Jurassic Park Trespasser

Jurassic Park: Trespasser

Developed by: EA/Dreamworks

Released: 1998

Platform: PC

 

Serving as a sequel to The Lost World: Jurassic Park, play as Anne, a sole survivor of a plane crash stranded on a remote island inhabited by genetically engineered dinosaurs. Stay alive and escape the island!

Jurassic Park: Trespasser plays a significant role in the history of physics based engines in videogames and was the first to implement ragdoll physics into a digital world.  It is remembered both for its firsts in videogame physics as well as for its game engine. This was the first game engine to successfully render detailed explorable environments with hundreds of trees. 

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIACT8MUZTgNhBuKre7B8d50f-MJXsGmc

Conservation

Despite being a commercial flop with only around 50,000 copies sold, the game continues to have a devoted fan base and is an excellent example of contemporary videogame conservation. 

Embedded within the game were audio clips of Richard Attenborough, the actor who played John Hammond in Jurassic Park. Fans of the game extracted these audio files from the game and created a ‘virtual audio diary’ for the character on YouTube, filling in gaps in the narrative with audio simulations of the actor’s voice. In this way the performance was preserved. Previously it would have been ‘locked’ within the game and only accessible if played through.

 

Interesting Facts:

 

• The game is abandonware. This is a term for games whose copyright has expired (either due to age or voluntarily) and is then considered ‘abandoned’ by its copyright owner/developer. Despite this, JP Trespasser still has a thriving community of fans who continue to share various builds, fan art, trivia and the like on their webpages and forums.

 

• The game was intended to release at the same time as The Lost World: Jurassic Park film in 1997. However, it was delayed for a year due to a number of problems as well as severely going over budget. This resulted in many features being either cut or left unfinished and unpolished.