This week, as part of an enormous round of cuts at Microsoft, the company closed down The Initiative and cancelled the ace-looking reboot of Perfect Dark it had been working on. The game had first been announced in 2020 but a "gameplay reveal" was shown in 2024's Xbox Games Showcase: and it blew us away.
The "eco sci-fi" shooter that's "not just about shooting" looked like the imsim we've all been pining for since Deus Ex got put on ice, with the footage showing Joanna Dark (after an intro cutscene where she wingsuits into Garden City) in search of her target, Carrington. It then shows Dark using spy gadgets like a voice recorder to bypass security, some sort of detective vision overlay, parkour and some extremely crisp combat and melee animations.
The game looked awesome, and like it 'got' Perfect Dark in a way that Perfect Dark Zero never really managed (despite coming from original developer Rare, the main talents behind Perfect Dark had long left to found the ill-fated Free Radical Design). But in the wake of the project's cancellation a prominent journalist shared on social media he'd been told the trailer "was basically fake," a claim that quickly went around the internet and resulted in articles calling it "everything wrong with modern video games".
A developer who worked at The Initiative for three and a half years, and was one of the three staff charged with creating the gameplay reveal, has taken issue with such claims. Adam McDonald, who now works as a senior game designer at Cuphead maker Studio MDHR, took to BlueSky to explain his involvement, and what the video represented.
"It is actually in-engine," said McDonald. "I was one of three level designers that worked on it. It worked best if you played it the way the person playing in the video plays it, but it still worked even if you didn't hit the marks perfectly.
"I'm seeing some 'I guess the gameplay demo was all bullshit' posts, and I will say... it's probably more real than you think. We were figuring stuff out on-the-fly in time to include it in the demo, doing our best not to 'lie' to players. There's some fakery but quite a lot of it was legit."
Some might seize on the word "fakery" as an admission but, honestly, any trailer for a game as far out as Perfect Dark is always going to have a little smoke and mirrors going on. What matters is whether it's all smoke and mirrors, and McDonald goes on to expand in detail on what was legit.
"There's some fake stuff in it, and the real gameplay systems shown off worked juuust enough to look good in this video," says McDonald. "We were rapidly making real design decisions so as to not knowingly lie to players about what the game will be. The parkour is all real, the hacking/deception is mostly real.
"The combat is 'real' in that someone had to really do all that stuff in the video, but it's set up to be played exactly that way and didn't play well if you played it a different way [...] It was a pretty typical 'vertical slice' I’d say and I don’t think we were particularly deceptive with it."
This is not just typical of a vertical slice, but also gameplay demos generally. I've sat in a lot of rooms watching a lot of game demos in my time, and it's not uncommon for them to be highly scripted and prone to breaking when the player goes off that script. I can well believe elements of the UI and overlay messages may have been added on top, but that's probably the case with a lot of game footage where the release is years down the line (and now sadly never).
"We had prototypes of a lot of the gameplay and quickly polished them up for the showcase," said McDonald. "It wasn't a case of starting from 0 and mocking something up."
McDonald left The Initiative a few months after the Perfect Dark gameplay reveal, but believes his old team was "making great progress" in recent months. "This vertical slice was also not the only thing the team was building at the time it was shown. Other parts of the game were coming along."
Sadly we'll never get to see just how real this vision of Perfect Dark was. I almost wonder if we'll ever see a Perfect Dark game again and, after this, I'm pessimistic. The Initiative seemed to have something potentially great anyway. But sadly, they all made that classic games industry mistake of working at a company whose "platform, hardware, and game roadmap have never looked stronger."
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