Dino Crisis is more than “Resident Evil with dinosaurs” – it shaped survival horror as we know it

“This is just like that movie.” In a game full of crazy B-movie dialogue, this telling line, spoken by Officer Rick as it starts raining Raptors, is by far the best – and the most authentic. It’s a fact that the game’s director, Shinji Mikami, was directly inspired by Jurassic Park, but perhaps surprisingly it was Michael Crichton’s original novel and not Steven Spielberg’s adaptation that was the main influence. In particular, the scene where Alan Grant and his friends visit the Raptor enclosure and witness the creatures hunting in packs.

Mikami has noted that in the novel the scene is written from the characters’ perspective, at eye level, while in the film it is shown from above, a place of relative safety. It was the first approach, and the original fear it instilled in Mikami – the fear of falling prey – that gave rise to the Dino Crisis.

An indwelling evil