
Myst: the Drawbacks to Success - zdw
https://www.filfre.net/2020/02/myst-or-the-drawbacks-to-success/
======
jaredcwhite
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.

~~~
scroot
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" ...

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pavlov
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.

~~~
Waterluvian
Look up "Dreams" on the PS4. This is absolutely today's version of that.

~~~
pavlov
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?

~~~
hyperpallium
Like a demo-tape, a great game could be picked up (like Portal was). Why
wouldn't Sony do this?

A distributable runtime, to a market of 100,000,000+ PS4 (plus PS5's),
royalties to creators as publishers, would be an intermediate step.

Bundled with PS5 for early gen content.

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eps
Also, a 2 hour (!) interview with Rand Miller by Arstechnica, which has been
absolutely killing it lately with their in-depth gamedev coverage -

[https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/02/an-extended-
interview...](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/02/an-extended-interview-
with-atrus-himself-myst-creator-rand-miller/)

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mdonahoe
“ the overlap between players of games like Doom and those like Myst is
inevitably limited. (The surprising thing is that an overlap exists at all…)”

Really? Is it that rare to like both?

I find this hard to believe.

~~~
vitaflo
I do too, especially because when you combine the two you basically end up
with Metroid Prime, another very popular well made game.

~~~
lostgame
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.

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abruzzi
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.

~~~
karatestomp
How could you hate Angry Birds unless you also hate the classic series
Lemmings and Worms?

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m12k
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.

~~~
AstralStorm
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.

~~~
m12k
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.

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joshuaellinger
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.

[http://gorogoa.com/](http://gorogoa.com/)

~~~
AstralStorm
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.)

But it is pretty.

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pcunite
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.

~~~
aidenn0
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.

~~~
tialaramex
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.

~~~
jfengel
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.

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danso
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.

~~~
mattbillenstein
Play realMyst - it's a fun experience.

~~~
thewebcount
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.)

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RugnirViking
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.

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thorum
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.

~~~
theresistor
Cyan’s latest game, Obduction, is quite good in VR.

~~~
james_s_tayler
It's epic.

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pmarreck
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggC6kfJJE_w)
, Myth II: Soulblighter
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s84pODz7ATs](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.

~~~
scroot
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!

~~~
pmarreck
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-...](https://www.stripes.com/news/middle-east/air-
force-aviators-killed-in-afghanistan-crash-were-lieutenant-colonel-
with-25-years-of-service-and-b-1-bomber-pilot-1.616815) He also liked Escape
Velocity, which was another Mac-only game at the time)

~~~
thewebcount
Escape Velocity was so much fun! Someone recently did a remake (or copy is
maybe a better term) of it called Endless Sky.

~~~
scroot
I remember getting a skin pack for EV that turned all the ships into Star Wars
ships, it was awesome

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nsxwolf
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?

~~~
Rury
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.

~~~
grogenaut
It'll probably run a lot better on modern hardware.

