VFX artist Tracey Landau shared footage from The Initiative’s scrapped FPS, showing weapons, traversal and zones nobody had seen before.
More than two minutes of gameplay footage from the cancelled Perfect Dark reboot has surfaced online, shared by Tracey Landau, a VFX artist with over a decade of experience on franchises including Marvel’s Avengers, Call of Duty and Tomb Raider. The footage reportedly shows weapons in action, player traversal, and several eco-sci-fi environments that hadn’t been seen publicly before, offering the clearest look yet at what The Initiative and Crystal Dynamics were building before the project was shut down.
A Reboot That Never Made It to Launch
Perfect Dark was first announced at The Game Awards in 2020 as the debut project from The Initiative, a first-party studio Xbox Game Studios formed in 2018. Crystal Dynamics came on as a co-developer in 2021, and the game got its first public gameplay reveal at the Xbox Games Showcase in 2024, though that trailer later became controversial after reports suggested the footage shown wasn’t representative of the game’s actual development state at the time. The project was still being worked on as recently as April 2025, under something internally called “Vertical Slice 1,” reportedly tied to a planned episodic “Season 1” structure. That work came to an end in July 2025, when Microsoft cancelled both Perfect Dark and the studio behind it as part of a broader wave of layoffs across the company.
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What the Footage Reportedly Shows
According to earlier leaks, the game was built around something called an Adrenaline System, a set of abilities that included slowing down time, healing, and boosting damage output, all tied to a broader vision of reimagining Perfect Dark while keeping the spirit of the original Nintendo 64 classic intact. The newly surfaced footage is said to back that up, giving fans combat and traversal they hadn’t seen in prior leaks or concept art drops. Reactions have been largely bittersweet: fans are praising the ambition on display while also noting visibly unfinished areas, a reminder of just how much work remained when the plug got pulled.
Is There Any Chance It Comes Back?
Not at the moment. The Perfect Dark IP remains with Microsoft, but with The Initiative gone, any future revival would have to come from a different team entirely, and there’s been no indication from Xbox that one is in the works. For now, this leaked footage is likely as close as fans will get to experiencing what this version of Joanna Dark’s story could have been.
Perfect Dark gets cancelled, and now we get 2 minutes of leaked gameplay. Microsoft shuts the studio down and the footage shows up later. Classic. 😅 https://t.co/EmTuW74Q0Q
— QG Reloaded | Gaming News & Tools (@QGReloaded) October 6, 2026
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