Joanna Dark
| Joanna Dark | |
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| Real Name | Joanna Dark |
| Aliases | "Perfect Dark" |
| Age | 23 (as of Perfect Dark) |
| Nationality | Anglo-American |
| Affiliations | Dark Bail Bonds, Carrington Institute |
| Gender | Female |
| Hair | Red |
| Eyes | Blue |
| Height | 5 ft 9 in |
| Tattoos | Star tattoo on neck (left side) |
| Voice Actor | Laurence Bouvard, Eveline Fisher |
Joanna Dark is the female protagonist of the Perfect Dark video game franchise developed by Rare. In the Perfect Dark franchise, Joanna Dark acts as an elite mercenary who specializes in industrial espionage. She is employed by the Carrington Institute, where she was given the code name "Perfect Dark" in honor of her flawless performance in training tests. Her real name is derived from Jeanne d'Arc (Joan of Arc).
Game appearances
Joanna Dark made her debut in Perfect Dark, a Nintendo 64 game released in 2000. Later that year she appeared in a version of this game released for the Game Boy Color handheld. Following the success of Perfect Dark for the N64 work began on its sequel, Perfect Dark Zero. While this game was originally developed for Nintendo's GameCube console, Microsoft's acquisition of Rareware prompted the studio to shift development to first the Xbox and later the Xbox 360 console.
During this long development process her character design went through several iterations. Images of the initial concept were met with much derision among the fans who criticized Joanna's new Manga-like appearance. In response the developers chose to tone down some of the more stylized aspects of the design, eventually arriving at a more realistic appearance. Perfect Dark Zero was finally released in November 2005 as a launch title for the Xbox 360 console.
Biography
Early Life
Joanna Dark was born in Atlanta, Georgia on March 18, 2000. She and her family moved to England soon thereafter. She was homeschooled for most of her life by her father, Jack Dark, who took her with him as he tracked criminals across the globe as a bounty hunter and owner of Dark Bail Bonds. She briefly attended an American school in Beijing, but was expelled after hospitalizing another student following a bullying incident.
As part of her education, her father trained her in self-defense, stealth, tracking, and firearm use. As a teenager, she began assisting Jack in his business. Joanna worked as a general assistant and apprentice in Dark Bail Bonds during this period, helping Chandra Sekhar with communications and piloting vehicles.
Perfect Dark Zero
In 2020, Joanna was a bounty hunter, working with her father and Chandra. On Joanna's first mission, they rescued a scientist named Zeigler from the hands of a Triad crime lord based out of Hong Kong. Soon after his rescue, Zeigler suddenly used a neurodrive to implant information into Jack's mind, hoping to keep it safe for Zeigler's employer. However, Jack was soon captured by dataDyne, a sinister weapons corporation, in order to allow Joanna to escape. Joanna rescued him from the palace of Zhang Li, the secretive founder of dataDyne, only for Jack to die during the escape at the hands of Zhang Zi's daughter, Mai-Hem. Determined to avenge her father's death, Joanna infiltrated a dataDyne facility in the middle of the Pacific Ocean at Chandra's suggestion. Joanna was able to locate Dr. Eustace Caroll, he had been Zeigler's partner at dataDyne. However, Caroll had been expecting Joanna and used the same neurodrive technology employed by Zeigler to extract any memory of the words her father said concerning Ziegler's secrets. Suddenly, Chandra appears and kills Caroll, revealing herself to be a traitor, working for Zhang Li. Before she can kill Joanna, forces of the Carrington Institute, which had hired Jack and Joanna to locate Zeigler, arrived and extracted her.
While driven to avenge her father's death, Joanna's goals coincided with those of the Carrington Institute, an organization founded by Daniel Carrington, which is officially an R&D centre but secretly operates an espionage group. Taking advantage of their resources but acting as an independent contractor, Joanna and the Institute set out to discover and end Zhang Li's plan.
Joanna was sent by the Institute to infiltrate a mining operation in an ancient Peruvian temple, where she discovered the conspiracy: Zhang Li and Mai-Hem are searching for an ancient artifact known as "The Graal", which embues its possessor with superhuman powers. Following them both to Africa after placing a tracker on a ancient power source Mei Hem found, Joanna rescued Johnathan and his team of operatives from the Institute that had been captured in Peru and disabled dataDyne's air defenses in order to allow Carrington to launch a full-scale assault on Zhang Li's forces. During the battle, Joanna battled and defeated Mai-Hem before leading the final assault on dataDyne forces. By the time Joanna arrived at Zhang Li's position, he had already used the Graal on himself, granting him god-like powers. He summarily executes Chandra before engaging Joanna in battle. Defeating the seemingly invincible power-hungry genius, Joanna was met by Daniel Carrington. When Joanna asked, "How did I do, Boss?" Carrington replied: "Perfect." The title "Perfect Dark" would stick with Joanna.
Perfect Dark
By 2023, Joanna had become a full-fledged operative of the Carrington Institute, which was still working with the Maians, who are engaged an interstellar war with the Skedar, reptile-like extraterrestrials who can disguise themselves as humans and have clandestine links to dataDyne. Joanna was sent to investigate suspicious reports from a dataDyne insider. In the process, she uncovered a conspiracy between dataDyne and the Skedar: the Skedar planned to steal an alien "megaweapon" from a crashed spacecraft on the Earth's ocean floor and use it to annihilate the Maians.
When the President of the United States refused to loan dataDyne the research vessel they need to retrieve the megaweapon, the corporation plotted to kill him and replace him with a dataDyne-grown clone. However, Joanna was able to sneak aboard Air Force One and prevented the assassination. Unbeknownst to dataDyne, the Skedar also intended to test-fire the megaweapon on Earth, destroying it in the process. With the help of other Carrington agents and a Maian bodyguard nicknamed Elvis, Joanna prevented the conspiracy by causing the weapon to self-destruct. She then helped the Maians launch a counter-attack on the Skedar homeworld, destroying the Skedar's "Battle Shrine" and eliminating their High Priest, thereby issuing Skedar morale a crippling blow.
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