If Xbox wants an Xbox Game Pass great, The Initiative's Perfect Dark must avoid the series' past mistakes

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Rare’s legendary N64 first-person shooter, Goldeneye, marked its 25th anniversary last month. However, at the risk of raising blood pressure worldwide, I’ll dare to say that it’s not the jewel in the British developer’s FPS crown. That accolade goes to its spiritual successor: Perfect Dark.

With the announcement of a series reboot at The Game Awards in 2020, Microsoft’s newest studio, The Initiative, has been given the momentous task of bringing the franchise to modern audiences, with a little help from Tomb Raider industry veterans Crystal Dynamics. Ignoring for a moment that The Initiative sounds concernedly like one of the shady organisations that Joanna Dark would be taking down, the new triple-A studio has its work cut out in creating a debut title that manages to deliver the nostalgia that long-time series fans will want, as well as enough modernity to satisfy new players — something that Rare failed to do with Perfect Dark Zero back in 2005. If they want to be in with a shot of satisfying both audiences, they’ll need to learn from Rare’s mistakes.

Firstly, we need a cool-as-heck story. Very little has been shared about the reboot so far, but the cinematic trailer confirms the theme of ecological disaster. We see Earth from space, rife with storms, fires, and floods. We’re told of corporations offering “solutions”, but series fans will know that corporations have long played complex roles in Perfect Dark’s lore. We also know by the end of the trailer that dataDyne is still a featured antagonist, as the camera pans across dead soldiers to show Joanna standing atop a dataDyne super-structure, looking out over a storm ravaging the Great Pyramids. Setting itself deeply within the fictional side of sci-fi, Perfect Dark has always played with the idea of an alternative future.

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