At last, now we know what really killed the dinosaurs.
While I’ll stress that the games chosen for this blog are 100% random, I find it quite delightful that it landed on this for entry #64. It just feels right.
Iguana Entertainment and Acclaim released Turok: Dinosaur Hunter as the first third-party game for the N64 in early 1997. You play as a time-traveling Native American badass, who must protect the world from a bad guy who wants to destroy time and space, as bad guys tend to do. It’s a bit of a wild premise, but it does a great job of allowing for varied environments and enemies.
Here’s something you may not know about Turok – it’s based on a comic book character that first appeared in 1954. That’s pretty old! It means the character is as old as Brown v. Board of Education. Hmm…
Moving on…Turok: Dinosaur Hunter is a first-person shooter, and its name basically explains the rest. You hunt dinosaurs! Oh, and some other stuff, too, But mostly dinosaurs, because they are cool (but they need to die, for reasons).
With a game like Turok, it’s especially important to look at it in the context of what else was available at the time. The console FPS world evolved a ton in the years following its release (Goldeneye was released just a few months later, for instance), so its shortcomings should certainly be looked at in context. Some of the visuals haven’t aged well, there’s no multiplayer at all, and the controls are archaic and occasionally frustrating. If you’ve only played newer shooters, this one could be a bit frustrating.
If that description applies to you, I still recommend checking this one out. Despite having all of the hallmarks of mid-90s FPS features that didn’t age well, it has many of the things that made them fun as well. Cool guns? Check. Cool enemies? Definitely. Blood everywhere? You’d better believe it. Explosions, everywhere and all the time? Without question.
Turok does a solid job of mixing up FPS elements with some amount of exploration – the game is still ultimately a bit linear, but it’s pretty fun to look around and find things. The levels can sometimes feel a bit open and empty due to this, but it’s probably still preferable to just being a bunch of hallways. Especially for the time, that hint of an ‘open world’ is a pretty cool feature.
The odds were stacked somewhat against Turok when it was released – it had an unusually high price tag ($80, and that’s in 1997 money), it experienced a multi-month delay, and it came at a time when Acclaim was short on cash for stuff like marketing. Thankfully, murdering dinosaurs apparently sells itself, and Acclaim had a huge hit on their hands. The game spawned a couple of sequels, as well as Rage Wars, a multi-player only spinoff. A few reboot-type games followed in the 2000s, though there hasn’t been a new one since 2008. The comic book rights to Turok, which Acclaim previously held, has changed hands a few times since, and is now with Dynamite Entertainment, who released a new series in 2017.
If you have an N64, you honestly probably already have Turok. If you somehow don’t, however, it’s definitely worth picking up. It’s a mid-90s FPS, to be certain, but it’s still a bloody good time.
Our next game is a first-party Nintendo classic, though it’s one that doesn’t get talked about much. I look forward to briefly alleviating that next week.