Dingo Pictures PlayStation games

Dingo Pictures was a Germany-based animation company infamous for producing extremely low-quality mockbuster films. Originally releasing their movies on VHS, they were later redubbed and rereleased (without the license to do so) by WG Verlag, who would later give the "rights" to budget publisher Midas Interactive, which released them in video game form, with a few added minigames aimed at younger children. Lambasted by internet critics not just for the movies' poor quality but also for having very minimal gameplay, they're often one of the first things that come to mind when the word "shovelware" is mentioned.

The first batch of PS1 games was released by Midas, while the second batch was published by its "successor" (at least in this department) Phoenix Games, who would later publish ports of their batch for the PlayStation 2 as well as a different set of mockbuster ports not associated with Dingo. How and why these games actually got licensed by Sony is a mystery in and of itself.

Common - Development-Related Text#

In every game, starting from offset 0xD6A800 of GAMEDATA.BIN is a .doc file which contains information about the games' filesystem. Analysing the metadata, it was last edited by Colin Cuthbert, who is credited as a programmer in several games by The Code Monkeys.

Download The Code Monkeys Layout.doc File: mosesprinceofegypt-text.zip (9.62 KB) (info)

Midas Interactive-published Titles#

Consists of the following:

• 2000:
  • Goldie (August 25)
  • Moses Prince of Egypt (August 25)
  • Nice Cats (August 25)
  • The Dalmatians (August 25)
• 2001:
  • Anastasia (March 16)
  • Lord of the Jungle (March 16)
  • The Sword of Camelot (March 16)
  • Lion and the King (March 16)
• 2002:
  • Hunchback of Notredame (March 22)
  • Legend of Pocahontas (March 22)

Unused Graphics#

Lion and the King#

Though the game cannot be played in Dutch, graphics in this language still exist within GAMEDATA.BIN.

Hunchback of Notredame#

Much like Lion and the King, this game cannot be played in Dutch, though graphics in this language still exist.

Legend of Pocahontas#

Unlike the previous two releases, while a Dutch language option is available, this one cannot be played in French, though graphics in this language still exist.

Oddities#

While all of the other Dingo Pictures games use stills from the included movies for their coloring and slide puzzle "minigames", Lion and the King bizarrely uses stills from the 1966 anime Jungle Taitei: Susume Leo! (the sequel to the 1965 Kimba the White Lion anime) instead. A line of similar CD-ROM ports was published by TRS Media (which the PlayStation releases use assets from), and their release of Lion and the King (named Leeuw en Koning) not only uses those same stills but has a compilation of two Dutch-dubbed episodes of the show (indicating that a Dutch dub of Lion and the King likely did not exist at the time).

Phoenix Games-published Titles#

Consists of the following:

• 2003
  • Dalmatians 2 (April 18)
  • Dinosaurs (April 18)
  • Atlantis: The Lost Continent (July 4)
  • Winky the Little Bear (July 4)
  • Animal Football (November 7)
  • Detective Mouse (November 7)
  • Herkules (November 7)
  • Lion and the King 2 (November 7)
  • Toys (November 7)
• 2004
  • Legend of Mulan (February 13)

NOTE: While Herkules and Legend of Mulan are not based on Dingo Pictures' productions (Pure Magic's Hercules and Django Studios' The Legend of Mulan, respectively), they share the same codebase as the other Dingo Pictures games, and thus are listed here.

Unused Graphics#

Common#

Leftovers from Anastasia can be found scattered through GAMEDATA.BIN:

Herkules#

While the game cannot be played in French, graphics in this language still exist within GAMEDATA.BIN.

References#