At the IMA amusement fair in Frankfurt at the end of January 1993, Capcom showed Cadillacs and Dinosaurs in a cabinet of its own, fitted with extra loudspeakers to show off the sound. The Italian magazine Computer+Videogiochi came away calling the sound “favolosi”, fabulous, and the game “an excellent clone of Final Fight”. The clone had an unusual source. Capcom had licensed Mark Schultz’s comic Xenozoic Tales, set in the 26th century in a world where people live alongside dinosaurs again, and with it the Cadillacs of the title: the game’s copyright line carries a licence from General Motors for the Cadillac name, script, crest and body shapes. Capcom’s own release list dates the game to April 1993.
Fast facts
- Developer and publisher: Capcom, for the arcades.
- Released: April 1993, by Capcom’s own list; shown in Frankfurt that January, and “just out in the US” by September.
- Based on: Mark Schultz’s comic Xenozoic Tales.
- Players: up to three at once, choosing from four characters.
- Hardware: the CP System Dash board, with QSound audio.
- Home versions: none from Capcom.
Poachers in the 26th century
Computer and Video Games previewed the game in May 1993. In its version of the story, dinosaurs roam the planet again, their “curiosity value has rocketed”, and hundreds of poachers have begun hunting them. The dinosaurs, “having been made extinct before”, fight back. Four heroes “pile into a Cadillac and burn across the plains” to stop the poachers. The mastermind behind them is the scientist Fessenden.
The magazine described the four characters:
- Mess O’Bradovich, the strongest, who “once he gets angry” takes “more than a bucket of water to cool him off”, and sends poachers sprawling with a flying lariat.
- Jack Tenrec, the “Greenie” leader of the group, “a hot-blooded guy who loves nature”, best at a dashing sliding attack.
- Mustapha Cairo, a skilled engineer with “panther-like reflexes and incredible speed”.
- Hannah Dundee, the acrobat, who could “jump higher than a tree” and had a triangular jump attack.
Up to three of them could play at once. Each had a special move, a “Sure-Killing Technique”, made by pulling the joystick down, pushing it up and pressing fire, and two characters could combine their attacks. The levels were full of weapons, from M-16 rifles and hand grenades to dynamite and knives. Roast beef, egg salads and coffee restored energy, and gold, fossils and jewellery added to the score.
The dinosaurs were not simply enemies. Many are docile or asleep, Hardcore Gaming 101 explained, but one that gets “smacked by a human” will “turn enraged and attack who gets too close”. The poachers try to set them off on purpose, and a quick player can stop them; a raging dinosaur left alone will “eventually wander off”. The fight against the poachers, whom the game calls the Black Marketeers, runs over eight stages. In the third stage the heroes take to the Cadillac itself. Computer and Video Games described the driving sections, where “you all pile into the Caddy and take a spin across the desert”; Hardcore Gaming 101 called the stage Hell Road, an automatically scrolling road where the player runs down gang members and tries to ram Hogg, a biker who throws grenades from his motorcycle.
The ending, as Retro Gamer recounted it, does not hold back. Fessenden turns into a human-dinosaur hybrid and then into something worse, and once the heroes have finished him off they escape the exploding laboratory in the Cadillac “just in time for Jack to give a boring speech about how great nature is”.
A QSound cabinet
The game ran on what Capcom called the CP System Dash, a version of its CP System board sometimes known as CPS-1.5. Fabien Sanglard’s history of the hardware describes it as the CP System in a grey plastic box, with a fourth board added to play QSound, a positional stereo system that, according to Retro Gamer, the Canadian company QSound Labs had developed for Capcom. Cadillacs and Dinosaurs was the first of five Dash games, with Warriors of Fate, The Punisher, Saturday Night Slam Masters and Muscle Bomber Duo.
The Dash was also a security measure. Its sound processor was a special Z80, called Kabuki, that decrypted the sound program as it ran, using a secret key held in battery-backed memory. According to Sanglard, this protection was only broken in the early 2000s. The sound itself was harder to show off. Computer+Videogiochi pointed out that Capcom had already offered QSound with Warriors of Fate and few operators had taken it up, because of the cost and because it was hard to make the most of in a noisy arcade.
Reception
The previews were warm. Computer and Video Games said that “Cadillacs And Dinosaurs is a blast!”, noting that the screen kept up with the action and that “it’s always clear what’s going on”. Total!, which saw the game “just out in the US” in September 1993, was less excited. It was a side-on scrolling beat-’em-up “like almost every other comic conversion”, and “not in the least bit original”, but “it looks like it might be worth a few 20 pees in the arcade.”
Later writers have been fond of it. Retro Gamer in 2011 thought it “fun, and certainly polished”, but not a patch on Capcom’s Dungeons & Dragons games, and suggested that by the time it arrived Street Fighter II had made the scrolling fighter look “a little long in the tooth”. When Retro Gamer’s readers voted for their favourite Capcom games in 2013, the magazine’s write-up said it “actually improves on the Capcom classic Final Fight in some areas”, adding “neat vehicle sections, a more interesting variety of punch fodder with dinosaurs, and guns”.
A game that stayed in the arcade
Nintendo Power wondered in March 1993 whether Capcom’s arcade beat-’em-ups, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs among them, might follow Street Fighter II and Magic Sword onto the Super NES. This one never did. The only home game of the licence was a different one. Rocket Science Games, a Californian start-up, made Cadillacs and Dinosaurs: The Second Cataclysm for the Mega-CD, which Sega Visions described in 1994 as “an action-packed eco-fable set in a future where dinosaurs and desperadoes rule the land”, with “2-D objects in a 3-D world”.
Capcom’s arcade game has stayed where it started. Retro Gamer noted in 2011 that it had not appeared on any of Capcom’s collections, and Hardcore Gaming 101 wrote in 2019 that it had “never received a home port”, “most likely due to licensing issues”: the game depends on the rights to Schultz’s comic and on General Motors’ trademarks.
Sources
- Capcom, arcade game gallery, “Cadillacs & Dinosaurs” (archived 6 December 1998, web): release 1993/4; the Mark Schultz and Capcom copyright line; the General Motors trademark licence. https://web.archive.org/web/19981206233744/http://www.capcom.co.jp/gallery/arcade/1993/cadillacs.html
- Maurizio Miccoli and Sergio Tellini, Computer+Videogiochi (Italy) issue 24, March 1993, p. 114: the IMA fair in Frankfurt, January 1993 (the dedicated cabinets and speakers, QSound and Warriors of Fate, the 26th century, Fessenden, “an excellent clone of Final Fight”).
- Computer and Video Games issue 138, May 1993, arcade preview: the story, the four characters, three players, the Sure-Killing Technique, weapons, food and treasure, the driving sections, “a blast”.
- Total! issue 21, September 1993, p. 8: news (“just out in the US”, “not in the least bit original”).
- Nintendo Power issue 46, March 1993: Capcom feature, speculating about Super NES versions of its arcade games.
- Fabien Sanglard, The Book of CP-System, chapter 2, “Epilogue”: the CP System Dash, the QSound board, its five games, the Kabuki sound processor and its protection.
- Retro Gamer issue 42, 2007: CPS-2 feature, with QSound Labs and QSound’s earlier use on Cadillacs and Dinosaurs and Warriors of Fate. Wireframe issue 54, August 2021, p. 80: the “stopgap” CPS Dash with QSound, and Cadillacs and Dinosaurs.
- Retro Gamer issue 28, 2006, p. 108: the ending.
- Retro Gamer Collection volume 5, 2011, pp. 65 and 67: “The Unconverted” (the verdict; Street Fighter II; not on any Capcom collection).
- Retro Gamer issue 117, August 2013, p. 45: readers’ favourite Capcom games.
- Sega Visions, August 1994, p. 19: Rocket Science Games and Cadillacs and Dinosaurs for the Sega CD. GamePro issue 106, July 1997, p. 22: Rocket Science “that gave us Cadillacs and Dinosaurs for Sega CD” stops making games.
- Bobinator, “Cadillacs & Dinosaurs”, Hardcore Gaming 101, 3 June 2019 (web, secondary): the dinosaurs, the Black Marketeers and the eight stages, Hell Road and Hogg, no home port and the licensing. https://www.hardcoregaming101.net/cadillacs-dinosaurs/