Legend has it that The 7th Guest's creators were 'fired' on the spot after pitching the game—it's 'hyperbole,' but not entirely untrue

Myst is the game best known for driving adoption of the CD-ROM drive, but as a Halloween-obsessed kid in the '90s, The 7th Guest was where it was at for me. The 1993 puzzle-adventure game was, like Myst, one of the first games that required a CD-ROM drive—but unlike Myst, sometimes your mouse cursor was a skull with bulging eyeballs and a throbbing brain. Hell yeah.

In the spirit of the original's once cutting-edge hardware requirement, a remake of The 7th Guest came out for VR headsets in 2023. A non-VR version of that remake is now due out June 4 on Steam, which led me to chat with the remake's director, Paul van der Meer, and one of the creators of the original 1993 game, Rob Landeros.

I took the opportunity to ask about a bit of '90s gaming lore: The supposed on-the-spot "firing" of Landeros and programmer Graeme Devine after they pitched the idea for The 7th Guest. Wikipedia states simply that the pair founded Trilobyte Games after being "fired from Virgin Games."

When they approached me, I said to them: I hear everything you have to say, but you are fired.

Martin Alper in a 2013 interview

Landeros had been hired by Virgin to bring a cinematic touch to "bargain bin" games, as he put it, but eventually he and Devine got the idea to do something original. The pair had been flying around to tech conferences, taking meetings with "a bunch of suits" about that brand new CD-ROM technology, which as Landeros recalls wasn't being pitched as anything fun. They were "just storing a bunch of data on discs and sharing it, you know, in corporations." Boo.

After a few of these meetings, Landeros and Devine started brainstorming at an airport, where they "wrote stuff on the back of a napkin, literally." Shortly thereafter they proposed the idea for The 7th Guest to Martin Alper, then president of Virgin Interactive. Alper, who passed away in 2015, recounted what he told the pair in a 2013 interview:

"When they approached me, I said to them: I hear everything you have to say, but you are fired. That's the truth, that's what I said. They just looked at me very strangely, wondering what was going on. I said, well, I want to support you, I want to produce this game, but we can't do it inside Virgin because it would be disruptive to everybody else who were working on much less ambitious projects."

Landeros tells me that the tale of that friendly firing is "hyperbole," but affirmed that Alper read their proposal and almost immediately greenlit The 7th Guest over lunch, with the agreement that they'd go make the game outside of Virgin.

"I've seen instances where a special project is set aside, and then the people go to work on it in another part of the building, and [other employees] go, 'What are those guys doing here? Why do they get this?'" said Landeros. "So I kind of wanted to avoid that. We felt this was a big enough project, it was going to take up all our time, we didn't need distractions, and so we just said, you know, we should do it elsewhere, and we'll even form our own company."

With a contract from Virgin, Landeros and Devine moved to Oregon to start their studio, Trilobyte Games, where they began experimenting with Autodesk's 3D design software to create The 7th Guest's haunted interiors, as well as those custom cursors I remember so clearly.

"We didn't have Photoshop … I was sitting there trying to make these animated icons in these old tools, and they kind of didn't work," Landeros told me. "And then I just went, 'Oh, wait a minute, Autodesk 3D animator came with a skull model, and an eye is easy to make, and so you know, 'I'll just make the skull, the jaw flap, or the eyes roll around, and the brain throbbing,' and I think I created the whole animation about two hours or something."

None of that would come close to filling up a CD-ROM, though; they needed video to accomplish that, so they shot the ghosts of The 7th Guest's mansion on Betamax tapes and created "terrible" digital files: "It's a good thing ghosts are transparent," Landeros joked, because it helped them hide the video's flaws.

Whatever misgivings about the video quality Landeros may have today, at CES in Las Vegas in 1991, a demo of The 7th Guest "blew people's minds," he said. That's when he and Devine knew they really had something.

The 7th Guest was followed by a sequel, The 11th Hour, and now the remake, which features new puzzles and a cool, more technologically-advanced take on the original's FMV scenes: "volumetric video" that allows players to view the actors from any angle. It was essential for VR, but looks cool in the non-VR version, too.

Van der Meer is a big fan of the original 7th Guest, and had been in contact with Landeros over email before ever pitching the idea of a remake. It was at a birthday party that he suggested to the CEO of Vertigo Games, known for Arizona Sunshine and the new Thief VR game, that the '90s classic would be great for the medium, and they went for it.

The new flatspace version of the remake, simply called The 7th Guest Remake, will be out soon on Steam. It's "pretty much the same" as the VR remake, but with a new interface and one puzzle room redesigned to avoid VR-specific controls.