Biography
Devine was born in 1966 in Glasgow, Scotland and began his career working on the TRS-80 at age 14 in the late 1970s. He joined Atari at age 16 to port their classic game Pole Position to home computers, including the Commodore 64, Apple IIe and ZX Spectrum. He also worked for Lucasfilm's Games Division, Activision UK, and Virgin Interactive.
Devine founded Trilobyte in December 1990 with Rob Landeros. Together, they designed the original concept of the 1992 horror game The 7th Guest. Graeme was the lead programmer on the game and on its sequel The 11th Hour. The 7th Guest was a phenomenon, selling 2 million copies, and is credited (along with the game Myst) with encouraging the use of CD-ROM drives for games.
Devine was also one of the forefathers of file compression. The game The 7th Guest made extensive use of movie footage, which required a great deal of disk space. Most games in the industry at that point were still shipping on floppy disks, which could only hold about 1 Megabyte of data each. The 7th Guest used roomier CD technology, but there was still a limit to how many CDs could practically be used for a single game. File compression technology at the time, especially for videos which could run into hundreds of megabytes, was still in a primitive state. However, Devine innovated a way to compress movie files, so Trilobyte could fit two hours of footage, along with the game itself, onto only two CDs.
Read more about this topic: Graeme Devine
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