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I searched and couldn't find an answer. I recall one of the designers in an interview saying that they were thrilled to have found a logical reason for putting them in, but in the movie-ized version of the game I watched on youtube it was not revealed. So is there a reason?

They were captured and experimented on by Shockwave.

Yes, but why do they transform into a form extinct on a different planet?

Fanwank. Emotional value. Bacause DINOBOTS.

Mykltron wrote:Yes, but why do they transform into a form extinct on a different planet?

According to the 'Aligned Continuity', they're based on extinct Cybertronian life. Shockwaves experiment was to create powerful/destructive TF's, but to help keep them subservient to him, along with the raw power, he was using beast forms.
You might want to read the Rage of the Dinobots 4 part mini, which covers this. This is a TF Prime comic, but as I previously mentioned it's all supposed to be part of the aligned continuity.

Shockwave also gets a peak in at Earth through that Galaxy Map thing if I remember right but that's in Earth's past when Dinosaurs are running around and he liked the idea. That's just what I gleaned from the previews and actually in game stuff though. That's more my head canon though as I never read any of the extra material outside the game.

Thanks ashe5k that makes sense.

I assumed it was because TF fans like Dinobots and their presence made the game cooler.

Real world explanation:
Back when Hasbro was first crafting the Binder of Revelation during the height of the first Movie trilogy era, they had come to a point where they felt they could no longer work the Dinobots into any future fiction with the brand now taking on a super realistic appearance thanks in no small part to the movies. As such, they felt that it was time to retire (perhaps permanently) the Dinobots as characters and had them put to rest until further notice, with Animated being their swan song. Notice at the time that the Dinobots has also virtually disappeared from the IDW G1 comics, having not been seen or heard from since "Maximum Dinobots".

Then, along came High Moon Studios wanting to do a Transformers video game, which they pitched to Hasbro and ultimately got cleared as the starting point for the new Aligned Continuity, coming in the form of Transformers: War for Cybertron.

Prior to this game's completion, however, Matt Tieger of High Moon heard about Hasbro's considering to retire the Dinobots and, being a big personal fan of Grimlock, took it upon himself to convince Hasbro to forgo retiring them. In response, Hasbro challenged him to come up with a believable explanation for not only why the Dinobots would turn into robot dinosaurs in a real world setting (at the time, Hasbro was still of the mindset of the Movieverse, in which they viewed Dinobots as unworkable for its realistic world), but also why they would do so on Cybertron in the past (which is where/when the games would be set).

As he really really REALLY wanted to use the Dinobots, Tieger accepted this challange and began crafting an explanation. The result was one involving space bridges and experimentation, which will be detailed further below. And the rest is history. The Dinobots came back into the limelight in the comics and have become so heavily showcased that they're gonna finally be put into the movies via Age of Extinction (the current Hasbro team likely has a different mindset from the old one).


In-fiction explanation:
Back during the war on Cybertron, Grimlock was the leader of a five-man unit called the Lightning Strike Coalition Force, who were among the biggest and strongest of the Autobots, minus guys like Omega Supreme, Metroplex, and such. As the war raged on, Decepticon scientist Shockwave eventually took an interest in the group and its members.

After Swoop infiltrated a Decepticon energy base, he was caught and captured by Shockwave. His teammates came to save him, but were overwhelmed by swarms of Insecticons and were all captured as well. Seizing opportunity, Shockwave used the five as test subjects for his latest experiments, reformatting them to suit the Decepticon cause and then discarding Sludge to be left for dead after Sludge was of no further use to Shockwave.

As Shockwave had the now-four Autobots at his mercy, he explained the nature his project. Previously, Shockwave had gained access to space bridge technology, and used the sole remaining space bridge to glimpse across time and space at other planets and eras. During his cosmic browsing, his eye was caught by one particular planet: A rather primitive organic world that was once dominated by powerful creatures of awesome size and strength (until a meteor struck the planet and wiped them all out, that is).

Impressed by the sheer raw might and awesomeness of these creatures, Shockwave took inspiration from them in his reconstruction of the Lighting Strike Coalition into the ultimate Decepticon weapon, one created from a symbiosis of intelligence and brutal savagery. However, he did not foresee their escaping (thanks in small part to Starscream) and the four redubbed themselves "Dinobots", with their first order of business after rescuing each other being to pay Shockwave out for his mistreatment of them.

Later, after the war ended but the battles continued, Shockwave eventually managed to re-kidnap the Dinobots (and Ultra Magnus this time) so as to finish what he started. This time, however, having observed how the Dinobots behave with their savagery and sentience, Shockwave declared that the sentience was no longer necessary for his experiments to succeed, as he planned to remove all of Grimlock's intelligence and render him a mindless monster for the Cons to bend to their will.

Thankfully, a quick save by the other Dinobots and Magnus, who had broken free not too long ago, prevent Grimlock from losing his mind and resulted in Shockwave being torn to pieces... only for us to discover that that wasn't the real Shockwave. No, the real Shockwave is safe and sound, and has several realistic avatars of himself that keep him safe from harm's way. The neverending struggle between the Dinobots and Shockwave raged on for thousands of years, having continued to this very day.

Sabrblade wrote:Real world explanation:
Back when Hasbro was first crafting the Binder of Revelation during the height of the first Movie trilogy era, they had come to a point where they felt they could no longer work the Dinobots into any future fiction with the brand now taking on a super realistic appearance thanks in no small part to the movies. As such, they felt that it was time to retire (perhaps permanently) the Dinobots as characters and had them put to rest until further notice, with Animated being their swan song. Notice at the time that the Dinobots has also virtually disappeared from the IDW G1 comics, having not been seen or heard from since "Maximum Dinobots".

Then, along came High Moon Studios wanting to do a Transformers video game, which they pitched to Hasbro and ultimately got cleared as the starting point for the new Aligned Continuity, coming in the form of Transformers: War for Cybertron.

Prior to this game's completion, however, Matt Tieger of High Moon heard about Hasbro's considering to retire the Dinobots and, being a big personal fan of Grimlock, took it upon himself to convince Hasbro to forgo retiring them. In response, Hasbro challenged him to come up with a believable explanation for not only why the Dinobots would turn into robot dinosaurs in a real world setting (at the time, Hasbro was still of the mindset of the Movieverse, in which they viewed Dinobots as unworkable for its realistic world), but also why they would do so on Cybertron in the past (which is where/when the games would be set).

As he really really REALLY wanted to use the Dinobots, Tieger accepted this challange and began crafting an explanation. The result was one involving space bridges and experimentation, which will be detailed further below. And the rest is history. The Dinobots came back into the limelight in the comics and have become so heavily showcased that they're gonna finally be put into the movies via Age of Extinction (the current Hasbro team likely has a different mindset from the old one).


In-fiction explanation:
Back during the war on Cybertron, Grimlock was the leader of a five-man unit called the Lightning Strike Coalition Force, who were among the biggest and strongest of the Autobots, minus guys like Omega Supreme, Metroplex, and such. As the war raged on, Decepticon scientist Shockwave eventually took an interest in the group and its members.

After Swoop infiltrated a Decepticon energy base, he was caught and captured by Shockwave. His teammates came to save him, but were overwhelmed by swarms of Insecticons and were all captured as well. Seizing opportunity, Shockwave used the five as test subjects for his latest experiments, reformatting them to suit the Decepticon cause and then discarding Sludge to be left for dead after Sludge was of no further use to Shockwave.

As Shockwave had the now-four Autobots at his mercy, he explained the nature his project. Previously, Shockwave had gained access to space bridge technology, and used the sole remaining space bridge to glimpse across time and space at other planets and eras. During his cosmic browsing, his eye was caught by one particular planet: A rather primitive organic world that was once dominated by powerful creatures of awesome size and strength (until a meteor struck the planet and wiped them all out, that is).

Impressed by the sheer raw might and awesomeness of these creatures, Shockwave took inspiration from them in his reconstruction of the Lighting Strike Coalition into the ultimate Decepticon weapon, one created from a symbiosis of intelligence and brutal savagery. However, he did not foresee their escaping (thanks in small part to Starscream) and the four redubbed themselves "Dinobots", with their first order of business after rescuing each other being to pay Shockwave out for his mistreatment of them.

Later, after the war ended but the battles continued, Shockwave eventually managed to re-kidnap the Dinobots (and Ultra Magnus this time) so as to finish what he started. This time, however, having observed how the Dinobots behave with their savagery and sentience, Shockwave declared that the sentience was no longer necessary for his experiments to succeed, as he planned to remove all of Grimlock's intelligence and render him a mindless monster for the Cons to bend to their will.

Thankfully, a quick save by the other Dinobots and Magnus, who had broken free not too long ago, prevent Grimlock from losing his mind and resulted in Shockwave being torn to pieces... only for us to discover that that wasn't the real Shockwave. No, the real Shockwave is safe and sound, and has several realistic avatars of himself that keep him safe from harm's way. The neverending struggle between the Dinobots and Shockwave raged on for thousands of years, having continued to this very day.

....

I knew most of the in-game explanation, but wasn't aware of Hasbro's intentions of "retiring" the Dinobots.

Many thanks for the detailed explanation!

Though, thinking more about it, I think I got some of the timeline details wrong as the creation of the Animated Dinobots might have come about after Hasbro was convinced to not retire the Dinobots instead of before.

I'm highly skeptical that Matt Tieger single-handily saved the Dinobots (some of the most popular Transformers ever) from permanent retirement. No other group of Transformers ever got retired, and the whole "Aligned" business seems like a gigantic melting pot of concepts anyways (especially in the novels). Plus there were classic Dinobot-themed toys in Animated, PCC, and DotM (the Mini-Cons), not to mention MP Grimlock.
"Saved the Dinobots" strikes me as a publicity stunt for FoC. There's probably a kernel of truth to it, but I just can't fathom Hasbro releasing nearly every dinosaur TF in familiar silver, gold, and red colors while simultaneously trying to "kill off" Grimlock of all bots.

Noideaforaname wrote:I'm highly skeptical that Matt Tieger single-handily saved the Dinobots (some of the most popular Transformers ever) from permanent retirement. No other group of Transformers ever got retired, and the whole "Aligned" business seems like a gigantic melting pot of concepts anyways (especially in the novels). Plus there were classic Dinobot-themed toys in Animated, PCC, and DotM (the Mini-Cons), not to mention MP Grimlock.
"Saved the Dinobots" strikes me as a publicity stunt for FoC. There's probably a kernel of truth to it, but I just can't fathom Hasbro releasing nearly every dinosaur TF in familiar silver, gold, and red colors while simultaneously trying to "kill off" Grimlock of all bots.

Most of those Dinobot toys you mentioned likely came after the retirement decision was dropped (and MP Grimlock was all Takara, independent of Hasbro). Production for both the Aligned Continuity and the WFC game began way back as far back as the first movie coming out in 2007, so the cancellation of the retirement could have happened around then.

Wow, they were setting up since then? Huh.

Though I did get the impression that the debate over the Dinobots happened during FoC's development, as we never heard of any kind of retirement before then. If they "saved" them during WfC's development you'd expect the Dinobots to star in WfC, too. Grimlock and Swoop appear in the DS version, of course, but notably without dinosaur modes, which seems to support that they hadn't completely saved the Dinobots...

... but Grimstone and his Dinobots were being developed and released around the same time, so uh... ???

Noideaforaname wrote:Though I did get the impression that the debate over the Dinobots happened during FoC's development, as we never heard of any kind of retirement before then.

True, but in the FOC interviews that talk about how they got the Dinobots into the game, Tieger talks about High Moon coming in and helping to think up the new origin at the time when Hasbro was "working on the bible", which would have had to have been before WFC's production. It seems like it was just the story of WFC necessitated that the new origin of the Dinobots be pushed back into the second game since it wouldn't fit with the first game's story.

But if they did come up with the new origin back when planning WFC, that would give them enough time to have the Dinobots be worked into the Binder (explaining the "grimlock comes from Simfur" thing mentioned in the Vault book) and to have Grimlock and Swoop be in the DS game (who wouldn't interfere with the new origin by having them in pre-Dino vehicle mode bodies).

Though, as for it being just Tieger who saved them, I think I may have worded that a bit awkwardly. I probably should have phrased it as "High Moon and Hasbro worked together to come up with a new origin story that would work going forward," instead of it being just Tieger alone who crafted the who thing.

Either way, this is the original article that talked about the Dinobots being retired and the ultimate decision not to - http://www.polygon.com/2012/11/14/3558604/transforming-grimlock-how-high-moon-saved-the-dinobots

Though, the article phrases the retirement as though it were something that was to happen just recently before FOC's creation, again, Tieger's mentioning of coming in when Hasbro was working on the bible strongly suggests that it occured pre-WFC, and that this article is a bit confused on the timeline.

Tieger mentions this in this video: