Trilobyte's CG-heavy puzzle horror The 7th Guest is now 30 years old.
Launched on April 1st, 1993, it was one of the first video games to be totally exclusive to the CD-ROM format and is famous for featuring copious amounts of pre-rendered 3D visuals.
It would shift two million copies worldwide and was instrumental in selling PC owners on the idea of CD gaming; alongside Myst, it was arguably responsible for a huge increase in the sales of CD drives for personal computers at the time.
A sequel entitled The 11th Hour arrived in December 1995, but its commercial underperformance led to the eventual closure of Trilobyte. Trilobyte co-founder Rob Landeros restarted the company in 2013 and started a Kickstarter campaign for The 7th Guest 3: The Collector; it failed to hit its funding target of $435,000. An unofficial fan game, The 13th Doll, arrived to lukewarm reviews in 2019.
Despite its impact, time has perhaps been less kind to The 7th Guest and other early CD-ROM releases; their limited interactivity certainly counts against them, and it doesn't help that, in 2023, real-time 3D visuals have far surpassed the pre-rendered graphics seen in these games.
Still, there's still a place in our hearts for these CGI pioneers – let us know if you feel the same way too.