Game 143: Myst (1993) - Introduction

 Written by Vetinari

Myst.

I hate Myst.

Wait, that came out wrong. Let me elaborate on that a bit. I do not hate Myst in the sense of "this game sucks" or “I find it intolerable” or “it is an affront to God and every copy of it should be burnt and buried”.

No, I hate it in the same sense that I hate the MCU, or Stefan Feld, or Poke bowls. I played it once, thirty years ago, and thought it was a fine game. Visually stunning, obviously, maybe a bit too much of a puzzle-fest and with a paper-thin plot, but certainly quite a good effort.

And then something happened. It was such a huge success that most adventure gaming companies tried to replicate it by doing games similar to Myst, and the market in the late 1990s pivoted to producing a plethora of puzzle-fests and Myst-clones, so the traditional plot-driven and quirky adventures that we had come to expect from Sierra and LucasArts quickly fell out of favour.

And when both these clones and the "real" adventure games failed to get sales, the market decreed that all adventures were no longer trendy, and suddenly the big guys in the gaming market started producing first-person shooters with Star Wars tie-ins, and from then on traditional point-and-click games were mostly relegated to indie companies.

So, this is why I hate Myst: because in my opinion it kickstarted the end of the golden age of adventure gaming. You can say what you want about the fact that the real reasons are instead the more and more ridiculous puzzles or the unrealistic plot developments or the fact that the increasing computing power meant that gamers wanted cutting-edge graphics that weren't suited to a more laid-back genre such as adventures.

In my heart of hearts, I know that the true culprit is the huge single-handed success of Myst.

And this is an absolutely and totally reasonable puzzle, thank you.

Anyway, after getting that rant out of my system, I can revisit this game with fresh eyes, so let's talk a bit about it.

Myst is primarily the creation of two brothers, Rand and Robyn Miller, who founded their software company Cyan Productions while operating out of their parents' basement in Spokane, Washington. Rand focused more on the programming side, while Robyn was more of a musician and an artist (and in fact later on abandoned the computing world to dedicate himself to independent film-making).

The Miller Brothers, as depicted in Myst's manual.

They released three other titles before beginning to work on Myst, all three puzzle games targeted at a children's audience: The Manhole, Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds beyond the Mackerel (fantastic title, btw) and Spelunx.

The two brothers then wanted to switch to creating a game that appealed to adults, but when they pitched their idea to Activision (who by then was evidently too busy burning Infocom to the ground) they were told to to stick to children's games. The Millers were struggling financially at this time, but luckily for them they were approached by Japanese company Sunsoft that, by financing this new project of theirs, allowed them to embark on it and develop it during the next few years.

The Millers were aided in this task by a small team composed of sound designer Chris Brandkamp, 3D artist and animator Chuck Carter, as well as Richard Watson, Bonnie McDowall, and Ryan Miller, all of them practically unknown before working at Cyan. As for Robyn and Rand, apart from sharing the lead on the design, the former focused on the videos and musical score, while the latter on graphics and animation.

The game went on to become a massive commercial success, selling more than 500,000 copies in one year. (!)

It was the best-selling computer game in the United States for 52 months. (!!)

It held the title of best-selling computer game of all time from its release in 1993 until the release of The Sims seven years later. (!!!)

It was ported to all kinds of consoles such as Sega Saturn, Sony PlayStation, Atari Jaguar CD, AmigaOS, CD-i and 3DO.

Some of these I had never heard of before now.

It went on to spawn six sequels (!!!!) and was itself remade four times (!!!!!): as Myst: Masterpiece Edition in 2000, as realMyst in 2002, as realMyst: Masterpiece Edition in 2014, and as Myst (without a subtitle, but with added support for virtual reality screens) in 2020.

This is a game that sold more than six millions copies. The Secret of Monkey Island sold less than one million copies, and that was considered a big commercial success. To reiterate, this game sold more than six times as much as a game for which there are countless t-shirts sold in game fairs all around the world.

I should know, I have three of them.

Bloody hell. Why did I even agree to review this game for the blog? It's like if they asked a weak replacement full-back with no international caps to play in the semifinal match of the World Cup.

Anyway, the game was shipped in a CD-ROM (it was a so-called killer app that helped to substantially increase the sales of CD-ROM drives in the mid-90s), and then inside the box there was also the game manual and a blank notebook titled “The Journal of Myst”, which as per the instructions on the cover page should have been used to jot down the player's observations about the locales and puzzles of the game.

Fancy...

...but a bit pretentious, don't you think?

After having learnt a lot about the background information for this game, the first hurdle that I have to overcome before playing it for the blog is choosing which version to use.

In fact, the blog files this game under 1993, but actually the September 24,1993 release of Myst is the one for the Macintosh (the Miller brothers developed the game on Macintosh computers, using the HyperCard software). The PC port was only released in March 1994.

Also, there is another issue. Having had so many remakes during the years, if I attempt to acquire this game at the moment, they try to sell me the most recent edition (from 2021). The only commercially (or otherwise) available version of the older releases of the game for PC seems to be the Masterpiece Edition from 2000. According to the comments of Myst aficionados that version of the game is pretty similar to the original one (which is all but impossible to find), but it has better rendered graphics and animation, so they wouldn't be the same as the 1994 version anyway.

What to do, what to do?

There is only one possibility.

We're going to emulate the **** out of this game, baby!

...Four hours later.

Wow. Who would have thought that it would be so hard to emulate a MacOS under Windows?

In any case, I am now running a MacOS 9 on which I have installed the original Myst 1.0 US version, so as close as I can get to what a player would have experienced at the time the game was first released onto the unsuspecting general public.

Starting the game, after the initial animated logos for Broderbund and Cyan, the title screen appears, with the letters rotating to compose the game title while an ominous music plays.

The face that launched a thousand ships

Then a voice-over starts while the game credits roll, and suddenly it dawns on me that this game has no subtitles option.

Let's just hope the voice actors are intelligible.

The narrator muses to himself that he tried to destroy the Myst book, but, as he fell into a starry fissure together with it, he realized that instead it would continue falling into this expanse, ending up who knows where. Not knowing where it would come to rest, he ends the introduction by saying that “the ending has not yet been written”.

Apparently I live in the middle of nowhere (literally).

The game proper begins with the same book referred to by the mysterious narrator landing right in front of me. By picking it up and opening it, I am thrust into an Endeian sequence where I am literally caught up inside the description of the book and find myself in another world, in particular the dock of an island in the middle of the ocean.

The animation of the book approaching the island is stunning.

Just by checking this initial sequence, I can already say that the interface is incredibly basic, but also very intuitive and quite ahead of its time.

In practice, all of the actions inside the game are performed by one click of the mouse. The mouse pointer changes according to what you can do in the related part of the screen. So for instance, if I want to move forward, I click straight ahead, if I want to turn left or right, I click on the left or right side of the screen.

The same interface that will be used in many escape room Flash games.

In other cases I could look up or down in a location, or examine an object by clicking on it and going into a close-up view. The same one-click action is used for activating mechanisms (such as switches) or opening/closing something (like we just did with the book).

The mouse pointer also turns into an open hand if the object is draggable from one part of the screen to another (used for some puzzles), and you can also pick up some specific objects, even if there is no inventory per se (the cursor just changes into a representation of that object, and you are supposed to use it somewhere else very soon after).

And with that, I think that this introductory post is done. In the next one I will start exploring the game and (hopefully) solve some puzzles.

Little known fact: Myst is short for Mysterious Island.

Session Time: 0 hour 10 minutes

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Note Regarding Spoilers and Companion Assist Points: There's a set of rules regarding spoilers and companion assist points. Please read it here before making any comments that could be considered a spoiler in any way. The short of it is that no CAPs will be given for hints or spoilers given in advance of me requiring one. As this is an introduction post, it's an opportunity for readers to bet 10 CAPs (only if they already have them) that I won't be able to solve a puzzle without putting in an official Request for Assistance: remember to use ROT13 for betting. If you get it right, you will be rewarded with 50 CAPs in return. It's also your chance to predict what the final rating will be for the game. Voters can predict whatever score they want, regardless of whether someone else has already chosen it. All correct (or nearest) votes will go into a draw.