Turok: Dinosaur Hunter is a first-person shooter video game developed by Iguana Entertainment and published by Acclaim for the Nintendo 64 console and Microsoft Windows.

The player controls Turok, a Native American warrior, who must stop the evil Campaigner from conquering the universe with an ancient and powerful weapon.

Iguana pushed the Nintendo 64's graphics capabilities to its limits, and were forced to compress or cut elements to fit the game on its 8 megabyte cartridge.

[22] An evil overlord known as the Campaigner seeks an ancient artifact known as the Chronoscepter, a weapon so powerful that it was broken into pieces to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands.

The Campaigner plans on using a focusing array to magnify the Chronoscepter's power, destroying the barriers that separate the ages of time and rule the universe.

Iguana considered a third-person perspective similar to Super Mario 64 and Tomb Raider, but decided to make the game a first-person shooter instead.

"If you want to handle fancy particle lighting, and transparency effects, and you want to throw around huge amounts of math ... or geometry onscreen, it's got the processing power to do that, and yes it's a fantastic machine.

[30][32] Fitting the game on its 8 MB cartridge was difficult; ultimately, Iguana had to compress everything and reduce the quality of the music to meet size requirements.

[34] Due to cash flow issues, much of the money planned for marketing Turok was contingent on strong sales of Magic: The Gathering: BattleMage.

Acclaim explained that the game had not reached the desired quality level; Nintendo maintained that the delay was to "add more depth to the gameplay".

[41] Acclaim dubbed the March 4 release date of the game "Turok Tuesday", reporting that pre-sales at Toys "R" Us had exceeded expectations.

[42] Turok was a critical and commercial success, earning rave reviews from video game magazines[60] and becoming the most popular title for the Nintendo 64 in the months following its release.

[43] Douglass Perry of the multimedia website IGN compared Turok favorably to other first person shooters, saying that the title distinguished itself by allowing a level of 3D movement not possible in other members of the genre.

"[61] While agreeing that the game offers greater freedom of movement, a Next Generation reviewer opined that first-person platforming does not work since the player cannot see their character.

[55] The Australian's Steve Polak wrote that while Turok was highly derivative, the game was evidence of the evolution of the genre, offering more graphics and gameplay options.

[46] In contrast, William Burrill of The Toronto Star wrote that Turok offered nothing new if players had tried a first-person shooter before,[63] and Next Generation Online said that its similar gameplay essentially made the game "a very pretty Duke Nukem".

Perry, GamePro, and Next Generation all noted that while many players would not initially like using the Nintendo 64's analog stick for weapon movement, they would become adept at the control scheme.

[62] George Mannes of The Daily News found the controls to be easy to learn and simple to keep track of in comparison to PC shooters, but said the joystick control could be disorienting: "the only problem is when you look up in the air and make the slightest twitch to the left or the right, you can end up like a tourist staring up at the Empire State Building and whirling like a dervish," he wrote.

[17][19][22] Critics lauded Turok's graphics; while giving the rest of the game a tepid response, Burrill and the EGM team both rated the visuals highly.

[21][22][61] GameSpot's Jeff Gerstmann noted that the graphics came at a price; if more than a few enemies appeared on screen at the same time, the game's frame rate would slow down.

Gerstmann wrote that the distance fog used to reduce the slowdown was a "neat effect" as enemies would appear out of the mist "fangs first", although it masked the console's limitations.

Like Next Generation, he said that while the graphics are impressive, the limited textures and constant fog make the game disorienting, and first-person platform jumping does not work.

[44] Worldwide sales of Turok: Dinosaur Hunter surpassed $60 million in late June 1997,[69][70] and accounted for 45% of Acclaim's revenues in the fiscal quarter in which the game was released.

[76][77] NGC Magazine wrote that Turok changed perceptions of a Nintendo console: "On a machine from a company that had long specialised in primary colours and family fun, the last thing anyone anticipated was the kind of cutting-edge first-person shooter that was previously the sole preserve of expensive gaming PCs."

Following the game's success, Sculptured Software (another of Acclaim's internal studios) conducted tests to see if Turok: Dinosaur Hunter could be faithfully converted to the PlayStation.

In February 2017, the source code of the N64 version was sold on eBay for $2551.99 which was found on a SGI Silicon Graphics Indy development machine which originated from the Acclaim Entertainment liquidation.