| Trilobyte | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Founder(s) | Graeme Devine, Rob Landeros |
| Founded | 1990 |
| Closed | 1998 |
| Website | tbyte.com (now used by Trilobyte Technologies Ltd.) |
| Search | |
| Search | |
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.
History[edit]
The company is most famous for creating the PC game The 7th Guest, one of the first computer games for CD-ROM. 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. If not for the popularity of The 7th Guest and Myst, a similarly 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. The game was released in DOS when Windows 95 had already been out for some time, and 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, and 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 expected amount, and the game did not recover its production costs, a key factor in the company's financial downfall.
The next projects for Trilobyte, Clandestiny and Uncle Henry's Playhouse, were published by Trilobyte itself. Neither of them did well commercially, and they are not well-known. After Clandestiny, the company effectively took two internal directions. Landeros led a project called Tender Loving Care, while Devine started a Massively Multiplayer project, Millennium.
About the same time, Red Orb Entertainment, a division of Brøderbund, signed on to publish two titles on Devine's "side" of the company, however The Learning Company purchased Brøderbund in 1998, and canceled many of the current Red Orb game projects, including the ones being developed by Trilobyte. With "both eggs in the Red Orb basket", the company was unable to find new publishers for the titles and shut down on September 15, 1998.
Games[edit]
- The 7th Guest: The first title released by Trilobyte Software. It sold over 2 million copies, making more than US$50 million for the company.
- The 11th Hour: The sequel to The 7th Guest. Many production problems and release date slipped by a year resulted in lost profits and sales of only 1.7 million units.
- Clandestiny: A cel animated child-friendly puzzle game. It sold only 2,500 copies in the United States, bringing in a profit of just US$500,000.
- Uncle Henry's Playhouse: A compilation of all the puzzles from The 7th Guest, The 11th Hour, and Clandestiny. It sold 27 copies in the United States, and 127 worldwide.