Perfect Dark Zero is day seven of our series on 15 Xbox classics you can still play on Xbox Series X|S. Rare’s first-person shooter was one of the Xbox 360’s launch games, and it’s now in Game Pass with an enhanced version for current consoles.
Perfect Dark Zero at a glance
- Developer: Rare
- Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios
- Original release: 22 November 2005 (North America), 2 December 2005 (Europe)
- Original console: Xbox 360
- Xbox Store price: £11.99 / $14.99
- Game Pass: Essential, Premium and Ultimate
- Backward compatible since: 12 November 2015
- Enhancements: Xbox One X Enhanced
What is Perfect Dark Zero?
Perfect Dark Zero is a first-person shooter and a prequel to the original Perfect Dark. Joanna Dark is a bounty hunter working with her father, Jack, and a computer hacker, Chandra. Over the course of the story, she joins the Carrington Institute to stop a rival corporation, dataDyne, from getting hold of an ancient artefact that gives people superhuman powers.
The campaign has 14 missions that you can play alone or in co-op. A cover system switches to a third-person view when Joanna takes cover, and instead of jumping she can climb over obstacles and roll to break enemy aim.
Multiplayer supports up to 32 players across deathmatch and objective-based modes, called DarkOps. Co-op and multiplayer both supported split-screen, System Link and Xbox Live.
Perfect Dark Zero’s history on Xbox
Development took five years in total. It started with a team of about ten people before Rare joined Microsoft. After Microsoft bought Rare in 2002, the project moved to the original Xbox and its multiplayer was redesigned for Xbox Live. Lead designer Chris Tilston said the team got as far as 50 players online at one point, but the original Xbox couldn’t handle it. With the game about 12 months from completion, it moved to the Xbox 360.
The team was about 25 people for most of the project. The new console let it build one of the first co-op modes playable over Xbox Live, and Perfect Dark Zero was one of the first games to use Havok’s HydraCore physics engine, built for multi-core consoles such as the Xbox 360.
Making launch meant cuts. Online matches dropped from 50 players to 32, and a “dataDyne TV” mode for uploading and watching matches over Xbox Live was dropped. According to Wikipedia’s account of the game’s development, Rare ordered 700,000 discs to be made five days before Microsoft’s certification was complete.
The game was shown at E3 2005 and launched with the Xbox 360 on 22 November 2005, alongside Rare’s Kameo. David Clynick wrote most of the score. The official soundtrack album was produced by Nile Rodgers, and there were also Perfect Dark novels and a comic series. By October 2006, it had sold more than one million copies.
A May 2006 update fixed bugs and added seven new bot types, and a multiplayer map pack followed. In 2015, Perfect Dark Zero became backward compatible on Xbox One and was included in Rare Replay. It was enhanced for Xbox One X in 2019.
Why it matters
Perfect Dark Zero was one of the first games anyone played on Xbox 360. Its online co-op and 32-player matches were early showcases for Xbox Live on the new console, and it’s still the most recent Perfect Dark game released.
A new Perfect Dark from Microsoft’s The Initiative studio was announced in 2020, but it was cancelled in July 2025 when Microsoft closed the studio. That leaves Perfect Dark Zero as the last new entry in the series.
How to play Perfect Dark Zero on Xbox Series X|S today
Perfect Dark Zero has been backward compatible on Xbox One since 2015, so it runs on Xbox Series X|S too. You can buy it from the Xbox Store for £11.99 or $14.99.
It’s included with Game Pass Essential, Premium and Ultimate. See our Game Pass tiers guide for what each plan includes.
The 2019 update makes Perfect Dark Zero Xbox One X Enhanced, and the store lists 4K support for Xbox One X and Xbox Series X. It doesn’t have FPS Boost.
If you own the Xbox 360 disc, an Xbox One or Xbox Series X will recognise it and download the backward-compatible version.
More on Perfect Dark Zero
Our Perfect Dark Zero hub has the essentials and will collect future coverage. Tomorrow, the series heads to Cyrodiil with The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Oblivion Remastered.
