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     Haunted Glory


Part 1: Recruiting the Guests
Part 2: Clock Strikes Eleven
Part 3: A Year of Waiting
Part 4: A Tender Moment
Part 5: A New Ascension
Part 6: The Bitter End
Table of Contents
Behind The Games
Page 2: You Guys Are Fired

When we last left Graeme Devine, he was busy cutting class to program Pole Position for Atari. One problem: The school didn't like it. "I took three days off to finish the game," explains Devine, "and when I came back, they expelled me!" Luckily, Devine's dad John was a resolute supporter of his son's programming. "I wrote the school a letter," says John, "and I told them, 'You guys should be proud of my son, not disappointed in him!'" As a result, Devine was reinstated, and he finished his schooling. Before long, Devine caught
"I took three days off to finish the game…they expelled me!"
- Graeme Devine
the eye of a distinguished British businessman named Martin Alper, who was preparing to move to the United States and head up software developer Virgin MasterTronics in California. Devine hit it off with Alper after one lunch, and he was offered the position of heading up Virgin's California programming department. Soon he would make the move from Britain to California and start the work of programming Virgin's slate of console titles.

screenshot
Rob Landeros left behind fossil ivory carvings for the computer age.
Meanwhile in the United States, after discovering the novelty of a Commodore 64, Landeros knew his future lay in computerized graphics. He went on to work at CinemaWare, a Thousand Oaks, Calif., software developer. Eventually feeling "underappreciated and underpaid," he went on an interview at a new California company named Virgin MasterTronic. Weeks later, he was hired to head up the company's art department.

"I remember the first conversation I had with Graeme," recalls Landeros. "I called him up on the phone to say hi, and he mentioned getting engaged the night before." Devine, who at the time was programming Spot for the NES - based on the 7UP soft-drink mascot - immediately took a liking to Landeros. "I remember he'd bring in a lot of his work from the '60s, and we'd read them together," says Devine, a huge fan of comics. However, the projects on the docket at Virgin were anything but creatively inclined, unlike Landeros' zany '60s comics. Landeros recalls, "At one point, the VP of Virgin came to me and said, 'Hey Rob, do you want to work on McKids for McDonalds?'" He retorted with a pithy, "No." Before long, Landeros realized that Devine's interest in programming cartridge games based on licensed properties was waning. As such, they formed their own department of "research and new technology," which, according to Devine, really meant, "looking at doing a CD-ROM game."

Part of that "looking" involved attending conferences around the United States to discuss the compact disc as an emerging storage medium. At the 1990 InterMedia conference in New York, the duo sat in an auditorium with some 800 other developers ready to burn their code onto a CD. However, most of the developers at InterMedia were looking to shovel text onto CD-ROMs in what would best be described as multimedia kitsch. "Everyone was talking about how you can store a whole library on these CD-ROMs, but we wanted to do a game," explains Landeros. Their hunch was confirmed when the moderator polled the audience with the question, "Who is going to do games on CD-ROM?" Four developers raised their hands - two of those hands belonged to Landeros and Devine.

Sitting at La Guardia airport in New York, waiting to return to the West Coast, they realized this was the time to put together a pitch to Alper for a CD-ROM product. Virgin had a license to the classic board game Clue, and the initial thought was to do a game based on that. If it didn't work out, the David Lynch TV show Twin Peaks was an option, as both were caught up in the whole "Who Killed Laura Palmer?" fad of the early '90s. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, Alper wasn't interested in Twin Peaks.

"The budget for The 7th Guest clocked in at US $600,000, triple what Virgin was use to paying for cartridge games."
For the next few weeks, Devine and Landeros worked away on the first version of Microsoft Word to perfect their proposal for the plainly titled Guest. By now, the concept had turned from Clue to a haunted-house story that would use still pictures and contain puzzles in the same vein as the classic '80s brain-teaser game, Fool's Errand. Because of the emerging technology and the fact that the tools required to build a CD-ROM were prohibitively expensive at the time, the budget clocked in at $600,000, triple what Virgin was used to paying for cartridge games.

One day in late 1990, Martin Alper received the proposal for Guest on his desk at 11am. By 11:30, he had read it, called up Landeros and Devine, and invited them to lunch at the Farmer's Market in Costa Mesa. The trio drove to the market in Alper's Rolls Royce, sat down, and ordered their food. Devine and Landeros didn't know what to expect. "We were so nervous we couldn't even eat our food," confesses Devine.

Alper, sitting across the table from the two developers, cut to the chase: "You guys no longer work for Virgin. You're fired."

Next: Setting Up Shop