Dino Crisis 3 is 20 years old today. So when are we getting a new Dino Crisis game?

Capcom’s dinosaur survival horror series Dino Crisis has now been AWOL for two decades, and fans are clamouring for its resurrection.

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Dino Crisis 3 launched on Xbox in Japan on 26th June 2003, 20 years ago today. Since then the series has been on hiatus, and some fans are impatient for its return.

The original Dino Crisis came out on PlayStation in 1999, and followed the survival horror template of Capcom’s Resident Evil series closely, swapping the zombies for speedy velociraptors. The plot sees the red-haired special operations expert Regina investigating an island where dinosaurs have been transported through time to the present, with predictably messy results.

The original game was headed by Shinji Mikami, director of the original Resident Evil, but the sequel the following year was helmed by Shu Takumi, who was a designer on the first Dino Crisis and would later go on to create the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney series. Dino Crisis 2 put more emphasis on action than survival, and both games were favourably received.

A light-gun shooter called Dino Stalker was released for the PlayStation 2 in 2002, but the third major entry in the series was 2003’s Dino Crisis 3, which, bizarrely, was set in space. Set in the year 2548 on the giant space station Ozymandias, the plot sees mutated dinosaurs being created from DNA extracted from different species. Neither Mikami nor Takumi were involved in development of the third game, which was instead directed by Tetsuro Oyama and Hiroyuki Maruhama.

Dino Crisis 3 was a critical and commercial failure, scoring a measly 51 on Metacritic. In addition to the poor reviews, the decision to make it an Xbox exclusive is likely to have hurt sales, particularly as the console had a miniscule user base in Japan.

The total sales for the Dino Crisis series are 4.4 million according to Capcom, and sales of the first game were around 2.4 million, with Dino Crisis 2 shifting around 1.19 million, and the third game significantly less. It’s obvious from the declining sales figures why Capcom decided to shelve the series, but fans with fond memories of the original are still holding out for a new entry.

‘Dino Crisis’ was trending on Twitter ahead of Summer Games Fest in June, as Capcom devotees expressed their hope of a new entry in the series. A couple of people have even made teaser trailers for what a Dino Crisis remake would look like in Unreal Engine 5.

Rumours of a remake have been swirling for a while now. Capcom filed a new trademark for the series in 2019, and the firm put out a survey after its showcase this month asking fans whether they ‘like’ the Dino Crisis franchise, possibly gauging if there’s enough love for the series to make a reboot worthwhile.

In the meantime, the closest we’re going to get to a Dino Crisis remake in the near future is Exoprimal, Capcom’s upcoming multiplayer shooter due for release on 14th July, where teams of futuristic fighters battle against hordes of dinosaurs. It may have dinosaurs, but it’s no Dino Crisis. And so the members of the Dino Crisis reddit page continue to vent their anguish.

Being a Dino Crisis fan is pain
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