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’.