The Dinosaur Game That Traumatized Me

Side note: It's been over a year since I wrote a blog post here, and it turns out now you can just click a button and AI writes the blog for you? I'm so sick of this planet.

Dinosaurs Are Scary In A Special Way

Dinosaurs are scary, but they're also awesome. To a kid, they exist in a category of scary that's separate from the "ghosts in the attic" type of scary. Even if they are loud and big and monstrous, they also existed in what was, essentially, a completely different planet from ours. As a result, they don't trigger the flight reflex that, say, a huge snake or a werewolf or a vampire might. Your caveman ancestors were scared of big snakes and wolves and creepy pale guys, but they didn't have to worry as much about dinosaurs.

This is just my perspective. Obviously, dinosaurs can be scary. This may seem like a hot take, but Jurassic Park does a pretty darn good job of making dinosaurs scary -- putting them in a modern context where your caveman brain starts to wonder, "Wait, should be looking around to see if a velociraptor is hunting me?" But even in Jurassic Park, that sense of awe somewhat mitigates the terror. Yeah, it's scary being hunted by a T-Rex, but holy guacamole, a dinosaur exists in reality. This is crazy. How cool is this.

I'm talking about the movie here, obviously. The novel is a lot scarier, as any irritating twentysomething guy at a party will tell you. The novel doesn't mitigate things with awe because, you know, it's a book. You can imagine an awe-inspiring dino, but it's harder to create that mitigating factor within your own brain. You just get the scares with significantly less awe.

All of this is a longwinded way to tell you about Dinosaur Safari.

A Game You Play If You Don't Have a Nintendo

Just try to make sense of the shadows in this image. It will break you.

Dinosaur Safari is a 1994 Macintosh game (1996 for the PC, you losers) where you travel back in time and take photos of dinosaurs. The gameplay is pretty simple: go to a bunch of static screens, wait to see if a dino shows up, take its photo, go back to the present. Get all of the dinos, and you win.

Oh, and also you're a weird reptile-person from the distant future, because humankind has gone extinct and I guess the reptiles are smart now or something. Or maybe one of the time travelers stepped on a butterfly. I dunno. It's a weirdly specific bit of world-building for a very simple game.

The T-Rex is actually pretty chill. He kind of roars in greeting and poses for you. It's nice.

You can watch an entire playthrough, but I've timestamped a relevant section here. Watch for a few minutes if you want a taste of what I experienced.

I played this game a lot as a kid. I liked dinosaurs, and I have to say, I learned a fair amount about them. DS works really well as an educational game. You learn the silhouttes of the different dinos, you learn which dinos ate what, you learn the differences between the prehistoric periods (imagine my shock to discover that the T-Rex was from the Cretaceous period, NOT the Jurassic period), and there's very little sense of danger, so you can focus on learning.

Now, I say very little, but there are a handful of dinos that attack your time machine and take away your energy. It's not a big deal, because you can always just return to the present and refuel, but it gives you at least some sense of suspense.

And this is where I introduce the dinosaur who singlehandedly did more to make me terrified of water than any other creature: the Plesiosaurus.

No, Please, No

Okay, let's get the obvious criticisms out of the way. For one, the goofy sound effect when the plesiosaurus runs into your vehicle does undercut the dread of being charged by a fish monster. Also, this thing does not in any way resemble an actual plesiosaurus. The neck is way too short, and the head is more T-Rex than Loch Ness.

But Dinosaur Safari, for all of its 90s simplicity, sets up this scare shockingly well. If you watched the portion of the playthrough that I linked above (and here), you'll get a sense of what I mean.

Most of Safari's environments are just detailed enough to keep you comfortable. The sounds and images give you enough ambience to feel like you're looking at an ancient world, a place that existed once but no longer does. It feels safe. You know this is someplace that's far in the past that can't hurt you. Even when the scariest dinos show up, you have an effective distance from them. These are remnants of a world that's long gone. You're safe at your desk, on your computer, in your time machine, observing through the lens of a camera.

But when you go into the ocean, things change.

The ocean tiles on the map (I'll call them "tiles" for you Civ players out there) are barren. You just see a field of dark blue. You hear that empty, hollow noise that you always hear underwater, no matter what time period, no matter where. There's no geography to orient you. A monster could come from any direction.

Unlike the other environments, this is distressingly familiar. We've all been underwater at some point. We've all felt, even for a moment, the helplessness that comes from floating in darkness in a physical realm where you -- a dry, bipedal primate -- do not belong. This is familiar territory. Your flight reflex knows that it should react to this. This is somewhere you can be right now.

How did the art team that made that title screen also make something this eerie?

What the short clip of plesiosaurus does not convey is that there are many ocean tiles on the map, and to get from continent to continent, you have to spend more time than you would like traveling through identical, empty blue screens. You don't know when something's going to be on one of those screens. You are always on edge.

And then plesiosaurus appears from the dark, announcing itself with a cry that to this day sends chills through my entire body, and swims in an unnatural, stiff motion towards you. I'm not even kidding about the cry. It was the scariest sound I had ever heard when I was a kid, and it still scares me. I don't know what it is; maybe that it's not a sound that any other creature in the game makes. It's also not a sound that anything nice makes. It's plaintive, threatening, and alien all at once. If you ever want to make me jump out of my skin, hack into my Alexa and play this sound at high volume.

Where Did This Hellbeast Come From

I wanted to learn a little more about the creators of Dinosaur Safari, because even if it's a basic edutainment game for kids, I can't ignore something that nailed a jump scare this well all the way back in 1996.

A quick Wikipedia search showed that the game was developed by "scientists from the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry"*, which is a pretty unique name for a developer. A little more Wiki-ing showed that this museum, especially in the 90s, ruled. It had a planetarium and an OMNIMAX theater, which in 1996 must have been the coolest field trip a kid could hope for. The OMSI owned the freaking submarine from The Hunt for Red October, for crying out loud. But coolest of all, they developed a freaking video game about dinosaurs. You can't get cooler than that.

*[Mobygames credits Creative Multimedia Corporation as the developer, so I'm assuming the entire thing wasn't built from the ground up by scientists, as Wikipedia seems to imply. Obviously, there were probably animators and artists and designers involved as well.]

Oh and there's a freaking LEGO dinosaur exhibit created by freaking BRICKMAN there as of this writing.

I had never heard of this museum until today, and now I would kill to go there.

Seriously, it makes perfect sense that a game like this -- a game that's both pretty simple but also genuinely educational -- would come from a place like this.

Unfortunately, the game was published by Mindscape, a company that did some pretty shady stuff in the 90s. Serendipitously, Mindscape also has a Lego connection -- they developed the fondly-remembered game Lego Island and laid off their entire team so that they wouldn't have to pay bonuses.

Maybe they put too much of their budget towards that free little train guy in the corner.

Okay, But Why Does Plesiosaurus Look Like That?

So why did these scientists -- who worked at a highly reputable museum and clearly knew what they were talking about -- make the plesiosaurus look like the worst thing I've ever seen instead of like, I dunno, an actual plesiosaurus?

I thought maybe this was just what we thought they looked like at the time, but no. The complete skeleton of this Nessie m'f'er has been around since 1823.

Maybe the 3D modelers at Creative Multimedia Corporation didn't get the concept art for Ples-boy in time, so they just went with the creepiest thing they could throw together in an afternoon. Hey, speaking of Creative Multimedia Corporation, I just looked them up, and guess what? Dinosaur Safari was their final game, along with something called The C.H.A.O.S. Continuum, which has a remarkably similar UI to DS. I dunno. I just thought that was neat.

Throw a plesiosaurus in this hallway, and watch me crap my pants.

I looked up the 3D modelers, and it turns out it's just one guy: Tim Elston. He didn't have an extensive career in 3D animation, it seems, but he did work on a 70s Plastic Man cartoon, so I guess that's pretty cool. DS isn't on his iMDB, but his Captain Quasar credit matches what's on Mobygames, so I'm guessing it's the same guy.

Oh cool, he had a piece in Animation World magazine! Good for him! If you know this dude, send him my way. I've got questions.

But who created that sound, that terrifying sound that haunts me to this day?

Well, the sounds were made by a company called New Media Magic. The sounds were engineered by Matt Logan, and edited by Divonna Ogier.

Matt did a lot of the programming on DS as well, so it seems natural that he would be able to figure out some basic sound programs. The person who interested me, though, is Divonna. This is her only credit on MobyGames. She co-wrote the game, too. Probably helped out with that reptile guy lore.

Oh hey! She was the exhibit manager for the museum's Star Trek exhibit! That's pretty cool! Well done, Divonna! So it turns out, some of the best stuff in this game really was done by museum employees rather than full-time game designers.

Her co-writer was Michael Ratliff, who I can't find much more on. Huh, I guess this one's a dead end, but...HEY WAIT A SECOND!

Is this the same Divonna who co-wrote the game? With MICHAEL RATLIFF? She worked at OMSI, so it looks like she did. She's a writer, exhibit producer, and musician...

Did Dinosaur Safari lead to a romance, and ultimately, a marriage?!!?

So, What Have We Learned?

So, I just wanted to talk about this scary dino for a few paragraphs. But it turns out, the people who made this game were cool museum employees. They have extensive resumes. They've worked in a wide variety of places.

It's easy to forget that games are just made by people. People with a wide variety of experiences. Some games are made by lifelong veterans, but it turns out some of the most memorable games you've ever played were made by museum curators. It's kind of crazy how easy it is to forget about that. Names like Ubisoft, Blizzard, and goddamn Mindscape take the big credit you see at the startup screen, but there are loads of interesting people waiting to be uncovered in the credits. Uncovered like, I dunno, some mysterious creature from the distant past.

Anyway.

Have a nice day.

RREEEAWWWWWR