I was the first concept artist hired in-house on Perfect Dark, at The Initiative, the studio Xbox opened in Santa Monica in 2018. That fall I kickstarted our world-building: a near-future Cairo for a spy thriller, with a look of our own, which we came to call “eco sci-fi.” For someone who grew up on Shadowrun and William Gibson, it was a pinch-yourself moment.

I was there from the blue-sky pitches in 2018 until Microsoft closed the studio in 2025. Over those 7 years the team around me grew and changed, with my tenure one of the few constants. I became the keeper of our concept vault and the resident historian of the game’s lore, the one who brought new hires up to speed on a world that had been evolving for years. When a colleague was given an assignment, I could hand them our earlier iterations on similar themes as reference. When an art director was preparing a new brief, they could check with me to see if we’d explored the topic before. (The answer was almost always an emphatic yes.)

We announced the game at The Game Awards in 2020, and from 2021 Crystal Dynamics co-developed it with us under one banner: Team Perfect Dark. Between that announcement and the gameplay reveal at the Xbox Games Showcase in 2024, I owned the source art for the game’s AR graphics: the obsession board and the hacking animations you can see in that trailer. I also delivered street signage and holograms, dashboards and login screens, collectibles, and screen textures across the levels.

Announcement Trailer

In 2018, the reboot had a name and a protagonist, but no world. The original Perfect Dark was closer to Blade Runner, but we couldn’t out–Blade Runner a game like Cyberpunk 2077, so we had to try something else. I started as I always do, with a genre deep dive: I watched every Mission: Impossible and Bond film and replayed both original Perfect Dark games. Once I was steeped in the design language of the spy thriller, I went wide with my research, then started sketching: around 3 rough photobashed sketches a day, each a blue-sky pitch hunting for a flavor we could build on. I felt like a mad scientist, experimenting with wild ideas until the early wins came.

From those wins, I worked out the formula with our studio head: a near-future Cairo shaped by ecological disaster, in a look we called eco sci-fi, a term we coined for cities forced to remake their infrastructure at scale to survive climate change. The new tech is retrofitted, so a destination you’d recognize sits in contrast with corporate futurism, old against new. We called it a “fauxtopia”: green tech grown onto a city still living with the damage. The goal was something ownable, the way Black Panther made Afrofuturism its own with a city drawn from vernacular African architecture. I designed the style guides that followed and worked with a cultural consultant to keep our Cairo true to the real one, down to the translated text in my concepts.

Two years of that work went public in one trailer at The Game Awards in 2020, the first time anyone outside the studio saw the setting. It was our stake in the ground: a bold claim that this world was a flavor of sci-fi nobody else had, and our way of standing out in a sea of near-future games. My work is in the drone’s flythrough over the market (1:44) and down in its streets (1:54).

I populated the market in the drone flythrough and designed its eco-props. Down in the street, the lighting paintover for the drone’s camera is mine, and so is the face-scan UI it runs over the crowd.

Gameplay Reveal

By 2024 it was time to show gameplay. Concept Art designs the look and Environment Art builds it, but on this trailer much of my design work happened inside Unreal Engine 5, painting over test levels and blockouts in-engine before I finished the keyframes in Photoshop. Six years of world-building, in motion at last: this is the reveal from the Xbox Games Showcase, three and a half minutes of gameplay, and everything below follows it in order.

Storm Jump

The trailer opens with a Mission: Impossible–esque stunt, Joanna’s death-defying jump from a private jet into a storm. A few seconds of screen time took concept, storyboards, character, level design, and cinematics to pull off. The hardest part was making sure the level designers and the cinematics team each got what they needed out of the story beat. The jet is mine, interior and exterior, though only the exterior is in the trailer. I argued for designing the exterior first, so that everything would line up as a whole, and that solved some major problems: what kind of door the jet needed, how it opened, where on the fuselage it had to sit. My lighting and VFX concepts took the storyboard frames, rough and sketchy by design, and gave them polish: I posed our Joanna model, rendered her out in Blender, and painted over the render to set the storm’s fog density, its debris, the way the light diffused through it, and the color of the lightning.

Alleyway

The second beat shows off our traversal moves in the alleyway behind Carrington’s hideout. I painted the keyframes, and designed the 2D textures for the signage and diagnostic screens. With our lead level designer and the environment artists I also set the visual language for traversable objects, so traversal reads the same from level to level: yellow on the pipes and turquoise on the painted wood, to pop against Cairo’s natural yellows and browns. A red tapestry blowing in the wind marks a traversable window. Earlier in the trailer, where Joanna steals a guard’s voice to open a gate, the red-on-blue sign is mine, and so is the voice box that opens it; I designed many of the game’s systemic interactable props, hackable doors among them.

Hideout

The inside of Carrington’s hideout was a lot of fun to design, and I pitched plenty of ideas and Easter eggs. We wanted an ad-hoc setup: this is a character who is effectively a chameleon and works through disguises, and I was delighted to see the prosthetic bodysuit make the cut. This is also where my AR work is onscreen. I designed the digital obsession board and its contents, and the hacking screen graphics, which one of our VFX artists animated.

Plaza

For the combat beat I did blue-sky concept work for the market plaza, and the octagonal oranges were mine. The ask was that every orange be its own physics object, scattering under gunfire, without giving up our target frame rate of 60 fps. The VFX artists made it work, and the day they did was a celebration for the whole team.

Logo

The trailer ends on the new Perfect Dark logo, designed by our UI/UX director. It replaced the 2020 announcement logo, which was built from my own treatment, a tracing of the original: the game had come out in 2000, we were announcing in 2020, and enough time had passed that the original was cool again, the style having boomeranged back. For the tracing I flipped the blue of the American box to the red of the Japanese one, with the exact value lifted from the back cover of Lil Yachty’s Teenage Emotions. The mark I cared most about was the dakuten after the name, the quotation mark–like accent that, by the anecdotes I dug up, Rare included to make the title feel more Japanese and foreign. The 2024 logo took what was cool about the legacy one, the angular strokes and that mark, and modernized it for a new era: a microcosm for the project itself.

×

2000

My tracing

2020

2024

I’m extremely proud of the work we did on Team Perfect Dark. When I first joined The Initiative I was still in my first year in the industry, working alongside veterans of the studios whose games I grew up on. It fundamentally changed how I think about games: I pay attention now to which ideas survive from blue sky all the way to the screen, and whether they still feel right once you’re on the sticks, controller in hand, feeling like a secret agent.

To the concept team and the leadership who taught me so much over those 7 years, thank you.

Concept Team

Isaac Kim

Concept Artist

Jessica Cheng

Senior Concept Artist

Jorge Molina

Character Concept Artist

Kanish Palathingal

Senior Character Concept Artist

Chris Doretz

Concept Artist

Jeremy Hunter

Concept Artist

Brock Grossman

Concept Artist

Lei Jin

Concept Artist

Concept Leadership

Miles Williams

Production Designer

Eric Persson

Lead Concept Artist / Art Director

Erik Jakobsen

Art Director

Horia Dociu

Art Director

Michael Baytion

Assistant Art Director

Nicole Plum

Outsource Manager / Concept Art Producer

Collaborators

Darrell Gallagher

Studio Head

Rich Burns

UI/UX Director

Heather Jackett

Lead Level Designer

Mark Bristol

Storyboard Artist

Kerrigan Marois

Environment Artist

Josh Pegram

Environment Artist

Jaime Molina

Environment Artist

Leonardo Cunha

VFX Artist