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Last year, the year of our Lord 2000, for those of you who weren't aware, Nintendo unveiled a new game for release. It was first announced in a front page article on Nintendo's homepage, and later unveiled at E3. The game was none other than Dinosaur Planet. What happened, you ask? You ask good questions! This game was based around two cat-like main characters, a boy and a girl named Sabre and Krystal. They both had a companion to follow them through their adventures. Sabre had a small triceratops named Tricky, and Krystal befriended a pteradactyl named Kyte. These two dinosaurs were described on Rareware's website as an earthwalker prince and a skywalker princess. You can assume from this that on Dinosaur Planet, dinosaurs hold some sort of exalted position. But by far the most intriguing aspect of this game was that you could play through as either Sabre or Krystal, seperately. Each character had a vastly different quest ahead of them. Dinosaur Planet was a game much like the Zelda series. It featured the same type of quest, and the battle system was basically taken from Zelda. As a matter of fact, it was a blatant rip-off of Zelda. But that's okay. Why was it okay? Because of who was developing it: Rareware. Therefore, it had to be good. After all, Nintendo owns 25% of the company. But after E3, this excellent game almost disappeared. The only hints that it ever existed were a page on Rare's website, a page on Nintendo's site, seven MP3s, and a five meg video released at E3, all of which I will include links to at the end of this editorial. The music was incredibly well composed, as good as, if not better than the soundtrack for Ocarina of Time. The graphics were incredible. As a matter of fact, Dinosaur Planet broke all existing records by using the largest cartridge ever produced: 512 megabits. Why did such an excellent game disappear? For several months, it seemed only natural that it would be quiet, because the game was in development. Then the GameCube was unveiled, and Dinosaur Planet was left behind in all the hype. After several months, IGN finally reported that Dinosaur Planet had been scratched from the N64 active release list, and moved to a list of future games that might not ever be released. Within a few weeks, an unsubstantiated rumor went around that the project was being moved to GameCube. This rumor was confirmed about two months ago by an executive at Nintendo. Then another wierd rumor started to circulate. The word was that Shigeru Miyamoto had interfered with development, and was turning Dinosaur Planet into the next Star Fox game. This rumor remains unsubstatiated, but it is supported by the fact that in an interview several months ago, Shigeru Miyamoto jokingly spoke of taking Dinosaur Planet and turning it into a game called Star Fox Adventures. Another thing worth noting is that Miyamoto-san didn't have to grope for a title. He didn't say, "we could call it Star Fox adventures OR SOMETHING," He said "We could call it Star Fox Adventures." The title was right there. Just a thought. So where does this excellent game stand now? Nobody knows. This game might not ever even be released. But it's quite interesting that Shigeru Miyamoto would talk of changing the game that drastically this far into development. Could he be talking about another Star Fox game, totally seperate from Dinosaur Planet? Or is he talking about blending the two games? Knowing Mr. Miyamoto's style, he could just be talking about the striking resemblence between Sabre and Fox McCloud. I don't know what will happen to this game, but I sincerely hope it will remain what it is: A Zelda-like adventure through hot, steamy jungles and lush green forests. We'll just have to wait and see. I'm going to try to post those links now, let's see if it works. if these don't show up as links, just copy and paste the addresses into the address bar of your browser. If you go to these pages, do yourself a favor and download every scrap of music you can find. There are a total of seven MP3s. The 5 meg video unveiled at E3 can be found on Rareware's downloads page for the Game. For those of you who don't know how, if you want to save a file online, right click on the link and click "Save Target As..." This will download the file to your computer. I would like to know what you think of my first editorial, so please give me feedback about what you thought. Thanks to IGN for providing the original stories from which this info was taken.
Rareware's DP page: http://www.rareware.com/recent/games/dino/
Nintendo's DP page: http://www.nintendo.com/n64/dinosaurplanet/index.html
Written by MegaManX503