So, with such a glamorous past behind it, have the rocky strata of JPOG stood up to 65 million years of erosion (or eight years of gathering dust on my shelf)? The answer is an unsatisfactorily neutral “well, sort of”. No 'savannah grassland' or 'coniferous forest' in sight. I had never done that before, and I haven’t done it since. Indeed, I had such a worrying amount of fun with JPOG, I bought it twice first on the PlayStation 2 and then, later, on the PC, the superior version. I realise now that spending hours seriously documenting virtual dinosaurs as opposed to, say, playing rugby, was probably a flashing warning-sign as to my present romantic life, but my memory assures me that I had an incredible amount of fun. Indeed, I stumbled as far as GameFAQs and joined the JPOG community forum where myself and other similarly over-excitable players participated in the ‘Dinosaur Studies’ thread where we would observe our animals’ behaviour and report it back like budding David Attenboroughs. It was a time when I was first stumbling into the internet, the little intrepid explorer that I was. My 12-year-old self firmly believed that he had died and gone to Cretaceous heaven: he had a game that combined his favourite genre with his favourite things.
Some years before reality sunk its cruel, merciless fangs into my dreams, before I took up medieval history and had an existential crisis, out from the ether popped Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis (or JPOG as it is affectionately known), a game allowing players to follow in John Hammond’s footsteps and build their own dream dinosaur park filled with the likes of tyrannosaurus and triceratops. It was only when I realised that I was essentially mathematically retarded and totally unable to grasp any scientific formula which claimed ‘x’ was a number, that it became obvious a career digging fossils in a dusty old riverbed in China was not to be my destiny.
Ever since my first viewing of Jurassic Park back in the murky, primordial ooze of the early ‘90s, dinosaurs and other prehistoric denizens have held a special place in my heart. Accidentally release it.īefore I wanted to be a writer/astronaut/documentarian/videogame designer/actor/billionaire, I had grand designs of being the world’s greatest palaeontologist.
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