Trivia / Perfect Dark

• Descended Creator: Like many Rareware games of the time, the N64 and GBC games featured voiceovers that were provided not by professional voice actors, but by members of the game's own development team. There is even a cheat code in the former title that loads all generic NPCs with heads modeled after staff members at Rare/Nintendo.
• Distanced from Current Events: The Columbine massacre which occurred during the game's development prompted Rare to scrap the "Perfect Head" feature which would have allowed players to use the Game Boy Camera to put their own faces on the in-game models.
• Divorced Installment: Rare had planned to develop a sequel to GoldenEye (1997), but lost the license as they were outbid by Electronic Arts. The developers still wanted to complete another spy-based title and developed a standalone game with a new story, but with similar mechanics to GoldenEye.
• Dummied Out:
  • There's a piece of cheese in every level of the game, but you can't collect them or do anything with them. Rare admitted that the pieces of cheese are just there to send people insane trying to figure out what they're for.
  • In the "Chicago: Stealth" level, there's a bar which was bowdlerized in the final version of the game. It can be entered in normal gameplay, but there's nothing in it but a guard and a couple of Falcon 2 pistols. A stripper pole is still visible on the table.
  • Also, the passwords given by Cassandra's necklace and getting rank 1 in multiplayer. It seems they were once intended to do something, but even the defunct dataDyne and Carrington Institute websites didn't accept them.
  • There are several missing multiplayer modes (touch the crate, destroyable doors, destroyable walls; no, nobody's sure how the last two were supposed to work) and at least one entire missing bonus level, "Retaking The Institute."
  • The Deep Sea level of the first game originally had much more upbeat music than what was used in the finished game.
  • Hats were intended as an attachment separate from the head as in GoldenEye, and the functions both for attaching a hat to a model and shooting it off are still in the game, but they were cut in favor of giving characters headgear that is permanently part of their model: this game's models have heads of varying sizes and shapes compared to the uniform heads of GoldenEye, which combined with the fact the hat models are anchored to the character models' necks meant they were almost inevitably in the wrong position, usually clipping into the wearer's head.
• Troubled Production: The game is undoubtedly one of Rare's finest works. Some would argue it surpasses the critically acclaimed GoldenEye 007 as the British developer's greatest FPS title of all time, from both a technical and story-line perspective. However, the game pushed the capabilities of the Nintendo 64 to its limit, and many in the industry observed, bringing the overworked development team to its breaking point as well. Tensions rose within the UK office as staff were under pressure to deliver, leading to many heated arguments internally and externally with Nintendo and missed deadlines. Some journalists believe that, with many staff resigning and leaving to find their own companies, the game effectively broke Rare, even before Microsoft's later acquisition.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The Game Boy Color port of the game would have been able to link to the Game Boy Camera, and you would be able to take a picture of your face into game as an avatar in multiplayer, through a feature called "Perfect Head". Sadly, Rare scrapped it due to "technical issues". They later admitted what everyone had already guessed — that it was, in fact, because of the Columbine massacre and the concern they and Moral Guardians would have over letting players paste pictures of their fellow students and teachers onto in-game characters and then kill them.
  • Perfect Dark Zero was originally intended for the GameCube before the Microsoft buyout, shifting platforms to the Xbox and then ending up as a launch title for the Xbox 360. There was also evidently supposed to be a heavy storm in the "Jungle: Storm" level, going by its name and several lines of dialogue within, but in the released game the level is bright, clear and sunny.
  • In March of 2011, it was revealed that a sequel to the original Perfect Dark known as Perfect Dark Core was also under development in 2007, but it was canceled before making it past the prototype stage in 2008 after the team developing it was cut down to three people. It was intended to be Darker and Edgier than Perfect Dark Zero, but by the time it was canceled it wasn't even a Perfect Dark game anymore; it was about an unknown male protagonist fighting giant mechs.
  • In 2015, Gregg Mayles stated there had been plans for a spinoff entitled "Velvet Dark" starring Joanna's sister, the blonde Player 2 character in co-op mode.
  • In the mid 2000s, Rare inked a deal with Creator/4kidsEntertainment to bring their various franchises to television screens and toy shelves, including Jet Force Gemini, Banjo-Kazooie, and Perfect Dark. However, only Viva Pinata received a cartoon before 4kids went bankrupt.

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