In The Chair: Howie Rubin

The ex-atari and Gottlieb stalwart talks us through his fascinating career

is Rob Hirschboeck. How’s it going?’” Ryan remembers. “I was so shocked, I almost dropped the phone.” Hirschboeck says he never thought he’d get another chance to put on Henry Stauf’s smoking jacket and speak his signature mix of sensuality and sinisterism. He says he was “gobsmacked” to hear that a group of fans had worked so long and so hard to bring the game and the character back to computers.

“It was kind of put together on a shoestring in both cases,” Hirschboeck reveals. “The original game was kind of produced by Virgin but it was Rob and Graham. When I met those guys, it was six people in an upstairs room above a bar. When I went back to Iowa, it was a similar feeling what I was shooting. It was in an upstairs room on the campus in Iowa and it just had the same feel of, ‘Okay, let’s see what we can do.’ I’ve got a garage and some old costumes. Let’s see what we can make.”

Peder Goodman, the game’s director of live-action production who studied film and animation at the University Of Iowa, says they wanted to recreate The 7th Guest and 11th

Hour’s unique mix of live actors in computerrendered scenery that rolls out stories to one of five different endings. The game even has its own score composed by Chris

Bormend – except for one song from The 7th Guest’s soundtrack that was licensed from George ‘The Fat Man’ Sanger who made the music for The 7th Guest and

The 11th Hour.

Some of the bigger

included keeping track of scenes’ storylines and multiple endings and shooting scenes on a green screen, while programmers and designers were still making the oddly lit rooms in the mansion and other locations. Peder says they still wanted to preserve the look of the original game while adding more movement to the controls and the camera. “We were trying to mimic the style of the previous game and not be like, ‘Oh, we’ll shoot in 4K and try and get the cleanest image,” he explains. “It’s a more dynamic environment kind of jumping between the mediums.”

Rob Hirschboeck says he enjoyed getting to play a diabolical character like Henry Stauf one more time who taunts and teases the minds of his players and his victims. “It’s the same guy with the same question: ‘What do you want for your soul?’ he says. “‘What will you give away?’ Henry sells his soul and he’s absolutely cynical that everyone will.”

Hirschboeck’s presence not only gives The 13th Doll credibility, it also added a cement-grade level of strength and

encouragement to a cast of actors who carry the game’s story and eerie tone. Ryan says Rob even helped shape the scenes’ and story’s look and style, and even brought some of the original costume pieces he wore in Trilobyte’s games, like the ring he wears on his right hand.

“He really commands the stage,” Ryan says. “When he’s on, he’s Stauf and has this bloodcurdling presence and then we called cut, he’s just Rob. He’s great to have, and he’s amazing to watch. He made filming so much better than it would have been without him. He made the game and made the set and has a presence that’s really great. He’s also fantastic to work with and just a really great guy.”

The filming only took two weeks but the post-production would take another four years of development, organisation and implementation. Finally, in the summer of 2019, the team decided to aim for a Halloween release and work as hard as it could to get the game ready. Matt says during the game’s final run, he and the rest of the team worked every available hour away from their job, and even 12 hours a day on weekends. “I think we could’ve just kept pushing it off forever,” he says. “So we set the date for Halloween and sat down to get it done.”

Upon its release, streams of The 13th Doll started popping up online. Ryan says he loved seeing players crack his puzzles and discover their hidden nods to The 7th Guest. “That’s when it really hit home and felt surreal,” he says. “We officially launched at 8pm the night before and I was up until five or six in the morning watching people play it.” The game’s release not only marks the end of a 17-year journey, it’s also a monument to the developers’ ambitions and dedication to something that inspired them to pursue their shared dream. “It’s a testament to our tenacity on some level but on another level, we’re just nuts,” Ryan says with a laugh. “We’re super proud of it.”

Matt says he’s proud to see in social media posts and comments how The 13th Doll created more fun and frightful childhood memories for a whole new generation of fans. “On Facebook, there’s a fan group and people were very nice about it and there are some people who tell the story just like mine when they remember playing The 7th Guest with their family as kids, and now they’re able to play The 13th Doll with their kids,” he concludes. “That was a really special moment.”

Howie, you will have heard the sad news that Tim Skelly passed away earlier this year. Weren’t you the man who brought him to Gottlieb?

I was, though not as an employee – as a consultant. I hired him to do one game but also to teach the others. In the beginning, there were no schools and no rules. People didn’t know how to do stuff, especially the software guys. Everything was done in assembler so they had to write the tools as well as the game.

Did you feel like a manager putting together a rock band and by recruiting a famous lead singer, it would be easier to attract a bass player and drummer?

[Laughs] I don’t think I thought of it like that. We needed to get started and the fastest way to do that was hire someone who had done it all already, someone who could both create and teach… and credit to Tim, he did help coach [the others].

Tim insisted on having his name displayed on the screen of his first game for Gottlieb, Reactor, the first incidence of this in a coin-op game. Was it hard to strike a deal with him?

I think we fitted each other’s purposes. I came to Gottlieb when they were hurting. They were the biggest pinball manufacturer in the world but they were fast asleep. They hadn’t kept up to date with technology. Bally and Williams were kicking their butt and Gottlieb was losing market share. They needed a revamp.

So how did you go about making that revamp happen?

I went to Columbia Pictures [the owners] with a plan and asking for the money I needed to set up a videogame division. I had to fight for the budget but once I got it, it made sense to get someone like Tim. I wouldn’t call him a rockstar but he was one of the few people back then who had been there and done that… and he was available.

What kind of budget are we talking?

Oh, it was in the millions. One of the things I learned at Atari was if you’re going to succeed, you need product of choice to keep the factory going. So obviously, you’re going to need to design more than one product at a time… because with any creative product, no one knows if it’s going be good or bad until the end. I mean, The Beatles wrote some god-awful songs along with their hits! I felt I needed to staff three or four teams so I always had a product of choice, always had something I could build to keep the factory going. That was the goal.

How did you go about recruiting staff?

I’m not an engineer so I needed to get me an engineer who knew how to pick talent. And that was Ronnie Waxman. Gottlieb had moved my family from California and Ronnie’s wife was our realtor. She said she’d find us a house if I’d give her husband a job.

Did that turn out to be a win-win situation? When I met Ronnie we just clicked. He’d recently quit his job at Bell Labs, and before that he’d