The game that reminded us how cool dinosaurs are will return next year, with Propaganda Games' reimagined dino-shooter Turok (PS3, X360). It's the Vancouver studio's first game, and it appears to capture the essence of the original title--kill dinosaurs and dudes with a knife, bow, or wacky weapon--while bringing the gameplay mostly up to date.

This version of Turok takes place 200 years in the future, where the mohawk-sporting Joseph Turok is a former Black Ops mercenary. After a probably fairly honorable dishonorable discharge from the military, he's been brought back as an adviser to a band of deep-voiced hardasses known as Whiskey Company. The company is trying to take down Turok's former mentor, a war criminal called Roland Kane, but unexpectedly crash on the prehistoric planet where Kane's hiding out. So that's where the dinosaurs come in.

Propaganda tried to add some depth to the combat with a couple mechanics. Since there are essentially three groups on the dino planet--Whiskey Company, dinosaurs, and Kane's men--you're encouraged to use the groups against each other. Dinosaurs can be drawn to armed guards with flares or called out of hiding by breaking up a nest of their precious eggs.

Another addition is the stealth mechanics, which require silence via creeping around and knifing baddies and dinos alike in the brain using the context sensitive instant kill. Both the instant kill mechanism and dino manipulation worked like they should, but those weren't really what drew my attention in the very short gameplay segment I played. Though I'm not sure the thrill will last through the entire game, using Turok's trademark bow and arrow and knife to dispatch dinos and soldiers felt pretty enjoyable.

Though the original Turok had no multiplayer, its sequels focused heavily on this aspect, and the new Turok will feature both competitive and cooperative modes. The game will ship with seven maps for the 16-player competitive multiplayer, with three maps included for the specially designed 4-player cooperative missions. To learn more about the multiplayer and the game in general, I chatted with Propaganda Games' co-founder, vice president and studio manager, Josh Holmes.

Shack: What were the main elements from the original Turok games that you most wanted to bring to this game?

Josh Holmes: First of all, just from what it meant to the industry, I think Turok was the first console shooter to really get the console shooting experience right. So first of all I just want to acknowledge its rightful place in the history of gaming. I think a lot of people forget that--they think back to Goldeneye. But Turok was actually out there first and really set the standard for what a first-person-shooter was on a console.

The things we really loved about it was, it was the first one to really take you out into what felt like a lush expansive outdoor world that was there for you to explore. It sort of deviated from that corridor crawler Doom clone that had been the standard for what a first person shooter was. Although, a lot of that, if you go back and look at it today, was through the use of fog planes and basically like a 6-foot draw distance. At the time with the graphics that they were using and also a lot of the audio cues, they were able to create that impression of a huge world that you were exploring.

Loved the dinos, this idea of predatory animals that really turned the hunter into the prey. And then the inventive weapon types and this sense of satisfying power at your fingertips.

Shack: What were some of the specific elements you wanted to leave behind from the more poorly received Turok sequels?

Josh Holmes: I think, basically, the Turok fiction got stretched so far into just far-fetched crazy fantasy that it kind of broke, at least for us. So we wanted to ground this in kind of a gritty realism, and one of the things that we as a team have always kind of used as a benchmark when we're considering something is, how could you see this translating into a movie or some other piece of entertainment? And would you laugh at it, in that case. If you're watching a movie about this situation and the main character jumps on the back of a dinosaur and starts riding it, would you laugh at that? Yeah, probably, so let's not do that.

If you're watching this movie and a dino came out with machine guns mounted on the side of its head, would that be super cool or would that be laughable? So that was kind of a litmus test that we used for all the elements as we were going through the game. There was debate on our team, some guys were like, "Dude, that would be super cool," but ultimately we kind of made our decision as far as where these elements fell and what tone we were going for with the game and we arrived at something that was a little bit grittier and more realistic than those later games in the Turok series, or really any games in the Turok series.

Shack: So Turok looks a little different this time around.

Josh Holmes: We liked the Native American hero, but what we wanted to do when we sort of took those elements and looked at--Okay, how can we sort of twist these elements and reinvent it? What we ultimately wanted to do was take kind of a new take at what it meant to be a Native American hero. It didn't mean a guy in a loincloth and moccasins running around with a bone vest looking at dreamweavers and stuff.

We didn't want to do the stereotypical thing where the fact that he's Native American is the one and only thing that defines him as a character and other than that he's paper thin. We wanted to create a deeper, more nuanced character where his Native heritage was a part of who he was but it didn't define him wholly.

I know that reading a lot of the boards and everything and people looking at the screenshots and stuff, that was something fans were like--What, is he not Native American? Did you turn him into some kind of action dude? And no, that's totally not our intention and that's not what we wanted to do, but hopefully people will realize that you can have a Native American hero that doesn't have all those stereotypical qualities to him. And we day pay homage to his heritage as a Kiowa Indian and talk a little about that, and that's part of the backstory with him and Kane, but again it's not the one and only thing that defines him.

Shack: Has anyone at Propaganda worked on any of the other Turok games?

Josh Holmes: Yeah, we do have some of our engineers that have worked on previous games in the Turok series. I believe one of our creature AI guys worked on one or two of the previous games and there's a couple other guys that had worked on it as well. But for the most part, it's a new team. And it's actually a team that has come together from all different parts of the industry.

So we've got a group of us that have worked together in the past at EA on titles like Def Jam Vendetta and Fight for New York and NBA Street, and we've got people from EA who've worked on Bond and Need for Speed, and then we've got people from Ubi who've worked on Splinter Cell and Prince of Persia, people who've worked on Metroid and Quake 4, Battlefield.

So we've got a bunch of really diverse talented people who have come in and brought individual perspectives to try and create something that hopefully is different from everything else out there. I think first person shooters have been so done, especially this holiday there are so many great shooters out there. But the formula is pretty much the same.

We really wanted to see if we could stretch that and expand it in terms of the immersiveness and grounding you in a body as opposed to a floating camera turret and adding some of the third person elements that bring the reality of the dinosaur situation to the forefront.

Go to page 2 to read about Turok's platforming heritage, narrative devices, a possible PC version, PlayStation 3 features (or lack thereof), and Propaganda's upcoming projects.