Rare's unreleased Dinosaur Planet for N64 out in the wild, gameplay emerges

Foxy.

News by Wesley Yin-Poole Former Editor-in-Chief

Updated on Feb. 20, 2021

Rare's unreleased Dinosaur Planet for Nintendo 64 is now in the wild, and gameplay of it running on the console is available.

The video game preservationists at Forest of Illusion announced they had released a build of the game dated December 2000. Dinosaur Planet eventually launched as Star Fox Adventures for the GameCube in 2002.

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

Digital Foundry's John Linneman has confirmed the validity of the build, and managed to get it running on an actual Nintendo 64. The video below is gameplay he captured:

This build of the game does not appear to originate from the Nintendo gigaleak that recently helped fans restore the Super Mario World soundtrack. Rather, it appears the preservationists bought a disc with work-in-progress code of Dinosaur Planet on it.

We purchased this disc containing the build from a private game collector in Sweden. The file date lists the build as being from December 1st 2000. It seems to be quite a late build of the game which is great, but it will need some hacking to be fully playable to the end. pic.twitter.com/igtDSzeRzG
— Forest of Illusion (@forestillusion) February 20, 2021

Dinosaur Planet was a 3D adventure game along the lines of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time that was originally unrelated to the Star Fox series. So the legend goes, Shigeru Miyamoto himself suggested it be retooled to incorporate Fox McCloud and co, and release not on the N64 but the GameCube.

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