Perfect Dark's protagonist, Joanna Dark, has a hidden meaning behind her name.
Perfect Dark is a first-person shooter game developed by Rare for the Nintendo 64 back in 2000. It's the first in the series, following the main protagonist, Joanna Dark, a secret agent who faces off against an extraterrestrial invasion led by a rival company. The game is known for pushing the Nintendo 64s memory unit as far as it could go, even requiring an expansion pack, with a campaign mode as well as a variety of multiplayer options.
The main character from the game, Joanna Dark, was a staple to the series because not many companies at the time featured female leads in games. Joanna Dark's name, in particular, is a pun off a similar female icon in history Joan of Arc.
Joan of Arc is known as a heroine of France for her courageous acts during the Lancastrian phase of the Hundred Years' War. Martin Hollis, the team lead from the game, is quoted saying, "It's a cross-lingual pun, which is perhaps the most painful possible! All I could really say that we got from the idea of Joan of Arc was that she was fairly young. She was a woman. And she was warlike."
The idea came from wanting to create a female lead who was the antithesis of Lara Croft. While Laura Croft was wildly successful, the team felt like there wasn't enough depth to her character, they wanted someone who felt alive. Joan of Arc just happened to be one of the best examples for creating the basis of their protagonist.
Brett Jones, the animator for Rare, elaborates by saying, "I wanted somebody more human than this Lara Croft character we had seen all the time. And that was the idea behind Joanna Dark, to make a female James Bond character who had all of his skills and resources, but was female and very capable." So while the team did use about 20 plus different characters when coming up with Joanna Dark, the intention remained the same in creating a female character that will break the typical trends in gaming and give female gamers another figure to admire.
Source: Eurogamer