It’s got two things the other Dinotopia games don’t have: puzzles, and animatronic dinosaurs. A shame! I wanted to befriend dinosaurs, to help dinosaurs, to live alongside them and participate in, I dunno, civics or something.Īnd then I found Dinotopia, the 1996 CD-ROM adventure game. Of course there are tons of hugely popular games that don’t revolve around combat - hello, Animal Crossing! But that number shrinks when you just look at dinosaur games. It felt like an easy out to a narrative challenge. Sunstone Odyssey introduces a separatist gang called the Outsiders that wants to subjugate dinosaurs. Timestone Pirates introduces, yes, pirates who are trying to steal T-rex eggs and need to be bopped on the head. It’s one of the key themes of the books, and one of the biggest challenges for storytellers working in the setting. After all, Dinotopia is a pacifist utopia. Dinotopia: The Sunstone Odyssey and Dinotopia: The Timestone Pirates came out in the early 2000s, on the coattails of the Hallmark miniseries starring David Thewlis and a young Wentworth Miller.īut both games had combat as a central mechanic, and that confused me. The thing is, there are a couple Dinotopia games. For every pastoral image of a human riding a dinosaur, Gurney shows you a cross-section of a city built from the wreck of a 17th century ship, or a chair designed to seat huge sauropods. Gurney is an accomplished painter who details every facet of Dinotopian life.
Over the years, humans discovered the island and formed a peaceful society with dinosaurs, one where both species live as equals.Īs a kid, I was sucked into these books. It takes place on the titular lost continent of Dinotopia, a land where dinosaurs survived the extinction event. WHAT’S DINOTOPIA?įor the uninitiated, Dinotopia began as a book series written and illustrated by James Gurney in 1992. It’s also an FMV, with dinosaurs played by huge, complex animatronic puppets.īut more on that in a minute. It came out in 1996, and it’s a children’s puzzle adventure game. I grew up on The Land Before Time, Jurassic Park, We’re Back, Disney’s Dinosaur, Dinosaur Adventure 3D, Walking With Dinosaurs, the film Super Mario Bros., if you’re into that… the list goes on.īut what I wanted above all was a dinosaur game that captured my favorite fictional world: Dinotopia. The 1990s were a golden age to be a dinosaur-loving kid.
0 kommentar(er)
