Beta of Dinosaur Planet, the game that turned into Star Fox Adventures, has been posted online

March 15, 2021, 07:56 Alexey Abrosimov ред.

The Nintendo video game preservation specialists at Forest of Illusion have released a working build of another extremely curious game. This was revealed via the community's official tweet:

Today we released Dinosaur Planet from Rare for Nintendo 64. Development was halted and moved to the GameCube, where the game was subsequently released as Star Fox Adventures. Enjoy!

According to rumors, this 3D adventure game in the vein of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was originally a completely independent project, but Shigeru Miyamoto himself ("father" of Mario and Donkey Kong) suggested remaking the game and including the Fox McCloud character, thus making it part of the Star Fox franchise. And, accordingly, release it on the new GameCube console.

Members of the community managed to purchase a disc of one of the early builds from a private collector in Sweden. The code is dated December 1, 2000, and on this basis was able to build a working version of the game (although some problems and bugs still remain). YouTube blogger John Linneman tested the build on a real Nintendo 64 console and confirmed that it worked.

You can download the game at this link-it only weighs 108 MB, so the process will be quick. In the archive after unpacking you will find two files - rom and rom_crack.d64. The last one you will need because it is specially modified to work under the emulators. And the first one is just for history.