Beloved actor Sam Neill sadly passed away on Monday, July 13, leaving many fans shocked about his untimely passing. Neill had recently made a full recovery from cancer, and the actor leaves behind a body of work that stretches across multiple movies and TV series. To many, Neill is best-known for his role as Dr. Alan Grant in 1993’s Jurassic Park, and to celebrate his legacy, multiple players in Path of Titans embarked on a dinosaur migration to pay tribute to him.
The turnout saw players transform into several signature dinosaurs from the Jurassic Park film series, including herbivores like the Triceratops and Brachiosaurus to carnivores like the infamous Spinosaurus from Jurassic Park 3. What makes the tribute extra-impressive is that isle servers in Path of Titans typically don’t allow for so many mixed species to co-exist on them, and pulling off a migration of this magnitude required a lot of communication and coordination from players.
Beyond Jurassic Park, Neill appeared in many other films and TV projects throughout his career. Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, Neill featured in big films like The Hunt for Red October and Event Horizon, and in 1998, he starred in the Merlin mini-series as the titular wizard, with the show being critically acclaimed for its unique blend of special effects and storytelling.
Neill would return to Isla Nublar–sorry, Isla Sorna–for Jurassic Park 3 in 2001, and in later years, he’d pop up in 2022’s Jurassic Park: Dominion and the first two Jurassic World Evolution video games. In animation, Neill also made a memorable appearance as the cat burglar Molloy in The Simpsons episode “Homer the Vigilante”.
Outside of acting, Neill was known for his warmth and humanity. Since his passing, anecdotes about his kindness have been shared online, ranging from a story about how he requested the Australian flag on his uniform in Event Horizon be altered to show the Aboriginal flag instead of the Union Flag, as he imagined that’s how it would look by the year 2047, the setting of the movie.
Other accounts spoke of how he sought to inject a layer of humanity into his Jurassic Park character, while his exploits of running a farm and vineyard in his homeland of New Zealand made him popular on social media.
