The Hidden Vault

 Have you ever experienced something so fun and addicting before, only to have it lost to time? That was my experience with Evolution Game, a computer game made for the Walking With Beasts (Walking With Prehistoric Beasts in North American releases) series by the British Broadcasting Company (BBC). It was an online game where players were tasked with keeping a small primate alive until they evolved into a different primate in a later epoch.

History

According to the Walking With Wiki, Evolution Game was released in December of 2001 and was taken offline sometime around 2007. The player started as a Teilhardina belgica, a small mouse lemur-like primate that lived in Eocene Europe around 50 million years ago. One of the most interesting and puzzling things about the game was when it taken offline. I personally remember that when I tried to play the game again in 2007, the website said that the game could not be played due to “technical difficulties”. However, the game was never fixed at all after that. I played other games on the Prehistoric Life page of the BBC site, and Evolution Game was the only game to my knowledge that had the weird technical problems screen. It is a huge mystery to all the fans of the game to this day.

Gameplay

The gameplay of Evolution Game was very unique as a computer game since the objective was to evolve from a primitive primate to a higher evolved primate through various epochs. The player started as a Teilhardina belgica primate in the Eocene of Africa and had to eat, mate and attack other animals to survive for a specific amount of time until they evolved into another primate in another epoch. Apparently there were six epochs that represented stages for the game: Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene and Holocene, but this is just an educated guess based on only a couple of surviving screenshots available for the game since we unfortunately don’t have a lot of background information about this game yet.

Since I personally played this game before, I have the privilege of using my own experiences when recounting this fun game. As mentioned before, you started off as the small mouse lemur Teilhardina belgica in the Eocene of Africa. The Eocene represented stage one of the game since once you “evolved” into another species, you automatically went to the next epoch. I remember that once I successfully evolved in the Eocene stage, I became either an Apidium, or a weird lemur-like primate with long arms and a proboscis. Again please take all of this with a grain of salt since it’s been a long time since I played Evolution Game and I doing my best to recollect my experiences with the game. One of the main selling points of the game was that you could actually evolve into different creatures depending on your choices in game. For example, eating only meat would affect your evolutionary trajectory versus eating only fruit. You could attack any animals, but you had to be careful because attacking large animals like Gastornis would instantly kill you. One of the funniest memories I have of the game involved trying to attack a Propalaeotherium as the small mouse lemur, and instantly getting horse-kicked into oblivion by the small and cute perissodactyl. I don’t remember the Oligocene too well, but from what I remember it was a beach themed stage that took placed in either Africa or Europe and you had to avoid sharks and crocodiles.

Where the game really took a turn though was during the Miocene stage. It was at this third stage where the difficulty really ramped up. The player was an ape of some kind and had to survive in East Africa. I remember one of the primates you could evolve into was an orangutan-like ape. The problem was that you only gained a small amount of energy eating either termites or fruit. You couldn’t gain enough energy eating those items, and you couldn’t find other available food for some odd reason. Dangerous predators included pythons as well as possibly large cats. Because you couldn’t find enough worthwhile food items, your ape would die very quickly and I remember that I couldn’t move past the Miocene stage no matter how hard I tried as a kid. It was one of the most frustrating things about the game, and I never got a chance to try to beat it when I got older when it went offline. The end game of Evolution Game has never been officially stated, but according to some of the images online, the player could eventually become a Homo sapiens and possibly even another type of human species by the end of the Holocene. However, I saw an interesting comment on Reddit recently from someone who played the game and they said that there could be a possibility that players could never actually beat the game past the Miocene since it was impossible to have the ape survive with the limited amount of food options. However, this is just a guess and we still don’t have official confirmation from the developers of Evolution Game.

Gallery

Sources

https://walkingwith.fandom.com/wiki/Evolution_Game

https://albertonykus.blogspot.com/2019/04/the-walking-with-beasts-evolution-game.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teilhardina

BBC Walking With Beasts "Evolution" game info?
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