Why Turok: Dinosaur Hunter for N64 is years ahead of its time

Bungie’s Halo or Rare’s GoldenEye are often referred to as games that first truly ported high-tech, high-quality FPS to console platforms, but from this point of view it can be said that Iguana Entertainment’s Turok: Dinosaur Hunter for N64 was the first . She was well received at the time of release, but over time, her reputation gradually faded, and many even began to believe that Turok may never have been impressive and important.

It is difficult to overestimate the excitement caused in 1996 by the release of Nintendo 64. This console, which boasts 64-bit power and hardware capabilities that no one else has on the market, instantly gained success. To a small extent, this success was due to the unsurpassed quality of Super Mario 64, which raised the bar for video game requirements. The problem was that in the first year very few games were released for the system, which led to a strong stir even around the most mediocre releases.

However, Turok was far from mediocrity, the excitement around him was bordered by madness, and you can easily understand why. First-person shooters experienced an explosion of popularity on the PC, but the consoles remained in relative deficit. In addition, there was violence - the level of bloodshed and cruelty of Turok contradicted Nintendo's long-established reputation as a provider of games for the whole family. A large selection of weapons and scattering particles of blood no doubt benefited the game. But in addition, it also had technologies: Turok turned out to be a true example of pyrotechnics and fluid animation, unlike anything else, even on a PC.

Here is one example of building his design: Turok had a holistic world that allowed him to go back and visit old areas, and even at the very first level there were several routes - a striking difference from the Quake design, made up of separate levels. And the first technological difference played a role in this. Iguana designed Turok completely from scratch. It was a completely original project with its own approach to visual design.
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The main task of the developers was to create a shooter that works with a fairly stable frame rate and has huge cards with non-linear passage. Shooters like Quake used binary space partitioning (BSP), and Turok took a completely different approach: it only used static meshes. In a way, it was a look into the future!


A complete analysis of Turok: Dinosaur Hunter from the DF Retro channel: why its release was so important, how do the different versions of the game differ, from the original for N64 to ports on other consoles and the magnificent remaster of 2015.

So what's the difference? In Quake, BSP brushes became the basis of the world - to create a map, the designer set shapes and structures in the editor. However, in Turok, levels were completely built from static meshes. This means that floors, walls, ceilings and other objects are pre-prepared polygonal meshes, the design of which was created in other programs, such as 3D Studio Max. These simulated objects, like Lego bricks, were used to create maps, but it also meant that, unlike Quake, it was impossible to set shapes in real time using the editor - if you need a large wall, you build it by repeating the mesh of the wall or combining several different types of walls.

This solution is well suited for creating huge Turok cards. In fact, to build a map you just need to place the meshes - you can quickly copy and paste groups of meshes, at the same time freely changing their position and scale. Artists create parts of the map, which designers then use to assemble it. Sometimes these parts can be huge - for example, the boss room can be a single static mesh.

After that, the level designer creates a navigation mesh (nav mesh) - a set of convex polygons that define the places in which players and other moving characters can move. This is a gaming area. After that, the designer arranges decorative objects, selected objects, enemies, creating a level flow. Inside N64 itself, all this is loaded and unloaded during game execution. When a player runs on a map, the game constantly loads level fragments from memory and unloads them based on the distance from the player. Here the problem with the rendering distance comes into play, which caused the creation of the famous Turok fog, but in general the levels can be quite huge, with smooth transitions between areas of the game and without noticeable downloads. What are the disadvantages of this approach? The console memory is limited, so only a certain number of static meshes can be stored in RAM, that is, the objects that make up the level are often repeated.


Thanks to the streaming loading of static geometry in Turok, it was possible to implement a continuous world that can be explored in any order. This is very different from the concept of “levels” that dominated the FPS games of that era.

Turok used technological progress in other areas. A great example of this is water rendering. The developers combined a seamlessly animated surface texture with transparency and, in some cases, with a vibrant surface mesh. When the player is swimming, small waves are visible on the surface of the water - a rather large step forward compared to what Quake and its similarities provided at that time. Another outstanding feature was the rendering of the sky: the clouds used several transparent scrolling layers. What about lens flare? They were in Turok too. The sun was drawn to the Z-buffer, and this data was taken from the GPU, where the system could test how much the sun was closed from the player. This data was then used to determine the lens flare transparency value.

In addition, Turok is a true celebration of particles. Particle collisions were tracked in two dimensions to realize natural behavior, and whole heaps of alpha textures were combined to create beautiful puffs of smoke, explosions and drops of blood. This is especially famous for heavy weapons. This is another example of the advantage over the Quake particle system. Iron N64 itself was engaged in solving other problems, for example, affine distortion of textures, noticeable in games for PS1. From the player’s point of view, everything looked right, and there was also texture filtering.

Simply put, despite the fog-hiding effects of the map, Turok has become an extremely impressive example of 3D rendering on a rather weak system, but it wasn’t limited to this. Turok solved one of the most important problems of first-person shooters - aiming. A modern circuit with two analog sticks did not exist then, so Iguana tied the camera to move freely to a single N64 analog stick, and the C buttons controlled the character's movement. As a result, the player can move freely while rotating the camera and being able to strafe in a circle. Thanks to this very progressive approach to management, it’s still convenient to play the game on the original console even today.


The Turok cloud layer system, which can be seen both above and below, depending on the level, is another example of the beauty of the effects created by the game.

However, when people recall Turok, they usually complain about the mechanics of jumping, and these complaints are well-founded, both then and now. Moving across platforms in 3D at that time was a relatively new genre, and for players in 1997 combining a new control scheme with first-person view was a difficult task.

The return to Turok today demonstrates yet another aspect due to which the game ended up in the big leagues. A high-quality animation system provides a smooth movement that can not be found in first-person shooters on any platform, even several years after the release of the game. Compared to her contemporaries, this was a huge step forward. First, the animation data itself was derived from motion capture data for human enemies and manually created frame-by-frame animation for everything else. Individual characters were created from a hierarchy of parts of the model, which functioned similarly to the modern skeletal system - this is another aspect in which the game overtook its time. The engine interpolated the results, creating smooth blending between frames. I repeat, even in games like Quake there was no interpolation between frames of animation, and many games of that era still used 2D sprites.

In many ways, Turok owes its excellent work to animation and the work of artists. You see how, when running, the enemies carry their weight and change the position of their legs when turning. In this regard, you can recall the fun bonus feature - Quack mode: a cheat code that pokes fun at Quake and disables animation interpolation, particle rendering and texture filtering - these are the key features that distinguished Turok from id Software. This is a little ridiculous bonus demonstrating Turok's innovations, although it is obvious that Quake has taken its own unique steps to develop FPS technology.


Turok's performance on the N64 was much better than that of many other games of the time, but the use of heavy weapons led to a drop in frame rate.

And unlike many console shooters in this difficult transitional period from 2D to 3D, the game speed was quite good. The N64 cannot boast a high frame rate, but the Turok looks better than most of its contemporaries. The developers sought to reach 30 frames per second (this is even indicated in the manual for the game), and Turok completely coped with this. With a normal exploration of the world and small hassles, he succeeds, but sometimes failures occur. However, when a player receives heavier weapons and explosions begin to appear across the screen, the speed drops to 10fps. However, such cases are rare and overall performance is good. It is a pity that compared to the first part of the Turok 2 had such a low speed.

The success of the game was followed by the release on a PC with support for the newly emerging Direct 3D and Glide APIs from 3DFX, but despite the increased resolution and sharper textures, some functions disappeared or were poorly implemented. Many visual effects were not completely rendered, especially with alpha transparency. The plane of the fog was displayed differently, the lens flare disappeared from the sun, the layers of clouds rendered incorrectly, and the colors seemed a little faded.

Therefore, it will be more interesting to consider the remaster of the 2015 game for the PC, created by Nightdive Studios. This improved version, written primarily by Samuel “Kaiser” Villarreal, uses its own KEX engine and has a whole bunch of new visual features, supports high resolutions and various aspect ratios, as well as modern graphics cards and full 60 frames per second. Console versions for the Xbox One and Switch were later released, providing 60fps in native 1080p resolution. In the case of Switch, it is available when connected to a monitor - portable mode works with a resolution of 720p.


The PC and Xbox versions support the effect of twilight rays, which allows sunlight to spread beautifully across the stage, and also have much improved water effects with reflections and refractions. They also have a field of view setting and the rendering distance is increased. The resulting smoothness, visibility and quality were unattainable in the original. And considering improved management, this is the best way to play Turok today.

In the port on Switch, I had to make some compromises. Firstly, due to the high costs, the GPU in the version for Switch abandoned the twilight rays. And even after that, slowdowns are noticeable when using the extended rendering distance, which does not happen on other platforms. The problem is the outdated engine and low-power Switch hardware. In fact, the root of the main problem is the design of Turok maps - level meshes were created taking into account the small rendering distance and increasing this distance significantly increases the number of rendering calls due to fragmentation. The engine was simply not designed to handle the increased rendering distance, and the Switch is not powerful enough to overcome this limitation.

Be that as it may, I believe that Turok is a curious nugget combining two elements of that era - Quake and Nintendo. It has fast, skillful gameplay and an interesting level design like id Software, and at the same time it provides a research, open-source Nintendo-style walkthrough that is often found on Nintendo 64. This strange mix has its drawbacks, and Nevertheless, it is interesting even today, and remasters are a great way to try to play a game, which I sincerely consider to be one of the important chapters in the history of FPS.