The 11th Hour (video game)

The 11th Hour
Developer(s)	Trilobyte
Publisher(s)	Virgin Interactive Entertainment
Producer(s)	James Yokota
Designer(s)	Rob Landeros Graeme Devine
Programmer(s)	Graeme Devine
Artist(s)	Robert Stein III Rob Landeros
Writer(s)	Matthew Costello David Wheeler
Composer(s)	George Sanger
Platform(s)	DOS, Windows, Mac OS
Release	DOS/Windows NA: November 30, 1995 EU: 1995 Mac OS NA: January 1, 1996
Genre(s)	Interactive movie, puzzle adventure
Mode(s)	Single-player

The 11th Hour is a 1995 interactive movie puzzle adventure game with a horror setting. It is the sequel to the 1993 game The 7th Guest.

Plot

The story opens 60 years after the events of The 7th Guest. It is now 1995, and the player assumes the role of Carl Denning, an investigative reporter for the television series "Case Unsolved". Robin Morales, his producer and lover, mysteriously vanished three weeks prior in Harley-on-the-Hudson, New York. She was investigating a series of grisly murders and disappearances that had plagued the otherwise sleepy upstate town over the last few months. Denning's only solid lead is a portable computer called the GameBook delivered with only a postmark from Harley. When booted, the GameBook displays Robin's plea to help her escape.

The story then flashes back to the beginning of Robin's investigation. She interviews Eileen Wiley, the only person known to have survived an encounter with Henry Stauf's mansion. Eileen confirms she lost her hand that night, claiming it had been bitten off by a dog, but offers no other meaningful details of the encounter.

Suspicious of Eileen's story, Robin interviews Dr. Thornton, who treated Eileen that night. Though the doctor appears to believe Eileen about the dog, the interview proves fruitful as Dr. Thornton reveals that Eileen was not alone that night; her friend Samantha Ford was with her in the house those 18 years ago. Samantha's family used its considerable influence to keep her involvement out of the papers. He also reveals that Samantha has been paralyzed from the waist down ever since the girls' encounter.

Robin attempts to interview Samantha, but their meeting is adversarial. Samantha's forceful denials convince Robin that the women are not telling the truth about their encounter. Samantha confirms Robin's suspicions later that evening when she visit's Robin's motel room and shares her story. Samantha claims that during their encounter with the house, something supernatural held the girls down and raped them, then let them go. Samantha had an illegal abortion that resulted in her paralysis, but Eileen had a daughter, Marie. Samantha claims there was always something sinister about the child and believes that all hell let loose around Marie's 18th birthday, that Marie is the mansion's offspring, and that Marie is responsible for the murders and disappearances. Robin confronts Eileen with the story, and Eileen denies everything. Eileen then challenges Robin to go to the house herself. After Robin leaves, it's revealed that Marie was listening to the entire conversation.

Desperate to keep her secret from getting out, Marie commands her lover Chuck to murder Robin. He initially resists, worried about the media attention a famous disappearance would bring, and Marie challenges him to say "no" to Stauf. He enters Robin's hotel and stabs someone sleeping in bed, but it's revealed that he actually stabbed the police chief who had a budding romance with Robin. Unable to remove the knife, he takes the body to Stauf's mansion, where he is pulled inside and killed for his mistake.

Robin comes to the house soon after and fatefully enters as Samantha watches remotely, somehow having hacked into Stauf's surveillance. As Robin moves through the house, it breaks her by systematically confronting her with uncomfortable truths about her past. He eventually wins her over by enticing her with her own television network.

The story then picks up with Carl in the mansion. He follows Robin's cries upstairs where he meets Stauf, who is presiding over a game show called "Let’s Make a Real Deal" (a parody of Let's Make a Deal). Stauf explains that Carl must choose to open one of the doors, then offers Carl $600. Carl can keep it, or he can pay $200 and reveal what's behind one of the three doors in front of him. He pays to reveal door number two, which turns out to be a large TV. Next, he pays door number one, which is Marie. As Stauf tempts Carl with Marie's sexual prowess, Samantha hacks into the TV, warning him not to give in to temptation as Stauf mocks her paralysis. Finally, Carl pays to reveal door number three, which is Robin. She expresses her love for Carl, pleading with him to choose her. Samantha urges Carl to choose her, revealing that this will end Stauf forever and that choosing either of the others will doom him. The game turns Carl's choice over to the player, which reveals one of three endings:

• Carl chooses Samantha: reaching out his hand to touch Samantha’s on the TV. A moment later, he walks through Samantha’s front door, and they watch the house burn to the ground on her monitors. Carl expresses regret about Robin, but Samantha laments that Robin was lost the moment she said "yes" to Stauf.
• Carl chooses Robin: Carl and Robin embrace as Samantha looks on in disappointment. The story then flashes forward weeks later, where Robin is in Carl's living room watching the news of his body being found in the Hudson River. The newscaster reports that he disappeared on his honeymoon in Harley-on-the-Hudson after marrying Robin, who is the new president of the Stauf Broadcasting System.
• Carl chooses Marie: as Samantha and Robin look on, Carl gives in to Marie's temptations. Marie leads him through a door to another room, and as the two have sex, Marie morphs into Stauf. The Stauf/Marie hybrid then taunts Carl while eating cooked ribs, which they claim to be his.

Gameplay

Overall, the gameplay is similar to its predecessor's with the same puzzle-based gameplay structure, but with the additional element of a treasure hunt.^[1]

Release

Although Trilobyte stated in 1993—even before The 7th Guest's became available—that it planned to release The 11th Hour by October of that year,^[2] it was very late to market and failed to meet sales expectations upon its release.^[3] Early into its development, a port to the 3DO was planned, and a release date of May 1994 was announced,^[4] but it was pushed back to March 1995,^[5] and ultimately cancelled.

Trilobyte had confirmed that the game would be released on both the iPhone and iPad platforms. The release for iOS was scheduled for Q2/Q3 2011, but in March 2012 Trilobyte postponed the release indefinitely due to "serious technical challenges".^[6]

In April 2012, The 7th Guest: Book of Secrets application for iOS was renamed to just Book of Secrets, and was updated to include a walkthrough and script for The 11th Hour, just as it already had for 7th Guest.

In 2012, The 11th Hour was re-released for Windows, as a download from DotEmu and GOG.com.^[7][8][9] On October 18, 2013, it was re-released again on Steam, as part of a collaboration between Trilobyte and Night Dive Studios.^[10]

Development

The makers of the game originally intended for it to contain more adult content in its cut scenes; the script for the game (published as part of a walk-through guide) included several R-rated sex scenes. Rumors immediately surfaced that an "uncut" version of 11th Hour existed, leading to the game makers announcing that the R-rated sequences, though planned, were never filmed.

Many of the videos that were filmed for the game used location shooting; the fifth scene utilised a blue screen incorporating a neutral blue drape. Macintosh Premier was used to convert the capture film into digitized images and videos. A program called 'Wavelet' was used to compress the game's videos.^[11]

It was developed by Trilobyte and used a later version of the Groovie graphic engine than that used by The 7th Guest.^[12] The 11th Hour also features the music of George "The Fat Man" Sanger and Team Fat.

Reception

Reception
Review scores Publication Score CGW [13] PC Gamer (US) 76%[14] Maximum [15] Next Generation [16] PC Magazine [17] Computer Games Strategy Plus [18] PC Games [19]

Reviews of the game upon initial release were mixed. After extensively praising the game's graphics, challenging puzzles, storyline, and atmosphere, as well as the lower amount of gratuitous gore when compared to The 7th Guest, a reviewer for Maximum concluded "However, the bottom line is that 11th Hour is basically a more advanced version of 7th Guest."^[15] A reviewer for Next Generation also found the game much too similar to its predecessor, particularly as he considered the entire genre of puzzle adventures to be a waste of time. He also criticized that the game has long load times except when running on high-end computers.^[16] Arinn Dembo reviewed the game for Computer Gaming World.^[13] In 2010, UGO included the game in the article The 11 Weirdest Game Endings.^[20]

By April 1995, Trilobyte planned to launch The 11th Hour with a shipment of 250,000 copies.^[21] However, by December, retailers in the United States had ordered 500,000 units of the game.^[22] According to Geoff Keighley, "The 11th Hour had the biggest ship-out of a PC game up until that point - nearly half a million units".^[23] The game was a commercial success, with sales of nearly 300,000 copies in the United States alone by May 1996.^[24]

References

External links

• The 11th Hour at MobyGames
• The 11th Hour on IMDb
• The rise and fall of Trilobyte - Detailed article on the company, including the making of The 11th Hour.