‘Warpath: Jurassic Park’ is the Best Tie-In Game That Nobody Remembers
The Jurassic Park franchise has seen many video games over the past 30+ years. Even as recently as the modern era of PlayStation 4 and 5, Jurassic World Evolution 1 and 2 have had great success taking the concept of a theme park simulator to a whole new level. My history with Jurassic Park games is as long as my history with gaming itself. I had a Jurassic Park game for my very first gaming device ever, Game Gear, and I had both Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park: Rampage Edition for my first console, the Sega Genesis. I had the incredibly difficult Lost World game for PlayStation, and for that same system, I also had Warpath: Jurassic Park.
That’s the game I want to talk about. Warpath never comes up in conversations of the best tie-in video games. It doesn’t even really come up in conversations of the best Jurassic Park games. Those are usually saved for Evolution or Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis. And sure, in terms of objective quality, those probably are the best. But it’s still a shame, because 25 years later, Warpath is still among the most fun, and resulted in many of the best times I’ve ever had playing a video game.
Let me explain what it was by explaining what it was not. Warpath was not a park simulator like Evolution or Operation Genesis. It was not a side-scrolling adventure game like Rampage Edition or The Lost World. Warpath was the Jurassic Park fighting game. That’s right, in the same style as Tekken or Mortal Kombat, you would have two dinosaurs square off to bite and claw the crap out of one another.
It shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise, really. In the aftermath of the huge success of Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter in the early ’90s, many franchises tried to push their own version of that. Star Wars had Masters of Teras Kasi, DC Comics had Justice League Task Force, and Marvel found great success with Capcom in X-Men: Children of the Atom, Marvel Super Heroes, X-Men vs. Street Fighter and then the now iconic Marvel vs. Capcom games. The X-Men also saw another fighting game, X-Men: Mutant Academy in 2000. And while those kinds of games have persisted, Warpath: Jurassic Park kind of represented the downward curve of that particular ’90s trend, releasing in 1999.
Make no mistake, though, despite that trend, Warpath was not simply slapped together. There was a lot of thought that clearly went into it to make the Jurassic Park game feel very different from any other fighting game at the time. It did things only a dinosaur fighter could do. Need a quick health boost in the middle of a match? Just eat one of the park employees running underfoot, fleeing for their lives, like Rampage. It featured several areas from the movie, many of which were unlocked by unlocking a specific dinosaur. Jurassic Park gate, helicopter pad, ship that carried a T-Rex from Isla Sorna to San Diego and paid dearly for that stupidity, pretty much any area you can think of from the first two films is featured, even the gas station from The Lost World. My favorite area has to be the actual Universal Studios theme park, which was unlocked alongside Albertasaurus.
Unlike many tie-in games, the people behind Warpath at the very least cared about making sure the game was fun after you bought it. It wasn’t just entertaining for a few hours before you got bored and never played it again, this game rewarded you to keep playing in a way that is common for most games, but again, I really can’t stress enough how many tie-in games of the era did the bare minimum. Warpath gave you a whole roster of dinosaurs to unlock in addition to the eight that you start with.
One thing I particularly love is the balance of dinosaurs. It didn’t simply give you all the icons up front and leave you to uncover more obscure dinosaurs later. It had a great balance of familiar and lesser known dinosaurs on the main roster that also extended to the unlockable characters. For example, Syracosaurus is available right out of the gate, but its much more well-known cousin Triceratops has to be unlocked. Through the main roster, I discovered Suchomimus, which became my favorite dinosaur at the time, though it had been Dilophosaurus before that and would be after. I obsessed over Suchomimus, a giant, pissed-off crocodile head on a T-Rex body but with long arms and scythe-like claws. That’s a nightmare animal. That’s a kid’s dream.
If you’re wondering how the franchise’s most popular star alongside the T-Rex, the raptor, could be in the game fighting toe-to-toe with giants, the game had you covered there, too. Let me explain about Megaraptor. Megaraptor is exactly as the name describes. It is a dinosaur kid’s ultimate fantasy. This animal was first discovered by unearthing what looked identical to a raptor’s well-known toe claw, only massive. Suddenly, we had a giant raptor that could go toe-to-toe with giants like T-Rex. Since then, paleontologists have learned that what was thought to be a toe claw was actually Megaraptor’s forearm claw, and thus it was not actually just a Velociraptor But Huge. In 1999, before we knew that, though, man, what a time to be alive.
Warpath actually introduced several dinosaurs that would later make their way into the movies and TV shows. Spinosaurus showed up in this game before its debut in Jurassic Park III. It looked nothing like that movie, but looked very much like the Lost World Spinosaurus action figure, which I loved. Giganotosaurus appeared in this game long before it appeared in Jurassic World Dominion and my beloved Suchomimus has finally made its on-screen Jurassic debut in Jurassic World: Chaos Theory, 25 years after it appeared in this game.
I played Warpath religiously with my best friend in middle school. It was an amazing way to spend an adolescent Saturday night, pretty much until the sun comes up. For two dinosaur kids, there’s nothing better than watching your favorite Dinos kick the crap out of each other. And the game leaned into it and had fun with it, too, that’s the key. There were destructive elements to the environments years before that took off. Jurassic Park scientists would watch the fights and provide commentary for the instant replay.
The developers clearly knew exactly how absurd the idea of a Jurassic Park fighting game was in the first place, and made sure to match the absurdity of the concept. The game was unsuccessful. It did not get good reviews. IGN’s negative review heavily criticized the size of the game’s raptor simply because the reviewer did not know of Megaraptor’s existence, even though the game explains this in its own “Museum Mode.” And to be fair, it is not a perfect game, criticism of the AI is valid, and the special moves don’t venture far beyond what a dinosaur could feasibly do, so they lack that wow factor. But it’s a blast.
It’s a game that, by and large, nobody played, and so it got buried and was almost immediately forgotten. Like the dinosaurs at its core, though, it is a relic of the past simply waiting to be unearthed.
