After millions of years of being extinct, these dinosaurs had to wait an extra 18 years for their promised comeback.
The Nintendo Game Boy and its semi-successor, the Game Boy Color, weren't exactly known for boasting a large variety of first-person shooter games. Titles like Faceball 2000 (1991) and Ultimate Paintball (2000) did attempt to simulate 3D environments on the underpowered handhelds, but remained fairly rudimentary.
One game that could've marked a step forward for the hardware was Tyrannosaurus Tex with its revolutionary engine and far superior presentation. Unfortunately, it fell victim to the whims of its publisher, effectively delaying its final release by about 18 years.
High Prehistoric Playability
The development of Tyrannosaurus Tex, conceived by Slitherine Software and originally slated for an early 2000 release by Eidos Interactive, was driven by a desire to bring a true 3D first-person shooter experience to the Game Boy Color. Lead programmer Ben John developed an entirely new engine dubbed "SLIT3D" to make the ambitious idea feasible.
The game's story, as depicted through various artwork intermissions, follows cowboy Tex being drawn to a newly opened diamond mine where he discovers a society of robots and revived dinosaurs living in harmony after the crash of an alien spaceship. Undaunted by this, he continues his diamond hunt, exploring the sprawling 3D mazes with guns blazing.
Not only does the game run at up to an impressive 20-30 fps, but the Doom-like engine supports up to sixteen moving objects on-screen as well as stereo sound and battery-backed save slots. There are a variety of weapons (from revolver to harpoon to laser rifle), secret areas and even a two-player death-match mode via link-cable with multiple selectable characters. There even was a small line of comics intended to advertise the title.
Surprise Meteor Crash
While the title made the most out of its limited hardware and was reportedly highly anticipated, its publisher Eidos Interactive decided to pull out of publishing for the Game Boy Color platform following disappointing sales of other titles, thus leaving the developer Slitherine Software without a funding partner to support the high manufacturing costs of the 16 MB cartridge. Frustrated, Ben John would reportedly steal the source code and take it with him to Australia.
The project was only later rediscovered when a prototype cartridge of Tyrannosaurus Tex surfaced at an auction in January 2013, prompting the preservation community to dump and analyse the build. This discovery revived interest in the title as a "lost" first‐person shooter on the Game Boy Color and sparked efforts to see whether it could be brought to light.
In came Piko Interactive, a company focused on physical releases for retro platforms, acquiring the rights in 2015, tracking a full beta version of the game in 2016 and finally enabling an official release of the ambitious title on a physical Game Boy Color cartridge in May 2018. Reports of a PC release have yet to come to fruition.
Resurrected Classic
The final release of Tyrannosaurus Tex proved fairly popular in the retro gaming community, with the finished title being far more advanced than the leaked prototypes discovered in 2013. Some have even gone so far as to label it one of the best titles for the Game Boy Color, sporting an unique multiplayer experiences on the platform, even if the main campaign was quite difficult.
Regarding the companies behind it, Slitherine Software remains active as an independent UK developer and publisher specialising in strategy games and military simulations. Meanwhile, Eidos Interactive was absorbed into Square Enix Europe following its 2009 takeover, marking the end of its independent operations as a major UK publisher.
While Pico Interactive has since gone on to release other previously unreleased games, these have mostly been ports of previously-existing titles, making Tyrannosaurus Tex stand out as a fictional world that would've been completely lost to time if it hadn't been for the passion of the retro gaming community.