Perfect Dark actress Alix Wilton Regan says she was stunned by the game's cancellation given how much had been recorded for it. Fortunately, the upcoming duet Tomb Raider: Catalyst and Legacy of Atlantis offers some relief.
Large-scale layoffs at Microsoft earlier this year led to the cancellation of a number of projects on Xbox and beyond, and Rare's Everwild, Unannounced MMO from Zenimax Online Studiosand even third-party games such as the unannounced Romero Games project, which lost funding. However, the loudest of them must have been Perfect Dark reboot, which not only showed strong results on MicrosoftXbox Game Showcase a year earlier, but was developed by The Initiative – a team created specifically to create the game – which was closed along with the cancellation (with co-developer Crystal Dynamics Also threatened with dismissal after cancellation).
Talking to GamerWilton Regan says, “I was just as shocked, surprised and devastated as everyone else when the funding dried up and the studio closed,” adding, “I was completely blindsided when the project lost its funding.”
She adds that by the time it was cancelled, the game had “achieved several results that the client was really happy with.”
“There was an ecosystem of creativity and collaboration that we lost overnight. It was really difficult, very difficult for everyone,” explained Wilton Regan, and although there were attempts to revive the project, it never came to fruition.
Wilton Regan is still working with Crystal Dynamicsbeing declared as new voice of Lara Croft in the new tomb Raider projects. “When Perfect Dark fell apart, my saving grace was that I had already been filming Lara for about a year,” she explains, adding, “I was just so relieved that I still had Lara, but I was also so afraid of losing Lara. I'm still afraid of losing Lara.”
Tomb Raider: Catalyst is Crystal Dynamics' “biggest” Lara Croft game, and there's “no homework required” to get started.
