This Week In Retro: Dino Crisis

July 1, 1999: Jurassic Evil

by Diamond Feit

Fun fact: no human being has ever seen a dinosaur. They lived and died millions of years before our species emerged on Earth. What's more astonishing is that we only documented their existence a few hundred years ago, a relatively recent discovery in the scope of our history. English paleontologist Sir Richard Owen first penned the word "dinosaur" in 1841, and it took decades for the term to enter the public consciousness. That means most people born in the 19th century never knew about the ancient population of creatures that once dominated our planet.

This astonishes me because anyone born in the last 75 years has grown up inundated with images of dinosaurs. Children seem innately infatuated with them; even in our modern age where kids understand touch screens from infancy, they'll also look at a dinosaur skeleton in a museum and feel the same sense of awe I did in my youth.

Given their unprecedented position in pop culture, along with their remarkable size and ferocious appearance, dinosaurs have long inspired video game developers in search of material. The sheer variety of dinosaurs known to us allows them to fill any role: friend or foe, cute or carnivorous, predator or prey. 3D Monster Maze had players flee from a Tyrannosaur back in 1981. On the opposite spectrum, Shigeru Miyamoto wanted to give Mario a dino companion since he finished Super Mario Bros. 

Ever since Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park made almost a billion dollars in 1993, dinosaurs have only increased their cultural profile. The film introduced global audiences to the velociraptor, a menacing man-eater that demonstrates both intelligence and an insatiable appetite. Unlike the more famous T-Rex, Jurassic Park's raptors stand slightly taller than an adult human, making them ideal threats capable of pursuing characters through doorways into ordinary indoor spaces.

This sudden star turn of a 71-million-year-old killing machine got the attention of Resident Evil director Shinji Mikami. Having terrified players around the world with a zombie-filled mansion, Mikami sought a new premise for an action game and pitting soldiers against raptors perfectly fit the bill. 25 years ago, Capcom debuted a new flavor of survival horror with Mikami at the helm, releasing Dino Crisis for the Sony PlayStation.

Dino Crisis strives to establish itself as high-tech in its opening cutscene, introducing the plot via a futuristic email interface—a communication method few laypeople had access to in 1999. We learn that an undercover agent has made a shocking find at a remote research facility on Ibis Island: energy expert Dr. Edward Kirk, long thought deceased, is alive and performing experiments of an unknown nature. Adding to the mystery, Dr. Kirk's supposed death came after his government declined to invest in his personal laboratory, leading to its closure.

Regina serves as our protagonist in Dino Crisis, an elite agent sent to "repatriate" Dr. Kirk from Ibis Island to his home country. She parachutes onto the island with her teammates Rick, Cooper, and leader Gail. Cooper fails to show at their rendezvous point so the other three infiltrate the facility without him, not knowing that he couldn't make it on account of an untimely run-in with a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

The team learns soon enough that nothing on Ibis Island makes sense; despite their arrival under cover of night, they find the facility has no power and no one on patrol outside. Gail also observes a huge hole in the security perimeter and signs of a recent firefight, though he surmises the guards didn't get many shots off before they fell. Whatever hit them, it hit fast, tearing through a metal fence and leaving nothing behind but blood stains.

It doesn't take long for Regina to see first-hand who's been wreaking havoc on Ibis Island when she gets attacked by what looks, sounds, and moves like a velociraptor. The beast pursues her for a stretch, even leaping over a locked gate, before she takes cover behind an impassable barrier which discourages the raptor from continuing the chase. Her teammates laugh at her initial reports but eventually they all realize she's not joking; wherever they came from, dinosaurs have taken Ibis Island and they're here to stay.

It's easy to dismiss Dino Crisis at a glance as "Resident Evil with dinosaurs" but despite Capcom hyping the connection, the two games feel distinct. The basic trappings of tank controls and fixed camera angles remain the same, but Dino Crisis uses polygons to create fully-3D environments. Players still cannot move the camera but by ditching pre-rendered backgrounds, Dino Crisis can pan and zoom the camera to accentuate the action on-screen as well as build anticipation for setpieces yet to come. When Regina first makes a long trek outside the facility, the dynamic camera follows behind her; the minute my friends and I saw this, we knew something would chase her down that same stretch.

Whereas Resident Evil forces players to constantly manage scarcity, always debating whether it's worth picking up a new item at the expense of having a free inventory space, Dino Crisis takes a kinder approach to resources. Regina can only carry up to 10 objects, but weapons and key items don't count. Dino Crisis also discards the typewriter/ink ribbon save feature of Resident Evil in favor of fixed rooms that offer to record your progress whenever you pass through. The game also grants a finite number of continues should Regina die in an inconvenient spot; players can opt to restart from the last door they entered rather than returning to the last save point.

I'm less enamored with Dino Crisis' take on item storage. Instead of a global system of interconnected crates that let you safely stow and retrieve your gear at select locations, Dino Crisis has color-coded Emergency Boxes. Each box only holds 10 items and only links to other boxes of the same type. Regina must also use special keys called Plugs to open a box and she won't find enough plugs to open every single box in the game. Fortunately, opening a box once permanently unlocks it, and each box she finds contains supplies already inside.

I'd go so far as to say that, regardless of Capcom's messaging, Dino Crisis doesn't qualify as a horror game—survival or otherwise. First off, Regina and her paramilitary comrades arrive together and work as a team. Even when things go awry and they get split up, they engage in frequent communication with one another. That runs counter to the isolation and dread which makes survival horror games so memorable; I never felt like Regina was trapped or isolated, not when Gail or Rick can hop on the radio and give her directions.

The Ibis Island facility also makes for a poor horror setting. Its plain-gray color scheme and modern office aesthetic can't compare with Resident Evil's crumbling mansion or the eerie Raccoon City police department. Sure, mutilated bodies lie scattered around the campus and splattered blood sullies the walls, but the building never feels more than one thorough scrubbing away from resuming regular operations.

Ultimately, the dinosaurs serve as the biggest issue holding Dino Crisis back from frightening players. The moment the player accepts the presence of these creatures on the island is the moment they cease to spread fear. They threaten throughout the game, often leaping through windows or even smashing through walls, but startling and scary are two different things.

Resident Evil games terrify me because the scenario always starts off bad and gets steadily worse. The original game traps players in a spooky house where the dead walk, only to raise the stakes with more dangerous enemies, a sinister plot twist, and a finale against a towering bio-weapon. Dino Crisis puts dinosaurs on the cover and shows a T-Rex eat a man within minutes of booting the game; having that same T-Rex chase Regina during the denouement just feels like more of the same.

Nevertheless, Capcom made sure to remind Resident Evil fans at every opportunity of the company's successful horror franchise in trying to sell Dino Crisis. In the United States, the back of the CD case announces "FROM THE CREATORS OF RESIDENT EVIL™" in all capital letters, and describes Dino Crisis as "Survival Horror," "pre-historic terror," and "a desperate fight for survival." Capcom took a slightly different approach in Japan, instead branding the game as "panic horror" on the front cover and comparing it to a "roller coaster" on the rear.

Capcom's gambit worked, as Dino Crisis went on to sell over 2 million copies, kicking off a series all its own. Two sequels and one lightgun-based spinoff would arrive in the following four years. However, just as suddenly as dinosaurs appeared on Ibis Island, the Dino Crisis franchise vanished from Capcom's radar. The final game—a 2003 Xbox exclusive set in outer space—underwhelmed at retail and failed to impress critics. Ports of the first two games eventually surfaced on the PlayStation Network as downloadable retro titles, and Regina occasionally makes a background cameo appearance in other Capcom productions, but otherwise Dino Crisis seems extinct.

Plenty of other companies tried hopping onto the survival horror bandwagon in the late 90s but few left an impression. I find it ironic that Capcom, the champions of the genre, managed to create a quasi-knockoff of Resident Evil that absolutely found an audience, only to let it slip into obscurity. Imagine how excited Dino Crisis fans must have felt in 2022 when Capcom announced a new sci-fi shooter featuring dinosaurs, only to have their dreams crushed when Capcom called it Exoprimal. The reveal trailer even features a woman with short red hair as one of the combatants, and the AI narrator says the name Aibius more than once! As one of the top comments on YouTube puts it, "This is like if Konami show a foggy town but it's not silent hill." [sic]

I never loved Dino Crisis. As explained above, it resembled Resident Evil to a degree but also differed enough from it to turn me away. Still, I would hope a major player like Capcom would acknowledge its own history and at least make it easier for fans to play these games without resorting to piracy. A recent survey shows the die-hards remain committed to their cause, as over 80,000 people said Dino Crisis deserved a sequel—the number one answer beating long-running series like Mega Man and Devil May Cry.

Given that Capcom has made bank in recent years by remaking popular games from decades earlier, a Dino Crisis remake would seem to scratch that itch perfectly. I think a second take on the first game in particular could smooth out a lot of its issues, as modern graphics would allow for more varied environments than gray hallway after hallway. Plus, if Regina's not alone on Ibis Island, why not allow for two players to team up and fend off the raptors together? If nothing else, it'd be an excellent warmup before Capcom tries to remake Resident Evil 5.

Writer/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but xer work and opinions exist across the internet.