Following the closure of The Initiative and the cancellation of its reboot, a former developer claimed that what we saw wasn’t entirely fake.

This week, as part of Microsoft‘s massive layoffs, the company shut down The Initiative and cancelled the Perfect Dark reboot, which was first announced in 2020 and had gameplay shown at the 2024 Xbox Games Showcase. The eco sci-fi shooter showcased Joanna Dark after an introductory scene in which she arrives in Garden City in a wingsuit, as well as her target, Carrington. The footage showed Dark using spy gadgets, such as a voice recorder, to trick the security system, as well as detective vision overlays, parkour, and exceptionally sharp combat and melee animations.

The game approached Perfect Dark in a way that Perfect Dark Zero never managed, despite being developed by Rare. Of course, the original N64 team was already at Free Radical Design by then, a company that has since closed down—twice. After the project’s cancellation, a prominent journalist posted on social media that he’d been told the trailer was fake.

However, a developer who spent three and a half years at The Initiative, and who was one of three people tasked with creating the gameplay footage, pushed back against those claims. Adam McDonald, now a senior designer at Studio MDHR (makers of Cuphead), explained his involvement and what was actually shown in the video on BlueSky. McDonald left The Initiative a few months after the gameplay was unveiled, but believes his former team made significant progress in the months since.

“It’s actually in-engine. I was one of three level designers who worked on it. It works best if you play it like the person in the video, but it still works if you don’t hit the marks perfectly. I’m seeing some ‘the gameplay demo was all bullshit’ posts, and I’ll tell you, it’s probably more real than you think. We figured stuff out on the fly in time to include it in the demo and did our best not to ‘lie’ to players. Some of it is fake, but a lot of it is real. Some of it is fake, and the real gameplay systems shown worked just enough to look good in this video. We made real design decisions quickly so as not to knowingly mislead players about what the game will be like.

The parkour and hacking/deception are real. The combat is ‘real’ in that someone had to do all of the actions shown in the video. However, it’s designed to be played a specific way and doesn’t work well if played differently. I’d say it was a pretty typical ‘vertical slice,’ and I don’t think we were deceptive. We had prototypes of a lot of the gameplay and quickly polished them up for the showcase. We didn’t start from scratch and mock something up. This vertical slice was also not the only thing the team was building at the time it was shown. Other parts of the game were coming along,” wrote McDonald.

This is a common feature of vertical slices and gameplay demos in general. These are often highly scripted and prone to breaking if the player deviates from the intended path. User interface elements and overlay messages may have been added after the fact, which is likely the case with many demos released years ahead of a game’s launch.

Meanwhile, Joanna Dark‘s voice actress, Alix Wilton Regan (best known as the female player character in Dragon Age: Inquisition), is trying desperately to save the project. On Twitter, she mourned the game’s cancellation, and the following day posted an even more direct call to action—urging fans to speak up if they want Perfect Dark to survive and using the hashtag #PerfectPickUp. Regan isn’t the only actor disappointed by the cancellation: Elias Toufexis, the somber voice of Adam Jensen, said he’d blocked out several days for his role in the game. Now, with its cancellation, he won’t receive the thousands of dollars he was expecting.

Joanna is resilient. Determined. Creative. Caring. Strong.

Agent Dark doesn’t give up & neither should any of you. It’s been an honour to work with the talents at The Initiative. My heart hurts for everyone affected by today. But like Joanna, we will all rise again.

❤️AWR / JD pic.twitter.com/au29E04APG

— Alix Wilton Regan (@AlixWiltonRegan) July 2, 2025

A lot of people have been reaching out and floating this idea on my timeline, my phone and in my DMs, so I’m just gonna say it:

I HOPE WE LIVE IN A NICE WORLD

🤞🤞🤞 #PerfectDark #PerfectPickUp speak up if you wanna see Perfect Dark survive 🤞🤞🤞 https://t.co/P9cdDQITND

— Alix Wilton Regan (@AlixWiltonRegan) July 4, 2025

Toufexis, who will voice the protagonist in Hell is Us, continued: “Now, for every game I do as a director or actor, I wake up hoping it won’t be canceled. I’m a freelance contract worker, and I have other games and series. The developers, designers, and writers are employees, and now they’re unemployed. This happens way too often.” In another tweet, he clarified: “This is a bit of an incorrect reading of what I said. I had days held for my work on the game that would have been thousands dollars of work upcoming. I didn’t literally lose money owed or anything. Just want to clear that up.”

These games getting canceled is a constant threat.
I had a good amount of days of acting in Perfect Dark that just got scrapped. Thousands of dollars that I expected and counted on gone in a snap.

..now every game I do as director or actor I wake up hoping it isn’t canceled. pic.twitter.com/neZiX1xDLH

— Elias Toufexis (@EliasToufexis) July 3, 2025

This is a bit of an incorrect reading of what I said.

I had days held for my work on the game that would have been thousands dollars of work upcoming. I didn’t literally lose money owed or anything. Just want to clear that up. https://t.co/FZ1DJ3sL92

— Elias Toufexis (@EliasToufexis) July 4, 2025

Microsoft probably won’t simply hand over the abandoned project to anyone who asks for it, but hopefully, the team and their work will find some kind of home.

Source: PCGamer, PCGamer, BSky