No Animals Were Hurt During the Making of Primal Rage

Our Starcade promo for this game could go as follows:

In a not too distant future, human civilization on Earth came to ruin and brought about the new age of godly beasts, each with their own special moves, fighting style, and plan for the world.  Select the beast you want to control and battle the many challengers around the new Urth. With each battle where you are successful, you will be one step closer ruling the new Urth.  Let the era of Primal Rage begin.

As you just read, Primal Rage is basically your standard fighting game from 1994 complete with special moves for each character.  However, the game takes place with animals such as dinosaurs and other primal beasts, which is not very normal for a fighting game.  The premise is very straightforward since you are only fighting for domination of the world, let alone mankind.

The mechanics of the game are a bit unconventional compared to many other big-time fighting game franchises.  The game incorporates a four-button system similar to Mortal Kombat with lows, highs, fierce, and quick attacks, each with their own varying degree of damage.  The process of executing special moves, however, is not conventional between the two to three attack buttons in each special and then the directions.  For example, to execute Blizzard's freeze breath to freeze a foe, you have to execute this command: (HQ+HF+LF),A,T.  This is to say that you need a high quick, a high fierce, and a low fierce at the same time, move back, then move forward.  The combo system is a neat part of the fighting mechanics not unlike those found in every Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter today. If there was anything else to make it unconventional, it would be the ability for the characters to eat innocent humans to recover health.

The underlying construction of the game seems to be on par with everything else going on at that time.  The sprites of the game are based on stop-motion animation similar to claymation and action figures.  Though it was the only thing available to bring video games with those characters to a pre-rendered life, it still did not hold anything groundbreaking since Mortal Kombat did it with Goro (flex your muscles now).  Second, game studios such as Capcom dominated the genre in the 1990s with so many things between Street Fighter 2 and 3.

The legacy of Primal Rage is relatively small.  There were other tie-in materials such as actual action figures and books to boost the visibility, even the team of Dexter's Laboratory made reference to the game.  A second episode was also in development since 1995, but it was not expected to sell well enough to continue developing and was therefore cancelled.  The big thing that killed the game's legacy was an excessive amount of censorship in the ports and MAME emulation, resulting from convoluted security encryption, the lack of programmers who know anything about the encryption, and the growing concern of violence in video games.
If anything, I would not say that it is a great game, but Primal Rage is a pretty interesting find and needs some attention, especially in the arcade where it is in its rawest form.