Color a Dinosaur (1993-)

When I first slid Color a Dinosaur into the NES and powered it on, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Developed by FarSight Studios and published by Virgin Games in 1993, the title suggests a whimsical, lighthearted creative experience, and to be fair, that’s more or less what it offers—at least on the surface. The game boots up with some cheerful music and a screen full of cartoonish, friendly-looking dinosaurs, each waiting to be brought to life with color. For a brief moment, it almost feels like a simple but harmless addition to the NES’s dwindling library in its final years. Almost.

The one genuinely positive thing I can say is that Color a Dinosaur might serve as a short diversion for very young children. It’s easy to pick up—there are no complex controls, no difficulty curve, no failing states. You simply scroll through a handful of coloring options and press a button to fill in different parts of the dinosaur. The dinosaur illustrations themselves are cute and harmless, reminiscent of the kind you might find in a dollar-store coloring book. For a four- or five-year-old in 1993, with no access to more advanced creative tools, this may have felt like a novelty for a short while.

But even as a children’s game, Color a Dinosaur is bafflingly limited. The color palette is depressingly sparse, with most options falling into dull greens, browns, and a few garish patterns that resemble TV static. There’s no ability to truly “draw” or customize the images, no saving your creations, and no music variation to keep kids engaged. Worse, the game doesn't offer any guidance or progression—it’s just a loop of choosing a dinosaur, smearing it with color, and moving on. For a title released in the same year as Star Fox and Day of the Tentacle on other platforms, this felt like a sad anachronism—something more suited to a primitive home computer from a decade earlier.

As a reviewer in 1993, it’s clear Color a Dinosaur is barely a game at all. It's a piece of shovelware at the tail end of the NES lifecycle, likely meant to grab a few uninformed parents’ dollars before the 8-bit era faded out. Unsurprisingly, it has since gone down in history as one of the worst NES games of all time—not because it's broken or offensive, but because it so completely misunderstands what makes interactive entertainment fun, engaging, or even memorable. If anything, it serves as a curious artifact of a time when not every cartridge on store shelves was worth plugging in.