Myst: the Drawbacks to Success
filfre.net
filfre.net
I was accepted into the early beta test program for URU, the MMORPG spinoff of the Myst franchise. It consumed the better part of a year…I helped run fan forums and organize in-game events. I made friends. For a time, it was an incredible community.
A visual art reference and "making of" book about Myst and Riven became my bible as I pursued 3D graphics art and almost went to art school to become a game designer. I ended up dropping that idea and went into web/software space instead. (good career move!)
All that to say, Myst is to me what, say, Star Wars is to many others. Its impact was gargantuan in my life and it shaped the person I am today. I will always be grateful to Cyan for that.
Per the article, they didn’t play contemporary games and only used off-the-shelf GUI tools on the niche Mac platform — this in an era where “real games” used handcoded x86 assembly. Yet their creation outsold practically everyone in the industry by an order of magnitude.
Where are the tools today for someone like this to be successful? Unity is of course impressive but seems very tightly bound to gaming industry thinking — not that approachable or interesting to an outsider.
Around 2000-2005, the Flash GUI had lots of potential here... But then Adobe turned Flash into a programmer-oriented sprawling mini-Java and eventually Apple threw it under the iPhone bus.
There’s a difference in distribution freedom though. HyperCard and Flash were conceived as production tools. You could interface with other tools and APIs. For the finished work, you could put it in a box and sell 6 million copies (like Myst), or host a game on your own server (like everything in the Flash golden era).
The Dreams runtime is a console game — a prerequisite investment, and limited audience compared to desktop / web platforms. Hopefully they’ll offer some kind of player-only licensing program for creators eventually?
A distributable runtime, to a market of 100,000,000+ PS4 (plus PS5's), royalties to creators as publishers, would be an intermediate step.
Bundled with PS5 for early gen content.
I suspect that a truly open platform/distribution would never realistically exist alongside something of this quality. It's a nice idea but it just wouldn't happen.
Something simple enough to be good and free is probably also not going to catch the attention of this generation of budding creatives.
Especially in combination with the Asset Store, which has a lot of free assets, and Fuse/Mixamo, you can pull stuff together with very little programming knowledge and share it to most major platforms.
I really love it.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/02/an-extended-interview...
Really? Is it that rare to like both?
I find this hard to believe.
It was just too early to have developed very specific tastes.
Doesn’t quite capture the platforming awesomeness, though. First good first person platformer I’ve played.
I fell out of gaming shortly after Wii was released (adulting?). Did the later installments of the franchise deliver the same experience?
Sometimes I wonder if Myst was like Angry Birds. A game that gamers hated because it didn’t conform to their expectations, but something that found mor purchase with people that didn’t game heavily.
Outer Wilds is action-adventure in that order. It does not allow the slow pace like Myst.
And the primary focus in Outer Wilds is not on action, but on exploration. And the way you learn about the history and technology of a previous civilization is quite similar to Myst.
It's more like a puzzle visual novel than adventure game. (And you have no agency in it really.)
But it is pretty.
As TFA says, a lot of people blame Myst for the death of the adventure game, but it was already trending that way in '93 as graphics improved. Most of the random actions that you could take to interact with the world in the Sierra games resulted in a fairly generic animation and a wall of text. This meant anything the designer anticipated could be interacted with, because the cost of writing that text was low (particularly with Sierra's near lack of editing and playtesting).
Once a generic animation and a wall of text was no longer acceptable from a production-value stance, these games were stripped of their charm, and all you were left with were charmless puzzle games with some window-dressing. Myst got there first and did it better than everyone else, so it gets the blame for something that was inevitable.
I wouldn't have built Myst because to me it seems pointless, why not just make a movie about this? Or a picture book? But clearly lots of people enjoyed it. Still, back then I could safely assume anything that looked that good had nothing behind the facade, today it's harder to guess.
It reminds me of a phenomenon which is broadly disliked in tabletop Role Playing. Some GMs like to plot out everything in great detail which necessarily means you can't go off piste, they need you to go into the tunnels under the castle with the torch because they've worked out exactly what will happen when you do. If their players try to instead simply leave the castle because it's boring, or divert a river into the tunnels and flood them to drive anything down there out the GM will either be angry and demand the players reconsider or will try to railroad the players into proceeding with the plan as they envisioned. Either way this is an unsatisfying experience for everybody.
It was a puzzle game. The puzzles were pretty basic, but the market for basic puzzle games is significant. Especially if the puzzle is also attractive enough that the next batch of visuals feels like a decent reward for having solved the puzzle.
Such a game won't attract people who want more interaction from their games -- though you do have to remember that at the time even a game like Doom was a huge advance in interactivity. Myst was relaxing rather than exciting, almost the way a game of solitaire or a crossword puzzle is.
2. Many of the deaths had animations and a bit of text, but see all the non-death things you could do that KQ1 had[1] and it did not have anywhere near the most.
Look more closely at the last review quote in the upper left. :-)
I've always loved Macs, and games.
Myst was the last great Mac-only game.
When it got ported to Windows, I was very sad, because I knew it meant the Mac was "dead man walking" as far as being a viable gaming platform was concerned. Oh, it floundered for a number of years later (shout-out to Oni https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggC6kfJJE_w , Myth II: Soulblighter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s84pODz7ATs and the Marathon series, all of which were made by a barely-known-at-the-time Bungie Software primarily (at first only) for Macs) but... anyway.
Myst was magical and inspiring because Macs were magical and inspiring.
Myst was a great adventure/puzzle game for its time. Although IMO, Riven and Myst III were better, with Riven being the pinnacle of the series. I would replay these if I were to play any of the games in the series again. Otherwise, if you're looking for something more modern, I'd recommend Quern.