As a spiritual successor to Rare's 1997 first-person shooter GoldenEye 007, Perfect Dark shares many features with its predecessor and runs on an upgraded version of its game engine.

GoldenEye 007 director Martin Hollis led the game's production for the first fourteen months of its near three-year development cycle before he left Rare to pursue other interests.

[9] These affect aspects such as the number of objectives that must be completed, damage taken from opponents, the effectiveness of the game's optional aiming assistance, and the availability of ammunition and protective shields.

[4] If all the levels have been completed on the highest difficulty, an additional setting becomes available, allowing the player to customise various aspects of the game's opponents, such as their health, aiming accuracy, and the damage they inflict.

There, Joanna learns that Cassandra, NSA director Trent Easton, and a mysterious man known as Mr. Blonde plan to kidnap the President of the United States to get access to a deep sea research vessel called the Pelagic II.

[20] Because the President of the United States refuses to loan dataDyne the Pelagic II, the NSA sends a strike team to kill and replace him with a dataDyne-grown clone.

However, unbeknownst to dataDyne, the spacecraft contains a powerful weapon capable of destroying a planet and the Skedar intend to test it on Earth before using it against the Maian homeworld.

[20] Perfect Dark was developed by Rare and originally directed by Martin Hollis as a spiritual successor to the company's 1997 first-person shooter GoldenEye 007.

[29] Other influences on the setting, theme and plot included conspiracy theories and works such as the Ghost in the Shell manga, Elektra comic books,[29] the films Blade Runner and Judge Dredd,[26] and the writing of author Philip K.

[27] For example, the first level takes place in a skyscraper that lead artist Karl Hilton had always wanted to build, and features realistic environments like service stairs and an exterior area that can be explored.

[23] Other incremental improvements included better shattering glass effects, which would allow players to shoot out objects such as bottles of wine, and the inclusion of computer-controlled bots in multiplayer matches.

[33][34] Death cries and more elaborate gore effects, which allow gunshots to disperse and stain enemies' blood onto nearby walls and objects, were also added.

[27] A flashlight was implemented by software engineer Steve Ellis,[27] who had been responsible for much of the multiplayer mode of GoldenEye 007,[36] but was ultimately not included in the game due to limitations of the Nintendo 64 hardware.

In 2006, Hollis remarked that such aims were overambitious, stating that "even today, you can see game developers struggle to make light and dark foundational from a gameplay perspective".

[4] For example, lights can be shot out to create darkened areas, gunfire and explosions illuminate rooms dynamically,[2] and the player can use infrared or night-vision goggles.

[38] Shortly after his exit in September 1998, four additional members—Doak, Hilton, Ellis and composer Graeme Norgate—left Rare to form Free Radical Design, partially because they were unsatisfied with the working environment.

[38] This resulted in a loss of half of the workforce and led Rare to assign more people to the team remaining on the project, which eventually became three times bigger than GoldenEye 007's.

[40] Game designer Duncan Botwood wore a pair of heels to portray Joanna Dark in some sessions, but motion capture artist Laurie Sage performed most of her moves.

[47] The iterative nature of the game's development led Hollis to describe the ultimate number of multiplayer options as "a vast array of features I [had] never planned".

[48] Although Rare's Nintendo-side producer Ken Lobb originally stated that the feature was removed due to technical difficulties, the actual reason was revealed to be sensitive issues surrounding the ability for players to attack images of real people.

[26] While he took inspiration from Blade Runner and the whistling sound of "The X-Files" theme song,[38] he reused much of Norgate's sample set, especially peculiar sci-fi noises he had created.

[55] Although a follow-up to GoldenEye 007 was confirmed to be in development in early 1998,[56] Perfect Dark was formally presented as Nintendo's lead game at E3 1998 in Atlanta, Georgia.

[61] A working version of the game appeared at the European Computer Trade Show in September 1998;[62] N64 Magazine described the preview as having "the kind of attention to detail that had everyone who saw [it] drooling".

[35] Nintendo arranged a number of publicity stunts, including hiring model Michele Merkin, who appeared as Joanna Dark in commercials and in-store promotions for the game.

[2][10][16][87] GameSpot claimed that, as a console first-person shooter, Perfect Dark is "unparalleled",[16] while IGN journalist Matt Casamassina remarked that its extensive features set the game apart from its peers.

[2] Similarly, N64 Magazine described Perfect Dark as "dauntingly huge", stating that it "takes everything that made its predecessor such an enduring favourite and does it bigger, better and more often".

[16] As with GoldenEye 007, the game's nonlinear approach to completing mission objectives was highlighted positively, giving players freedom to deal with situations as they see fit.

[10][14][16][87][88] According to Trigger Happy author Steven Poole, the game's "inadequate temporal resolution—owing to a wrongheaded choice to privilege visual detail over frame-rate—made it unplayable at higher difficulty levels".

[93] IGN editors observed that the frame rate can be choppy in large areas or environments with many characters on screen, but felt they were too frequently caught up in the game to notice it, or else were willing to forgive it.

[116] In 2022, a fan by the name of Ryan Dwyer fully decompiled the original ROM image into C source code, allowing the game to be ported unofficially to various platforms.