Trespasser: We March to Olympus

Let's have a look at Trespasser. More formally The Lost World: Jurassic Park^tm: Trepasser^tm. It's a video game from 1998. A tie-in with The Lost World, Stephen Spielberg's sequel to the enormously popular Jurassic Park.

Everybody loves Jurassic Park. It was an ambitious film that combined a solid adventure story with memorable characters and state-of-the-art special effects that have held up remarkably well. Everybody loves Jurassic Park.

The Lost World, not so much. It's generally dismissed nowadays as a typical late-1990s blockbuster marred by some maddeningly unlikeable prote-a-goan-ists and a plot that ends and then begins again. Solid, but uninspiring. Less hatefully awful than Godzilla, good on a technical level but full of plot holes. I haven't seen it, I can't comment.

Trespasser was marketed as a continuation of The Lost World's story. A video game with cinematic production values and some clever technology. Jurassic Park is a simple adventure story at heart, and although the effects are fantastic they have a purpose. They support the story and they're subservient to the drama. Trespasser isn't like that. It was devised as a technical showcase, in the hope that exciting gameplay would emerge from a mixture of advanced physics and worldbuilding. The extensive gameplay design document described a bunch of interesting puzzles that relied on the game's physics engine, including a sequence in which the player fought off a T-rex using a motorised crane. It was heady stuff.

I remember playing the demo at the time. It was neat, but it had some obvious problems. The arm, for one. The arm stood out. It was so obviously wrong. The developers seemed to have blinded themselves to the arm's shortcomings. Is there a word for that? When you build something, or write something, or produce a creative work that has an obvious, massive flaw, but you can't see it because you're too close? And there's nobody to stop you because you've driven everybody away, like Tony Hancock.

It happens a lot on the internet. Without editorial oversight or any kind of audience feedback it's easy for a creative genius, such as myself, to go off the rails and become self-indulgent. To spend eight months writing a two-million-word document explaining in great detail why a woman cannot be King of England. Because it would violate the law of the sea, that's why. Imagine waffling on interminably without

Trespasser was an ambitious game, but towards the end of development the team realised that it wasn't working, so they scrambled to add some actual, hand-made puzzles and gunplay etc, but they didn't have their heart in that kind of thing or the time to finesse it all, with the result that the finished product is a simplistic 3D platform game surrounded by the shell of a vastly more ambitious world simulator.

Many years later the developers of Half-Life 2 found themselves in a similar position, but they had the luxury of time, and they never lost touch of the fact that their game was supposed to be a rock-solid first-person shooter. I mention Half-Life 2 because the developers of that game were acutely aware of Trespasser's problems, because it was big news in 1998. It was an infamous flop, and if you read games magazines back then you would have been aware of it.

It's hard to think of 1998 as part of the modern age, but the internet existed back then and a few traces from 1998 still survive. This review was actually written and published in 1998. Big Brother, the TV show, was still two years away. You could still buy VHS recorders. It's incredible to think that you can read a review on the internet that was published in the twentieth century, before most people on the internet nowadays were born, but there it is. I wonder what happened to the reviewer. He or she must be dead by now. Ign Staff is a distinctive name, but Google doesn't help me at all. Is it Danish?

Back in 1998 video game fans gave Trespasser a harsh reception. Old Man Murray was famously unimpressed. It was nothing like the hype, and of course if you paid £39.95 for it you were probably not happy when you compared the posed pre-release screenshots with the actual game, but I have a soft spot for Trespasser. In its favour the maps are occasionally atmospheric, and at times the gameplay almost works. The voice acting and music are genuinely undeniably good. A couple of levels are interesting adventure-puzzly maps, and the outdoorsy bits have some effective moments. The finale is simplistic but at the very least tense, the introduction of the dinosaurs - a scene that parallels Jurassic Park - is effective, and the larger dinosaur models still have scale and heft nowadays.

You have to remember that a game in which you could walk through a large outdoors environment and then into a house and back out again without a loading pause was still very rare in 1998. Even nowadays the Fallout games and The Long Dark etc don't manage that kind of seamlessness.

The development team was led by Seamus Blackley, who began his career in video games at Looking Glass Studios, a company that produced a string of technically groundbreaking, influential games - including System Shock and Thief - before overextending and collapsing in 2000. Nowadays Looking Glass has a nigh-mythic reputation as an incubator of talent. Former employees Warren Spector and Ken Levine went on to oversee Deus Ex and BioShock, while Blackley himself was hired by Microsoft to design the original XBox.

In between Looking Glass and Microsoft Blackley worked at DreamWorks Interactive, a spin-off of the ambitious DreamWorks group. At various times DreamWorks also had a record label and a television production company. The concept of DreamWorks Interactive was sound - imagine Steven Spielberg finally making a decent game out of ET - but as with the rest of the DreamWorks empire the results were curiously weak. The studio's only bona fide hit was Medal of Honor, but it was too little, too late, and in 2000 it was bought up by Electronic Arts.

Apart from Medal of Honor, Trespasser is the only other DreamWorks game anybody remembers, largely because it was a huge financial failure, apparently selling around 50,000 copies in total over the course of its life. In contrast Half-Life, which was released a month later, sold over a million copies in its first year and went on to sell almost ten million in total. LucasArts' Grim Fandango, another notorious flop from 1998 - a great game, but a flop - also sold around 50,000 units in its first year, but had legs, ultimately selling around half a million. I mention Half-Life and Grim Fandango because they were, at least initially in the case of Half-Life, PC exclusives, just like Trespasser. There was no way Trespasser could be made to work on the OG PlayStation generation, and by the time of the PlayStation 2 the game was more-or-less abandonware. PC games tend to sell far fewer copies than console games, but even in 1998 50,000 units wasn't very good for a big-budget A-list title.

But still. They tried. Rather than churn out a simple Tomb Raider-style jumping game Blackley decided to use the Lost World licence to make a large, open-world adventure, taking place on a massive, dinosaur-infested island. The island would be a single seamless level populated with an ecosystem of artificially intelligent dinosaurs. The player would use a mixture of guile, occasional brute force, and clever physics manipulation - Blackley had a degree in physics - to dodge the dinosaurs and escape from the island.

The idea still sounds great nowadays. Think of it as a mixture of Half-Life 2, STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl and The Long Dark but in 1998. Half a decade before Half-Life 2, ten years before STALKER, twenty before The Long Dark. Which were, admittedly, far more polished and successful than Trespasser, but whatever they did, Trespasser did it first.

This section of the game is strikingly reminiscent of some parts of Half-Life 2.

I can remember 1998. It's hard to focus because my mind was still clouded by lust back then. I am free of that now. In 1998 there was nothing quite like Trespasser. An obscure RPG called Daggerfall had a similar sense of scale, but for the most part 3D games shied away from large open-air environments. The only games that tried to portray a wide open world were flight simulators and tank games, but their worlds were spartan, mostly just a flat texture with some blocks. The Ultima titles had the same feeling of being part of a living world, and there had been abstract representations of wildlife ecosystems since the dawn of gaming, but not in a 3D action game. The 3D physics puzzles were unprecedented.

The Long Dark

The initial design document was a walkthrough outlining the game's plot, which drew from both the film and book of The Lost World. Steven-with-a-v Sp-i-before-e-lberg popped into the office a few times and gave the game his blessing. In retrospect it feels like the first product of a bunch of clever people who had limited experience with games design, but bags of ideas. People who were willing to think the unthinkable, challenge conventions, push a unique vision even if it didn't work. In that sense Trepasser reminds me a lot of Deux Ex: Human Revolution and, yes, STALKER again. It has a mixture of clever ideas that are still clever today, plus bad ideas that might have worked with more time.

And also Mirror's Edge. And Crysis. Ambitious failures, quasi-failures, not-quite-successes.

Crysis and Crysis Warhead (2007-2008), which have a similar sense of scale.

A release date was set for 1997, to tie in with the film, but it was pushed back a year because the game was nowhere near ready. At that point DreamWorks signed a deal to use AMD's forthcoming 3DNow! technology, which had the downside of tying them to a firm release date of October 1998. The last few months of development apparently consisted of stripping out much of what made the game clever and inserting simple jumping puzzles, and on release Trespasser had a mixture of poor-to-at-least-they-tried reviews and poor sales. I remember seeing boxed copies in the local Virgin Megastore, and I wish I had bought a couple, because they're collectors' items nowadays.

Ironically the 3DNow! aspect was pointless in the end, because by the time the game came out 3D graphics cards had made it obsolete. What was 3DNow! space question mark? There was a brief period in the mid-1990s when polygonal 3D games were obviously the future, but dedicated 3D graphics cards were still weird and expensive and made by Lockheed for CAD workstations. Titles such as MDK, Carmageddon, and Quake used clever software tricks to run 3D graphics quickly on the hardware of the day, but there were limits to what could be achieved with pure software.

And so there was a brief fad for adding extra instructions to the CPU to speed up 3D graphics and multimedia instructions. Intel had MMX, AMD had 3DNow!, and Apple's PowerPC chips had AltiVec. The problem is that with the release of the 3DFX Voodoo2 and other contemporary 3D graphics cards circa 1998 the fad immediately became pointless, because dedicated 3D cards were vastly, vastly better at churning out polygons than even the most heavily-tweaked general-purpose CPU.

Software mode. This illustrates one of the game's most interesting technical tricks - the distant trees and objects are rendered as two-dimensional scaled sprites until the player approaches them, at which point they turn into polygonal objects. They called it image caching. A two-dimensional sprite requires fewer resources to draw on the screen then a physics-enabled collection of polygons, which is how the game manages to render large forest scenes.

Trespasser suffered badly from the leap to 3D accelerators. The game was built around software rendering. Hardware acceleration smoothed the textures, but didn't work well with the aforementioned technical trick whereby distant objects are rendered as sprites. The problem is that contemporary 3D cards tended to have only four megabytes of memory, too low to hold a whole level's textures, so the CPU still had to render most of the scene, and of course this was years, nay decades before 3D cards could accelerate physics. As a result 3D acceleration was not the panacea the developers might have hoped for.

Let's describe the plot. Trespasser is a 3D action adventure set on Site B, Isla Sorna, an island west of Costa Rica. In the 1980s biotech entrepreneur John Hammond constructed a facility on the island that could clone dinosaurs, and by the late 1990s it was all set to go live. His plan was to exhibit the dinosaurs on Site A, Jurassic Park, but of course it all went wrong because Phil Tippett got the yips.

After losing control of his company and being made bankrupt Hammond and his staff pulled out. Pulled out in a hurry, because Site B was a dangerous place. By the time of the game's events, circa May 1998, the island is covered in dinosaurs.

The game's playable character, Anne, is on a solo trip across South America when her chartered plane comes down just off the coast of Site B. She is the only survivor. It doesn't take her very long to realise that she is trapped on an island with a bunch of hungry dinosaurs, most of whom are meat-eaters, because veganism hadn't been invented back then.

All the jokes about physics games having pointless puzzles originate from this thing right here, which - ironically - isn't actually a puzzle, it's just a fun diversion.

Trapped on an island with a bunch of hungry dinosaurs, and lots of crates. Trespasser was one of the first modern 3D games to exploit physics, perhaps the first, or at least the first to have a universal physics engine whereby every object in the game world was physics-enabled. Gravitar and Exile did it in two-dee, and I suppose Quake had rocket jumping and bouncing grenades, but Trepasser codified the modern stereotype of physics games. Whenever people joke about piling rocks onto a plank of wood in order to raise the player up slightly when (a) she could have just climbed over the obstacle, so all the talk of realism is bogus (b) the whole thing was set up purely to justify having the puzzle, so the whole thing is circular, like the military-industrial complex (c) stacking things isn't fun, comma, short pause, all of those jokes began with Trespasser.

Playing it again I'm struck at how many of the quirks that affect Trespasser's physics engine still happen nowadays, specifically slippery jumps, and objects that are the size of a person but weigh almost nothing, and the inability of characters to jump from mild slopes. And the way that objects hover in the air until the player touches them, because the engine saves on processing power by deactivating physics objects until absolutely necessary. The Fallout games have that problem to this very day. The way that objects slide across the ground as if everything is covered in oil. The way that it's much harder to throw accurately than it would be in real life. Etc.

While I'm digressing, Trespasser also illustrates the way that formerly-revolutionary ideas eventually become commonplace. Almost all modern games have an underlying physics engine, but it's just one of those things. It's sometimes used for puzzles, but mostly it's just something games have because realistic gravity occasionally looks neat.

It's the same with faction wars and day-night cycles and realistic sleep schedules etc. For many years a certain kind of developer had a fetish for making a game with non-player characters that had a schedule, so that they woke up, went to work, had lunch, went home, went to bed etc, and if you wanted to sell your gold bars to the shopkeeper you had to wait until he opened his shop. And to be fair a lot of games have that nowadays, but in the past it was touted as a major selling point, but of course the reality is that it's just a neat background detail.

Trepasser was originally going to have complex dinosaur AI, and the finished game still has values for tiredness, hunger, curiosity etc, but in the absence of a functioning ecosystem it was all pointless, so famously the carnivores are set to maximum anger and maximum hunger, like Henry Rollins back when he was good. The AI revolves around pathfinding. The herbivores are programmed to stay in a certain zone. The carnivores are generally told to run at the player until injured, at which point they tend to back off and regroup. In order to give the player a chance the bigger carnivores are usually set up so that they get into fights with the herbivores, thus allowing Anne to slip by.

In the game's defence it's a lot smarter than Quake II, but it's nowhere near the revolution that was promised. In particular there was talk of pack hunting, as in the Jurassic Park film, but the engine couldn't cope with more than a few physics objects at a time, so Anne rarely encounters more than two dinosaurs, and they don't work as a team. They don't attack their own species, but they don't co-ordinate their behaviour in any way. They are not quote clever girls unquote.

At this point it's probably best to just run away, because a six-shot revolver isn't going to do much against a pair of big carnivores.

Trepasser has some neat ideas. Some of them are clever, some are influential, some are both clever and influential, some were neither of those things. Let's talk about the clever things. Let's do a list. Firstly, the heads-up-display. Trespasser doesn't have one. Most games have a HUD that shows the player's heading, health, ammunition etc. Trespasser does not sanction such buffoonery. It cannot go back to that frownland. It outranks tranq. The developers wanted the game to feel real, so there's no HUD at all:

When Anne picks up a gun she describes its condition - "feels full", "four shots" - and when she fires she counts down rounds until the rifle is empty. Which is a smart idea that works well, and adds a certain amount of tension with the magazine-fed guns because the player can't be sure exactly how many rounds they have left. That aspect wasn't influential at all but I have the impression that minimalist interfaces are something that modern-day developers still wish they could implement but are constantly told not to.

The original System Shock had one heck of a HUD. It came out in 1994, only four years before Trespasser, which really brings home the rapid pace of change back then.

The only visual interface is Anne's chest, which has a tattoo of a heart. When Anne gets hurt the heart fills up with blood. In the following image she's doing a-ok:

Trespasser is often remembered as "the game with boobs", but I'm not convinced the developers had seen an actual woman from that angle. Anne can only sustain a little bit of damage, so the heart is mostly pointless, but I have to respect the game for giving the player a semblance of a physical body years before Mirror's Edge did the same thing. Trespasser tries hard to make Anne's body feel like a physical object actually present in the world - most games to this day present the player character as a floating camera - and for the most part it works, which is surprising given that Anne is just a chest and an arm balancing on an invisible marble. When Anne dies the dinosaurs poke and prod her corpse, which reminded me a bit of Doom (2016), albeit without the whole dismemberment aspect. Trespasser has blood, but it's not especially gory.

In addition Anne has regenerating health. She spontaneously recovers from her wounds, which is something that didn't become a standard thing until the latter half of the 2000s. I think the implication is that the blows that don't kill her are just bruises or nudges. Given the huge time gap I'm skeptical that the regenerating health of Call of Duty came from Trespasser, but who knows.

The next clever thing is the inventory. When Trespasser came out the typical first-person character could carry a huge armoury of all kinds of weapons, while role-playing games tended to have a more grounded but still very large bag of holding. Trepasser has none of this. Anne can hold one object in her right hand and one object on her back, and nothing else. Just two objects. Only one more than Adventure on the Atari 2600. There's an implication that her left arm was broken in the crash, although the game never explicitly says so.

The idea of a two-object inventory is something that other games have toyed with since Trespasser. The original builds of Half-Life 2 were going to restrict the player to just a handful of guns. Modern military shooters tend to allow the player to pick one weapon per class, e.g. one pistol, one rifle, no more than one. It's an appealing idea because it forces the player to conserve ammo and plan ahead. In Trespasser it's a mixed bag. One level gives the player a toxin rifle at the start that can kill a T-Rex. The player has to choose between carefully taking out the level's dinosaurs with their pistol and keeping the super-rifle in reserve, or cutting loose and hoping that there's another way to deal with the end-of-level boss. This works really well. It's tense.

But on the other hand the two-item limit also applies to tiny keycards. I spent one level with a shotgun on my back and a keycard stuck out in front of me in a way that looked and felt ridiculous and reminded me of the video for Erasure's "Blue Savannah" which made me feel old and made me feel depressed and bad and wrong.

The rooms are unusually spartan, even when you account for looting. At times the environments reminded me of the ancient 8-bit game Cholo, which was one of the few open-world 3D games from the 8-bit era that tried to model a realistic environment.

What else works? About the only aspects that were universally praised were the voice acting and the music. The developers didn't have the rights to use any of John Williams' original score, so they got a chap called Bill Brown to come up with some atmospheric cues that evoked the music from the films. For the most part the soundtrack is deployed as background ambience or tension music, but it sounds great. One track that stands out is the minute-long "Hammond's House", one of the few pieces with a distinctive melody:

What makes it work is the production and orchestration. It sounds exactly like late-1990s Hollywood film music, not just a synthetic approximation. Some of the tracks popped up as stock music in trailers and in other video games for several years afterwards.

The voice acting is equally good. Sir Richard Attenborough reprises his role as John Hammond, delivering ghostly background narration that fleshes out the backstory, and when I say "reprises his role" I mean that the developers actually hired Richard Attenborough. They didn't just reuse dialogue clips from the films, they hired him to pop into a studio for an afternoon and read out some lines.

I'm not actually a fan of the Jurassic Park films - I saw the original once, long ago, and have no desire to see any of the others - but even though Hammond's narration is a bunch of split-up sentence fragments I still have the impression of tragic figure who meant well but was played a bad hand. The developers also asked Attenborough to read Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias", which fits the theme of the game, although in the end it was cut out of the final release:

Meanwhile Anne is voiced by Minnie Driver, who as far as I can tell recorded her dialogue just slightly before Good Will Hunting came out. Driver manages to be snarky without being an asshole; scared without being annoying; tough without being obnoxious. Despite the fact that Anne is just a voice and a disembodied chest I warmed to her and wished she had been in more games. I wonder if she met Richard Attenborough, or if they recorded the dialogue separately?

One thing that didn't strike me until replaying the game is that Hammond's dialogue is technically Anne-remembering-Hammond's-autobiography rather than Hammond-narrating-the-events. Does that make sense? We're listening to Anne's recollection of Hammond's autobiography. I remember being confused the first time I played the game, because Anne responds to Hammond's narration, but of course it's in her head all along. Minnie Driver apparently enjoyed the experience and referenced it many years later on Twitter, in a thread where she revealed that she had been let go from Gears of War 3 because she wasn't very good at shouting (the loudest she gets in Trespasser is the occasional "ouch").

Other good stuff? The water is nice. The engine generates realistic ripples. The game otherwise doesn't do a lot with water - at one point Anne quickly descends a cliff by leaping into a pond - but the ripples are a nice touch. There is the suggestion of a day-night cycle, with the game beginning in the morning and the final levels taking place in late evening, although this is very subtle and baked into the skybox. God rays and realistic shadows were years away. Anne walks at a realistic pace, which has the effect of making the maps feel larger than they are. A clever trick exploited by The Long Dark years later.

What didn't work? Hoo boy. The original plan was for the whole map to stream from the hard drive, as in Half-Life, so that the player could in theory walk from one end of the island to the other without a loading break. Ultimately this was cut, presumably because there are few places in an open-air environment where the loading pauses could be hidden, and in any case the game is entirely linear. There's no reason to revisit earlier levels, and the only reason to backtrack in the current level is to pick up more guns. The only exception is the town, which has a bit of back-and-forth puzzling. As it stands each level loads separately, with Anne's inventory being reset between maps, which is annoying. The first and last few levels naturally flow, but the middle maps have discontiguous terrain, which highlights the fact that at least two maps were cut and the rest re-ordered.

As mentioned earlier the dinosaurs were originally going to have motivation and emotions. Hunger, fear etc. In the end all of that was turned off because there wasn't time to debug it. In the finished game the dinosaurs just run at the player. And occasionally run past the player and slide of the edge of a cliff and go limp, because outside a certain radius from the player the AI is turned off:

Cheerio, old chap. It wasn't the ice age that killed the dinosaurs, it was a lack of friction.

And sometimes the dinosaurs run into a sharp object and die, because when objects intersect the physics engine goes haywire. The game has a wide range of pick-uppable objects, because the original plan was that Anne could ward off the dinosaurs with random background junk, but the physics didn't work properly, so object damage was toned down. And so the developers had to scatter guns over the world in order to give Anne a chance. For a series that tended to downplay the effectiveness of firearms, Trespasser has a fetish for guns. It has a bunch of realistically-modelled versions of real-world weapons with accurate ammo counts and rates of fire etc. Given the presence of dinosaurs, and the suggestion that Hammond's enterprise was well-funded but tended towards style over substance, Trespasser is one of the few games where the presence of Desert Eagle handguns actually makes logical sense.

Incidentally I was terrified that touching the M14 in the following screenshot would kill me, but I managed to pull it through the floor without being thrown into orbit or extruded etc:

Even in lobotomised form the dinosaurs are still a credible threat, because Anne can't take much damage. They're persistent, and quiet, so they do occasionally provide a good jump scare. Trespasser is very occasionally scary, although the drama is undermined by the fact that the terrain is littered with guns and the dinosaurs are hard to take seriously because their physics-based animation just looks goofy.

One of the scariest video games I have ever played is The Long Dark. The wildlife in that game is mostly just wolves and bears. Not dinosaurs. In theory they shouldn't be a problem, because in the snowy landscape the wolves and bears stand out as small specks off in the distance. The problem is that in The Long Dark the player can't wait for the animals to clear off, because the environment is so harsh. The player has to keep moving forward otherwise they'll freeze or starve. Even if there's a wolf in the way.

In contrast Trespasser doesn't give the player a reason to keep moving. Anne doesn't get hungry or bug-bitten or sick or delirious. The player can, for the most part, just wait for the dinosaurs to wander off somewhere else, so it doesn't really work as a prototypical survival game, but to be fair a realistic eat-drink-heal survival aspect wasn't one of the game's promised features. Trespasser predated the fad for survival games by several years. I can't hold that against the developers.

Explorer, on the ZX Spectrum, notable for its huge, procedurally-generated map and prototypical walking simulator gameplay. The RamJam Corporation didn't last long, but they did release some interesting games.

Let's move on to the game's two biggest problems. Three biggest problems. The arm, the physics, and the actual game. Most modern games abstract the player's interaction with the world. When the player character picks something up, it hovers in the air. When the player investigates a cupboard the game plays an animation of the cupboard opening and then displays an inventory screen. When the player holds a gun they automatically bring it up their shoulder, and so forth. Trespasser isn't like that. It doesn't abstract anything. In order to manipulate the environment the player controls Anne's right arm:

The mouse moves it around. Left mouse + CTRL and SHIFT twist her wrist around, right mouse drops things, F throws things. In order to interact with keypads the player has to move Anne's finger around and actually prod the keys, which is just as irritating as it sounds:

If the player wants to take an object out of a cupboard they have to use the arm to grab the cupboard door, open it, then use the arm to grab the object. Or at least that was the theory. The cupboard, the door, and the object are all physics-enabled, and during the later stages of development it was found that storing objects inside a cupboard with a flappy-open door didn't work - the objects and the door clipped into each other and got stuck - so the doors were removed and the objects were mostly put on the floor, although sometimes the level designer made a mistake and put the objects under the floor.

On the one hand this kind of you-are-there aspect makes a certain amount of sense, but it's one of those developer-obsession things that just doesn't work in practice. It feels like a smart idea, but it doesn't benefit the game and it looks odd. Towards the end of development the team tried to add contextual actions to Anne's repertoire, but they didn't have time to implement much more than a pointy index finger.

As a consequence Anne holds rifles at arm's length, in a way that's both realistic and unrealistic. Realistic because she holds it just as a real one-armed person might hold it, but unrealistic because she has no trouble carrying a five-kilogram M14 at arm's length while jogging over rough terrain for several miles. Anne is also incredibly lucky that every single weapon has the safety catch off and the mechanism ready to fire. And they haven't rusted in the tropical climate.

Perhaps because of the one-arm limit Anne can't reload the guns. She uses them up and throws them away. But on the other hand if the developers had implemented reloading they would probably have forced the player to put individual bullets into the magazine and then push the magazine into the gun, so it could have been a lot worse. Imagine if they had implemented weapons malfunctions and zeroing. Good lord, that would have been horrible.

Trespasser is almost certainly the first implementation of actual, non-abstracted iron sights in a video game ever, but the implementation is awkward and unentertaining. If Anne had simply held guns as any other first-person protagonist, and levitated objects in front of her as in e.g. Half-Life 2, the game would have been no worse. The pre-release screenshots suggested that there was an advantage to Anne's articulated wrist in combat, because she could shoot raptors that jumped her from the sides, but in the game that's completely impractical.

In a perhaps unintentional example of emergent behaviour the raptors' most effective tactic is to close the gap with Anne so that she can't bring the gun to bear, forcing the player to backpedal. This happens quite a lot and is frustrating, but I'll give the game a pass because it's something the raptors might eventually have learned to do in real life. On thing that is however unforgivably irritating is Anne's tendency to drop her rifle when she catches it on the scenery, which happens a lot because she holds it stiffly at arm's length all the time. More than once I found myself leaving a building to find my shotgun clattering to the ground and getting stuck behind something.

Which leads to the physics engine in general. It's a clever technical achievement, especially for 1997. The developers hoped that they could build a whole game around it, but in practice the physics puzzles tend to be set up in advance for the player because the physics engine was too buggy otherwise, as per the following gag with a shootable jeep, which only works because the dinosaur is artificially fixed in place:

Something something fossil fuels. The player's footsteps squelch when Anne walks over blood, which is a neat touch.

Many years later the developers of Half-Life 2 realised that physics puzzles were clever in theory, but there's a limit to how often you can ask the player to stack bricks onto a teeter-totter before it gets boring. Trespasser has a few decent puzzles, generally just one per level, but for the most part the physics engine is a bonus feature that doesn't add much to the core gameplay, which is ironic given the amount of time put into it. An awful lot of the game would work just as well with the kind of scripted, imitation physics that were used by other games.

All of this leads to the game's biggest issue. The huge, streaming map didn't work. The dinosaur AI was mostly disabled, so the baddies might as well have been aliens or robots. The clever audio mixing was nice, but not something people might buy a game for. The physics puzzles won a lot of column inches in the gaming press, but ultimately the game only has a few of them. There's much less box-stacking than you might expect; the developers realised that stacking boxes was awkward, so Anne mostly jumps on top of boxes that have already been stacked by hands unknown.

With all that stripped away, what remains? Not a lot. The environment is mostly empty, and the only interactive objects are guns, which are scattered around the terrain, and keycards, which only appear a few times, and keypads. For the most part the gameplay consists of navigating some simple jumping puzzles while exploring an empty world. The few non-physics puzzles were dumbed down such that if Anne finds a keypad the combination is generally right next to it, as in the image above. The few remaining puzzles are obtuse and can be bypassed by just exploring the map thoroughly.

For the final levels the developers gave up all pretence of adventure and turned the climb up the mountain to the helipad into a conventional first-person shooty-dodgy arcade game. The final battle is a let-down, being simultaneously annoying (the boss dinosaur spawns unexpectedly from thin air) and easy (it goes down with just a few shotgun blasts). In its final levels Trespasser turns into the kind of straightforward first-person arcade game that the developers tried to surpass, but with an inappropriately elaborate engine.

The frustrating thing is that the developers seem to have been on the right track. My favourite map is the town level, illustrated at the head of this post. It has a bunch of explorable buildings, some fighting, some puzzles, some interactive objects. It's the most conventionally adventure-gamey level of the bunch, and it works fairly well. Back in 1998 there wasn't anything quite like it, but it feels as if the developers built the engine and were then asked to wrap things up before they could build the actual game. If the interface had been improved, and the game had been given more and better puzzles, it would have been a fascinating exploration adventure with occasional shooting. As with Deus Ex a couple of years later the puzzles generally have more than one solution - the player can enter the town by working out a code, or finding a hidden pipe, or exploiting the physics engine - and if the game had more puzzles of that nature it might have been a gem.

Ironically therefore the things that won headlines - the physics, AI, environment etc - ended up contributing relatively little to the gameplay, while diverting development time from the few things that did work. But on the other hand would I remember Trespasser nowadays if it was just a competent 3D adventure? It's the ambition that makes it stand out. The flashes of brilliance. The occasional glimpses of what might have been, and what eventually came to pass in a years to come. I salute you, Trespasser.

Anything else? As with STALKER the developers created a bunch of large maps, too large to use, and then cut them out, with the result that the game has a lot of hidden and unused content. The demo level takes place in a small corner of a much larger map that was cut. The same map had a geothermal plant that is briefly referenced in the game, but never seen:

There are vestiges of cut content all over the place. John Hammond's house has a floppy disc that does nothing; it apparently contains a diary, but Hammond's computer plays back the diary even if the player doesn't have the floppy disc. One level contains a large, forested valley that is referenced in a line of dialogue but blocked off from the player. The same map has a plantation house that feels too elaborate to be just a background detail, but it's just a dead end. Early versions of the map had a sequence in which Anne hid from a big dinosaur that smashed off chunks off the building, but that was cut. Some of the cranes have interactive controls that don't actually do anything, presumably a remnant of the crane vs T-Rex fight mentioned in the design document.

There are mounted machine guns and high-calibre rifles, but they're almost impossible to use because they just flop about. Anne can pick up discarded articles of clothing - notably helmets and boots, complete with ankle bones - but she can't wear them, despite the fact it would have been easy to implement clothing upgrades as a little bit of extra gameplay business.

Incidentally Trescom.org, which has been online for over twenty years, catalogues a bunch of left-out bits here. It even hosts some of the early builds. I had a go at Build 96, which was compiled a month or so before the game's release. It includes a bunch of cut content, including a whole new level called Pine Valley that was eventually used as the basis of the demo map. Pine Valley has a geothermal plant, which would have been the setting for one of the game's major puzzles, but the team couldn't get it working so it had to go. It's a shame, because the rest of the map is more or less finished, and it has a couple of interesting locations.

There's something sad about Build 96. It represents the point when the developers realised that time was up. The best they could do was block off some of the unfinished terrain, remove a bunch of physics puzzles, cut out and amalgamate anything that required more work, and generally simplify the maps so that the physics engine was taxed as little as possible.

How can you play Trespasser nowadays? That's a good question. It was only ever released for the PC, specifically late AMD K6-2 / early Pentium III-era machines running Windows 98 with DirectX V6. On my much more modern machine - a Xeon 1275 running 64-bit Windows 10 - it works, surprisingly, but it works even better with Lee Arbuco's Trespasser CE replacement executable. I'm reasonably confident it would work in an x86 virtual machine on any modern-day platform, such as an Apple Silicon machine. There have been attempts to reimplement the game in a newer engine - the maps are apparently 3D Studio Max files - but none have come close to completion.

Trespasser was released on CD-ROM, initially at full-price, latterly on budget, and as far as I can tell it was never re-released after that, and there's no legitimate way to buy it nowadays. No doubt the game is caught up in rights issues. I had an ISO copy of the game, I assume ripped from the budget reissue I owned many years ago, but you, dear reader, you are on your own. At least until we meet again.

But until then, yes, you are on your own.