The Jurassic Park 404 page

As part of this new site I wanted to have a fun 404 page, as I think keeping an element of fun and personality is essential when representing yourself. You could say this may be a bit of a trend but me and Keir set out over a couple of nights to hack something together that we'd really be proud of.

Haven't seen it yet? Then do have a look and play before reading on.

Behind the scenes - "The Making Of"

As we were working away I occasionally pulled out my phone to record how we were getting on, so take a look at the video if you're so inclined to explore the creative madness that went into this little project of ours. Jump further down to get a litte more in-depth look at the tech and such.

Fun + idea + tech

As I mentioned personality, some of you may know that I'm rather fond of the 1993 classic, Jurassic Park. This led me straight to an idea that we could recreate an aspect of the film and make it into a bit of game, so it wasn't such a one hit wonder.

The main idea was that you'd be rebooting Jurassic Park (ala Samuel Jackson) just as the park fails in the film. At the very least we wanted Nedry  to popup and give you the classic "Ah ah ah, you didn't say the magic word line" but we thought we could push that idea a bit further. We ended up mocking up Nedry's Mac OS8 terminal screen and knew this was going to be a great interactive element for people to try and hack Jurassic Park back online.

Keir went all out replicating the OS8 feel, making it feel like you've stumbled across a computer from the 90's - also hitting up some fancy html video which you may be lucky enough to find if you can reboot Jurassic Park successfully! I worked on the almost fully functioning terminal in JavaScript, which was great fun to make in itself.

We then spent quite a bit of time deciding how much we should guide users down a path, what they might type into the terminal, how users that have never used a terminal might react and how the terminal should react to them.

We guessed that most people wouldn't get Jurassic Park on first time round, so counted on people giving it a refresh for a second attempt. The terminal on second load gives the user a nice little hint on how to get things up and running.

In the end

It was really fun to code and I think people enjoyed it, especially those with a fondness for Jurassic Park. The response we had from Twitter was brilliant, Jurassic Park quotes were flying left, right and centre. If you still havent managed to reboot it, here's a hint.

sudo reboot all

And lastly, a special thanks to Keir for is awesomeness.