The follow-up to Rare's incredibly popular James Bond franchise, their follow-up title was a spiritual successor which shared many of the previous entry's core elements.
Perfect Dark iterated on almost every aspect of GoldenEye 007. Multiplayer matches were larger, maps were bigger and more detailed, and the amount of weapons players had to choose from greatly increased. Perfect Dark also included the ability to add AI teammates and enemies to multiplayer, and even featured a separate challenge mode which players could undertake either solo or with friends. There was one thing in GoldenEye 007 which did not make a return in Perfect Dark, however, and it's something a lot of players were hoping for: a cheat menu.
According to GoldenEye 007, but it was accidentally deleted because he didn't think it was supposed to be there. Check out Chesluk's full statement on why there are no cheat codes in Perfect Dark below:
Now’s a good time to apologise. During the time when we had to crush it down from 8MB to 4MB, we were going through code looking for stuff to delete and I found this file from GoldenEye where someone had put in all the button cheats. And I thought, ‘Oh, there’s no button cheats, this must be old.’ So I deleted it. Sorry. I’m very sorry.
It's amazing to think that a game which included as much content as Perfect Dark did could be crammed down into just 4MB, but it's understandable for players to wish something else had been cut instead of the cheats. From the sound of things it wasn't an intentional deletion, as Chesluk didn't even realize cheats were supposed to be included in Perfect Dark to begin with.
If nothing else, this should serve as a cautionary tale for game developers, something which they should reference and as a reason why communication between team is so important. If the file which contained Perfect Dark's GoldenEye oo7-style cheat codes had been properly labeled, and if Chesluk had been properly informed that it was a feature which needed to make it in to the game's final release, players would have been able to enjoy all of the freedom cheating would allow. Things didn't end up that way for Perfect Dark, however, and the only cheats available must be unlocked the old fashioned way - by beating missions under varying levels of time and difficulty restrictions.
Source: Nintendo Life
