[I recently discovered that I had missed out a large number of #1 games earlier in the ’90s. I am very thankful to have had many offers of help in covering them all! This strong start to the catch-up process comes courtesy of David C James, who you can find at pixelhunted.com and on twitter as @PixelHunted]
It’s the summer of 1993. I’m a dinosaur-mad ten-year-old. There were only ever going to be two words carved into my brain: Jurassic Park.
I’d read Michael Crichton’s novel a year beforehand and while the chaos theory, genetic science and corporate malfeasance stuff went right over my nine-year-old head, the gruesome dinosaur disembowellings really hit the spot. By the time the movie released I had the toys, the Panini sticker album, the McDonalds collectable cups, the official movie magazine and, that August, the official licensed Mega Drive game.
As was the style at the time, the movie has been distilled into a 2D platformer. You play as Alan Grant, desperately trying to escape the island after a T-Rex attack. You journey through the jungle, raft down waterfalls, sneak through industrial areas and escape through the Visitor’s Centre to freedom.
I believe there is an edict from Steven Spielberg that no character in a licensed Jurassic Park product was allowed to use firearms against the dinosaurs. As such, Grant has a non-lethal arsenal consisting of a stun gun, tranq darts, flash and gas grenades and uh, a rocket launcher. I’m not exactly sure how a rocket launcher is non-lethal, but you can see the dinosaurs breathing after they take a missile to the face so it passes the Spielberg test.
But in a neat twist: there are two whole campaigns stuffed onto the cartridge! Find playing as a middle-aged paleontologist boring? How about controlling a Velociraptor? To ten-year-old me this was basically the coolest thing imaginable. The raptor also way more fun to play as than Grant: able to leap across the screen and slash open an InGen flunky before they know what’s hit them. Plus, while Grant moves awkwardly, the Raptor is absurdly mobile and fast, able to leap about a screen’s height into the air. As Grant you feel like prey, as the Raptor you feel like a badass.
You gotta hand it to developers BlueSky Software for ambition: Jurassic Park has a lot more effort put into it than the average 16-bit movie license. The game shoots for a rough approximation of reality, with Grant acting much more like an actual human than most other platforming heroes of the time. The level design is also broadly plausible, though that often just translates into them looking a bit dowdy.
Lead artist on the project was Doug TenNapel, who’d go on to create Earthworm Jim a year later, and his attention to detail in the animation really shows. The dinosaur sprites were created by digitising the models used for the film (with guidance from paleontologist Robert Bakker), Grant’s animations were rotoscoped from a member of the development team and the game was supposedly developed on the exact silicon graphics workstations used to do the CGI for the movie (though I strongly suspect that is a marketing fib).
The game also touts its “Artificial Dinosaur Intelligence”. This seems to translate to the raptor enemies occasionally ducking under or jumping over your tranq darts, but hey, at least it’s an attempt to get across the movie’s point that Velociraptors aren’t your typical dumb monsters.
Sega and BlueSky Software spared no expense on Jurassic Park over its lengthy 15 month development. But, just as InGen belatedly realised, you have to follow up ambition with competent execution.
As I eventually realised at ten years old, Jurassic Park simply isn’t much fun. The platforming is clumsy, exacerbated by the number of frustrating instant deaths via bottomless pits and sadistic enemy placement. In hindsight the frequent unfair difficult spikes are because the entire game (including both campaigns) can be completed in about 25 minutes if you play flawlessly.
Despite that, I never beat it in 1993. I believe I saw the ending for both characters, but only after using codes to skip levels and max out my ammo. Playing through it now I dimly remember a Mega Drive controller being thrown in anger after endlessly dying in the trial-and-error river-rafting section.
From a 2020 perspective it’s a moderately interesting curio, but the decades have obviously sanded away every grain of graphical wonder. What’s left is a stilted, short and frustrating platformer that’s better left in the memory.
But from Sega’s perspective Jurassic Park was a wild success. It sold like crazy, picked up respectable reviews and – very importantly – looked, sounded and played better than the competing (completely different) SNES Jurassic Park game. Anyway, considering the vast, varied and often extremely crappy lineup of Jurassic Park licensed games that’d follow, this is easily one of the better ones.
