Ultimate Guide: Turok: Dinosaur Hunter
As the original Turok: Dinosaur Hunter celebrates its twentieth anniversary, Martyn Carroll returns to the Lost Land to reveal why the game was more than just ‘Doom with Dinosaurs’
Turok means different things to different people. For fans of comic books it’s a slightly obscure series that’s been running intermittently for more than 60 years, where Turok is a Native American man battling prehistoric creatures that have slipped through the cracks of time. For gamers it’s a series of popular videogames loosely based on the comic, published between 1997 and 2008, primarily by Acclaim Entertainment. For gaming historians it’s the hit series that gave Acclaim a much needed financial boost when it was struggling following a period of expansion and diversification in the mid-nineties (which included buying up Valiant Comics, the publisher of Turok).
The game came along at just the right time, at the beginning of the console’s life
Turok was a violent game with plenty of the red stuff on show
justify that purchase), but it also proved that thirdparties could exploit the power of the new console as ably as Nintendo.
Another crucial element was the game’s gore score. It seems laughably tame these days but Turok was a violent game with plenty of the red stuff on show. Nintendo was obviously keen to close the door on the SNES era where it regularly censored ‘unsuitable’ content in certain regions. Acclaim had experienced Nintendo’s meddling previously – witness the bloodless version of Mortal Kombat for the SNES – but with Turok there was no intervention from the platform holder. Accordingly, the game was rated ‘Mature’ in the US and received a ‘15’ rating in the UK (the blood was removed from the German version but that was down to the authorities and had nothing to do with Nintendo). With bloody games like Loaded and Resident Evil readily available for the Playstation and Saturn it was important that the N64 wasn’t viewed as the ‘kiddie’ console, and Turok helped greatly in that respect.
But there was more to the game than snazzy visuals and splashy violence. It wasn’t a straight-up corridor shooter either. Turok was an action adventure title where the emphasis was on exploration, and that involved running, jumping, climbing and swimming. Hidden within each vast level were keys which unlocked further levels and some keys were easily missed so you really had to search. You faced many deadly foes, yes, and there was an arsenal of overthe-top weapons with which to kill them, but finding the keys was the main objective. And this task was largely entertaining, spoilt only by too many tricky platforming sections where one misplaced jump often led to instant death and a trip back to the last checkpoint (of which there were far too few).
Something the game did very well was creating an immersive atmosphere. A nearby roar or screech would see you backing nervously out of area, weapon brandished. And the fogging, which was a technical limitation, served to heighten tension as enemies often emerged from the fog and surprised you. Perhaps it was dense jungle mist all along.
On release Turok was a critical hit in many countries, receiving strong reviews from many publications. The UK’S Nintendo Magazine raved over it, calling it “a remarkable achievement” and claiming that it was better than Quake. That was hardly surprising coming from the official Nintendo mag, yet Turok and the seminal Super Mario 64 both received the exact same score in the March 1997 issue – 95%. “At the moment this is the other main reason, aside from Mario, to get an N64,” the review concluded. C&VG also drew favourable comparisons to the Mario game in its 5/5 review, calling Turok “a completely engrossing and challenging 3D action game. You’ve finally got a second reason to buy that Nintendo 64”.
Whether Turok was a system seller is difficult to say, but the game itself certainly sold well, shifting a reported 1.5 million copies. It may have sold even more had Acclaim not blatantly tried to exploit the N64’s scant software line-up by ramping up the game’s price – its RRP was a hefty £70 in the UK, which was £10 more than Super Mario 64 and £15 more than most other third-party releases. It soon dropped to £40, which was a far more suitable price. Cannily, Acclaim licensed a whole bunch of Turok merchandise, with the usual action figures, clothing lines and tie-in novels appearing. The game was also converted to the PC in late 1997 and a 2D Game Boy offshoot (brilliantly subtitled Battle Of The Bionosaurs) was also released.
Sequels followed like that flock of Gallimimus in Jurassic Park. Turok 2 arrived in 1998, introducing a deathmatch mode that was a necessity following the success of Rare’s Goldeneye. Multiplayer spin-off
Rage Wars followed in 1999 and Turok 3 the year after. Two further multiformat games were released in 2002 and 2008 (the latter published by Disney Interactive following Acclaim’s eventual collapse in 2004). Each sequel strayed further and further from the primitive storyline and setting of the original, and it’s probably fair to say that they lost the sense of wonder and fun somewhere along the way.
In 2015 the original game was remastered and released for PC and Mac by Night Dive Studios. Playing the N64 game using an emulator is a clawhanded nightmare so if you don’t have access to the original, this update is the ideal way to revisit Turok and discover why the game means so much to those early N64 adopters.