Jurassic Park, everyone living in this generation and even the past decade knows the famous book written by Michael Crichton and the hit movie adaptation directed by Steven Spielberg. Everybody loves dinosaurs. They’re the most fascinating, yet dangerous, living animals of the planet more than 200 million years ago. What we see in museums are merely recovered fossils of these humongous creatures.
Even in the form of video-games, we see dozens of inspired titles with their own iterations of dinosaurs like ARK: Survival Evolved, Robinson: The Journey, Turok, and Dino Crisis. And with a popular franchise like Jurassic Park having its own theme-park simulator experience is the dream, and every dino lovers and gamers out there will be eager and excited to get their hands on that kind of game.
Jurassic World Evolution, heavily inspired by the 2015 film Jurassic World, is an upcoming theme-park sim game from the people behind Planet Coaster, Frontier Developments. Most outlet that reported its announcement last year at Gamescom in Microsoft’s Xbox media session, Jurassic World: Evolution is going to be a “park manager similar to Roller Coaster Tycoon” (from IGN) without any recognition of the original Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis developed by Blue Tongue Entertainment and published by Vivendi Universal Games and Konami for the PS2, Xbox, and PC in 2003.
I’ve been playing Operation Genesis since its launch in 2003. It’s one of the best theme-park simulators that featured dinosaurs, and back then, it was the ultimate dinosaur theme-park game that even Game Informer and GamePro praised its concept and gameplay. While it’s given that it does have that similarity to Roller Coaster Tycoon, it seems these so-called game journos forgot that a game like Operation Genesis existed. If you’ve played Operation Genesis in the past, you know that there are tons of references that Frontier Developments borrowed from Blue Tongue Entertainment’s dinosaur theme-park simulator.
Frontier released a gameplay demo, and if you’ve seen how the game works, you’ll see the helipad and the dig sites maps that are also in Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis. Coincidence? I think not. Frontier evidently borrowed gameplay elements from Operation Genesis and the studio forgot to even mention the game and how they could innovate and improve the ultimate dinosaur park simulator that everyone has been longing for. It’s sad to think that even the next-generation of gamers aren’t properly informed by big outlets like IGN since their so-called game journalists probably didn’t come across a game like Operation Genesis in 2003. They even have a review of Operation Genesis.
What I think, just because the game looks visually amazing, people tend to forget that without Operation Genesis there wouldn’t be a game like Evolution in the first place. I’m pointing at some major outlets, especially IGN, for not even taking your time to do research or even ask people from your publication if someone played something similar to Frontier’s upcoming game. Evolution isn’t an original concept nor is it the first Jurassic Park theme-park simulator, it’s more of a reboot or a remake of Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty much excited for Jurassic World: Evolution and it’s certainly going to be a day one purchase from me. It’s going to be one of the best simulators this year and with Frontier Developments’ experience with theme-park sims, I’m definitely confident that they can pull this off.
