Trilobyte

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This article is about the computer game company. For the prehistoric creature, see Trilobite.

One of the later logos for Trilobyte, consisting of a trilobite on a pyramid.

Trilobyte was a computer game developer founded in December 1990 by Graeme Devine and Rob Landeros. They are well known in the computer game industry for The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour games, and to a lesser extent for Clandestiny and other titles.

1 Logo
2 History
3 Closing
4 Released Games
5 Unreleased Games
6 External links

[edit] Logo

Their official logo consists of a Trilobite embedded into a pyramid. The design for the logo has gone through many changes, from the simple, to celebrating holidays on their webpage (now offline). The logo pictured is one from a mirror of the old official company page, and is more heavily designed then versions seen within the games themselves.

[edit] History

The company is most famous for creating the PC game The 7th Guest, one of the first computer games for CD-ROM. Most of the footage for the game was filmed with a USD$35,000 budget, Super VHS cameras, and blue butcher paper as a background that would later be removed to help insert the actors in the game (a process called chromakey, also referred to as bluescreen). The game was a puzzle-solving game similar in style to Myst. However, most of the puzzles in the 7th Guest were based on versions of real puzzles invented by people such as Max Bezzel, while the puzzles in Myst were mostly fantasy-based. For the time, it had amazing graphics by Robert Stein III, Gene Bodio and Alan Iglesias, MIDI music by The Fat Man, and an interesting story by Matthew J. Costello. During planning, a sequel was already being thought of in anticipation of success. The final version of The 7th Guest was released in 1993. 60,000 copies were snapped up overnight, and a bevy of requests for reorders arrived days later. When the game was released, some CD-ROM manufacturers registered up to a 300 percent increase in sales for CD-ROM drives.

Overall, the game proved to be a turning point in CD-ROM based technology. Many believe that if it wasn't for the popularity of The 7th Guest and Myst, a similar-styled adventure game, the CD-ROM would not have been as popular and would have taken longer to gain a foothold in the marketplace.

The 11th Hour was released in the fall of 1995, after missing its original release date by more than a year. It was one of the first games to support 16-bit color. Graphically, the game was superb for the time. It featured detailed environments and fluid motion. However, the game drew criticism for several reasons. The game was released in DOS when Windows 95 had already been out for some time. The company was flooded with callers trying to get the game to run on their machines. The game still used MIDI for music, instead of CD audio. In addition, the gameplay was not well received by some, with players getting angry at the puzzles and riddles they had to solve, ranging from abstract logic to anagrams. Despite the massive amount of pre-orders from vendors, sales ended up being far below the the expected amount, and the game did not recover in sales the amount of debt it had cost the company to produce it. This was one of the key events that led to the company's financial downfall.

The next projects for Trilobyte were published by Trilobyte itself. Clandestiny, with gameplay similar to the previous The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour, though using cel animated (cartoon) video rather than live-action, and Uncle Henry's Playhouse, a re-packaging of a number of the puzzles and games from The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour. However, neither of them did well commercially, and are not very well known.

After Clandestiny, the company effectively split into two internal directions. Landeros lead a project called Tender Loving Care, while Devine started a Massively Multiplayer project: Millennium. Tender Loving Care (starring John Hurt), often referred to simply as TLC, was completed in 1998.

About the same time, Red Orb Entertainment, a division of Brøderbund, signed on to publish two titles on Devine's 'side' of the company: Assault! and Extreme Racing—a top-down multiplayer action game and a racing game, respectively, which ran on a shared game engine. Red Orb was also publishing the games Riven and Prince of Persia 3D at the time. Assault! was later renamed Extreme Warfare and changed from top-down to a first person perspective. Extreme Racing was likewise re-titled Baja 1000 Racing and attached to a SCORE International racing licence. Both games made E3 appearances that year.

[edit] Closing

Brøderbund was purchased by The Learning Company in 1998. At that time The Learning Company cancelled many of the current Red Orb game projects and Trilobyte, with 'both eggs in the Red Orb basket', was unable to find new publishers for the titles and shut down on September 15.

A third part of The 7th Guest series (not developed by, and unknown to, Trilobyte) was rumoured to be in development using the Unreal engine. Only a few screenshots of this cancelled game exist, with few details existing about it except for a proposed introduction storyline. Later, Rob Landeros also developed a proposal for another first-person sequel in The 7th Guest series: The Collector.

[edit] Released Games

The 7th Guest The Original title of Trilobyte Software. Sold over 2 Million copies making more than $50 Million for the company.

The 11th Hour The Sequal to The 7th Guest. Many production problems and a sliding release date that went back as far as a year caused a loss of profit for the game only selling 1.7 million.

Clandestiny - A Cel Animated kid friendly puzzle game. Sold only 2500 copies in the US and only bringing in a profit of $500,000.

Uncle Henry's Playhouse - A Compilation of all the puzzles from The 7th Guest, The 11th Hour, & Clandestiny. sold less than 25 copies in the US, and under 500 in the world.

[edit] Unreleased Games

Dog Eat Dog - An office politics simulator. At a cost of over US $800,000 it was scrapped halfway through production.

Tender Loving Care - Rob Landros' explicit R-Rated psychological thriller interactive movie. It cost over 2.4 Million to make and crippled Trilobyte to near bankruptcy. This would later be produced by Rob Landros' new company Aftermath Media.

The 7th Guest III - A highly rendered and media stuffed game where the house would be back to its original form and all forms of media was controlled by Satan. $500,000 went into production. Only a few highly rendered screen shots were all that were created before Landros canceled the project.

Extreme Warfare - Greame Devine's (originally named "Assault") online top-down perspective 3D tank game. Red Orb Entertainment was sold to The Learning Company who had no interest in the project pulled funding.

Baja Racing - Originally "Extreme Racing", shelved due to the lack of personnel to work on it seeing as Extreme Warfare had a skeleton crew already.

The 13th Soul - A 3rd-Person Real Time game inside the Stauf Mansion. A few rendered rooms were all that were made. The sale of Virgin Interactive killed the project.

Trojan Planet - An RPG set in a parralell universe where all the world is Trojans. The company went under shortly after the concept arose.

The 7th Guest III (3rd Version) - Another version where the town was abandoned and Tad (the young boy from the 7th Guest) was grown up and a writer, coming back to stop Stauf. The company went under shortly after the concept arose.

The 7th Guest III: The Collector - A completely new version of 7th Guest III where the events took place in a German museum rather than the house. Lack of funding and interest by the producer Lunny Interactive have shelved it.