It's entirely possible that the only reason I'm a programmer today is because of Myst.
For reasons that I either never fully learned or fail to remember, my father received a CD in the mail from Myst's publisher (Broderbund?) containing a demo of the game. Only, someone screwed up, and instead of the CD containing a demo, it actually contained almost the entire game in a just-before-release, playable state (only a single world was unfinished). And all the HyperCard scripting was unlocked and viewable by the player.
Myst was amazing for its era, so of course, wanting to know how such a game was possible, I took full advantage of being able to read all of the HyperTalk code. And I'd be lying if I claimed I didn't use this access to "solve" a few of the more difficult puzzles. The times spent understanding and "hacking" Myst are among my fondest memories.
All of this led to me learning HyperCard and HyperTalk myself, and eventually moving on to CodeWarrior/C, Perl, PHP, Ruby, etc.
So thanks to Robyn and Rand Miller for the awesome memories. It had a huge impact on my life.
Fellow Myst and HyperCard enthusiast who used to have a CodeWarrior t-shirt, checking in. I wouldn't be where I am today without all of that stuff too.
The release version of Myst was a Hypercard stack, too, at least on the Mac. If you changed the type/creator on the right data files, you could open them in Hypercard. The images wouldn't display without some extra jiggery-pokery, but I do recall being able to view the scripts. Hypercard didn't support any sort of source code encoding, so the scripts were out there in the open.
As I recall, it was the tree world that was unfinished (Google says it was called "Channelwood"), and at some point, the floating walkway just ended, and there were floating icons in the air representing the blue and red pages, and some apologetic text from the developers acknowledging that the world wasn't finished yet, so just go ahead and pick a free page.
Ha! While this has probably been common knowledge from various interviews, articles, and featurettes over the years, I never knew Channelwood was the last age the team created for Myst – yet I recall thinking as a child that its level of visual sophistication meant it must have been the one they made with the lessons learned from creating the others. Selenetic, I thought, must have been the first one.
I vividly recall playing Myst, headphones on, snow falling outside, in a time before cellphones and (for our family) high speed internet. Cliche as it is, I felt transported. At times I felt spooked. I also remember getting a hold of every magazine I could that went into the making of Myst, transfixed by the creators’ sketches and drawings. Few cultural artifacts — not limited to games — have had as lasting an impact as those days playing Myst in my bedroom in the mid 90s.
For me, this is where memories of Myst are best left. At the time I loved it, but in the early 90s one was willing to forgive a game a great many short-comings in sympathy to the state of modern games technology. Myst was very much “state of the art of the possible at the time”. I’d argue that much of the appeal of 90s Myst for some was that such a world could be made at all, let alone be a reasonably competent adventure game to boot. It was also one of the first to give us an excuse to do something cool with our fancy new CD-ROM drives.
Timing was critical too for Myst too I think; it came at the point when many ‘ordinary’ (for want of a better word) families were buying their first home PCs. My experience was that Myst and Riven found fans among people not traditionally PC gamers, often via word of mouth that this was something interesting one could do on their relatively expensive new fangled PC investment.
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think it holds up all that well as a ‘game’ in 2018, our expectations of video games are rightly so much greater. The standards of adventure games improved dramatically in subsequent decades. If you are looking for a Myst style puzzle world to lose one’s self in in 2018, Jonathan Blow’s game “The Witness” is arguably a strong modern spiritual successor.
+1 on The Witness, but there's an entire genre now of walksim games that follow on the pattern of puzzles, story, exploration and non-combat engagement:
That is a good list, even if some fall more on the “walking simulator” side more so than “puzzle game”.
Games like “What Remains of Edith Finch”, “Firewatch” and “Gone Home” etc I loved, but these aren’t really puzzle games in the way Myst was, although I do see a common thread in the idea of an intricately made world to slowly explore.
Cyan also put out a game called Obduction a little over a year ago that's very much in the same vein as Myst (the Wikipedia article calls it a spiritual successor), only updated to fit the current times. It's really well done, and worth a look.
Obduction is fantastic. Very Myst-like but feels modern. I thought it started little slow but once you unlock some other areas it opens up and becomes really amazing. A lot of the puzzles revolve around a central theme that's both simple to understand but spatially challenging. And everything fits together real nice in a way that I wouldn't have guessed up front.
I tried witness, but, just have up after a while. Too much running around and if you miss the hidden paths etc it can be totally frustrating. Just like that darn door in riven that started open and you had to close it once inside to find the hidden passage. I dunno, I just find that frustrating. Shadow puzzles when not really that clear, also frustrating, even when you know what you're supposed to be looking for. Myst on the other hand, loved it all.
I would check out Quern. Quern is an excellent Myst style game and comes closest to Myst style puzzles. From what I've seen of the "The Witness" is looked to be the same maze puzzle but repeated throughout the game. I loved Johnathan Blow's "Braid" but I passed on the Witness after seeing some gameplay.
The Witness is a fantastic game, and while all the puzzles are drawing a line on a screen, without getting into spoilers, they have a great deal more variety than you might think.
That said, unlike the magical-realism of Myst and Riven's lived-in locations, the island of The Witness is impressionistic: It's not supposed to feel like a real place, only a kind of 3-d painting filled with relaxing and thought-provoking details, and coincidences to notice. So it might not be your cup of tea.
IIRC it may be one of the water reflection puzzles. You see the solution reflected in one half of the room, and have to repeat it on a panel in the other half. One of a small handful of puzzles I cheated - my short term memory is horrid.
The puzzles are pretty basic by modern standards, but realMyst is a pretty decent modern reimplementation of the original Myst. They have just recently updated it as part of their Myst 25th Anniversary Collection kickstarter.
Weirdly, the games that felt to me the most like Myst were not of the same genre (instead, they were D2-ish), graphical detail (they were glorified board games with a few frames of animation) or mechanic (they were RPGs).
They were called the "Avernum" games. They started their life as flash games. They had bottomless writing and story behind the franchise, to compensate for their near-total lack of visual splendour (unless you're into map reveals) and graphics. I don't know why they felt like Myst to me, given their procedural and eminently surmountable nature, but still . . . they held, and still hold, that same sense of wonder and exploration.
I think there are a few other games from "humbler" (intra-WWW-revolution, drowned out by the Flash revolution noise) beginnings that are similarly excellent.
I think you've got something mixed up. The Avernum series was a set of RPGs, but they were a remake of the creator's earlier Exile series, not a Flash game. (Exile I: Escape from the Pit was released in 1996, long before Flash was viable for this sort of game.) They weren't procedural at all, either; the content was all handmade.
Exile was my jam. I could never quite get used to Avernum, much as I liked being able to see many more tiles on one screen.
Part of it was the controls: I preferred a proper top-down view over isometric, but the main reason was probably the fact that parties were smaller. In Exile, a party could be 7 characters (I think), and it made the combat feel much more tactical.
Still, both the Avernum and Exile series are amazing, and I can highly recommend them. If you're starting fresh, Avernum 3 is probably a good one to start (it's also the on iPad and decently playable).
I don't know if I was just too young at the time, but I had Myst/Riven as a kid and never even began to understand what the objective was or what I was supposed to do. Aside from a little bit of walking back and forth, I don't think I accomplished a single thing in game.
Given the article references 6 and 8 year olds playing, maybe I was just a dumb kid.
I made decent progress solving the puzzles in Myst until I got to that rocket ship and discovered that my tin ear was a showstopper.
It didn't help that my machine (A Mac LC with 4 MB of RAM) was only barely powerful enough to run the game, and when it ran out of resources the first thing to go was the sound.
Despite playing the piano, I never could get past that puzzle until I figured out how to make the computer record itself. I recorded playing the notes on the spaceship's keyboard, then played it back as I adjusted the sliders on the other side of the ship.
I had the same tin ear problem. Then I returned to Myst as an adult and I realized that the position on the spaceship slider corresponded to the position of the key on the piano and I solved the puzzle by counting!
You're thinking of the maze on Selenetic Island, which comes later. jandrese was referring to the puzzle in the rocket ship on Myst Island, which required the player to play notes on a piano, turn around, and set sliders to play the same notes. This puzzle was a prerequisite to reaching the maze you were thinking of.
Ah, yes. That one is annoying, indeed. For the keyboard, on at least one playthrough, I think I counted the number of slider positions so you could solve it by the index of the keys on the keyboard.
Still easier than the sound puzzle in Myst IV Revelation though! That required reading a guide to solve it was so unobvious.
Or just not patient enough? Note that the kids from the article were guided by their parent in the game.
My experience is not very different from yours. I remember going back and forth on the first island and playing with the different puzzles. I was just minding my own business in the game and imagining my own story without taking any interest in the game scenario.
We played it as a family; one of us would take notes, another would be 'at the controls', and the rest would be observing and helping solve the puzzles. Social gaming back before everyone had their own pocket-sized computer :-)
Yeah I was like 9-12 at the time I played Myst and I got maybe 10 minutes into the game and spend countless hours trying to find something I couldn't find. Really frustrated me and made me hate the game. I think I eventually found it or figured it out, but the very next "clue" or whatever was even harder and after a while I just gave up on the game completely.
Myst wasn’t actually a very good game for this reason. A lot of the ‘puzzles’ were just clicking every pixel on every screen of the island to find some hidden thing. Riven was a good game though, with challenging but fair puzzles.
It’s basically like how Super Mario 3 is one of the greatest games of all time, but the only real was to beat the original was by cheating since the last level was an invisible maze with no internal clues on which way to go.
I think it's visually apparent in Bowser's Castle when you've made progress vs. being sent back, which is kind of similar to some of the earlier maze fortresses like the first fortress in World 3. There are other levels that have doors or pipes that either do or don't send you somewhere useful.
But solving any of these mazes without a strategy guide will probably call for multiple lives because you almost certainly won't be able to find the complete solution in a single run-through. I think that's characteristic of many Super Mario 3 levels, though, because pipes and doors that send you backwards aren't that uncommon.
Other examples of tricky maze levels where you have to explore a lot:
6-5 (you have to fly while holding a Koopa shell in a place where it's not particularly obvious)
7 first fortress (again, you have to fly in one particular place in order to escape)
8 fortress (lots of backtracking, several different ways to solve it)
Edit: I didn't realize that when you said "the original" you were referring to Super Mario Bros. rather than Super Mario 3. I agree that 8-4 in the original Super Mario Bros. is a huge nuisance to figure out although I think you can get it with a degree of discipline, probably in only 1-3 lives. If I remember correctly, there are three branching points where you have to repeatedly choose passageways and you can be sent back if you chose the wrong one. I think the hardest branching point gives either 8 or 9 total possibilities, of which only one is correct.
SMB3 offered an easy 100 lives plus continues. The parnent was referring to the original SMB, where you had to play the whole game, try to solve an invisible maze once or twice (unless you got good at the one or two 100 lives spots), and then play the whole game from the beginning (which you might fail at!) to get another chance at exploring the maze. It was a common tactic to make short games feel long.
Riven did have a couple of annoying "click until you get it" spots (the pitch-black tunnel in the boiler room, for example), but yeah, the puzzles were much more organic.
The article didn't make mention of the role of sound in Myst. I remember people setting up their big 90's stereos with massive speakers to fully immerse themselves in the Myst world. The game really built a strange, otherworldy atmosphere.
The music and the sound in Myst and Riven were both outstanding - absolute classics of the genre, and even more amazing given that they were an amateur effort by one of the creators, and not the work of a full-time composer or game sound designer.
There was one location in Riven where I spent about fifteen minutes listening to a short-ish music loop over and over and watching a simple atmospheric location animation, because both were just so perfect.
This really proves in the arts and creative business, it's really an individual's work that connects the souls. You can have a team of thousands of people, but if no one has any vision or creativity then their work can go straight down the toilet.
Even just the first minutes, the Cyan logo, and the introductory music, are etched into my brain. Every once in a while, despite the fact that I haven't played Myst in at least a decade, they'll just pop in my head.
I remember seeing a TV special on how they came up with the sound effects. One of them was created by something along the lines of rotating a vibrating wrench just inside a toilet bowl... and all the sound effects was stuff like that.
This article misses a few major points about Myst (IMHO):
- Myst was one of the first CD-ROM based games. It helped drive CD-ROM adoption. Even Doom (which came out around the same time) was installed via floppy.
- Myst felt expansive in a way that made it ahead of it's time by several years.
- Myst made you feel like you were in the middle of a story. Its lack of interaction made the player the focus of the game -- which was unique at the time.
Riven was also a huge improvement in worldbuilding. The world of Myst was often rather contrived; the places it depicted didn't always seem particularly "lived in", and the puzzles were often rather contrived in nature -- in many cases, their motivation was simply that the world itself was created as a puzzle. The rocket ship piano puzzle falls squarely into this category, for instance!
Riven, on the other hand, depicted a much more natural-seeming world, and its puzzles fit much more organically into that world. For instance, one early puzzle involves learning the Rivenese number system from a child's toy. Some of the Moiety puzzles seem a little artificial, but even those do have some in-game motivation (as part of a security system).
They were pretty good about only putting the CD swaps only in major area transitions. Anytime I saw one of the magnetic rail trams, I knew it was time to get the disc box out and prepare for a swap.
Putting the more technical aspects aside, I found the games after Riven to be lacking something, and I only discovered afterwards (maybe even only after the second post-Riven game) that it wasn't by the original studio/team/brothers.
Uru, despite its many problems, seemed to recapture some of that magic. But I'll always wonder if that's actually true, or just because I knew the original team (or at least one of the brothers?) was involved again.
(Not that the Riven sequels were bad! I quite enjoyed Myst 3)
It once had a point to its online, it just never had the Publishers / budget to execute on that vision. The fact that it is free to play online today is a testament to tenacity in the face of two and a half cancellations, a lot of corporate misery, and the hearts of a lot of earnest fans.
Just throwing this out there for Riven fans: A community-made (still in progress with a long way to go) 3D real-time version of Riven: http://www.starryexpanse.com/
I played Myst when I was a kid, but even to this day, never really understood it. I kept going back to other games, like Kings Quest 6, that had characters and whose world felt lived in.
Also, I despised the Quicktime for Windows that it installed with.
I sort of got sidetracked in the article when I read this:
"As we collaborated over puzzles played out on vintage machinery, my older daughter said, “People back then must have been incredibly creative to make something like this."
I don't know any 6 or 8 year olds that talk like that.
Not saying you're wrong, its anecdotal on both our parts. But I do! If you say to a kid "They built all of this by hand on pen and paper from ideas in their head! (amazed expression)" they'll parrot back to you the above sentence if they catch the meaning and context. My 3 year old does this already, although she'll say "fantastic" instead of "incredible".
I would agree with this. My observations after having children, is that they do exactly what they see until they understand what they see and make it their own.
For example - my youngest recently had an abscessed tooth removed. He is 5 this year. The dental surgeon was astounded that he used the words nitrous-oxide and Novocain. The surgeon said things like giggle gas and sleepy juice, and the five year old dead pan corrected him.
Kids will say what they hear - outside of a disability/difference of that kind. If they hear short baby talk, they say short baby talk. If they hear larger words, in context, often, then they'll use those.
My 3 year old daughter told me that I was a "fabulous dad" the other day. Neither my wife or I use that word. It's amazing what kids can say and think.
If you need a portable version, it is available on iOS (and realMyst is available on Android) and a demo is available for both. It is also available on DS and PSP but I wouldn't recommend those version as much. I've played the iOS version and touch controls offer a good recreation of the original. Though I would recommend it for replaying the game, not playing it the first time. Some of the immersion is lost on playing a device that can provide other distractions. For me, playing through while sitting down at a screen with a notebook next to you for tracking things you find, is the best way to play for the first time.
FYI they recently did a kickstarter for a special Myst 25th Anniversary Collection of all the Myst games in a special linking book box, complete with video screen! I'm eagering awaiting delivery of mine:
Never played the game, but someone bought me the novels in a pack for my birthday and because back then I would read anything, I read them without many expectations, and they were quite alright.
All the world rules and the lore was interesting, but I don't know how much of that would be in the games. The books didn't have tricky puzzles, of course, but I kind of tells how big the games were.
I'd still recommend them today. Riven is a triumph of world-building fused with gameplay, even if some of the navigation gets a bit too obtuse. The later Ubisoft games are visual spectacles that maybe expect a bit too much generalized scientific knowledge in places. Haven't gotten around to Myst V yet...
Yep, this basically is the VR Myst, no need to hold off.
It’s of course compromised in all the usual ways 2018 VR typically is, but if you want a Myst style adventure in an expensive, low res vomit inducing uncomfortable headset, have at it! (I say this as a very disgruntled Oculus Rift + Touch owner...)
Kind of fitting that Myst was at the edge of technological capability back then, stretching cdrom tech. Now we are at the ‘barely able to do it cheaply’ stage for VR bringing it back to that medium or Cyan doing something in VR like the old days we need imagination from the players too, letting imperfections slide as long as the story is there.
I didn’t play it in vr so I have no clue how good it is but it was a fantastic game even without vr. Very pretty. I have a dev kit 2 and it does cause me some nausea in some early demos. The new standalone oculus seems compelling and I might pick that up.
That's my big problem with VR right now. I love it, but I can't wear any of the existing headsets for more than 5-10 min without a day-long headache. I've always been sensitive to this kind of thing (I couldn't play portal, even on a computer screen). I'll keep an eye on this game, though. Maybe when the headsets get better.
I never owned a copy, so inevitably I only played Myst at computer stores -- it looked interesting, but I never really understood what was going on. Games of this era would tend to come with an instruction manual that was book sized and could really help with understanding what was going on.
For the Mystics? out there, what's the best way to play the game for a person who knows of Myst, but hasn't every played it? What can I read to get started, but that's not a walkthrough?
Sort of related, I recall Pyst appearing in stores about a year or two after Myst; is that worth trying to run as well?
Myst is kind of defined by it's lack of boundaries and structure. The point is to just boot up the game and start exploring and interacting. The story will slowly unfold as you explore the world. The only think you really need to understand is that all the buttons and switches do affect the world, so observe the results of all your tinkering.
The original still-frame version is available as well; GOG packages both Myst Masterpiece Edition and Riven with ScummVM so they don't have any compatibility headaches (I recall back in the day, having huge problems since they required QuickTime installed, and only _SPECIFIC_ versions of QuickTime, not newer nor older ones).
There are fans that swear by the original still-frame only. It is fine, but I've always felt that immersion was kind of the whole point of the game, and realMyst provides that far better.
Myst was the first really immersive game I remember playing and thinking "I feel like I'm actually a part of this world". I was a bit too young to really grasp how to play it but that didn't stop me clicking around just exploring because the game (for its time) was just so beautiful and engaging despite the graphical limitations at the time.
It's funny looking at it now, because in my head it was basically photo-realistic!
For the era it was such a mind-blowing game, and that's really saying something considering it's the same year that gave us NBA Jam, Virtua Fighter, Ridge Racer, Star Fox, X-Wing, Link's Awakening, Doom, and Mega Man X (what a year!).
Did you play it around the years that it first released, or in later years?
I didn't play it until the Windows release, but even then, it was vastly different from many games available at that time. The graphics were very obviously ahead of most games. While many games do so now (and some over do it), Myst provided a very cinematic experience. Most of all though was the immersion. Many games had addicting gameplay, but few tried to captivate the player in the same way Myst did. It is of course a point of preference, but it did a lot to draw in the player. Not all of the clues were known to be clues at the time. You could discover something and not know what it did until later on. Then it became a point of realization. You weren't playing the role of a super soldier or simulating someone else. You as the player were the one discovering pieces of this world and helping it unfold.
This was extremely captivating. Even to those of a young age who didn't entirely get it. It just provided a different experience from most games at the time. An experience that has been emulated through different means like flash games, but hasn't been recreated in a meaningful way.
Neither did I, to the degree I never played it. I thought of it as pseudo computer game for people that didn't know how much better it could be, even though I had a friend or two that played computer games that really liked Myst and it's sequel. It's pretty plain looking back that in my case it was just arrogance on my part, since I never even played them.
I just couldn't imagine then how it could compare to Space Quest, King's Quest, Alone in the Dark, etc. Now I can imagine a few ways in which they might have been able to leverage the format and limitations to expand the world and puzzles in different ways that weren't feasible for other games.
The one thing that I remember about Myst is how damn hard it was. Adventures games of the time were all about combining items and trying things. To solve Myst you had to immerse yourself in the story. You couldn't just try dumb luck, it wouldn't work like that. This along with the spectacular graphics and the storytelling was that made it a milestone in video games.
Maybe I'm a stupid person, or maybe it's just that I'm not a native English speaker or that I get bored of games super quick. Myst was one of the first games I ever bought (I mean... bought with my parents money :-) and played for maybe something like 10 to 15 hours? The only thing I remember about Myst is that I made absolutely no progress. Like none. I couldn't even get the premise. I was stuck at the very first stage of whatever puzzle the game had. I suppose I was something like 12 years old.
Myst was so immersive. For me it created a real sense of wonder and exploration. There was something beautiful about being alone in a gorgeous world filled with puzzles that gradually revealed a story.
Also the first Myst tie-in novel is one of the only game tie-in books that I really enjoyed. I was quite young, so I'm not sure how the book holds up, but I remember really enjoying it.
Also released in 1993 was the first of the X-wing series from LucasArts. I ended up only playing Myst a couple years later, after hearing so much hype... but the pace was so different that it wasn't living up to that hype for my personal tastes. Still, even not being a big fan, I do recall that everyone talked about it, even in those days where gaming was nowhere near the popularity it is today.
If you haven't had the chance to play Scratches, another game mentioned in the article, you should. It's fantastic and has a really great soundtrack. The developer is launching a new scary adventure game, soon, and it looks really really good.
My first game of the point and click adventure genre was Return to Zork, which I believe was released a few months prior to Myst and had many similarities, but was never nearly as popular for whatever reason.
For reasons that I either never fully learned or fail to remember, my father received a CD in the mail from Myst's publisher (Broderbund?) containing a demo of the game. Only, someone screwed up, and instead of the CD containing a demo, it actually contained almost the entire game in a just-before-release, playable state (only a single world was unfinished). And all the HyperCard scripting was unlocked and viewable by the player.
Myst was amazing for its era, so of course, wanting to know how such a game was possible, I took full advantage of being able to read all of the HyperTalk code. And I'd be lying if I claimed I didn't use this access to "solve" a few of the more difficult puzzles. The times spent understanding and "hacking" Myst are among my fondest memories.
All of this led to me learning HyperCard and HyperTalk myself, and eventually moving on to CodeWarrior/C, Perl, PHP, Ruby, etc.
So thanks to Robyn and Rand Miller for the awesome memories. It had a huge impact on my life.