![]() This was aided by our heroine Joanna Dark’s array of gadgets, which let you interact with the world in clever and creative ways. This added a hearty dose of replayability that kept me coming back to each and every campaign mission to try and find new and different ways to tackle the challenges. Especially on higher difficulties, which added a slew of new objectives to each mission, Perfect Dark felt more like Deus Ex, Hitman 2016, or Dishonored than a traditional shooting gallery. Levels didn’t feel like a series of bland corridors, but rather actual spaces that encouraged experimentation and exploration. Perfect Dark’s single-player campaign took the beloved structure of GoldenEye 007 and injected it with a healthy dose of Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, and The X-Files. But for me back in 2000, needing the Expansion Pak made the game feel all the more cool, like it was somehow exclusive only to those in the know. Even in the current era with mid-cycle console updates like the Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 Pro, having a game that locked so many of its features and modes behind an upgrade is tough to wrap your head around. The game pushed the aging Nintendo 64 hardware so much that it came bundled with the Expansion Pak, whose additional 4MB of RAM was required to access most of the features in the game. After a long and winding development road, Rare released Perfect Dark on May 22, 2000. Starting with the likes of the Donkey Kong Country trilogy and Ken Griffey Jr.’s Winning Run on the SNES, then transitioning onto the Nintendo 64 with games like Banjo-Kazooie, Jet Force Gemini, and GoldenEye 007, Rare had created some of the defining experiences on Nintendo consoles. Throughout the ‘90s, Rare was in the midst of an incredible streak that few developers have ever managed to deliver. And looking back on it 20 years later, not only does the game still hold up, but that entire world is ripe for Microsoft to return to on the Xbox Series X. ![]() In a world before Halo: Combat Evolved changed everything, Perfect Dark was king of the console FPS. At the time, Rare’s ambitious shooter was an absolute revelation. That span between May and August during the first year of our new millennium remains fresh and clear in my mind, thanks mostly to the fact that a majority of it was spent fused to my Nintendo 64 playing Perfect Dark. Streaks of sunny days, warm nights, family vacations, and getting into trouble that all kind of melt together into one single amorphous blob. ![]() When I think back to summers when I was a kid, most of them are just a blur. ![]()
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