When Jurassic Park hit theaters in 1993, the course of cinema history was altered completely. A new bar had been set. Technology had finally caught up with human imagination, making it possible for writers like the late Michael Crichton to bring their creations to the big screen in a way that had never been seen before. No longer would film adaptations of wondrous novels have to make storytelling sacrifices because the special effects couldn’t keep up.

What made Jurassic Park so thrilling, and terrifying, is that it felt like it could really happen. Even though you had likely seen the trailer before entering the theater and were fully aware these dinosaurs were eventually going to break free of their cages and snack on some screaming humans, Crichton and the team behind Jurassic Park still made it look inviting. When I recently rewatched the classic, the first portion of the movie had me wanting to take some time off and plan a little vacation to Jurassic Park. It was absolutely gorgeous, and the dinosaurs looked every bit as real as the inevitably doomed doctors researching them.

Crichton, a Harvard Med-educated doctor that would go on to work at Mass General, excelled at taking actual situations and bringing them just a little bit outside reality, stretching what the audience previously thought possible. The writer-producer-director had a supreme knack for riding the fine line between fact and fiction, using science as a tool to make the unthinkable, well, thinkable. Provoking thought and conversation were paramount to Crichton and his many stories, whether in print or on the screen, are some of the best at doing just that. So incredibly attune to mother nature and human nature, Crichton was able to craft narratives a half-century ago that still raise important questions today.

With The Andromeda Strain introducing a deadly virus and global pandemic, it begged the question of whether Crichton saw any of this coming. Sphere aimed to show us what lied beneath in the deep unexplored ocean. The Terminal Man explored biohacking and artificial intelligence’s effect on humans nearly 50 years ago. Disclosure dove headfirst into workplace power dynamics and sexual harassment. Even Jurassic Park was somewhat foreboding, considering we’re living in a timeline where a bunch of maniacal super-billionaires are deadset on blowing what they should have spent in taxes on going to space and… possibly creating a real-life Jurassic Park?!

Oh, you all thought we were going to be able to go around saying “eat the rich” all willy-nilly without these psychos figuring out a way for us to get eaten instead? I wonder how much DOGE it will cost to get into the park.

But looking far into the future and telling stories from that place in a way that made us hungry for more was one of Michael Crichton’s superpowers. America hasn’t been able to get enough of Crichton’s amazing work for the better part of a century, and his ability to make us do a double-take and question whether something was real or not is what has us continuously coming back for more.

We always talk about the EGOT (winning an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony over the span of a career) as the pinnacle of pop culture dominance, but one could argue that Michael Crichton bested this by having the number one book on the bestsellers list, the number one movie at the box office, and the number one most viewed show on television, all at the same damn time. And he did it twice. Nobody else has ever accomplished the gargantuan feat even once. Crichton pulled off the seemingly impossible trifecta first in 1995 when his book The Lost World topped the charts simultaneously with his blockbuster movie Congo and his show E.R., which was based on his real-life experiences as a doctor. Then, Crichton did it again just two years later with E.R., his new book Airframe, and the movie Twister.

Jurassic Park was a gamechanger in so many ways, but its use of CGI and animatronics to bring the myriad of extinct species back to life was especially groundbreaking. And while Steven Spielberg is credited with taking CGI to the next stratosphere with Jurassic Park in 1993, it was Chrichton who got the ball rolling a couple of decades earlier when he wrote and directed the 1973 film, Westworld. You may know Westworld as a wildly successful series on HBO, but the thriller it’s based on was Crichton’s directorial debut, and the first film to ever use Computer Generated Imagery (CGI).

But CGI didn’t catch on in Hollywood until much later, with Westworld’s 1976 sequel Futureworld claiming the title of the second movie to ever use the technology. In Futureworld, a 3D animated hand is shown, designed by a young graduate student at the time named Ed Catmull. You may know Catmull as the Oscar-winning co-founder of Pixar.

Now, virtually every film, TV show, and commercial use some form of CGI to convey their message. A blurring of the lines between the worlds that exist on Earth and in our imagination, constantly forcing us to question our existence and the reality we think we know. Though we tragically lost Michael Crichton to cancer in 2006, his legacy lives on in the timeless work he created, the entertainment industry he pushed forward, and the next generation of storytellers he still inspires every day.