What does any of this mean? Probably something about being aware of early success. And then realMyst Masterpiece Edition 2.0 in 2015, which had higher-resolution textures.ĭespite every Cyan game being on Steam in a package that crashes a lot, a Kickstarter pulled in $2.8M for yet another repackage of every single Myst-branded in one, easy-to-pay-for download, with physical rewards for the highest tier backers. Peak cynicism was achieved in 2000, when Cyan created realMyst, a realtime version of, uh, Myst. So too has Cyan sort of devolved into a company that repackages Myst onto every possible platform to extract every possible dollar from this 25-year-old game. Oldfield fanatics will know our Mike has a habit of starting every single new album with a haunting piano or synth lead that, even if only ephemerally, evokes the famous opening to Tubular Bells (you know the riff if you’re a fan of the Exorcist). Which brings us back to the Mike Oldfield comparison. Cyan released a couple of expansions for it, and it’s on Steam again. Its servers were even hosted by fans at one point. Uru trundled along in the background and its fate is complicated and only really interesting to people who love Uru, and those people already know the story. If nothing else, Myst V proved that the pre-rendered, flip-book style of Myst and Riven had been a super-correct decision on Cyan’s part. Because this was 2005, Myst V was a real-time game but Cyan’s decision to texture-map live actors onto 3D character models produced ghastly results. That didn’t keep the lights on at Cyan, of course, so the developer found itself more or less compelled to create Myst V: End of Ages. Meanwhile, Uru gathered itself a tiny cult following and refused to either take off or completely die. These were perfectly adequate Myst-clones that sold unspectacularly. Ubisoft somehow got mixed up in the whole thing, and while waiting for Cyan to do something- anything-tasked other studios with creating Myst III and Myst IV. Uru had a very troubled life, occasionally popping up on live servers only to be shut down shortly thereafter by whichever publisher had been mad enough to take it on that year. Cyan (the company) built a super-cool HQ in Washington State, with just the most awesome sunken creative library-type central area, and spent the next decade trying to build a real-time, massively-multiplayer version of Myst, called Uru. Riven sold 1.5 million copies in 1997-1998, was critically lauded, and is still probably under-appreciated, at least in terms of how much raw human talent went into its creation.īut after Riven, the Miller brothers parted creative ways. Meanwhile, Cyan went on to produce a sequel called Riven. Myst was duly ported to pretty much every platform that existed at the time including the Atari Jaguar, sold six million copies, and remained the best-selling PC game until the Sims came along in 2002. It was, in many ways, a preview of the future. Myst offered the proto-humans of the 1990s the experience of staring at a screen for five minutes, clicking a lever, going “Hmn…”, and then shutting down the PC to go and make dinner. Because in 1993, the wider population thought of games as being fancier versions of Space Invaders, or maybe Super Mario “Bross” if they were particularly hip. It also had no timer, no countdown, no score, no lives, no levels, nothing that non-gamers usually associated with games. Myst bombarded the player with esoterica and made no attempt to hold any hands. You were supposed to keep notes in there. Myst came with a Journal in the box, all official-like and bound and nice. Also the Millers couldn’t really, you know, code. Oh fine, maybe Microsoft Flight Sim 4.0 or something, but not a fully-textured environment with thousands of polygons. The graphics had to be in 640x480 so you could see if the tiny pilot-light on the boiler was actually lit or not.Īnd the machines of 1993 absolutely could not render at 640x480 real time. The whole point of the game was to move around a weird island and engage with weird puzzles. Its “linking book” mechanic made that explicit. To be fair to the Miller brothers, Myst never pretended to be anything other than literary. PC gamers demanded worlds, not storybooks. Merely using a Silicon Graphics workstation to ray-trace a fantastical and surreal island landscape with, like, an airship and cogs sticking out of the ground, wasn’t enough. For years, probably until at least 2000, whenever you tried to tell a non-gamer (especially a Mac user) about some amazing new graphical innovation on the PC, they’d say: “Sure, but did you ever play Myst? Now those were good graphics!”īack in the 1990s, non-gamers failed to understand something very basic. Because of this, it penetrated what was, in the 1990s, a vast and untapped market: non-gamers.
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