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Since we're nearing the end of the game, I thought it might be neat to take a brief look at some of the things that didn't make the cut and were left out of the retail version. And by brief, I mean brief; there's not a whole lot that's known (or known to me, at least).
I'll start off by saying that there was once going to be a lot more (read: a) story! Unfortunately, any hint of storytelling was cut roughly a year out from release in order to help the team at Iguana Entertainment focus on the important parts of the game. I have no idea what the "any semblance of story" would have entailed, but I like to think it would've been simple cutscenes à la those in Seeds of Evil.
And before we get into the interesting stuff, I'm going to show a few of the older enemy textures. First off is this delightfully low quality magazine image showing off the Dimetrodon:
Some skins for the human enemies:
And the older Raptor skin:
Let's talk weapons.
There's not much to talk about. The first soldier screen up above gives a decent view of the older Auto Shotgun model, and this image here:
shows the Pulse Rifle back when it worked like the Minigun, though it could've just been used as a placeholder. The Minigun does appear alongside the older Pulse Rifle in this image from an old Nintendo Power, however:
Ignore the multiple Alien Weapons at the bottom. You'll see that, right above the bow, there's a tomahawk. The Tomahawk was the game's second melee weapon. It would've acted almost exactly like the Knife does. It was for this reason that it was cut. The model can still be found in the opening Iguana logo/movie as one of the things flung at poor Iggy.
But now it's enemies time.
Early in development there was a saber-toothed cat:
Then there wasn't. Saber-toothed cats were still shown in promotional material, however, such as this render of the Campaigner being ridiculous.
The old Dinosaur Hunter website had an interesting bullet point regarding the game's features. Amid talk of "Razor-toothed raptors" and "Mounted Triceratops" is the tantalizing "Artillery-packing Pterodactyls." As far as I'm aware, only one screenshot of these things exists, and it only appeared in one of the game's advertisements:
Forgive the quality. It was a tiny image. This particular screen was scanned from the ad in the back of the comic Turok: The Empty Souls, Acclaim Comic's first entry in their then-new Turok reboot. The next screen is from the same ad:
Yes, once upon a time there would've been at least one Brachiosaurus in The Treetop Village. As I understand it, this was one of the last things to be cut before the game went gold, and it was all because they had run out of space on the cartridge. In an interview with GameFans magazine, David Dienstbier lamented that "if we'd had 50K [of space] more, we'd have had a Brachiosaurus in there!"
And then there's this thing:
I don't know what it is. It has no official name. It appears in a screenshot from the old website:
and for the longest time, I thought it was an older Dimetrodon model, but it was apparently its own thing, and it was huge:
As you can see, Nintendo Power recommends the Grenade Launcher for the thing. They also call it an "Iguana," but they call the dragonflies "Mosquitos" so I dunno. An issue of GameFans refers to "non-spiny" komodo dragons (the spiny ones being the Dimetrodon), so I'm happy to call it as such.
And that's it for this game. Like I said, not much. If anybody wants to see an older version of Dinosaur Hunter in low-resolution motion, there are a couple of videos that may prove to be of interest. If people want, I can do another of these whenever we get to the second game, though there are enough things known about it that I could easily do a post for each level.
Finally, have this alternate model of the humble fish:
