While Luc Rooijakkers (ex-CD-i developer at SPC Vision) was reverse engineering 'The 7th Guest' on CD-i during a job to extract audio files for the Android 'remastered' version in 2015, he observed an interesting fact about the CD-i conversion of The 7th Guest.
Luc: "I found out during the reverse engineering that the CD-i game uses a kind of “compiled” game scripts for all the interactivity, with a very general format and functionality. It did not in any way look like the ScummVM code, not even in the “opcode” list based on the PC version assets. My guess is that the CD-i makers re-used an existing “script compiler” architecture and/or game engine and wrote or recompiled all the scripts from scratch.
Due to the generality of the script codes, you could create many different “FMV” games using the same engine; the actual game as released is almost completely data-driven. This could even be a “portable” engine, all the asset manipulation is in the CD-i specific parts outside the basic script engine and called using generic operators."
It looks like if Philips Freeland Studio (the developer of the CD-i conversion of The 7th Guest) wanted to benefit from developing an engine that could be used for different games, which would be very efficient for future CD-i developments at Dorking. After (even during) The 7th Guest development on CD-i, the team also worked on Microcosm, which was also some kind of FMV title. I wonder if they were trying to re-use the engine in a way. They also planned the design on the CD-i conversion of Star Wars: Rebel Assault. Both titles that never saw the light of day.
[Thanks, Luc Rooijakkers]