Turok Retrospective Part 0: My Intro

There were a few video games that little 90s me just couldn't get his hands on no matter how much he saved up. The console wars were still going strong even that far back, just not between Playstation and Xbox: back then, it was all about Nintendo vs Sega. My parents bought me a Sega Genesis back when my age was still in the single digits and I became utterly obsessed with it. I loved that machine to death, so much so that it actually took some convincing to get me to even try using a computer because "why would I ever want to spend my time on some dumb typing box when I have all these Genesis games right here?!". Little did I know that Sega's time making hardware was already coming to an end.

No, my time as that weirdly enthusiastic neighborhood Sega-stan didn't last for long; I can't recall ever seeing a Sega CD, Sega Saturn, or Sega Dreamcast in any store, ever, even at a thrift-store, and before I knew it they'd already announced they were out of the console business.

I didn't have the money or interest to ever fully switch sides as a kid (though I did learn to love my little Gameboy Color), so a lot of the famous Nintendo properties most people grew up with just never had an impact on me. I didn't own the consoles, I didn't play the games, I barely knew the characters. I mean yeah, there was Donkey Kong from the Country and Racing games and everybody knew Star Fox 64 was the bomb, but Mario & Luigi were just those guys with the weird cartoon hosted by a wrestler that aired early in the morning on a TV station I didn't have and I didn't know who anyone in Super Smash Brothers was. Kurbo?! Zeldar the Barbarian? Metro-Man???

What I'm trying to get at here is that any Nintendo character not ultra-famous enough to reach me through cultural osmosis did not reach me at all... except for one. Cuz that one had dinosaurs.

The Turok franchise is older and broader than just video games, but a lot of people in my generation especially were introduced to it through the N64 game. Turok the dinosaur hunter became a popular character in his own right in the 1990s, with multiple comic runs, novels, a toyline, a contest to name children after him, and even a "save the dinosaurs!" viral marketing campaign 20 years before Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.

 

Turok's not as much of an icon now as he was then, but there IS a new game coming out this year, so what better time for me to take a look back and replay some of these classic titles that made him such a big deal in the first place? I'll be going over the Acclaim games specifically, so the original N64 trilogy of Dinosaur Hunter, Seeds of Evil, and Shadow of Oblivion plus the 2002 prequel Turok: Evolution. (Sorry, Turok 2008.) Maybe Turok: Origins will be connected in some way? Only time will tell!

Naturally I, being the creature enthusiast that I am, will also set aside a few extra paragraphs to talk about the monsters of the Lost Land- because the Acclaim/Valiant-verse actually had some unique ones!

Bear in mind though I'll mostly be talking about the modern remasters of these games by Nightdive Studios in these posts, not the pure untouched originals, because they're a hell of a lot easier to get my hands on and are thoroughly excellent. You can get all of them for cheap on any system, PC included, and I highly recommend doing so!

Before I get started with the follow-up reviews I thought it'd be funny to quickly summarize my memories of each of these games, because as of writing this I'm three of four Turoks in and let me tell you folks, wooooo boy have all my first impressions so far been woefully, hilariously wrong.

According to little 90s kid me:

Dinosaur Hunter was the one that was just kind of there. It was cool but only got popular because it was the original. Everything was way too foggy and maze-like and the levels all looked the same. It had some cool dinosaurs in it but you had to look really hard and long to find them; I used to replay the first level over and over into the wee hours of the morning trying to find the Dimetrodon and Leapers and never did. Lame.

Seeds of Evil was the best one, hands down. Not as dinosaur-y but it was longer and scarier and you could see farther cuz there was no fog, it had more blood and better guns and the bosses and enemies were way cooler. It felt a million times better to play and was way more fun than Dinosaur Hunter because you moved faster, combat was more intense, and you didn't get lost so much!! One of the best video games of all time. Probably THE best video game! Only cool people knew about it.

Shadow of Oblivion was the super lame FAKE TUROK that NOBODY PLAYED because it was DUMB AND BAD. Did it even have dinosaurs in it? Probably not! Super-lame, not a real Turok game.

...What's Rage Wars?

Evolution was the disappointing one. It had a cool marketing campaign with terror birds and dinosaurs eating people on TV so I thought it'd be a return to form, but it didn't even have anything to do with the other Turok games! The dinosaurs were ugly and less important than they were before and you didn't get any cool weapons to use like lasers or brain-exploders... you just swung a dumb club around at baboons! Wasted opportunity.