Trespasser is a 1998 action-adventure video game developed by DreamWorks Interactive and published by Electronic Arts for Microsoft Windows. The game serves as a sequel to the 1997 film The Lost World: Jurassic Park, taking place a year after the film's events. Players control Anne, the sole survivor of a plane crash that leaves her stranded on a remote island with genetically engineered dinosaurs. It features the voices of Minnie Driver as Anne and Richard Attenborough as John Hammond, reprising his role from the film series.
The game engine of Trespasser was advanced for its time and required a fast and powerful computer to adequately display the game's detailed graphics without pixelation artifacts. The mixed reception is believed to have been caused by rushing the development to reach the 1998 release date and the game's overly ambitious and advanced nature.
Plot
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'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. 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.
| Allgame = 4/5
| GI = 6.5/10
| GamePro = 4/5
| GSpot = 3.9/10
| IGN = 4.7/10
| NGen = 2/5
| PCZone = 70%
| rev1 = The Cincinnati Enquirer
| rev1Score = 3/4
| PCA = 5/10
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." 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<nowiki/>'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 2s 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
- Jurassic Park video games