Trespasser is an action-adventure first-person-shooter video game released in 1998 that was billed as a “digital sequel” to the 1997 film “The Lost World: Jurassic Park”. The player assumes the role of Anne, who is the sole survivor of a plane crash on InGen’s “Site B” one year after the events of The Lost World. With only a single arm and limited weapons, Anne must escape the remote island by solving puzzles and evading the dangerous dinosaurs.
The game is noted for the involvement of the film’s director, Steven Spielberg, and actors Richard Attenborough and Minnie Driver. Trespasser’s game engine was also very advanced for its time, showcasing large outdoor environments, real object physics, an advanced AI system, destructible objects, an advanced LOD (Level-of-Detail) system, and the first ever use of ragdoll physics and inverse kinematics for dynamically generated animations. The gameplay is very atmospheric with no visual HUD of any kind except for a heart-shaped tattoo on Anne’s left breast to represent her health points and speaking out loud how much ammo is in each weapon.
Tresspasser was one of the most highly anticipated games of the 1990’s. Unfortunately, problems arose as soon as development started. The development team was newly formed with inexperienced management and artists who were unfamiliar with basic game development processes and 3D modeling. After a very welcoming and positive reception from early demos and concept art from E3 1996 and PCGamer, the team got overconfident about their skills and started putting in one of the worst forms of Feature Creep imaginable. The game was being delayed and going overbudget as new and never-before-seen experimental features were added or changed with an immobile release date set into the Fall of 1998.
While the game was originally conceived as a Survival Horror title, it was turned into an Action-Adventure as the dinosaurs were incapable of doing advanced AI tactics or going near structures without getting stuck on building geometry. The dinosaur models themselves would cause severe slowdown for the PC due to the attached physics boxes to every raptor, along with the blood particle effects. (Recommended specs for Tresspasser at the time called for a 166 MHz Pentium II.) The models would constantly warp, twist, and compress in broken ways due to the animations and physics boxes attached them, making almost every creature stumble around in an incredibly drunken manner. The AI also had an advanced mood and emotion system for each of the dinosaurs where they could potentially hunt Anne or other dinosaurs depending on their mood. It was the earliest time a 3D game tried to create a living world using AI and emergent gameplay. Due to a bug where the AI switched so quickly in the extremes, it caused the dinosaurs to stop moving or responding altogether. A hard-coded fix was put in place where the aggression and hunger levels were set to maximum while all other moods and emotions were set to zero, turning almost all the creatures into mindless hunters. Due to an oversight, only very few raptors in the game (mostly in the Industrial Jungle level) had this emotion system still turned on. The raptors would go up to Anne to follow and sniff her curiously, until they were injured in some way.
Tresspasser also conceived a “very immersive” arm system where players could interact with the world through their mouse and keyboard to inspect and look at objects close up. Anne only has a right arm to interact with the world that’s capable of being manually turned in 360 degree movements that are impossible to do in real life. While it can pick up and hold objects, Anne be constantly dropping objects she’s holding in her hand when bumping into structures, invisible boundaries, and dinosaurs. A left arm was scraped due to time and technical issues.
Other similarly weird visual bugs, severe slowdowns, and crashes are a constant feature.
Tresspasser had to be pushed out in a very unfinished and unpolished state with a lot of features, content, and several levels cut\merged. Some of which are still found within the game’s files. It ultimately received mixed to negative reviews at the time and disappointed many reviewers, with some declaring Tresspasser as “the worst game of 1998”. It ultimately sold somewhat over 50,000 copies with the CD-ROM being very rare today.
Even with the negative reception, Tresspasser still has an active cult following to this day with various fixes, mods, and several potential remakes on modern engines. The game was the main inspiration of Valve’s Half-Life series and many of Tresspasser’s other ideas would later realized in other future games.
Tresspasser
The game opens with John Hammond reading an excerpt from his memoirs. Hammond is a rich industrialist who used his wealth to assemble a scientific team that cloned dinosaurs. Intent on creating an amusement park showcasing his biological attractions, Hammond's park ultimately fails when the dinosaurs escape. While Jurassic Park was built on Isla Nublar, off the coast of Costa Rica, the animals were raised at an alternate location, Isla Sorna, also named "Site B". Trespasser takes place a year after the events of The Lost World: Jurassic Park, where the general public has learned about the existence of Jurassic Park.
The game begins in a dark apartment, where mail is piling up and a phone rings. When it goes to voice-mail, a woman named Jill leaves a message, expressing amazement that Anne (the apartment's resident) had actually gone ahead on a trip to the tropics. The message closes with Jill's comment, "I thought you HATED flying." The scene changes to an unseen person closing and bolting an airplane bathroom door and then the sounds of retching can be heard. The plane suddenly bucks and an apparent malfunction occurs and the plane crashes.
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, InGen's dinosaur breeding facility. Pursued by dinosaurs, Anne makes use of weapons left behind to defend herself as she explores. Following a monorail track into the island interior, Anne encounters dinosaurs such as Brachiosaurus, Velociraptor, Stegosaurus, Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus, Parasaurolophus, and Albertosaurus. After recovering security cards from an InGen town, Anne proceeds past a dam and to a large mountain. At the summit, Anne is able to contact 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. The game closes as Anne returns to her apartment. Jill calls and the message goes to the answering machine, saying she "better have a good damn reason for not calling," Anne wordlessly responds by tossing a raptor claw on her desk.
