by Moe Zilla

Created on: January 25, 2009

They'd sold over two million copies of "The 7th Guest," and hoped to repeat its success by creating a sequel. Now it's been almost 15 years since "The 11th Hour" was released - one of the last games from Trilobyte. It's a colorful and complicated reminder of the glory days of computer games. Trilobyte packed over an hour's worth of video into the four-CD game - plus 19 different puzzles - and spent millions of dollars (and several years) developing the game. In the end, it lost money - and soon Trilobyte went out of business.

Ironically, the game's story involves an abandoned mansion that was once grand but has now fallen into decay. It's been 60 years since the events depicted in "7th Guest," but a reporter explores the lingering mysteries in the mansion. Video footage shows he's haunted by the disappearance of his girlfriend - a news producer who seems to have disappeared into the mansion. Just like in "7th Guest," the player wanders through the mansion, revisiting its now-decaying rooms solving puzzles to earn another video clip.

That's really the game's biggest problem: the video clips aren't that interesting. And a lot of them take place outside the mansion, which disrupts the feeling that players are exploring secrets within the mansion itself. Original "guests" from the first game make cameo appearances in some of the rooms, but the tone of this game is entirely differently In the end, the game ended up with the worst of both worlds - retaining the predictability of the old environment while sacrificing its original characters. One pithy reviewer simply described it as "A second game, much like the first. Not recommended."

But there's something gothic about its failure. Working through disk after disk of video footage shows an almost obsessive amount of attention - as though, just like the mansion's owner, the game's developers were crazy toymakers themselves. And it's the subject of the most fascinating article I ever read about a technology company - Haunted Glory: The Rise and Fall of Trilobyte. The hip developers wanted to be cutting edge - at one point filming a topless model in spiked collar holding a German shepherd. Creative differences hung over the production, and it kept missing its release date. "Even the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland wasn't this late," complained one of the company's founders.

It's all there on the CDs, as though all their hopes and shattered dreams were preserved forever. And the virtual mansion is still there - still trying to tempt new users with its 19 puzzles.

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