Perfect Dark actor Alix Wilton Regan says she was blindsided by the game's cancellation, given just how much had been recorded for it. Thankfully, though, the upcoming duo of Tomb Raider: Catalyst and Legacy of Atlantis offers some relief.
Microsoft's sweeping layoffs earlier this year resulted in a number of project cancellations across Xbox and beyond, with Rare's Everwild, Zenimax Online Studios' unannounced MMO, and even third-party titles like Romero Games' unannounced project, which lost its funding. However, the most high-profile of these had to have been the Perfect Dark reboot, which not only had a strong showing at Microsoft's Xbox Game Showcase the year before but was being developed by The Initiative – a team built specifically to make the game – which was shuttered alongside the cancellation (with co-developer Crystal Dynamics also facing layoffs following the cancellation).
Speaking to The Gamer, Wilton Regan says, "I was as shocked, surprised, and devastated as everyone else was when the funding was pulled, and the studio was closed," adding, "I was absolutely blindsided when the project was defunded."
She adds that the game "had delivered several milestones that the client was really happy with" by the time it was cancelled.
"There was an ecosystem of creativity and collaboration that was in place that we lost overnight. It was really difficult, really difficult for everybody," Wilton Regan explained, and even though there were attempts to revive the project, it never came to pass.
Wilton Regan is still working with Crystal Dynamics, having been announced as the new voice of Lara Croft in the new Tomb Raider projects. "The saving grace for me when Perfect Dark fell apart was that I'd already been shooting Lara for about a year as well," she explains, adding, "I just felt so relieved that I still had Lara, but I also felt really frightened about losing Lara. I'm still frightened of losing Lara."
