Myst is an graphic adventure game released in the early 90s. - Viewpoint: First Person - Style: Graphic Adventure - Mood: Steampunk Tech Low Magic - Type: Immersive Abstract Puzzle - Developer: [[Cyan Worlds]] # Notability Hugely inspirational and influential on who I became as a person. The best selling game of all time for almost a decade from 1993-2002 when it was finally surpassed by The Sims. # Philosophy Secret room: the game. Essentially, it is a text adventure game, but done with graphics and clicking, without inventory items or weird verbs. Very innovative control scheme. A type of play-once "knowledge" game. Once you know how to solve the puzzles, you can skip most of the exploration and run straight through. Apparent budget was around 700,000 from the original 250,000 asked for - which the Millers thought was going to be more than double what it would actually cost. # OS Support Originally built in Hypercard and available exclusively for Mac OS, before being rewritten and ported to other systems. Then rebuilt in full 3D. Then rebuilt again. (Unity) And then rebuilt again (Unreal Engine) from the ground up with modern rendering and VR capabilities. While other games have been remastered or may have been ported to more systems (like [[Another World]]) I am not aware of any other game that has been totally rebuilt with all assets replaced so many times. - Mac OS Classic - Windows 95 - ... - Windows NT # Features - Many puzzles, some are logical, others are very odd and require a lot of exploration and thinking to put together, extremely varied - Several different islands on different worlds to explore - called Ages - Random unrelated puzzles and aesthetics glued together surprisingly well with lore - Great soundtrack - FMV - live action and pre-rendered CGI, but used in extremely limited and fractional ways that kept it small and aesthetically viable - Good acting - Beautiful immersive environments (despite being very low res in the original release) - Boatloads of lore, atmosphere, worldbuilding (literally!) - There is no combat or interactive dialogue, yet there are a few different ways to end the game that are not at all nice for your character # Foibles - The slide-show navigation in the original release was really odd, but the only way to make a game look as good as it did - While the lore really does hold things together well, but particularly the main island, Myst itself, is a mish-mash of things that make no sense if you allow yourself to think about it for more than a moment - While the whole point of the genre is to provide puzzles for players to discover the solutions to through exploration, many of them are ludicrously contrived even within the justified context of the world and plot - The only character you meet in person does extraordinarily little to help save you, himself, his children, or wife - this is kind of retconned in Riven to make sense, but without that context it seems weird as hell - and then Riven ends up pretty much doing it again, Quern solves this by just... not having anyone else alive... but that creates its own problems # References # Inspirations While other graphical adventure games existed, the Miller brothers were not players of them. The text adventure and D&D type storytelling influences come through loud and clear though. Other graphical adventure games did descend from text adventure games as well, but they were forced to mature through years of commercial pressures and incremental technological progress due both to the video game crash of the late 80s and Intel's monopoly on the PC market. Thus, without being aware of these limitations or history, the Millers started building things that took a different evolutionary path. Myst was the first game the Millers designed for a more adult audience, and in so doing managed to avoid the issues that often come with that change in direction, it was intense in places but not edgey. And the graphics were several levels beyond anything their games had been before. And really anything else on the market. [[The 7th Guest]]'s presentation ended up influencing the development of Myst and forced them to push harder than they probably would have otherwise. # Legacy Kicked off a huge number of clones in the early 90s, none of which had any staying power. Some of the more notable are [[The 7th Guest]] (which was released before Myst) and [[Phantasmagoria]]. Also kicked off a long series of sequels of varying quality. The next game [[Riven]] is often said to be the best in the series. A short lived MMO called [[Uru]] was also part of the series, later released in single-player form and subsequently with community-run servers. Later non-Myst games released by Cyan Worlds have not lived up to this series. - [[Quern]] is a game hugely inspired by Myst and manages to be a better followup to the series than probably anything else available, itself now several years old - Arguably, modern first person puzzle adventure games like [[Portal]] wouldn't exist without this series There have been talks for years about TV shows and movies, but so far nothing has ever materialized.