Perfect Dark by Rare is one of the most widely regarded classic video games ever. Many consider the stealth FPS for Nintendo 64 to be a worthy spiritual successor to Goldeneye 007. Many also praise the title for its AI, gameplay and multiplayer options.
While Goldeneye 007 will get its much-needed re-release thanks to Nintendo and Microsoft next year, Perfect Dark, on the other hand, is stuck in eternal limbo.
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Fortunately, the community took it upon itself to change that. Coder Ryan Dwyer recently decompiled two NTSC versions of the shooter (via VGC). The decompilation allows people to create ports of the title. This also allows modders to add new features and improvements like resolutions, texture quality and more.
Dwyer posted the decompilation status of the 1.0 launch version and the re-release with fixes on a page. As per that, both versions of Perfect Dark are around 97% complete. However, they say that it is 100% complete, and the missing percentage is just a technicality.
As for legality, the project is legal as it’s recreating the code of Perfect Dark from scratch without reusing any copyrighted assets. Any ports from this decompilation will require players to have a legal ROM of Perfect Dark. That will allow the files from that ROM to get pulled and added to the code, allowing a PC port.
Similar works previously allowed modders to create PC ports. Earlier this year, everyone welcomed an unofficial Ocarina of Time port. Similarly, a Super Mario 64 port also landed on the PC platform following its decompilation.
Hopefully, we’ll hear some great news about a PC port for the title soon.
