Jurassic World began life as a sequel to infamous PC game Jurassic Park: Trespasser, Xbox creator reveals
Hold on to your butts, this is quite a tale
There are some things in this world that just take you completely by surprise. Drop bears, for example. It was a total shock, though, when co-father of the OG Xbox Seamus Blackley revealed earlier this week that the Jurassic World series originally started life as a sequel to 1998's terribly received PC-exclusive Jurassic Park: Trespasser. You can watch the original pitch trailer for Jurassic World that Blackley created below.
The main thrust of Blackley’s pitch is immediately recognisable as the foundation of the Jurassic World movies: humans having to live with dinosaurs outside of the controlled theme park environment. Blackley was prodded into working on a pitch by legendary movie director and bloke who mixed The Shining with Mobile Suit Gundam in Ready Player One, Steven Spielberg. Blackley says the team he put together “made a game design, an art design, and a story Bible”.
“We called it Jurassic World,” Blackley said on Twitter. “And we made the trailer. It was leaked long ago, and people were very confused by it.” Spielberg loved the game, Blackley continued, as did producer Kathleen Kennedy. The pitch was approved and Blackley’s team started hiring developers. Unfortunately for players of games, and potentially watchers of movies depending on your opinion of the Jurassic World trilogy, the co-president of movie studio Universal left, “everything was scrambled”, and Blackley had to send all the work they’d done on to Kennedy’s fellow producer and husband Frank Marshall for a movie that was being developed.
Blackley’s promised to share more in a convo with Derrick David, a.k.a. Jurassic Memoirs on Twitter, next month. In the meantime, he summarised the game in a tweet:
If you’ve never played Trespasser, then the basic gist is that you control an arm that has to save itself from being eaten by dinosaurs. Craig Pearson interviewed himself about Trespasser’s demo for RPS back in 2013. It’s an unusual read, but then Trespasser is an unusual game. Quintin (RPS in Peace) waxed lyrical about Trespasser all the way through the mists of time in 2011 too, although he was supposed to be writing about Telltale’s Jurassic Park episodic adventure series. You really had to be there, I guess.
There’s no way to download Jurassic Park: Trespasser on any of the modern storefronts, alas, although that's probably for the best.