The 7th Guest went on sale in April 1993. Graeme Devine remembers that Virgin Games had priced it at $100 and shipped it in a huge box. He remembers a phone call from Martin Alper, the head of Virgin Games, at the end of the first day. 'We completely sold out across the country,' Devine said.
Devine was born in Glasgow in 1966. He started programming on a TRS-80 at fourteen, in the late 1970s, and his first games were published by a small company called Softek for the ZX Spectrum. At sixteen, Atari hired him to port Pole Position to home computers: the Commodore 64, the Apple and the Spectrum. It was not a famous job. It taught him how to fit a game into a machine that had not been built to hold it.
In December 1990 he and Rob Landeros, a designer and artist, founded a company called Trilobyte. Their idea was a haunted-house game that played real video, and it would come on a CD-ROM, a format almost nobody owned a drive for yet. Devine later described the pitch with a joke: they had been given three rules for making a game, and they broke all of them.
Landeros says they handed the pitch to Martin Alper, the president of Virgin Games, when he came in one morning. A story has gone around for years that Alper fired them on the spot. PC Gamer calls it hyperbole, but not entirely untrue. What the accounts agree on is the result: Virgin helped them set up Trilobyte and backed the game. The details of that morning differ from one telling to the next.
Then came the part that was Devine's alone. 'CD-ROMs at the time gave you 150k/second,' he said. 'It took the full power of the CPU to give you 150k/second on most machines.' Video needs far more than that. So Devine wrote a video player, which Landeros says played at double the normal resolution and stayed smooth after compression. It became the heart of the GROOVIE engine, which streamed data off the disc as the game ran. No one had handed him a faster drive. He wrote the program that made the slow one enough.
The pictures had their own trouble. The actors were filmed, in Devine's words, 'against a terrible blue screen that wasn't even blue; it was blue paper.' The footage left faint halos around the ghosts. The team kept them, and the halos became part of how the house looks. Landeros remembers that near the end, 'we were up nights working hard.'
The game sold. Sources differ on the exact total, but it passed two million copies worldwide. Bill Gates called it 'the new standard in interactive entertainment.' Trilobyte made a sequel, The 11th Hour, in 1995. Devine moved on to id Software in 1999, where he worked on Quake III Arena, then to Ensemble Studios in 2003 as lead designer of Halo Wars. In 2009 Apple hired him to help make iPhones and iPads better at playing games. He left in December 2010 and founded GRL Games in Santa Cruz.
The drive in 1990 could read 150 kilobytes a second, and for a while nothing else was on offer. Someone had to write the program that made that number enough. What are you waiting for someone to make ready, and who, exactly, do you expect to do it?