Former Activision Blizzard boss Bobby Kotick has said he desperately wanted the rights to make a Jurassic Park video game – and created a bizarre personal pitch to movie director Steven Spielberg before the first film came out.
Speaking on the Grit podcast, Kotick said the proposal to Spielberg was “nuts” and the only time he ever pitched Spielberg after hearing that the legendary director had been interested in video games.
Alas, the pitch was unsuccessful. But the story of what Kotick did is still a good tale.
“I had a board member who was Spielberg’s lawyer, and he called me and said – ‘Spielberg wants to make video games, he loves video games… we’ll come to you first’,” Kotick recalled.
“The only time I ever pitched anything to Steven was I really wanted the rights to Jurassic Park. I was friends with Michael Crichton and I had read the manuscript and I thought ‘this is going to make a great game’. So I called Michael and said ‘what do I need to do to get the game rights to this?’ He said ‘you gotta get them from Spielberg, he owns the rights’.
“I built… I had to make a manuscript – our proposal was a manuscript – of what we were gonna make, and I put it in, like, a dinosaur egg, in a crate,” Kotick said. “I went nuts. It was all I wanted.
“I knew him [Spielberg], but I had all my friends who were good friends with him call him and say ‘you know Bobby really wants to do this’. And I called him up and I said ‘what do you think?’ And he’s like ‘great pitch, great vision for what you want to do with the game’.
“He said ‘I really want you to do it, I really would like you to do it, so pay the most money’.
“And Konami ended up giving him some crazy guarantee and we didn’t get the rights. And I was bummed too because I thought it would have made an incredible game.'”
It’s now been a year since Kotick departed Activision Blizzard after a long and frequently controversial tenure at the top of the company. Last autumn, Eurogamer sat down with Bloomberg writer Jason Schreier for more detail on life behind the scenes at Activision Blizzard – featuring plenty of chat about Kotick’s time and influence at the firm.