Collection essentials #241: Prehistorik Man (SNES)

This is another game I acquired in my mid-childhood, I believe another yard sale find. The box and manual shown here were acquired as an adult, but I’m pretty sure the cartridge is my childhood copy (though I’m annoyingly not quite 100% sure). One thing that immediately endeared me to this game was the main character, and more precisely his name…Sam!! You play as Sam the caveman in a cartoony fictional prehistoric world. While other cavemen in this game talk and appear to be intelligent like normal humans, Sam doesn’t talk and seems to basically be a dog in a human body, which is kinda weird, but it works for a goofy game like this. The plot of the game is that a bunch of evil dinosaurs have stolen a bunch of food from the humans, and the village elder tasks Sam with getting it all back in time for the winter. 

Prehistorik Man is a platform that has a lot of big open levels that it wants the player to explore thoroughly to be rewarded with secrets, power-ups and ultimately 100% completion after collecting all food. Sam uses a club for a weapon and can occasionally shout to defeat all susceptible enemies on screen, and he can find temporary things to use throughout the course of the game as well.

Now, there’s one big, glaring problem with Prehistorik Man: it’s a fairly long game for its time (probably will take at least 2 hours or more for the average gamer to beat), with big levels that a player may want to take their time exploring, especially with an emphasis on attaining 100% completion…but there is NO WAY TO SAVE YOUR GAME! I honestly am shocked that the developers let this happen. There is a cheat code one can enter to skip to any level, but the problem with this is that you will do so with no power-ups accumulated, and this puts you at quite a disadvantage. For this reason, I didn’t spend as much time with this game as it deserved, because doing it all in one sitting just felt really unreasonable. 

Now, as an adult living alone many years later, finally, one day where I had nothing going on, I decided to sit down with this game and see it through from beginning to end. And what do you know, I really liked it a lot. My expectations were exceeded, even! The level and boss designs are fun and clever enough for the game to stand out among tough competition. 

The game later got ported to future Nintendo systems. I haven’t played those versions, but I’m sure they were downgraded in terms of graphics and audio from the original, at least. 

Despite the huge terrible flaw, Prehistorik Man is a pretty wonderful game. I get a certain satisfaction from finally getting around to playing through and beating again after putting it on the back burner for years and years, and this game is a good example of that. An overlooked, underrated SNESsential, this one is.