The early days of the CD-ROM were anything but glamorous: games like Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective (1991) featured postage stamp-sized videos, and cheap shareware collections tended to use the discs’ ample storage space as a digital dumping ground. With filler like this, the hot new format would never take off.
It needed a killer app – and that meant creating a killer company first: Trilobyte.
Born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1966, Graeme Devine says he started programming at the age of nine. After working for Atari, Activision and Lucasfilm Games, he set up his own companies, Program Techniques and IC&D, before moving to California in 1988 to work for Mastertronic, where he developed games and acquired a solid knowledge of advanced compression techniques.
The second important name is Rob Landeros. Born in California in 1949, he was a talented graphics artist, and in the mid-Eighties bought a C64 that would change his life forever. His work on the system led to jobs at Cinemaware and Virgin Mastertronic, where he met 24-year-old Graeme Devine.
Rob Lsaneros
The two formed an internal sub-company called Research And New Technology to focus on the brand-new CD-ROM, as Rob recalls, “The possibilities of the CD-ROM fascinated us, so we formed our own little two-man department within the company, which we made ‘official’ by printing up business cards identifying ourselves as VPs of New Technologies, and taking them to industry
