The circumstantial evidence is pretty good.
It looks like we might be getting something interesting when it comes to Capcom’s venerated Dino Crisis franchise.
As reported by Gematsu, Capcom very recently renewed the Dino Crisis trademark in Japan. They filed for the trademark last March 4, and it got published to the public after a successful renewal yesterday.
Most of the time, these actions are pretty routine. The way intellectual property laws work, individuals or entities do need to renew trademarks after a certain period of years, to avoid other actors from claiming it, or to keep it from lapsing into the public domain. We won’t go any deeper into the intricacies of IP laws here, but some fans believe that this move is more than that.
Twitter user and Dino Crisis fan @Romy_Arths shared their theory as so:
“Friendly reminder that most of Capcom’s trademarks has led to some kind of new release, be it a re-release of an old game, or a brand new game entirely.
There’s an actual chance they’re doing something with Dino Crisis.
Here’s some trademarks from 2020 as an example. The majority of these games were included in some kind of collection, and in the last pic, we see Ghosts ‘n Goblins, which got a new game in 2021, as well as Onimusha and Okami, which both got a new game announced last year.”
Jawmuncher, who is another Twitter user and Dino Crisis fan, also pointed out that Japan and US trademark systems work differently. So in this situation, Capcom would not be moving to renew the trademark unless they were planning to release something new related to Dino Crisis.
Not for nothing, but in the last year, Dino Crisis was added to PlayStation 5’s PlayStation Plus library, and then made available as a standalone purchase on PlayStation Store. And then at the start of this year, GOG made the surprise reveal of Dino Crisis 1 & 2 becoming available on their store, DRM-free. This marks over 20 years before the PC versions of these games were rereleased for the first time.
As any longtime Dino Crisis fan will tell you, Capcom wasn’t able to sustain the franchise after the brand confusion surrounding Dino Stalker, a lightgun game spinoff, and Dino Crisis 3, which split off too far from the original characters with a new scenario in outer space and the future. It would actually be interesting if Capcom thought they could give Dino Crisis the Resident Evil remake treatment, and how they could make that work today. But we’ll see if these fans are on to something, and we’re about to get something exciting.
