Turok Evolution - What Happened?

[Music] [Applause] hello once again and welcome to a name screaming I am taurog reptile blasting fog-filled episode of what happened the show who repaired deep into the mists of time and bring to life a troubled development of games and movies your mama warned you about if you grew up with the mighty Nintendo 64 then your mother also probably warned you not to play those nasty Tarak shooting games as they had realistic motion capture for all enemy deaths and expansive arsenal of violence killing weaponry and the intergalactic space gazongas of this weird alien chick copito nunca yes truck was a big deal in the 90s he had four games in the space of one console generation numerous handheld versions his comic book series of course and even a line of cheap-looking action figures I had one making it one of a clings biggest money spinners then came Tarak evolution and things got very what happened II so without further ado let's hunt for the truth about the dinosaur hunters darkest chapter it's the year 2000 and acclaim and iguana entertainment have just wrapped the n64 off trilogy with shadow of oblivion a game that really pushed the system as far as it could go probably too far judging by that framerate it did feature advanced facial animation in its and game cutscenes had two playable characters and yeah tons and tons of weapons and aside for some PC ports handled by other Studios iguana entertainment was an n64 game making machine and pumped out more titles and you can shape a raptor claw at oh sorry I mean you could shake a Raph Toye clawed along with the original Tarak in early 1997 Tarak - in late 98 rage wars in 1999 and shadow of oblivion in 2000 the studio also pumped out Southpark eggies wrecking balls and it shall break away 98 and 99 all-star baseball 99 in 2004 - black Club 99 South Park chefs Love Shack and there's probably some more I'm forgetting fact being and Guana was acclaims go to developer for just about everything but as the millennium was kicking off they needed to diversify and start working with new machines outside the n64 which was a bit of a downer for some cuz as everyone knows claim however wasn't exactly well known for giving their Studios enough time to make the most polish game so it's pretty shocking but not shocking at all that Tarak evolution a brand new built from the ground up prequel to the original dinosaur hunter was developed and launched on three console SKUs plus a PC version in less than two years after shadow of oblivion this of course contributed heavily I eat completely to the rushed development of the game now while it's easy to speculate about a greasy 90s era company like a claim you don't have to take my word for it I spoke with the lead artist on Tarak evolution David Levy and asked if a claim did indeed strongly suggest that certain games need to be out by certain times even if they weren't exactly ready a claims management definitely had an extremely aggressive style of applying pressure on to us very often during these years a claim ordered a few rounds of firing and restructuring which to stabilize the situation even more then there was some rehires and back and forth again so I would say that it was a pretty stressful production overall in the end we did tons and tons of overtime with the consequences these kind of things can have on people's lives and so on okay who if that established and moving on to the core game itself one of the more notable things that was likely paired that a lot of critics took issue with was this story or black there of since the ending of Tarak three kind of left things in a weird place evolution was actually a prequel going back to towel set from the first game ah Torah it seems when you don't have a whole lot of time to suss out an enthralling story that pushes things forward you tend to get a lot of prequels most the narrative was handled via in-game radio transmissions and text on the load screens which is another hallmark of being put under time crunch now in terms of the big bad who will be squaring off against Tarak the son of stone the guy that'll stand shoulder to shoulder with a super-powered 8 foot tall campaigner or space conquering alien warlord the prime engine or the ancient world devouring old one oblivion well that would be captain brockner captain broken or as you can imagine many fans felt this was a notable step down for the franchise and probably not the best way to introduce tarak on next-generation machines the creative director for the project won David dine stiver even touched upon the fact that the story was taking more of a backseat this time around in an old interview with Planet Game Cube that takes me back mission objectives are now conveyed in game through radio transmissions etc and the player is constantly aware of the plotline it's an elegant and simple solution to creating context for the player they'll bogging down the gameplay experience with cutscenes now the problem with this is that in 2000 2002 storytelling was more important than ever in video games and fans wanted more and more cinematic cutscenes to bookend each level hell even Tarak too had some nice mood setting intros in that same interview even when in full PR mode dine sniper said some things that would be raising the old red flags if you took a more critical eye to it things that further prove just what went wrong with evolution the team is thirty five people total though there are a few more if you count shared resources being used to create tools for both Tarak and facts let me stop my own narration right there yes I forgot the guano we're also developing vex the edgy mascot hero who's not as cool as shadow in addition to evolution and if you count them all up it means they were tackling two games and six SKUs at the same time which is just [ __ ] anyway let's continue the game has been in development for just under two years but we must also remember that a full year of that really involves the creation of tools and engine technology the game content itself followed as soon as the tools reached a usable State it is a huge undertaking to create the tools and technology need for games as big as Tarakan VAX game from 2002 thankfully things got better in the futuristic year of 2020 right yeah anyway let's just focus on a particular quote there they spent a year on the engine and tools and roughly just one on game content which explains it explains Tarak evolution with only a year the game had to be considerably scaled back and scoped in some ways which is messed up to say since it was an n64 franchise evolution was a much more linear experience compared to the dense maze like labyrinth so Tarak to where you had multiple objectives collectibles keys and power-ups I'll let you revisit locked off areas here though you follow fairly tight paths being to open valleys or clearings always moving forward rather than having to do all that you know content and seeds of evil while it's true that a series eventually needs to do some different things for a lot of people this change in evolution was seen as a step back losing a lot of the level complexity fans were accustomed to now where Tarak evolution did try something new is in its flying sections that saw the dinosaur hunter saddling up on a pterodactyl arm to the proverbial teeth well David Levy and the art team had fun doing something different the sections were criticized for being a bit overused padding out the game's length the player encounters these sections several times throughout the game and they did tend to drag on for a while as well as not being particularly polished in terms of controls now Tarak has featured Dino riders like sequences before but they were always kept brief and explosive so while a nice distraction they probably relied on these magic carpet dinosaur rides a little too heavily it's a real shame that these aggressive timeline problems seem to affect every area of the game and that also includes the multiplayer all the Tarak series had MPs and seeds of evil the deathmatch never really reached the heights and popularity of rares efforts but fortunately that was their only competition back then because unlike those glory years in 2002 through a lot more titles gunning for that console shooter space not to mention all the incredible things happening on the PC the stock evolutions kind of underbaked MP didn't really have a chance to stand out again like most things in the game if they had more time it would have been more memorable out of all these examples though there is one thing that best exemplifies all the corners that were cut during the last few months on Tarak evolution at e3 a build was shown that displayed a huge variety of wildlife populating the jungle areas which included but was not limited to rhinos wolves of the regular and dire varieties Komodo dragons water bugs cranes boars bats as well as several unused enemy variants now in the final version of the game all of these NPCs were cut but are still nestled within the game code I also have to mention it is common for some unused data to still be present in release games but even this a bit of an overkill David Levy theorizes that may have been due to either platform specific assets or simply lack of time / resources to introduce them also it could be that late in the game we had to cut some levels out which may have given us too many problems are the technically or just quality wise the end of the project definitely was fast and furious we did so much work that the art team I was running was just in head down mode once we sent our assets along with animations and so on we trusted the rest of the team to use them wisely so I think we firmly established that all these cut features and simplifying of the Tarak formula was due to a claim mandating a release date that could not budge while that might have been viable if they were using the same engine and tools from a previous project this was brand new technology on prend new machines it should have never happened this way but a claim were desperate for a hit that why were they so desperate well a claim was a company that was always treading water ever since their glory days of publishing mortal combat which ended in 1995 when Williams / Midway took over therefore in 1996 the company posted a 200 million dollar loss since they lacked the safety of such a lucrative franchise fast for a few years and they were facing similar dips in revenue when games like Shadow Man chew Atkin coming vex and yes Tarak evolution all underperformed the reviews for Tarak evolution certainly weren't stellar and the sales kind of reflected that thus in 2004 a claim filed for bankruptcy with many of their IPs passing to various different publishers like Disney who didn't fare much better but before all this went down there was a rumor that evolution while selling well under expectations still had a sequel in the works but was this actually true that is completely true says David Levy ultimately though evolution did not live up to its investment and expectations and acclaim had made some really bad choices with a few other games in the end the lack of vision or understanding of the gaming business coming from a publisher can only lead to devastating results for a studio I feel sad for the way of Guana collapsed as I feel it had finally become a very functional group despite the constant shake ups we were under a lot of the mistakes we learned on Torah were not reproduced once the whole company is more stabilized and were able to create a game like the red star for which as a studio we were very proud of sadly at that point acclaim did not really care about anything but making maximum profit or restructuring and dumping the studio with golden parachutes made out of our 401ks expense what of truck nowadays though well there's the fantastic HD ports of both to rock 1 and 2 courtesy of night dive as well as um Tarak escape from Lost Valley which was yeah I don't have a way to finish this sentence suffice to say it's very unclear foggy some would say that a brand-new traditional truck game will ever appear from the mists again but here's hoping that sometime in the future the dinosaur rental will be burrowing into our brains once again thanks goes to David Levy for answering our questions and to Steven kick for making the introduction and if you fellow dinosaur hunters know of any other games movies or a cetera that have had diabolically disastrous developments you want us to cover suggest it in the comments below or stock your way to the flop house VIP patreon nominate the subject we'll take on next see you next time and thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Matt McMuscles

Views: 588,876

Keywords: Turok Evolution, Turok Dinosaur Hunter, Turok 2 Seeds of Evil, FPS, Turok, Acclaim, Iguana Entertainment, What Happened?, Wha Happun, Matt McMuscles, Flophouse, Video Game Documentaries, Bad Video Games, Video Game Disasters

Id: VwoOlyOoNNs

Length: 14min 58sec (898 seconds)

Published: Wed May 06 2020