storyline from that of the Mega Drive/Genesis games; it is generally regarded as taking place in a separate continuity. The storyline and game are divided into four parts. Development Appaloosa's Managing Director Andras Csaszar told Official Dreamcast Magazine that development took over two years and involved some members of the team responsible for the original Mega Drive game. While the team did not take motion capture of actual dolphins, they consulted videos of dolphins in movement and spent "more than a year" to develop "a unique skeleton animation system" to achieve the "desired lifelike results". The game environment "took three or four full cycles of building, testing and discarding the results before we mastered the quality" and that their aim had been to evoke "National Geographic underwater video documentaries". The story was written by science fiction author David Brin, who had already written stories featuring intelligent dolphins in his Uplift Universe. Reception The game was received very positively and was considered "one of the year 2000's best" by IGN in 2000. GameRankings and Metacritic gave it a score of 81% and 84 out of 100 for the Dreamcast version, and 69% and 71 out of 100 for the PlayStation 2 version. References External links 2000 video games Acclaim Entertainment games Action-adventure games Appaloosa Interactive games Cancelled GameCube games Dreamcast games Ecco the Dolphin PlayStation 2 games Science fiction video games Single-player video games Video game reboots Video games about extraterrestrial life Video games about animals Video games developed in Hungary Video games scored by Tim Follin