Remember: Star Fox Adventures, released in 2002 for GameCube, took a radical change of direction in the franchise's gameplay, offering mainly third-person ground exploration in an adventure style, relegating the space shoot'em up to the background.

The game was originally developed for Nintendo 64 as a brand new licence called Dinosaur Planet. Although the universe was already reminiscent of Star Fox, there was originally no question of playing as Fox McCloud. Instead, a new character was imagined who bears a strong resemblance to Krystal, the heroine who will be featured in Star Fox Adventures.

Dinosaur Planet is not a discovery in itself: this aborted project is well known to the retrogaming community, and a beta version even resurfaced five years ago. It's this beta version that's attracting attention today, because it's been ported to PC using the N64 Recompiled tool. This tool allows Nintendo 64 games to be run on PC, as has already been the case for Majora's Mask or Star Fox 64 (Lylat Wars), as we told you here.

Developer Francessco121 and a community of modders are now hard at work porting Dinosaur Planet to the PC, attempting to ‘complete’ its development while making a number of improvements, including 16:9 compatibility, better resolution and a higher refresh rate for a smoother experience.

Now that the project is attracting interest and is open to developers wishing to contribute, the hope of playing a ‘complete game’ originally developed as a prototype by Rare for the Nintendo 64 is no longer a fantasy. To be continued.

In the meantime, if you miss Fox McCloud, you should know that Star Fox can be played on Recalbox: the first two titles on Super Nintendo, the third on Nintendo 64, and - who knows - maybe Star Fox Adventures will soon be playable on Raspberry Pi 5...

Sources: RetroDodo / Time Extension