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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 group of people building something from their bedrooms.
Looking back, I think of that work less as an early version of the game and more as a piece of interactive 3D concept art. It proved there was something compelling at the heart of the idea, and it established the relationships and conviction that would eventually make the game possible. The idea stayed with me for nearly two decades, until we finally had the experience, technology, and opportunity to return to it and execute on it with a lot more knowledge and know-how.
So the journey from that mod to The Lost Wild was anything but a straight line. Looking back, it is surreal that a simple idea I had as a teenager could stay with me for so long and directly or indirectly shape so many of the decisions that followed. We still talk about how wild it is to this day.
The Lost Wild has taken Nick Gregory 20+ years to bring to life, but it's now nearly here.
When, if ever, did The Lost Wild become your main focus/full-time job?
For several years, The Lost Wild was something we built around full-time jobs and other responsibilities. We spent our evenings and weekends developing a vertical slice because we felt it was important to show the game itself, rather than rely on a polished presentation and promises about what it might eventually become if everything went to plan.
It was not easy. There were a lot of late nights, missed weekends, and personal savings poured into something with no guarantee that it would ever become more than an idea. It required a real sacrifice that, in hindsight, was now absolutely worth it.
The major turning point came when we signed with Annapurna. Since then, The Lost Wild has been the studio’s full-time focus. Their support allowed us to grow the team, move into full production, and take the project from that early vertical slice towards the game we are now preparing to release.
So it was a gradual journey rather than a single overnight moment, but signing with Annapurna absolutely made this dream possible.
What's the size of the team making the game today, and how has that differed from its earliest version?
When we first began working on the game full time, the core team consisted of just four people: myself, my co-founders Tim and David, and Dennis, a very talented freelance programmer at the time, who eventually joined us full time and is still with the studio today.
Today, the team has grown considerably. We now have eighteen staff based in the UK and a further nine full-time, salaried team members working internationally. We also collaborate with a number of co-development partners and contractors whose contributions are equally important to the game.
Including everyone actively involved in development, the entire effort currently sits at around 30 people. It is a significant change from those earliest days, but we have tried to grow carefully and build the team around the specific needs of both the game and the studio, while also thinking about what comes next.
Why dinosaurs? What is it that made you want to make such a game?
I grew up on films like Jurassic Park, Jaws, Alien, and E.T. are just a few of them. I loved movies, and still do, so I probably had no choice but to be shaped by them. But I was always a gamer at heart, and I think that naturally made me want to take those feelings and turn them into something you could inhabit rather than simply watch.
For me, dinosaurs occupy a fascinating space between the familiar and the unknowable. Everyone recognizes them, but our understanding of how these extinct animals actually moved, behaved, and interacted can only ever be reconstructed from the evidence they left behind. Paleontology can tell us an enormous amount, yet there are still gaps in our understanding, and those gaps leave room for imagination and curiosity.
The appeal was never simply about wanting to see a dinosaur up close. I wanted to experience them as animals. I wanted to see them moving through a natural environment, hunting, reacting, and existing without behaving like monsters.
At the same time, I wanted to capture the reverence and natural horror that might come from actually encountering one in the wild. There is something very primal about that idea. It is a mixture of fascination, awe, and fear. You are looking at something extraordinary and beautiful, but also something powerful, unpredictable, and completely indifferent to you. Of course, it is all hypothetical, but it became a scratch I needed to itch.
In many ways, the game is my attempt to try and recreate the feelings those films gave me as a kid, but in a form where you are no longer sitting safely on the other side of the screen, but interacting with something instead.
How scary do you want the game to be?
My hope is for The Lost Wild to be genuinely frightening, but not relentlessly so. The horror comes through observation, instinct, and restraint. It comes from feeling vulnerable, sharing an environment with powerful animals and never being entirely certain how they will respond. If every dinosaur simply attacked on sight, it would stop feeling like an animal and become a conventional monster.
Just as importantly, the fear has to sit alongside awe, fascination and respect. We want anticipation and uncertainty to do as much work as the encounters themselves. Ideally, players never feel completely in control, but there is still space to appreciate the animals and the world they inhabit and genuinely be fascinated by them - even when one may be trying to eat you.
What was it like designing the main character and who she is? What did you find important about creating this character?
Saskia was important to us from very early on, because the entire experience is filtered through her. She is not a soldier or a scientist or a hero; she is an ordinary person thrown into an extraordinary situation. She wakes up on the island after a car crash and gradually realizes that dinosaurs are real, that the island belongs to a mysterious company called Idehama, and that she has no idea how she got there or how she is going to get out. That ordinariness was the whole point. The question we kept coming back to was simply, “if I were there, what would I do?”, and Saskia is our way of putting the player inside that question.
The challenge was finding the balance between giving her enough personality to what we hope feels like a real, defined person while still leaving enough space for the player to inhabit her decisions. She is capable and resourceful, but she is not combat-trained.
We also wanted her story to be something you uncover rather than something we force upon you. Saskia’s journey is shared with the player’s, and is the grounding rod in the game.
Today, publisher Annapurna is revealing a new poster for The Lost Wild.
Do you find it odd how relatively few dinosaur games there are? We see other enemy themes like zombies, raiders, or aliens so often. Why do you think we have so few dino games?
This is such a great question because it’s so close to home for me. On the face of it, I have always wished there were more dinosaur games in general, particularly when you consider how universally loved dinosaurs are. Almost everyone has a dinosaur phase at some point, so it seems like an obvious subject for games. But I think the scarcity tells you something about how genuinely difficult they are to get right.
There are, of course, dinosaur games, but they are also technically difficult and hard to make convincing in my opinion. For us, that difficulty was part of the appeal. We wanted the freedom to build our own world and explore our own “what if,” rather than simply imitate what had come before.
Where other people might see challenges, we saw it as a chance to do something on our own terms.
If I recall rightly, the folks at the Summer Game Fest demo said the dinosaurs in The Lost Wild are “animals, not monsters.” I found this to be a really interesting nuance. What do you feel is the important distinction, given the game does feature the dinos sniffing you out and hunting you down?
The distinction is really about motivation rather than danger. A monster exists to menace the player. It notices you the instant you enter the room, it fixates on you, and everything it does is built around threatening the person holding the controller. An animal does not care that you are the protagonist. You are simply another thing moving through its world.
The fact that it might hunt you does not make it a monster; it makes it a predator behaving as a predator might. We were very deliberate about not reducing those encounters to conventional combat puzzles with obvious weak points
You watch where an animal is looking before you move. You learn how it responds to sound, how it occupies a space, and when its attention may have shifted elsewhere. You are not equipped to kill the dinosaurs, but you can find non-lethal tools that help you create distractions, deter an approach or buy enough time to escape. Survival comes from evading, hiding, and using the environment rather than overpowering them.
And crucially, that framing is what leaves room for awe. If every dinosaur charged you on sight, you would only ever feel hunted. Because they behave like animals, there are moments where you can watch one and feel genuine wonder before the fear sets back in. They are not villains; they are creatures behaving as they should, and that produces a more complicated emotional response, one that blends fear with fascination and respect, I think. The danger is a consequence of what they are, not the entire reason they exist.
I've likened the game to Alien: Isolation. Do you feel that was an inspiration? Any other inspirations you'd call out, especially those that may not be so obvious?
It is a very fair comparison, and in our case it runs deeper than a surface resemblance. Our game director, Gary Napper, worked on Alien: Isolation, so there is first-hand experience within the team of how powerful vulnerability, restraint and anticipation can be. Knowing when to show a creature, when to hold back and when to let the player’s imagination do the work are all things we think about very carefully.
That said, we are not trying to replace the xenomorph with a dinosaur. Our animals have their own behaviors, and their presence has to leave room for exploration, fascination, and awe as well as fear.
Beyond games, a lot of our influence comes from the natural world. The original Jurassic Park is a clear example for reverence and scale, but Jaws matters to me just as much because so much of its terror lives in what you do not see, and in the anticipation of the threat rather than the threat itself.
The less obvious inspiration is wildlife filmmaking and real predator behavior. The patience, observation, and respect for an animal as an animal are things we think about constantly, because grounded behavior is what makes the whole experience convincing. We’ve watched all the dinosaur documentaries and YouTube videos, and are deep down dinosaur nerds at heart.
Alien: Isolation is a useful reference for the feeling of being hunted. Nature is the reference for how we want the hunter to feel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-frigam660
The Lost Wild seemed to capture a lot of wishlists on Steam after its reveal. What effect does that have on the team this far out from launch? Is it purely an emotional boost or does it have other benefits, too?
It is absolutely an emotional boost, and I do not want to downplay that because it matters enormously. For a project that began with a small group of us working during evenings and weekends, seeing that level of interest is deeply validating. It tells us that the thing we believed in for so long resonates with people we have never met, and that is a wonderful feeling to have.
But it is far more than a morale lift. Wishlists are a real signal, both to us and to our publisher. They are one of the clearest indications we have that the premise and presentation are connecting with an audience.
Every wishlist is effectively someone saying, “You have my attention.” Our job is to earn the rest.
Does the team have any policy or opinions on generative AI?
Our position is straightforward. No generative AI content has been used in The Lost Wild. The art, writing, performances, audio, and other creative work in the game are the work of our team and development partners. We want the game to reflect the craft and authorship of the people making it.
The Lost Wild is due out in 2027 on PlayStation 5 and PC.
