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Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Video Podcast - Trilobyte Fossils

This week, we take a look back at Trilobyte, creators of The 7th Guest.

(I've learned recently that some RSS readers -- like the one that updates the Gaming After 40 Facebook page -- can't see the embedded video in this post, so from now on I will also include a direct link to the YouTube video here.)

4 comments:

  1. Is that you at the beginning? Wow, you look nothing like that little sketch of you next to the "contact info" link! (Not even any glasses!)

    I don't know that I'd call the original DOOM "rendered 3D". It was done by pre-rendering bitmaps of all the objects in all their poses at 8 different angles, and then just scaling those bitmaps larger or smaller according to how distant the object was. (Id software didn't go true 3D until _Quake_.) The backgrounds WERE true real-time 3-D, though.

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  2. I was trying to do my best David Attenborough for that intro. (I've drawn several cartoon self-portraits over the years, none of which bear any strong resemblance to my actual appearance despite my best efforts. Vanity, all is vanity!)

    And yes, I was only thinking about the backgrounds of DOOM -- since The 7th Guest really doesn't have sprites of ANY kind, or any characters moving in a 3-D context, just 2-D video overlays displayed in fixed locations.

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  3. Still, 7th Guest was a good deal more visually sophisticated than MYST.

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  4. Oh, no doubt -- I never got into the MYST series, though I have messed around with Cyan's predecessor The Manhole and I will eventually get around to seeing what all the fuss was about. I think I just prefer a populated game world, even if it's populated by ghosts.

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