I wasn't expecting much from the initial pitch of "late-90s Macintosh pack-in game for children", but Nanosaur clears that bar just fine.

My family was poor when I was growing up, so our household usually lagged at least five years behind wherever the newest technology was at the time. Even then, the first waves of iMacs were still far too pricey for us to justify picking up half a decade after their release. $999.99 for the cheapest model? Not likely. If I'd have been both old enough and tapped into the PC market enough to beg my parents to buy one, there wasn't a chance that they would have listened. We wound up getting one of those bottom-of-the-barrel eMachines desktops that you could technically get for free if you mailed in the dozen or so rebates you were instructed to send off. My dad was terrified that whatever disk games I wanted to run on the thing would have given it a virus, of course, so I never really had the chance to get into PC games until I was a teenager. What I wasn't forbidden from getting into, however, were web games.

Nanosaur reminds me a lot of the stuff I'd used to dig up on sites like Miniclip, or OneMoreLevel. Remember On the Run? You ever played that? Also goes by the name FFX Runner? That game was in 3D! And it was entirely in your browser! That's a sentence that's a lot less impressive today, given the breadth of itch.io games that can be played via the web version of Unity, but unearthing the Macromedia Shockwave titles that ran in full 3D was like breaching the first hole into Tutankhamen's tomb. I didn't even know it was possible to do something like that with Internet Explorer. I developed a taste for those 3D web games, however hacked out or janky they were (and they very much were both, constantly). I have to imagine that something similar happened to the kids who supped their first taste of the PC gaming market from Pangaea Software. For better and for worse, I feel like I would have been enamored with this had I found it on AddictingGames fifteen years ago.

It's...surprisingly fine? It's definitely quaint. I'd take a dozen of these "press spacebar on the Nanosaur to start, press spacebar on the glowing emergency exit sign to quit the game" menus over any of the modern, minimal, live-service offspring that tries to obfuscate the exit button to force you to waste more time in the game. There's something about the UI here that's really setting off a lot of weird nostalgia. I know I never played this, but it feels as though I've played a lot like it. I think Cruelty Squad did a great job in capturing a lot of the weirder design idiosyncrasies present in smaller-scale games from the turn of the millennium, and this is that but without the veil of irony draped over it. It's cute.

The actual gameplay itself is mostly unimpressive. There's an irony here that we're at the end of the Cretaceous period and yet the Nanosaur controls as if we're in the Late Cenozoic ice age; it feels like you've got skates strapped to the bottoms of your little digitigrade feet. Considering how most of your enemies are content to just walk at you and deal contact damage, these controls can make it especially annoying to try to pivot around and shoot them. You're much better off just bolting in a straight line and hoping they lose you, rather than trying to take them in a proper fight. There are a decent breadth of weapons here that are certainly fun to have a collection of, but they're not especially varied. The heat-seeking missile is the default laser by any other name. The rest of your playthrough is going to be running around in search of eggs to plop into randomly-available time portals, with some light platforming connecting everything together. It's competent. This is especially impressive for something designed in a three-week window, as detailed in this wonderful write-up, here. Given these circumstances, perhaps it's a testament to the skill of the people at Pangaea that it reached the heights of "competent" at all.

You've only got twenty real-world minutes to win or lose, so it's borderline impossible for the game to overstay its welcome. It's short, it's breezy, and it's really nowhere near as bad as I was expecting it to be. Nanosaur certainly isn't going to set the world on fire today, but it's a wonderful little look back into a bygone age of computing and the free-form design philosophies that came with it.

     ‘Holy smoke, can I be dreaming?
     What's that waltzing up the strand?
     Dinosaurs from deeps are streaming,
     Come to jumble-job the land!’
     – Ray Bradbury, Lo, the Dear, Daft Dinosaurs!, 1980.

Played during the Backloggd’s Game of the Week (Mar. 7 – Mar. 13, 2023).

A prolific writer, Ray Bradbury has been the subject of numerous anthologies over the decades, collecting his work under various books. While most of the more romantic short stories had already been published in The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953), Dinosaur Tales (1983) collected several new pieces and provided original illustrations to accompany them. The Poe-like poem Lo, the Dear, Daft Dinosaurs! (1980), about dinosaurs doing ballet and other dances, was illustrated by Overton Loyd. The reader is treated to burlesque scenes featuring dinosaurs of comic proportions and almost frightening expressions. There is a certain tenderness to this whimsical creation of the imagination. Dinosaur Tales provides all sorts of material for children's imaginations – this is indeed the main subject of the short story Besides a Dinosaur, Whatta Ya Wanna Be When You Grow Up? (1983).

PasokonDeacon gave some context to the creation of Nanosaur, whose demo aimed to push the boundaries of 3D, particularly in the way models were articulated. The groundbreaking nature of the project led to Brian Greenstone being commissioned by Apple to turn it into a full game within three weeks. The title proved to be a huge success as it was bundled with the iMac. In this short showcase entry, the player assumes the role of a time-travelling dinosaur in the late Mesozoic era, collecting eggs from other species to support the future population, before the impact of the massive asteroid. The absurd premise of Nanosaur is reflected in the design of its protagonist: the Deinonychus is equipped with a jetpack and a machine gun to defend itself against creatures from the past.

The title remains relatively simple, as the objective is to collect five different eggs on a single map. On each run, the dinosaurs are positioned in the same places, as are the eggs, all of which can be collected quickly. On reasonable difficulty levels, the opposition is almost non-existent, and it is possible to complete the mission by jumping over the Tyrannosaurus Rex's charges without firing a shot. Players progress linearly through more or less open spaces until they find an egg: they then drop it into one of the time portals and move on to the next section. From a primeval forest, the Deinonychus proceeds along the slopes of a volcano before reaching a steep canyon.

As the first game for many American children, Nanosaur has a simple charm that stimulates the ingenuous imagination. Just as in Besides a Dinosaur... young Benjamin Splauding, fed by images from Irwin Allen's The Lost World (1960), dreams of the Ice Age and fiery skies under which dinosaurs fight, so Nanosaur seems to be the product of the overactive imagination of a child, who would have strapped a little plastic gun to the claws of his favourite dinosaur toy. The soundtrack, with its clear bass and airy marimba, paints the picture of a strange Mesozoic with a mysterious and appealing aura. The title is little more than a window into a new world, that of 3D, whose potential was irresistible at the time. As the player completes they mission, they are given a glimpse into the dinosaurs' future through one of the most universal of allegories: an egg about to hatch.

Move over 40 Winks Croc: Legend of the Gobbos... Here's the platformer adventure that helped save Apple Computer Inc. from bankruptcy. Every original iMac came bundled with this short but sweet demo, showcasing QuickDraw 3D and giving the kids something fun. And it stars a silly far-future dino blasting through its ancestors to grab some McGuffins. 20 minutes are all you get, and all you need, to have a round with what was possibly the most played GPU-centric game of its day. And it's still worth it today, especially thanks to Iliyas Jorio's source port for modern OSes.

We all love to say 1998 was one of gaming's best years, but rarely does that seem to include the Macintosh. I'm not saying that Apple's once-ailing prosumer home computer line suddenly got anything on the level of Unreal, Metal Gear Solid, or Ocarina of Time, but remember, this was the iMac G3's time to shine. Under interim (and soon permanent) CEO Steve Jobs' direction, the corporation snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, aggressively and effectively marketing a cheap but powerful enough Internet-age Macintosh experience to new users. Tons of schools, businesses, and home users bought into Apple's previously ignored hard and soft ecosystem, even as Windows 95 and its progeny gave Microsoft a near monopoly on the PC space. Beyond a better value product, the iMac was a triumph of design and advertising, this bulbous, umami-like machine benefiting from Mac OS 8's strengths over Windows and previous versions. It also happened to come with a curious pack-in game from this dude out in Austin, TX, stuck in a boring job at Motorola and raring to make another hit shareware game.

Brian Greenstone's the driving force behind Pangea Software and its earlier efforts, mainly Mighty Mike (aka Power Pete) from '95. That earlier release was itself bundled with mid-'90s Performa and Power Macintosh models; Nanosaur logically continued the relationship he'd built with Apple. His early work with Apple's new graphics API, first demoed in '95 and '96, proved important to the iMac's gaming potential, with said line using ATI's baseline Rage II series of accelerator cards. With scarcely more than a month to create a small pack-in title, Greenstone and crew put out what's basically the spiritual successor to Mighty Mike, but set in the Cretaceous.

Nanosaur's premise is simple: you've traveled back in time to 20 minutes before the great meteor mass extinction begins. As part of a civilization of uplifted 'saurs building from humanity's dead remains, you're tasked with collecting five eggs, each from a different species, and returning them to the future. Easier said than done, of course. None of the reptiles are happy to say you invading their land, stealing their young, and blowing up their neighbors. Unluckily for them, our protagonist comes strapped, able to use multiple weapons, power-ups, and a double jump plus jetpack to boot. There's only one level to play over and over again, but it's quite large by '98 standards, and Pangea gives replay incentives like a score table and secret areas.

Actually controlling this raptor is far from smooth going. Croc has the edge on this because it offers strafing, whereas Nanosaur basically uses tank controls. Sense of motion and air control's about as good as in Argonaut Games' platformer, though, and this short thing's more about combat and exploration than pure tests of jumping. No bottomless pits, no required collectibles in the air—none of the frustration I have to grin and bear when trying to save the Gobbos. Turning could have been faster, and I'm pretty sure this control scheme had to account for keyboard-only play, hence the lack of an analog camera. But it's simple, responsive, and offers leeway to less skilled players. Gamepad support's good, too, making it easier to spam shots than just tapping keys. I wish Jorio's port had more options for customizing joy bindings, though.

The game loop itself works very well for something this short. I only wish there was more to actually do here, like a more challenging second level or something. Every cycle of running and jumping across each biome, killing dinos and nabbing eggs to throw into a nearby time portal, feels like a small stage each time. Most enemies just want to ram you for big damage, save the pterodactyls throwing rocks from above. What makes dodging and obliterating them trickier are the environmental hazards, from spore bombs to lava flows, which complicate one's movement and approach. Expect to die a couple times or more when starting out, as there's some traps like the canyon boulders or stegosaurs hiding in shrubs waiting to catch you.

All this comes together to make a thrilling, if very lightweight and predictable fetch-action romp. Granted, it's a miracle Nanosaur plays as well as it does since Greenstone only had three weeks to design and implement the game itself. He'd originally planned this as a QuickDraw 3D demo showing off the tech's potential, as well as his own skin-and-bones animation system inspired by SEGA's recent The Lost World lightgun shooter. To that end, this transformation from pet project to miniaturized Power Pete turned out way better than Greenstone, Apple, or anyone else could have expected. I can beat this in less than 10 minutes, knowing the layout and mechanics quite well now, but so many kids enjoyed trying this over and over again that the runtime hardly matters. There's a quaint joy in optimizing your runs, either for time or score, while jamming out to that funky jungle rock music, traversing the fog for more ammo and health pick-ups to feed your path of destruction.

Pangea had made a relatively small but useful amount of cash over the years, from their Apple IIGS-defining hit Xenocide to the trickle of royalties Greenstone received from MacPlay for Power Pete. But the company's deal with Apple was a boon for everyone, landing him a job on their QuickDraw team and soon leading to more shareware classics for iMac and beyond. As both charityware and a defining pack-in product, Nanosaur marked a maturation of the Mac games market, its success lifting burdens off other beleaguered studios like Bungie and Ambrosia. Greenstone soon leave Apple to give them another hit, the iconic Bugdom a year later, and eventually revisited our plucky chrono-jumping hero with 2004's Nanosaur 2. In the meantime, they put out an expanded paid version of this called Nanosaur Extreme, also included with Jorio's port. All this added was a new high difficulty mode, but having to deal with tens of T-rexes at once definitely gets everything out of the game's design as it deserves. I actually had to stand on geysers and charge up the jetpack when playing this mode, just to keep distance from the hordes cornering me!

I guess the pitch for trying Nanosaur boils down to "cool bipedal boi tears through budget Jurassic Park for great justice". This really isn't something I'd boot up for a revelation or even a great take on the prehistoric action adventure. It's also difficult to appreciate how graphically advanced this was in its time, combining detailed 3D modeling and animation with proto-shaders and a high rendering resolution matching the iMac's hardware. But I'm going out of my way to criticize or downplay a humble, very enjoyable piece of history which stacks up well to modern game jam faire. It takes the best parts of Mighty Mike and competing efforts like Ambrosia's Harry the Handsome Executive, shunting the Mac shareware world into polygonal view just like Avara and Marathon 2 had tried. Weird freeware collect-a-thon platformers would never be the same; given how far this one spread, they could only strive to beat this benchmark.

Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Mar. 7 - 13, 2023