Darrell Gallagher: Last News

The Initiative, the studio working on a reboot of Perfect Dark, is facing significantly high turnover and issues with slow progress.As reported by VGC, as many as half of Perfect Dark‘s core development team have quit The Initiative over the last year.VGC reports that this includes “most” of The Initiative’s senior design team. Last week, it was discovered that Dan Neuburger – game director at The Initiative – was one of the senior members that left.Departures include two senior system designers, a lead level designer, two senior writers, a design director, and more.The report claims that from speaking to several senior developers, “a lack of creative autonomy and slow development progress” were attributed to this departure.

Perfect Dark, Head of Xbox Phil Spencer has said that the reboot will add some diversity to a predominantly male first-party lineup.Phil Spencer was speaking on the IGN Unlocked podcast when he commented “I think it’s awesome that, for us, we can focus on a female protagonist in our line-up”, noting “we don’t have a lot of that” in the Xbox first-party lineup.Following up, he states “I think Joanna offers a lot of modern opportunities that I love to see the team focusing on”The upcoming reboot was first announced in 2020 and is being developed by The Initiative, a studio that is part of Xbox Game Studios.Studio Head Darrell Gallagher has a positive history of franchise reboots – during his time at Crystal Dynamics, he was Studio Head for