Perfect Dark Scribes Excerpts (1998)
The following excerpts detailing the development of Perfect Dark was originally published on Rare’s Scribes letter page in 1998. We’ve scoured each edition for that year in order to provide you with every mention of the title to be found in Rare’s posted answers in chronological order below.
We’ve also included a link above each heading which will re-direct to the original letters page that the question was featured in should you wish to view it in the original context – otherwise you’ll find that the entries below only focus on answers related to Perfect Dark for a comprehensive listing for any fan wanting further information on pre-release content, hidden easter eggs, abandoned features and development secrets:
Dear Scribes,
You guys at Rare are a bunch of old sods.? Putting out teasers and previews of a bloody good game like Perfect Dark, when you could quite simply release a ROM of the game and an N64 emulator and your problems would be eliminated.? What the heck is wrong with you old chaps?!
Steve (rbyers@integrityonline.com)
Rare Says: Sounds suspiciously like a non-Brit trying to use British expressions, if you ask me. But you’re right, we are a bunch of old sods. Sorry. I’ll get a development ROM and a cheque for $500 in the post to make up for it. If anyone else wants some free money, just write in.
Dear Scribes,
Let me start by saying your games crush all the competition’s, sorry, except for Nintendo’s own, and I never miss them!? I’s just wondering about the pics shown for Perfect Dark.? Are they renders, or are they running on an N64?? They seem a little too high quality, or the game is about 5 minutes long!? But I guess you never know, Rareware has done amazing stuff!? Also, any movies from Jet Force Gemini yet?? I couldn’t find them on any sites.? Oh, and another Blast Corps would be excellent!!!!
Cloud XIII (cloud_xiii@hotmail.com)
They’re definitely not renders. I’m not quite sure what we’d gain from faking screenshots, except a reputation for being big fat dirty liars (which we seem to have already, judging by Andrew Ferguson’s letter).
Seems like no other sites have posted the E3 video of JFG yet – dunno whether they will at some point in the future. As for us, well, movie files are something we’re looking into. I suppose we should have them really, but we’re too tight to pay for the extra drive space. We’ll see what we can sort out.
Mr. Editor:
After playing 007 many times over I have found something interesting. You may not have noticed this before so I’ll make sure I explain this slowly and clearly. We all know that Bond has a lot to do with killing guards. However, several times in the game I find myself clutching my stomach with sheer joy as a guard keeps running into a closed door. Or, upon shooting a guard’s close comrade he keep swatting at flies or scratching his bum. I suggest that later exploitations of this wonderful engine (maybe Perfect Dark?) that you give the guards the gift of hearing and normal sensory skills. I will miss watching guards strafe or roll into odd and sometimes confusing positions. Hopefully, I can move on and witness a game with guards who are disappointingly surreal. Then, and only then can we have closure on such an extraordinary game.
Regards,
Jacob Casey (Caseyvan@aol.com)
You’ve completely lost me. But to cover my pathetic lack of comprehension, I’ll print your letter and follow it up with a hilariously cutting response: Bum! Poo! Willy! There.
Scribes,
Can’t be ars.. er… bothered writing much and you probably can’t be bothered reading it.
Questions:
1) Is Perfect Dark the follow up to Goldeneye or are you going to make another Bond game AS WELL?
2) Is Banjo-Kazooie going to make it to the U.K before August????
3) Conker’s Quest has been talked about since Mario (64) times, and looked an exciting prospect then (not that I’m into squirrels or anything like that), but everybody seems to have forgotten it? Have YOU?
4) Any chance you might make a realistic racing game (the first GOOD F1 game on the N64 maybe)?
5) Why are all the other companies so BAD at making games??????
6) Er….. got any questions I could ask you?
Much ta. Letter 2 long. By.
Hoofrid! (Hoofrid@aol.com)
1) PD is a follow-up only in the sense that it’s being developed by the GoldenEye team, and it runs on an improved version of the GoldenEye engine. No, we’re not working on another Bond game. Pay more attention in class.
2) Just about. July 31st, as far as we know.
3) You must have some weird ideas about the process of game development if you think a whole team can just turn up for work one morning and spend the day milling around in confusion, having completely forgotten about the game they were working on.
4) Dunno. We might. Who’s asking?
5) Oooh, you bitch.
6) What about “Why is Mr. Pants so crap?” That’s always popular.
Dear Scribes,
Ok, I was just looking at all the stuff for the new game Perfect Dark, and I’m already totally psyched by the pictures and well, I guess the overall hype in its comparison to Goldeneye (which in my mind is the best game ever made). But there’s one thing I’m not real comfortable with… the lead character is a woman. I mean, no, I’m no chauvinist pig, I just find it harder to see a woman doing all these action riddled things, not to mention cruel things. So don’t you think you could put a male character in also?? Like, maybe you can have game players choose whether they want to use Joanna Dark aka “Perfect Dark” or her husband Jack Dark aka “Major Dark”. Yeah, I like that. A leading woman just, to me, gives the game an overall softer look. Sorry, haha.
—Jeff
Yeah, we’re going to include Daisy Dark the happy flower as well for all you pacifists out there.
You don’t think women are capable of cruelty? Ohhhh, sir, you’re woefully mistaken. Why, I remember the time when… (Stop now before you doom us all. – The Management)
Dear Scribes,
After reading the first sentence of your response to my last post (you know, the one about whether or not Perfect Dark was being released in the US) and crying constantly, I realized that there was a hint of sarcasm in the rest of your response (Ha Ha. As if you expected me to know where Tristan da Cunha was located.) I desperately reached for a dictionary when I saw that you called me a divot. Now, excuse my stupidity, but I am not familiar with the English term for divot. The only definition I could find was ‘A piece of turf torn up by a golf club in striking a ball.’ Okay, in other words, let me rephrase this question.
Select A or B for the following Question:
Is Perfect Dark coming out in the US?
A. Yes
B. No
Thankyou
Just an ordinary teenage girl who happens to be a bit obsessed about a certain new game…
perfectdark@white-star.com
That’s a perfectly serviceable description of a divot. What’s the problem? And if it’s a straight answer you wanted all along, why didn’t you just say so? The simple, honest truth is that you’d be misinformed to think that we were lying about Perfect Dark not being cancelled in the US.
Hello,
I’ve just been reading NMS and they said that PD is going to have a two player co-operative mode, is this true and if so who’s the other character?
How about making a game of Robot Wars, where you get to make crap remote control cars covered in even more crap, and just get to slowly bump into each other and watch Jeremy Clarkson ponce around in the background trying to take the p*ss out of the contestants but completely failing.
And why the hell does averyone like Tip Tup so much, everyone can see that Krunch is the best.
Has anyone there thought about putting Mr. Pants in PD as a secret Deathmatch character ‘cos that’ll be coo-el.
Anyway I can’t really be arsed to write anything else.
J Dean
Despite what’s being said, the co-op mode isn’t a fact just yet. There’s a wish list of features for PD (just as there was for GoldenEye), and try as the team might to squeeze it all in, there just ain’t no guarantees. As the designer puts it: “We can’t confirm that it will go in because it might come out before the game is released, due to it not being right. And then we’d end up looking stupid. A 3D Canasta sub-game is also on the wish list.”
Oh, and Krunch is a baddie. Therefore you have the psychological profile of a serial killer.
Dear Scribes,
Stop working on your Killer stinks and your mortal wombats and your No Brain Athletes and your Whacky Wham Wrestling and start working on good games such as Perfect Dark and especially BANJO-TOOIE! I want to buy that game before I’m to old to enjoy it!
DavidS010@aol.com
Rare Says: What? You want us to stop working on No Brain Athletes? How did you find out about that, anyway? (Oh, and oddly enough we have actually started work on Banjo-Tooie and Perfect Dark – hence the official announcements some time ago.)
Dearest programmers at Rareware?,
I am slightly worried about Perfect Dark. You see, taking it as a futuristic game will lose a lot of realism, and it is realism that makes games. Look at Goldeneye, not too much blood made it realistic, and real weapons too. Everyone complains about the glitches and cheats, but it were them that kept the game going, increasing lastability.
In fact if you look at the amazing games, they were the most realistic. Goldeneye. Command & Conquer: RA anyone? Toca Touring Cars. (Well maybe not actually). Etc etc… The best realism in Goldeneye was if you shot a guard in the head he died instantly, but in Turok, Quake, etc, you’ve gotta shoot them millions of times, and if you use some bloody stupidly enormous gun, you can wipe out a room full of the critters in one go. Although the Rocket-Launcher could have been improved it was far better than the BFG or Fusion Cannon.
I’m really looking forward to PD, but please reassure me…
Oh and one more thing, vehicles in multiplayer would be cool. Did I say 1 more thing? I meant 2. Last thing, instead of wasting valuable cartrige space with the staff’s faces, use this for other things that make more difference.
Miron Badowsky
The GoldenEye/PD designer says: “You have absolutely nothing to worry about. As far as Perfect Dark is concerned, that is.”
He also says: “The extra face textures made a difference for some people. The amount of space taken up by the faces is negligible; there is really nothing that would fit in such a tiny space that would make as much difference as that.”
Hey, that was good. I hardly had to write anything.
Dear sirs and knightly developers across the pond,
My friends and I play Goldeneye multiplayer consistently and we wish oh so much to have more levels available in four player mode. All reasons for these functions to not be available in Goldeneye seem to point at slow frame rates and severe lagging of the system. But if one were to install the RAM expansion coming out in November, would the speed be increased enough to allow for these levels to be playable in multiplayer? I suppose that someone would have to incorporate that into a GameShark or some other hacking device, or in the N64 DD or something. So, basically my question is: How will the RAM expansion affect Goldeneye‘s multiplayer mode? Could more levels be playable if they could somehow be accessed for multiplayer mode with the upgrade?
Sincerely and hoping to kill old friends in new ways,
Ryan Sturt “Janus Special Forces”
P.S. I hope Perfect Dark‘s multiplayer will be able to keep score over time and between multiple matches. You could just tally up kills and suicides and deaths and score the “Characters”. So if someone were to always pick the same character he or she could get a good idea of their score/average gameplay. That would be fun!
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I roped in the designer to answer this one for me:
“Installing a RAM upgrade will not make any difference to the GoldenEye cartridge. The cartridge is not set up in such a way that it will use the extra memory. You could use a Gameshark to try and alter this. And then complain to the makers of the Gameshark when it fails to work. This would please me greatly.”
He was rather less vocal on the subject of multiplayer, simply stating: “We have a lot of plans for the multiplayer section of Perfect Dark.” Expect good things.
Dear Scribes,
The stories to Perfect Dark and Killer Instinct seem remarkably similar. Allow me to explain. Perfect Dark is about a female secret agent (Joanna Dark) sent to investigate a large corporation (Datadyne). Killer Instinct has a secret agent (B. Orchid) sent to investigate a large corporation (UltraTech). Is this just coincidence? It might open up possibilities for KI secret characters in the game.
Oh, oh. Forgot to say something really stupid to get my letter printed.
IrRabee3@aol.com
So you went back and typed over your original first paragraph with a load of old rubbish? Arf arf.
No, to be fair, I suppose we could have crowbarred Orchid into the plot if we’d wanted to. But that’s about the only similarity between KI and PD, and as they’re developed by two completely different teams for different target audiences, the likelihood of crossovers is, er, unlikely.
Dear Scribes,
hello. I am juanjose, i buy a game of GOLDENEYE 007 (RAREWARE) BUT I HAVE A TROUBLE BECAUSE WHEN AM IN THE LEVEL 18 -CRADLE, END THE GAME, I KNOW THERE ARE OTHERS LEVELS 19 (AZTEC) AND 20 (EGYPTIAN).
WHAT GOT TO DO FOR PLAY THIS LEVELS, DON?T CAN?T TO SEE THEM?
WHEN FINISH THE LEVEL 18 CRADLE IN SECRET AGENT THE GAME FINISH HERE? PLEASE HELP ME FOR DO IT.
I AM VERY INTERESTING IN BUY THE NEW GAME PERFECT DARK YOURS CAN SEND ME, WHATS IS THE PRICE? AND WHAT GOT TO DO FOR US SENT ME THIS GAME?
THANK YOU VERY MUCH, I AM WRITING FROM POPAYAN, CAUCA. COLOMBIA.
PLEASE CONTEST ME FAST!
Juan Jose Alvarez
I know it’s bad form to make fun of someone’s English when it’s not their first language, but “Please contest me fast!” is the best phrase I’ve heard all year.
I’m sure you are very interesting, Mr. Alvarez, and I’m sorry you have a trouble. Finishing all the GoldenEye levels on Secret Agent should open up Aztec for you, and finishing them all on 00 Agent should allow you access to Egyptian. Perfect Dark, meanwhile, is still in development and won’t be out until next year. We’ll be contesting everyone fast with more information nearer the time.
Dear Rareware Guys,
Breasts. That got your attention didn’t it? Well, this email is basically about them. This email is less of a question, and more of a comment to other readers of this email (assuming that you do post this email onto your letters section) that Jo Dark has great breasts. (The word ‘great’ is used in this context as a synonym for ‘perfect for child-rearing purposes’. I would not on any level condone the chauvinistic-male, sexually-driven practice of ‘breast-admiration’. How awful! :))
I mean, judging by the current screen shots that you’ve offered us adoring public, it’s inevitable that people are gonna start complaining that Jo Dark’s breasts are nowhere near as ‘great’ as Lara Croft’s. You cannot deny the fact that comparisons WILL be made. But here is my comment to all of those who complain about the apparent, inherent lack of ‘child-rearing’ properties on Jo Dark: JO DARK IS WEARING A FUTURISTIC CATSUIT.
Anyone seen Lost in Space (the movie, not the show)? Anyone notice Mimi Rogers?? Anyone notice what she was wearing??? Anyone know what Mimi Rogers looks like outside that futuristic catsuitish thing????? Well, for those of you who don’t know, Mimi Rogers (outside of that futuristic catsuit thing) gives even Lara Croft a run for her money (in the child-rearing stakes that is :)).
So before anyone starts to give flack to Rare for not making Jo Dark so…. noticeable, well, then I ask you to go rent some Mimi Rogers movies from your local video store (with your parents’ company that is).
Please post this up coz that’ll make it 3-in-a-row for me,
Joe F. Tangco
We’d welcome your arguments if only there was a hint of resistance to them in the first place. However, as of yet we haven’t had a single negative comment on the size of Ms. Dark’s physical assets, and your energetic defence only serves to underline the suspicion that you’ve been spending far too much time thinking about it yourself. Tut tut, young man.
Dear Scribes,
I am writing to rebut Ice Cream Man’s claim that no one wants PD (Nov 2 Scribes).
Hey, Vanilla Ice, or whatever your name was, What game got the award for Game of the Year at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts? Huh? GOLDENEYE, which I agree is the best game ever. Then you said in your letter and I quote “…But it has the Goldeneye engine right? WRONG! Sure it has the engine…” Let’s ponder this, you said “it has the Goldeneye engine right? Wrong! Sure it has the engine.” Now there’s a paradox.
PD is based on the Greatest game in the world’s engine, and you have the nerve to say that no one wants it? How much fun would a TipTup game be where.., and I quote again, “TipTup an agent, side by side with Timber? Out to rescue Diddy or something.” What a horrible and despicable idea. Why would anyone want to be a small racing turtle out to save some monkey? PD has potential, your little detective game is dumb. How many more games can the gaming industry make where you try to save a monkey? How many Donkey Kongs were there? (Donkey Diddy TipTup Banjo, Stop with the monkeys) Save the monkey here and save the monkey there. Ahhhh. Use people, like Bond–One of my personal favorites, or some girl named Joanna– And… How can you compare a game, that is based on the greatest game’s engine, {and is the second in the only Spyfi series which Rare started and is taking off like my Dog after you shoot him in the arse (sorry, I just had to include arse)} to a game about a small turtle? Pffffffft.
If Rare went around making games, solely based on a single character of one game, then they would have to make a lot more games. How many people think that Oddjob (or any other character in the Bond game), is cool. Oh here’s an Idea Rare, why don’t you make a game where Oddjob is an agent next to Bond, and they go around trying to save some monkeys or something?
You said that Rare lost all your Ideas up their ass. Well, that’s the only good place for them. I say (along with hordes of other people who liked Goldeneye and want PD) that PD would and will be 10 times better than TipTup 009 the super agent. PD will be great, and will make Rare more money than your little TipTup 009, super hero, agent that saves monkeys. So there Mr. Ice Cream Man. Thanks for your time Rare. Keep up the good work.
John Knight Greer, SC/USA
On seeing this, the GoldenEye/PD designer looked a bit bemused and said “I think people take things too seriously.” Nonetheless, your heartfelt defence is appreciated, sir. To rest your worries, bear in mind that we now have enough development teams here to avoid a situation where we’re forced to prioritise genres – we can happily work in several at a time, and ultimately satisfy as many people as possible. Like Robin Askwith.
Dear Mr. Rare,
Having played Turok 2 I can wholeheartedly say that the US are the kings of Computer games. I read a message by a certain Matthew Sullivan, detailing the bad points of the masterpiece Turok 2 and I can only assume that he is blissfully unaware of of its target audience (ie. us Yanks) and the various clever programming techniques applied to make for a total gaming experience – a full-on assault on all the senses.
To help him, and other unfortunates like him, I have taken the liberty of preparing a brief outline of the game’s merits:
1) Extraneous graphical detail – Aside from looking cool (dude) this means that the framerate is lowered to a point where we can comfortably keep up with the action. You should know that fast games cause hyperactivity. Some of us still haven’t recovered from Outrun. And what’s more – we LIKE slideshows.
2) Sluggish controls – This should be fairly obvious. Many Americans, myself included, haven’t quite got the knack of computer games yet. So what better way to ensure a level playing field than to implement latency in the control system so that no matter what you do, you’re still gonna end up staring at the ceiling whilst someone fires a rocket up your ass. Like er… Bodacious, man.
3) Big Monsters/Bigger guns – See above. Big Monsters fill the screen, meaning we don’t have to bother with things like aiming. With weapons that obliterate everything on the screen in one shot, we don’t have to concern ourselves with such dull minutae as “oh, did I install the modem?” or “Did I meet Sean Bean by the statue?”. Just KILL, KILL, KILL. Sorry, I’ve just eaten another 8 pounds of raw meat.
4) Non-linear, hub-based gameplay – Well, this is like er, obvious dude. What we enjoy more than anything (aside from gratuitous reptile slaughter) is after spending eight hours getting off a level, discovering that we have to go back and do it all again ‘cos we missed a pickup of some kind. Now that’s fun.
And finally:
5) Fog. Whilst some less knowledgeable gamesters believe that fogging is a crude device used to mask screen redraw, this is in fact a fallacy. Recent polls in US games magazines reveal that what US players really want in a game is fog. Yep, that’s right, fog. It takes us back to Dick Van Dyke-ian images of a Cockney London, inhabited by the chirpy chimney sweeps we miss so dearly in our own country.
I hope that has cleared up a few matters and has given you guys some new ideas for Perfect Dark. Glad you got rid of Bond – now lose the chick, beef up the weapons and throw in some lizards. Oh yeah, and make it FOGGY! Cool, bodacious, woooaaahh! Gee, um, shucks and other Americanisms.
Benjemino
P.S. Who said Americans had no sense of irony? Oh yeah, everybody.
Rare Says: It’s lucky you sent this mail in when you did, before the PD team went ahead and released something that ignored every last one of your handy guidelines. Radical! Boss! We’ll see if we can get hold of the OutRun licence and slow it all down a bit for you. Tubular!