No One Can Find This "Creepy Dinosaur" Game...

the saying goes that nothing can ever truly be erased from the internet once it's there it's there forever but this adage is at the very least not entirely true it posits a permanence to the internet that simply isn't there so many things hosted on the internet have been lost from early web blogs and personal sites to YouTube videos and video games though the Lost media and internet archival communities have made great strides in the preservation of Internet media they are fighting the unwavering forces of entropy and it is inevitable that pieces will slip through the

cracks things that now only exist the memories of a select few and will disappear with them today I'll be investigating a bizarre piece of lost media a game lost for more than 20 years what I thought at first would be a quick video on an obscure topic quickly became an obsessive search that would lead me to discoveries I never could have anticipated and it all starts with one post a Reddit user named Dinosaur Game Hunter posts to R/C Creepy Gaming does anyone remember this creepy dinosaur game I played this dinosaur game when I was a

kid that really freaked me out you were stuck in a natural history museum with a bunch of dinosaur exhibits and then the dinosaur statues and skeletons come to life like Night at the Museum I just remember how tense I was exploring the game knowing I could get eaten by one of the dinosaurs at any moment it had that weirdness of '90s 3D graphics and was set at night probably another reason it creeped me out anyone else remember a game like this this post could have easily been lost in the Clutter of Reddit posts about faded

memories of childhood games which pop up every now and then and fall to the Wayside but when I read it I knew something was different because I did remember a game like that [Music] knowing how searches for lost media tend to go I went into this video unsure if I was really capable of getting to the bottom of it these kinds of things can go on for years with large scale searches and dedicated communities but I felt a kind of special connection here knowing that I had likely played the exact same game as a kid

maybe my parents still had the disc lying around somewhere or at the very least I could remember some detail which would nudge the search in the right direction and what started as a cursory search for information turned into a full-blown investigation but I'm getting ahead of myself let's take another look at that Reddit post the op shares a decent amount of information including going on to post a drawing they made from their memory of the game here's some more details from the post they say it would have been from from around the '90s or 2000s

a firstperson pointing click game like Mist you started in some kind of lobby with a T-Rex statue in the middle when you left the room and came back it was gone after that I think all the dinos were on the loose hunting you my most Vivid memories are that there were a ton of different ways you could get killed by the dinosaurs I used to just get up and leave the computer when I thought I was going to die because the death screens freaked me out they also seem to remember the game being riddled with

bugs crashing randomly they recall one instance in particular that is uniquely UNS medling I can't remember how we triggered it but one time the audio completely broke and the screen faded until it was completely black except the cursor we heard the dinosaurs making sounds but the audio was up so it sounded like wailing I think something else might have happened but I remember we ended up on a game over/ deaths screen but it wasn't a dinosaur it was like a weird furry creature face not 100% sure what happened I really thought I dreamed it until

my brother said he remembered it too thep then provides a drawing of this face from their memory freaky I was introduced to the concept of lost media while searching for it and I guess I never considered it until now but it's possible the only thing left of the game is my recollection of it and for it to just disappear like that would suck so if this rings a bell to anyone else let me know these descriptions immediately rang a bell to me as a little kid in the 2000s I had a few different games I

played a lot of one was Fisher Price Great Adventures Castle which I just called the night game another was Tonka digging rigs which had a whole steering wheel setup and I called the truck driving game and another was something I called the dinosaur game it actually took a bit of digging a few years back to track down the other two but the dinosaur game no such luck and while I don't remember the name of the game I do have more details I recall that weren't included by op so yes I remember it being an escape

game set in a Dinosaur Museum and the statues coming to life I also remember it being pretty creepy to me as a kid but perhaps this early experience with horror is something that contributed to my later fascina and subsequent job as a YouTuber talking about spooky things in addition I remember a few details about the layout as well there were three different exhibit areas for each of the main periods of the dinosaurs with different dinosaurs from that specific era a Triassic area Jurassic area and a crous area I also have a pretty distinct memory of

an aquarium and specifically there being some kind of Submarine there considering the combined information we had you might think it would be only a matter of time until it was identified but despite all of these details we were still no closer to finding a name for the game any identifying information about a publisher or Dev team or a release date the types of things you'd need to track down a listing for the game somewhere I did end up messaging the op they told me that they had shared everything they remembered about the game already with

nowhere else to turn I started by simply trying to brute force it searching for terms like dinosaur and prehistoric in Google the internet archive and the like narrowing the search between the '90s and in early [Music] 2000s this process was tedious and timec consuming and though I wasn't able to immediately find the game I was able to find some similar games to rule out the first being eyewitness dinosaur hunter this game hit so many of the descriptors I was actually convinced for a while that this was the game that I had played and that my

memories were just really inaccurate it's a first person point and click game with very 9s 3D Graphics which takes place in a kind of eyewitness Museum filled with dinosaur skeletons it has the separate areas for the Triassic Jurassic and Cretaceous periods and it even has portions where there are dinosaurs that come to life and it has other people on the internet sharing memories of being scared of it as a kid like a real human on YouTube great video by the way but there's no getting mauled by the dinosaurs there's no aquarium and the more I

played it the more sure I be came that this wasn't what I remembered as a kid most of the game is spent digging for fossils and reading about dinosaurs the game I remember and the one the op seems to recall as well was mostly spent solving puzzles to escape the museum though I witnessed dinosaur hunter was close I didn't feel confident about this being the answer so the search continued the only other game that seemed close was 3D dinosaur adventure this game is also point and click and takes place in a kind of dinosaur park

clearly inspired by Jurassic Park and it does include the separated areas for each era but otherwise it's even further than dinosaur hunter the graphics are far too rudimentary and it again focuses more on being educational out of luck again at this point I was beginning to run out of steam a bit if the answer was easy wouldn't I have run into it by now and if it's not then what am I getting myself into it was just as I was beginning to think about this that I made the first major breakthrough a video game review

blog from 2011 what's Justin playing in a post from October 18th Justin lists eight games he's played but never finished asking the readers what they want him to try completing again among them are Lego Star Wars Journey to the Center of the Earth and Escape Triassic hall now I'll be honest the name didn't click right away like I said all I ever called it as a kid was the dinosaur game but it did sound promising I messaged the Reddit op to see if this was it and though they could be sure they said it was

something like that finally we had a [Music] lead I started with a cursory search of the new found name nothing I started poking around YouTube game review sites and forums I found what I was looking for with a 2011 YouTube video by Evans Essence Triassic Hall teaser this might be it this could be our first Glimpse at this creepy dinosaur game [Music] [Music] [Music] this is exactly the game I remember I cross referenced this video with the Reddit op and they basically confirmed it as well we found it kind of though we do have a

name and some footage to place the game we can't play it the game itself is still lost but we have some more concrete leads at the end of the trailer there's a website gam.com this website is defunct now but after a bit of research into the name gametic I was able to find that it was a briefly operating software development company in the late '90s and early 2000s through this name I was able to track down two email addresses Henry shagu gmail.com and gmail.com belongs to Danielle who was working at gametic back in the 2000

I was able to get in contact with her and get some more details surrounding Escape Triassic Hall what happened to the game I believe the publisher ended up cutting production after only a few thousand copies were made so after they sold those units off that was the end end of it why would they shut production down as I understand it the publisher was going under do you have a copy or know anyone who does I don't have a copy no I would suggest talking to Henry as he was the creative lead on the game he

may still have one of the discs or ISO images Danielle was incredibly helpful but the holy grail for this thing would be getting an email back from that other email address Henry shagu Henry shagu was the lead on the game and he may be the only one with a surviving copy of course I had already sent an email to Henry but after a week with no response I was running out of options I started getting desperate refreshing eBay searches and my email inbox driving around local Goodwills and used game stores and I think it was

starting to get to me I was spacing out in conversations thinking about what I do when I found it getting distracted by memories of the game memories that I was beginning to question the validity of it had been so long and I was so young I really couldn't be sure of anything I was remembering now or if they were all dist Ed by time I was so distracted by this search I started to dream about it okay this is like the third time I've had this dream it's got to be because of the game because

it's dinosaur dream I'm like lost in the jungle and then I hear a dinosaur like I don't I can't see a dinosaur but in my head I'm like oh that's a dinosaur coming to get me so I start running and like I know it's getting closer I don't even see the dinosaur but I just know it's a dinosaur and then I look up and there's this bright light I don't know maybe it's like the light at the end of the tunnel or something I don't know I'm like oh that's death this light in the sky

it's kind of like oh that is me dying is that okay I have an alarm going off in my house what is going on this video is with me I'd started getting a little impatient because of a trip I had planned I would be busy and out of town for a while and I was hoping I'd make another breakthrough before then maybe I was getting ahead of myself so what I made a few breakthroughs early on that doesn't mean the next one is going to come easy or in a timely fashion had I lost sight

of the facts I knew from the very start that these things can take years and that there's no guarantee a surviving copy even exist it's been decades for all we know the last remaining discs are scratched Beyond repair or sitting in a landfill feeling a little defeated I decided to talk to my own siblings about my memories of the game and how the search was going and then one of them asked me something did mom and dad even throw out our old CD case wait did I did I ever actually check with my parents one

of the first thoughts I had when I read the post did did they ever actually throw it away has the game actually been right under my nose this whole time bro no when did that happen when did that happen remember those plans I was talking about earlier I had booked a trip to visit my hometown and I would be staying at my parents house so it kind of worked out perfectly before I left I texted my parents ahead to inquire about the C case to which they said they didn't know but it's possible it was

in the Attic with all the other boxes I would have to wait till I arrived so I hopped on the plane basically the first thing I did when I arrived was begin rooting through the attic and it didn't take long to find that old pleather CD case from my childhood as I skimmed through it I noticed a good deal of the discs were missing not a good sign but stored about 2/3 of the way through quietly waiting for over a decade now was the disc for escape Triassic Hall and now I'm back so let's even

get this thing running shall we [Music] [Music] Escape Triassic Hall begins with us standing in the empty Lobby just across from a statue of a T-Rex it's quiet and dimly lit the museum is closed everyone is gone and you're locked inside in need of a key in order to escape the ambience is peaceful if slightly Eerie with the thought of the exit key in our minds we explore the rest of the lobby getting a closer look at our surroundings various fossil exhibits Adorn the walls ammonites Footprints strangely underneath the ammonites there seems to be some

faded text scrolled onto the wall it's incomplete but appears to be about clay and love then of course there's the T-Rex in the center it appears at first to be a statue but we can find a small red button and speaker at the base pressing it plays a brief animation the T-Rex moving stiffly with a compressed Roar emitting from the speaker it appears this is some kind of interactive animatronic display getting an even closer look which requires us to slowly pan our camera up we can see what appears to be a key in its mouth

I have to admit there's something pretty unnerving about this slow look up into its jaws realizing just how massive this thing is especially after just having seen it move unfortunately we are unable to reach the key from here the goal of this game is to escape and in doing so we will need to progress through the Triassic Jurassic and finally Cretaceous exhibits as we slowly unlock them along the way we'll also explore the ammonite aquarium and the activity center at the start there's only one door unlocked and that's the Triassic exhibit [Music] we are met

with an artificial forested landscape surrounded on both sides of our walkway by displays of Trias era dinosaurs some of these diaramas are quite brutal showing prehistoric prey ripped apart blood bones and all this combined with the dim lighting and ambient sounds lends this whole place an eerie atmosphere a few of the figures upon further inspection move robotically with a limited range of motion similar to the T-Rex in the [Music] lobby giving them an eerie sense of life like they're watching you in theme with the unsettling atmosphere the descriptions and informational blurbs given on the display

plaques here are similarly dark for small mammals like this megazostrodon life in the Triassic period was a dangerous place they spent their lives on high alert to avoid becoming a largic Predators next meal though megazostrodon highly evolved senses of hearing and smell help them to evade the dangers of their environment their demise as shown here was inevitable jeez did no megazostrodon ever just die peacefully of old age from here we can find an employee room with a control panel which allows us to change the animation of the T-Rex allowing us to reach the key be

careful about which animation you choose otherwise you might end up in this prehistoric robot's Jaws coming back from the employee room actually has one of the most unsettling scares in the whole game as we enter back into the Triassic exhibit we find all of the creatures eyes are now on us creepy after solving a few more puzzles which give us access to the Jurassic Hall through a side door when we make our way back into the lobby the T-Rex is gone no Trace just an empty display and then we hear this the T-Rex is loose

in the building that's not good and as if it couldn't get any worse if we Circle back to the Jurassic exhibit we see [Music] this and even entering the Triassic Hall we find that many of the dinosaurs previously here are missing as well this is the point where things really ramp up the dinosaurs have come to life and are on the loose if you go up to a door and see one of these dinosaur animations you need to come back later [Music] otherwise and make sure you've memorized where those dinosaurs were because you might also

be in danger if you see one out of place or if you hear a sound like this this is both terrifying and also a little bit frustrating as far as I can tell whether a dinosaur will be in a room or not is basically random and though it's usually only a few seconds before you can come back and they'll be gone it can be pretty annoying to just have to leave and be blocked from progressing at random times this is also the point in the game where you can definitely start to see the bugs popping

up that op referenced sometimes clicking things just doesn't work there's audio and visual issues and while recording footage for this video I got one of the creepiest glitches I've ever run into playing a game what the as the game progresses you come across these notes from the employees while also helping us on our way way to solve puzzles they also reveal bits of story information to us that the owner is eccentric and that the museum is in danger of shutting down one note in particular from the owner himself reads I had a somber Epiphany yesterday

morning since I embarked on this endeavor it had never occurred to me that it could end I was so focused on the next step I was blind to the inevitability of its final conclusion whether we can scrape together enough resources to keep this place running for another month or year or 10 years the end will always be the same looking into the mirror yesterday this finally hit me I realized truly for the first time that Triassic Hall will die maybe not now but someday along with these notes these faded scratched writings like the one we

saw in the lobby keep popping up though most times they are almost too faded to make out clearly one of my favorite places in the game is the activity center there's this dusting for dinos mini game where you dig up dinosaur bones with a little brush and it's home to maybe the creepiest dinosaur of the whole game the exhibit is called Build a Dino and it's this collection of bones that you can snap together to build your own dinosaur fossil but later in the game this horrifying spider dinosaur skeleton amalgamation comes to life and hides

in the activity center just seeing it in the dark Corners is terrifying not to mention its death [Music] screen then we have a brief stint in the mazike ammonite aquarium complete with submechanophobia inducing water animatronics and the submarine that I remembered the submarine is actually a kind of ride like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and it was definitely an atmospheric highlight [Music] [Music] after that we make our way to what is essentially the final area of the game the Cretaceous exhibit this is also when the game is both the most difficult and frustrating as the

density and frequency of dinosaur encounters increases the most unsettling part of the Cretaceous exhibit I think is right at the end there's this little area dedicated to the death of the dinosaurs and it's just so dark imagery of dinosaurs decomposing bursting into flames and suffocating and the way it describes it is so Grim though they could not conceive of it as the last of these Prehistoric Beasts suffocated from the toxic air this marked the end of the reign of the Dinosaurs the final puzzle might be the creepiest moving into an employee room just off from

the Cretaceous exhibit where we've been led to believe the key to the exit is we find The Rusted and decaying body of an animatronic Carnotaurus it seems to be on the edge of death it's robotic breathing shallow but approaching it causes it to attack in order to reach the key however morbid it may be we need to put this thing out of its misery it seems to be plugged in to a power cord almost like life support keeping this thing alive much longer than it would have otherwise we follow this cord out and through the

rest of the museum tracking it from room to room until we find its socket and unplug it there's this horrifying sound and then silence when we enter the repairs room again the Carnotaurus is lifeless we grab the key and Escape [Music] [Music] while putting this video together especially when I was faced with the possibility of never finding the game I thought a lot about lost media in general since I was first introduced to the concept I've been sort of fascinated by it I've always had a fear of things being lost or going missing ever since

I was a kid there's something that fills me with equal parts of anxiety and Dread when I think about a song being lost forever or a film that no one will ever be able to watch again it's deeper than just a little wistfulness over lost media there's a real panic when The Melody of a song pops into my head and I know I don't remember enough of it to meaningly search for it or that it will be gone by the time I get to a computer it's a genuinely harrowing feeling when I think about the

memories from my childhood knowing that they will fade and it is deeply saddening to know that I can't watch every film ever made or listen to everyong song in some ways this fear of loss loss of experiences of the world has made me a bit of an obsessive archist I send images and links to myself when I think I may someday maybe want to come back to them even if I know I won't I can't ever bring myself to delete old pictures or files I just get a new hard drive or transfer them to USB

I can't seem to accept that what I'm fighting is Unstoppable the decay of the universe and even though I know it's Unstoppable even though I know all of my attempts at salvaging and saving media are only temporary I can't seem to accept it I just keep trying I was going to end the video around here but literally less than 24 hours before this video was supposed to go live I got an email back from Henry shagu hey Sean you found the right man I worked as the lead designer for gametic for the short time it

existed sadly I do not have a working copy of Triassic Hall we didn't really hold on to that kind of thing I'm not sure there are any more that exist it didn't sell well and the publisher stopped producing them not long after I appreciate your interest in one of my projects but in all honesty I am not particularly proud of the game or anything I worked on at gametic really if you do happen to find a copy I have a little tip for you there are little scribbles on the walls in the museum if you

see one click it they may reveal a bit of a surprise I wish you luck on your search Henry shagu I want to sincerely thank Henry shagu for actually responding to my email but I'm sure you're dying to click on all those scribbles just as much as I am right let's boot this thing up for a second time I think I remember where all those faded writings are [Music] a [Music] oh