In the summer of ’97, SEGA stole the show at E3 with the announcement of their upcoming release, The Lost World: Jurassic Park™. An early experiment in immersive gaming, The Lost World: Jurassic Park™ was the first “theater-style gaming cabinet” on the market, designed to replicate the embodied experience of moviegoing in an arcade environment. With 50-inch monitors, in-cabinet multi-speaker surround sound, and action-responsive seats, TLW™ encouraged gamers to fully enter Spielberg’s Jurassic universe with all senses engaged.

SEGA’s dedication to The Lost World’s™ immersive environment extended to the outside of the cabinet, designing enclosures to be built around the game itself that mirrored the dark, jungle-like environments of Spielberg’s franchise. SEGA developers even travelled from Japan to Los Angeles to meet with Stan Winston—the legendary production and special effects designer behind the first three Jurassic films—to ensure the authenticity and continuity of TLW™ and its cabinet design. While exact designs varied from location to location, the enclosures designed by SEGA included signs like the lot on offer here—[LED], plaster, and plywood creations bearing the inverted version of Chip Kidd’s iconic Jurassic Park logo that sღerved as the hero art for the f🐈ranchise’s second film.

The Lost World: Jurassic Park™ built on an existing collaboration between SEGA, Universal Studios, and Dreamworks SKG (Spielberg is the “S” at the end of the company’s moniker) that began in 1996, as the three parties came together to found and develop the US-based arcade franchise, Gameworks. Then in its second year of operation, Gameworks was one of two exclusive locations at which TLW™ was available, the second being Joypolis arcades in Japan. The present example likely ꧅came out of the arcade at Universal Studios theme park in Hollywood🍸.

Spielberg is not only the father of the modern summer blockbuster, but also, a pioneer in the world film licensing and promotion. Signaling the end of the New Hollywood and the “beginning of the mass-cultural, late-capitalistic supernova that defined the next few decades,” the 1975 release of Jaws permanently altered the landscape of marketing a studio’s tentpole release as the first film to benefit from Universal’s new concept of “Exhibitor Relations.” Under the direction of new hire Steve Kallan, the Jaws campaign expanded the concept of movie marketing beyond print, radio, and television ads to direct-to-consumer, trademarked products. By 1993, every studio had an Exhibitor Relations team and Spielberg won a $65-million-dollar licensing and promotional campaign for Jurassic Park that included deals with over 100 companies to generate over 1,000 products. Rumor has it that trademark-ability was of significant concern for Spielberg when deciding on what would eventua🐎lly become the film’s iconic logo.

The present lot represents a later example of Spielberg’s explosively successful approach to licensing his film projects and his dedication to giving his stories a continued life outside of the theater. With the curr🙈ent video game landscape defined by at-home consoles and career live streamers, this artifact is an exceedingly rare, nostalgic relic of that late 90s moment where movies, games, cutting-edge technology and community converged.