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Created: 10 November, 2001
Welcome to page two of this unique section that is sure to bring out the memories.
Delayed!
That word was much too familiar for us Perfect Dark fans at the time. When December of 1999 rolled around, gamers were practically urinating their pants because of the fact that PD's release date was ever so close. The first planned release date was December 6, 1999. Message boards were gaining popularity at this time. Gamers wanted ways to get the latest news and get the opinions of fellow fans. After the news came about the delay, gamers were outraged, but soon came to their senses and said to themselves, "Well, only four more months." That's where they were wrong. The game was set with a new release date of April 11, 2000. Again, when the newest release date came drawing closer, fans were getting very excited for a second time. Just before the April 10th deadline came, PD was delayed for a second time, this time for May 21, 2000.
This was too much for fans to take. 99.99% of fans were outraged, and their hopes of getting their hands on this revolutionary game declined with every new day. Soon, however, popular websites were trying to make their visitors happy by saying that this newest date was "set in stone". They hoped they would be right, and they were. One week before the release date, there was a shipping error, which was an advantage to some fans. This shipping error shipped a number of games one week early, but these early copies dried up like a pond in a desert. When the 21st came, videogame stores were getting swarmed with telephone calls. Most still didn't have their shipments yet, saying that they would be available on the 22nd. One day later, thousands of fans, including myself, raced to the stores before the first shipments would dry-up. I remember that day, the 22nd of May, 2000. It was a Wednesday, I believe. Finally, North American gamers were able to go home happy, fire-up those dusty N64 consoles, and experienced the most technologically advanced console game for its time. This same month, hundreds of new ameteur fansites were pooping-up. The number seemed to have doubled with every month for an entire year, until interest in the game began declining.
Facemapping: Taken out
Facemapping was perhaps one of the most creative multiplayer options that was intended for being in the final version of PD. For those of you unfamiliar with this feature, it allowed players to take a picture of themselves (or anything, for that matter...) via a GameBoy Camera and map it onto a plain model head to be used as a custom multiplayer character. The Transfer Pak hooked up to the bottom slot of the controller to load-up the picture and play around with it. Here is a screenshot of this feature, courtesy of PDCentral:
This was one major breakthough in the console videogaming industry, being able to have your own face in a videogame. However, with the spree of bomb threats and school shootings during this time period, Nintendo and Rareware decided to scrap their wonderful idea from the game completely. This was done just before the final release date. Why they did it? Like I mentioned before, school violence was a controversial issue in the news every day, and Nintendo did not what-so-ever want to take any chances of being sued by victims of school violence who needlessly blame what happened to them on videogames. You can thank Eric and his buddy (the Columbine kids) for not being able to use this feature.
Believe it or not, however, this feature is still somewhat in your copy of PD. Just the menus, that is. Last year, various Gameshark owners uncovered some menus with the aid of hex codes. Various codes exist on the internet for these menus, whic can be found at Gameshark sites such as GSCentral. Now, I'd like to end this part of this page with a few more facemapping screenshots:
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