on whoever enemies were on the other side of these walls. It's just incredible. I mean, just so overpowered. It was like the golden gun, you know, from Golden Eye. Which is also in this game. You know, now I wonder, though, because I don't think I had seen this episode at the time,

but there is a late DS9 episode, like season seven, where Dax has to, like, use an alien sniper rifle to, like, look around the station and she's looking through the walls. And I wonder, you know, if rare were a bunch of big Star Trek fans in there, if they got that from that? or if it was maybe just, you know, Kar, you called a rail gun earlier, because I know Eraser, 97, Schwarzenegger had like a big-ass gun that was like, had a scope that went through walls too.

So I don't know. I don't know if it was the Star Trek or Schwarzenegger that might have influenced the Farsight. Maybe both. Maybe. I mean, I will say that DS9 at that time in the UK was broadcast very regularly on BBC 2 at 6pm, I think, had a regular slot.

And it was very rare for people who only had terrestrial TV, i.e. like BBC, BBC 2, ITV, Channel 4. And I think Channel 5 at the time, that was our, you know, quote unquote free TV, even though it was like, you know, TV license. It was pretty rare for us to get any American TV on that apart from things like The Simpsons and, you know, Star Trek and stuff like that. So I would say that like DSN probably had an iron-sized influence in our ideas of sci-fi at the time because it was constantly airing. Another thing that is weird is that for shift workers, they would put it on on BBC 2 at 5 a.m. So for me, like when I was at high school, I was a compassionate swimmer. We used to get up at 5 a.m. to be in a pool at 6 a.m. before school. And so at 5 a.m. I would eat my breakfast to D.S. So it probably did have, like, his humongous influence in British culture at the time. So I would be not at all surprised to hear that this game was very much influenced by, like, a lot of ideas about alien technology from D.S.9.

Hmm. My God. You could actually have breakfast with Garrick. I'm so jealous. What's so crazy is that, like, I always seem to get up when Odo was doing something weird. Like, he was, like, sleeping in a bucket or having a romance with, like, something in town. I don't know, but, like, it was always really weird Odo episodes for me. So, like, and I only ever got, like, the second half of it.

I never got, like, the introduction. So it was always, like, the bizarrest wrap-up. Like, he was always in the middle of having the weirdest problems. So I have a lot of affection for it, but I also don't understand any of it because I never got the beginning of this story. It's a good show. In context, it's a very good show. I recommend it.

It's wonderful. Wonderful. Dax is my actual favorite. I mean, she's lots of people's favorite. But like, Dax and Wharf were like the original cool couple in my book. So, yeah. So, let's talk multiplayer mode because obviously they had to put multiplayer mode in Perfect Dark because that was a huge part of Golden Eye. But one of the things I really appreciated for Perfect Dark version, at least, was the addition of Sims. Now, we should point out, by the way, they call, Sims was basically their term for any bots that they put in the game, you know, CPU players. I should point out that Sims, like the EA game, The Sims, only debuted a few months before Perfect Dark. So they probably had that name in the code before EA actually, like, put it out in the store shelves.

So probably it's coincidence there. But throughout the game, you know, and this is multiplayer mode or the single player mode. We'll get back to that later a second. But you can add a number of artificial AI players to your match. I believe the standard, you know, Golden lie was a maximum of four players. I believe Perfect Dark, the maximum is eight players, by which I mean. You can have four people holding controllers and four sims, or you can play it by yourself and just have a ton of sims, which is something that I love to do. You know, like, Carrey, you talk about your elevator levels.

Yeah. I would just have a level where I would, like, take the alien sniper rifle, and I would put it, you know, at it was always at the end of a hallway, and I'd go down there, I'd get the end of the hallway, I'd be put a turt in front of the door to make sure no one opened the door while I was in there, and then I would just snip everyone, you know, the whole game. Through the walls. They couldn't touch me. Yeah. I remember cheating. I remember playing, I remember throwing on some music and just sitting down with like a bunch of Sims in perfect dark and just having a great time. Because, you know, what was I going to do after school?

Honestly. See my friends. That's silly. There's nothing as pure as that in any game still. Like, it's such a pure feeling of like, I'm going to kill these dopes for like 10 hours and they can't do anything about it. And it doesn't feel gory because they're not real. They're dissimulated people. You know, there's, I don't know, there's something really very pure about that is that you're not hurting anyone.

It's just a practice level. Grid looks slightly surreal as a level. So that's why I always chose it and had this very nice structure with the elevator. I just feel like there's nothing quite as like straightforward as that in games anymore. it's very, like, complex. If you want to try and rig that kind of stuff up now in a multiplayer game, it's a little too there are too many selections, there's too much stuff you have to, like, pick or whatever. It's, like, just a very pure form of, like, here's something silly that I'm going to do.

Like, you know, like I said before, like cleaning for two hours. It just feels like an exorcism, so it's nice. And it was fun because, like, you can mix and match the Sims behaviors and difficulty levels. So I used to do that a lot. I'm like, okay, we'll have, like, one or two that are, like, really dangerous, and then we'll have some that are really weird and kind of useless. We'll have a good, like, mix of opponents. Yeah. And, God, now that I'm thinking about it, this game, like, hit around when Columbine took place in the U.S., and I remember, I remember, you know, a lot of the Zeitgeist was blaming video games for that.

Of course, now we know you can blame Nazis for that. But the fact that this was like a game where you're just, like, running around shooting computer players constantly in these multiplayer zones. I remember that, like, noodling around in my head a bit while I was playing. I'm like, this is kind of weird, but it's so fun that I'm just going to run with it. One thing that I appreciated, though, about Perfect Dark in comparison to Golden Eye was that to play multiplayer in Golden Eye, I had to play with my friends. and I had to play really against my friends. Like, you could do, you know, there were some team modes, but basically, we almost always played, you know, death match, you know, you're on your own, four, you know, 4V4.

But because Perfect Dark has all these sim modes, you could create your own sort of custom scenario. So you could make a scenario where you and your friends team up against the Sims. So, you know, it's P versus E instead of P versus P. Or you can have teams where it's like me in a computer versus you in a computer. Or, you know, you could even, you know, you could even, you know, handicap yourselves where, oh, this guy, you know, my friend's a really good player. He has to be by himself, but I've got computers to back me up because I'm not as good as

him, you know, and or you just play by yourself and just practice all day. Like, that's what I love. That's why I think I probably put more time in the end into perfect dark because I could play it by myself. I didn't have to have all my friends over at the same time. And also, you know, I'll be frank, I wasn't that great at Golden Eye, so I lost most the time, but in Perfect Dark, I at least had a fighting chance. You know, this is something I will give Perfect Dark Zero as well, because Perfect Dark Zero is also very much built around having a lot of multiplayer options. You talked about how you could set up these multiplayer death matches, but also, you know,

this game had a really robust co-op campaign, and you could play it with another person, or you could play it with, like, a computer assistant, or I think you could even do both if you had that option. And like, some of the cheats were unlocking specific, like, backups. Like, you can get one of the little gray alien guys. You could get, uh, you get, like, a hot shot who just, like, runs around with double magnums shooting at, uh, computers, uh, opponents. So that's, like, fun.

It's a fun, like, twist. I remember doing that a lot. Um, and, and they had this counteroperative mode. I think you have it in the notes here, too, where a second player. controls one of the opposing computer guards or whatever and if they get shot down they respawn as a different guard

so you're like an agent Smith sort of thing going on and yeah that was super cool I don't know that I've really seen that in a lot of other games like it's probably hell to put together but it was super cool I feel like that might have been a factor in one of the Left for Dead games

where you could play as zombies against Pumans, but yeah, I do like, I liked how in Perfect Dark, besides the multiplayer modes, which we talked about, there were multiplayer ways to play the single-player campaign, which absolutely was not the case in Bond. Like in James Bond, James Bond, James Bond is James Bond. But in Perfect Dark, you could play as Joanna Dark, and the second player could be Velvet Dark, who was like her sister, I guess, or cousin, I don't know, or you could, yeah, unlike extra players, like, I think you could play as Carrington or the ELEA. in, or you just put Sims in there.

So you can, in fact, play the main one-player game, but give yourself a whole crew to make it easier, you know? Why not? It's you playing at home. You should be able to make it easier if you want to make it easier. I support this plan. I think I'm trying to remember if the co-op characters also got all the outfit changes that Joanna does, I'm just trying, I'm trying to remember, like,

that one where she's, like, all dressed up and, like, a dress for like they, I don't know, some sort of major event. Like, does your partner also get a dress? I don't remember. It's been too long. I don't know. I think Carrington always wears a suit because I think that's how he rolls. Yeah. He seems like that kind of person, like, who's always dressed to the nines because he's got that kind of money. I always played, like, with the big trench coat on. You know, she just has a trench coat. But then I was always afraid that the hit box expanded to be between her legs if you put the trench coat on. So I was like really uncertainness to whether if you got shot in the trench coat.

Trenchcoat, whether you would die. The Trenchcoat was a really great look. I liked that one a lot. It was cool, yeah. Also, we should mention the challenges. They've added sort of a single-player challenge mode, although, of course, you could play this multiplayer and your friends as well, where it was almost like, you know, these are different scenarios where you have to fight

certain teams of computer players in certain areas with certain restrictions. And the longer you played, the harder they got. and I remember trying to beat some of the upper level challenges that were just very hard because the computer would like run down the hallway and the computer like on the maximum difficulty they just they don't miss so you either shoot them first or you're dead so it was very challenging but I loved trying to get that working too because I believe beating those challenges is how you unlock more stuff for multiplayer so you know obviously almost everything in the game was designed around unlocking more stuff which you know encouraged you to play the

game longer to get more stuff to play the game longer. It's, you know, it's circular. But it worked. I couldn't stop playing. But yes, Kevin, you mentioned it, so there was a working feature, working feature by all accounts, called Perfect Head. And the idea was, you know, at that point, the Game Boy camera was already out, and they had the technology to link the Game Boy peripherals to the Nintendo 64, you know, plugged into your controller. So they had something called Perfect Head where you would take a picture with the Game Boy camera and then put the picture into Perfect Dark. And that way you could create your own custom avatar. You didn't have to play as the game characters or the Rare staff members. You can play as yourselves.

And Rare said they got this working, but before release, Nintendo said, oh, we had to cut it because it didn't work. And Rare's like, no, it worked. You just didn't want to release it because of potential Columbine fallout. No one wanted to be the game that someone, like, put their principal into and shot their principal before shooting their principals in real life. so God, I remember being really bummed that this didn't make it

I can't remember why specifically but I thought that was such a cool feature and I was really looking forward to using it Well yeah I mean my friends

absolutely had a Game Boy camera and we were goof around with that thing already so the idea that we could actually play multiplayer as ourselves we were absolutely down for that but yeah it was removed

I believe data miners have found the you know the menus still locked inside the game, but obviously, it's useless now. I surprised they didn't take that through before they start developing it, but I guess they just wanted to maximize the technology. Yeah, it's weird.

This thing does use basically every, like, sort of expansion you could think of for the N64 and, like, the Game Boy. It's like the Rumble Pack works here. You use the transfer pack with the Game Boy game to unlock a bunch of sheets without having to actually do the work. which I absolutely did I feel like every late you know game in a

in a console life like they all have to have all the features in there right because like you know the later it is in the cycle the more stuff you have to push into it you know so it's a shame that that gets that way because it's often like the features don't really

fit the game but speaking of edits I wanted to raise the point because Perfect Dark also came out in Japan and the Japanese version has a few unique elements to it. Some of them are very curious to me. For one thing, they sort of had this new concept. Like, the entire packaging and title screen of the game looks completely different.

Somewhere, someone decided that, like, red and black were going to be the colors for perfect dark. So, like, the entire, the logo, the poster, if you saw it in a store, the title screen is all red and black. Some online sources say they actually wanted to rename the game red and black. I don't know why you would rename the game like that, but that's what some people say. They completely changed Joanna's face. Again, I don't know why, but someone, I guess, at Nintendo, thought the character would be more appealing with a different face. I don't really see much of difference, but they put a new surface owner face. Maybe Winona Ryder wasn't famous there, stuff?

I don't know. I guess. Could be. Yeah, she looks like, she looks different, but like not extensively so. It's a very strange change. I mean, they couldn't really do very good face modeling, so I don't really know why they bothered. I don't know.

I really don't. Of course, Japan had their own moral panic at the time because in 1997 there were some very serious crimes committed by children against other children in Kobe. So because of these crimes were still very much in the zeitgeist, and their politicians were doing the same stuff that were our politicians were doing where it's like, oh, there's too much violence on TV,

there's too much violence in video games that caused the children to kill each other. Because of those crimes, there's no knife, there's no knife at all in Perfect Dark. So all the knives were removed. You can't, again, data miners have brought it out and found the data, but yeah, the retail version, you cannot use any knives in Perfect Dark,

cut in Japan. Weird, I mean, they didn't do that for Glasgow here, so, I mean, sat. It's like a weird thing that like there's like a kind of selective, uh, sensibility right? These things around the world, right? It's a very like, oh, I also feel really annoyed about the fact that these, uh, the games especially, but films to you and all these like different parts of media become scapegoated for these kind of things because the very simple answer is a lot of kids are deprived of stuff to do and ways to relate to each other.

spaces they can go to be social. They might be living in poverty. You know, there's a lot of, you know, elements of this that, like, come in and it's just laziness and the part of politicians. So obviously, I think it's easier to ban a film or a book or a video game than it is to actually do their jobs, which is really frustrating. Obviously, now it's like so much worse than it's ever been, but that's a frustration I have where, you know, why not?

actually look at your policies instead of what's in the media, you know, whatever. Also, this is breaking news to me because I just found it last week because I was in a Karoke booth and I was looking at video game songs and I found Perfect Dark in the Karoke computer. It's like, what do you mean this is a Perfect Dark song? And apparently in Japan, because they promoted it with a rock band called Syam Shade, and they used their song Sexual Sniper in the Perfect Dark commercials. Today, if you go to a karaoke booth, you can find sexual sniper under the perfect dark category. It's just a rock song?

I don't know. It's not the game, but it was in a commercial, and that's enough to still be in there 25 years later. I don't know. What are you doing going to a karaoke booth and typing in perfect dark is what I want to know? Why not? Do they have the Zelda rap, at least? I mean, I can speak. I always go in there and type in Karbo-Bibob to see if they have.

have the real folk blues, so yeah. I've never seen that at a caro-a-o-kabe booth. I'm really disappointed now. Oh, there's at least a couple places I've been in Japan where they have it, which is really cool. But it's so old that I know what watches at Kaibo Beebop in Japan. Right.

I will give the Japanese release this. Like, the box art is immaculate. It's so good. It's like the woman on the couch with the gun. Yes, yes. As opposed to the U.S. and U.K. covers, which basically just like Joanne, it's like Polygon Face. So, yeah, it's a lot artier in Japan. I'll give them that. Yeah.

But ultimately, Japan comes out. Japan. Perfect door comes out. And it does pretty well, you know. It sells too many copies, which is certainly a good result for a Nintendo 64 game, especially a late Nintendo 64 game as far as the system goes. I believe, you know, it came out in May in the U.S. U.S. and probably soon after in the U.K., I believe that summer is when Nintendo first announces the GameCube. So, like, just to give you an idea of how late it was when the Nintendo's

like, like, they were already hyping their next big thing. Um, I think this might have been the last, like, first party Nintendo 64 game that I ever played. I'm sure I played some of the wrestling games later, but like, I don't think I ever, I don't really remember playing any of the late stuff like Kirby's or Mario Parties or anything. You know, I think this is probably it for me. Yeah. You didn't play Major's Mask? I did not.

I did not. The timer freaked me out, Kevin. The idea of having a timer in Zelda didn't not sit right with me. It was very stressful. Yeah. I'll get back to that someday. but the game had a long life

in fact they made an I believe me I was so shocked when this happened I really didn't expect this in a million years but in 2010 they made a perfect dark HD remaster for the 360 and you know they added all the bells and whistles online play

you know alternate controls you know twin stick controls you know because obviously the Nintendo 64 controller only had one analog stick I think that was it there was a in, like, controller mode. I know Golden I had a twin controller mode. I assume Perfect Dark had the same thing. But now, in the HD version, you can just play it like a modern controller, you know,

looking and aiming with different sticks. And, you know, obviously the graphics were made for a very different system. So it certainly looks a little stranger today. But I think it's, I think the game's overall aesthetic still holds up in the HD version, in my opinion. My sense is that, you know, we talked earlier about how this game really makes the N64 chug and like they were

reaching just a little beyond their grasp and that's no longer an issue with this HD remaster and I feel like that actually works to the game's benefit and there's a lot of cases where they'll do a remaster

of a game and I'll think oh it loses something not being on the old hardware but for perfect dark for the most part I think it's a fine move because the game's actual design is so solid and I don't want to say forward thinking.

It's ahead of its time. Or it was that. It's ahead of its time. Yeah. Yeah. And so, like, it holds up remarkably well in 2010, or even now. Like, I played it for this on the HD Remaster a few days ago. And I'm like, wow, this game is still a crap load of fun. I'm having a great time. And it no longer runs at, you know, 30 frames per second. Or less. Or less. Still looks really moody as well, right? Like, it looks, I think the art survives well. I think so, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, they did a very good job, like, making sure that they didn't lose the mood that they were trying to set with all of the art pieces, which is not something I can say about some other HD remasters that have come out since. Yeah. And I think the cyberpunk aesthetic, because it looks like it should belong in the 90s, again, And it survives well because it looks like it's still in the 90s, because that's what the aesthetic was then. So, yeah. Mm-hmm.

The only issue I had with it is that the analog stick on basically everything after the N64 is not as sensitive or is more sensitive, rather. So that means that when you have these N64 games that rely on very small movements, you'll just go flying. So, you know, the mission. where you're the sniper trying to save your cohort, who's the phony negotiator. Very tricky, trying to get those sniper shots lined up right with your analog stick just sort of flying everywhere with the slightest movement. For the record, the HG remaster is included in the Rare Replay.

So if you didn't buy it separately when it first came out, but if you have re-replay or if you have GamePass, of course, you can play today. It's backwards compatible. It works on all modern Xboxes. head and switch to switch online. It was added, I believe, just last year to switch online, but you do have to download the special, like, mature app to play the mature rated Perfect Dark. Oh, really? So it's not the regular app. I didn't know by the mature app. I didn't know by the mature app. I surely have been playing only childish games. But Perfect Dark was not

only on Nintendo 64, because that same year, it came out, at least, in America and Europe on the Game Boy Color. And Kevin, I know you said you had some memories of this game. So please tell us with the Game Boy Color version. Yeah, so I did not play this nearly as much as I thought. I loaded up my old cartridge save. And I'm like, wow, I must have played this for like an hour tops. Because I did not get very far.

But so it's primarily sort of a top-down view sort of game. And it has, you know, those late Game Boy games that are basically like tech demos, just showing off that they know how to do all this stuff with the Game Boy now that's really what this feels like because the animation has a lot of like rotoscoping elements to it

there's voice samples like extensive ones too the very opening of the game has like a whole conversation with Carrington and Joanna it is a prequel to the N64 games they're discussing like her training process

But there's like sniping and driving missions. There's a, like, hallway shooters, sort of a Hogan's Alley sort of thing. And it's got, it's a rumble game. Like, you pop a battery in there and it'll shake. It has multiplayer, uses the Game Boy printer. And like I mentioned earlier, like you can use the transfer pack for the 64 that they put out the Pokemon Stadium games to unlock cheats on the N64 game. So, like, there's a lot you can get out of this.

I really should spend more time with it because it is pretty fun. It's not amazing, but it's kind of cool. I think it's worth checking out, if only for the sense of, like, how the hell did they do this on a Game Boy? I remember I was working in a, I guess, the UK equivalent of a GameStop in around about 2010 and there's a whole selection of Game Boy games

that they resell there and a lot of them are stuff like that from that era but there was also like Call of Duty on Game Boy and stuff and I was just like what on earth?

And it's the type of things that you know like moms who are clueless about their kids would come in and ask like oh my son likes Call of Duty but he's played all of the ones on the console we have but he does have a game boy

and you're going, I don't know if it's kind to recommend the call it Duky on Game Boy? Like, is it okay of me to say? I don't know. Because it's a sort of thing that no one would probably think of if you knew something about video games. You probably wouldn't recommend a version of it on the Game Boy. So I'm surprised that you liked it as much, Kevin. Like, I think it's cool that they had all these features on it for certain. Yeah, I, like, I didn't remember, like, I remember it was like, oh, that's fine.

And then I, yeah, played it again prepping for this podcast. I just thought, oh, wow, this is actually kind of impressive. Yeah, I never played it. It must have not impressed someone in Japan because they never released it in Japan. So all the features that it used to unlock stuff in the cartridge version, the Japanese version actually had special cheats to unlock them like button sheets. You know, so all the feature is still there, but there's no connectivity because there is no Japanese perfect dark gameboy version. Hmm.

Thank you. Which brings us to the next game in 2005 called Perfect Dark Zero for the Xbox 360. Wait, what? Yes. Because in 2002, Microsoft bought, did they buy a rare or bought a controlling interest in rare? I forget, what's the full story there? I didn't look that up, but it's like, they basically took control over Rare from Nintendo that you still own Rare. or have an interest in Rare. Yeah, Nintendo had like a 49% like ownership of Rare and I think they sold it off to Microsoft and I think Microsoft might have bought a little more or something because, yeah, the Rare is basically like pushed around by Microsoft these days. Yeah, which is a shame because honestly, Rare actually like changed a lot of video game culture

like purely on its own by making such, you know, different games than anyone else was making. Like, it really had a huge impact on my childhood and a lot of people's ideas about what video games are and can do. And it's very strange to think about, I mean, maybe it's too harsh to say that they were hobbled by Microsoft, but that's kind of what it feels like. It feels like they were turned into a studio where Microsoft were like, now you make features for our consoles, you know? Because, you know, there was like, what does it, connect sports they've made and like they made a bunch of other. games that were designed to display what Xbox hardware could do and all of those ideas about Xbox

hardware were really, really dumb. Like, just really dumb. Like, I feel safe saying it now, but at the time, they were very stupid. There was the one where, you know, on the Xbox one, it had an infrared detector eventually on it and stuff like that. And it's just like,

Like, they really neatly, when I was a journalist, they sent, the Guardian sent me to interview about the new Xbox features. And I would not let go of the idea that like if you, for whatever reason, got interaction in front of this piece of hardware, it would be able to tell. I just thought that was really messed up. Like, this thing that shouldn't be allowed. Like, you can't, you shouldn't be allowed to, like, that information. And then I'm like, where is that information stored in the cloud? Do you own it? Do you have access to it? Like, I think that's messed up. People's privacy should not be violated that way. And the poor guy, I think he might have even been sent by rare to answer was just like, I literally don't know the answer. And I'm not even sure if I knew whether I'd be able to tell you. You know, like that kind of, the guy was just crestfallen. And I'm pretty sure. sure it was the one from rare so if you're listening i'm really sorry but i just thought it was weird and i think that the way that rare was used during that era was that they couldn't make games that they wanted to make they had to make these things that were showing off features and they did a great

job of fulfilling those kind of things they made some really good stuff but it was just like that's obviously not what rare was good at making it was good at making story-based games and games that had a real feel, a different, like, vibe that had anything else, you know? So it was a weird time, I think. It's funny because, like, this game started off during the Nintendo era. Like, this was originally going to be what a GameCube game and just got shuffled around to new platforms. And, like, I don't know, it just, it loses a lot. I don't think Star Fox Adventures, their GameCube game is particularly great either.

So I think Rare just had a real, I don't know, identity. Crisis, is that what you'd want to call it in this time frame? Like, they just, their games just weren't landing the same way that they were in the 80s and 90s, for me at least. Yeah. I mean, I feel it must be, it must be due to some of the ways that Microsoft, you know, rules over these studios, that they lose the ability to, you know, maybe it's, the milestones are too short or the management has too much creative control or I really don't know. with the way the relationship works at all. I have no insight whatsoever, but it seems very weird to me, you know, because it, looking back on that era, it just seems like you say, like, that they, they didn't seem like

they were producing anything that was particularly interesting anymore in that era. Now it might be different, but back then certainly, they just seemed like not sure what to make, you know? Well, yes, Kevin, as you've wanted to. out this product was started under the Nintendo umbrella. It was even showed off early on for the GameCube as a GameCube game.

But once Microsoft came in and took over, then it became an Xbox game, Xbox original. But then it became a launch title for the 360 and by all accounts behind the scenes once that was decided, oh it needs to be a launch stop for the 360 that means it had to be ready at

launch for the 360, which means some features that they had planned were just cut or heavily truncated. to get it ready in time for November 2005, which is most unfortunate. But yeah, as the name suggests, Perfecto Zero is indeed a prequel. So you're getting a younger Joanna Dark. They certainly gave her a very 2000s makeover. I'll say that, you know.

Yeah, she looks a little like Lindsay Lohan or something, didn't she? She's got bright red hair. I'll give her that, yeah. They did Joe dirty in this case. game. Let me tell you. The makeover, I don't think it works very well, and her characterization is not quite there anymore because now she's like working as a bounty hunter with her dad's like outfits, pulling questionably legal jobs, which I guess technically is what she was doing with Carrington as well, but let's, let's be real. She's not, it's less like a spy thriller

sort of tone and more like a John Wu action movie. I think is the best way to put it. And I don't think it really works for the setting or the character. I mean, I think they made a mistake, like, doing away with, like, the cool character they had created originally. I think that that was an iconic character. So to change her appeared so much, I think it was a mistake. But, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, the basic structure of the game is the same as far as this mission-based stuff, and it's a first-person shooter game. But a lot of the little things have changed. Like, for example, there are now, like, moments. where you go from first person to third person, like you have a dodge roll, which means you have to like, you know, obviously you're going to do dodge roll in first person. So when you push the dodge roll button,

you like snap back and see Joanna do a little like somersault and then you're back in Joanna's head. Or, you know, cover-based shooting. That was obviously, that was all the rage back then. So now there are moments where if you walk up to something, you press the A button, now you're in cover-based shooting, which means, of course, is third person. So you can see Joanna standing like this.

And then you can go around the corner and shoot somebody. but I remember having a hell of a time getting that to work because like the button to come out of cover like was the trigger button but you're like hold it down so it's like you have to hold the button down long enough to come out and then shoot

and then let it go and you go back but if you just want to get off like one shot you don't want to hold the button down too long because then you're like you'll just start spraying ammo I find it baffling I don't know I found that part very baffling personally as a player

This game just like feels very sluggish compared to the N64 game. Like, you talked about how slow the cover shooting takes to actually, like, come out. Even just, like, her regular movement, like, there's a lot of momentum to it. She feels like she's dragging a lot of weights with her. Yeah, you're right. It did feel that way. It's all kind of flooding back to me now, actually.

It was very, it felt clunky. And I think to me, as a developer now, I think it was under. baked probably. It needed more time for them to iron out that kind of stuff because, you know, character movement is super important and I feel like they probably did care a lot about it. So it seems to me like maybe

it was a little underbates because they were rushed and making it or porting it or whatever it is they were doing at the time. So yeah, for sure, it felt like the core gameplay was not ready to see

players. And I think I feel bad for them. Yeah. Yeah, it feels like they were chasing, like, the sort of Halo deliberate movement bug, and I don't think it really worked very well here. But that's a big thing, Kevin. Like you said, like, you know, Perfect Dark came out in 2000, and it very much followed in GoldenEye's footsteps for a console that was very popular, you know, not urban, not that pop, but Golden Liley had an audience, Perfectter had an audience, Nintendo had an audience. in 2000. But now it's five years later. Think about all the console shooters that have come out in that time period, including Halo. So now it's like the audience is going to have a different

expectation for a new shooter in 2005. And I really don't think that Perfect Dark Zero meets any of those expectations. No. And at the time, it definitely didn't. Because I remember, you know, it didn't compare favorably at all. But also, like, it was really hard to impress. So the PlayStation era marketed really heavily to young men. It actually changed the console race to be much more like masculine coded where, you know, Sony had done this thing where they had said, you know, our console means that you're a real man and only real men have a PlayStation. And so Xbox obviously were trying to go really hard for this like young male demographic as well.

and they realized that all they wanted to do was market to young man. And then they had this, like, you know, launch title that was just all Lindsay Lohan characters or whatever. And I imagine for the marketing team, they were like, wait, what? Like, how do we sell this? And honestly, I personally, I'm not against the way that they look in that game. I didn't see the story or the character, but I'm sure, you know, I made a deliberate choice to be interesting. I really like the idea that she's got like silly.

I think in the box art, she has silly nail polish or something on. It's all like, you know, sparkly nail polish. And I loved that, right? But I can't see that appealing to anyone who bought an Xbox at that time because they were a guy. And it's not like men aren't interested in like fun teen girls. all running around, shooting each other. It's just that, like, I just imagine that, like, they were confused about how to really sell that.

So, yeah, I sympathize a little bit with, like, the kind of gender stuff that's going on during this time. And I do think it was probably hard to think about how to, like, make that game and sell it. But, like, I also think that, like, it just seems confused as a game. like it has a very confusing identity and I think that that's all like in the mix here how are we going to sell this? Who is it being sold to?

What, you know, what is the game about? All of this stuff is like such a big identity problem when if they had stuck with that original vision of her being like this dark female James Bond, I think they would have done a better job because they would have known what her identity was a bit better, you know? I think they went to Halo with this reboot. They went fully Halo when they shouldn't have done that, you know?

So, yeah. Look at my eyes you will see. There's so much more to me. A reflection of my life. See what you see. When all I want to do is be in front of you. All you want to do is always bring me down. Try to understand.

Well, you mentioned the marketing of men, so let me give you a real 2005 sentence here. Oh, no. Joanna Dark, Joanna Dark was nominated for Cybervixen of the year at the Spike Game Awards. Of course she was. But, I mean, again, original Joanna Dark would have, like, smashed that, right? Like, she was, like, a Cybervixen. But this new Joanna Dark is not. really sure if she's a vixen at all, right? Like, she's very much like, I don't know.

She doesn't give off that, like, confident I'll, you know, shoot you in the face vibe that the original Joanna did. And I'm just wondering, I mean, I guess they aged her down, didn't they? Is this an origin story game? I can't even remember. Yeah, it's supposed to be like a year or two before the first one. It's very like short timeline, which is why it doesn't really work for me very well because like how do you go from this to this like super cocky secret agent who can and will you know shoot up an entire building of people uh without blinking an eye in the in that time frame i don't know so i haven't really discussed this on any podcasts um before but like i have a really big beef with origin stories um i really i don't know how you guys

feel about it, but I really hate them and think they're a bad idea. Oh, they're awful. And they're always the go-to as like a sequel. It becomes a prequel. And I hate that because first of all, the reason why I was interested in your story is because I was already, I had already mastered the tools of my trade. And this goes for movies as well. And the character is already a master of what they are supposed to do and can do. That's what's exhilarating about them. I don't want to it's like going back to school

to learn how to do Kung Fu. No one wants to do that. Do they? No one. And it really bothers me that anyone would think that that is an interesting thing. No one wants to go back to school for any reason. And that's

always what they make you do. They do it with Batman constantly. Where they're like, let's go back to school to become Batman. And I'm like, no, let's not. Batman is cool now. He wasn't cool when he was 10. He's cool now. I don't care what made him into Batman. He's cool now, you know? And it's like, I think they were doing that, you know, a lot with video games as well. But like, particularly this. It's like, I don't really want to know what traumas this young woman has gone through so that she became Joanna Dark. That's not the play.

of it. Like, you wouldn't want a young James Bond, even though they made James Bond Jr., which is very dumb. I don't really care what made him into a psycho. You know, I want to play the psycho now. So it's very weird to me that this is the go-to. I think it's a very, it's a misstep. It's a very stupid idea because I actually do think sequels are where it's at. I want a sequel. I don't want a prequel. I want more of the same stuff that you gave me previously, you know. So, yeah, I don't know. I don't know why they chose to do that. But I guess it's because sometimes they want to do a different style of a thing. And that's cool. But do a different IP or a different character in the IP, you know? Yeah. I'm with you. I feel like almost any time that you're doing

a prequel, like that if you wanted to do that story, then you should have done that story first. all right. I don't need to go back and see that story. And yeah, I would have loved to have a perfect dark sequel that like goes ahead. Like, yeah, as a prequel, it just feels like a misfire because... Can you think of any prequels in games that are good? I mean, is Majora's mask? Does that, is that a prequel? It's not really... No, that's a sequel. That's a sequel to Okerina of time. That's true. I'm struggling. I can't think of a prequel game off the top of my head that I'm like, yeah, that was a good time. Maybe Halo Reach, but even then, like, I didn't really need to play Halo Reach to get what I wanted out of that story. Yeah. I just can't think of a prequel in video game forum that I have enjoyed. Maybe your listeners will be able to figure, I'm sure they'll have some favorites. But, like, I honestly can't think of one. And I just think they're a dreadful idea.

Also, it's a problem for developers and storytellers in studios specifically because we have to retroactively fit things into it, into an existing world building structure, especially when everyone already knows all the lore and all the things that happened before the first game came out. Now you have to then show them that stuff, and that's just very boring because then there's no, like, surprise anymore, right? it's just like living through a history that has already proportionally happened. And so there's no surprises there to give the player. So it's just a very difficult prospect because there's no, there's no way, unless you're saying it was a fake history that was presented in your original game, which then you're saying to the players who played that, well, you don't have the real version, which doesn't feel good, right?

So it's just a terrible idea, I think, but like, you know, just choose another character. and tell their story. It's an easy sell, I think, but I don't know. I don't know why people want these things. Would you call this the solo of rare video games? You know, I was just thinking about solo and how completely unnecessary and shit it is. Like, I was so disappointed watching that movie. I actually turned it off.

I was just kind of annoyed by how incapable of making that exciting. exciting anyone was. And I was like, it's literally just explaining lore to me that I already know. It's just really depressing. My hot take is that solo is extremely dumb, but I still liked it better than the prequel of Rogue One. Oh, well, I really, the only thing I'll watch of Star Wars anymore is Andor, like, I don't think I can stomach any more of it, honestly. But, you know. That's sensible. Yeah. I mean, and again, I don't. Andor is, like, completely separate from, like, almost everything else happening in the Star Wars universe.

And that, again, that gives them a license to explore different themes, different characters, different ways of thinking about the rebellion, you know, that kind of stuff. I loved it. And I think more games should just be like, see this tiny character you met for, like, five seconds? Imagine a world in which that person was the main character. And here's a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of, like, all. all the stuff going on over here instead, right? And so I think that's way more interesting as a prospect. Like, you could, I don't know, you make a Carrington game.

I mean, actually, that's kind of a terrible idea. But, you know, you know what I mean? It's like a little bit more, you know, we already have 50 Sean Connery's in video games. You probably shouldn't make another one. But, you know. Yeah. I mean, one of these canceled games that you put on here sounds like it could have been that. Yeah, I think, no, but it's very frustrating when you think about,

Perfect Dark came out and we'll all like Perfect Dark and what did we get? We got a prequel spin-off for Game Boy Color and five years later we got a prequel, straight a prequel. And two different sequel projects were apparently in the works at some point, but both were canceled. Oh my God. Why are the prequels? Why are they obsessed? I don't understand the obsession.

Like, can't they just do a sequel? What's wrong with them? I don't know. But there was apparently a sequel. called Velvet Dark, I guess that would have focused on the other person you played in co-op, you know, Velvet Dark. Apparently, the development started shortly after, you know, shortly after Perfect Dark came out. They were thinking about a sequel. They wanted to put it for GameCube. Um, we don't have a lot of information about this. It's just, the primary source

seems to be a tweet from Greg Males. So, but, you know, they were, they were rare, so they would know. Contrast that with Perfect Dark Core that was supposed to be even more of a sequel. It's supposed to be an older Joanna worn down by years of fieldwork. That sounds great. Yeah, I would have been all over that. Yeah. They started working on that post-zero, so that would have been 2006, 2007. But once it started, apparently, they started making so many changes that eventually the game just had nothing to do with perfect dark at all.

So it also got canceled. And you can read about that project on Unseen 64. You can see some animations and some concept art of older Joanna. And, yeah, but that game went nowhere else old. Wow. It's you for my mind. I'm sorry, but I'm cutting all the tides. So I'm saying my goodbye.

Goodbye in my good side. It only ever got me hurt. And I finally learned It's a cool, cool world Which brings us to today And the perfect arc of the potential future Because in 2020, they announced Sorry, I'm pausing for dramatic effect

They announced a reboot And apparently development started in 2018 With the initiative, which is one of Microsoft's internal studios. But then Crystal Dynamics allegedly joined the project in 2021 to help support them. And the coalition is also supporting the other two studios. And we saw a trailer last year, 2004, there was an actual gameplay trailer. But that's all we've got. We have very little information. There's obviously no release date. There's no real concept of what this game is going to be like or what they're going to do with it. And, you know, to me now, you know, this

steps is going out in May of 2025, which means it'll be the 25th anniversary of Perfect Dark. And I'm like, at this point, how much does, how much recognition does Perfect Dark or Joanna Dark even have anymore? You know? Like, what are we doing here? I mean, it's definitely a question, isn't it? But also, what worries me is if they started in 2018 and they said it was a quadruple A game at the time, which is a very funny idea to me personally. You know, and I'm sure there's lots of really, I know there are lots of really talented developers working on it. But the worry I have is that it's kind of like, you know, the original perfect dark in that, you know, you could only reach so far into, you know, these ambitious ideas before you just have to release the game.

And, you know, if it's a new team that's never worked together before, again, it's a very big risk to take. What you really want is a practiced existing team who's already made a number of good, big hits for you to then take on an original game. And you need to build that team slowly and sustainably and make sure you've got all these systems in place before you take this massive shot. and, you know, the more and more help they kind of enlist, the more I'm like, oh, no, I hope they haven't, like, you know, bitten off more than they can chew. And so I do have a bit of a worry about it. The gameplay trailer they show just seems like some really beautiful environments, but I'm not sure really what you're going to be doing yet.

So, like, I'm really hopeful that it's going to be great because honestly, I really, I'm starved for espionage games. At this point, I don't think any of them. It seems like no Aspen Ashby and Ash game has come out for years and years and years. I know there's a Splinter Cell in production over at Clint Hawking Studio. But, you know, like, I don't know. It just seems to me like we're in an era right now where everything is about a conspiracy. And it's weird that we've got a dearth of conspiracy-based games in the last at least 10 years.

It seems weird that nothing has come out in that space. we should have had like 50 espionage games. You know, I'm sure if Kojima, you know, was allowed to, he would still be making those games. Who knows? Maybe he'll make more espionage games for us. But, you know, there's this kind of sad empty space where that should have gone. So, you know, I'm hoping this was a noirri, interesting type game. But it's been going for a long time.

And I don't know how sustainable that is as a quadruple A game, you know. Yeah, like, you, the original question, like, you were asking about brand recognition for this. And my kind of feeling is that what brand recognition does Microsoft really have at this point? Because they've kind of mismanaged so many of the properties that they own. I mean, Halo is probably their biggest thing. And I feel like none of the Halo games have really made any kind of impact, really. I guess Infinite kind of did for a little bit. But other than that, what?

You've got Battletoads. You've got killer instinct, which they haven't put out a new one in, you know, 10 years or thereabouts. So, I mean, from that perspective alone, like, I could see them giving perfect dark a really, big push, because this is something that some people remember and remember it being, they remember it fondly. Wait, are they, did they, did I see news that they had partnered with Amazon for this, or is that Tomb Raider? Yeah, I don't remember seeing that.

There's like so many stakeholders of this game and of lots of these brands now that it's actually impossible for me to see, as a developer, how you get through all of those gates with all those stakeholders, right? Every single time you change something, you're going to have to make a report to such and such and such and such and a report to such and such. And it's like, how do you all agree? I mean, the answer is you don't agree. And that's a very time-consuming process, right? And so as a creative actually working in the business, it seems to me like a really tough proposition. Because if you've got like five masters, how are you going to get them to agree on your vision? And if they do agree on your vision, it's like they've kind of, um,

they might have diluted it a little bit. So I don't know. I, God, I really want it to be good, though. Fingers crossed. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not, I didn't put together this podcast just to get to this point and say, boy, perfect dark sure sucks now. Like, I don't want that to happen. I'm just, But I am confused at this point as to what we might possibly get, given that, you know, this product is apparently years in the making, and how many times have they restarted? Did they restart? Did they scrap it? Do they change hands? Do they change platforms? I don't know. But do I want perfect dark? Of course I want more perfect dark. But also, at this point, I'm kind of like, well, there was one perfect dark game that I really enjoyed. I don't know how that translates into for a new one beyond any of the other, you know, 300 different games that I could be playing in the future, or that I already own, or that I always wanted to play. I just, it's a hard, it's a really hard sell to me. And I say that as a really big fan of Perfect Dark, the first game.

Yeah. We'll always have that first game. We will. We'll always have day to dine. Yeah. I mean, I think as well, because they have put so much money. into this new perfect arc that, first of all, I think it has to come out, which is great for us as players. And second of all, I think that they will support it and make a big swing.

So I think that's something that we've got going for us, right, is that, you know, as players, we might get to see this, like, massive big swing. And whether or not it's good. It's obviously, like, you know, we can't know that until it's released. But, like, like, you know, we can't know that until it's released, but I honestly feel like because they have given it so much support, like, that's good. And yeah, we'll see how it goes. I'm hoping for the return of the Winona Ryder looking lady, you know? Hey, Winona Ryder is hotter than ever now, given her recent appearances and acting work. So I think, by all means, bring her back. And plus, like, You know, it is time for, you know, an original woman character who is good at her job and who might be slightly jaded to come into video games and shake it up a little bit.

It would be nice if that happened and it was a fun game to play and had interesting, you know, opinions about world politics or, you know, espionage or interesting gameplay to do with espionage. Like, I honestly think that it's time for this. And I hope that that is what they're thinking because that's exciting. That's an exciting prospect. And, you know, but it's also like the world is currently very unstable politically. So it's like hard for me to imagine as a storyteller what like benign espionage story I would have to tell under those conditions, you know? Yeah, yeah. A tough prospect in terms of, like, what story do you tell?

I guess maybe they'll fully launch it to the alien vibe, right? And just be like, aliens are attacking the Earth. And that's what's wrong with it. You know? That's where it's all gone off. Nothing to do with humans and what humans are doing to the planet. It's 100% aliens' fault. So, yeah.

I mean, let's be honest. honest. If you look at the billionaires, like, if they were aliens in disguise, would you really be that surprised? Because they're pretty lousy human disguises. Let's be frank. Yeah. And they have absolutely dreadful taste, every single one of them. Just awful. Terrible taste. Like, you know, like, during the Roman, ancient Roman era, those guys had impeccable taste. You could see it everywhere. They made, they had all these, like, artists. He made them these beautiful statues, and they're making these nice freezes. And, you know, lots of paintings everywhere.

And, you know, we've got Elon and his crap cyber truck. Like, why? Why? Like, you know what? I wanted, I want to, that just reminded me because I was reminding myself a perfect dark zero and like, why I didn't really care for it. And I forgot that, I think, like, the second or third mission, you started at car park and all of the cars look like cyber trucks. Maybe that's where all of them. Maybe Rare should sue. Maybe they should.

They're like, you ripped off this cyber truck design from Perfect Dark Zero, or maybe Perfect Dark Zero foresaw hideous car designs of tech companies. I don't know. It's one or the other. I once bought, so there's a shoe brand called United Nude, and they have a famous shoe that is called the Low Poly shoe, and it looks like it's a low polygon shoe. You know, it's for the angler.

Yeah, no, I recommend. They're really uncomfortable to wear, but look fantastic. I was going to say, like, there's no way that can be nice to wear. No, they're jelly. They're made of jellies, but they're like, you know, they're kind of jelly shoe vibe. But when I first saw the cyber truck, I was like, oh, man, those look like the pair of shoes that I have that, like, you know, no one wants to drive a shoe, you know? I'm like, that's what my opinion was, right? So, yeah, I don't know.

I feel like they should have better taste. But, you know, not like that would make it better in any way at all. I mean, rich people are rich people. But, you know, it's just disappointing as all that they're not giving any of this money to the arts. They're just giving it to their own bad taste and AI stocks, which are. terrible, you know. So, yeah. My feeling is, I'm hoping that they have something to say with this new game, but I very much doubt

they can say anything very interesting with it simply because of the bizarre changes in our current political systems. So yeah. Yes, well, I hope you out there have enjoyed this episode of Retronauts. Thank you for coming. Thank you for listening to this. And I especially hope that Ryan Hoss was not disappointed by this episode because you, as a hero that you are, you support the show on Patreon and you suggest this topic. We are here because you ask for.

perfect dark. I hope this is filled your needs. Ryan Hoss, I should have said your name at the top of the show. I'll say it again one more time. Ryan Hoss, thank you so much for sponsoring Retronauts and making this episode possible. A reminder that anyone can sponsor Retronauts at Patreon.com slash Retronauts. And at $3 a month, you get episodes one week early, higher bit rate, five dollars a month. You get two bonus episodes a month, sometimes three of his extra Fridays, weekly columns from me, and I read you the column. You get monthly community podcasts, Discord access, it's a whole bunch of stuff. And, of course, there are higher levels, like Ryan Hoss, who can

nominate topics for the show or even beyond the show. That's the highest level of them all. But enough about Retronauts. Let's have our guests here, say goodbye first. Kara, please tell us again about your work. And if you want people to look for you the internet, tell them how to find you. But you don't have to do that if you don't want to because the internet's a scary place these days. Sure. Well, I'm Kara Ellison. You can find me at Kara Ellison.comode at UK.

So that's C-A-R-A-E-L-L-I-S-O-N at dot code.uk. And you can see all the things I've worked on there. I write and design the stories for video games. I currently working for a lovely studio called Gravity Well, we haven't put anything out yet, but I also have some side gigs. So coming out soon is a game from the Room developers, if you remember those mobile games with a little puzzle box type gameplay. Oh, yes, yes. They are fantastic games. You might remember not long ago that they made the Room VR, which was a really, really popular VR game, which is basically just the same kind of puzzles but in a VR space with a little bit of a sort of vibe of a story. And they asked me to come and make a game with them in the same vein

and it's called Ghost Town. And it's got much more of a story this time around. Same kinds of really nice, chill puzzle solving things, except this time there's a little bit of a story about you and your job as a witch and exorcist around 1980s London. And Um, she's very cool. Her main, um, her name is, uh, Edith. And she basically solves mysteries and is a bit of a ghostbuster around 1980s, London. Um, so there's a really nice, it's not scary at all. It's no, no jump scares.

Uh, but it's a VR game coming out in April on all VR platforms, but I think meta first. Um, and essentially that's something I've written recently. And, um, I've also been working on a game called Sight of Hand, which is, um, weirdly this, a similar protagonist, she's a witch, but she, uh, she's kind of, uh, trying to find out, um, you know, who assassinated someone close to her. Um, and that's a kind of stealth action game, um, with lots of occultism in it. That's currently in development. Um, and I've been working on that. So yeah, so if you, if you do want to look me up, um, look me up in my website, carolison.com. Or, um, you can find me on blue sky. I'm just Kara Allison.

on Blue Sky. But, yeah, like, it's been lovely to speak about ParkFit Dark, one of my favorite games. So thank you so much for inviting me. Thank you, Kara. And I guess this episode's going up in May, so your VR game should already be out by time people hear this. Oh, excellent. Well, please enjoy.

I hope you're enjoying it. If so. Kevin, how about your things that you work on in the world? You can find me on Blue Sky at Atari Archive.org. is also my website and my YouTube channel where I've been going through the history of the Atari 2,600 and early video games generally through the lens of the 2600's library and chronologically. That is also Patreon supported at Atari Archive. You can also check out my book. Same topic. It's available through limited run games.

And that's for me. My name's Diamond Fight. You can find me on the internet by looking for a fight club. F-E-I-T, that's my last name, C-L-U-B, that is a weapon that Joanna Dark would never use. It's too low-tech. But Fight Club. dot me is my low-tech website where I put it together myself

and it looks like it was made in the year 2000. But, no, I made it recently. It's all right. It functions. It's good. And on that note, thank you very much again. And we'll see you at some point in the future

where Perfect Dark may or may be out. Good night. We're going to be able to be. Good night, Miss Dark.