A group of gaming preservationists has released online a fully playable (and a bit buggy) build of Dinosaur Planet, a cancelled Nintendo 64 project developed by Rare. It would eventually become Star Fox Adventures, which was released on the Gamecube in 2002.
Game preservation group Forest of Illusion uploaded the unreleased build of Dinosaur Planet earlier this morning. The group explained that this build of the game was purchased from a private game collector in Sweden. According to the group, files in the build imply it was last worked on December 1, 2000, making it a fairly late build of Dinosaur Planet.
Today we have released Dinosaur Planet by Rare for Nintendo 64. The development was halted and moved to the GameCube, where it was then released as Star Fox Adventures. Enjoy! (More info in this thread).
Link to the dump:https://t.co/gQGGcU4vJK pic.twitter.com/Orub7RU3fa
— Forest of Illusion (@forestillusion) February 20, 2021
While it does appear to be the full game, it won’t run perfectly on emulators. The group also explained that it will need some hacking before it becomes fully and easily playable to the end. Though even with these issues folks are already downloading the game and playing it via emulator.
Dinosaur Planet was announced back in 1999 and during its development, Nintendo and Shigeru Miyamoto decided the game would work perfectly as a Star Fox title. While some at Rare weren’t thrilled about this change, most realised how the Star Fox brand and characters could help the game be more successful. Interestingly, this leaked build of Dinosaur Planet contains Fox McCloud, indicating that this build is extremely late in the N64 development era of the game, with Rare already beginning to bring in Star Fox elements.
It’s been quite a month for fans of cancelled Rare games. Earlier this month, an unreleased build of the cancelled XBLA remake of Goldeneye was released online.
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