We learn today via our Twitter account Illusion forest A playable version of Dinosaur Planet has been released on the Nintendo 64 online! This group, which aims to preserve Nintendo games, would have purchased this December 2000 release from a Swedish game collector.
Dinosaur Planet was canceled on the Nintendo 64 in order to transfer its development to the Nintendo GameCube. The game was finally released in 2002 as Star Fox Adventures and was the last project developed by Rare for Nintendo.
ROM for the game is available for download via this Reservation. The game works great on console if you have a Flash cart, But less well via the emulator (graphics issues and some slowdowns).
Little was known about Dinosaur Planet on the Nintendo 64. Development reportedly began in Rare sometime after the release of Diddy Kong Racing. It’s seldom planned to use the Expansion Pak and the 64MB cartridge to push the Nintendo 64 to its limits.
The game was revealed during E3 2000 in order to introduce the hero, Saber, and the character Crystal to the general public. Upon noting that Saber is very similar to Fox McCloud, Shigeru Miyamoto made the decision to modify the game in order to release it under a Star Fox license.
With this leak of the Nintendo 64 Edition, we learned that the switch to Star Fox began long before the development moved to the Nintendo GameCube.
