
Myst creators launch Kickstarter to bring every game in the series to Windows 10 - Tomte
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/04/myst-creators-launch-kickstarter-to-bring-every-game-in-the-series-to-windows-10/
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MikusR
The Kickstarter is only for the physical stuff. Making games run on newer
versions of Windows was done by GOG.com and will be released even if
Kickstarter fails.

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oh_sigh
Only if it's abandonware right?

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WorldMaker
GOG has never been an "abandonware" site. Everything on GOG has always been
appropriately licensed from the IP owners. The early focus was digital
distribution of out-of-print titles (hence the original name "Good Old
Games"), but it has always been a retail storefront.

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sandGorgon
For those that love these kind of games, the modern day interpretation is (the
creator of Braid) Jonathan Blow's Witness.

[http://store.steampowered.com/app/210970/The_Witness/](http://store.steampowered.com/app/210970/The_Witness/)

That said, I really wish the creators remake these games for the mobile. These
kind of puzzle games dont have any of the FPS requirements that today's mobile
phones cant handle. The beautiful scenes that Myst was well known for can
easily be rendered on a 4 year old phone as well.

But most importantly, touch and gyroscope opens up degrees of freedom that was
previously impossible to conceive. Imagine an AR like Myst.

~~~
wetpaws
Just to iterate on your comment, while The Witness is one of my favorite games
and very close in spirit to the Myst, the closet game after many many years I
was able to find is Quern:

[http://store.steampowered.com/app/512790/Quern__Undying_Thou...](http://store.steampowered.com/app/512790/Quern__Undying_Thoughts/)

If you like Myst, give it a try, you want be disappointed.

~~~
sandGorgon
oh wow - thanks for this.

And its Linux supported too!!!

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rbanffy
If they say Linux, I'm in.

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abrowne
Or even better IMHO something web-based [that can be used on Linux]. At least
the first one is basically hypermedia. (Was it based on Hypercard?)

~~~
spiralganglion
Yes, it was built in HyperCard.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst#Production](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst#Production)

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driverdan
Link to the actual KS:
[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1252280491/myst-25th-
an...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1252280491/myst-25th-anniversary-
collection)

They've already surpassed their goal.

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andyjohnson0
The earlier games in particular used pre-rendered 640x480 graphics, so I'm
curious about whether they will be re-creating the graphical assets to make
use of modern display resolutions. Could be a lot of work depending on the
state of the source material and dependencies. Riven, for example, was
rendered using a package called Mental Ray which was discontinued last year.

Whatever, I'm almost certainly in on this.

~~~
Crespyl
The assets for Myst at least should be in decent shape, or at least the ones
used in the real-time 3D Myst Live (I think that was the title) remake from a
few years back.

I seem to recall hearing that there wouldn't be a similar Riven remake, due to
loss of the source assets from that game. I assume the new package will be
using the same GOG versions you can get now, with the original stills.

It's also worth checking out the fan-run Starry Expanse project[0], which is
an attempt to manually recreate the entirety of Riven in a modern 3D
environment. Progress is very slow, but already looks quite impressive.

I'm really excited to see that they've finally got the rights to III and IV,
which I always felt were the technical/visual peak of the series.

[0] [http://www.starryexpanse.com/](http://www.starryexpanse.com/)

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wafflesraccoon
As someone that has never played Myst, how does it hold up in a modern
setting? It always looked like a game that needed a VR remake.

~~~
tetrep
I played Riven about a year ago (never played Myst), and it held up pretty
well. I think the biggest shortcoming is the standard 90s adventure game trope
of arbitrarily obtuse solutions to some puzzles. I ended up needing about 2 or
3 vague hints to point me to certain areas to advance the plot (luckily,
though, IIRC no puzzle solutions), usually revolving around not understanding
navigation options (like not knowing you could move through a certain part of
a screen). I'm not sure how much of that was developer's being tricky or the
low resolution of the game making it difficult to discern details, or the
general shortcomings of the cursor-based UI.

If I wasn't able to find a walkthrough or guide, I don't think I would have
been able to complete the game. But, that was also the era of official
strategy guides, so maybe acquiring those would provide adequate context (I
know the one for Morrowind makes the game for me. It's written in such a way
that you feel like you've got a companion guiding you along with its
commentary, providing just enough information to "unblock" you when you're
stuck).

~~~
hlandau
Myst and Riven are fond memories for me. Riven was a real masterpiece, though;
after the success of Myst they went to town on it. I never paid much attention
to the sequels, since gur raqvat bs Evira onfvpnyyl cerpyhqrf frdhryf, and
they weren't made by the Miller brothers. In my own personal mind-canon Riven
is the end of the series.

Riven's use of puzzles is actually very good when compared to other adventure
games of the day; pretty much all of the puzzles are justified in the context
of the world that you're in. It's like an anthropologist-archaeologist
simulator: you're visiting an unknown world and you have to figure out a lot
very quickly, which personally I found a very compelling hook.

This doesn't mean that some of the puzzles aren't very difficult... the game
is genuinely hard and use of guides was very common. (I ended up using one
myself when I played it as a kid; I somewhat regret this.) But in this era of
dumbing-down I actually think it's to the game's credit that it expects a lot
of intelligence out of you (how many games expect you to erirefr ratvarre na
haxabja ahzore flfgrz?), and it goes to a lot of effort to give you what you
need to work with.

There are a few exceptions... a _certain pair_ of double doors was a pretty
cheap trick, for example.

What's nice is that the adventure genre seems to be experiencing a (small)
revival; I think Portal started it. Before Portal the use of modern rendering
technology _and_ first-person perspective was, bizarrely, almost exclusively
used for FPSes, with anything else tending to use e.g. third-person 3D. Only
with Portal did people seem to sit up and notice the potential of first-person
non-FPS gameplay. Before, there seemed to be an attitude that anything not an
FPS shouldn't be first person -- I recall reading that when Mirror's Edge was
proposed, apparently executives were skeptical and pushed for a third-person
perspective. Now we have things like Portal 2, The Talos Principle, etc.

~~~
sjm-lbm
I also think Riven killed adventure games for a bit - regardless of what you
think of it from a gameplay perspective, it's _really_ pretty graphically, and
the slideshow-style presentation honestly doesn't hamper what you can allow
the player to do if you aren't twitch-reacting to enemies that the computer is
throwing at you.

It's been much more recently that the same sense of artistry could be added to
realtime games, at least IMHO. Even Myst 5 - ok, yes, done by Cyan when they
were a shell of their Riven selves - just feels different due to the
compromises made to make it realtime.

~~~
WorldMaker
Myst 5 also suffered from the fact that it was a "third season" excised at the
last minute from Uru Live (on strange experiment network GameTap).

The rollercoaster that was the Uru project is a fascinating history. Uru:
Complete Chronicles collects ~"season one" and "season two" in a lonely single
player form, but the best way to experience them is to grab a friend or three
and log in to one of the MO:UL servers [1] that are mostly open source at this
point and have been run for the last few years entirely through combinations
of Cyan Worlds good will and fan dedication.

All of which is to say that the compromises that made Myst 5 feel "poor"
compared to Riven I think are much more due to the lost opportunities of
changing waters in an amazing, but troubled business model (the world's
largest attempt at a graphical massive multiplayer online third person
puzzler), and Cyan Worlds doing needs must to survive (spinning content back
out into single player adventures to sell at retail, just like they did with
"Complete Chronicles", and using a name they knew would sell, Myst 5).

(There's some sadness that the Myst 5's Ages likely will not be reintegrated
into Uru, and I can't play Myst 5 without instinctively trying for my Relto
book or KI and being sad when those don't work.)

[1] [https://mystonline.com/en/](https://mystonline.com/en/)

~~~
sjm-lbm
Well, you are correct - there's a lot of reasons - but I still think art is
one of the primary ones. If you'll allow me to drop into a specific example:
during Riven's development, Cyan hired a guy named Richard Vander Wende, who
had previously worked on Aladdin at Disney. Much like Aladdin, he made color
grading a focus of Riven - most images tend to be unusually warm or cool, dark
or light, etc. in ways that communicate a mood or something about the world
you are interacting with (even if it's not something you yet know about the
world you are interacting with). Stuff like this is, IMHO, unusually effective
in a game like Riven - the player is often too busy looking for a switch or
button or whatever to consciously absorb little details like that, but there's
a way that I feel like that communicates the mood of a location in a way
that's very emotional and brilliant. The effect may work better on me than
other people, but it's one of the reasons why Riven is the highlight of the
series for me.

There's other examples (I think losing Robyn Miller's musical talents change
things a bit as well, even though the music in Uru is great), but that's the
sort of thing that I'm on about. And, for that matter, I may be over-crediting
Vander Wende for this, I just think it's an oddly notable similarity between
Aladdin and Riven.

(also, as a bit of a Cyan nerd, I do sort of want to be pedantic and point out
that GameTap was actually the third place Uru Live was hosted - there was a
test-ish server around 2003/2004 when the single player game first came out,
and community-hosted versions in the 2006ish timeframe before GameTap's
version launched in late 2006/early 2007. Myst 5 actually came out in 2005,
before GameTap's Uru launched)

~~~
WorldMaker
I think that there was still a lot of things that could have been done in
real-time graphics even at the time of Myst 5's release that weren't done
simply due to the business economics that the Uru engine (Plasma) didn't
support them, in large part due to the compromises Plasma made to support
real-time multiplayer physics.

> (also, as a bit of a Cyan nerd, I do sort of want to be pedantic and point
> out that GameTap was actually the third place Uru Live was hosted

I mentioned that obliquely in that it had a long history. I played every
version. If we want to play pedantry, that "test-ish" server you are thinking
on was Ubi's official server which was meant to be the original MMO publisher
before Ubi got cold feet and shut down all of their MMOs.

You are correct that Myst 5 came out before GameTap's server, and I
misremembered that, but the exact order of operations isn't entirely critical
to my point that Myst 5 was a "keep the lights on" release of content
originally meant to be slowly released to Uru. Ubi's cold feet scuttled five
years or so of planning. GameTap's scuttled two or three years. Between the
two "publishers", Cyan Worlds got several hugely raw deals.

~~~
sjm-lbm
Sorry, I didn't mean to be pedantic in that way - more like I'm just gleefully
geeking out about Cyan being in the news a bit. Your overall point above was
completely correct.

~~~
WorldMaker
No worries. Yeah, I could probably talk about Uru for days, given the chance.
Might be about time to plan a fresh trip down to the cavern. :)

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jontayesp
These games would be perfect for the Nintendo Switch!

Edit: I just noticed they released the original Myst on 3DS back in 2012.

~~~
mkirklions
This is entirely the reason why I'm a PC gamer.

Steam games are cheap, old games are cheap, lots to choose from.

Nintendo(or other consoles), full price 60$ games, 40$ on sale. First party
games are the primary buy, and those are few and far between.

The last Nintendo console I owned was the GC, I havent looked back. There are
enough cheap games for the PC that I dont miss out on the last 2 zelda games.

~~~
scarface74
It's not only about price, PC game compatibility goes back a lot further than
console or mobile games.

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dudul
I have an old version of Myst IV and Myst III, and they run just fine on my
windows 10 installation. Totally thrilled by this project though :) The series
(and especially Riven) kept me in front of the computer for a loooong time in
my youth.

~~~
alleyshack
What black magic did you have to do to get Myst III to run fine on Windows 10?
I tried it a couple months ago and it was so slow and janky and low-res that
it wasn't playable. (Maybe because I was using a USB CD drive?)

~~~
dudul
I don't remember doing nothing special really. For the slowness, see my other
reply. I usually don't run directly from the CD drive.

The one that gave me the most troubles was Riven (before I got it from GOG).
For this one I had to do some mumbo-jumbo to finally get a full screen yeah.

~~~
alleyshack
Huh, I wonder where I went wrong. Exile just... didn't function. But then, I
was trying to run it on my shiny new VR rig, so it might've just been hardware
compatibility. :/ Thanks!

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Overtonwindow
Strange, does this involve Robin and Rand Miller, the creator? If this is just
a W10 port I'm not as interested, but I WOULD be extremely interested if the
Miller's ...revisited Myst a little. That game was a significant part of my
childhood.

~~~
wolfgke
> Strange, does this involve Robin and Rand Miller, the creator? If this is
> just a W10 port I'm not as interested, but I WOULD be extremely interested
> if the Miller's ...revisited Myst a little.

Cyan Worlds already did this multiple times. I just want to mention "Myst:
Masterpiece Edition" (adding 24 bit true color graphics instead of 256 color 8
bit graphics), "realMyst" (adding 3D graphics and (small spoiler) na
nqqvgvbany ntr pnyyrq "Evzr") and "realMyst: Masterpiece Edition" (better 3D
graphics).

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hd4
SCUMMVM already has support for older Mysts on newer Windows version, why do
we need a kickstarter again?

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m_mueller
What I‘d like most is a VR port of Riven. How good is their VR game?

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justin66
"You hold a gun like a guy who plays _Riven!_ "

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TheRealDunkirk
IT BELONGS IN A MUSEUM!

~~~
DoofusOfDeath
Indiana Jones reference?

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mathnode
Will there be another kickstarter in the future for Windows 11?

EDIT: From the KS page, "A Word to Mac Users" This does not lead me to believe
it's going to be something like an SDL2 port but a one off port. I hope I can
be proven wrong.

EDIT2: Another World/Flashback was ported a while ago, but that was built on a
VM, which is very cool:
[http://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/index.php](http://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/index.php)

~~~
codetrotter
There isn’t going to be a “Windows 11” according to what Microsoft has said.

Instead new versions of Windows are released as updates of Windows 10.

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/09/windows-1...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/09/windows-10-spring-
creators-update-everything-you-need-to-know)

Does this mean that Windows 10 apps released today will run on the latest
“Windows 10” years in the future? Only time will tell I guess, but if there is
one thing Microsoft has been good at historically it’s been backwards
compatibility. Not perfect, but still so good at it that they deserve
recognition for that. Credit where credit is due and all that, even for an
operating system that I generally don’t like and don’t want to use.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Hmm, that's interesting as new versions have driven hardware sales - and vice-
versa - in the past. Wonder how hardware companies will adapt?

