Trespasser is a 1998 action-adventure video game developed by DreamWorks Interactive and published by Electronic Arts for Microsoft Windows.

Players control Anne, the sole survivor of a plane crash that leaves her stranded on a remote island with genetically engineered dinosaurs.

It features the voices of Minnie Driver as Anne and Richard Attenborough as John Hammond, reprising his role from the film series.

[6] The mixed reception is believed to have been caused by rushing the development to reach the 1998 release date and the game's overly ambitious and advanced nature.

After recovering security cards from an InGen town and rebooting a computer to activate a mountain-top radio tower, Anne proceeds to the large mountain and ascends.

As she traverses the island, Anne will often talk to herself or remember clips of John Hammond's memoirs (voiced by Richard Attenborough) describing the creation (and downfall) of Jurassic Park.

By pressing a key, Anne will extend her arm out into the game world, allowing the player to pick up, swing, push and throw objects.

[17] A late shift in development effectively changed the game's genre from survival horror to action shooter, resulting in many complaints upon release.

Additional problems were caused by the lack of experienced management and the use of artists who were unfamiliar with basic game development processes and 3D modeling.

[10] Art director Terry Izumi's background, for example, consisted of being a designer for Tomorrowland, and George Edwards was a veteran animator of Disney films.

The team rushed the remainder of development, and Trespasser released as an unfinished game set in a very large and open outdoor environment.

[citation needed] It accomplished this by rendering terrain to an offscreen cache and then only redrawing objects when the player character moves significantly.

In the final release the dinosaurs were disallowed from making jump attacks and entering buildings to avoid interpenetration, a glitch where two objects will collide and then become stuck inside one another.

[5] Trespasser was designed to have a complex artificial intelligence routine, giving each creature on the island its own set of emotions and the possibility of dinosaurs fighting each other.

[19] However, system bugs in the artificial intelligence routines made it so that dinosaurs would switch between mood-based actions so quickly that they would stop moving and acting.

[23] A GameSpot review by Elliot Chin described it as the most frustrating game he had ever played with "boring gameplay and annoying bugs".

He lambasted the needlessly complicated physics engine, levels being over-filled with box-stacking puzzles, and a clumsy arm interface.

[23][21] Other complaints included exploration being tiresome due to slow movement speed,[22][12][27] landscapes being barren with few dinosaurs,[27] graphical glitches,[23][4] and poor voice acting.

[22][23][27] An IGN review was more favourable, describing the plot as "super-intriguing" with high praise for the realism of the game's physics engine.

While deriding the blocky and heavily pixelated environment that offered limited interaction, and the erratic and impossible arm movements, the reviewer said the dinosaurs were convincing and "looked and moved really well" and concluded the game was badly implemented but still ground-breaking.

On the downside, it said the gameplay is very basic with the usual "key-finding, enemy-killing, button-pushing" of the FPS genre, and that when there was more than one dinosaur on-screen the game slowed considerably.

[26] An AllGame reviewer didn't like the bugs and graphical glitches or the slow frame rate but concluded the game was a "ground breaking title that offers some great thrills, challenges, puzzles, and rewarding gameplay".

[30] An Adrenaline Vault review liked the game's originality and some tense moments, but disliked the slow treks, the lack of a real inventory system, the frustrating interface and there being too many guns lying around.

Members of these communities developed fan-made software to examine, preview, and eventually edit Trespasser, such as the TresEd level editor.

[40] Gabe Newell cited Trespasser as influential to Half-Life 2's physics, though its failure caused him and the rest of Valve to worry about the potential for negative comparisons between the two.

[42] Around 2012, as Steven Spielberg was preparing to revive the Jurassic Park franchise, he contacted Blackley about making a new Trespasser game.

Due to a management change at Universal Pictures, the project was cancelled and Blackley turned the assets over to Frank Marshall, who produced the 2015 film Jurassic World.