In 2008, I
wrote about a community of fans who were developing a sequel to the 7th Guest and 11th Hour called
The 13th Doll. It was a promising, self-funded project which began in 2004 after Trilobyte canceled its official,
real-time based sequel-
The 7th Guest Part III: The Collector. The game was again to be set in the Stauf mansion, painstakingly recreated from game screenshots, with Tad as the protagonist. However, after several years had gone by without any updates, the project appeared dead.
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| Early screenshot of The 13th Doll. (2005) |
In recent years, 7th Guest co-creator Rob Landeros attempted to restart the franchise using the popular crowd-funding site
Kickstarter as well as the lesser-known
CrowdHoster, but ultimately failed in both ventures.
Possibly realizing that a continuation of the series would never be realized, last month the fan-based 13th Doll team started a
Kickstarter campaign to revive their game. Amazingly, they met their funding goal of $40,000 and are now headed for one of their first stretch goals. On the site they mention the background of their development over the years:
We started the game in the fall of 2004. Up until 2008 we made great progress, but were too ambitious, and lost steam. We gradually let the game fall to the backburner for several years, and only picked it up again in the spring of 2015. By then, all of our source images, video, and code had become outdated, so everything is basically being done from scratch.
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| Screenshot of the Stauf library using Unity. (2015) |
You can view their teaser trailer
here and read more about the project at their
official website. Using the
Unity game engine, the game is shaping up quite nicely judging from their most recent screenshots.
