[ravenstine]

That game was ahead of its time, but tripped over its own frame rate. Besides that, a huge weapon sandbox, dual wielding, co-op, secondary weapon functions, the ability to peek around corners, better AI than in Goldeneye, multiplayer AI "simulants", bonus missions, an alien sniper rifle that shoots through walls, the laptop gun, a surprising amount of dialogue for AIs(considering it's N64), and I'm sure other things I'm forgetting. Rare probably should have held off and instead released it for Xbox.

And actually, you can play a remastered version of it on Xbox through Rare Replay.

Decompilation will be pretty cool, I think, because the newer Rare Replay assets could be imported and then I'm sure that many other improvements could be made as well.

[elwell]

I think I heard that Perfect Dark is what Rare wanted Golden Eye to be, but I guess didn't have time to fully develop. It's a shame that it never got the same level of attention as Golden Eye, I assume because of lack of marketing & being second to come.

[ravenstine]

The marketing wasn't good and I think that was also an era where the relationship between Rare and Nintendo was in decline(they probably weren't that interested in a game that was going to compete with Tomorrow Never Dies).

There were definitely issues with Rare during the development of Perfect Dark. Nintendo probably wasn't that interested in a game that would compete with their IP(Tomorrow Never Dies). A bunch of key people left Rare out of dissatisfaction during the middle of development.

This wasn't entirely a bad thing. According to Mark Emmonds:

> Although the story and ideas for the game were kept intact, the new team contributed so much to the development that it was seen as a fresh start. The team worked in a very isolated and free environment and did not have a production manager, a schedule, meetings, commercial pressure, or any sort of deadlines. According to artist Brett Jones, "People would just do things they thought were cool and would work"

It sounds like half the original team were looking for a more organized process, but the new developers thrived. The problem, however, was that the Nintendo 64 could barely handle all the features they'd packed into the cartridge, which is why the game suffers a bad frame rate even with the Expansion Pack.

To summarize, I think a lack of top-down enthusiasm for this game from both Rare and Nintendo lead to a lack of marketing effort, and problems with development actually lead to more creativity, but that creativity caused the game's performance to suffer. Back in those days, I remember some kids not even wanting to play multiplayer because of the frame rate. Multiplayer was a big deal for Goldeneye, and Perfect Dark's multiplayer performance was objectively inferior.(despite being better from a feature standpoint)