Retro Inspired: The 13th Doll

Learn how a dedicated group of The Seventh Guest fans wanted to pay it tribute

IN THE KNOW » PUBLISHER:

ATTIC DOOR PRODUCTIONS

» DEVELOPER:

ATTIC DOOR PRODUCTIONS

» RELEASE: 2019

» PLATFORM:

PC, PS4, XBOX ONE

» GENRE: ADVENTURE

Pretty much every adventure game fan in the Nineties with access to a computer remembers being terrified by the evil toymaker Henry Stauf and the horrors he hid in his Victorian mansion in Trilobyte’s groundbreaking puzzle adventure, The 7th Guest.

“My grandpa got me into it,” says Matt Gottshall, the lead programmer of The 13th Doll: A Fan Game Of The 7th Guest. “We tried to solve the puzzles together. It was a fun experience and I was young enough for the game to scare me, even though it was cheesy horror.”

The 7th Guest, designed by Graeme Devine and Rob Landeros and distributed by Virgin Interactive, received attention for its effective mix of full-motion video and stunning 3D rendering following its release in 1993. It took almost two years to release a sequel, The 11th Hour, and even longer just to get an enticing trailer for The 7th Guest 3: The Collector. Rob Landeros tried twice to raise money through crowdfunding through his newly reformed Trilobyte brand but both campaigns failed to meet their goals – even with over $200,000 in donations – leading instead to two tabletop board games based on the games.

Back in the early Noughties when the third game failed to get greenlit, one dedicated fan, Ryan Holtkamp of Iowa City,

Iowa, wanted to play it so much that he decided to make a sequel of his own.

“When I found out about fan games and how The Collector got cancelled, I decided instead of making a game that was similar to The 7th Guest, why not just a make a 7th Guest fan game?” says Ryan, the producer of The13th Doll. “It all started from there.”

Ryan’s game isn’t officially connected to

The 7th Guest’s canon but his company, Attic Door Productions, obtained legal permission from Trilobyte and Rob Landeros to use the game’s characters and settings, including Tad, the boy who (spoiler alert!) turns out to be the long-awaited seventh guest in the first game, and the nefarious Henry Stauf, played by the character’s original actor, Rob Hirschboeck. Ryan and his team say it took 16 years of hard work, unexpected obstacles, fundraising and true fan dedication to bring the horror experience back from the dead as a multi-path puzzle adventure on Halloween 2019 for PC,

Mac and Linux.

The entire ambitious project ran on the work of volunteers working from different locations until Attic Door was able to obtain over $60,000 in funding from a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2015. “We’re fans first,” Ryan tells us. “Part of the reason we wanted to make this game was to prove that there’s life in the franchise so that they would make a third game, a third official game.”

Ryan first started assembling his crew by reaching out to Paul Van Der Meer, a game designer and 3D modeller who ran a 7th Guest fan site and helped with the first iteration of the game’s graphics from 2004 to 2008. Then Ryan built a 13th Doll website and started soliciting volunteers to write, design, act and compose

Lead programmer

Producer

Director of live-action production

music for the game through the site’s forum. “We have this community and part of it was built from Paul’s website, so people from there joined us and we kind of went from there and it snowballed,” Ryan says.

The crew worked on the game for four years but lives and careers got in the way and development on The 13th Doll stopped in 2008. Ryan says he put it aside after he got married and became a father. The game’s coding and demos sat dormant on his computer for seven years. “We got a bunch of puzzle designs and a basis for the game put together,” Ryan remembers. “The biggest trouble was artists. We’d delegate an entire room to an artist. If they finished it, cool, but if they didn’t, then we were stuck in limbo waiting for them to go.”

Then in 2014 while Ryan was going through a divorce, he decided to revisit The 13th Doll and realised that the graphics were so behind the times that they’d just have to start over again. “I just decided that I missed it,” he says. “By that time, we took a look at it and basically we had to throw out everything we’d done before.”

Modern innovations like the Unity engine helped Ryan and his team catch up as they made the game a second time from scratch.

New faces like Matt Gottshall, who found Ryan through his website while he was studying computer programming at Michigan State University, jumped in to help.

“I think Unity allowed us to do a more modern style and model everything,” Matt says. “The old engine was somewhat limited. I remember Ryan telling me the reason they were switching was because they pretty much completed the game in the old engine and he put it on his TV and it just looked terrible.”

Ryan also posted a screenshot of a new crypt puzzle on the game’s dormant Facebook page and it started gaining some serious attention, which drove the team to pick up where it left off, even though everyone had to start all over again. “I was kind of floored by the response this post got,” Ryan says. “The post got like 150 likes overnight, which isn’t a whole lot but it still showed us that this still had life in it. There was an audience for it.”

One of the post’s most noticeable viewers was Rob Landeros who