How Myst Taught a Generation of Gamers to Explore New Worlds | Hacker News Reader

How Myst Taught a Generation of Gamers to Explore New Worlds

atlasobscura.com

150 pointsbangonkeyboard66 comments

> “It took me so many years to realize that the power of all games are not with the characters but instead the actual environment.”

This is an interesting thing to read from the co-creator of a game franchise with a deep enough lore that multiple novels have been published in its universe. The characters in the Myst series are not insignificant – certainly the specter of Gehn in Riven, even though you actually meet him only briefly at the end of the game, is ever-present as you explore the world he ruled and bent to his will.

And yet, that seems to be exactly what Robyn Miller is talking about there: The character of Gehn is important, but the player gets to know him not through direct interaction, rather through exploring the environment. Gehn's screen time is an afterthought to the character development that derives from observing the obsessive details of the places he frequented and shaped. The environment is the character development.

Myst marked a turning point in environmental storytelling, and its effects have been felt all the way from the golden age of first-person shooters into the modern age of "walking simulators." Even when today's games take the overused shortcut of audio logs to fill in the details, the stages they set all track back to those curiously broken chairs in Sirrus' study that made you ask "wait, what happened here?"

Riven really was the pinnacle of this in their games. The mark of a man on an entire culture, subtle yet unmistakable. One of the games that made the most lasting impression on me over the years.

same here, I think of Riven as the perfect game.

My preferred model for describing games is: a simulation of some universe, and a way to interact with it. In such a model, learning a story/plot through interaction (with the simplified simulation) is only natural, and storytelling through direct means in the fashion of books/movies, in a game, is clearly a hack, directly conflicting with the nature of a simulation.

And ofc myst was no innovator in this — environmental/interactive storytelling was well established by interactive fiction (IFs), MUDs, text adventures, etc — but it is the quintessential example for modern video games (but thats not saying much imo, since few modern game developers seem to even believe games actually existed before 1990, let alone learn from them)

And thats not to say that all games fit my described model well (eg asura’s wrath has almost no simulation/interaction at all, but derives decent impact from the qte mechanic) but at the same time, a lot of games that don’t fit the model were doing a job in the wrong medium (the uncharted series has a sufficiently engaging plot [kinda], but it was really just an action/adventure plot told very innefficiently, with a sufficiently engaging but almost totally seperate third-person shooter game interspersed. Both plot/gameplay would have been better served by their own mediums, instead of being composed into an awkward hybrid)

I think the true innovators in that realm are games like Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, both of which were heavily influenced by Raph Koster, who came from a background of roleplaying in MUDs.

There have been lots of "sandbox" games before and after, but those two really captured the right balance between creating a rich world to explore and giving the player(s) the tools to shape it and create their own stories. They really understood the concept that "it takes a village" of different players and playstyles to form a dynamic community. I think they were really ahead of their time and hinted at what might be possible in terms of creating compelling alternate realities in VR.

The recent game “The Return of the Obra Dinn” is a fresh take on this environmentally driven storytelling.

I really want to play something like this in VR. PSVR’s resolution is too low for me so I recently bought an Oculus Go. Great device but I can’t find anything Myst-like. Any recommendations?

I've not played it, but Obduction supports VR kits and is by Cyan Worlds themselves (so I can only assume it's as Myst like as you're going to get).

I know but unfortunately not for Oculus Go. Not gonna buy a PC and Rift just to play it.

Take a look at Eclipse: Edge of Light and Relic Seeker: Hypogeum. I've finished neither, but have enjoyed playing each for a few hours. Eclipse in particular has good storytelling through environment, I think.

Thanks! I just bought Eclipse, looks very promising. Looking forward to play once my little one is asleep...

I can still hear Myst, the music, the sound of the tree as it rose into the sky. Kerbam! Kerbam! As a kid I wanted few things more than to open a book one day and find a linking page.

I remember being, at age 13 or so, in the library of the college my parents taught at, a year or three after Myst came out, and finding a book that was exactly the same (general) style as the linking books.

I have no idea what it actually contained at this late date, only that it was infinitely disappointing that it was not a linking panel. (Probably some sort of dry research.)

I played Myst and Riven at a time when the internet connectivity was very poor, so there were no tips or game guides to help. Got frustrated, me and my friend started playing it as a duo in our spare times, and we would compare notes afterwards. My friend later said that he would see an ordinary gate or a wall, and think of ways around it or over it, for days after playing Myst. Even now, I can remember some of the atmospheric backgrounds - the breezes, the creaks etc. Very spooky and enchanting games. I don't know if I loved them, just that they were an annoying part of my life for 2-3 months.

Myst was the only adventure game I abandoned playing. I just never felt immersed; rather it felt like a so-so puzzle game with a bit of window dressing.

Gaming pretty much died for a while in my book when these games got popular.

Thanks to games' inferiority complex and desire to look "more like movies", we temporarily ditched most of the things that made games unique in favor of a bunch of laughable full motion video.

Calling these games "interactive" was an extra kick in the teeth, as they were so much less "interactive" than even an early video game like Frogger, Pac-Man, or Robotron where you had multiple (or perhaps over a hundred, in Robotron's case) objects moving around the screen, in real time, at 60fps, each behaving according to its own rules.

Luckily, the industry eventually corrected itself and swung back to creating the kinds of highly kinetic experiences that are unique to the medium.

It's a shame because games can be so much more than movies.

Her Story[1] manages to pair an interesting mechanic with with an engaging story. I really recommend setting aside an evening to try it if you haven't already.

It's a shame that the games industry seems to be allergic to using video in games. You can have video with interactivity and story-telling all in one package.

[1] http://www.herstorygame.com/

I'll take your advice! That looks cool!

Really neat short game!

It's much better than L.A. Noire at making you feel like a detective and that moment when you figure out what happened is amazing.

The mechanics are limited so it only works a short experience, thankfully it doesn't overstay it's welcome.

> Thanks to games' inferiority complex and desire to look "more like movies", we temporarily ditched most of the things that made games unique in favor of a bunch of laughable full motion video.

FMV is barely relevant to Myst at all. And 'highly kinetic' is hardly the only unique experience videogames bring - Myst brings the experience of exploring an unknown environment and uncovering the puzzles/narratives within, in a way you can't do in other media.

I don't even think it's that good, to be honest, but decrying it as just 'laughable full motion video' is straight up inaccurate.

There were a lot of pointless "interactive movie" shovelware titles in the early CD-ROM era, but Myst was not one of them. Gameplay-wise, it was a direct descendant of the classic Infocom/Sierra/LucasArts adventure games, just with a strong focus on atmosphere that the genre hadn't really seen before. It had some FMV, but not a lot, and only ever in small windows.

And, honestly, saying that the only good games are "highly kinetic" is just ridiculous. Some of the best games in history have been turn-based or very deliberately paced. If you only like twitch games, there's nothing wrong with that, but don't project your preferences onto the rest of us.

Re: "Gaming pretty much died for a while", Myst came out in the same year as Doom. The FMV-shovelware era was pretty cringey, but at the same time there was an explosion of high-octane action games on the PC.

    And, honestly, saying that the only good games are "highly kinetic" is just ridiculous.

I didn't say that. I called full-motion video of that era "laughable", and I said that video games can create kinetic experiences that are unique to the medium.

There are lots of fine examples of classic games that aren't "highly kinetic" - strategy games like XCom and Civilization, RPGs, etc.

Myst is not a FMV game (it has some short motion videos, but it doesn't use FULL motion videos) and computer games of other genres (such as the 1985 racing game Road Avenger) had long been using FMVs before the release of Myst. I don't see how your comment is relevant to Myst.

Some FMV adventure games were actually quite well received. E.g. I remember that there were some very positive reviews on The Dark Eye (1995), an adventure game based on some short stories written by Edgar Allan Poe, but I don't know if the game is really good or not because I haven't played it.

Like that, but exactly the opposite. I loved Myst and that era of games, can't care less about anything that came since.

Fmv was a factor in my teenage gaming years. Lacking suitable bandwidth and the fact at the time those videos were a pointless waste of time, the pirated copies without it was nice. I didn't grow up poor, I could have actually bought the game. But a pirated copy that removed those videos was a better experience.

I am not a heavy gamer but I really don't want to go through the 10 minutes of intros and bullshit me backstory, I simply want to play damn game. I want to skateboard, or play an adventure, shoot villians. I don't want to watch videos. If I can't start actually playing the game in less then 30 seconds, I'm probably not going to actually ever play it.

On topic: The modern remake of Myst is visually stunning.

I played Myst way too young. I couldn't figure out any of the puzzles and still remember just randomly pressing piano buttons but the atmosphere was so much fun to explore.

That damn piano... I’m pretty tone deaf and had no idea what to do there.

I thought it was really interesting that the first version was written in HyperCard.

(And it was ridiculed by some back then as an "interactive slide show".)

If I remember correctly, Myst was a pioneer (if not revolutionary) in a number of areas:

1. It was one of the first computer games that were distributed with CD-ROM.

2. It was THE first computer game that was distributed ENTIRELY with CD-ROM.

3. It was probably the first computer game outside the racing/flight simulator/FPS genres that emphasised a first-person perspective.

4. It was probably the first computer game that used pre-rendered 2D backgrounds.

5. It was the first adventure game that isn't dialogue-based or inventory-based (it has a small inventory, but mainly for storing documents rather than tools; if I remember correctly, the first Myst game has only one "tool" that can be "used" at the end of the game). Myst was exploratory. The player wasn't told to achieve any goal.

It also remained as the top best-selling computer game for a half-decade. Its sales record (six million copies) was surpassed only by Half-Life and StarCraft in 1998, five years after Myst was released.

Myst was predated - and for some time, outsold - slightly by The 7th Guest, which was very similar in all those respects.

Neither of them were the first graphical adventure games without an inventory, as Loom had come out three years before. Several had likewise been in a first person view, perhaps most notably the MacVenture series in the 80s. The first CD-ROM game was The Manhole in 1989, which had the same designers as Myst.

Generally speaking, none of the individual pieces were particularly innovative, but Myst pulled them off well enough and in a simple enough package to appeal to people who didn't want to _learn_ to play a game. That's a merit unto itself.

Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. What I meant was that Myst was the first adventure game that was neither inventory based nor dialogue based. The Loom and The 7th Guest did have no inventories, and technically they weren't dialogue based either (there weren't any dialogue trees that decided how the stories progressed), but they relied quite heavily on dialogues/monologues to advance the stories. In contrast, inventory and dialogues/monologues were almost non-existent in Myst, and the player wasn't told a background story at the outset. This was very unusual in that era.

And I also didn't say that Myst was the first CD-ROM game. What I said was that Myst was the first game that was distributed entirely with CD-ROM. (Actually The 7th Guest was the first, but it and Myst were released in the same year. ) The Manhole, according to Wikipedia, was released on floppies first.

On point #3, there was lots of previous work that goes back to Catacomb 3-D [0] which used the prototype engine which eventually ran Wolfenstein 3D. Before that, you had a couple "first-person" titles which offered quantized movement with pre-rendered backgrounds.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catacomb_3-D

Thanks. You are right, but I actually talked about pre-rendered, 3D (not 2D) and photo-realistic background. Pre-rendered 3D background wasn't a new thing even among adventure games (again, The 7th Guest had done that), but Myst was probably the first one --- at least among adventure games --- that really had photo-realistic pre-rendered 3D backgrounds.

> 3. It was probably the first computer game outside the racing/flight simulator/FPS genres that emphasised a first-person perspective.

Disagree with this one. First-person dungeon crawlers, maze games, illustrated text adventures, gun games (different than FPSes IMO), and more had been around for well over a decade by the time Myst came out.

I broadly agree with the rest, though.

Half of these comments note how Myst captured the imagination. The other half make it clear how the authors had no imagination to spark.

Myst arrived at a turning point in computer gaming, where what it provided gamers was so much beyond what had come before the mind filled in the gaps (as gaping as they truly were, with our 20/20 hindsight).

Sad that some cannot even comprehend what this means.

People like what they like. Stop trying to gatekeep.

What if what they like is trash?

So what? It's not hurting you.

I would content that it does, but the effect is pretty minor.

I can still feel the sounds of Riven in my mind. It was fun moving around and touching things.

Not this gamer. My dad got me a copy and I tried for a couple of hours to get past the first bit, couldn’t, and gave up forever. Evidently my brain is not suited to that stuff.

Myst was the first game that made me feel I was somewhere else.

I can recall seeing the back of the CD jewel case as a kid. The scenes were stunning! I can also recall the utter disappointment when it was not something you could walk through and it was point and click. Expectations were not managed well in my case, and I never gave the game a chance after that. It also didn't help that it was installed on a friend's computer, so access alongside boredom did not readily present itself to compel me to try again.

Did you ever try RealMyst after that? It sounds like the experience you were looking for.

I recently downloaded both. The point and click version plays better.

Myst and even riven were great but very poorly designed and thought out. When you play for the first time there’s a huge hump to get over because you don’t know where the puzzle makers are coming from. I tended to overthink the puzzles and over-estimate their difficulty on first finding them, something I think can lead to people abondoning he game when they don’t need to. The witness did a great job of easing the player into things. You know exactly who is behind these puzzles and so you never lose your sense of direction so to speak. Also, the interface of myst and riven are very clunky. Clicking the side of the screen sometimes makes you do a 180 but other times only 90. Your sense of space and ability to navigate is totally fucked in myst and riven. I think a game that cleaned that up and added animations between stationary scenes would be very good.

What's the best way to play Myst these days? realMyst?

RealMyst Masterpiece Edition is a surprisingly good modern-tech recreation. I played through it again recently.

I just wish they'd do riven next.

Here is the steam page for it: https://store.steampowered.com/app/244430/

The main difference is that you can actually walk around, as opposed to point and click with animated pictures.

If I remember correctly, the original game was still images with quicktime movies overlaid over them.

My view may be controversial, but I'd say the Nintendo DS version. The touchscreen interface works well, the inclusion of the "RealMyst-only" ice world into the old-fashioned format is great, it's just an excellent adaptation in general.

There is a new game by the creators called 'Obduction' you could try out. I think its equally playable in VR and not-VR

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/how-brothe...

edit - technolust isn't exactly a myst clone, but if you like the genre its a decent first person adventure game with a killer soundtrack

Yeah I've been meaning to give it a go for a while now. I really like those types of first person puzzlers like Antichamber, The Witness, Talos Principle etc.

Sadly I don't have a VR setup to try Technolust, but thanks for the recommendation!

I tried Obduction recently, but it has so much walking just to be in the right place to solve part of a puzzle. I've given up on it for that reason. The Myst series did this better, I think: you never really discovered that actually you were an entire world's length away from where you needed to be to solve the obstacle in front of you. (Possibly I'm just bad at the game.)

By now, there are some Myst games on https://www.gog.com.

realMyst: Masterpiece Edition for the original game, and use ScummVM for Riven.

Must intrigued me, but when I played it as a kid I never got into it. Just felt like a puzzle game that was boring.

However, the books that were part of the Myst universe drew me in. I loved the books.

Loved myst as a kid. A game I played recently that recreated that sense of wonder and exploration was the Talos Principle. Should definitely try it if you enjoyed the Myst series.

Have you tried The Witness? http://the-witness.net/

I second Witness. Quern is also good, probably closest game to Myst you can ever find : https://store.steampowered.com/app/512790/Quern__Undying_Tho...

The games themselves are mediocre, but the trilogy of novels (at least the first two), and the Myst and Riven soundtracks are things I will cherish forever.

Not playing myself but my wife and her cousin who happen to stay. Play for months and they keep notes. I was stunned only the graphics. The pc then was horrible compared to the mac environment. I do not know that it is faked 3D. But it looks very real to me then.

Just today I was looking through old boxes at my parents house. I found my Myst and Riven CDs. I remember playing these games as a kid after my grandfather gave them to me so I would play something other than Doom.

I never played Myst, but lately I played Quern and The Talos Principle.

Pretty intense games.

It was ADVENT with a gui interface.

Arguably, Myst has a more unique and deeper setting than Colossal Cave Adventure / ADVENT. Maybe it's Zork with a GUI, then, but I still love text adventure games (and seriously there's some great innovation still happening with the style, so I know I'm not alone). Therefore, I don't see that as a pejorative. Rather, I'd say that Myst accomplished what games like King's/Space/Police Quest couldn't - they split the adventure game genre, showing how to get away from the text parser - if you want to. I like the more personal, serene experience of a classical turn-based adventure game and the puzzle-solving element still excites me. I've only seen a few games that scratch that itch the way Myst did (and still does).

I didn't mean it as a pejorative, just that the game play concept was almost identical to that of ADVENT. Instead of typing "go west" you just clicked.

The innovation was in the graphics, which really pushed the boundaries of what could be done on a computer of that era.

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