The history of Trespasser begins back in 1995 with the plans of a second Jurassic Park movie. DreamWorks Interactive was a new computer game company on the market and willing to take the risk and to produce a 3D-Enviroment never seen in any games before. So they got a group of Programmers together, under the leadership of Seamus Blackley, a former Looking-Glass Employee, who has been working on the “first real 3D game” System Shock before and was really interested in the project. In 1997 they were able to present their first concept Art Images and the feedback they got was quite astonishing. Due to this feedback, they decided to implement more and more fantastic features, until, once and for all, the game was getting too expensive in Production. DreamWorks Interactive decided then to pull a deadline and to cut everything out, which wasn’t stable enough or would simply wouldn’t sell. After a few months, the product was partly stable and being shipped. Many features were left out, turned off or simply removed from the levels. The game was shipped at the end of 1998.
However, with the end of production, started the Hacking Community to do their job. After all, many people have been looking forward to this game, but didn’t like it the way it was and simply wanted to modify it or to improve it, so that it’ll become to what people wanted. A small group of hackers, named THS, was formed. They did some first important steps on editing the game. They even tried to get DWI to publish the source code, but of course they denied and made it impossible for all the others to finish their jobs easily. That is why they stopped hacking the game in March 1999. They have only been working on the game for 3 months, but they surely did find a lot about it, making it possible for others to retry editing the game.
A couple of the first THS Members regrouped and formed the THS2 in July 1999. They accomplished some great Trespasser editing tools, which are still quite useful and found out about several things, which were of a lot of use later on. But mystically they stopped working, leaving only two of them behind. These two were Andres and TSOrd. TSOrd started working on his own site (Trespasser Secrets) and brought a board up. The site was about the recreation of the Geothermal plant level (also known as the Pine Valley) and the board was the only place left for the Trespasser Community to stick together. But he mysteriously disappears in September 2001 and was never heard of again. In 2005, after a forum member managed to get in touch with his family, we received the news that TSOrd had been killed in 2001 by a speeding driver while he had stopped and helped a victim of a hit and run by a drunk driver on the side of the highway.
Andres for his part started working on TresView, allowing us to view Trespasser levels with High-End graphics. TresView later changed its name to TresEd, and the last version was released in 2003. It is possible to edit the levels and create your own levels, in any way you want.
In the year 2003, we’ve successfully edited our first few levels and even created some entirely new ones. We’re pushing the game engine to its limits and new exciting game features are being discovered on a regular basis. The TresOps was founded back in 2002 and have been developing levels ever since. (One of which, the fist TC-level, was released in Dec 2002, with TC-Isle and TC-Rescue released later on). But not only the TresOps have been busy. The rest of the community has put a lot of effort into creating new levels by themselves. Even though some of the projects have stopped, it is a pleasure to see so many people willing to spend their spare time creating new stuff for Trespasser, including great new webpages, fan art and more. TresCom used to be a part of the huge GameSpy Empire, uhh Network :). By being part of this network, we’ve become more capable of handling the huge request.
Over the years, many fantastic fan-made levels have been released. We have even made new amazing discoveries about the game. The years even bought a leaked source code, GUIApp and several early alpha versions. In 2014 we got a new patch, bringing state-of-the-art graphic to Trespasser. Who knows what the future will bring?
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