Jurassic Park: J Trespasser

Excavating the site of one of gaming’s most infamous failed experiments.

- Phil Iwaniuk

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 first-person 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 first-person gaming.