A developer involved in Microsoft’s now-cancelled Perfect Dark reboot has responded to claims that the 2024 gameplay demo was “fake,” clarifying that the footage was a genuine in-engine vertical slice of the project.
The Perfect Dark reboot, developed by The Initiative in collaboration with Crystal Dynamics, was one of several high-profile projects axed this week as Microsoft implemented sweeping layoffs across its Xbox division. Since its initial reveal in 2020, the game remained largely under wraps—until June 2024, when a gameplay reveal debuted during the Xbox Games Showcase. That footage, while impressive, quickly drew skepticism over how much of it reflected functional gameplay systems.
Earlier this week, Kotaku’s Ethan Gach suggested on social media that the demo had been “basically fake.” In response, former Perfect Dark developer Adam McDonald—now a senior game designer at Studio MDHR, the team behind Cuphead—provided further context, confirming the demo was built and run directly within the game engine.
“It is actually in-engine,” McDonald stated. “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.”
While acknowledging some elements were staged or polished for presentation, McDonald emphasized the team’s intent to remain truthful to the game’s direction. “There's some fake stuff in it,” he admitted, “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.”
On combat, he noted: “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.”
Perfect Dark Reboot Gameplay Reveal Screenshots - Xbox Games Showcase 2024
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McDonald’s comments suggest the demo was typical of a development-stage vertical slice—crafted to showcase the game’s vision while still relying on controlled conditions. “I'm seeing big controversy over 'THIS WHOLE THING WAS FAKE' and it's annoying me, so I wanted to say something,” he explained. In a follow-up, he described it as “a pretty typical vertical slice” and added, “I don't think we were particularly deceptive with it.”
He concluded: “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.”
Following the cancellation of Perfect Dark, along with Rare’s Everwild, an unannounced MMO from Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls Online team, and other project cuts, industry attention has turned to the future of Microsoft’s unshown titles. While all games featured in the June 2024 Xbox Games Showcase are reportedly still in development, the fate of other internal projects remains uncertain.
