Hi Everyone,
As you know, this quest is a long on and off journey into gaming history obscurity. The quest, to find the original video footage and any other assets from The 7th Guest, The 11th Hour, and other Trilobyte Inc. properties.
20+ Years is a LONG Time
It is difficult to find or even expect people who retain work from over 20 years ago. I was 15, going on 16 in 1999. I can't think of one item that I've retained from those days.
That being said, I've made some progress moving forward.
Earlier this year I tracked down some of those who worked most closely with the original footage. None of them had any copies or materials related to the work.
I didn't do much searching after that. Life gets in the way, and this is purely a one-person volunteer effort.
A Renewal of Interest
Last week the 25th Anniversary Edition of The 7th Guest launched. It inspired me to continue digging. Specifically, I wanted to track down Diane Moses/Watson. Dianne seemed to be the potential key to everything. She was, among other things, the office manager for Trilobyte, Inc. during its entire existence. If anyone would know where stuff was, it would be her.
So, I dusted off my Google skills and decided to have another run at things. After several hours and some weird free people search sites later, I tracked down what I thought were some good leads. 95% of them were wrong and lead to disconnected phone numbers, disconnected email accounts, and wrong numbers. Out of curiosity, I decided to try one last phone number before I went back to the drawing board. I left a message, expecting nobody to return the call.
The Beginning of the End
The call I made on a whim paid off! Dianne was nice enough to call me back and leave me a voicemail. It WAS the correct Dianne, although, she has a different last name now. I called her back and we had a good chat about Trilobyte, and that I wasn't the first person to ever call her out of the blue about the good old days.
In the course of our conversation, she gave me both some amazing and devastating news. She was the one who had the videos and a bunch of other Trilobyte materials! The bad news, she thinks she threw all of them away a couple of years ago.
Now, Dianne wasn't sure if she did or didn't throw away the box of Trilobyte treasures. She is going to look and see if she still has them and get back to me.
On one side of things, I can 100% understand someone getting rid of something over 25 years old, especially when nobody had asked about it. (Yes, NOBODY had asked her about the footage in 25 years) On the other side, I REALLY hope that she didn't throw it away and just thought that she did. The material she had is a piece of gaming history and wasn't the only treasure in the Trilobyte box.
If she does have these assets, they will end up going to Rob Landeros at Trilobyte. I hope to continue talking with him about preserving this footage both for the fans and for Trilobyte use. Obviously, with today's technology, it's easier to apply masks and keys to the worst bluescreen footage. It's also possible to upscale the video to HD, especially with the advent of new AI-based tools like Waifu2x-caffe.
If the footage still exists I hope Rob might include me in the preservation efforts, and allow me to make the full contents, outtakes, and deleted scenes, available to the fans. It might not be that simple due to IP rights, but, that was my original goal.
I'm going to give Dianne space in the meantime. I'll check back with her in a couple of weeks or a month. It's been 25 years, surely we can wait a while longer.
But What If...
What if everything was thrown away? Well, the only thing I can do is contact the dump in the hopes that they might know where something like this would be buried 2-3 years ago. That is presuming the footage didn't go to an electronics recycling facility and that a garbage dump would know where they were dumping things.
This isn't like the Atari ET cartridge find, where thousands of cartridges were buried and someone remembered where they were. This is a random box in a garbage dump, and over 2-3 years who knows if the contents would even be worth finding.
Yes, I can dream that someone at the dump saw the stuff, knew what it was, and set it aside. But, there is a high chance that all of the footage is lost forever.
Let this be a lesson to game developers and companies. Archive everything. If you get sick of holding on to it, put it on Archive.org or somewhere that will preserve things for you. If you are someone from the 90s era of gaming and have raw footage or audio, get it preserved for the sake of the fans of your work. You never know how it might be able to inspire others and possibly be a road to a better tomorrow for you.
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