Jurassic Park: Survival is coming to the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Windows. The game is being produced by Saber Interactive, as a sequel set immediately one day after the events of the 1993 video game.
However, it seems that there was a time when Activision maneuvered or the chance to make a Jurassic Park game themselves. We assume this is more than a tall tale, because it comes from no less than Activision’s former CEO, Bobby Kotick.
As Kotick explained in a podcast with Kleiner Perkins, one of his board members also happened to be Steven Spielberg’s lawyer. The lawyer called him up once, telling him that Steven wanted to get into video games, and they decided to approach him first.
At this point in time, Spielberg did have some experience licensing his movies into video games. Everyone remembers the infamous E.T. for the Atari 2600, but he also has the arcade classic adaptation of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
Kotick pointed out that the only license he was interested in working on was Jurassic Park. Kotick did happen to know the original writer of the Jurassic Park novel, Michael Crichton, but Crichton told him that he needed to negotiate with Spielberg.
So Kotick decided to make his huge pitch, that he would deliver the pitch in the form of a manuscript, put it in a dinosaur egg, and then put that egg in a crate. He then had the crate delivered to Spielberg personally.
Kotick also knew other people who were friends with Spielberg, and he tried to get them to contact the director to help convince him. After all this, Kotick called Spielberg to ask him if the pitch worked. Spielberg admitted that he had a great pitch, but ultimately he would give the rights to whoever had the most money.
At this point, Kotick’s story somewhat goes sideways. He claimed that Konami got the rights to make Jurassic Park games under him, but that doesn’t quite match up to what we know. Konami would make an arcade shooter for Jurassic Park III, but it was Sega and Ocean Software that made the first video games based on the first movie in 1993.
It’s more likely that Sega was the company that made the big bid for the Jurassic Park license. As reported in this Wired article from 1993, Activision and Acclaim both made their bids to make a Jurassic Park game on the Sega Genesis, but they both lost out to Sega itself.
In any case, it’s all very interesting to look back on, and it does make one wonder if Activision would have gotten that Sega Jurassic Park game right. After all, Sega was forced to remake their title to satisfy fans with Jurassic Park: Rampage Edition. None of those original Jurassic Park games are particularly critically well regarded, so we will always wonder if we had gotten that good one from Activision back in the day.
