// GAMESPOT — GAMING
Jurassic Park Meets Alien In This Childhood Dream Turned Horror Game
Revealed during PlayStation's State of Play earlier this year, The Lost Wild is a first-person horror game that combines the awe of walking amongst dinosaurs, such as in Jurassic Park, with the terror of being hunted by a creature you can't defeat, à la Alien: Isolation. For Great Ape Games CEO Nick Gregory, it's a lot more than that; it's the culmination of an idea he's had in his mind since childhood.
GameSpot recently caught up with Gregory via email to discuss the more than 20-year journey from boyhood dream to a Steam wishlist darling. He spoke to his team's growth as the project shifted to a full-time job, The Lost Wild's humble origins before he even knew how to really make games, and the subtleties of depicting dinosaurs as "animals, not monsters."
GameSpot: As I understand it, this game began as a Crysis mod. Can you talk about the long journey from that to where it is today?
Nick Gregory: Believe it or not, this actually goes back even further than the Crysis mod.
I was a teenager living with my mum, over two decades ago now. I was lucky enough to get a PC at that age, and it opened the door for me not only to gaming, but to tinkering too. It was not quite the proverbial garden shed, but it changed the course of my life all the same.
I first started tinkering with a game called Operation Flashpoint, a military sandbox game that shipped with a mission editor and extensive modding tools. I began with simple things like placing units, creating waypoints and setting up event logic, then gradually moved into custom mission scripts and assets. That period exposed me to a whole lot, learning how to model, script, keyframe, and design. None of it was remotely close to shippable quality, but it was an honest, naive, and practical crash course, driven entirely by passion and curiosity.
A few years later, I went through the same process with Crysis and CryEngine. The technology felt like a huge leap forward. Crysis shipped with its editor, and being able to load the game, fly around the world, and change things in real time felt extraordinary. It's easy to take that kind of workflow for granted nowadays, but at the time it was transformative.
I joined the Crymod forums and became fascinated by what people were making with the SDK: maps, models, skins, full conversions. I would come home and see what everyone had created, and eventually I stopped wanting simply to observe it. I wanted to be part of it.
So I decided to find out what a dinosaur might look like in CryEngine. I wanted to know what it might feel like to walk alongside one in a natural environment, where it behaved like an animal rather than a mindless monster. That was the original vision, and it grew from there.
The first dinosaur looked surprisingly good, so I began posting work-in-progress images online. Those posts gradually attracted people who believed in the idea, and before long we'd assembled a volunteer team of around 15 developers: artists, level designers, programmers and sound designers. Several of them now hold senior positions across the games industry. One of those people was Tim, who joined us straight out of university, believed deeply in the project and is now a fellow co-founder and Creative Director.
I was never the strongest developer. I was very much a kitbasher and generalist, but I discovered that I had an ability to establish a vision and a clear “why,” find talented people, bring them together, and articulate why an idea was worth pursuing. That has stayed with me throughout my career and still shapes how I run the studio today.
We improvised constantly. At one point, we retrofitted Crytek's chicken AI to make one of our dinosaurs semi-functional. We were a million miles from producing a complete game, but the journey mattered far more than the destination for me. We formed lifelong friendships, learned an enormous amount, and eventually had the mod featured in a full-page article in PC Gamer, which was an incredible moment for a