On the plane back to Oregon, Devine and Landeros had mixed feelings. They were proud and elated. They felt they might have a game that would sell exponentially more than Alper’s prediction of four copies. They were also so terrifed that they felt sick to their stomachs. Now they would have to deliver a game that was even better than the demo.
“Shit,” said Devine.
“Shit,” added Landeros.
Back in Oregon, the company couldn’t afford a proper tech department, and their computer network, which only stored five hundred megabytes, kept crashing from the weight of the sizable video editing projects. They had to make the game look like it had full-motion video; that was their hook. But the opening scene alone, in which the camera moved up an old staircase, had to be tweaked for a month before it looked like a smooth scene shot by a movie camera. The whole problem seems ludicrous today. Today, nearly everyone has QuickTime or Flash to run videos on YouTube, MySpace, or Facebook; you download trailers in seconds with three-megabytes-per-second broadband, and even waiting those seconds can seem like an eternity. But back in 1990, playing video was a novelty. Placing video into game code was a monumental hurdle to overcome, even with the help of Devine’s magic video player. Handling and compressing the data was a complex puzzle, more brain-busting than anything in The 7th Guest itself, and more horrifying, too. An hour’s worth of video took months to organize.
One day during crunch time, Alper and a few business executives flew up to Medford and drove over to the Trilobyte offices in Jacksonville. Alper was still forcing Trilobyte to create a floppy disk version of the product. Equally pressing, since the game was delayed by four months, was Alper’s need to make certain that hard work was being done. As the meeting began, Landeros suddenly excused himself. Minutes went by. At the ten-minute mark, Alper was getting more and more annoyed. Devine had no idea where his partner had gone.
“What the hell is this, some kind of negotiating tool?” complained Alper.
The minutes passed too slowly for Devine, who was now sweating. At the fifteen-minute point, Landeros returned and calmly sat down. “Where were you?” asked Devine, who had anxiously tried calming the executives to no avail.
“I’m sorry. I just got married.” Landeros explained that the only block of time he could find to get hitched was during the hours when Virgin Interactive was in town. He had gone down to City Hall to meet his betrothed, place a ring on her finger, stand for a brief ceremony, and kiss the bride. Then he got back in his car and headed back to the meeting. Alper was impressed with the work ethic, and Virgin Interactive never again demanded a floppy disk version of the scary mystery.
Once Alper departed, one of the employees got up, opened the window, and screamed to the world in vitriolic Peter Finch/Network fashion, “I screwed up! I screwed up!” He had made an error writing code to a CD-ROM and had to dispose of it. CD-ROMs for testing on Trilobyte’s prized $5,000 CD-ROM copier were priced at $100 each in the early nineties, and they weren’t rewritable. Making a mistake with one disk was an expensive proposition, but one that was difficult to avoid because Trilobyte needed to experiment in order to break new ground. The neighbors and passersby on Jacksonville’s streets heard the plaintive and pissed off cries all too often.
Yet there were saviors swooping down from the heavens, the first in the form of one of the more forward-thinking game companies, the second in the form of the world’s most paranoid game company. The Consumer Electronics Show buzz caught on throughout the industry, and Sega now yearned to have The 7th Guest for the CD-ROM-based Sega CD attachment to its Genesis console. The Genesis, which started slow in Japan, was on its way to becoming the bestselling game player in Europe. Sega was also releasing the first in a series of games featuring its speedy, cheeky mascot, the very blue-colored Sonic the Hedgehog. Sega approached Trilobyte with a lucrative offer. But Nintendo, which would soon begin to lose market share to Sega, got wind of the company’s interest and preempted the deal, licensing The 7th Guest for the Nintendo Entertainment System for a staggering $500,000. However, they never planned to publish the game. Nintendo had made a Go-like strategic move to stop Sega from gaining any more ground. Trilobyte received half of those monies and Virgin the other half. Better for the ego than money was the fact that Nintendo sent superstar Shigeru Miyamoto to the little town in Oregon to see what all the fuss was about. Devine planned a grand barbecue for the Legend of Zelda maker. On a hot August day, as steaks sizzled on the grill, Miyamoto seemed happy to hang out with Devine, although the Japanese game maker was somewhat confused about where he was in the world. Through the two translators who arrived with him, Miyamoto told Devine, “I don’t think this CD-ROM technology will ever become popular. At Nintendo, we have cartridges. Cartridges cannot be broken by children. Kids will scratch and smudge these disks, making them unusable. That’s why Nintendo is sticking to cartridges.” Devine knew that CD-ROMs were the future, but he didn’t dare challenge the great Miyamoto.
The finished game was nothing like Mario or Zelda. It had moments that scared you to the point of shivering. The game opened by showing players a Victorian house on a hill, a lone bright light in one second-floor window. Below, a barren, moonlit path snaked its way to the door. Above, the midnight clouds looked like the gnarly fingers of Nosferatu, ready to grab, hold on, and choke until death came. Wind ravaged, thunder pillaged your ears, and tentacled lightning blinded. In the distance, a lone wolf cried out in pain. There was the unsettling sound of a door creaking, somewhere. And that was just the first seven seconds.
Instead of The Stranger, you meet the The Drifter Stauf, sleeping in a trench coat under a craggy hundred-year-old oak tree. An echoing, disembodied voice tells you The Drifter was “moving from town to town, robbing a gas station here, a grocery store there—until one night …” As he steals her purse, Stauf kills a young girl coming home from choir practice because “he had nothing, no life, no possessions, no dreams.” Stauf has visions of toy making, and the toys he carves make him rich. But they might also kill children. The scene is shot in front of a blue screen, a wide shot with a static camera shooting the actors straight on, somewhat like the films of the silent movie era—crude, but effective. In a few moments, you realize that the name Stauf is an anagram for Faust. You shiver, thinking your goose bumps will pop like acne. Once inside the dark old mansion, a bony skeleton’s hand beckons, suggesting where to go for clues. Upstairs goes the shaky camera, Steadicam fashion. At the top, a ghost with long tresses floats across the wide floor planks and through the walls. It’s often written that scary games are best played with the lights off. However, even if your sixty-watt gooseneck lamp was right next to your PC, you were utterly spooked by The 7th Guest. Even better than the frights (which featured a passel of eerie toys) were the peculiar puzzles that Devine and Landeros invented for the game. Moving the blue cells in the old microscope around so that they outnumbered the green cells, which Stauf controlled, was an enigma solvable only by genius math gurus with a major in algorithms. You would curse aloud and throw your trackball mouse against the wall and then go out to the corner bar for a stiff drink.
Back in California, the honchos at Virgin Interactive were well aware of the heat around The 7th Guest. And they were ready to take advantage of it. Keith Greer, the company’s chief financial officer, led the charge to put a $99 sticker price on the game, which would be a collector’s package that would include a video documentary, a small book, the soundtrack, and a bizarre box that looked as though red-eyed demons would crawl out of it, Pandora style, when it was opened. Both Devine and Landeros protested, thinking $99 was an outlandish price to pay. But they had no say in the matter. Virgin Interactive had what it felt was a genius plan, and Virgin Interactive was going to stick by it. They also were asking for a sequel, which Landeros was already working on. Just as Devine was finishing the technology for The 7th Guest, Landeros was involved in shooting the script for The 11th Hour. Without Devine’s input, filming commenced in the spring of 19
93, partially at a sprawling National Guard armory in Medford, Orgeon. Even during preproduction, there was trouble. Matt Costello’s script was too long and was severely rewritten by director David Wheeler. The story, which took place sixty years after the horrific events of The 7th Guest, was steeped in sex and was much more violent. Heads exploded to reveal a gross mass of brain, eyes, and gore. Fingers were smashed. Throats were slit. Flailing, alien insects emerged from toothpaste tubes. When Devine walked onto the set, he fumed when he saw the filming of a woman in S&M gear, including a spiky leather collar. She was bare breasted as well. But Devine could do little beyond worry; filming had already commenced.
Ultimately, The 7th Guest was only about five months late, and when it was released, it became an overnight hit. The modest pressing of sixty thousand copies was gone from store shelves within days. The retailer Software, Etc. wasn’t content merely to sell the game; in a sign of sheer greed, the chain began bundling The 7th Guest with a CD-ROM drive. Virgin Interactive struggled to keep up with the demand for a game that was played by every member of the family. Along with Myst, industry analysts claimed that The 7th Guest was responsible for selling hundreds of thousands of PCs equipped with CD-ROM drives. By the time it stopped selling, more than two million copies of The 7th Guest had been sold. For its breakthrough in technology, Trilobyte received eleven awards from multimedia organizations and magazines between 1993 and 1995. Devine and Landeros had become millionaires on paper. For a project that cost at most $750,000, the financial return for Virgin Interactive was in the stratosphere. For the time being, Trilobyte was hotter than Nintendo, which was seen by pundits to be losing its steam. Devine and Landeros were the new stars of an industry in which adventure games were the Next Big Deal. Overnight success, however, was the worst thing that could have happened to Trilobyte.
Venture capitalists began to swarm and pick at the company like turkey vultures on fresh carrion. An advisory board full of hotshots and moneymen was created. A bigger office, featuring tens of thousands of square feet and bulletproof glass, was leased and sixty employees were hired. Devine and Landeros were forced to spend a lot of time looking at financial projections and spreadsheets. Trilobyte was being groomed by Wall Street to be the next gold-mine initial public offering. Microsoft, Disney, and Fox representatives pulled up in fancy cars, thinking seriously about investing in the company or offering Devine and Landeros lucrative gigs. They proposed a Clive Barker horror game, a Blade Runner game, and an X-Files game. Trilobyte passed every time. Some analysts, who valued the company at more than $50 million, said Trilobyte was on its way to becoming a company more massive than Sega, with more reach than Nintendo. Two million sold? That was nothing, they said. The next game would do Super Mario Bros. numbers. Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen became a believer, adding $5 million to Trilobyte coffers. How utterly wrong they all were.
The new video movie for The 11th Hour was the bugaboo. The director was drunk with adding camera angles he perceived to be crucial to the plot. There were long pans, close-ups, and outdoor shooting in the miserably rainy Oregon spring at a rushing dam. There was running through the forest with a Steadicam. By the end, there were two and a half hours of video in the game. An overwhelming amount of compression work for Devine awaited. As he dug in, the pressure began to take its hold. A making-of video shows an exhausted, halfhearted Devine almost whispering his answers. In the same video, Landeros, who had gained weight from the stress, talks about how big the game will be. Yet both appear somehow sad. They don’t seem to believe their own words. At least no one fell through the blue screen this time.
The two were no longer in sync. Devine disliked the gore in The 11th Hour and became freaked out by the massive amount of work before him. The company was working on six projects at once, including a game that would take place in Antarctica and which dealt with an archaeological dig and dinosaurs. Landeros’s direction changed too; he wanted to do an interactive movie for the theaters.
Then Devine locked himself in his office. He was alone with his thoughts, too alone, trying to figure out how to compress the video, all the time knowing that technology was changing, month by month. He fretted that by the time The 11th Hour was released, it would seem old to consumers. Day after day, he kept the door to his office shut. By his own admission, he was hell to work with because to find better solutions, he would literally turn the game technology upside down every week. Charged up on caffeine, he sent e-mail missives at four a.m. He would go home, drop into bed, only to return a few hours later. The amount of change that he expected and demanded was very hard on the creative team. But he felt he constantly had to do something, to say something. He kept thinking, “Trilobyte can’t fuck up. I can’t fuck up. There’s too much at stake.”
By the end of the development cycle, Devine and Landeros were no longer speaking. For the making-of documentary, they were shot separately, not together as in The 7th Guest promotional video. Somewhere in Devine’s brain, in a deep place he could not consciously get to, he knew he was screwing up, that Landeros was screwing up, that the whole project was doomed. By 1994, they had earned $5 million from The 7th Guest. But they were not happy or fulfilled. As The 11th Hour’s budget added up to $2 million and then some, Devine was enduring terribly painful migraine headaches.
When the game was released one year and eight months late, in 1995, it was beset by technological issues that made it difficult to install on computers; half of those who purchased the game had problems getting it to run. There were one million copies of The 11th Hour on the market, and this time, the buzz was not good. Landeros was off with director Wheeler making his sex-drenched $800,000 interactive movie called Tender Loving Care, a film in which the audience would answer multiple choice questions to move the story along. It was the wrong direction in which to take the already bloated company.
With The 11th Hour underperforming, Devine dreaded going to work. As he drove through the town’s pretty streets, he felt ugly and sick. He no longer wanted any part of Trilobyte. But they wouldn’t let him go. The board elected to fire Landeros and to let him keep the rights to Tender Loving Care. They decided to keep Devine, who was working on an online tank combat game called Assault, which could accommodate as many as twenty-four players at one time. Even though Paul Allen put more than a million dollars into the game (later renamed Extreme Warfare), it was, like the others, deadline plagued. It would never be released.
Devine lamented, “The friendship is over. I sided with the board. I didn’t side with my partner. I didn’t side with my friend. And now I feel lost.” He would be lost for many years after that. Eventually, Devine tried to sell the company to Midway, but Midway backed out at the last minute. There was nothing left to do but close the shop down. Admitted Devine, “I’m mentally exhausted, mentally ill, poor, have no money, and am literally living on money from my parents and my wife’s parents.” For his part, Landeros felt that the real horror story was not in the game, but in real life. The company became a monster, the two friends mere puppets in the quest for financial reward. Everyone was pushing them to build a gleaming publishing empire so they could take Trilobyte public. Worse, Landeros had seen the writing on the wall: Interactive storytelling was becoming a thing of the past.
While it wouldn’t happen immediately, he was right. Games themselves were changing. While adventure games hadn’t yet peaked, gamers would soon turn away from them in favor of first-person shooters full of Nazis and monsters and bloody action. Yet Devine and Landeros (along with the Miller brothers) were responsible for making games begin to look as good as the movies. They had set the bar high. And they had made their mark, just as Myst did; games now had to look so real, you could almost smell the reeking, rotting corpse in Stauf’s mansion. Without The 7th Guest, games like BioShock and Heavy Rain, both of which rely on lifelike graphics and expertly written tales of horror, would likely not have been so frightening. Because of The 7th Guest and Myst, the future would be all about graphics that looked h
yperreal, so much so that the moving pictures and artwork would tell the story better than words. The efforts of these men—and the power of the CD-ROM—also helped make the PC into a viable gaming platform in the 1990s. So now games were in the arcades and bars and bowling alleys, in the consoles in the living room and bedroom, and in the PCs in the den. And with the ubiquity of laptops, you could take your game on the road with you and see it in more glorious detail than with a Game Boy. Weirdly, the platforms did not cannibalize one another. They all thrived. Games were available on just about every cool tech device a nerd—and the quickly growing companies—could imagine.
But beyond its essential role in the horror genre and beyond turning families into PC gamers, the tragic, friend-ending story of Trilobyte became a cautionary tale for all videogame changers. Once close friends whom some called the Lennon and McCartney of videogames, Devine and Landeros would not speak to each other for well over a decade. Some developers wouldn’t pay attention to Trilobyte’s fate. Many, full of haughtiness and swagger that led them to cut corners and drop deadlines, would follow a path down into the musty greed cave, just like the devilish Mammon in Book II of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. But a few would listen as they raised their fingers to test the winds. They could predict the trends and, through diligence and just a little bit of dumb luck, would become millionaires many times over.
All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture Page 14
