Tonight I was strafing about in Perfect Dark, collecting footage for a video project in the works. I never really played Perfect Dark growing up, so a lot of the game's lobby, the Carrington Institute area, is new to me; places and secrets I'm yet to explore. Surely most know that pressing B at many of the computer terminals throughout the building pull up some kind of menu or information.
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I came across this area in the large hangar area; the location where you end the "Carrington Institute: Defense" mission. And so naturally, I pressed B at this terminal. Interestingly, this terminal tells you about the locations in the game, as well as the vehicles in game, like the hoverbike.
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I'd never known that the official name of the "Defection" tower was actually the "Lucerne Tower." A neat piece of Perfect Dark trivia in itself, and something I don't think I've ever seen referenced in any stream, video or forum post. But what caught my attention even more was the location of Crash Site.
The crash site is located at 71° N, 118° W, which is on Victoria Island, Canada! So incredibly and surprisingly, one mission in Perfect Dark takes place in Canada.
Alright, so what is there to know about Victoria Island?
Well firstly, it's the second largest island in the entire Canadian Arctic Archipelago, at a staggering 217,291 km² (or 83,897 sq miles); the 8th largest island in the entire world. One spot ahead of Great Britain, believe it or not; and one spot behind the island of Honshu (the largest and most populous in Japan). Honshu, while only about 8,000 km² larger than Victoria Island, has a population of over 100M. And Great Britain, about 8,000 km² smaller than Victoria Island, has a population around 60M. But can you guess the population of Victoria Island?
It's about 2,100 people. And they only live in two settlements; Cambridge Bay on the east, and Ulukhaktok on the west.
These two settlements are several hundred kilometres apart. Cambridge Bay is the larger, with around 1,700 people, while Ulukhaktok has about 400 people. These settlements have roads within them, but obviously, there's not 500 km of road joining these two places together with nothing in between. So the only way to access either community is by air. This makes them incredibly remote and inaccessible.
The barrenness of northern Canada is truly incredible and strains even the imagination of most. The entire Canadian Arctic Archipelago has a population of roughly 14,000 people, spread across thousands and thousands of kilometres of land and sea. Imagine for a second, driving from Texas to Minnesota. Then imagine crossing the border into Manitoba, and driving the same distance directly north (this isn't technically possible, but imagine it). You would roughly be at the northern coast of Canada, on the shores of the Arctic Ocean. It's here where the Arctic Archipelago begins. So now imagine, starting at the northern coast of Canada, on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, and traveling that same distance north; the equivalent of Texas to Minnesota. And that's roughly the distance you'd have to travel to get to the North Pole; crossing the entirety of the Arctic Archipelago as you go. Yes, imagine that. The north-south distance of the continental United States, yet a barren arctic tundra spanning the entire length, with only 14,000 people spread across those lands.
Keep in mind, half of Canada's roughly 37M population lives below this red line, so if you're on the shores of the Arctic Ocean you are already incredibly remote; far more remote than most people could possibly imagine.
To give you an idea of just how epic, raw and isolating these lands are, this is one of my favourite pictures; Mount Thor on Ellesmere Island. Known for being the highest completely vertical drop on planet Earth.
Victoria Island below is in purple. The six islands in red are all uninhabited. They're six of the top 10 largest, uninhabited islands in the world. Two others are in Antarctica, while the other two are among Russia's northern islands. Every one of these uninhabited islands are larger than countries including Jamaica, Kuwait or Cyprus.
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I find the Canadian Arctic Archipelago to be so fascinating. Here's a nicely labelled map of all the islands; over 1.4M km² in area just on the islands alone, which is large enough to be a top 20 country in terms of land mass. Larger than nations like Peru, Angola or Egypt. Yet its population is such an incredibly small ~14,000.
So what about Victoria Island, and the crash site in particular? Well interestingly, since Victoria Island is so huge, its Wikipedia page gives coordinates of 71° N, 110° W, which is roughly the centre of the island. However, if we go over another 8 degrees of longitude west, we are, incredibly, still on the island.
The red marker is exactly 71° N, 110° W, and is roughly 30 kilometres from the settlement of Ulukhaktok. So imagine, crashing in that situation, and trekking 30 kilometres to salvation (if you even knew where you were or which direction to go)... only to come across this:
Yes, this is the humble settlement of Ulukhaktok. There would likely be enough people to help heal minor wounds and give you a meal, but not much more. And there's nothing else around. For literally hundreds and hundreds of miles. Nothing, but the vast landscapes you see here and beyond.
The land truly looks alien, which fits the theme of Perfect Dark perfectly. Especially given it's a hostile race of aliens which caused the plane to crash there in the first place. And a friendly group of aliens who help with the rescue.
The crash site was well chosen, and is a fair geographic representation of what this area would look like in the winter. If a plane really did crash there, Ulukhaktok might be used as some kind of base of operations. And the most practical way to travel the 30 km distance back & forth would likely be snowmobile.
There's good reason the area is so sparsely populated. The community of Cambridge Bay has never recorded a temperature above freezing between the dates of October 31 and April 19. That's what I'd call a long winter! Here's the climate data for Ulukhaktok:
Cambridge Bay actually has full Google street view, which is pretty cool to check out. But Ulukhaktok has only one Google sphere image viewable:
I was quite surprised when I saw Victoria Island as the location of the crash site. According to the Perfect Dark story, it sounds like the President was flying from the Air Base in Alaska to Oslo, Norway, which makes some kind of sense, I suppose. Oslo would be a reasonable place for a G20 type meeting. Though I'm not sure flying over the Canadian Arctic Archipelago would be the best idea, precisely because there are few places to stage an emergency landing, and rescue operations are near impossible. I imagine one of the developers just picked it as a remote-enough sounding island that made enough geographical sense, in order to make a really cool stage. And they succeeded in that. But be honest, did any of you know that the Crash Site in Perfect Dark is supposed to take place on this remote, northern, Canadian island?
In the meantime, be sure to pack some warm clothes.