Limitations, Part Two

In the 1990s, one of the hottest properties in Hollywood was Jurassic Park. Naturally, the property owners wanted to make money on the property outside of theaters, so they attempted to bring Jurassic Park to life through video games. One such attempt resulted in Trespasser (Dreamworks Interactive), a 1998 action-adventure game designed to make the most of the cutting-edge technology of the day. “The pie-in-the-sky concept for Trespasser was an outdoor engine with no levels, a complete rigid-body physics simulation, and behaviorally-simulated and physics-modeled dinosaurs,” said designer Richard Wyckoff in a post-mortem with Game Developer.⁵ As⁠ exciting as these concepts were, the team struggled to make them a reality with the technology they had on hand. Their rendering software, level designs, artificial intelligence systems, and physics engines all caused the team problems. The final result was received so poorly that GameSpot proclaimed it ‘The Worst Game of 1998.’⁠⁶ In detailing the teams’ troubles to Game Developer, Wyckoff summed it up thusly: “…there is a difference between having a plan and successfully executing it, and the product that we eventually shipped was as disappointing to us as it was to the great majority of game players and game critics.”⁠⁷

Trespasser is a familiar example of a game that fought against technological limitations and lost, but it isn’t the only game in that category. Thousands of other game developers have struggled in the face of similar obstacles, including the Factor 5 team behind Lair. Lair’s development was rife with problems (see Part One for more details), and many of those problems stemmed from their issues with emerging technology. Lair was one of the first projects developed for Sony’s Playstation 3 console, and as a result, the staff at Factor 5 had to learn how to develop for the new console on the fly. That process turned out to be far harder than anticipated. According to designer Seppo Helava, the team was confident that they could mimic the stunning graphics seen in the earliest trailers for the consoles, but “…then you got to the PS3 and shockingly beautiful became so expensive and so complicated. The things you needed to do to support a game that had that level of fidelity — the problems became exponentially more difficult.” As if those troubles weren’t enough, Sony reportedly added further pressure by insisting that the game use the latest motion controls. “All of the designers were unanimous that we didn’t like [the motion controls] and it wasn’t how the game was meant to be played,” said designer Joe Spataro. “We ended up shipping it that way and none of us were happy.“⁠⁸ Reviewers weren’t happy, either; the game was so troubled on launch that Sony actually sent reviewers instructions on how to play the game,⁠⁹ which did nothing to improve the game’s middling reviews. Had Sony and Factor 5 been more aware of the technological limitations of the time, Lair might have been a very different game—one remembered more fondly than it is today.