![]() The sense of desolate, immersive beauty it all conveys can be strangely affecting, and it’s married to puzzle-design instincts that are reasonable and fair. Its imagery is well-composited and occasionally striking, its sound and music design equally apt. It strikes this critic at least as far from the best or worst game of its year, much less of its decade, still less of all gaming history. Seen strictly as a computer game, Myst is… okay. Myst, he says, is just “a post-hippie HyperCard stack with a rather good music loop.”Īfter listening to the cultural dialog - or shouting match! - which has so long surrounded Myst, one’s first encounter with the actual artifact that spurred it all can be more than a little anticlimactic. A personal favorite of mine is the description deployed by Michael Bywater, who in previous lives was himself an author of textual interactive fiction. Some of the hatred directed toward Myst by stalwart adventure fans - not only fans of third-person graphic adventures, but, going even further back, fans of text adventures - reaches an almost poetic fever pitch. And when the people understandably rejected this airless vision, that was that for the adventure game writ large. Myst, so this narrative goes, prompted dozens of studios to abandon storytelling and characters in favor of yet more sterile, hermetically sealed worlds just like its. But, however they categorize it, they’re happy to credit it with all but killing the adventure genre dead by the end of the 1990s. They have a decided aversion to the first-person, minimalist, deserted, austere Myst, sometimes going so far as to say that it isn’t really an adventure game at all. These folks were usually raised on the Sierra and LucasArts traditions of third-person adventures - games that were filled with other characters to interact with, objects to pick up and carry around and use to solve puzzles, and complicated plot arcs unfolding chapter by chapter. Much of this vitriol comes from the crowd who hate any game that isn’t violent and visceral on principle.īut the more interesting and perhaps telling brand of hatred comes from self-acknowledged fans of the adventure-game genre. For a huge swath of gamers, Myst has become the poster child for a certain species of boring, minimally interactive snooze-fest created by people who have no business making games - and, runs the spoken or unspoken corollary, played by people who have no business playing them. ![]() Their passion was such that, when Cyan gave up on an attempt to turn Myst into a massively-multiplayer game, the fans stepped in to set up their own servers and keep it alive themselves.Īnd yet, for all the love it’s inspired, the game’s detractors are if anything even more committed than its proponents. Whatever the merits of that argument, the hardcore Myst lovers remained numerous enough in later years to support five sequels, a series of novels, a tabletop role-playing game, and multiple remakes and remasters of the work which began it all. Then, by the end of the decade, it was lamented as a symbol of what games might have become, if only the culture of gaming had chosen it rather than the near-simultaneously-released Doom as its model for the future. In the years immediately after its release, it was trumpeted at every level of the mainstream press as the herald of a new, dawning age of maturity and aesthetic sophistication in games. Myst‘s admirers are numerous enough to have made it the best-selling single adventure game in history, as well as the best-selling 1990s computer game of any type in terms of physical units shifted at retail: over 6 million boxed copies sold between its release in 1993 and the dawn of the new millennium. Even today, everyone seems to have a strong opinion about it, whether they’ve actually played it or not. Myst would prove to be one of the most polarizing games in history, loved and hated in equal measure. Their reaction was the exact opposite: they loved the game. But then, just as the Miller brothers were wondering whether they had wasted the past two years of their lives making it, the second group came in. Much to its creators’ dismay, they hated the game. Robyn and his brother Rand reluctantly agreed, and soon the first group of guinea pigs shuffled into Brøderbund’s conference room. ![]() ![]() When the game was nearly finished, he says, its publisher Brøderbund insisted that it be put through “focus-group testing” at their offices. Robyn Miller, one half of the pair of brothers who created the adventure game known as Myst with their small studio Cyan, tells a story about its development that’s irresistible to a writer like me. ![]()
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