Dinosaur Planet ROM Leaked

Big news this week. The Dinosaur Planet ROM has been leaked after being in hiding for over twenty years. This was a game that was to be developed late into the N64’s life but was cancelled due to being made towards the end of the console’s lifespan. It was eventually given a Starfox coat of paint and released on the Gamecube as Starfox Advantures.

Since this is a copyrighted ROM, I’m not going to host it on N64 Squid but you can find the original leak here. If you’re using an everdrive, you’re going to want to add this code to the bottom of your save_db.txt file:

DP=5
NDPE=5

ForestOfIllusion released the ROMs a week ago and people around the internet have been playing it for quite a bit since. He bought the disc from a private collector in Sweden who had a beta build from 01/Dec/2000. This would have probably been around the time that they decided to instead release the game as Starfox Adventures on the Gamecube.

I played the game twice, once for practice and once for recording. During the recording run, I got a bit lost towards the end and I don’t think I completed the snow level correctly.

This of course begs the question – how far do the similarities go? Well, the prologue us almost word-for-word. Krystal boards General Scales’ ship to save the princess and confronts him. The next section is on Warlock Mountain where the Wizard lives, a segment replaced by the Krazoa Palace in Starfox Adventures.

After leaving, Krystal meets the Swapstone (Warpstone in SFA, but we all just call him the Rockbiter) and we switch to Sabre’s story. Here we encounter Tricky in the Snowhorn tribe in the snowy mountain level. Toward the end of it, I found a path to Swapstone Hollow (analogous to ThornTail Hollow) which is eerily empty. Then the game crashed. This is as far as I got.

There is something that caught me as something strange… and that’s Sabre’s character. The Swapstong refers to him as Sabre but he then refers to himself as Fox McCloud. He does look a lot more like Fox than his in-game icon shows.

This most likely means that they were planning to make Dinosaur Planet into a Starfox game some time before they decided to move it over to the Gamecube.

Overall, this is a very interesting piece of history, it’s not often that an old hidden game like this gets uncovered. You’re probably not going to want to beat the game because of its glitchiness though. The big fun of this game is enjoying the low-poly models, the new environments and trying to find all the differences with the public game. If you want to play the game to the end, I’d say it’s best to stick to Starfox Adventures on the Gamecube.