Joanna Dark
character from Perfect Dark
Joanna Dark is a fictional character and the main protagonist of the Perfect Dark video game series. She debuted in the Nintendo 64 first-person shooter Perfect Dark and is a player character in all the games of the series. Outside of video games, Joanna appears as the lead character in all the Perfect Dark novels and comic books. Joanna is an operative for the fictional Carrington Institute, where she was given the nickname "Perfect Dark" in honor of her flawless performance in training.
Joanna Dark was originally created by video game designer Martin Hollis, who found inspiration in a number of fictional heroines such as FBI agent Dana Scully from television series The X-Files, the eponymous femme fatale of the film La Femme Nikita, and Motoko Kusanagi from Manga/Anime Ghost in the Shell among others. Her Perfect Dark Zero model was redesigned by manga artist Wil Overton. Joanna Dark is among Rare's most well known characters and has been featured in several "top lists" by the gaming media.
Character design
Joanna Dark was originally created by Martin Hollis, the director and producer of GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark, before he left Rare in 1998. Hollis explained that the suggestion of having a female lead in a first-person shooter was inspired by Kim Kimberly, the protagonist of the first two games in the Silicon Dreams trilogy by Level 9 Computing, where the player experiences the shock of discovering that they are a woman fairly late in the first game. He also felt that there should be more games with female leads.
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This entry incorporates text from “Joanna Dark” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.