The 7th Guest was a PC game that people bought CD-ROM drives to play. Two Virgin employees, Graeme Devine and Rob Landeros, set out to fill a disc that everyone else in 1990 wanted to use for encyclopedias. They ended up filling two. The player drifts through a haunted mansion rendered on a computer, solving puzzles while filmed ghosts act out a murder story on the stairs. Computer Gaming World called it “a multimedia showpiece” in August 1993, then spent most of its review on the sound cards it would not run on. A year later Edge called it “the game that put multimedia PCs on the map” and reported that it had just made its millionth sale.
Fast facts
- Developer: Trilobyte, founded by Graeme Devine and Rob Landeros.
- Publisher: Virgin Games, from 1993 Virgin Interactive Entertainment.
- Released: 1993 on PC CD-ROM (two discs, $99.95), after missing Halloween 1992 and then February 1993. Versions followed for the Macintosh, the Philips CD-i (June 1994) and, in 2010, the iPhone and iPad.
- Game: 23 logic puzzles in a 22-room mansion, with 36 minutes of video of live actors.
- Engine: GROOVIE, Devine’s own video-playback engine.
- Music: George “The Fat Man” Sanger.
- Script: Matthew J. Costello.
- Sales: one million by August 1994; later accounts say over two million.
- Sequel: The 11th Hour (December 1995).
A game to fill a CD
Devine had come to America in 1988 when Martin Alper, co-founder of Mastertronic, asked him to help set up the company’s new American office for six months. He stayed, and met Landeros, a former Cinemaware art director, at what was by then Virgin Mastertronic. Looking back in 2020, the two told Wireframe that the CD-ROM talks they went to at trade conferences were all about text: “It was all about encyclopedias,” Devine said. “All Rob and I could see was the potential to use megabytes of space.” Their first sketch, on a napkin, was a version of the board game Clue with the mood of Twin Peaks. It turned into a haunted house. According to Devine, Alper looked at the plan and said “I’m going to have to fire you.” He wanted the game made, but he thought a special division inside Virgin would upset the other teams. So Devine and Landeros set up their own studio, Trilobyte, in Oregon, and Virgin published what it made.
Building the mansion
The first plan was to film a real mansion in 360-degree pans, but, Landeros told Retro Gamer, “there were no mansions there that had 100ft art galleries”. Then one of their artists, Robert Stein III, took home a copy of 3D Studio and came back with a rendered room whose furniture floated about. The mansion was built that way instead. In April 1993 Computer Gaming World reported that its graphics had taken more than two years and “over a half-million dollars”. The finished house had 22 rooms, each taking at least a month to produce. Moving from room to room played a rendered camera path at 15 frames per second, in 256-colour SuperVGA.
The ghosts were real actors from Oregon, shot in two days on Super VHS. Wireframe gives the cost of the shoot as $24,000. The blue screen had come from a party shop, and in Devine’s account “one of the actors fell through it”. The team could not clean the fringe of colour it left round the actors, so it kept the fringe and called it a “ghostly aura”. Getting the footage off a CD at 150K a second needed a program of its own. Devine wrote GROOVIE, the engine that played the compressed video. ScummVM, which runs the game on modern machines today, still calls its engine for Trilobyte’s games “Groovie”.
Nintendo Power put the whole cost at up to $1.5 million in January 1993, when it described the game as “considered by many to be the most advanced CD-ROM entertainment product created to date”. Bill Gates had already shown it at the 1992 Multimedia Convention in San Francisco. According to Computer Gaming World, he called it “the new standard in multimedia entertainment”.
Stauf’s puzzles
The story takes place in the house of Henry Stauf, a drifter who became a rich toymaker after dreaming of a doll, until children who bought his toys began to die. Six guests were invited to his house and disappeared; the player is the seventh. Stauf was originally called Henry Steeple. The writer, Costello, renamed him: in Devine’s words, “he thought it was good to have his last name be an acronym of Faust”.
The structure came from Landeros’s love of puzzle books and from The Fool’s Errand, a puzzle game where each solved puzzle gave you a piece of a map. In The 7th Guest each solved puzzle opens another part of the house and plays another scene of the ghosts’ story. Computer Gaming World counted 23 of them, mostly logic puzzles: word puzzles, variations on the Rubik’s Cube and a maze. Edge pictured a chess puzzle, and Retro Gamer one with a cake decorated with skulls and headstones that has to be cut so that every slice gets two skulls, two headstones and one empty space. A player who got stuck could visit the library and read Stauf’s book of clues. The first two visits gave hints, and on the third the book solved the puzzle outright.
The review
Chuck Miller reviewed it for Computer Gaming World in August 1993. He praised the house, the “ethereal” music and the “deviously clever puzzles”, but the game had “arrived just a bit too early”. It needed at least a 386DX, 2MB of memory and a 16-bit SuperVGA card, and slower machines fell back to MCGA graphics, which he called “pitiful”. Worse, it crashed with sound cards built on the MediaVision chip set, including his own Pro Audio Spectrum 16. “It would have been better to further delay the game than to release it as was done, without sufficient testing.” The next month the magazine printed a fix: reinstall the card’s software on DMA channel 3.
A million copies
It sold anyway. Devine told Wireframe that 60,000 copies went on the first day, and “people bought CD-ROM drives just to play the game”. By April 1994 Computer Gaming World called it “a proven bestseller” that had “remained unchallenged in its 3D-rendered beauty until the recent release of Myst”. Edge reported the millionth sale in August 1994, and Trilobyte had grown from four people to 25. Retro Gamer and Wireframe both later put total sales at over two million.
The criticism that stuck was that there was not much game between the videos. Edge noted that the main complaint was that it was “too linear”. When it reviewed the CD-i version in July 1994, Edge praised the video: it played in 24-bit colour at 24 frames a second through the machine’s MPEG cartridge, from one disc instead of two. The game itself was “a lavishly produced puzzle compendium with minor adventure overtones”, and “no click-and-wait game could ever be classed as” great.
After the guest
The 11th Hour began in October 1992, before the first game was finished. It had a new director, David Wheeler, and 65 minutes of video that Devine had to squeeze on to two discs with a wavelet-based codec. It came out in December 1995. More than 60 people worked on it, against five or so core members on the first game, and by the time it came out Devine and Landeros had fallen out. Landeros left to finish his next project, Tender Loving Care, at a new company, Aftermath Media. Trilobyte closed after a string of cancelled games, and Devine went on to work on Quake III Arena and Halo Wars. Devine sold Landeros the company, as Landeros tells it, “for a dollar”, and Landeros released The 7th Guest for the iPhone and iPad in 2010. A Kickstarter campaign for a 7th Guest 3 in 2013 fell well short of its $435,000 target, but a board game raised $61,933 in the same way.
Sources
- Computer Gaming World issue 109, August 1993, pp. 54–56: Chuck Miller’s review (Halloween 1992 schedule, two CDs, 23 puzzles, 22 rooms, 256-colour SuperVGA, George Sanger’s soundtrack, the book of clues, system requirements, MCGA fallback, the MediaVision problems, the patch, $99.95, credits).
- Computer Gaming World issue 105, April 1993, pp. 30–31: Chuck Miller’s preview (release planned for the end of February, Stauf’s story, 15 frames per second, over two years and half a million dollars of graphics, The Fat Man).
- Computer Gaming World issue 108, July 1993, pp. 54–55: feature on making the introductory sequence (Bill Gates at the 1992 Multimedia Convention, 36 minutes of video, 22 rooms at a month each, the green screen).
- Computer Gaming World issue 110, September 1993, p. 81: the fix for Pro Audio Spectrum 16 cards.
- Computer Gaming World issue 117, April 1994, p. 22: “a proven bestseller”, compared with Myst.
- Nintendo Power issue 44, January 1993, pp. 127–130: CD-ROM feature (“the most advanced CD-ROM entertainment product created to date”; cost estimates up to $1.5 million).
- Edge issue 10, July 1994, p. 76: CD-i version review (Philips, £50, June release, 24-bit colour at 24 frames per second, the chess puzzle).
- Edge issue 11, August 1994, pp. 24–25: The 11th Hour prescreen (the millionth sale, Trilobyte’s growth from four to 25 staff, “too linear”, 65 minutes of video on two discs, the wavelet-based system).
- K (Italy) issue 58, February 1994, p. 17: the Macintosh CD-ROM version about to appear.
- Martyn Casserly, feature on The 7th Guest, Retro Gamer issue 108, November 2012, pp. 40–41: Devine and Landeros on Clue and Twin Peaks, Henry Steeple and Faust, The Fool’s Errand, Robert Stein and 3D Studio, the cake puzzle, the Super VHS shoot and the “ghostly aura”, sales of over two million, the iOS version.
- David Crookes, “The trials of Trilobyte”, Wireframe issue 44, October 2020, pp. 28–33: Devine’s move to America, the napkin plan, Alper and the founding of Trilobyte, GROOVIE, the $24,000 shoot, 60,000 copies on the first day, The 11th Hour’s production and December 1995 release, the split, Aftermath Media, the iOS release, the Kickstarter campaigns, Devine’s later career.
- ScummVM, “Compatibility” (web, secondary): The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour supported by its “groovie” engine. https://www.scummvm.org/compatibility/