A developer who worked on Microsoft’s now-cancelled Perfect Dark reboot has addressed the claim that last year’s gameplay demo was “fake,” and said the glimpse was a vertical slice of the project running “in-engine.”
Perfect Dark was one of several projects canned by Microsoft this week as part of the company’s latest devastating cuts to Xbox staff and games. Developed by The Initiative, a studio Microsoft is now shutting down, alongside Tomb Raider studio Crystal Dynamics, Perfect Dark had rarely been glimpsed since its initial announcement back in 2020.
That all changed last year when a “gameplay reveal” video aired as part of the Xbox Games Showcase in June 2024. And it’s this video that has since sparked questions over how much of what it shows corresponds to actual, working game systems.
Earlier this week, Kotaku writer Ethan Gach posted on social media that he had been told last year’s demo had been “basically fake.” The question of the gameplay demo’s legitimacy was discussed in more detail by former Perfect Dark developer Adam McDonald, who now works as a senior game designer at Cuphead maker Studio MDHR.
“It is actually in-engine,” McDonald said. “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.
“There’s some fake stuff in it,” he continued, “and the real gameplay systems shown off worked juuust enough to look good in this video. 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.”
What McDonald is saying then, is that there’s nuance here. Like many vertical slices meant to showcase a project that’s still in development, it was made to work just enough, and to give a sense of how the final game would have appeared, had the project survived until launch.
McDonald’s suggestion here seems to be that the team behind it intended to show something that gave as accurate a sense of what Perfect Dark would be as was possible. That said, some elements clearly still sound like they were a work-in-progress, even if they were meant to be representative.
“I’m seeing big controversy over ‘THIS WHOLE THING WAS FAKE’ and it’s annoying me, so I wanted to say something,” McDonald concluded. Then, in a reply to another user, McDonald said “it was a pretty typical vertical slice” and “I don’t think we were particularly deceptive with it.”
He added: “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.”
After the cancellation of Perfect Dark, Rare’s long-awaited Everwild, an MMO from Bethesda’s The Older Scrolls Online team and cuts to other projects, it’s believed that every game featured at the Xbox Games Showcase presentation in June this year will continue on. But what about the others? We’ve tracked down every major upcoming Xbox game we know about to check in on their status.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
