﻿Dinotopia is a *formative* series about a land APART FROM TIME where dinosaurs
and humans live in harmony. It’s been adapted into a miniseries, and a cartoon,
and a bunch of little paperbacks which defined my childhood, and a couple games, one of which:
IS A FULL MOTION VIDEO GAME WITH PUPPETS.
(raptor, seductively) -Trust me, you'll love this game.
- Who did this? Why does it exist? And is it good?
This 1996 adventure game was so lost to the sands of time that *I* didn’t even know it existed, but today I’m
going to disinter it, give it a good autopsy, and tell you why it’s my new obsession.
But first, you have to know something about the wasteland that is dinosaur games.
Games about dinosaurs.
Dino games.
Dino gaming.
The 90s were a golden age of dinosaur media. I was born in 1990 so I’ve been indoctrinated to
love dinosaurs all of my cursèd life. And that’s why as an adult, I’ve been really disappointed
with dinosaur games. You have series like Turok,
where you: kill dinosaurs.
Games like Second Extinction, where you: kill dinosaurs.
And games like Primal Carnage Extinction, where you... !!!! Kill dinosaurs.
I’m bored!! I didn’t grow up loving these amazing creatures just
so I could turn them into the Cretacous equivalent of a rhino mounted on Ernest Hemingway’s wall.
Now, there are some games that have done dinosaurs with less or different killing. Jurassic World
Evolution is a park sim, which is such a good take on this whole franchise, because we all
know we could do a better job than this guy.
John Hammond: I guarantee it.
- And 2020’s Parkasaurus is the cute, colorful version
of a dino park sim, one where the dinosaurs can wear little hats. It's impeccable design.
Ark: Survival Evolved does require dino-killing, but only because you’re
trying to develop technology so you can TAME AND RIDE THE DINOSAURS YES!!! YES!!!!!!!!!!
YES!
YEARHG
That being said, in all of these games, dinosaurs are just dumb animals who can either be killed,
caged, or tamed. But if you watched or read Dinotopia,
you know that there’s a different way. A magical world of adventure where dinosaurs… are your friends.
The first glossy, enormous, illustrated Dinotopia book was published in 1992,
just in time for me to become literate and obsessed. It’s about a lost continent
where dinosaurs and humans have formed a peaceful society. In Dinotopia, the two species are equals:
dinosaurs can read and do science, and some can even speak human languages.
The series is special because writer and illustrator James Gurney puts in a
nutty amount of worldbuilding. For every pastoral image of a human riding a dinosaur,
Gurney says “here, have a cross-section of a city built from the wreck of a 17th century ship,”
and I say “THANK YOU MR. GURNEY, YOU ARE THE ARCHITECT OF MY CHILDHOOD.”
These books were such fodder for my imagination: they show you how everything
works in this fantastical world, and invite the question “and what would you do, if you were in
Dinotopia?” Would you work in a hatchery, become a Skybax rider and deliver messages,
would you even just pick up DINOSAUR POOP because all these options are valid!!
It’s always been a given to me that Dinotopia is a fun setting for a game.
But there’s one mayyyyyybe-roadblock: it’s a pacifist utopia, where violence is unthinkable.
And that’s, I guess, why two of the biggest Dinotopia games are about fighting people!
When the Dinotopia Mentos hit the video game Diet Coke, some dark alchemy happens. Like, the ghost
of Marketing Past comes down and says
[raspy Marketing Man voice] - “Listen bud, this is a video game and it’s about
dinosaurs and both those things are for boys, so uhh shouldn’t we get some combat in there?”
- In 2002, French developer RFX Interactive took a crack at the license. RFX had just made the
BIZARRE and INCREDIBLE-LOOKING Dinosaur'us: a GameBoy Advance game where you play as a
baby dinosaur, doing platforming sequences, just trying to get by,
and THEN — FIGHTING TURN-BASED BATTLES AGAINST OTHER DINOSAURS LIKE IT’S FREAKIN’ POKEMON.
That same platforming gameplay shows up in Dinotopia: The Timestone Pirates.
You play as Clayton, NOTthatone, a Dinotopian who gets a “sunstone prod,” okay, and has to
beat up a ton of pirates who are stealing T-Rex eggs. It’s a punishing platformer, and perfectly
fine, with admittedly beautiful art. And it makes a little more sense than what
happened in 2003, when developer Vicious Cycle was tapped to work on the IP and turned out Dinotopia:
The Sunstone Odyssey, a game where you can beat up dudes *and* dinosaurs with a
mallet as long as you are ~A Guardian of Dinotopia,~ a made-up job that means you can do violence,
as long as you’re protecting Dinotopians.
[woman in game] - Only use that weapon as a Guardian of Dinotopia would.
- It’s incredibly jarring for me narratively, and for
many reviewers it was jarringly repetitive. Both of these games are hamstrung by
combat-focused mechanics. Neither one really feels like Dinotopia, and neither one pushes against the expectations
set out by other dinosaur games, where again, you’re just killin' stuff the whole time.
Sooo it was with low expectations that I cracked open Dinotopia, the 1996 adventure game.
It opens with this lovely painting of Waterfall City and I was like, heck yeah, okay, that’s
what Dinotopia looks like to me, good start, and then — THIS GUY STARTED TALKING TO ME. AND THEN.
THIS DINOSAUR STARTED TALKING TO ME. And I realized.
This was a frikkin’ FMV.
And it had animatronic dinosaur puppets. And my life has not been the same since.
Dinotopia, the game, stars a guy with the unlikely name of NATHAN DRAKE, NOTthatone. NATHAN DRAKE is
newly shipwrecked on Dinotopia, and looking for his missing sister Constance. Along the way he
solves puzzles and interacts with iconic book characters, all played by real people who look
eerily like their illustrated counterparts. I couldn’t believe that a) this game existed,
and b) I had never heard of it before. SO, I reached out to who else but James Gurney himself,
to see if he remembered anything about the game:
James Gurney: In those days, every publisher felt
they had to have an interactive department for making these CD-Rom versions of books.
This was cutting-edge at the time.
- Said publisher, Turner Interactive, brought
on developer co-op The Dreamer’s Guild to make the game. The Dreamer’s Guild was an employee-driven
business, with the developers themselves weighing in on what projects to take next.
And they had just done a book-to-game adaptation:
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, the horrifying
Harlan Ellison short story which you might recognize as freakin’ dark and not for kids!
But that adaptation was well-received! And if you’re an employee-run business you can
decide to pivot from Hugo Award winning sci-fi shorts to Children’s Puzzle Adventure Games.
But the Dreamer’s Guild wouldn’t be handling the game’s cutscenes.
Turner Interactive made the incredibly big-brained decision to film the cutscenes with real actors,
and dinosaurs played by animatronic puppets whose voice actors perform as if they are
doing callbacks for The Jim Henson Company.
[very MUPPETY dinosaur voice] - I no can live that way! I here on planet to speeeeaaak... truuuuuuth...
Holy sh*t.
The resulting game is appropriately delightful and weird.
When you first get to the island everyone is speaking gibberish —
[sound-up of nonsense speech]
— which I thought was just a funky choice!
Until you meet this old woman and she gives you a DINOTOPIAN ALPHABET BOOK. And suddenly —
[Woman speaking English] - Now it may be a bit childish for you, young man,
but it is a good way to study the ABCs.
- Later you use the same alphabet book to decode puzzles. There’s also this delightful
music puzzle where you have to play back the notes that a Parasaurolophus sings to you.
[dinosaur singing in deep voice] BOMMMMMM BOMMMMM bommmmm bommmmmm!
And then the song that you make plays in the city! These puzzles are creative,
fun, and coherent with the setting. Notably they also don’t involve “mash A to hit.”
And then there are moments that don’t quite hit the mark, like this one where you just have to
throw yourself off a cliff over and over and hope that you land on the Skybax. Not so intuitive.
Also everyone knows it takes much more training to bond with a Skybax - HA HA. AM I RIGHT. Anyway,
The gameplay graphics are very of their time. But then you have the game's cutscenes,
which are, just like Gurney said, cutting-edge. Andre Freitas and his special effects company,
AFX Studios, made TEN! dinosaur puppets for the game, all with hand-painted latex
skins and complex animatronics. Each one had to be piloted by multiple puppeteers — some working
eyelids on radio controls, others using rods to maneuver the puppets’ massive heads. Freitas said
Turner only gave him $85,000 for the project, which breaks down to...
not nearly enough per puppet!!!!
Freitas’ work is amazing, and goes a huge way to making this game look like Dinotopia, even though
the later games have better “graphics.” Freitas also did the makeup on the actors,
translating Gurney’s painting style onto a human canvas.
This would end up being the first time Dinotopia was put on film … but what Gurney’s
publishers initially envisioned for a Dinotopia adaptation was an Oscar-studded masterwork.
James Gurney: A memo from 1995, from TNT, suggests any of the following actors would do a good job with it:
Lloyd Bridges, Dick Van Dyke,
Tony Randall, Charlton Heston, Robert Mitchum, Alan King, (chuckles)
Dean Martin…and the list goes on and on.
They suggested anyone from Ray Charles
to Ben Vereen … Kareem Abdul Jabbar, they suggested James Earl Jones, Billy Dee Williams. … so they
had grand ambitions for this game.
- Even though legendary actor Robert Mitchum did not star in Dinotopia a year before his death,
the fact that this is an FMV game
at all showcases Turner’s ambition. FMVs were the! hot! stuff! of the era.
People saw them as the next evolution of video games, because what could be better than moving
from these silly, childish “computer graphics” to real people acting in real scenes?
It was expensive to do, and the history of FMVs is laced with million-dollar flops, as people gradually
realized that static videos couldn’t provide the same reactivity as an animated game.
But for this game!! It works!! The mix of FMV and puzzles doesn’t hinder the player,
and the video footage adds the life and color that the books have — and
that the overworld gameplay lacks. And with my 20-year vantage point on it,
I think it’s actually really charming when there are scenes where the dinosaur
and the human are so obviously shot separately and their dialog kind of overlaps —
Enit: But your skills as a librarian are positively prehistor—
Nallab: WELL I WILL SEE TO IT THAT THEY ARE PUT ... properly... away...
- It warms my heart! Anyway, this just underscores what a weird time it was for
this game to come out. Because everything kind of fell apart right after that.
The Dreamer’s Guild rushed out one more game, [DEEP VOICE] Halls of the Dead: Faery Tale Adventure II,
and then went bankrupt. Another thing that went bankrupt was the concept of FMV games.
They totally fell out of favor as 3D graphics became more readily available.
What’s more, I can’t find any record of later Turner Interactive games either.
Dinotopia was well-received as the children’s puzzle game it is, and then… poof!
But when it comes to Dinotopia games — and dinosaur games in general — it is frankly the boldest and
the best of them. It used cutting-edge technology, it didn’t shoehorn combat into a utopian setting,
and it showed a new way forward where PUPPETS ARE IN VIDEO GAMES and ONLY
REMEDY ENTERTAINMENT has been brave enough to take up that mantle.
It’s the kind of weird little artifact that could only have existed in the 90s,
when big budget and art project collided.
James Gurney: I'm glad to see that people are
interested in it again. It was a stage in the development of video games
fairly early on... and no one knew where video games would bring us now.
Um, but the same basic principles applied then, as now:
Having a world that's fun to explore, that's sort of open-ended feeling...
...and where you find interesting surprises around every corner.
- Nowadays it’s possible to make a game that looks more-or-less photorealistic… or even completely
hand-drawn, just like Gurney’s art. SO THAT MEANS, IT’S TIME FOR SOMEONE TO MAKE A NEW
DINOTOPIA GAME. And you know what?
They could still use these puppets.
[Jurassic Park knock-off music swells]
it really is a good knock-off