Jurassic Park (Arcade, 1994)

There’s something ironic about Jurassic Park the movie showcasing cutting-edge rendering technology while Jurassic Park the arcade game has graphics on the verge of being extinct.

It’s summer 1994. Arcadegoers have already had two years to enjoy the slick untextured polygons of Virtua Racing, Virtua Fighter birthed the 3D fighting genre a year later, and the hot new thing as of March is the stunning Daytona USA. Those texture-mapped 60fps polygons made jaws drop around the world and teased a graphical standard that wouldn’t be matched at home until at least the millennium (arguably longer).

And then there’s Jurassic Park. This runs on the final iteration of Sega’s Super-Scaler technology – their last arcade system dedicated to pushing sprites over polygons. Jurassic Park would be the final System 32 game and the full stop on a glittering legacy of faux-3D sprite-based hits that began with 1985’s Hang-On.

But there are benefits to arriving at the tail end of a decade of hardware and software development.

I’ve dabbled with Jurassic Park a few times over the years after having spotted a few cabinets in Japan, but when I saw the full hydraulic setup in Seville’s amazing Arcade Planet I couldn’t resist giving it the full whirl.

What followed was eighteen minutes of the trashiest dinosaur blasting action around. The game starts on its strongest foot by immediately hurling a T-Rex at you, composed of several enormous sprites that get right up in your face. From there it’s basically a theme park ride in which dinosaurs of all varieties sprint at the screen and pop in from the corners.

There’s no real strategy other than jamming down the fire button and trying to take down as many targets as possible, but it’s easy to forgive that when you’re sitting in a sumptuous cabinet based on the film’s Ford Explorers that tosses you around so much any loose change in your pockets is likely to go skittering across the floor.

Beyond the blasting the game also has a wicked sense of humor and comic timing. After a level in which you inadvertently disturb a herd of Triceratops a group of them engage in hot pursuit. You zip into a forest – a lull in the music – and then a horde of trikes three times as large bursts through the undergrowth after you.

Then there’s the completely barmy soundtrack, which ignores John Williams’ elegant and inspiring movie score in favor of something that sounds like Flight of the Bumblebees on a dose of amphetamines. Sure it’s not very ‘Jurassic Park’, but for a 100mph game dazzling you with an avalanche of dinosaur sprites it’s basically perfect.

But here’s the rub. Jurassic Park never got a home port and licensing issues makes the chances of a retro re-release vanishingly small. It’s easily emulated on MAME, but so much of the thrills come from the lovely cabinet and hydraulics that the game is a shadow of itself outside its intended setting.

Jurassic Park isn’t impossible to find in the wild but fully functional cabinets are rare. And sure, the Super Scaler tech maybe isn’t quite as whizzy as Sega’s polygonal arcade hits, but it’s a great game that doesn’t deserve to be completely forgotten.

If you see it, set aside 20 minutes and a stack of credits and see it to the credits. You won’t regret it.