Trivia / The 7th Guest

• Blooper: In the infamous soup cans puzzle, moving the "H" can into the upper left slot wasn't fully rendered, leaving the can hanging in midair; it even leaves an afterimage when moved into another space.
• The Other Darrin: Brian Dutton was played by a different actor in The 11th Hour, one whom nearly lacked his full head of hair.
• 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.)
• Meme Acknowledgment: During one video for the Kickstarter project for the third installment, "The 13th Doll", Rob Hirschboeck reads several poems from a binder while walking through a sunlit graveyard, and all the while never hesitates to bring back Stauf's hamminess in every way possible. He even comments that Henry himself "down in the crypt" wrote them.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: The 7th Guest was originally planned to have the player meet the other guests in person while they were still alive. However, the bluescreen technology used gave the filmed actors the appearance of having glowing auras, so the developers decided to make use of that and rewrote them as ghosts instead.
• Technology Marches On:
  • The Microscope puzzle in 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. 11th Hour couldn't be re-released until the developers found a way to limit the AI's advantage over human players.
• The Character Died with Him: Martine Burden's actress, Debra Ritz Mason, died in 2006 at the age of 55.
• Vaporware: This is the fate of both the 3DO port of 11th Hour and 11th Hour's planned sequel, The Collector.
• What Could Have Been: According to the script, more scenes were planned for 7th Guest and 11th Hour than what was shown in-game, including an alternate bad ending for the first game. Technical limitations prohibited this from going through.

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