Pak Required: The 2000 Perfect Dark N64 Cartridge

A gray Nintendo 64 cartridge, no box, no manual. The label art is Joanna Dark with a pistol, light wear at the edges. The back sticker reads NUS-NPDE-USA. Someone wrote on the top edge in marker. That is the whole item. Here is why it is worth twenty minutes of your attention.

Read the sticker first

Every N64 cart carries a code. NUS is the console, Nintendo Ultra Sixty-four. The three letters after the dash are the game, and NPD is Perfect Dark. The last letter is the region, E for the English North American release, and USA confirms it. So before you plug anything in you already know this is the US version, which matters because the Japanese version came out five months later with different text on the label, and because the code is the fastest way to catch a reproduction cart with a wrong sticker. Learn the codes. They are free.

What it is

Perfect Dark is Rare's 2000 first-person shooter, released in North America on May 22, 2000, in Europe on June 30, and in Japan on October 21. Rare developed and published it, which is why the label says Rareware and not Nintendo. It is the follow-up to GoldenEye 007 from 1997, same studio, same core team, an upgraded version of the same engine. Director Martin Hollis ran it for the first fourteen months and then left. By the time it shipped, the team said roughly thirty percent of the GoldenEye engine was still in there.

You play Joanna Dark, an agent for the Carrington Institute, against a corporation called dataDyne and two alien species. The plot is not why anyone remembers it. The modes are. Counter-Operative let a second player jump into the bodies of the enemy guards while player one ran the mission. Combat Simulator gave you four human players plus eight bots, called simulants, each with a personality you could set. Cooperative mode let a friend run the campaign with you. It got an M rating from the ESRB, which was rare for anything on a Nintendo console in 2000, and it scored 97 on Metacritic. About 3.2 million copies sold. There was going to be a feature where you photographed your own face with the Game Boy Camera and put it on an enemy. Rare cut it late in development, because letting players shoot images of real people was not a conversation anyone wanted to have in 1999.

Pak required

This is the part that separates people who know the N64 from people who own one. The console shipped with 4MB of RAM. The Expansion Pak, a small red-topped module that slots into the top of the console, adds 4MB more. Most games used it for a higher resolution mode. Perfect Dark needs it to run the campaign at all. Without the Pak you get a stripped Combat Simulator and nothing else, around thirty-five percent of the game by Rare's own count. Some retail copies were bundled with the Pak for that reason.

So a loose Perfect Dark cart is a key. It does nothing until it meets the right lock. If you have a console with the standard Jumper Pak still installed, this cart will boot to a menu that tells you to buy something. That is not a defect. That is the game. Check your console before you check out.

What happened to it after

Microsoft bought Rare in 2002. That closed the door on any Perfect Dark on Nintendo hardware for a long time. Perfect Dark Zero came out on Xbox 360 in 2005 as a prequel. In 2010 the original got a remaster on Xbox Live Arcade with a real frame rate and online play. Then in June 2024 Nintendo added the N64 original to Switch Online's Expansion Pack tier, which was the first time it had been on a Nintendo machine since the cart in your hand.

The modern reboot is a different story. Announced at The Game Awards in December 2020, developed by The Initiative with Crystal Dynamics. Microsoft closed The Initiative and cancelled it in July 2025. Talks with Take-Two about picking it up collapsed in September 2025 over who would own the property. A separate pitch from id Software this summer was reportedly turned down. Two studios, six years, no game. The N64 cart is still the only Perfect Dark you can hold.

This copy

Tested and working before listing. Light wear on the label, no tears. Marker writing on the top edge of the shell, which on N64 carts usually means a rental shop or a household with more than one kid, and which does not affect play. Some oxidation on the contact pins, normal for a cart this age. A swab of isopropyl on the pins before the first boot is a good habit anyway. Cartridge only. No Expansion Pak included, see above.

Price is $25. PriceCharting has the loose cart at $24.99 as of this week, moving about three copies a day. So this is not a deal and it is not a markup. It is the number. What you get on top of the number is a cart that has been tested and described honestly, which, if you have bought loose N64 games on the open market, you know is not the default.

The cart is here. Bring your own Pak.