For a period during the mid-1990s, it was ruled that no blockbuster movie was really complete until it had also been translated into a rock hard platformer or run-and-gun arcade adventure, seemingly designed to enrage and frustrate children everywhere. Disney’s wildly uncompromising Aladdin and Lion King tie-ins were shining examples as were Probe Software’s challenging Robocop 3 and Alien 3 titles.
But veteran Manchester-based publisher Ocean was also a key purveyor. The company spent the 1980s churning out TV and movie games such as Miami Vice, Top Gun and Highlander, but its Jurassic Park titles were among its most ambitious creations and this new collection from cult retro label Limited Run Games brings its NES, SNES and Game Boy translations of the 1993 film together, while also including sequel Jurassic Park 2: The Chaos Continues and two Mega Drive tie-ins created by Bluesky Software: Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park: Rampage Edition. That’s seven chunks of nostalgic dino chaos.
Let’s be honest here: none of the games were considered amazing at the time. The original NES Jurassic Park is a top-down viewed shooter where you collect ID cards and eggs while blasting prehistoric creatures and attempting to escape the island. There are some recognisable moments from the movie, but it’s basically a pretty version of the influential 1985 arcade hit Commando. Jurassic Park: The Chaos Continues is a decent run-and-gun platform shooter with some nice cinematic sequences, but it arrived at a time when seemingly every game was a run-and-gun platform shooter. Meanwhile, the Mega Drive titles were platforming adventures heavily influenced by titles such as Flashback and Another World sporting similarly smooth character animation and filmic narrative style.
However, Limited Run has done an excellent job of curating and updating these digital fossils for modern players and fans of the movie franchise who missed out on them first time round. It includes the ability to save your position wherever you are in the games and also to rewind time, so that you don’t have to go right back to the beginning of every level over and over again due to one comically sadistic pixel-perfect jump challenge. There are also options to go full screen or stick with the original display ratio, and to add a platform-specific filter – CRT scanlines for the console titles and a dot matrix style overlay for the Game Boy adaptations. Limited Run has even added new on-screen maps for spoilt millennials who don’t like getting lost in a vast dinosaur enclosure. My only major disappointment is that there is no museum section providing information about the original games and perhaps images of the packaging, print adverts, etc. Limited Run provided a booklet with the physical copies of the release but those have all sold out.
As someone who played most of these games first time round, re-encountering them now out of their contemporary context is a sweet nostalgic experience. The graphical flourishes of the Mega Drive era, including weird digitised recreations of the T rex, and the modest attempts to recreate images and moments from the films – the opening gates, the crashed jeeps, the computer interfaces, the spitting dilophosaurus – speak a lot about how game designers had to really work to conjure the feel of TV and movie material. Weirdly, although I love the fact that the Mega Drive versions allow you to play as either Dr Grant or a velociraptor, it’s the Game Boy versions that prove most accessible and compelling now, with their simple controls and easily recognisable platforming conventions. They could almost be modern indie titles.
The same old arguments apply to this release as to all retro compilations: you can find these games online then run them on an open source emulator for free, though you won’t get the modern save features. You could buy an original console and a copy of the games on eBay, but then that will work out much more expensive and unreliable. For Jurassic Park lovers and retro enthusiasts, this is a really nice way to relive a lost world of gaming.
• Jurassic Park Classic Games Collection is available now on PC, PS4/5, Switch and Xbox, £25
