As a teen, Myst was my first rabid geek fandom. I spent hours, days, weeks, playing and replaying Myst, and its sequel Riven which is like Lord of the Rings to Myst's Hobbit.
I was accepted into the early beta test program for URU, the MMORPG spinoff of the Myst franchise. It consumed the better part of a year…I helped run fan forums and organize in-game events. I made friends. For a time, it was an incredible community.
A visual art reference and "making of" book about Myst and Riven became my bible as I pursued 3D graphics art and almost went to art school to become a game designer. I ended up dropping that idea and went into web/software space instead. (good career move!)
All that to say, Myst is to me what, say, Star Wars is to many others. Its impact was gargantuan in my life and it shaped the person I am today. I will always be grateful to Cyan for that.
My first website was a Geopages Myst fan site. I spent weeks trying to "debug" why I couldn't get a picture of Atrus to be the tiled background on my page using the eponymous tag. 12 year old me realized -- eventually -- that there is a "g" in the word "bacGround" ...
Similar for me. I was really into Star Wars too, but the Cyan worlds were on par with that. I never felt clever enough to actually finish the games without walkthroughs, but the world was one that I was fully invested in, and in a way equalled only by Star Wars, Star Trek, and Lord of the Rings.
I’m fascinated by the “outsider” profile of the Myst creators.
Per the article, they didn’t play contemporary games and only used off-the-shelf GUI tools on the niche Mac platform — this in an era where “real games” used handcoded x86 assembly. Yet their creation outsold practically everyone in the industry by an order of magnitude.
Where are the tools today for someone like this to be successful? Unity is of course impressive but seems very tightly bound to gaming industry thinking — not that approachable or interesting to an outsider.
Around 2000-2005, the Flash GUI had lots of potential here... But then Adobe turned Flash into a programmer-oriented sprawling mini-Java and eventually Apple threw it under the iPhone bus.
From what I recall, the creators were not devoid of programming experience. Rand Miller had some experience writing software for banks, and first game required quite a bit of programming. I would suspect Unity is pretty similar in terms of complexity but perhaps not in terms of simplicity of interface.
That’s very cool. I remember an excellent Siggraph presentation about the still in-development Dreams engine a few years ago. Nice to see it shipping.
There’s a difference in distribution freedom though. HyperCard and Flash were conceived as production tools. You could interface with other tools and APIs. For the finished work, you could put it in a box and sell 6 million copies (like Myst), or host a game on your own server (like everything in the Flash golden era).
The Dreams runtime is a console game — a prerequisite investment, and limited audience compared to desktop / web platforms. Hopefully they’ll offer some kind of player-only licensing program for creators eventually?
Indeed that is a very important difference. But in the absence of something truly open and free, Dreams is still incredibly empowering.
I suspect that a truly open platform/distribution would never realistically exist alongside something of this quality. It's a nice idea but it just wouldn't happen.
Something simple enough to be good and free is probably also not going to catch the attention of this generation of budding creatives.
You're not selling anything made with Dreams, though. And anything you make is only playable by PS4 owners with a copy of the game. It's far more limited and not really comparable.
I’d say Unity is a free, fairly simple entry-level tool for this kind of thing.
Especially in combination with the Asset Store, which has a lot of free assets, and Fuse/Mixamo, you can pull stuff together with very little programming knowledge and share it to most major platforms.
Unity is great but it’s a mainstream 3D pipeline. I was thinking something leftfield; superficially limited but with untapped artistic potential unlike standard gaming experiences, like the HyperCard+QuickTime combo was in 1993 for Myst.
This seems really wrong in my experience. In 1993 my friends and I were playing anything we could get our hands on. Adventure games, solitaire games, flight sims, racing games, first person shooters - everything was just so damned amazing and novel you wanted to experience it all.
It was just too early to have developed very specific tastes.
For years I’ve (often unsuccessfully) tried to pitch people Metroid Prime, calling it ‘Myst with a gun’, to which my friends responses often include ‘what’s Myst?’.
Doesn’t quite capture the platforming awesomeness, though. First good first person platformer I’ve played.
As the article mentions, a bigger anti-Myst sentiment was from the traditional inventory-NPC based adventure fandom, which was annoyed that this game eliminated inventory and NPC-based puzzles. And arguably killed the traditional adventure games, except for fan works.
This is literally what the article mentions: "But the more interesting and perhaps telling brand of hatred comes from self-acknowledged fans of the adventure-game genre. These folks were usually raised on the Sierra and LucasArts traditions of third-person adventures — games that were filled with other characters to interact with, objects to pick up and carry around and use to solve puzzles, and complicated plot arcs unfolding chapter by chapter. They have a decided aversion to the first-person, minimalist, deserted, austere Myst, sometimes going so far as to say that it isn’t really an adventure game at all"
Myst was really the last game I played. As the article mentions, Doom was released at about the same time, and really became the blueprint for the future of gaming. My problem was I couldn’t play a FPS for more than 10 minutes or so before bad headaches kicked in.
Sometimes I wonder if Myst was like Angry Birds. A game that gamers hated because it didn’t conform to their expectations, but something that found mor purchase with people that didn’t game heavily.
For any Myst fans wondering if there are any recent games they might like, I'd highly recommend The Witness and Outer Wilds (not to be confused with Outer Worlds). The Witness is a gorgeous puzzle-solver where you learn a sort of 'puzzle language' while walking around a beautiful island and Outer Wilds is genre-defying, but blends physics, space-travel, exploration, puzzle solving and much more to become the most unique and captivating gaming experience I've had in many years.
Unfortunately Witness is different genre because the puzzles are mostly self-contained and exploration is not as necessary.
Myst and Riven are adventure-puzzle games, while Witness is almost pure puzzle game. (Likewise Talos Principle, but it has some story.)
Outer Wilds is action-adventure in that order. It does not allow the slow pace like Myst.
I respectfully disagree on both counts. The puzzles in the Witness are linked - but instead of e.g. picking pushing a lever to help with another puzzle, you learn a new rule that will allow you to solve more advanced puzzles that combine the rules of several other puzzles.
And the primary focus in Outer Wilds is not on action, but on exploration. And the way you learn about the history and technology of a previous civilization is quite similar to Myst.
I recently played Gorogoa, first game that reminded me of Myst in ages. Although it was much easier than I remember Myst being, it has that artistic flair that I loved about Myst.
Hmm. Gorogoa. Its puzzles are trivial in comparison. Byeing visual puzzles with only a few simple order of operations additions, they're hard to make harder. The game does not force exploration either.
It's more like a puzzle visual novel than adventure game. (And you have no agency in it really.)
Myst was captivating. Visually so "immersive" with just enough graphics to really stimulate what "might" be around the corner. I truly could sense that I was somewhere else, another planet or whatever, abandoned, with me to explore.
I felt that way for about 10 minutes, after which it felt like visiting a Hollywood set; looks great but it's just a facade. The level of interactivity was just too little to be convincing.
As TFA says, a lot of people blame Myst for the death of the adventure game, but it was already trending that way in '93 as graphics improved. Most of the random actions that you could take to interact with the world in the Sierra games resulted in a fairly generic animation and a wall of text. This meant anything the designer anticipated could be interacted with, because the cost of writing that text was low (particularly with Sierra's near lack of editing and playtesting).
Once a generic animation and a wall of text was no longer acceptable from a production-value stance, these games were stripped of their charm, and all you were left with were charmless puzzle games with some window-dressing. Myst got there first and did it better than everyone else, so it gets the blame for something that was inevitable.
More inexcusable is the aesthetic choice to do this now, when you can afford to have decent graphics and let players do whatever they want but designers often inexplicably decide to curate the experience to the point where you might as well just watch somebody else's play.
I wouldn't have built Myst because to me it seems pointless, why not just make a movie about this? Or a picture book? But clearly lots of people enjoyed it. Still, back then I could safely assume anything that looked that good had nothing behind the facade, today it's harder to guess.
It reminds me of a phenomenon which is broadly disliked in tabletop Role Playing. Some GMs like to plot out everything in great detail which necessarily means you can't go off piste, they need you to go into the tunnels under the castle with the torch because they've worked out exactly what will happen when you do. If their players try to instead simply leave the castle because it's boring, or divert a river into the tunnels and flood them to drive anything down there out the GM will either be angry and demand the players reconsider or will try to railroad the players into proceeding with the plan as they envisioned. Either way this is an unsatisfying experience for everybody.
There wasn't enough story for a movie. It was pretty enough to be a picture book, but how big is the market for picture books?
It was a puzzle game. The puzzles were pretty basic, but the market for basic puzzle games is significant. Especially if the puzzle is also attractive enough that the next batch of visuals feels like a decent reward for having solved the puzzle.
Such a game won't attract people who want more interaction from their games -- though you do have to remember that at the time even a game like Doom was a huge advance in interactivity. Myst was relaxing rather than exciting, almost the way a game of solitaire or a crossword puzzle is.
1. 2 out of 3 of those games are from Lucas Arts not Sierra
2. Many of the deaths had animations and a bit of text, but see all the non-death things you could do that KQ1 had[1] and it did not have anywhere near the most.
My bad of course those are Lucasfilm. However, I was referring to late adventure point and clicks, unlike kq1 from 84: let's take lucasfilm games post 93, including grim fandango or full throttle, those do not seem to fit your description.
That's exactly what hooked me - I worked in a VR research lab while an undergrad and then grad student, and Myst came out just as VR was fizzling out. It was the most immersive thing I'd ever experienced without a headset - I would turn off all the lights and crank up the audio, and lose myself for hours.
For some reason I vaguely remember 1993 as having a 7th Guest vs Myst marketing theme. To this day I still haven’t played Myst but my memories of 7th Guest have not grown fonder with time.
Just note that if you play it on iOS there is a bug that makes one really useful clue not show up, and can leave you scratching your head as to what to do. (Hint: When you see the map in the library, the tower should be blinking. It's not.)
I loved 7th Guest! I mean yes looking back it seems a bit cringe-worthy, but the merging of video into a game that had a decent creepy factor made me want more and set me on a course of enjoying creepy/scary video games.
I can’t remember if I liked 7th guest or 11th hour better. But I distinctly remember playing both and myst and thinking the graphics in video games were amazing :)
I was introduced to Myst as a youth in high school, which was probably the only time where I truly enjoyed writing. I'm not much of an author, but we we played through the first two worlds in myst together as a class and then had to write fiction set in those worlds, which really caught my imagination.
Myst’s style of gameplay (user jumps from environment to environment by clicking) seems like it would be a great fit for the current generation of virtual reality headsets.
We got our first Mac in 1984 when I was 12 (and we were seemingly the last people to get a computer in the fairly affluent neighborhood we moved to not long before).
I've always loved Macs, and games.
Myst was the last great Mac-only game.
When it got ported to Windows, I was very sad, because I knew it meant the Mac was "dead man walking" as far as being a viable gaming platform was concerned. Oh, it floundered for a number of years later (shout-out to Oni https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggC6kfJJE_w , Myth II: Soulblighter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s84pODz7ATs and the Marathon series, all of which were made by a barely-known-at-the-time Bungie Software primarily (at first only) for Macs) but... anyway.
Myst was magical and inspiring because Macs were magical and inspiring.
Marathon Infinity was the absolute jam. It came with its own software for making levels/scenarios, and there were all these community-made Marathon games online. No one ever talks about it!
At the time (I was enlisted in the USAF for 4 years) I had PC gamers using my Mac just to play Marathon. Probably one of the last times that's happened, lol. (And I just realized one of the guys who did that often, Paul Voss, was killed recently in a crash, sigh: https://www.stripes.com/news/middle-east/air-force-aviators-... He also liked Escape Velocity, which was another Mac-only game at the time)
As someone who loved the adventure games of the 80s and 90s but somehow never played Myst, do you think it would be worth my time in 2020 to give it a play through?
All a matter of what you like to do with your time.
Myst was a great adventure/puzzle game for its time. Although IMO, Riven and Myst III were better, with Riven being the pinnacle of the series. I would replay these if I were to play any of the games in the series again. Otherwise, if you're looking for something more modern, I'd recommend Quern.
Maybe play realMyst to get through it. But Riven is the real masterpiece, because the brothers took all of the lessons they learned and made something really amazing
I started playing realMyst recently (for the first time). Must admit I found it a bit unfun. Perhaps I just didn’t get into it enough but I found the puzzles sometimes quite unintuitive. I’ve also started The Witness and enjoying it more.
I know many people have very fond memories of it, and I don't want to disparage that, but I remember finding it dreadfully dull. And I liked the slower-paced games of the time, like the Infocom text adventures, or SimCity. But Myst just didn't engage me at all. I felt like I was looking at movie set posters with marginally-designed minigames attached, and it just didn't do it for me.
I was accepted into the early beta test program for URU, the MMORPG spinoff of the Myst franchise. It consumed the better part of a year…I helped run fan forums and organize in-game events. I made friends. For a time, it was an incredible community.
A visual art reference and "making of" book about Myst and Riven became my bible as I pursued 3D graphics art and almost went to art school to become a game designer. I ended up dropping that idea and went into web/software space instead. (good career move!)
All that to say, Myst is to me what, say, Star Wars is to many others. Its impact was gargantuan in my life and it shaped the person I am today. I will always be grateful to Cyan for that.