Bobby Kotick, the former head of Activision Blizzard, has revealed that he was so eager to bag the rights to a Jurassic Park game that he sent director Steven Spielberg a proposal in a makeshift dinosaur egg.
Speaking on the Grit podcast, Kotick revealed the pitch came up after hearing Spielberg was interested in video games, although obviously it didn’t pan out. Still, he was able to share the story behind the proposal, which he described as “nuts.”
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. 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. 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’.
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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.’
Kotick served as Activision Blizzard’s (and previously Activision as it was known as for many years) CEO from 1991 – 2023, having retired from the company on December 29, 2023 after the publishing giant was acquired by Microsoft.
[Source – Grit Podcast via Eurogamer]