Like many others from my generation, I grew up obsessed with gaming and paleontology. So imagine the grin on my 8-year-old face when I wandered into the videogame section of my local Blockbuster and found a title literally called “Dino Crisis”. Ignoring the back of the case (not to mention the ESRB rating), I begged my parents to rent the game and raced home to try out what I thought was going to be a fun little shooter.
Suffice to say that I couldn’t get 15 minutes into the game before turning the TV off and resigning myself to reptilian nightmares. Years later, I revisited the game with a friend and beat it all in one incredibly entertaining sitting, defeating my own childhood trauma and becoming a massive fan of Capcom’s other iconic survival horror franchise.
Naturally, I’m not the only die-hard Dino Crisis enthusiast out there, with the franchise becoming one of Capcom’s most lucrative series. So why is it that other horror franchises like Resident Evil and even Silent Hill have risen from the grave (or in some cases refused to be buried entirely), but this multi-million-dollar IP never made it past the sixth generation of consoles? That’s what was on my mind as I watched the trailer for Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’ upcoming movie 65, which promises an unpretentious sci-fi yarn featuring time travel and copious amounts of terrible lizards. And with the reaction to the trailer proving that audiences are still desperate for prehistoric thrills, this feels like the perfect moment to dive into Dino Crisis’ fall from grace and why the franchise deserves a comeback.
The story of Dino Crisis begins way back in 1993, with the release of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park kickstarting the 90’s obsession with dinosaur-related media. From Dinotopia to Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, there were countless movies, games and even TV shows which attempted to capitalize on the public’s fascination with extinct creatures. And with Capcom’s own Resident Evil taking the gaming world by storm with its claustrophobic sci-fi horror thrills, it makes sense that RE co-creator Shinji Mikami would combine the two ideas for his next big project.
Funnily enough, the original Dino Crisis is a lot closer in tone to Michael Crichton’s iconic (albeit extremely technical) novel than Spielberg’s blockbuster adaptation, featuring disemboweling via velociraptor and more overt mad science elements than the movie. Putting players in the shoes of a spec ops agent tasked with investigating a secretive research facility, the first game in the franchise sees its protagonist attempting to navigate a high-tech facility while solving puzzles and fighting off increasingly aggressive dinosaurs.
What if Nemesis was a lizard the size of a schoolbus?
While this sounds like a prehistoric reskin of Mikami’s previous work, the director actually made a conscious effort to update the RE formula with his new project, describing Dino Crisis as a “panic horror” experience rather than traditional survival horror and comparing the game to a terrifying roller coaster ride due to its faster pace. DC was also the first of Capcom’s horror titles to incorporate real-time 3D graphics into its environments, allowing for more dynamic camera angles and improved visual cohesion.
With the original Resident Evil games receiving a second shot at life with their incredibly successful remakes, I feel like a similar update for Dino Crisis would be a really smart move for Capcom. Hell, they could even include a Mr.-X-like pursuer in the game, with a single dinosaur dynamically stalking players as they go about puzzle solving and combat (which is basically what Mikami had originally intended for the T-Rex).
In any case, despite media outlets claiming that the title was just another one of many Resident Evil clones, Dino Crisis’ unique pulpy thrills made it stand out from its contemporaries. This inevitably led to a sequel in 2000, with the second game straying even further from the RE formula as the title became more action-packed in ways that still haven’t been reproduced.
The first truly engaging third-person shooter, Dino Crisis 2 saw an entire city be transported to prehistoric times with only a duo of special agents (including the first game’s protagonist Regina) able to fight off the titular dinosaur crisis. However, gameplay would be radically altered this time around, with the title shifting back to more traditional pre-rendered backgrounds and adding a point system to encourage players to be more aggressive. In fact, DC2’s innovative combat served as the basis for Devil May Cry’s style system, which in turn inspired a whole new breed of character action titles.
With how far third-person shooting has come, it seems like a no-brainer to bring back the trigger-happy thrills of Dino Crisis 2 either in a remake or a completely new game. In fact, a return to this addictive style of combat could even incorporate the action elements of Resident Evil 4, bringing both franchises full circle as the Dino-Crisis-2-influenced Devil May Cry began life as a canceled version of RE4.
Things would only get weirder from there…
In the years that followed the release of DC2, we’d see a couple of spin-offs in the form of a light gun shooter named Dino Stalker (which was kind of a crossover with the Resident Evil franchise) and a mobile FPS in Dino Crisis: Dungeon in Chaos, but neither of these was especially notable. It was only in 2003 that a proper third entry would be released on the original Xbox with Dino Crisis 3.
Featuring jetpacks, giant colony ships and horrifically mutated dinosaurs, the game was yet another departure from its predecessors as it leaned into its sci-fi elements. Putting players in the shoes of yet another special-ops team tasked with investigating a technological disturbance, the game saw players zooming around a transforming space-station while facing off against genetically engineered abominations with futuristic weapons.
Unfortunately, this might have been a step too far away from the franchise’s original concept, with the game alienating core fans with the updated setting and irritating newcomers with its awkward mechanics and annoying fixed camera angles (which were incongruent with the sequel’s break-neck pace). Strangely enough, the title was originally meant to take place in more fleshed out metropolitan environment, but Capcom axed that idea after the September 11th terrorist attacks, believing that urban horror might offend western sensibilities.
Naturally, the poor critical reception of DC3 translated into poor sales, with this being the final entry in the series so far. As of 2023, it’s been two decades since the last Dino Crisis game, and while titles like ARK: Survival Evolved and The Lost Wild have tried to become the next big Dino-centric franchise, no game series has ever lived up to Capcom’s original extinction simulator. However, as films like Jurassic World: Dominion (and hopefully the aforementioned 65) have shown us, audiences are still hungry for dinosaur-related media, so any direction that the Dino Crisis franchise takes will likely result in success.
From an RE7-like first person horror experience that tries to simulate the thrills of being actively hunted (think of a more intense version of Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie) to a modern Gears-of-War-inspired third person shooter with plenty of gory dino action, it’s hard to go wrong so long as developers look back on what made the original games so beloved in the first place.
So what are you waiting for, Capcom? It’s about time that you let gamers make dinosaurs extinct… again.
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