This is the week when your childhood will return. That’s right … Turok is back!
After teasing the return earlier this year, developer Night Dive Studio revealed today that it will release a modern remastering of Turok: Dinosaur Hunter on Steam, GOG, and The Humble Bundle on Thursday. This will update the 1997 Nintendo 64 classic shooter, which also came out for Windows that year, to run on today’s PC rigs with a widescreen ratio and better textures. Turok was important for its time as it was one of the first 3D shooters to come out on a home gaming console rather than the PC.
Night Dive uploaded a new trailer to show you the game in action, and it sure does look like it’s from 1997:
Turok put you in the moccasins of the Native American warrior who travels through time and kills dinosaurs. He didn’t do this for fun; he is the last line of defense between reality and The Lost Land where time has no meaning. It’s a silly premise, which developer Iguana Entertainment adapted from the original Turok comic books, that was really a way of putting players in a situation where they could fire a bow-and-arrow at a raptor.
As one of the Nintendo 64’s first big 3D shooters, Turok found a lot of critical and commercial success. It went on to spawn several sequels before publisher Acclaim collapsed into bankruptcy.
The most recent Turok was a 2008 reboot called simply “Turok” that came out for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. But it had nothing to do with the previous games as it was an independent effort from publisher Touchstone Games, which also licensed the use of the comic book character. We have not had a new Turok since.