A major studio staging a hack of its own website may seem ridiculous, but judging by the rest of the site, it wouldn’t be entirely surprising. Long before viral marketing campaigns and VR experiences, The Lost World’s site attempted to draw the film’s fictional world into the real world. Laid out like the office and HR portal for the Jurassic Park franchise’s central corporation InGen, the sit was a fully interactive portal that allowed users to view messages from John Hammond, find out more about InGen’s staff and learn about the Park’s dinosaurs.

Best of all – it’s still live!

Yup, head over to www.lost-world.com and you too can enjoy the best in 1990s web design and development. Well, most of it anyways. In-keeping with the site’s concept, some pages are locked behind passwords which, I assume, were widely available 20 years ago, but have now been lost beneath the sands of time. For example, try clicking the computer on the ‘Hammond’s Office’ page, and you’ll find a request for an ID and password. A TV in the same room is similarly frustrating, offering only an ACCESS DENIED message when you click on it.

Wonderfully though, there are plenty of elements that are available. Having trouble sleeping and fancy replacing those relaxing ocean noises with something a little more adventurous? Download two (lamentably short) audio tracks of ambient dinosaur noises here. Wanna catch up on a few messages between Hammond and Ian Malcolm? Here’s a letter from Hammond, and you can view a lovely signed picture from Malcolm here. Keen on finding employment in a bioengineering company hell-bent on resurrecting dinosaurs at any cost? Check out the InGen Employee Handbook!

The Lost World site is a playbook for what movie marketing has become in the internet age. You’re not just being sold a movie, but a story that extends beyond the cinema screen. Through the site, you can learn about characters who were never a part of the Jurassic Park film universe, but who (I suppose) are technically cannon. Kevin Davies, Jason Preston and James Saunders, for example, are all mentioned and take prominence on the ‘hot sheet’, which is used to keep tabs on troublesome employees.