Rare had plans for a spinoff to Perfect Dark called Velvet Dark, the studio’s creative director, Gregg Mayles, has revealed.
The longtime Rare employee, who has led the studio since the departure of the Stamper brothers in 2007, has been sharing bits of the company’s history on Twitter in the lead up to the release of Rare Replay. This includes a look at a complex grid used for balancing Viva Pinata‘s ecosystem, the graph paper design for the snake level in Battletoads, and the design document for a game that would become Blast Corps.
Perhaps most interesting among the things Mayles has posted is a picture of a design document for something called Velvet (seen below). “There was a planned ‘sister’ title to Perfect Dark called Velvet Dark,” he wrote.
Asked what system the game would have been for, Mayles responded, “N64 if I remember rightly.”
Unfortunately, he hasn’t offered any other details about the project, and what he shared was only the table of contents for Velvet Dark’s design document. Still, from that we can glean that it would have had a multiplayer component and some kind of Game Boy Advance compatibility, the latter of which would suggest the game may have been for GameCube, not Nintendo 64.
In Perfect Dark, the protagonist–Joanna Dark, who goes by the name Perfect Dark–seems to have a sister named Velvet. This is the character players assume the role of in the game’s co-op mode.
Perfect Dark did receive a companion game for Game Boy Color, and one full sequel in Perfect Dark Zero. The Xbox 360 game launched shortly after the release of the console back in 2005 and was panned by most fans as a mediocre shooter. The original Perfect Dark was ported to Xbox 360 in 2010 and is included in Rare Replay, the 30-game collection of past Rare games coming to Xbox One next week.
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