Which Game Had the First Ragdoll Physics?

Guinness World Records and APS News name Jurassic Park: Trespasser from 1998 as the first game with ragdoll physics. Hitman: Codename 47 from 2000 has the best documented early technique and a claim of its own, so the answer depends on what counts as ragdoll.

Who claims what?

Source	Claim
Guinness World Records	Lists Jurassic Park: Trespasser, 1998, as the first game to use rag doll physics
APS News (2023)	Says Trespasser was the first game to incorporate ragdoll physics, which it describes as treating a body as rigid shapes joined by joints that gravity acts on
Wikipedia, Ragdoll physics	Calls Trespasser a pioneer and names no first. The article is tagged as needing more citations
Wikipedia, Hitman: Codename 47	Says the game's engine work led to the first use of advanced ragdoll physics in a video game, citing Retro Gamer and Jakobsen

Those claims can both stand, because the Hitman claim carries the word advanced. Trespasser is the earlier game. Some web pages date Hitman to 1997, which does not match its release on 19 November 2000 in North America.

What does the developer record show?

Trespasser. The June 1999 postmortem by designer Richard Wyckoff describes a concept with a complete rigid-body physics simulation and physically modelled dinosaurs. He then describes what shipped: dinosaur bodies built from up to five boxes, standard game movement physics and an inverse-kinematic animation system, with legs that stretched and popped. The word ragdoll does not appear in the scanned issue we searched. The postmortem confirms physics-driven bodies but does not itself state a first, and it describes the result as troubled.

Hitman: Codename 47. Thomas Jakobsen of IO Interactive wrote the most direct technical account. His paper says the algorithms were developed for the game and that the physics system moved cloth and plants, simulated rigid bodies and made dead human bodies fall in unique ways depending on where they were hit. It explains the method, which uses Verlet integration with particles and stick constraints. The copy on Game Developer is dated January 2003.

That paper is why Hitman is often named. It is a primary description of a working technique, published where other developers could read it.

What counts as ragdoll physics?

• Any physics-driven body. The body is simulated and not animated by hand. Trespasser is the usual reference, and its dinosaurs were built this way in part.
• A limp body after death. A character goes loose and falls according to physics. Jakobsen's paper describes this for Hitman.
• The word itself. We could not establish when the term entered use.

What can we say with confidence?

Jurassic Park: Trespasser, 1998, is the earliest game we can document with a source naming it for ragdoll physics, and Guinness and APS News both do so. Hitman: Codename 47, 2000, is the earliest we can document with a detailed technical description from its own developer. We found no reliable source for an earlier game.