The more I thought about it, however, the more I started to bite my nails.
Back to the Future is fine. It actually shares a lot with the Monkey Island series in terms of tone. It's funny, it's balances a lighthearted and epic storyline at the same time, and focuses on the characters and their interactions. Therefore, it was no surprise to me that when Telltale finally released this concept art for the new Back to the Future game, it looked genuinely awesome. Jurassic Park, though?
Do me a favor, and take a look at the following image:
Look real hard. These are some of the featured characters from Telltale's biggest franchises. What you have here is a sarcastic Mexican wrestler, two anthropomorphic detectives, a bumbling mighty pirate, a prehistoric animal that feasts on the flesh of living things and strikes fear into the hearts of children across the world, and a goofy inventor who lives with a dog.
One of theses things is not like the others.
It's not that I think that Jurassic Park can't be translated into a video game. After all, there have been many Jurassic Park games running the full range of good, bad, and ugly. What makes me hesitate is that Telltale games (to date) tend to follow the same shtick: Light, episodic, cartoony adventure games with a sense of humor. It's a great shtick and I'm all for branching out, but it seems like they might be a little bit over their heads with this one. So, Telltale, just in case you're a bit stuck, here are five things that I think a good Jurassic Park game should be.
A Jurassic Park game should be:
1. Dark and terrifying
Remember that part in Jurassic Park where Robert Muldoon (the Australian guy) is sitting in the bushes trying to line up a shot to kill a Velociraptor and another Velociraptor pops up right beside him and he realizes for two brief seconds that he's been ambushed before he is viciously torn apart and devoured? Remember how afterwards you had to change your underwear, couldn't sleep at night, and to this day are scared to death of the jungle?
Jurassic Park is a scary movie based on a scary book based on a scary group of animals that we'd better be glad can't be resurrected in real life because they would eat us. That's part of what makes it good.
A Jurassic Park game should capture that feeling and run with it. The atmosphere should be tense. We should hear the distant roars of different dinosaurs, find the bodies of their victims, see them dart through the trees, and hope that they're full. When we come face to face with a dinosaur, we should feel like I'm sure Robert Muldoon did after that second raptor popped out: scared out of our minds.
2. An adventure game
As far as I know, there has never been a Jurassic Park adventure game, and I think it's a pretty good idea. First, it gives Telltale a comfortable foundation and an opportunity to experiment with something that they're good at. Second, I feel like there's a lot of unexplored opportunities for puzzles within the Jurassic Park universe. Most adventure game puzzles require communication with other (semi)intelligent beings and interaction with relatively static environments, but Jurassic Park is alive and mostly devoid of human life. I would love to see the dinosaurs be incorporated into puzzles in different ways. In addition, adventure games are usually non-combat. Not having combat would lead to all sorts of interesting and terrifying survival situations. I think a non-combat survival adventure game set in Jurassic Park would be awesome.
3. About characters we care about
I don't necessarily want to rehash characters from previous books and movies, but I do want to care about them. This is one area where I'm sure Telltale can knock it out of the park. Before the Dilophosaurus spit hits the fan, we need to have a good read on each character, their personalities, and their flaws. One of the many reasons that the second and third movies were so terrible was that the characters were all stilted stereotypes that no one could find interesting. Every character in the first movie was developed enough that we had at least one reason that we didn't want them to get eaten by a T-Rex.
One thing that I find interesting about the (mostly terrible) new Jurassic Park comic book is that the main characters are adult versions of Lex and Tim, the kids from the first movie, but they're very different. Lex grows up trying to preserve the island and its scaly inhabitants and tries to protect them from the outside world while Tim tries to keep his grandfather's dream alive by opening a new, much more secure, carnivore-free park. They are constantly at odds, working at every chance to sabotage the other's plans, even though they still love each other.
That's the kind of emotional investment that we need out of a game. We need something besides "let's go back to the island because [insert stupid MacGuffin here]" as a plot.
4. Set on Isla Nublar
Okay, this one is really just a personal thing, but think about the Jurassic Park series for a second. There has been exactly one book, one movie, and one game (possibly two) that have had the words "Jurassic Park" in the title and not been terrible. What do they all have in common? Isla Nublar.
See, there's two islands with dinosaurs on them in the Jurassic Park universe: Isla Nublar (Jurassic Park) and Isla Sorna (Lost World, Jurassic Park III). Isla Sorna is the location of "Site B," a facility where the dinosaurs were allowed to mature before being sent to the park. Every story that has ever taken place on Isla Sorna has been awful. We could speculate that this is because we don't get the feeling of lost security on Isla Sorna or that the lack of human element detracts from the experience. But, seriously? I think the place is cursed, and I don't want to go back there again.
5. Awe-inspiring and breath-taking.
Jurassic Park is not just about watching people get torn up by dinosaurs. It's about trying and failing to control something bigger than you, human beings fighting nature, and ultimately, about life finding a way. These are grandiose themes that should be met with grandiose images. The first few minutes on the island in Jurassic Park make up one of my favorite moments in movie history. The beautiful scenery, the tearfully moving music, and the juxtaposition of human beings to such magnanimous creatures are what separate Jurassic Park from every other creature thriller out there.
You should feel tiny in a Jurassic Park game, like you're part of a bigger world that you couldn't control even if you had the desire to. There should be mountains, waterfalls, and rich jungles full of life. The main character of any good Jurassic Park story is nature itself. Whoever you play as in this game should be out of his/her element, and it should be beautiful.
That's not too much to ask, right?
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