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A proper sequel initially made for GameCube was not canceled and instead shifted to Xbox, before finally releasing as Perfect Dark Zero, a launch title for Xbox 360 on November 22, 2005. One of these projects was Velvet Dark, a spin-off based on Joanna's sister. The series went dormant for several years after Rare was acquired by Microsoft and many projects in development were canceled. Joanna was an early example of a female lead in the first person shooter genre, and was deliberately made more plain looking than most hyper-sexualized female protagonists to be a more realistic character and stand out among her contemporaries. The game starred Joanna Dark, a secret agent who must assassinate her targets to take down the evil dataDyne corporation. The game finally released on May 22, 2000. The game also received minor controversy pre-release due to it being the first M rated game developed and published by Rare.
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To make sure the game ran at all on the Nintendo 64 hardware, it was one of the few games that required the use of the Expansion Pak, which allowed for higher resolutions and more memory. These unchecked ambitions, as well as completely reworking the Goldeneye engine during development, incited a minor exodus of key staff due to expired contracts, and the team moving to new offices in 1999 slowed the game to a nearly four year development cycle. The intentionally poor grammar of "Perfect Dark" was inspired by the team's love of Japanese products using English words and phrases inappropriately, a practice also known as "Engrish." The game was now set in a dystopian science fiction setting based on popular media at the time like Ghost in the Shell, Elektra, The X-Files, La Femme Nikita, novelist Thomas Pynchon, and The Matrix.ĭevelopment on the game was rocky from the beginning, with more and more features routinely being added, such as high quality sound, full voice acting, and native 16:9 widescreen support, to the point of the team not realistically including them all in the final product. The two slash marks in the logo was inspired by the Japanese writing system. Several names like Covert Ops and Alien Intelligence before the final title Perfect Dark was chosen. The developers saw this as a blessing in disguise, as they felt working on an original project would allow them to be more creative. However, the studio lost the rights to the film after being outbid by Electronic Arts. The game first started as an adaption of the then-upcoming James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies.
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