What is Trespasser?

In the year 1996, together with the production of the second Jurassic Park film, The Lost World, started a small team of game designers (Dreamworks Interactive) with a huge plan of building the most realistic and still most enjoyable game ever created. What they had in mind was a game in which the player could have complete freedom and interact with an enormously detailed and realistic world, the World from Jurassic Park: The Lost World. Steven Spielberg himself would bring his ideas into this game and make the world as close to the one of the movie as possible. The programmers would do their part and tried to implement not only a very detailed Graphics Engine, but also a Physics engine, which would work on any Object in the game.



Once they had the first main concept ideas together, they simply drew a few first concept art images and represented their work on the E3. They received a lot of feedback: Not only that their ideas were great, but also that their Graphics Engine was so revolutionary by that time, that people were totally overwhelmed by it. One of the reason was, that there was no other engine even coming close to this one. The Quake1 used to be the newest Engine back then and did not even feature big outdoor terrain as the Trespasser-Engine did. Time passed by and more and more magazines interviewed actual Game Designers. That lead to the point where more and more “secret ideas” were revealed and made public. Thus the programmers had to implement more and more features into the game and the team cornered itself more and more.



Not only that, there were too many features on the to-do list now, they were also running out of time. This game was being in production for over two years then and the Game Developers were still facing many problems. For example, the Physics Engine would mess up at many points in the game and would slow down the entire game. The Graphics Engine had to handle too many Objects and would slow down as well. The developers ultimately decided to release the game half-way stable and to sell it as it was, with the intention of releasing patches to improve the game later on.



To make the game stable, they had to disallow dinosaurs to enter buildings (otherwise they would get stuck in the doors and walls), exclude a couple of dinosaurs activities, such as allowing them to jump-attack, and to cut out an entire level (Pine Valley), simply because the player would not be able to handle all its puzzles.



Up to that point people were still awaiting one of the best games ever created. So when the DreamWorks Interactive released the game and sent the first few beta versions away to Game magazines, it was not the game that everybody expected and therefore it got bad reviews everywhere. Not only because of the fact, that DreamWorks couldn’t live up to the promise being made, but also because of the game engine, which was simply too much for computers back then and made the entire game unplayable.



Despite all of its flaws, or maybe even because of them, Trespasser has a fanbase that is active to this day. During the past years, its members have developed their own software to improve the game. This includes various patches and editors that have led to graphic improvements and the creation of new content, such as levels, weapons, and dinosaurs.

Source: TresCom - The Trespasser Community