I Know This: Indie hidden object game that lets you hack Jurassic Park's Unix system

A developer has designed an indie game based on the "I know this!" scene in Jurassic Park, a family film favourite from 1993 where cloned dinosaurs ran rampant on Islar Nublar, a fictional islet near Costa Rica.

Apart from being groundbreaking at the time for its life-sized animatronic dinosaurs and computer generated imagery, Jurassic Park has also amused computer programmers for the past two decades with its hilarious fake representation of hacking.

In a memorable but ridiculous scene at the climax of the blockbuster, Lex Murphy, the young girl in the film, manages to save everyone by hacking into a computer in the park's visitor centre to turn on the power for the electric doors in order to keep the dinosaurs out.

"It's a Unix system! I know this!"

Within less than two minutes, Lex manages to navigate through a "Unix system" file manager displayed in poor 1990s 3D graphics, with each file representing a square block lined up in rows upon rows on an island, which represents a file directory.

This scene has so tickled programmers that it has spawned its very own subreddit on social bookmarking website Reddit, where users post inaccurate depictions of technology in the media.

I Know This was made by Renaud Bédard, the programmer behind pixelated platformer game Fez, illustrator Gavin McCarthy, Adam Axbey and Matthew Simmonds for Global Game Jam 2015 in about 40 hours, and is available to download for free.

Running on Windows, Mac and Linux, the object of the game is to find a file within 30 seconds and users can navigate a 3D landscape where their cursor navigates the file manager system to locate a file.

Users need to hack into specific "search nodes" (purple file blocks) in order to find the right file, but no real hacking knowledge is required – all that is required is to mash buttons on the keyboard until code appears and make sure to hit the enter button when the line of code ends.

The game's creators have also made their very own version of Clippy, the 1990s Windows Office Assistant that annoyed/delighted users for years, and users need to avoid him but pay attention to what he says.

"I love the low-poly, lo-fi aesthetic of these systems and I mainly wanted to make a game that takes place in this environment," Bédard, who is currently working at Capybara Games on a game called Below, told IBTimes UK.

"Then we figured that a hacking game was a natural fit, and the idea to use the keyboard mashing mechanic was directly inspired by a website I saw years ago called "hacker typer", which we extended to a mini-game where you have to complete code lines without "syntax errors" [extraneous characters]."

A 3D Unix system actually existed

The game is quite hard but every time you fail, the timer is extended. There are no plans to commercialise the game, so it will remain free, but the developers plan to update it to support Oculus Rift in March.

And in case you are wondering, although Unix does not have 3D graphics, nor do any computer systems in the world today, apparently a software developer in the 1990s had hoped virtual reality would one day look like this.

While it was never developed into a fully functional file manager, Silicon Graphics created the File System Navigator application (Fsn), which could enable users to view files in 3D, and it was featured in Jurassic Park.

It was meant to be used on the firm's IRIX operating system, which is part of Unix, and could even be ported to Linux.