Jurassic Park for Sega CD Was the Best Jurassic Park Game You Never Heard Of

Back in the 1990s, Sega thought it was unstoppable — unstoppable enough that it launched an absurdly overpriced add-on to the Genesis called the Sega CD. The charm of the Sega CD was that it had Sonic CD and two Lunar games. The downside, however, is that there was very little else on the console that was even remotely worthy of your time.

One of the most tragically overlooked exceptions to that rule was Jurassic Park, a Myst-like adventure game that helped you learn factoids about dinosaurs that Michael Crichton totally made up.

The hook was that you had twelve real-life hours to solve puzzles and get off Isla Nublar before it got nuked to Oblivion.

This was no walk in the park (pun intended? You decide). Some of the puzzles were quite difficult, and you were oftentimes forced to solve them while being stared down by a crabby triceratops that was ready to charge you at the slightest perturbation.

And even when there were no dinos nearby, there was a timer that was constantly ticking down, and any time you traveled to a new area, the clock would subtract a chunk of time to compensate for your travel time.

In a world where retro game classics are available in digital format for just about any device with a screen on it, I’m a bit sad that Jurassic Park for Sega CD hasn’t eeked its way onto any download platforms. It was pretty obscure, and I know better than to get my hopes up, but there’s a part of me that sincerely hopes to play this one again without eBay-ing another Sega CD.