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.
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.