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A lot of the anticipation for Jurassic Park: Survival not only comes from what looks like beautiful work by developer Saber Interactive, but from its association with what is definitely the most nostalgic point in the wider franchise's history: the original Jurassic Park film. For the past decade, most of the efforts in the series have tied into the new Jurassic World branding, including a series of terrific park-builder games, Jurassic World: Evolution. But this upcoming adventure promises to throw us back into the chaos of Isla Nublar where, in 1993, a theme park full of genetically modified dinosaurs went awry.
For Jurassic Park devotees, this new game offers something interesting that even predates the first movie. Jurassic Park: Survival might be the best chance yet to experience the park as seen in the original 1990 novel, which, despite its tight relationship to the film adaptation, features an expansive view of Jurassic Park that we haven't quite seen yet onscreen. But, to paraphrase the great Ian Malcolm, Survival might find a way.
Fossilized
Not that emulating Michael Crichton's bestseller hasn't been attempted before. The first novel is so potent that many films have since translated parts of it, chipping away at it like rock from prehistoric bone. Scenes and subplots are regularly extracted and placed in whenever a new film needs an exciting sequence: One of the selling points of Jurassic World: Rebirth was finally getting a chance to see the now-classic "T. rex chases a raft" scene. It's a novel that's not just been adapted once, but in pieces for over 30 years.
Its vision of the park, though, remains singular. It's why there are countless videos on YouTube of wannabe John Hammonds constructing what they imagine is a novel-accurate park in a Jurassic World: Evolution game. It's also why, when you ask them about their dream Jurassic Park project, many will say a more direct adaptation of the novel, perhaps in the form of a TV series. There are so many little details that filmmaker Steven Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp dropped, not for lack of care, but because a two-hour blockbuster needs to be propulsive. If including, for example, the novel's "Safari Lodge" hotel in the film weighs it down, then out it goes.
But in a recent "Behind the Scenes Featurette" for the game, Jurassic Park's hotel is one of the things that the developers, directors and producers mentioned as being picked up off the cutting room floor and added into the game. There's an array of park buildings, storage facilities, garages and other elements that were visited in the novel, but never made it past the concept art stage in the film, if they were even visualized at all. The park itself is traversed during the film, but the novel's trek is far longer and even more nightmarish, so it's nice to see a grab-bag of unforgiving jungle terrain included, too.
Survival's leading lady Maya Joshi, an original character created for the game, even feels like a continuation of the novel's extended park staff. By the end of the film, there are a handful of folks left uneaten on the island. The book makes it clear, though, that in the dinosaur-induced pandemonium, there could be a few InGen employees and workmen that are still unaccounted for (and likely fleeing for their lives.) Though the Isla Nublar of the novel is firebombed by the Costa Rican government, meaning that anyone still on the island would be incinerated, there is something very thrilling about the terror of being left behind, or at least left out of the plans for escape.
For years, the closest thing we got to playing through the novel was the Super Nintendo's Jurassic Park game, so full as it was with missions and locations that echoed the novel rather than the leaner film (like making sure that no dinosaurs were escaping by boat.) Looking back on the game – which was recently made available as part of Limited Run Games' Jurassic Park: Classic Games Collection – reveals a title as punishingly difficult as surviving the park itself. But for years, it served as a reminder that the film, though spectacular, didn't provide every angle of the novel's story.
There's no telling how much Jurassic Park: Survival will pull directly from the novel, though it wouldn't be an outlier to the franchise if it raided the text for some choice ideas. But even if it doesn't dig any deeper than applying some simple locations that the novel included that were absent from the film, it goes a long way in expanding on a journey that's never stopped growing.
Every sequel tends to raise the esteem surrounding the 1993 film, and every adapted sequence simply enhances the 1990 novel's impact. As the film's tagline said, it's "an adventure sixty five million years in the making." We've yet to see if our appetite for exploring this series will last quite that long, but from the looks of it, we're still ready to go back to the park.
