Many moons ago, Nintendo and Rare fans were eagerly anticipating what looked to be a very promising Nintendo 64 game — Dinosaur Planet. An action adventure game with a fox as the main character, fans better know the final product as Star Fox Adventures on the GameCube. It was never intended to come out the way it did, with many original ideas scrapped. Following on from Part 1 of the MiA feature’s look at RiQa, Cubed3 takes a look at what Dinosaur Planet could have been, and how it ended up as a surprise entry in the Star Fox series.
Where did it all begin?
Believe it or not, the first ideas for Dinosaur Planet were that of a racing-adventure crossover. Fresh off of making Diddy Kong Racing, it is suggested that the game could have been started as a sequel of sorts to Rares monkey racer. Each level was intended to have a race track, with the end product of the GameCubes Star Fox Adventures showing evidence of this in its racing portions of the Ice Mountain and CloudRunner Fortress mines. The team settled on a full-blown action adventure for their next project, eventually revealing Dinosaur Planet for Nintendo 64 to the masses at E3 2000, with an estimated release date of early 2001. Designed to utilise the N64 Expansion Pak and be crammed into a 512-megabit cartridge — something only the likes of Donkey Kong 64 had done — showed that Rare meant business with this game, planning on pushing the N64 to the max, just as the company had always strived to do in their previous games.
What was it all about?
Rare had dabbed their hands into a variety of genres by the time the Nintendo 64 was reaching the final years of its life, but a more role-playing action adventure wasnt one of them. Dinosaur Planet was an ambitious idea for the UK-based developers, but one that had the potential to do extremely well given the success of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It was obvious that Rare had drawn a lot of inspiration from Zelda, with everything from control setup to Z-targeting emulating that of the 1998 masterpiece. With cinematic story-driven games lacking on the N64, Rare intended to counter this with Dinosaur Planet by creating over 50 characters and providing full voice acting.
Dinosaur Planets original script was based around two anthropomorphic foxes, called Sabre and Krystal, that the player could switch between using two swapstones (giant rock creatures called Rocky and Rubble), set on a planet that the game got its title from. Sabre was the son of the great wizard Randorn and had an older brother that had previously been killed in battle. Following the death of his son, grieving Randorn disappeared, and an adult sword-wielding Sabre vowed to find his father with the help of his sidekick, Tricky the triceratops. Krystal was orphaned at a young age and was adopted by Randorn, presumably during the time he left Sabre. She, too, had a dino companion in Trickys brother, as well as a pterodactyl called Kyte which she could ride on and fought enemies with a staff throughout the course of the game. The story was split equally across both characters, with half of the game played as Sabre, and another half as Krystal, each with their own levels. The antagonist was General Scales of the SharpClaw tribe. It is believed the two protagonists would cross paths eventually, as the player continued to flick between them.
Why did it disappear?
After the game was shown to the world and Miyamoto got a chance to play it, he went on record as saying in an interview that main character Sabre looked a lot like Nintendos Star Fox lead Fox McCloud, and joked that he should ask Rare to turn it into Star Fox game. This quote was widely publicised, with Rare eventually hearing word of it, but the game bearing any resemblance to Fox was completely unintentional. Not long afterwards, a meeting proposed the idea of changing Dinosaur Planet to Star Fox. Despite some reluctance, Star Fox was still a big IP, and so Rare went ahead with it. By this time, the GameCube was edging closer to launch, and it was decided to port development of the game to Nintendos fourth home console instead. The title received a new name: Star Fox Adventures: Dinosaur Planet.
Due to the shift of franchise, a lot of the original content from Dinosaur Planet was cut. About 1/3 of the levels were gone, and since Krystal had only a bit part role now, her levels were either transferred to Fox or removed entirely. The game featured many gorgeous and tropical locales, one of which was Discovery Falls, but this, too, was cut. After not long, the Dinosaur Planet subtitle was dropped, and it became simply Star Fox Adventures. Another twist in the tale cropped up when it became apparent that Microsoft wanted to buy Rare off Nintendo. With the deal looming, Rare had very little time to finish up their project, and once more the team had to chop parts to meet the deadline. The final battle with General Scales is one of the more obvious chunks to be trimmed out. In the end, it was evident that the final product was rushed, and a far cry from the designers original conceptions.
It is really sad to see what happened to Dinosaur Planet. It had the potential to be a really high quality title, and going off of Rares history, you could have placed a lot of money on it being one of the games of its era. It looked to be pushing the Nintendo 64 to its limits, and it is a shame that, even after moving the project over to the GameCube, they could not realise their original ideals, instead worming the Star Fox characters into it and cutting a lot of content. Interested fans have managed to locate a lot of unused text inside the files of Star Fox Adventures, revealing dialogue from both the original Dinosaur Planet and SFA storylines. It seems that Rare had plenty of ideas for the project, including time travel in order to save Sabre, and a pretty deep and dark plot that can somewhat be unravelled by researching some of the hidden dialogue online.
Whilst fans will notice plenty that did make its way into SFA, such as music and locations, the warpstone, the dinosaur sidekicks and the galleon battle at the start to name just a few, it is a terrible shame that, despite Dinosaur Planet seemingly being quite far along in development, we may never get the chance to see Rares originally proposed concepts for this game fully realised. But, even though the game went through a tough time in development, the end result of Star Fox Adventures was still a good one. Rares graphical talent was still so apparent, with fur-shading being used to incredible effect, and actually still looks better than a lot of Wii games of today. It was a good adventure game, with trademark humour, and some great Arwing levels that Star Fox fans enjoyed. Playable N64 demos of Dinosaur Planet may be sitting snugly somewhere in the world, so we may yet get to see more of the game some day, but for now we can only continue to wonder what could have been and feed off of fans efforts of uncovering more secret files.
