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Someone Made a Game From That Operating System in Jurassic Park

'I Know This' teaches us that it was less ridiculous than it looked.
The famous OS, and it's Clippy-esque assistant. Credit: I know this.

Jurassic Park has a lot of pseudo-science in it, but when watching it today, nothing looks as farfetched as the operating system Lex needs to hack to save the gang from some chompy raptors.

It's this scene:

​A 3D, animated environment to navigate your computer? Hilarious. If only our operating system looked this cool today.

Well, it turns out that the OS isn't that outlandish, as one Global Game Jam 2015 team discovered when they set out to make, I Know This, a game ​based on Jurassic Park's computer systems.

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The team of three, which went by the name Two's Complement, found that the OS we see in the movie was actually used on SGI workstations, high-performance computers at the time built for 3D graphics (the SpeedTree folks, who make award-winning trees for games and movies, told me they cut their teeth on these).

Like another Global Game Jam 2015 game we covered recently, Höme Improvisåtion, Two's Complement's I Know This was initially created in just 48 hours. What they managed in that time and a few more evenings since the Jam is simple, but pretty damn fun.

"Hacking" involves having a seizure on your keyboard

The OS in the game looks a little better that what's in the movie, but the goal is the same. Get in, find the file, and "hack" it. "Hacking" involves having a seizure on your keyboard to produce code, minding only to press return at the end of a line. Honestly, I'm so bad at coding that even this was rather difficult.

Two's Complement said that this hacking method is largely lifted from hackertyper.net. If you haven't tried that, do yourself a favor and give it a shot. It will make you feel like a regular Kevin Mitnick.

You can download I Know This and read more about what went into creating the apparently pretty realistic operating system from Jurassic Park here.