Dinotopia is the best dinosaur game and it has puppets.

The 1990s were a golden time to be a dinosaur-loving kid. I grew up in The land before time, Jurassic Park, We’re back, From Disney Dinosaur, 3D Dinosaur Adventure, Walking with Dinosaurs, the movie Super Mario Bros., if you like that … the list goes on.

But what I wanted most of all was a dinosaur game that would capture my favorite fictional world: Dinotopia.

This year I found that game. It came out in 1996 and is an adventure puzzle game for kids. It is also an FMV, with dinosaurs played by huge and complex animatronic puppets.

But more on that in a minute.

WHAT IS DINOTOPIA?

For the uninitiated, Dinotopia began as a series of written and illustrated books by James Gurney in 1992. It takes place on the titular lost continent of Dinotopia, a land where dinosaurs survived the extinction event. Over the years, humans discovered the island and formed a peaceful society with dinosaurs, one in which both species live as equals.

When I was a child, I was absorbed by these books. Gurney is an accomplished painter which details every facet of Dinotopian life. For each pastoral image of a human riding a dinosaur, Gurney shows you a cross section of a city built from the remains of a 17th century ship, or a chair designed to accommodate huge sauropods.

DINOSAUR GAMES

The thing is, there are a couple of Dinotopia games. Dinotopia: The Odyssey of the Sunstone and Dinotopia: The Timestone Pirates came out in the early 2000s, on the coattails of the Hallmark miniseries starring David Thewlis and a young Wentworth Miller.

But both games had combat as a core mechanic, and that confused me. After all, Dinotopia is a pacifist utopia. It’s one of the key themes of the books and one of the biggest challenges for storytellers working on stage.

Timestone Pirates Features, yes, pirates who are trying to steal T-rex eggs and need to get hit on the head. Sunstone Odyssey introduces a separatist gang called the Outsiders who want to subjugate the dinosaurs. They also need to be hit on the head.

It seemed like an easy way out of a narrative challenge. Of course, there are tons of very popular games that don’t revolve around combat – hello, Animal Crossing! But that number drops when you just look dinosaur games. It is a pity! I wanted to befriend the dinosaurs, help the dinosaurs, live with them and participate, I don’t know, in civics or something.

And then i found Dinotopia, the 1996 adventure game on CD-ROM.

It has two things that the other Dinotopia games don’t: puzzles and animatronic dinosaurs.

DINOTOPIA

Dinotopia, the game, stars a guy with the unlikely name of Nathan Drake. Nathan Drake has just been shipwrecked on Dinotopia and is searching for his missing sister Constance. Along the way, solve puzzles and interact with iconic book characters, all played by real people who eerily resemble their illustrated counterparts.

The game’s publisher, Turner Interactive, incorporated the developer cooperative. The Dreamers Guild to play the game. The Dreamers Guild was an employee-driven business, with the developers themselves evaluating which projects to take next. And they had just done a book-to-game adaptation: I have no mouth and I must scream, Harlan Ellison’s horrifying tale that you might recognize as damn dark and no for children!

But that adaptation was well received! And if you’re an employee-run business, you may decide to go from Hugo Award-winning sci-fi shorts to adventure games and puzzles for kids.

As a side note, The Dreamer’s Guild website is still live, and it’s a beautiful relic from the early years of the internet. I highly recommend it.

The Dreamer’s Guild wouldn’t be handling the game’s cut scenes. Turner Interactive made the incredibly big decision to film the scenes with live actors, and the dinosaurs were played by huge animatronic puppets whose voice actors act like they’re doing callbacks for The Jim Henson Company.

I’m not kidding. Watch the video.

The resulting game is appropriately delicious and strange. The puzzles are lovely – players use the Dinotopian alphabet to decode things or create songs with a Parasaurolophus, and the puppets are amazing.

Andre Freitas and his special effects company, AFX Studios, made ten dinosaur puppets for the game, all with hand-painted latex skins and complex animatronics. Each had to be piloted by multiple puppeteers, some with their lids working on the radio controls, others using rods to maneuver the huge heads of the puppets. Freitas said Turner only gave him $ 85,000, which is broken down into not enough for puppet.

Freitas’ work is amazing, and she makes a enormous way to play this game Sight like Dinotopia, although later games have better “graphics”. He also did makeup on the actors, translating Gurney’s painting style onto a human canvas.

Check out the video above to see more of these incredible puppets in action and to learn more about Dinotopia. It is a strange and wonderful gem from the 90s, and my child self would have loved it.

Make sure subscribe to Polygon on YouTube to see more videos like this!