Wonderbook: Walking with Dinosaurs marches onto PS3 next week

I’ve always been fascinated by dinosaurs. They’re the biggest creatures to ever walk the earth and their era covered over a hundred million years. With long teeth, razor sharp claws and giant club tails, dinosaurs are the original real-life monsters!

When Sony first showed Supermassive Wonderbook we were blown away by how intuitive a system it is. Blending an augmented reality book with the precision of the Move controller changes how you experience games. Whilst the images still happen on screen the sensation you get is that your living room has come to life. We instantly set about dreaming up game ideas that would make the most of this amazing technology. It didn’t take long for us to start talking dinosaurs!

Fortunately we already had contacts at BBC Worldwide so were able to start discussing bringing the Walking with Dinosaurs show to Wonderbook. At that point we didn’t know there was already a 3D movie in production. Our stars were fully aligned so it didn’t take much to get BBC Worldwide and Sony excited about the possibilities of bringing dinosaurs back to life on Wonderbook.

Walking with Dinosaurs is all about ‘Fun, Fear and Facts’. We wanted to create a new way of learning about and interacting with dinosaurs. With Wonderbook images come to life, popping as if the worlds and creatures are standing right there on the page in front of you. This gave us a unique way to introduce people to the amazing time of the dinosaurs, from the Jurassic to the Cretaceous periods.

One of the best things about working with the BBC is their incredibly rigorous fact checking. We worked with palaeontologists to verify and triple check that all our facts were fully accurate. It was an amazing journey full of mind-boggling discoveries – something we’re so excited about passing on to a whole new audience.

Did you know that the Tyrannosaurus Rex is nearer to us in time than a Stegosaurus was to a Tyrannosaurus Rex? If T-Rex had longer arms, a palaeontologist’s hammer and a curiosity for the past, it could have been digging up Stegosaurus fossils that would already have been 80 million years old!

Walking with Dinosaurs for Wonderbook lets you dig up the past and discover how dinosaurs really lived – and died. You start by excavating fossils on the book which then come to life on the page. From there you get to feed, fight, weigh, x-ray and chase dinosaurs in your quest to become a dino expert!

Each chapter takes you to a different time and place where you can interact with a host of different dinosaurs from the giant Argentinosaurus to the dome-headed Pachycephalosaurus. There’s even time to meet classics like the Stegosaurus and Triceratops, feed baby dinosaurs, or run for your life from the fearsome Tyrannosaurus Rex!

We’ve loved working with Wonderbook and Walking with Dinosaurs and hope you all get the same thrill of discovery and awe as you try it out for yourselves when it launches on PS3 next Wednesday!