Trivia / Primal Rage

• Accidentally Correct Zoology: Even if just for a cosmetic reason; Talon sporting feathers in any capacity, even limited, happened a full decade before any other widespread feathered dromaeosaurids appeared in fiction. Now it's known the entire group was plumage bearing.
• Colbert Bump: Emulation of old arcade games combined with a livestream by the Galloping Ghost Arcade brought the game series back into the spotlight during The New '10s.
• Development Hell: This video explains the absolute hell that was the development of the second game due to the sudden spike in frames needed, along with Midway buying Atari and firing the development team to kill any possible competition to Mortal Kombat.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Want an arcade-perfect experience? Then you need to track down a working original arcade board. The game was ported to many platforms but the arcade version is bound by an encryption that has never been broken and no one who worked on the game is willing to help. Every emulation attempt is flawed (most grievously in hit detection issues that arise because of it). The reason this is worth mentioning is because in the Midway Arcade Treasures 2 collection, it is just as broken. Even in an official emulation it can't be perfectly replicated. At least the PC version is a good substitute, as are the PS1, 3DO and especially Saturn versions.
  • In a more positive example, there has been news of an arcade cabinet in Illinois that is one of only two functioning cabinets that have the Primal Rage II demo available. While clearly incomplete, it still gives everyone a glimpse at what the game could have possibly been. Since its discovery, a mostly working emulator has been distributed online.
• Parody Assistance: A British commercial for the game featured Simon Bates parodying his own BBFC rating bumpers that appeared on UK videotapes at the time.
• Referenced by...:
  • Jitsu Squad, that pays homage to old arcade classic games, have a dinosaur-themed level titled "Primal Rage".
  • In the third segment of the seventh Dexter's Laboratory episode, Game Over, Dexter & Dee Dee were playing a parody of the game as Primal Fighters.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The early concept for the game was just two T-Rex fighting with a generic sprite art style but animator Jason Leong came up with the idea of different kinds of dinosaurs (with the exception of Blizzard and Chaos) and the idea of the dinosaurs being Gods, He even thought of the idea of using stop-motion to compete with Mortal Kombat.
  • In some concept art shown in the promo video for the game, Talon is shown in a generic kung-fu robe and garb, possibly showing that the game went in a somewhat different direction.
  • Some of the characters had different names in the early prototypes.
    • Armadon was originally named Spike.
    • Blizzard was originally named Kong.
    • Vertigo was originally going to be male, judging by the male pronouns in her prototype story.
  • Primal Rage II, the canceled sequel, would have introduced a Bloody Roar-style transformation system (the players were human avatars of the gods). As a result, the ending for every character is left open-ended. The tie-in novel tied up these loose ends.
    • The game would have also introduced two new characters, Slashfang the sabertooth tiger who is the god of Hunting, and Necrosan, some sort of skeledragonsaur who is the god of Death.
  • There was also consideration at one point to release an update for the first game that would have added Necrosan (as they didn't have the time to include him the first time around) as well as give him a unique stage set on the Moon. The update was dropped in favor of the ill fated sequel, though perhaps due in part to these origins, Necrosan actually did get added to the toy line alongside the first game's cast.
  • Among the myriad of console ports released, two more for the Sega CD 32X and Mac OS were planned, but never released.
• Working Title: T-Rex