Time Extend
Excavating the site of one of gaming’s most infamous failed experiments
Excavating Jurassic Park: Trespasser, one of gaming’s most infamous failed experiments
They didn’t know it at the time, but when two former Looking Glass employees Seamus Blackley and Austin Grossman decided to create a game about InGen Corporation’s disastrous dinosaur endeavours to tie in with an upcoming Jurassic Park sequel, they set forth an irony that would echo through the ages. Jurassic Park: Trespasser is, perhaps harshly, remembered as one of PC gaming’s great failed experiments, like its subject matter a wildly ambitious project that ultimately ended in catastrophe and saw much of its innovations abandoned. If Sir Dickie Attenborough’s voice wasn’t so synonymous with John Parker Hammond, you could almost believe that the sombre diary entries he reads throughout the game come from the developers themselves, rather than the InGen chief: “My work... my work lies where I left it. If there is anyone brave enough and clever enough to take it and... return the keys to time. Perhaps the foundation of a new empire.”
Certainly, like Hammond, Dreamworks Interactive spared no expense. The mandate of Trespasser was to deliver an emergent firstperson experience within the Jurassic Park licence with no level-loading times, simulated solid-body physics, convincing dinosaur behaviour, and go a step beyond the key-hunting, floating-gun drudgery of
Quake, as its developers saw it. While the product that shipped could never be accused of leaning on Id Software’s safe template, it also fell short of its original vision and exceeded its budget several times on the way to an autumn 1998 release, one year later than intended. It was a big-budget project with considerable expectation, and it was the weight of that expectation which left
Trespasser no room for error, and no willingness from critics or players to look past the shortcomings and enjoy the curiosity of exploring a near-miss milestone moment for firstperson gaming.
Time has softened attitudes to it. Blackley and Grossman coaxed more Looking Glass staff to their team after securing the Jurassic Park licence and Electronic Arts’ publishing support, and there’s a sense of the same pioneering spirit that gave players Ultima Underworld and
System Shock in the tropical exteriors of Trespasser. Rarely does the design muscle in and try to force the player through a conveyor belt of experiences, which must have been the most immediate temptation when making a Jurassic Park game. Instead its developers placed their faith in the interplay between their ambitious systems to autonomously ‘design’ the player’s adventures. There are only a handful of dinosaur types on Isla Sorna, but within their AI programming are several emotional states triggered by their proximity to other dinosaurs and the player. The governing idea is that their placement alone is enough to put protagonist Anne through the full gamut of combat and evasion scenarios, at times depending on realtime physics to manipulate the world to her advantage, and frequently acting as an intimidator more than a hunter, firing off a weapon to scare velociraptors away rather than kill them outright.
It’s possible to enjoy this different take on firstperson action gaming, even if all the dots don’t join up. This is a game with far more walking and talking than gunplay or puzzle sequences, to the extent that it’s even reminiscent of modern-day walking sims in certain passages. Anne (voiced sensitively by Minnie Driver) was only counting on a holiday to sunnier climes when she boarded the plane, as we learn in an opening FMV that, like much of
Trespasser’s writing, seems to be visiting from a different, better game. When the plane goes down off Costa Rica, Anne’s eventually washed up on a small island whose white beaches and tall palms give it the look of a fine makeshift holiday destination in itself. That’s until she sees the InGen logos on derelict buildings and a half-finished monorail, and realises she’s at the infamous ‘Site B’ they’ve been writing so much about in the papers. A breeding ground for the dinosaurs that were once intended to be shipped out to Jurassic Park. Fifteen minutes of island exploration and firstperson narrative in, and not a scale nor claw has been sighted. It’s a striking departure from conventional ’90s shooters.
As with much of the game, that thoughtful and action-light style came about by accident, the result of last-minute
revisions and gutting sizeable chunks of game that weren’t working. Although realtime physics were always intended to be a lynchpin of the way players experienced and made their way through the world, the game designers at Dreamworks Interactive quickly found that in order to implement stacking and toppling sequences intended to colour Trespasser’s puzzles, a much deeper and more detailed physical simulation was required. Legend has it that at one time the desks of this department were strewn with building blocks and other objects, used to plan out object behaviour. Before release, Dreamworks decided it was simply too difficult for the player to build stairways and bridges using crates and barrels to progress through Isla Sorna, and all but a handful of these puzzles were axed in order to meet the release date. In their place, as far as the player can tell when they’re at ground level, is simply more walking.
The physical geography of the island itself was hand-drawn by an environmental artist using the topography of one of Costa Rica’s neighbouring islands. The idea was that the level-design team would approach the island as InGen would have, forging a path through the undergrowth and bulldozing hills where facilities would sit. Only after having painstakingly created the island in 3D Studio Max did the team realise that the end product wasn’t particularly conducive to good level design. All traversal and visibility barriers had to be handmade after the fact, and the man-made quality of their mathematically perfect gradients makes them hard to miss at ground level.
Despite this and multitudinous other design shortcomings, there’s something about Isla Sorna. Something that immediately transmits a sense of place so strong you can easily pick up on its nuances: the human tragedy of dinosaurs killing and eating the scientists who created them, expressed with little more than hard hats scattered round a deserted construction site. The majesty of the remaining inhabitants as they plod, 80 feet tall, through the forest. The sheer menace of the place, whether velociraptors and Tyrannosaurs are on-screen or lingering in the folds of your anxiety.
Anne’s extreme vulnerability in the situation she’s faced with, along with the atmosphere, are the only things Trespasser can claim to really nail. Every single encounter with a carnivorous dinosaur is a terrifying ordeal that’s only ever survived by the skin of the teeth, and in part that’s a happy accident of the game’s bizarre and infamous control method. It’s easy to take the floating-gun concept of shooter design for granted at this stage, but when Trespasser was in development there were those who saw it as a lazy design shortcut which drew the player out of the game world; a temporary Heath Robinson solution until physics and control sets caught up. It was this mindset that led Dreamworks to giving players full, joint-by-joint control of Anne’s
NONE OF THE MECHANICAL ROUGH EDGES ARE ENOUGH TO NEGATE TRESPASSER’S CHARM AND CURIOSITY
right arm. Through that interaction method, a simple gunfight against one velociraptor would require that the player source a weapon and pick it up, then aim their arm holding the gun, and finally fire it, using the iron sight of the weapon itself rather than any crosshair overlay.
This involves waggling a slightly-toolong limb around in panicked swooshes, pushing it through the floor and inadvertently bending the wrist at nightmarish angles, before firing a shot harmlessly into the sky and being bitten to death. As Anne falls slowly towards her final resting place on the forest floor the camera settles on Anne’s cleavage, her heart tattoo now depleted to reflect the player’s health – another effort to do away with UI elements. What any player wouldn’t give for a floating gun when the velociraptors come in packs towards Trespasser’s end.
None of these mechanical rough edges are enough to negate Trespasser’s charm and curiosity, and that fact is amply demonstrated by its community’s efforts to remake the entire game in newer engines. With every playthrough, there’s a tantalising glimpse of the game the developers wanted to make before their ambitions got the better of them. The skeletons of systems that later made Half-Life 2 such a seminal release are visible. It perpetually threatens to produce the kind of emergent gameplay that would later characterise the Far Cry series, but those sophisticated AI interactions never really materialise.
Then and now, Trespasser’s name is incredibly fitting. Just as Anne found herself an unwelcome guest on Isla Sorna and prey to its inhabitants, the player, too, feels as though they’re intruding on something private, perhaps still subject to experimentation and gestation. It’s like stumbling on a leaked alpha build and trying to explore it without drawing detection. In 2018 a game like this would be saved by an iterative Early Access approach, eventually reaching its potential even if it missed a few deadlines. Having released in 1998, however, it’s doomed to stay in development stasis forevermore, the player-made bridges and stairways its developers envisaged never to be constructed, and the potential of realtime physics in firstperson gaming now always to be credited to a Half-Life sequel which released six years later.