In 1990 the talks about CD-ROM at industry conferences were all about encyclopedias. “They were talking about how fast text search was,” Graeme Devine remembered, “and all Rob and I could see was the potential to use megabytes of space.” He and Rob Landeros filled two discs with a haunted house, and The 7th Guest became the game people bought CD-ROM drives to play. Devine had got there the long way round: from Spectrum shoot-’em-ups written as a schoolboy, through conversions for Atari and Activision, to a six-month trip to America that he never came back from.
Fast facts
- Born: 1966, in Glasgow.
- First games: Firebirds for the ZX Spectrum (Softek, 1983), then the Spectrum Pole Position for Atari and Ballblazer for Activision.
- Studios: Program Techniques (Xcel, 1985); Trilobyte, founded with Rob Landeros, in Medford, Oregon.
- Best known for: The 7th Guest (1993) and The 11th Hour (1995), and the GROOVIE video engine behind them.
- Later: designer at id Software on Quake III Arena; Ensemble Studios (Halo Wars); Apple; Magic Leap.
A Spectrum programmer
Devine’s name was in the British press by 1983, in Softek’s advertisements for Firebirds, a 16K Spectrum shoot-’em-up: “Realisation: Graham Devine.” CRASH called it “a classic phoenix” with “beautiful graphics”, and gave the fire rate and movement as “the best we’ve seen”.
At 16, by Wireframe’s account, he converted Pole Position to home computers for Atari, and was expelled from school for taking time off to do it. Atarisoft’s Spectrum version was shown at the Earls Court computer fair in September 1984, withdrawn almost at once after criticism, and reviewed by CRASH in January 1985, which found it looked “very like the arcade original” but did not play “anything like as well”. Devine then got a job at Atari, Wireframe says, and was laid off with most of the staff when Jack Tramiel took the company over.
With a friend he set up Program Techniques, whose Spectrum shooter Xcel Activision distributed in Britain in late 1985. Computer Gamer, putting his game Xebec on a cover flexidisc that December, introduced him as the author of the Spectrum Pole Position, a member of Program Techniques “who wrote Xcel”, and the converter of Lucasfilm’s Ballblazer for the Spectrum. Wireframe tells what happened to the Xcel money: a royalty cheque for £28,000, of which, he later found out, his friend’s cousin had kept £25,000.
Mastertronic and America
His next studio, Industrial Concepts & Design, made games for Mastertronic. In 1988 Mastertronic’s co-founder Martin Alper asked him to help start the company’s new office in the United States. “He said no one there knew how to turn on a computer,” Devine recalled. “He asked me to fly over for six months and help get it up and running.” He stayed. At what became Virgin Mastertronic he designed SPOT: The Computer Game (1990), a variation on Othello for up to four players.
Trilobyte and The 7th Guest
At Virgin Mastertronic Devine met Rob Landeros, a former Cinemaware art director. They sketched their first idea on a napkin. The aim, as Devine put it to ACE in 1992, was “a David Lynch version of Cluedo”. Alper liked the plan but did not want a special division inside Virgin, so the pair set up their own studio, Trilobyte, in Oregon, and Virgin published what it made. Devine was president and lead programmer; Landeros ran the puzzles and art.
The hard part was the video. A CD-ROM drive delivered 150K a second, and Devine wrote GROOVIE, the engine that played the compressed footage over the rendered rooms. He also wrote the code to capture the actors, shot on Super VHS against a blue screen from a party shop, frame by frame through a serial port. The 7th Guest came out in 1993, and Devine told Wireframe that 60,000 copies sold on the first day. By August 1994 Edge reported the millionth sale, and Trilobyte had grown from four people to 25.
Devine had no time for the criticism that there was little game between the films. “We didn’t aim 7th Guest at the obsessive gamesplayers — we don’t make games for that small and largely sad section of the market,” he told Edge in 1994. “We aimed it at a mass audience and they loved it.”
The 11th Hour was harder. Devine said he had asked its director to keep the camera still, and found the footage full of camera movement and “impossible to compress”. He rewrote the engine around a wavelet-based codec to fit 65 minutes of video on two discs. The game slipped from spring 1994 to December 1995, the team grew past 60 people, and Devine and Landeros stopped talking. Landeros left to finish Tender Loving Care at his own company, Devine’s children’s puzzler Clandestiny sold poorly, and Trilobyte’s next projects, Extreme Warfare and a racing game, were cancelled. “You could throw a hundred rocks at what caused Trilobyte to implode,” Devine said in 2020. He later sold Landeros the company, Landeros said, “for a dollar”.
id, Ensemble and after
In 1999 Devine joined id Software. He had known John Carmack since the early 1990s from trade shows: “He was doing Doom when I was doing 7th Guest; Quake when I was doing 11th Hour. He teased that he was catching up with me in real time.” When Edge visited that year he was looking after Quake III Arena, and argued that its bots made it “a classic singleplayer game”. In 2000 PC Gamer reported him at QuakeCon describing a massively multiplayer game id had considered before choosing Doom 3.
He moved to Microsoft’s Ensemble Studios, where he worked on Age of Empires III and was a designer on Halo Wars. In 2009 he joined Apple to look after games on the iPhone and iPad, and left at the end of 2010: “I am ultimately a game designer that wants to make games.” He later ran the games studio at the augmented-reality company Magic Leap, as its “chief games wizard”. By 2020 his steadiest income came from his own Full Deck Solitaire. “My gravestone will say, ‘he made a pretty good Solitaire game’,” he told Wireframe.
Sources
- Your Computer, June 1983, p. 172: Softek advertisement for Firebirds (“Realisation: Graham Devine”). Personal Computer News, 27 July 1983, p. 63: Softek advertisement (“Realisation: Graeme Devine”).
- CRASH issue 1, February 1984, p. 46, and issue 3, April 1984, p. 62: Firebirds (Softek, 16K, £5.95; author Graeme Devine).
- CRASH issue 12, January 1985, p. 81: review of Atarisoft’s Spectrum Pole Position (48K, £7.99; withdrawn after the autumn show).
- Computer & Video Games issue 50, December 1985, p. 17: Xcel advertisement (Program Techniques, distributed by Activision).
- Computer Gamer issue 9, December 1985, p. 22: the flexidisc and Xebec; Devine as author of the Spectrum Pole Position, of Program Techniques and Xcel, and converter of Ballblazer.
- Computer Gaming World issue 77, December 1990, p. 88: SPOT: The Computer Game review (Virgin Mastertronic; designer Graeme Devine).
- ACE issue 53, February 1992, pp. 21–22: The 7th Guest preview (“a David Lynch version of Cluedo”).
- Computer Gaming World issue 109, August 1993, p. 54: The 7th Guest review (designers Graeme Devine and Rob Landeros; Virgin Games).
- Edge issue 11, August 1994, pp. 24–27: The 11th Hour prescreen (the millionth sale; Trilobyte’s growth; Devine’s video system; lead programmer; his reply to the critics).
- Edge issue 73, July 1999, pp. 46–47: Quake III Arena prescreen at id (Devine as the founder of Trilobyte, now at id; Carmack; the bots).
- PC Player (Germany), October 1999, p. 65: Trilobyte’s last game and Extreme Warfare; Devine at id.
- PC Gamer (UK) issue 88, autumn 2000, p. 18: Devine at QuakeCon.
- David Crookes, “The trials of Trilobyte”, Wireframe issue 44, October 2020, pp. 28–33: Pole Position and the expulsion; Atari and the Tramiel takeover; Program Techniques and the Xcel royalty; Industrial Concepts & Design; Martin Alper and the move to America; Trilobyte, GROOVIE and the shoot; 60,000 copies on the first day; The 11th Hour, Clandestiny and the end of Trilobyte; Quake III Arena, Halo Wars and Full Deck Solitaire.
- Wireframe issue 60, February 2022, p. 74: Devine at Ensemble Studios on Age of Empires III.
- “Apple game boss quits”, MCV, 9 December 2010 (web, secondary): Devine’s year at Apple and his statement. https://www.mcvuk.com/development/apple-game-boss-quits
- Adi Robertson, on Magic Leap’s games studio, The Verge, July 2020 (web, secondary, read in a syndicated copy): Devine as “chief games wizard”. https://ipsnews.net/business/2020/07/08/fading-light-the-story-of-magic-leaps-lost-mixed-reality-magnum-opus/
- Wikipedia, “Graeme Devine” (accessed October 2026) (web, secondary): birth year and place; Trilobyte founded in December 1990; id from 1999. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graeme_Devine