After working at Looking Glass games for a number of years, helping to create games like System Shock, Ultimate Underworld II, and Flight Unlimited, Xbox creator Seamus Blackley was forced to confront a new manager who had little experience in the games industry. Rather than follow Blackley’s idea of taking Flight Unlimited’s well-received gameplay and translate it into a flight combat game, the manager wanted to make a direct sequel to compete with Microsoft Flight Simulator’s considerably larger budget. Blackley refused and was quickly fired from Looking Glass.

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“I was all full of piss and vinegar with the experience of the flight game,” Blackley says on the next episode of our interview show IGN Unfiltered , which releases tomorrow. “I had it in my mind to take these technologies and really keep pushing in the direction of Looking Glass. We’ll try literally to just put you in an environment somewhere with a bunch of things around and you figure out how the hell to deal with it.”This drive resulted in Blackley earning a position with Dreamworks, which allowed him the budget to make such a game so long as he set it within the Jurassic Park franchise. While not thrilled about developing a licensed game, Blackley agreed. Trespasser , released on Microsoft Windows in 1998, was billed as a digital sequel to The Lost World: Jurassic Park. At the time, Trespasser ran on a revolutionary physics-based game engine that determined much of what happened while players explored a 3D jungle island populated by dinosaurs. This physics system was ostensibly designed to allow the studio to bypass animating the dinosaurs, produce sound effects, and drive the plot. It also featured voicework by real-life actors like Minnie Driver and Richard Attenborough.“That was really cool because we described to [Attenborough] how the game worked and the way a game script worked, and he was an older guy, but he completely understood,” Blackley says. “The performance he gave for it was perfect. Much younger actors we worked with had no idea and gave terrible performances. He appreciated that we were trying to do something new and took care of us. It was such kindness. I wish I could thank him for that now.”Unfortunately for Blackley, Trespasser’s budget was tied to a deal with a chip manufacturer that Dreamworks had established, which came with a demand that the game ship by a date the team couldn’t comfortably meet. Many of the ideas the team was throwing around (how the physics system worked, how status effects were shown, and many more) were only partially developed by the time the game had to ship.“I was too young to know how to change this,” Blackley says. “This wasn’t a game company, it’s a movie company. The movie guys don’t understand, if you just decide a movie is done and show it in a theater, it can’t crash the theater and kill half the audience and piss them off. I honestly thought it had destroyed my career.”Blackley still claims responsibility for the failure of Trespasser, which became an industry pariah and a victim of early internet fandom outrage. Blackley says he almost enjoys taking crap for Trespasser in his older age, having grown comfortable with his own shortcomings. That following Game Developers Conference, however, he felt so ashamed that he was almost afraid to show his face.“I had gone from feeling like I belonged to feeling like not only had I screwed up terribly, but I had hurt games. I had hurt the idea of physics in games, I had hurt the idea of interactive storytelling,” Blackley says. “I hurt all these things with the backlash to this game, so I felt like I had done damage and violence to my friends and the industry. [Computer Gaming World editor] Johnny Wilson, who had written stories about Trespasser, said he wanted to meet up with me. So I sneak in and he’s there. He was like the godfather of games press. I asked ‘do you want to talk about it?’ and he took my hands and said ‘keep making games.’ That’s why there’s an Xbox.”You can check out the entire Unfiltered interview with Seamus Blackley Wednesday at IGN.

Joseph Knoop is a contributor to IGN. Follow him on Twitter at @JosephKnoop