Surprising news this morning. The archival group Forest of Illusion announced that they had obtained a copy of Dinosaur Planet. The build of the game is clearly in a much different state than the E3 demo version. This one has Fox McCloud partially implemented, but other characters still call him Sabre and Krystal is still playable for large parts of the game. The build file lists a creation date of December 1st, 2000.

They had obtained a disc from a private game collector in Sweden which contained the build of the game.

The build is playable. Streamers are already starting to play through the build on their channels. It has glitches and issues, and many hackers will no-doubt work on it to fix and complete the game as they have time to look at it.

All this news caused Dinosaur Planet to briefly trend on Twitter.

Obviously, this is huge news. Dedicated fans and archivists have been waiting for something like this to happen. People are excited. Unfortunately, I must throw a little bit of cold water on this and say that these files aren't authorized and possibly stolen. Nintendo, Rare, or maybe even Microsoft might come down hard on people distributing or streaming the game. Please exercise caution. It is for this reason that I can't even link to the original post because it contains a download link.

For now, though, I'm still in shock that something like this happened after all these years. This is kinda like the Playable Krystal Mod for Star Fox Adventures that was released just a few months ago. So much interesting stuff is happening now, of all times.