Trespasser (video game)

John Hammond, a rich industrialist, used his wealth to assemble a scientific team that cloned dinosaurs. An amusement park showcasing his biological attractions fails when the dinosaurs escape. Trespasser takes place a year after the events of The Lost World: Jurassic Park, where the general public learned about the existence of Jurassic Park. The player controls Anne, whose plane has crashed on the way to Costa Rica. Anne awakens on the shores of an island, apparently the sole survivor of the crash, and proceeds to explore. Anne learns she is on Site B. Pursued by dinosaurs, Anne makes use of weapons left behind to defend herself. She follows a monorail track into the island interior. After recovering security cards from an InGen town and rebooting a computer to activate a mountain-top radio tower, Anne proceeds to the large mountain and ascends. At the summit, Anne contacts the United States Navy on an emergency channel. After defeating the Alpha Velociraptor and its tribe that lives atop the mountain, she is rescued by helicopter. Anne returns to her apartment and listens to her messages, including one from her friend asking where Anne's been and says she had better have "a real good excuse"...immediately afterward, Anne tosses a velociraptor claw on the table near the machine. ==Gameplay==

The entire game is played through the eyes of Anne (voiced by Driver). Anne's health regenerates quickly over time as long as she does not take further damage. To track weapon ammunition without a HUD, players must rely on Anne verbally describing weapons she picks up, and she weighs the weapon in her hand and says phrases like "About eight shots", "Feels full" and "Hasn't been used", along with verbally counting down ammunition as she fires a weapon. By pressing a key, Anne will extend her arm out into the game world, allowing the player to pick up, swing, push and throw objects. This allows the player to create improvised weaponry, for instance: picking up a large rock off the ground and hitting an enemy with it. Anne can move her arm in any direction, allowing the player to get a different feel of use for each weapon. Anne can only carry two items at once and when bumping into things will often drop items. In addition to picking objects off the ground to use as weapons, Anne can find and use various other armaments including key cards and diskettes. In situations requiring button input (such as keypads), Anne will extend one of her fingers. In keeping with the "hyper realistic" vision of the game, firearms have no cross-hairs. The player aligns the gun by adjusting Anne's wrist and then manually moving her arm to aim. Anne can carry up to two weapons at a time. Weapons have been made to incorporate realistic recoil, as if being held with two hands. Once each firearm is empty, it can be used as a club when swung. Empty weapons cannot be reloaded. All weapons must be discarded at the end of each level. Hints and keypad codes appear in unexpected places on walls, often in a level or two before they are needed. ==Development==

The game was initiated by two former employees of Looking Glass Technologies, Seamus Blackley and Austin Grossman. With the film The Lost World: Jurassic Park expected to be a success and after securing the movie license, the pair approached several movie animation groups before signing with DreamWorks Interactive. Adobe Photoshop 5 and 3D Studio Max were used to produce the game. A 3D model of the island was built and digitally scanned to construct the game environment. John Williams was contracted to compose music exclusively for the game. Trespasser went severely over-budget several times throughout its development. Originally, the game was to be released in the fall of 1997. However, due to a number of problems and how advanced the game was becoming, the project was delayed by a year. The rush to release the game caused many features to either be cut, or left unfinished and unpolished. One of the most advanced features of the rendering engine was the ability to render objects like trees and rocks as 2D sprites, which, when close enough to Anne, would be replaced by their 3D counterpart. Every animation in Trespasser is done using inverse kinematics. No animation in the game is pre-animated; every movement of every dinosaur is generated automatically through their artificial intelligence. Due to the rushed nature of development, this feature resulted in awkward movement as the dinosaurs performed unnaturally. Trespasser was designed to have a complex artificial intelligence routine, giving each creature on the island its own set of emotions and the possibility of dinosaurs fighting each other. Dinosaurs would react to the player differently depending on what mood they were in. However, system bugs in the artificial intelligence routines made it so that dinosaurs would switch between mood-based actions so quickly that they would stop moving and acting. A quick fix was hard-coded into the game that maximized the anger and hunger emotions of carnivorous dinosaurs and left all other emotions at zero. ==Reception==

Before the release of the game, it was announced that Trespasser would revolutionize PC gaming. However, reviews after release were mostly negative. Trespasser was a critical and commercial failure, selling about 50,000 copies. Many reviewers disliked the poor graphics performance on even the fastest graphically accelerated PCs available upon the game's release, but some praised the title's originality and scale. Despite the anticipation over the many "first attempts at" within the game's original development scope, the reality did not match the hype. Alex Huhtala of Computer and Video Games gave the game a score of 1 out of 5, criticising the "technically impressive" in-game physics for making simple actions frustrating to perform, and concluding "Trespasser is possibly the worst game I've ever played." A review by Kim Randell published on the Computer and Video Games website in 2001 called the game "a dog's dinner" and gave it a score of 1 out of 10. It described elements of the physics engine, such as Anne's difficulty holding onto items without dropping them, as wholly unrealistic. A GameSpot review by Elliot Chin described it as the most frustrating game he had ever played with "boring gameplay and annoying bugs". He lambasted the needlessly complicated physics engine, levels being over-filled with box-stacking puzzles, and a clumsy arm interface. PC Gamer UK thought the game got the atmospherics right. GameSpot included Trespasser as one of nominees for the title of the Most Disappointing Game of the Year ("losing" to Star Wars Rebellion) and awarded it the Worst Game of the Year (PC), commenting: "Of all the games released this year, none was as ill-received and terrible as Trespasser. No game was implemented as poorly, and no game squandered its potential as much. No game played as awfully. (...) There's one thing we won't forget: Trespasser was undoubtedly the worst game of 1998." == Fan community ==

Although Trespasser was a critical and commercial failure, substantial amateur interest in the game persisted for years, coalescing into online fan communities such as the Trespasser Hacking Society and Trespasser Secrets, both now defunct, and TresCom, which remains active as of 2025. to create modifications and unofficial patches. For example, Trespasser CE allows players to play the original Trespasser game at higher resolutions and frame rates without experiencing crashes. == Legacy ==

Despite lackluster reviews, Trespasser went on to influence game developers who were interested in the game's ideas and flawed but innovative mechanics. The game's unique control scheme inspired at least two indie titles, Surgeon Simulator 2013 and the original Octodad, whose developers have referred to Trespasser as a source of inspiration. Trespasser's outdoor level design also partly inspired the use of outdoor environments in level design for FPS games such as Halo: Combat Evolved and the Far Cry series. Gabe Newell cited Trespasser as influential to Half-Life 2's physics, though its failure caused him and the rest of Valve to worry about the potential for negative comparisons between the two. In September 2019, Trespasser was spotlighted in the 172nd episode of the webseries Angry Video Game Nerd, with Seamus Blackley making a guest appearance to discuss the game's development. Around 2012, as Steven Spielberg was preparing to revive the Jurassic Park franchise, he contacted Blackley about making a new Trespasser game. Blackley developed a concept titled Jurassic World, in which the dinosaurs from Isla Sorna escaped and forced humans to reevaluate their place in the world. The game would focus on Billy Brennan, a character in the 2001 film Jurassic Park III. Having been hired to prevent further escapes, Brennan would travel to the island and eventually become allies with a pack of raptors. Due to a management change at Universal Pictures, the project was cancelled and Blackley turned the assets over to Frank Marshall, who produced the 2015 film Jurassic World. ==See also==