The 7th Guest/Trivia

• The Character Died with Him: Martine Burden's actress Debra Ritz Mason died in 2006 at the age of 55.
• Development Hell: The 11th Hour suffered from this greatly, the reception was lukewarm and the resulting game faded into obscurity for a time until the advent of the Let's Play that helped bring attention to the game.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Good luck trying to find a physical copy of Uncle Henry's Playhouse. Only twenty-seven copies were sold in the US. Worldwide sales capped at 176 copies. Yes, those numbers are right. And no, it hasn't been re-released.
• Killer App: The 7th Guest was often bundled with CD-ROM drives (at least until Myst came along).
• Technology Marches On:
  • The Microscope puzzle in The 7th Guest pits the player against an AI in a game of Ataxx. The AI performs a brief search tree for its most optimal move, waits for a set delay, and picks the best move it finds. Processors have become at least fifty times faster with a single core since 1993; the Ataxx AI can now think so far ahead in the same amount of delay that defeating the AI is nigh-impossible. But this was only one minigame in one relatively minor room of the house—and it didn't deliver a cutscene reward for winning—so excising it for the tablet releases wasn't that big of a deal.
  • The 11th Hour features several puzzles that lock players in a "duel with Stauf". One such "duel" is the final puzzle of the game, which is essentially a game of Pente. To access the game's multiple endings, players have to beat the final puzzle multiple times—and each successive playthrough gives the AI a bigger advantage in that puzzle. The 11th Hour couldn't be re-released until the developers found a way to limit the AI's advantage over human players.
• Vaporware: This is the fate of both the 3DO port of The 11th Hour and The 11th Hour's planned sequel The Collector.

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