Comment by The_suffocated | Hacker News Reader

Comment by The_suffocated | Hacker News Reader

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(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.

> 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.

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.

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