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It would eventually be remastered for Xbox Live Arcade. The RAM Expansion Pack in particular was a major boon for developers, allowing them to create larger, more complex worlds with higher-resolution textures. Nevertheless, the Nintendo 64 still had a few things going for it. Sony had decisively won the generation, and the PlayStation 2 was just around the corner. Perfect Dark wanted to follow in GoldenEye's footsteps, but by mid-2000, the Nintendo 64 was pretty much on its way out. Rare was one of the studios to break through, capturing the imagination of players with wildly fun local multiplayer driven by gadgets and other items. Limited controls and a lack of online play made the genre largely a non-starter on console, though that didn't stop developers from trying. Perfect Dark was released in a period where first-person shooters were still largely confined to PC. With a new generation of consoles on the way, and Xbox badly in need for marquee franchises, what better time to revive Perfect Dark? What Made Perfect Dark So Memorable It's been a while since Joanna Dark has been on a mission, though, with the most recent entry in the series being the thoroughly-mediocre Perfect Dark Zero for the Xbox 360. Today, Perfect Dark is remembered fondly for its big ideas, even if it tends to be overshadowed by its more famous predecessor. Rare still wanted to make a secret agent game, so it invented Joanna Dark, a British secret agent fighting aliens and secret organizations in 2023-a date that no longer looks so distant.
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Indeed, Perfect Dark likely would have been another James Bond game if the license hadn't been stolen away shortly thereafter. It was a spiritual sequel to GoldenEye 007, the Rare shooter that defined Nintendo 64's multiplayer legacy. Her adventure, Perfect Dark, was perhaps the most ambitious game to appear on the Nintendo 64 to that point a wildly complex shooter that sought to match the strides the genre was making on PC.
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Twenty years ago this week, Joanna Dark rolled onto the Nintendo 64 for the first time.
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