Back to Dinosaur Island

Back to Dinosaur Island
Information
VR/AR	VR
Developer	Crytek
Publisher	Crytek
Platform	Oculus Rift (Platform)
Device	DK2
Operating System	Windows
Type	Tech Demo
Genre	Simulation, Exploration, Adventure
Input Device	Head tracking, Keyboard, Mouse
Game Mode	Single Player
Release Date	November 18, 2015
Price	Free
App Store	Steam, Oculus Share
Website	http://www.cryengine.com

See also: VR Apps and VR Games

Back to Dinosaur Island is a free virtual reality tech demo developed and published by Crytek with its CryEngine engine for the Oculus Rift DK2 development kit on Windows. The player sees the world from the viewpoint of a baby dinosaur sitting in a nest of eggs in a jungle, and the roughly five-minute experience builds to a face-to-face encounter with an enormous dinosaur.

Crytek first showed the demo at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in March 2015, where it ran on the Crescent Bay prototype headset, and released it on Steam on 18 November 2015. Road to VR described it as Crytek's "first foray into the world of VR", and Crytek's lead programmer described it as a tech prototype for the studio's later VR game Robinson: The Journey. A second demo, Back to Dinosaur Island 2, debuted at E3 2015 in June of that year.

Reviewed 9 October 2026. Release date, Steam requirements and developer statements, GDC 2015 demo details, Oculus Share listing, sequel and Robinson/The Climb links checked against the archived Steam page, Crytek, Road to VR, UploadVR, VRFocus, AUTOMATON, MCV and DSOGaming. About review dates.

Features

Back to Dinosaur Island has no locomotion or combat. In the press release for the Steam launch, Crytek described the player as "the eyes and ears of a baby dinosaur in a nest", surrounded by dinosaur eggs in a jungle environment, and listed the eggs, a dragonfly and finally an enormous dinosaur as the elements the player interacts with. The Japanese site AUTOMATON described it as a viewing demo in which the player can neither move nor attack and simply takes in the world along with the dinosaur eggs.

The interactions are driven by the player's head. Writing about the GDC 2015 version, Ben Lang of Road to VR said Crytek used the demo to explore ways of interacting in VR and described three of them. A giant insect hovers around the player's head and swoops in to sting, and the player can dodge it. A T. rex then emerges from the forest, approaches the nest, backs off and stares at the player, mirroring the player's head movements with its own. Finally, the eggs in the nest react with physics when the player headbutts them. At the end of the demo the T. rex runs off, and the eggs behind the player begin to hatch as the scene fades to black. The demo has no hand input; Lang wrote that headbutting the eggs felt out of place and hinted at the need for hand controllers.

Crytek's director of production David Bowman said in the launch announcement that "Back to Dinosaur Island shows how intense, involving and rich virtual reality can be. Players will see a powerful dinosaur breathing inches from their face, getting an unprecedented sense of its immense scale." He tied that effect to the feeling of presence in VR.

Development

At GDC 2015 Crytek's VR design director Patrick Esteves told Road to VR that the company had a 50-person VR team, and that 20 members of that team had made Back to Dinosaur Island in about 45 days using CryEngine 3. Esteves said the company was "investing a lot of time and money into doing VR right", and that Crytek planned to generalize its VR code and integrate it into the CryEngine SDK for partners and licensees.

The dinosaur theme refers back to Crytek's early X-Isle: Dinosaur Island technology demo. Crytek's Steam page said the original X-Isle/Dinosaur Island demo had impressed press at E3 in 1999 and that the new demo "takes advantage of 15 years of CRYENGINE development". In a Steam post after the launch, the CRYENGINE team wrote that the dinosaur subject was chosen "as a throwback to the initial X-Isle demo". UploadVR also described the GDC demo as a tribute to X-Isle.

Crytek called the project "a first test for us as a company to see what kind of visual fidelity we can achieve in Virtual Reality" and stated that it is not a full game. It was originally made as a demo for industry events such as GDC and E3. At E3 2015 Crytek showed Back to Dinosaur Island 2, a cliff-climbing demo. Lead programmer Dario Sancho Pradel told Road to VR that both demos were tech prototypes for Robinson: The Journey. Lang noted that where the first prototype "gave no hints of character, setting, or conflict", the second offered the first glimpses of the game's narrative.

Release

Crytek released the demo on Steam on 18 November 2015 as a free download, the first time it was available outside games industry events. The CRYENGINE team said it chose to release it after the convention season ended so that Oculus Rift owners could try it at home. VRFocus reported on 24 November 2015 that Crytek had also brought the demo to Oculus Share.

Date	Event	Notes
March 2015	Public debut at GDC 2015, San Francisco	Shown on the Oculus Crescent Bay prototype
18 November 2015	Free release on Steam	Oculus Rift DK2 required
November 2015	Listed on Oculus Share	Reported by VRFocus on 24 November 2015
March 2016	Back to Dinosaur Island 2 released free on Steam	Separate Steam app; DK2 with SDK 0.8 and an Xbox 360 for Windows or Xbox One controller required

System requirements

Crytek stated that the demo was built from the ground up for the Oculus Rift DK2 and needed Oculus SDK 0.6 or higher; other headsets were not supported. The company explained the high requirements by pointing to the DK2's suggested frame rate of 75 frames per second, with the scene "effectively being rendered twice", and said the requirements were specified to ensure a smooth 75 fps; weaker hardware could still run the demo at lower frame rates. Road to VR noted that the demo has no in-game settings to lower, and its writer reported that it ran without problems on the Oculus 0.8 runtime.

Component	Minimum (Steam listing, November 2015)
Headset	Oculus Rift DK2, SDK Version 0.6 or 0.7 (0.8 listed as "coming in the future")
OS	Windows 7, 8 or 10 (64bit)
Processor	Intel Core i7-2600K CPU 3.40GHz
Memory	16 GB RAM
Graphics	NVIDIA GTX 980 or AMD Radeon R9 290
DirectX	Version 11
Storage	2 GB available space

Sources: Steam store page and Road to VR.

Reception

In its launch announcement, Crytek said the GDC 2015 showing had earned "widespread acclaim from press and attendees". Road to VR called it "an impressively detailed scene, one of the most polished we've seen of any VR tech demo", while warning that the hefty minimum requirements and lack of in-game settings meant weaker systems would get "a juddery mess". AUTOMATON reported that the CryEngine visuals were impressive but came at a high hardware cost, noting the GTX 980 minimum requirement. At the time of the Steam release, user reviews on the store page were "Mostly Positive", with 71% of 123 reviews positive in a snapshot taken on 19 November 2015.

Legacy

Crytek's VR work continued with Back to Dinosaur Island 2 and then with two full games. Road to VR described the second demo, built around climbing a cliff face, as a precursor to both The Climb, then a forthcoming Oculus Rift exclusive, and Robinson: The Journey, then announced as a PlayStation VR exclusive; it said the demo's gaze-based climbing would feature fully in The Climb. When the demo was released, executive producer Elijah Freeman said that the lessons learned from creating Back to Dinosaur Island 2 had been significant for the company's current VR projects.