An interesting piece of first person shooter history has been discovered in the files of an old SGI Indy workstation, acquired from the liquidation of Acclaim Entertainment. Documented by retro tech YouTuber SiliconClassics, he has found the original source code for Turok: Dinosaur Hunter within the files of an SGI Indy, previously used by Turok developer Iguana Entertainment.
If you’re looking for modern fare, check out these top PC shooters.
The actual story of how SiliconClassics got these workstations is quite the long winded one. He bought them off of a Russian warehouse manager in Brooklyn in the summer of 2016, who in turn bought them from the liquidation sale of Acclaim Entertainment back in 2004. Luckily, despite being on a shelf in a warehouse for the past 12 years, most of the Indy stations are still working, with their power supplies and hard drives all in good order.
This bank of SGI Indys contains files from various developers which were bought up by Acclaim, including Probe Software, Sculptured Software and Iguana Entertainment so there are more games to be discovered within the banks of these old computers. By the looks of it, some of the Indys even had the Nintendo 64 development boards plugged into them at one time, but they have since been removed.
While acquiring this archive of ‘90s game history back in the summer, SiliconClassics has only now started to sort through the mass of files located on these systems. Besides finding a healthy amount of motion capture data, art assets and developer documents, SiliconClassics very recently discovered the entire source code for Turok: Dinosaur Hunter on one of the workstations owned by Iguana.
You can see in the video above, the workstation in question has sound files, programming data, art assets and much more which all related to the original Turok. It’s a real treasure trove of information, with many clamouring for SiliconClassics to upload the source code to a file sharing site so modders and hobbyists can play around with this classic FPS. One of the actual developers of the Turok source code, Stephen Broumley, has even chimed in on the comments of the video, commending SiliconClassics for documenting this find.
With the large amount of attention resulting from this video, SiliconClassics actually released another video today (found below) where he outlines his future plans for this wealth of videogame history. As he is an attorney, SiliconClassics knows he cannot just release the source code out into the wild, as it is still a copyrighted piece of work and Turok: Dinosaur Hunter is still being sold on Steam by Nightdive Studios, who could pursue legal action. However, as he lawfully bought these workstations, the First Sale doctrine means that he, as the rightful owner of these computers, is allowed to sell these workstations on to anyone who would buy them.
As a result, SiliconClassics is planning to sell on these workstations via eBay, making it up to whoever buys these computers to do what they want with the contents of them. 20% of the money raised from this sale will go to charity so if you are interested in potentially acquiring the source code for Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, break out that wallet and get bidding.