In November of 1990 something amazing happened. Michael Crichton released his international best seller, Jurassic Park. Fast forward twenty four years and we still don’t have a video game that does it justice. Now they’re taking a crack at it again in Hollywood with the announcement of Jurassic World, which many around the world are pants-wetting excited for. So why don’t the developers of the world give it another shot?
To know what we want we need to look at what we have so naturally let us take a look at the games we have had so far. Since 1993, there have been Jurassic Park games released on consoles such as the NES, Game Boy, Super NES, PC:DOS and Amiga all the way to modern day PCs and the original Xbox. Now these games consist of mostly ‘side-scrollers’ like but there are at least two main attempts at making truly passionate video games in the Jurassic Park universe.
The first is Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis which, was a delightful game for the original Xbox, PlayStation 2 and PC. The game is centered around the idea that you have to make your own park for dinosaurs in a very similar way to Zoo Tycoon. Now, once you get past the initial “Oh my god, I can kill visitors with dinosaurs!” fascination, the game actually presents some solid features such as balancing the prices of entry fees, souvenirs, food, etc. Rather than focusing upon the dinosaurs themselves, you’ll spend more time making the park profitable and also micromanaging your research teams and dig site teams to give the most up to date technology and the most outdated ‘dinos’.
Telltale Games took a serious run at the franchise by releasing a game in the same style of its own colossal series such as The Wolf Among Us, The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones and Tales from the Borderlands. Unfortunately, Jurassic Park: The Game garnered a less than satisfactory reception from fans of both worlds upon release.
Many people felt that the game lacked the depth of character they had come to expect from Telltale and that both the story and setting were not brought to life like in the books and movies. One under lying problem with the game was that the quick time events were, ironically, too quick for a lot of players, causing players to distance themselves from the actual story. Telltale’s undoing in the game seemed to be how well they’ve done with those mentioned above . They delivered a mediocre game in the midst if too much hype.
Now we do have other games with dinosaurs in them which are more than adequate such as Turok, Dino D-day and the Early Access game theHunter: Primal that are all fun to play. That being said, these often feel gimmicky in the sense. It’s like taking a really bad film to producers only to say “Oh look! We added dinosaurs!”. That doesn’t matter, everything around the dinosaurs is still balls.
Now comparing these to the motion pictures and then to the books they are not nearly as enjoyable as they should be. Those pieces were iconic and successful in their respective mediums but the games? They sucked. They flew in under the radar and didn’t fly for very long
But what would a good Jurassic Park game look like? It would probably fall under the genre of an ‘FPS-RPG’ because of two crucial reasons. Firstly, it’s well established in the books and movies that us humans don’t stand a chance against most dinosaurs toe-to-toe, a narrative mechanism which is necessary to make us fear the nasty critters like the Velociraptor. In order to fight back we would need a weapon. Preferably a big gun.
Anyone who has played theHunter: Primal will understand what trying to kill a T-rex with a bow and arrow feels like. A first person perspective would also help to increase immersion and be very useful for a recent piece of technology.
Secondly, Jurassic Park has always been story driven but the one thing Telltale perhaps failed at was that it is driven by danger. Essentially it is a thriller. However, to be thrilled by any medium, a certain level of pace is necessary and Telltale’s work wasn’t matching that. You need to have a very strong character driven story to pull this off because us players need to be invested in this story. We need to care what happens. After all, everyone reading this has played many games where the story feels shoe-horned in as if it was a monkey in a suit.
Above all else the story has to be top notch. Let’s just toy with two ideas here. The first is that you a play a protagonist who has been on a boat or plane that crashed and they are stranded on Isla Nublar or Sorna and you have to survive with this group using what Ingen has left behind. Another idea is that you are a visitor to a new park that has multiple ways of failing for example a fault in the fencing system lets some dinosaurs loose. This would be a bit like Left 4 Dead where you have to escape the island from multiple dangerous situations depending on how the resort failed.
There needs to be choice, or the illusion of choice, present in some form or another. Moral choices like there is a kid stuck between you and a T-rex whilst you are heading to the helicopter. Do you try and save them?
The last thing that would be a great addition to a game like this would be . . . Virtual Reality. More specifically the Oculus Rift. Imagine looking over the expanse of a decimated Isla Nublar watching a herd of duck-billed dinosaurs nest by a lake as you can see a puddle in front of you ripple with tremors. You know what is coming and you know to get the hell out of there to avoid being (dino) sore in the morning.
The Jurassic Park property has potential to be one of the most thrilling and terrifying games out there. Maybe not in the ways suggested above, but it is fun to theorize and brain storm the possibilities that can be built with present day technology and the ever-growing video game industry.
What features and mechanics would you like to see in a new Jurassic Park game? Let us know in the comments box below.
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