The Making Of The 7th Guest (Part 2)

[quicksilvercinema]

The music in this game really influenced my life... hearing it now, again after a long time immediately brings me back to that time. Thanks to The Fat Man and crew, well done.

[DarkF00L]

The music for this game was BRILLIANT. I've carried this soundtrack throughout the years on CDs and MP3s. To this day, it is STILL in my ipod. The Fat Man and Team Fat ROCK!!!

[ilovetosing013]

i remember playing this game when i was like 6 or 7 years old , the only thing in the game that scared me was the lady in white beckoning to you in the hallway and cellar , to this day she STILL freaks me out , and i'm 16 ! xD

[LanIost]

I know the frame rate of the game isn't increadible but.. there are no compression artifacts in the game. I still, to this day, do not understand how they pulled it off on running on a 486 processor. I rememebr having the encyclopedia britannica program thing that came with most cd-rom kits back in the day.. it had video of ~180x? pixels and were HIGHLY COMPRESSED. How they got full motion full screen video working.. I have no idea. I've been coding for years and yet it baffles me that it worked

[aaroncake]

@LanIost And not only that, but the "breakthrough CD-ROM game" that everyone raved about just after T7G came out was "Myst"! Myst was crap compared to T7G in every way; technically (the environment was just static bitmaps that hard flipped from one to another, the video was postage stamp QuickTime), game play (horrible environment to move around in) and general feel. Yet for some reason it was considered better then T7G?!

[Roxor128]

@LanIost Well, if the image data is quantised to a 256-colour palette first, there's plenty of room for lossless compression to reduce the file size. PNG is lossless, and I've seen some massive compression ratios with images stored in the format. I created a 4096*4096 image containing every colour in 24-bit RGB colour space. The original binary PPM file was 48MB. Conversion to PNG shrunk it down to 58KB.

[aaroncake]

@Roxor128 Remember though, this game was designed to be played on a 386DX. It doesn't have the power to handle the impressive compression we have today. It would actually play on a 386SX in 320x240 mode as well.

[Roxor128]

@aaroncake Huh. Funny. I thought it was designed for a low-end 486. At least, that's the hardware I had when we got our first CD-ROM drive.

PNG actually uses the same compression algorithm as ZIP, and PKZIP was definitely around when T7G was made. GIF was also around at the time, and that format also uses lossless compression. Also, keep in mind that decompressing data tends to be significantly faster than compressing it in the first place.

[aaroncake]

@Roxor128 The minimum requirements on the box are a 386DX. I actually played it on a 386SX but had to run the game in 320x240. Which is remarkable, because with the DX being a 32 bit chip and the SX being 16 bit, it's not like the SX was only marginally slower. It was a LOT slower. Trilobyte developed their own compression for T7G. Don't forget, back when T7G was released it would take a full second to show a 640 x 480 GIF. Their compression was able to show 15 FPS at 320x240. Pretty impressive.

[Roxor128]

@aaroncake I didn't know GIF was so slow. Always good to learn something new.

[aaroncake]

@Roxor128 Not really that GIF was slow, more that processors themselves were slow and video acceleration was in it's infancy. I remember using the DOS program "cshow" to view GIFs at about that time and it would take 1-2 seconds to fill the 640x480 screen. :-D

[LanIost]

after about 20 minutes I walked into the room crying to find that my brother who had already moved out (he is obviously much older) had come home to play this game and was playing it at about 3am in the morning.. so I really WAS hearing Staufs voice.. I hadn't seen my brother in months though.. Seriously, you have no idea how scared I was. I seriously thought Stauf was somehow in the real world. All I saw was the light seeping through the bottom of the door with his voice echoing.

[aaroncake]

@LanIost That's hilarious! It's amazing the effect an engrossing game can have on a person. Years later when I played The 11th Hour for the first time, I felt like I was actually revisiting a physical house and was a bit dismayed that it had been vandalized.

[LanIost]

Anyway, the nightmare.. Stauff used to scare the shit out of me.. I guess being so young this made sense. Anyway, I used to be afraid that Stauf was real or something, who knows, anyway.. the game scared the shit out of me. I used to have nightmares about him and then one night woke up and SWORE that I heard him talking to me. After about a half hour of absolutely freaking out I left my room to see the light on in the computer room and the creepy 'de do de do do do do do' music boxy midi playing

[LanIost]

I had the worst nightmare I've ever had due to this game. I was born in 1985 so I was increadibly lucky to be able to play this game on my 486. I actually spoke with Trilobyte trying to get it to run on my 486 and eventually figured it out. I didn't realize till later that at the time the Trilobyte tech support was basically the dev. team. They were really excited that I was able to figure out what they couldn't offer support for and I was like 6-7 years old.

[aaroncake]

@LanIost At the time it came out, I just had a 386 SX/16. In order to play the game I not only hand to track down VESA drivers for my Trident card (not easy to do without the Internet) but also run the game in the unsupported half VGA resolution. The video did stutter every once in a while, but aside from the lower visual quality it was totally playable.

[HLGFreeman]

I played this game when I was 16, we got our first cd-rom PC and I loved it to death! I was infatuated with it. Remember a couple of years later, getting the Limited Edition "Book" version on a fleamarket, which had the VHS with this making of and also the soundtrack CD. I got The 11th Hour when it came out but it was kinda disappointing. Nice bit of nostalgia to watch it 16 years later! Thanks :)

[oystersnag]

Thanks for posting this! I loved this game as a youngster and it's cool to look back on the making of it, knowing that they were just a small company using the latest technology of the time to make such an epic game. Cool video.

[midniter07]

Gorgeous music, amazing gameplay, graphics that inspired me to get into 3D design myself...this is the kind of thing that new games are only now beginning to try and approach in depth of design and storytelling.

[redfoxbennaton]

All they did in this video is talk about sound production and nothing about game design.

[Cj1500]

I have to say that the soundtrack for this game was very creepy and gave a tremendous amount of atmosphere.

[TheMightyFatMan]

You can find the sountrack album as "7-11" by The Fat Man and Team Fat

[TheMightyFatMan]

That's my name, Wear it Out!

[vipor29]

well they were right about the cd-rom taking off cuz it took off with a bang and did very well across many different platforms

[pahootaguy]

The Fat Man!

[jmkit]

cool, thanks for posting!