Trivia / Turok

• All-Star Cast: The 2008 reboot has most of the characters being voiced by noteable screen actors, including Powers Boothe as the Big Bad, with Ron Perlman, Timothy Olyphant, William Fichtner, Donnie Wahlberg, and Christopher Judge as your most prominent teammates.
• Author's Saving Throw: The remake of Seeds of Evil dumbed down the totem defence missions, made the levels less maze-like, and allowed you additional ammo and health refills at checkpoints. Many welcomed these changes, however, as most agree that these were the most frustrating aspects of the original game.
• Banned In Germany: ...Until all the human enemies were replaced by robots.
• Creator Killer: The game series managed to do this to two different companies.
  • Evolution's failure is credited alongside the disastrous BMX XXX for killing Acclaim, who were already limping at the time of its release. It was given a lukewarm reception and suffered from an infamous "Name Your Kid Turok" marketing campaign that did it no favors. Acclaim would last only two more years before declaring bankruptcy.
  • The 2008 reboot's failure to start a new series resulted in it being the only video game Disney released under Touchstone Interactive, and the main Touchstone Pictures label was relegated to being a distribution arm for live action DreamWorks SKG films in 2010 after Disney purchased Marvel, with that deal ending in 2016.
• Cut Song: This piece was supposed to be used for the Primagen boss battle in Turok 2, but they ended up using the Mantid Queen music instead.
• Executive Meddling: Evolution was originally developed as a GameCube exclusive, with work on an Xbox port starting about halfway through production. The PlayStation 2 port was a very late addition, after Sony threatened consequences for publishers who failed to release a multi-platform game on their system. Acclaim, thinking that most of their sales would likely be on the GameCube due to the franchise having been Nintendo-exclusive until that point, got some junior developers to quickly hash out a PS2 port just to keep Sony happy... which ended up backfiring horribly when the PS2 version sold roughly double the combined sales of the other two versions, meaning that the obviously half-assed PS2 port ended up being the version that most gamers were familiar with, helping further wreck Acclaim's public image and hastening their demise.
• Follow the Leader: Shadow of Oblivion was clearly inspired by Half-Life in terms of level design and visual style, and GoldenEye (1997) in terms of the objective system.
• Franchise Killer: Twice: Evolution for the Acclaim series, and the rebooted Turok.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: While Night Dive Studios has given the first three games Updated Rereleases on PC and digital services for consoles (with limited physical releases by Limited Run Games), the remaining Acclaim games (Rage Wars and Evolution) have yet to receive any rerelease or signs of any happening in the foreseeable future. The 2008 reboot is also unavailable on modern hardware or digital services for PC and is unlikely to be since the game is owned by Disney while the Turok IP is now owned by Dreamworks Animation via their acquisition of Classic Media.
• No Export for You: The PC port of Turok: Evolution was never released outside Europe.
• No Port For You:
  • Unlike the first two games in the series, Shadows of Oblivion never saw a PC port until Night Dive Studio's 2023 remaster (23 years after the game's original release), making it a Nintendo 64 exclusive up until that time.
  • Turok: Rage Wars remains a Nintendo 64 exclusive, something that seems unlikely to change due to its status as a multiplayer arena Gaiden Game.
• Schedule Slip:
  • Nightdive Studios originally gave a release date of 2016 for the Turok 2 Updated Re-release, but the complexity of the game and undisclosed issues forced them to push it back to March 2017. This also affected the modding tools for the first game; originally intended to be released in early 2016, it wasn't until December of 2016 that they would finally be released.
  • Their rerelease of Turok 3 suffered a much more minor instance: announced in August 2023 for a release on November 14th, it too was pushed back, but only by about two weeks to the 30th.
• Stillborn Franchise: The 2008 game was intended to be the start of a new series. That didn't happen.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The first game was envisioned as a Third-Person Shooter akin to Tomb Raider I, before the developers decided to make it a First-Person Shooter to take full advantage of the Nintendo 64's hardware. A number of enemy types and certain level elements had to be cut from the final game due to cartridge space limits - the game used virtually all the available space that was available on carts of the time.
  • Seeds of Evil went through a number of changes through development. Originally, it was planned to have 8 levels, one of which was a Crossover with Acclaim's Shadow Man. When it was cut, the enemies planned for it were placed in the River of Souls in the final game. Each level was also intended to have its own boss fight, but roughly half were cut out of the final game (Gant, one of the intended bosses, was recycled into a multiplayer character model). An enemy called the Hunter was cut so late, the strategy guide and instruction manual still list it as being in the game.
  • The fourth game was originally planned to follow on from the Sequel Hook that Shadow of Oblivion set up, with Adon being Promoted to Playable and undertaking a quest to resurrect Joshua. After Shadow of Oblivion received underwhelming sales and reviews, however, this storyline was abandoned in favor of a prequel starring Tal'Set.
    • Vexx would have made a cameo in the forth game according to some unused models and animations found in the game. It's unknown if he would have been used as a playable character for multiplayer, just a weird cameo, or used for testing purposes and wasn't meant to be used at all. The two games shares the same engine after all.
  • The 2008 Continuity Reboot game had a planned sequel that was actually halfway into development, but due to a mass number of layoffs at Propaganda Games, it sadly will probably never come to fruition. No gameplay footage was released, but several pieces of concept art were leaked and piece together various plot and gameplay elements. Players would be able to play as dinosaurs in third person, along with a weapon called the Jak that would allow players to control them. Many of the dinosaur species would have had multiple variants, all depending on the environment in which they were found. Known variants include jungle species, desert species, and swamp species of both the Utahraptor and the Tyrannosaurus rex. There also would have been Savage MG Soldiers, who presumably defected from the Mendel-Gruman Corporation and acted as another faction. A new species called the Ork would have debuted in the game as well.