Trespassing on Dinosaur Island

Trespasser

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should - Dr. Ian Malcom, Jurassic Park(1993, dir: Steven Spielberg)

At this point, I imagine most folks reading this have a general idea of my predilections regarding the playing of video games most ancient and obscure, especially when it comes to my stream output. My brain is a special kind of broken which considers “I’ve never really finished Link to the Past, have I?” a far less interesting and exciting endeavor than “lololol what if I played the Visceral Games Dante’s Inferno to completion?” You’ll have to forgive me for this, but my contrarian desire to unearth as much obscure nonsense as possible is all I have left in regards to #content. I will always go for something which is more “interesting” than good, and for that I dearly apologize to everyone who follows my streamblog shenanigans.

My most recent example of this is, surprisingly enough, not any of the Ukraineous titles of note, but rather a licensed vehicle whose greatest contribution to video game memery is the idea of looking down at your character’s breasts to see their health. That’s right motherfuckers, we’re talking about Jurassic Park Trespasser, the hit* physics hell nightmare game put out by Dreamworks Interactive as a tie-in with the second film. On one hand, Trespasser is a blatantly unfinished, deeply clonky experimental title where you play as a floppy right arm and diegetic cleavage in your quest to get velociraptors and everything else to ragdoll as hilariously as possible. On the other hand, it’s wildly, staggeringly, far far too ambitious for its own good and as a result is far more interesting than something that wasn’t trying so hard. Should you play it? No, probably not. Did I regret playing it? No, no I didn’t.

Led by a team of former Looking Glass employees who worked on both Ultima Underworld games (including future Xbox exec Seamus Blackley,) the problems of Trespasser’s development are well documented. Mismanagement, failing to test different systems in tandem, making the entire game focused around software acceleration just as 3D cards were becoming ubiquitous, etc. Give that post-mortem a read if you aren’t familiar. It’s frankly insane how many things they had planned, and how many of those things needed to be cut because they didn’t work correctly. The amount of cut content still on the disk is significant. It’s almost impressive they shipped a product at all.

What’s left is a series of ideas and features (constantly buckling under their own weight) in search of a coherent video game. There’s a physics engine in this game, pre-Half Life 2, pre-Havok, pre-any sort of physics middleware, which I need to stress is fucking absurdly impressive for 1998. It’s busted and janky, sure, but when combined with your primary method of interaction (a right arm which can grip and manipulate a ton of items in the environment) hilarious chaos immediately ensues. I saw raptors accidentally kill themselves on random pieces of geometry multiple times! Sometimes the arm gets stuck and stretches out like you're Mr. Fantastic! Trespasser’s control scheme is… unique. Hold the left mouse button to move Anna’s arm, and then press the right mouse button to grip or drop objects. It’s the kind of uncompromisingly anti-player control scheme I can get behind, especially when any sort of aiming or combat is involved. It’s Immersive Sim QWOP. It reminds me of a lot of modern VR games, especially ones with a lot of tactile object interaction… except without the fidelity and technology granted by modern motion controls. Basic actions, like stacking boxes or aiming a gun, are a constant struggle. The attempts at a diagetic UI are extra funny. Aside from the aforementioned boob tattoo health meter on a pair of impressively large becleavaged behonkers, which will never not be funny, Anne will call out exactly how many shots she has in a gun while she’s firing it in the most robotic fashion possible. This game tripped so Dead Space could walk, I guess. I kind of love it. In a different world this game would’ve been stupidly influential and important, but since it’s all terrible and busted it’s a curiosity falling directly into my wheelhouse.

Since Trespasser is less a video game with explicit objectives or mechanics, and more a box filled with broken tools, there are moments where it’s accidentally just kind of a walking sim. The late Sir Richard Attenborogh reprises his role as John Hammond, acting as the ghostly audio log narrator describing the creation of Jurassic Park, while Anne (voiced by Minnie Driver) will occasionally quip… something, sometimes as if she’s hearing Hammond speak. The attempt at creating coherent, realistic spaces is one of those things the game actually does well. Especially so when you get to the overgrown, abandoned InGen facilities and just… poke around like it was Gone Home. The fidelity isn’t quite there, but it's ahead of its time in a lot of ways. The game still manages to evoke the kind of beautiful desolation the devs were going for. But a lot of it just involves very slowly walking through jungles and occasionally shooting velociraptors poorly, which is its own kind of meditative. Well, as meditative as my weird deranged tangents during the latter half of the second stream became.

I’ve been trying very, very, very hard to avoid just vomiting out as many parallels as possible between a failed dinosaur theme park foiled by hubris and systemic chaos, and a failed dinosaur theme park video game foiled by hubris and systemic chaos, but they write themselves. I mean, the game itself has an unused voice line where Hammond recites part of Shelly’s Ozymandias. It’s right there! Clever Girl! That’s a lot of shit! Etc etc. Jurassic Park Trespasser is an admirable failure; far too broken and unfinished to be anything other than a curiosity, a shadow of what could've been. I imagine it’ll never get any sort of modern re-release, but god bless the weirdos still making fan patches to make it run surprisingly smoothly on modern OSes. Video games… find a way. Okay I’ll stop. I’ll stop. Gonna try and finish my write-ups for the Wheel of Ukraineous Video Games in the next week or two, so look forward to those.

Also… maybe look forward to what comes afterwards? It’s gonna be spoooooky. and maybe not even a wheel?

Actual Video Game Playing starts at about 15 minutes in if you want to skip watching me ineffectually flail with config files until I figure out how to get the game in a window

Trespasser always looked great in magazines, but then again, I was a sucker for anything advertised in a magazine. I'll have to watch your playthrough. I've seen a few minutes of the game here and there but I've never really seen anything in depth.

You've all but assuredly seen it, but Kim Justice's video on Trespasser is an absolute must watch for you or anybody else interested in this game's production, its vibes, and the ~~cargo cult~~ community around it.

This Jurassic game might have the potential if this will have a remake or remastered version, though the video is kinda interesting to look at like the player is making fun with the raptors lol.

I wouldn't mind a health bar on my body I could see.