The classic puzzle game began as notes on an airport napkin before "blowing minds" at CES 1991. Myst is the game best known for driving adoption of the CD-ROM drive, but as a Halloween-obsessed kid in the '90s, The 7th Guest was where it was at for me. The 1993 puzzle-adventure game was, like Myst, one of the first games that required a CD-ROM drive—but unlike Myst, sometimes your mouse cursor was a skull with bulging eyeballs and a throbbing brain. Hell yeah. In the spirit of the original's once cutting-edge hardware requirement, a remake of The 7th Guest came out for VR headsets in 2023. A non-VR version of that remake is now due out June 4 on Steam, which led me to chat with the remake's director, Paul van der Meer, and one of the creators of the original 1993 game, Rob Landeros. I took the opportunity to ask about a bit of '90s gaming lore: The supposed on-the-spot "firing" of Landeros and programmer Graeme Devine after they pitched the idea for The 7th Guest. Wikipedia states simply that the pair founded Trilobyte Games after being "fired from Virgin Games." When they approached me, I said to them: I hear everything you have to say, but you are fired. Landeros had been hired by Virgin to bring a cinematic touch to "bargain bin" games, as he put it, but eventually he and Devine got the idea to do something original. The pair had been flying around to tech conferences, taking meetings with "a bunch of suits" about that brand new CD-ROM technology, which as Landeros recalls wasn't being pitched as anything fun. They were "just storing a bunch of data on discs and sharing it, you know, in corporations." Boo. After a few of these meetings, Landeros and Devine started brainstorming at an airport, where they "wrote stuff on the back of a napkin, literally." Shortly thereafter they proposed the idea for The 7th Guest to Martin Alper, then president of Virgin Interactive. Alper, who passed away in 2015, recounted what he told the pair in a 2013 interview: "When t