David Wheeler – The 7th Guest 3

Though he’s known as a pioneer of interactive storytelling to adventure fans of The 11th Hour, Tender Loving Care, and Point of View, writer and director David Wheeler has also been busy making AAA games such as Ghostbusters and Medal of Honor in recent years. Now the Kickstarter campaign for The 7th Guest 3: The Collector has finally brought back the old Trilobyte dream team of Wheeler and Rob Landeros. The occasion gave us an excellent reason to chat with Wheeler about his lengthy career and his involvement with the new game. As we discovered, the man who may have helped paved the way for companies like Quantic Dream and Telltale not only has a lot to look back on, but also a lot of ambitious plans for the future.
 

Ingmar Böke: Hello, David! I did an interview with Rob Landeros last year, and of course I asked him if you would ever work together again, as it’s no exaggeration to say you were a dream team of interactive storytelling back in the day. At the time it seemed very uncertain from what he said that it would happen. How did you get back together again?

David Wheeler: Well, for many years we tossed around the idea of doing a third sequel or third version of The 7th Guest. We actually started up a version of it in, I think, 2003 maybe. We mapped out the original concept for The Collector. But it was hard getting things going in those days because most publishers were pushing away from FMV and the cries that “FMV is dead” were pretty well heard and it was like a self-fulfilling prophecy. And Full Motion Video was the sort of central part of our work and without it, it was very difficult.

Honestly, we not only had The 7th Guest part 3 but we had been developing another totally different, very unique story and I really could not get any publishers interested. People loved our work. Several publishers, some of them who I later worked for, told me almost the same thing. They would say: “David, you just have to get it through your head. People will never, never want to watch movies on their computers.” (And of course now we are watching them on our phones; that’s changed quite a bit.)

So we died off back then with the concept of doing The 7th Guest part 3 and Rob and I went in different directions. We had started our company in Canada, which was Digital Circus, and we produced Point of View there. And then I got kind of fed up with publishers and I kind of quit the game business completely. Rob went into expanding his web design business and I went in a very different direction. I did a very large project, which was a science museum, and I did 88 interactive exhibits for a science centre and it was very well received. It took me quite a while to do that but what I did was bring a lot of my story-oriented thoughts to displaying and explaining science and it was quite successful. Then I did some human rights work for a couple of years, basically again using my interactive experiences.

Then I got totally back into the game business; I was seduced back by a very good friend of ours. I became content director for Vivendi and oversaw all of the content, especially from a story point of view, for Sierra and Vivendi Universal. Then I went to Electronic Arts and was a creative director there and I was invited to create a new IP. They didn’t want to do an interactive movie, but they wanted me to create a shooter game. That was fine; by that time I had a lot of experience in that sort of thing. I pitched an idea based on a book idea of mine and they really liked it, so we developed it for a while but then the economy went sour and they decided they didn’t want to do any new IP. So they asked if I’d work on Medal of Honor – this was 2009. So I worked on bringing it from World War II to modern day and it was very successful; I think it almost tripled the sales from the previous instalment. But I left before it was finished; I sorted out all the story stuff and the cinematics and so forth.