Nowadays, Sid Meier seems to only lend his name to the popular Civilization series. The studio has branched out a couple of times recently with games like Sid Meier’s Ace Patrol and Sid Meier’s Starships, but those types of games are few and far between. It seems like Sid Meier has become a Civilization machine, but there was a time when Firaxis was hard at work on other exciting titles like Sid Meier’s Dinosaurs. The potential of such a game cannot be understated.
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Sid Meier’s Dinosaurs Never Quite Stuck the Landing
In the early days of Firaxis, Sid Meier was working on a brand-new dinosaur simulation game. The title would have given players control over their very own race of dinosaurs, and presumably would have had them try to ensure the dinosaurs’ survival. There is not much known outside a couple of diary entries, interviews, brief gameplay concept presentations, and a mention in Sid Meier’s Memoir!. What all these things seem to show is a game that never quite figured out what it wanted to be.
The biggest struggle for Sid Meier’s Dinosaurs seems to be that the studio did not quite know what it wanted to do with the game. At the D.I.C.E Summit 2002, Sid Meier showed off three different versions of this dinosaur game. These three versions are all very different from one another, but they all share the central theme of controlling a race of dinosaurs. The struggle to nail down a direction persisted for a while before the title was ultimately put on an indefinite hold, leaving this game, like its subject, in the past.
One prototype of the dinosaur game was called Dino Sid, and it looked like it would be pretty similar to Sid Meier’s Civilization with dinosaurs. Players would be placed on a map shrouded in a fog and would have to guide their race of dinosaurs through a turn-based strategy game. The demo showed them eating, moving around, building nests, and doing everything that dinosaurs do. Players would have to ensure their race grows by manipulating the gene pool, and they would have to prepare to survive against things like volcanic eruptions. It looked like decent fun, but the game was apparently too complicated and simplifying it apparently made it feel boring.
Firaxis tried bringing the dinosaur concept to the real-time strategy genre with its second prototype Dinocraft. Dinocraft took inspiration from the Starcraft series, but it replaced aliens with dinosaurs. Players would control their dinosaurs, collect resources, expand their base, and build their own little dinosaur army. Just like most RTS games, this title also featured combat against other dinosaurs. While this seemed like it could be fun, it was apparently missing some of the most important aspects of RTS games and therefore felt lackluster.
The final prototype that Sid Meier showed off was called Dino Mon, and it took the concept to a completely different genre. This prototype was a card game starring dinosaurs, and players would battle other dinosaurs to climb up the food chain. It was heavily inspired by Magic: The Gathering, and that is partly why Firaxis did not go forward with it. The studio also felt like it was far from the greatest dinosaur game ever made, and its shelving served as the final nail in the coffin.
All of these different prototypes make it pretty clear that Firaxis was not quite able to figure out the perfect dinosaur game, but perhaps someday, Firaxis (if not another studio since Firaxis is busy with other IPs) can deliver on such a concept. There are not many dinosaur games on the market, and the concept of Sid Meier’s Dinosaurs has a lot of potential. While it may have been shelved for the foreseeable future, its potential deserves to be fully realized one day.
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