game's music and sound effects. By June 1993, the development team had been working on the game for 15 months. The game's development had been kept secretive up until that month, when the game was publicly unveiled for the first time at Chicago's Summer Consumer Electronics Show. Jurassic Park was the first film-based video game to give players the option of playing as a protagonist or antagonist. Release Jurassic Park was released in the United States on August 10, 1993, and was the first video game to utilize Sega's new ratings system, receiving a GA (General Audiences) rating. Reception Approximately 250,000 copies were sold within the first week of the game's U.S. release, totaling a record $13.8 million. Rocky Mountain News wrote that the film "had all of the elements to make a video game classic. Too bad Sega didn't see that. In all of its 16-megabit, Spielberg-licensed, digitized, graphically detailed glory, the game still grates, bores and frustrates". William Schiffmann of the Associated Press favorably compared the game to Flashback, and called it "a winner", writing that "playing Jurassic Park is as much fun as seeing the movie—maybe better. Graphics are great, control is excellent and the sound, both music and effects, is perfect". Joel Easley of Scripps Howard News Service considered the game too easy, and criticized the background graphics, although he praised the "awesome" designs of the main characters and T. rex, as well as the "cool" ability to play as either Grant or the Velociraptor. Pat Ferguson, a video game industry analyst, called the game's character choices "the great hook here", and stated that Sega "has combined all the best of 16-bit video games in Jurassic Park. The quality of the graphics is as good as it's going to get, and the sound is the highest quality I can recall in any video game". Bob Strauss of Entertainment Weekly called the game "a blast". In a later review for AllGame, Christopher Michael Baker praised the graphics, the ability to play as either Grant or the Velociraptor, and the sound effects and intelligence of the game's dinosaurs. Baker concluded: "It's the type of game that – even though it is the product of movie merchandising – is fabulous on its own. A rare find indeed". In 2005, Morgan Webb of X-Play criticized the game as a poor movie tie-in and included it on the show's list of