I’m 74 years old now. I bought Myst when it first came out, the same year my wife died. I was devastated in my sorrow and barely able to function. But I got sucked into the world of Myst and became lost in exploring those fantasy levels. The game kept me sane, no, honestly, I think it kept me sane. Thank you, Miller brothers.
This same game was able to allow me to keep my sorrow at bay after my father died in 03. I watched him play it when I was a boy and I played it to remember him. Love and consolation to you my friend.
Eli T We seem to have found a similar respite in the webs wound within this marvelous, suspenseful world of MYST. Did you continue with the other worlds?
Kudos to Ars Technica for seeking out developers to tell these amazing stories. This isn't the kind of material likely to go viral and get heaps of clicks, but it's the definition of quality journalism.
And it's effective advertisement for Firmament. Because odds are if you like Cyan Entertainment you're likely to want to check out their other projects, or at the very least don't mind hearing about them at the end of something related. It's... conversational, in a way that banners and forced viewing just aren't.
That's exact,y right I was playing this when I was 4 a yeart I had no idea what I was doing and was clicking around with my dad's help but I was so amazed by the beautiful world for me to explore.
having played Myst and read all 7 Narnia books, I can confirm the OP is correct. to those involved in the making of Myst: thanks for bringing dreams to reality!
I was working in CD-ROM publishing at the time. It's not an understatement to say that everyone I worked with was BLOWN AWAY that this worked so well on a 1x drive.
This game just took over our house. My wife played during the day and kept notes. I got home had dinner and I got to play. Over dinner we discussed what she has learned and I could read the notes. Our kids would stand next to us and point things out. Touch this touch that it was a tremendous help having our kids assist. My wife and I discussed how lucky we were to be alive at a time that all these parts come together computer, we were not rich but our household could afford one, cd rom drives we could barely afford who ever created this game. All came to this point in time that 100% of our family was working on this puzzle, that by no means is a simple game. Myst is a ball kicker game. Our kids 7, 8 and 11 did not want to watch tv. The way Myst is played the & year old could take a turn playing. Our whole family was working on this puzzle for well over 90 days before the kids started to get bored. Maybe the 11 year old did not last as long. But all of the kids to this day, because of this game when they sit down to play a game bring out pencil and a note book for notes. To this day our family talk about the game we all worked on at a family together.
I have the same story and memories as you, except from the kids perspective! My parents played this game all the time when my sister and I was young, and they would keep notes between themselves and my sister and I would watch them play and help them out in the same ways you described. We had so much fun with it and eventually when we finally finished it, my sister and I would play the game for years to come using our parents old notes to help us out. Especially the maze! Thanks for your story, it really brought back some great memories for me.
I remember my grandfather playing Myst back in the early 90’s. He had a notebook full of notes and diagrams trying to get through the world. He was so meticulous with it. He eventually beat it and move on to Riven and Exile. I believe they were just about the only games he ever played.
I remember Myst, and he might have been drawn to it the same way I was. For me it wasn't a puzzle game, it felt like an investigation, or like archeology almost. You found something and didn't just think where you need to use it, but also why you would use it as well. Some of the puzzles were more abstract then others, but at its absolute best it was a mystery in an unfamiliar world, and more importantly a world that did not exist FOR you. It always had the feeling that the it was already there, and that it would continue to be there after you left. Those buildings were built with a purpose, that mechanism makes sense. It has a mechanical and mystical weight too it so it never felt like puzzles, I never 'completed' a puzzle, instead I understood the world a tiny bit more, and that revelation would lead to another, and another. Everything that the story is about has happened already, and you aren't actually as part of it as unlike in other games YOU are the story, and instead you are learning how it and the world as a whole worked, and how to make your way through technology you didn't understand. At least that is how I always felt, and I get the feeling he may have had a similar draw too it. Many people have interpreted it in so many ways that there isn't really a right or wrong one. But the stranger in a strange land, just trying to make their way through and the slowly piece together how it all works, that is the emotion and mindset that it put me in, and as curiosity takes over and the human need to understand starts trying to push deeper and deeper and deeper. I wonder how other people felt playing Myst, it is almost like the story feels a little different for each person, and I kinda love that. Clearly so did your grandfather! Sorry for the small wall of text, but I hope other people, however they interpreted it loved it just as much as me!
Jordon Burk I relate. I was young and loved playing it because of just about everything your comment covers. The mystique of the barren land with many workable components alongside background noise/music captured my attention. Ironically, my failure as a kid to understand the purpose of everything made me enjoy it that much more. Good memories 🙂
I remember when I was playing Myst as a kid, I could "cheat" because I could tell when something important or interactive was nearby because the CD-ROM would take an extra second to seek! I used that to find a lot of hidden buttons or whatever.
Me too, and it really is - especially coming out in 1993!! Having played Myst myself so young (age 6-7, a couple years after Myst came out), the enhanting music, surreal animation/graphics, and the fantastical worlds will stay with me forever. Being immersed and all alone in such amazing realms with no one to help me was so unique, and in fact it made it easier for me to get myself through games like The Neverhood, Rayman, Phantasmagoria, Duke Nukem 3d, Shadow Warrior, and Diablo (yes I know, far too young for some of those but most of them had a censor option!), since I was so used to exploring bizarre and eerie locations with no one but myself to depend on. If museums exist for video games as art (I'm sure there are) then Myst should be in every single one.
Never played Myst, cause it costs a fortune in Russia for a kid to have it. All i could do was to reread pc magazine with 2 pages about over and over. Remember walking by CD shop starring at this box, wondering about worlds inside. Now making my own adventure game. Thanks for Myst and this video.
I was the same with computer gaming and video magazine (must look it up to see if it still exists) looking at all the Sega and Super Nintendo games, reading reviews and art work. Ah life :)
Shorah b'shemtee. Greetings from France. You can download Myst online from Cyan's website. It's free. And welcome in D'ni ages. Link to Ae'Gura you will discover a very nice community...
No.... One day Aleksey Loykuts,people one day will watch a video about you being a great game creator inspired by Myst just like We all watched this one for Rand and Robyn and Myst.
Myst's success owes everything to how talented an artist Robyn Miller is. He captured that Victorian/Neoclassical/Baroque aesthetic decades before it became super trendy.
My wife went away for the weekend. As soon as she was gone, I ran to the computer store to buy a cdrom player, for $300 and Myst and spent the entire weekend playing. What a great memory.
73 years old.... still loved the way the books made noised when you turned the pages ..one hell of a game Rand Miller thank you for creating such a brilliant adventure game..
@@MrBcuzbcuz it's crazy that there are so many people in their 70's who are commenting here on youtube about Myst. Myst was just one of those games that crossed all boundaries of age or background, everyone was interested in it at the time.
@@casedistorted Thank you for giving a response. Myst made a huge impact on me, as I’ve already stated. It appealed to me on so many levels. I still don’t appreciate first shooter type of games.
I love the humility of this guy. He has the spirit of a true artist. We need more passionate gaming creators experimenting and breaking artistic boundaries.
That lunar lander game was the first computer game I ever saw too. It was open on an Open University terminal at Luton College in about 1974. I was so hooked I went home and plotted dozens of graphs in order to plan the perfect landing. My technique was to let the lander drop under gravity until the point I calculated and then apply maximum thrust in order to reach the surface at zero m/sec. I tried it the next week and it worked and it also spurred me into a change of career from chemistry into computers. Thanks lunar lander, I owe it all to you.
i didn't comprehend the puzzle solving as a kid... but those graphics stayed with me to this day. the atmosphere of myst, little big adventure, alone in the dark and ecstatica gave me big chills back then.
same. as an 8 year old child i dug this up from my father's old dusty cd cases. he had been unimpressed with the game, but i booted it up anyway on his 2000's mac os and just wandered around the main island. couldn't get into one of the worlds, or solve any puzzle, but i kept coming back to the rocket, because i loved space. many years later i went back into this game with walkthroughs and just got absolutely lost in these universes. it sparked my imagination like crazy.
I watched my Dad play this game when I was as young as I can remember and the visuals and atmosphere of the game may have been one of the biggest impacts on my imagination. I'm glad to hear about others who were affected in the same way.
I was too young to get it as well, and I remember being frustrated by how long certain things took to load. I’d love to give it a play now. The game The Witness reminds me of it a lot.
I became addicted to Myst in my late 30's. I'm 67 now. It was such a wonderful place to"live". My husband and I played all the games. Our little squee still sits on the desktop computer tower. We recently played Myst again on Steam, but not having to click pictures to advance. We still have the CD's but it's too low tech for computers today. The series was a major part of our lives for years. Seeing moving water was fantastic. I enjoyed walking through the worlds not even playing, just living there and listening to the music and sounds.
Myst was formative for me. I was 7 when it came out. I remember playing it before school in the mornings and being completely stymied by Channelwood. It, and Riven, remain my favorite games (and I've played a lot.) Really love seeing folks from different walks talk about what these games were (and are) to them.
@@jaycooper5338 WTF?! I went to Steam, enteterd all the required things, installed everything, and MYST will still not load (click PLAY NOW). I'm SO frustrated that I've requested a refund. HELP?
"Myst" and "The 7th Guest" basically ran constantly on my Packard Bell 486DX2-66. That was the only time in my life where I wore down a CD-ROM drive to the point where I had to manually spin up the disc with my own fingers.
I hate that about algorithms. They think they know what I want so I don't ever really get recommended new exciting ideas. It just pigeon holes me. Its almost offensive in a weird way.
The phone number for Hints and Tips was on the CD. It's a 1-900 number meaning your phone bill was going to be a thick envelope that month. Those are the calls where you try to set the pace of speaking preemptively. ua-cam.com/video/EWX5B6cD4_4/v-deo.html
@@The_Obvious_Solution yes! I would buy the strategy guide if they had it a microcenter. My friend and I would call the 900 number if we absolutely had to. We'd pay for it out of our allowance and get permission first knowing how bad a 900 number would look on the phone bill!
He really nailed how at least I experienced Myst. I never got off the first island, I didn't even KNOW there were more islands lol..I still put DAYS into it just exploring, it was mind blowing.
I didn't play MYst that much. I did play Riven however (sequel) and while I knew there were more places to go, after a while I got stuck with some puzzle. I loved (had a new stereo back then) the sound of going into the tube to travel between some of the island I did unlock. So, the next time I was in a game store, I bought a booklet/walkthrough in a game shop (while I normally played PC, I had this on PlayStation 1, so must have been 1997 or so). But, that kind of ruined it for me in another way. This because after some attempts on other things that might have been solvable when I really wanted, I looked it up just to be able to continue.Self-control was never one of my best features. ;) Was cleaning out my closets this Sunday and while I didn't come across that walkthrough (probably at my parents house still) but did find Final Fantasy VII. Looking at it now, it says “Free 68-page guide with Powerstation”, I have no clue what Powerstation was, a magazine I guess. Will read it through again this weekend or so, lots of storyline in there, not so many pics. Also found SimCIty 2000 World Edition 164 pages, but I think that game in the CD Rom case. Oh, and found some old porn mags and dvd's :)
He's a gosh darn genius. Listen to his design theory. It blows my mind. Don't design levels or puzzles; design a "history" to your world that includes those puzzles. Don't just add story arbitrarily, tell the story of the world around you natrually through contextualization. It's absolutely brilliant.
He also did what most "developers" nowadays refuse to do -- care about your customers and program your game for them. Specifically, he knew or had a good idea of the computers people would have and he did everything he could to ensure a good-performing experience on that hardware. Nowadays, "developers" just say "upgrade your system". They don't care if their game requires a new $2000 computer or a $600 video card. The same can be said for "programmers" in general nowadays. Nobody optimizes anything and they all just assume that everyone will be willing (and financially able) to buy a new computer every year to be able to run new software. For some reason, nobody seems to question why software isn't blazing fast when new computers keep getting more powerful. They just accept that each new version of software keeps getting bigger, slower, and more bloated with "features" nobody wants. The industry has lost the "tinkerers" -- the people who wanted to find out how the hardware works and push it to its limits, the people who wanted to do things nobody had done before. Nowadays, everyone wants to do as little work as possible to get as rich as possible.
I remember watching my brother and cousins playing this game whenever we visited our grandparents. I was never allowed to play because I was only 5 or 6, but it was magical for me. Thank you for creating something so wonderful.
The fact this was started on a Mac, that was hacked to make it color, shows why right to repair is so important. Tinkering with things like that, is exactly what modern Apple wants to stop you from doing. They want to force you to buy a new machine every few years and toss the old one in the trash.
Considering the Apple II was a hobbyist's DREAM and fueled the rise of stores like Fry's Electronics and Newegg it's a shame (Woz, we missed you. But I get it.)
The ironic thing is that Apple wouldn't exist today if its longstanding mindset (closed and proprietary ecosystem) was the mindset of the industry when Apple came into existence. If computers were closed systems back in the 60s and 70s, then neither Apple nor Microsoft would exist today; neither would the computers and "smart" devices we all use on a daily basis. Apple also wouldn't exist in its current form if BSD wasn't Free, and yet Apple does everything in its power to limit or remove choice and options for its customers.
Nah, they just want to own your purchase dollars as well as your repair dollars. Also bad, but different from making computers intentionally disposable. - Sent from my 2015 MacBook Pro, still chugging along 6.5 years later
@@nomore6167 On the other hand, the very existence of these companies proves the basis for the rights of the end user. If IBM had the legal authority to control what people can and can't do on their hardware they'd have done so.
Cyan in 1996: let's organize the files by ages and place them strategically close on the cd's sectors to reduce load times. EA in 2020: Oh, there's a bug on the game that releases next week, let's make a 200 gb day one patch.
@steveo314 not really, it would be more cost effective if they wouldn't have to issue a recall, they'd only give away the patched game on a new cd. Still, the last time I can recall such a thing happening was Metroid Prime 3, but I don't think there was a mass recall. When I was a kid I remember the Sonic Blast Man arcade had to be recalled because people were breaking their hands when punching the pads, but I can't remember a case in which a bug was so damaging that the entire run of the game had to be recalled because it made it unplayable. Another case was one GTA game for the PSP that allowed to run homebrew. But my coment about the day one patch is to highlight how incompetent are those companies into patching games, they prefer to make the user download the whole new game again instead of patching the files that cause the issue.
I think the reason why this game sold so well even if most people never finished it was the look. It was a glimpse into the future of how games will look. 3D raytracing games nowadays are common and graphics allone are no longer a reason to buy a game. But back in the days, render graphics fueled my imagination of what else might be possible in the future. And now I am an adult and a 3D artist. Thank you Miller brothers for paving the way for so many others back in the days.
I bought Grand Theft Auto just in time for Covid because I wanted to drive their universe, which so resembles a photo-realistic Central California. I never got to the point of just driving around, but I still watch UA-cam replays for the scenery....
People for sure still buy games for graphics. It's even more important than ever, as we are getting so photo real in some games. It's drawing us into the world and aweing us like never before. Myst had atmosphere like no other. It was believable. You felt like you were there, you felt a part of the world, that was the huge selling point. Never before had games pulled you into the world like that. But yes the graphics too were quite something to look at and helped a lot with that. It did amaze people.
@@VROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM In a few years, graphics will not be able to evolve any further. When we reached a point where we can just show anything on the screen. It´s not far into the future. I hope then, devs will finally come up with good gameplay again. I am bored of photorealism nowadays. It doesn´t make the game better. I still play games from the 90s and they are more fun than modern day graphics showoffs with no gameplay depth
Myst is great, Riven is awesome but I recommend playing these games with someone together. It's much more fun to figure this out with someone you really like to hang around with and discus things.
Riven ignited my passion for gaming as a child, starting 30 years of diving further and further into the industry. I'm now working with a friend to start creating games of our own and I could not be more grateful to this man and his brother. Thank you so much, from the bottom of my heart, for sparking joy in millions.
It's like a parallel to how filmmakers in the early eras of cinema (Buster Keaton, e.g.) were so inventive in their art, because they had to come up with all kinds of clever ways to circumvent the technological limits in front of them to achieve the vision they had.
Myst is such a great experience just for the fact that I had to write down notes. I still have a self-drawn map of that one underground system where the game tells you that it would take "years" to explore which gave me enough motivation to explore it completely as I didn't want to miss anything because seeing a new image was always such a delight - I believe this aspect is something that many new games have lost nowadays namely that seeing a new section of a game should feel really special
Omgoodness!! I love finding these videos! Love you Rand! Your videos changed and ENHANCED my life!! I’m 66 this year and I backed the 25 anniversary complete Myst set on Kickstarter! It’s the pride and focal point in my living room!! Thank you 🙏🏽
Abraxas Voice Myst is a way of living and breathing; a way of seeing and understanding the great tree on which we live every day of this life and the next.
@@danielduncan6806 But will I be able to play firmament if I haven't finished myst, riven, exile, revelation, end of ages, uru and obduction? I have all of these btw
An ingredient of success they completely miss is that in an era where "oh just get the developers to be the actors", most games were terrible and schlocky. But the Millers really kind of nailed the roles.
I was obsessed with this game in high school. I just played it on the Oculus for the first time in twenty years and it was so amazing. I had forgotten how to solve most of the puzzles so it was like playing it again for the first time only now I felt like I was literally on the island of Myst. If you loved this game you have to play it in VR.
Myst was my late mother's favorite (only!) Computer game. She would spend hours on it and would ask me to come over to help her resolve the hard puzzles. Myst was such an amazing and captivating world. It really set the standard for this style of game and fantasy art worlds. Truly iconic.
I played Myst when I was maybe 12 years old at a party where the grown-ups leave you alone with the other kids. It was and still is the most haunting, magical game I've ever played. Since then I've played every sequel and nothing is more satisfying than getting a puzzle right and seeing everything come together. The music has always haunted me and especially in Riven, some of those vistas will stay with me forever.
No.... it is not the most haunting and magical game..... RIVEN! the sequel to it was lol. The same format and movie animation embedded into the actual gameplay... and the world.... was.... Myst on sterroids.... But ya.... I still never actually ever "finished" Myst either.... lol.
@@harkejuice I guess you didn't have the chance to play Riven.... usually the sequel to anything usually sucks.. but Riven's story just literally expands upon the Myst story (not the same world but stories are connected.) They introduced actual "motion" and yet it was the same as Myst... only in some spots instead of a picture fading to the next picture it "takes" you to the next point with actual "motion" of traveling there. Everything Myst was they went over the top of everything that made Myst great and pulled Riven OUT of it. I absolutely LOVED both of the games.
@@rustykoenig3566 Did you even read my post, I've played everything they've made. I love Riven, but we're talking about Myst here. I even played URU when it was online. Yes it was awful.
18:24 I'm one of those!!! RAND and ROBYN, I hope you're seeing this! I remember my parents in the 90s playing Myst, me being maybe around 7 and way too young to get it but I LOVED it, the places were so beautiful, the music eery, the atmosphere was so stunning and captivating. When I was old enough, computers were too advanced to run the first part, but I did manage to play through the others. When I was 21 I got my hands on a PSP and a copy of the game and boy did I play it through! I spent every free minute on it. I recognized all the places from my childhood, all the impossible puzzles from back then suddenly clicked into place. A thousand light bulbs wrapped into nostalgia went off. A few years later I built a copy of Myst Island in Minecraft, including most of the puzzles (though crudely simplified). MYST has been one of the greatest joys of my life. I love the game and everything that came with, all the milestones it represents. Many of my generation don't appreciate it and most don't even know it, but that doesn't change how I feel about it.
Boy this brings back memories. I was killing time on a computer at my in-law's house, and they had this game installed. I had never before played a computer game. Myst grabbed me immediately. I couldn't walk away. The mood of the game was completely immersive.
I met Rand and Robyn Miller when I was in the 8th grade. The Book of Atrus had just been released, and they were doing a tour-one of their stops was at the defunct Tower Books in Portland, OR. I told them I wanted to be a graphic designer, and Rand encouraged me to steer close to my passions. I did, kind of! But I’ll never forget that meeting. Such cool people, and I’ll always hope for a new MYST.
While it's not a Myst title exactly, they are working on a new game right now called Firmament. If you want a Myst type of adventure game, that is coming down the line.
@@amandaobrien2405 Yeah, it's still being worked on, though they did put out Obduction back in...2016 as well, if you want something to tide you over until then. You may see a familiar face or two in that game, lol.
I was 12 when Myst came out, I didn't even have a computer, but my friend did. I was hanging out at his house and he showed it to me. That opening narration blew my mind and still stays with me now. "I realized the moment I fell into the fissure that the book would not be destroyed as I had planned..."
For its day? If I plugged it in right NOW I would be sucked into it just like I was back then! Even though it was still images the graphics were still amazing and paired with the ambient sounds and music....
I remember, as an 8-year old, playing on my Uncle's iMac and finally making it off the main Myst Island (and to the Mechanical Age, using the rotating tower). I played that game for ages until I ever made it off the main island. What a setting. It really did feel magical. Maybe a bit too difficult for a kid but really well designed.
Myst will forever be my favorite game series of all time. I'm still trying to finish Obduction, and I'm drooling over the world of Firmament! I even own the novels, and an art book. Everytime I pick up a book, a CD-ROM box, or hear those iconic Myst sounds, I can't help but be hypnotized.
I never understood it. It was always so unstimulating to me. But I suppose that was perhaps the thing people like about it? If I explored a world, I had to feel like there was something for me to learn, create, and change. Without failure the place has no expectation of me. Without danger there's no fear of being alone in an unknown world. All the dreariness and mood is pointless if there is no risk and loss. Eventually it just patronizes you. Your puzzles aren't meant to keep you from achieving your goals, they are the goals... Just odd for me, needing as soon many games give why Myst does, and richer. I suppose it came at the right time.
Krystal Myth The fact that there was no danger was revelation in a video game. You were free to explore and figure things out at your own pace, without worry or concern, you could just exist. It was a very new concept at the time and very freeing.
I've been struggling with confidence lately, whether or not I'm cut out to actually fulfill my dream of making video games for a living... but your message at the end really reassured me. The fact that I'm only 30, and you're literally twice my age and still making great games is deeply reassuring to me. I'm glad that this video was made.
@@gozinta82 I still have my Voodoo ii with that short vga cord and the CD-ROM containing the driver and some decent game demos. Some guy down my block sold me a Pentium system with the card in it for $50 some time around the late 90s.
I remember finishing Riven was a fricking accomplishment. It took me months. It looked insanely awesome at that time. I had a notebook where I took notes and little sketches because there was so much to connect and to figure out. The notebook had more content than the notebooks for some study subjects :-D
I did the same with the "Zork: Grand Inquisitor" game. I ended up with more than 100 A4 pages of handwritten notes. I was so pleased with myself when I managed to finish the game without cheating (by looking at other people's hints) but only using my notes.
I did exactly that but got stumped someplace well into the game. I think if I had realized it was a Hypercard-based game, I could have figured it out but the grids and outcome tables were a great preparation for Foxpro and SQL...
I was a young guy at the time and remember being excited for Riven to come out. I played a ton of it and got really far, but there was so much walking back and forth, and also there were a few too many puzzles that didn't use logic but mostly just just luck and random clicking. That irritated me too much and eventually I didn't finish it. If I can think my way out of it that's great, but if I'm reduced to pure chance and I'm also wasting a ton of time going back and forth trying to figure out what they even want me to do then that didn't cut it. I need to know why that one pixel in the field of grass (or whatever) should have been clicked on. Seriously that was the breaking point after wandering around for hours and hours and then it was just some random chance clicking on some like blade of grass lol. Most of it was awesome though. Loved the worlds. I really want to buy one of their newest games but the reviews on steam say the same thing, too many random puzzles that have no logic, just chance.
I was literally just talking about Myst with my dad the other day! We had it on our family's computer growing up and my little brother and I would take turns playing for hours. It was a great exercise in problem solving and logic based puzzles. We loved it and I think it contributed to shaping both of us into who we are today. Cool getting to hear this backstory years later as a young adult!!
My copy had a broken image, but it was a non-interactive one, I think sitting on a throne in Mechanical. Otherwise I don't remember any problems. But as Rand said, they were over budget and over time and then it depends on how much extra the publisher is going to give. Gothic 3 or Trespasser give great testimony on how to run into feature-incomplete at release.
Back then you _had_ to have polished every detail because there was no way of distributing patches. We're lucky to live in a time where games can be tweaked after you've bought the thing.
No. There were games that were not finished that got published way before Myst. You just don't remember them or even know about them. Dishonest and/or badly organized developers still existed. At most, publishers were more forced to tolerate delays. You just have to research them because back then, they didn't make hate-controversy-parties that they do today (not that they didn't get hate). Even before CD-roms, there were such games. There were also cases where professional reviewers got a different game than what the costumer brought in the store. Even on consoles, there were cases of very badly made games (look up Angry Video Game Nerd for some). Please understand that I am not trying to defend the practice of releasing an unfinished games and calling them something other than they are. It's just that comments like these depict the game industry as it never was.
Thank you so much for this. Myst was huge for many of us gamers. I had heard of some of the challenges but this was revealing. I was a big user of HyperCard and Myst inspired our company to build a similar game. 7th Guest was a big deal, but none of us were fans of it. The Journeyman Project was great. We went ahead and built a more pure puzzle game in 1993 called Jewels of the Oracle. There's always a compromise with technology so we opted for more of a 3D walk-through experience, rather than dissolving from still to still. That meant we had no room for story elements, but the Millers were better at it than us, anyway. We had one of two 1-speed CD ROM burners in Toronto. It cost us $7000. Blank CDs were about $40 each so when we ended up with coasters we cried. Macromedia Director was our platform but the workhorse tool was DeBabelizer that let us reduce the colour space down to 256 colours. Infini-D was our 3D program and when things came down to the crunch I would take a hard drive of all our files to a friend's company who had dozens of Macs and I would turn on the distributed rendering option. I would set it up at 10 pm and come in at 6am to collect the rendered .movs so as to not be in any of the employees' way. The game was a sizable hit but the publisher did not pay us our royalties. A bittersweet ending to an amazing project. A project we never would have attempted without the inspiration of Myst.
I loved this game when I was a kid. I was so amazed when it came out. I used to play it until the sun came up the next day! Thank you for sharing. I talk to my kids about how wonderful the game was. I used to sleep to the sound effects by the beach. The crashing of the waves... It was beautifully done. Thank you for the gift you gave us.
dude it wasnt that good, any game you can buy these days has much better graphics and sound design you can sleep to, you only liked this game cus you played it when you were young, no one these days will like to play this trash....
@@amandaburleson2035 dude you are missing the point entirely this game was the first of its kind and very special not only to the people that used it but the gaming industry as a whole you should have more respect for how and why things are the way they are now it of course doesnt have the graphics and sound of todays games but it was freekin 30 years ago mostly likely 3 times older than you oh and guess what i dont have to use capitalization or punctuation either its so wonderful what you kids take for granted.
@@beastslayer9153 at least we agree on somehting, punctuation and grammar are not needed, i didnt even notice you didnt use proper grammar, nor did i care, i still understood what you said, and all im saying is this game was all hype. it was for the normies of the time. much better games were already out.
"I realized, the moment I fell into the fissure, that the book would not be destroyed as I had planned. It continued falling into that starry expanse of which I had only a fleeting glimpse. I have tried to speculate where it might have landed, but I must admit, however... such conjecture is futile. Still, the question of whose hands might someday hold my Myst book are unsettling to me. I know that my apprehensions might never be allayed, and so I close, realizing that perhaps, the ending has not yet... been written."
At 17:00 that's actually Riven in the game store, not Myst when he's talking about being in Albuquerque. However, the fact that I recognize the box art and haven't played Riven in 23 years, and even then it was only at a friend's house, is testament to just how memorable of an imprint those worlds left in your mind.
I was part of that "older audience" in my thirties if that counts, and I *loved* MYST and RIVEN and all the others. Those still are my favorite games of all time. Cheers, Russ
Riven was my introduction to the series, watching Mom play it, then eventually getting into it. I haven't finished any yet due to time constraints, but I own all the Myst games now. We are slowly completing them on our own free time. Such a wonderful game collection. Thank you for that interview.
I played this in ‘93/‘94. It was just so unlike any computer game I’d seen before, and it was completely engrossing. It was this lonely world that you traveled to then quite difficult puzzles were inflicted on you. I gave copies to friends because I was so enthusiastic about it. Those were the days of Spaceship Warlock and The 7th Guest. Gosh, I guess that’s almost three decades ago. How time flies.
I remember doing exactly that (card stack thing) in Powerpoint when I was in Primary school. Used MS Paint to draw every single slide with all the different scenarios and outcomes, and then HYPERLINKED invisible buttons to certain slides based on what you clicked. What a time.
I beat it with a friend over a period of around 4 months, while being enlisted in the military. Played each night after polishing our boots. It felt so great to "win" at long last...
The Indie scene has definitely come back to a really great place. What we need to come back is the Mid level AA games. That market died and just hasn't returned yet.
@@brpadington They have much smaller budgets though. Have you maybe considered you don't think of the modern AA games as such because graphics and dev tools have gotten so good that the distinction is just not that meaningful?
@@williancruz9657 Those are smaller budget games for sure but they are by large studios. What I think we are missing is medium size studios that specialize in AA games. I don't know anything about Nier so it my fit that description.
@@brpadington FromSoft and Atlus aren't as big as you think. Persona5 is by an ENORMOUS margin the highest-selling game Atlus has ever made, and it has sold in the same ballpark as games like The Order 1886, which by this point noone remembers, and less than the original PS1 Twisted Metal.
My best friend and I stayed up almost all weekend playing Myst. A part of childhood I'll never forget. I remember getting so lost within that wonderful world. Thanks for the memories guys!
This really brings back memories. I played Myst before I was married, and Riven came out after I was married. My wife had heard about Myst but never played it. So when I started playing Riven, she thought she would just look over my shoulder to see what it was about. She quickly got pulled into it as much as I was, and we solved the rest of it together. She came up with solutions to puzzles I never would have on my own without a hint. We then got to relive those moments by solving Obduction together. We're counting the days until Firmament is released.
I have such a huge respect for Rand Miller. I played Myst and Riven when I had like 10 years old and it always has been such a big inspiration for me. Thank you for this episode !
I remember playing this as a kid... 10 years old sitting down with my older brother. Starting to play the game after dinner on Christmas Day and stayed up all night playing. We beat the game by 8 AM. That's one of my fondest memories of childhood.
What I love almost as much as the incredible stories these legends tell us is the fact not a single question is heard. No annoying, pretentious, self absorbed, look-at-me social media posers ... just one guy talking us through gaming history with a camera rolling. It is SO refreshing. I too played this game at certain points but scoffed at friends who had a mac because there was a stigma you were a massive nerd if you had/used one. Umm... yeah literally everything I have, computer wise now is Apple.. and those same "nerds" rule the world!
When I was a child in the 90's I saw the comic, "Myst: Book of the Black Ships" and bought it immediately. It was then that I fell in love with the story. I then bought the 3 Novels in hard cover and read them repeatedly. If I stopped reading them it was only to try and forget a bit of it so I could read them again fresh. That set was eventually stolen so I bought two new sets to replace them, although their condition wasn't as good as my original set. I printed out every short story from the website of Atrus' journals and I still have them kept to this day. I read the books so much that I once had a dream of watching a Myst movie. In the dream I saw an opening cinematic of a camera panning to the left with rock in the background panning to a cave opening a contrast of dark rock and lighter dark background with a bluish tint and then I saw the Myst title and I got so excited I woke up. I then bought the games. Yes, with my own money I saved up for on my own computer that I saved up for. I must have spent a few years waiting. Honestly, I didn't like the Game play nearly as much as I liked the story, but I still enjoyed it. I liked the online game, but I think I would have liked it more if it was a local network game since it really didn't feel like it fit the MMO model. I was excited when I learned that a new book was being written, then disappointed when it never materialized. If they launched a Kickstarter to fund the novels continuation I'd buy at least a dozen up front no matter how many years I'd have to wait to read it. When I learned that Myst reached limited run games for the Nintendo Switch I bought a copy to play and a copy to remain sealed as a collectors edition. I will do the same with Riven and any other game in the series they port. Suffice to say I'm a fan.
I absolutely love the books as well, in fact, I'm probably more of a fan of the books than the games! I read the books after playing all of the Myst games, and they were so good I've read them all at least 3 times.
My first ever experience with a video game was sitting on my Dads lap "helping him" with Myst. I'm 26 now in 2020, and still think about Myst and Riven often.
I still remember playing Myst on my old XT -- It seemed so real that when remembering parts of it it seemed more like remembering something I saw in real world experience
I'm not a gamer. Never really have been. Never really want to be. But Myst, had me entranced back in the day. It was magical in ways that were hard describe. It was almost mythical in some of the story lines, and paired with haunting soundtracks that hold up to this day. It was a masterpiece. Bravo Rand Miller.
Rand and his glasses are so iconic... I feel like a Beatles fan watching this, I am so excited and I just want to find these people and hug them and scream and never let go... Also, I love Catherine.
1988 - the year I was born.. 8 years later my father and I picked up Myst.. We spent months, maybe a year and a half to complete / finish Myst. We made drawings, wrote entire journals to get through the journey that Myst was. We managed to complete the game without using a single hint or walkthrough and it has been one of the most magical times to be able to play through that journey that Myst is. Thank you for the memories of a lifetime! Myst truly was and still is a Masterpiece.
@Dubious I believe that in addition to compression, Rand was talking about working out the physical placement of various files on the CD so the head would only have to travel a minimal amount to access a sound that went with a certain graphic. If the sound is used in multiple places, do you save it in multiple locations on the CD, or just do a lot of puzzle-piecing to keep the distances minimal? Nowadays, if you want to burn a CD you just burn it, but back in the days when CD players were slow and computers had a lot less power, you actually needed to design the data layout on the CD for optimal playback. Regarding images, when you have a choice of thousands of colors but are limiting each image to 256 of them, and different sets of images use different 256-color palettes, this was definitely an issue in the 1990s. Whenever you went from one palette to another, for example dissolving from one image to another, the PCs of the day did an auto-shift of colors that generally looked awful. And I don't mean a little off, I mean weird color flashes and nightmarish imagery. To make the transition look good, you had to do some manual color gymnastics with the palettes. In fact, I had a job in 1992 where all I did for two months was manhandle color palette transitions for a company that produced corporate training CDs. That issue went away by the late 1990s, and sadly, I am no longer in demand as a Color Palette Manipulator. :)
@@manyworldsvideo VESA BIOS Extension changed everything for DOS games. Then Windows 95 was released and color modes were handled by Windows and videocard drivers.
This was my dad's frustration with the first game. We had a 1x CD drive, but it didn't work particularly well. A lot of games even at the time would install a lot of assets to the HDD, and then stream audio from the disc, but because this was a near fully disc based game it was extremely difficult to play at the time. By the time Riven came out it was no longer a problem, but Myst was the great motivation for my dad to upgrade a lot of computer parts lol. Probably the most expensive game he ever played!
I remember my Dad had a computer with a CD drive waaay before they were common because he was a doctor and needed it for work, and next to his stacks of medical notes was a notebook filled with codes and maps, and I used his notes to play Myst without understanding but was so engrossed by the graphics, because at the time there really was nothing like it. It truly was magic.
This is almost my exact story but my mom was a software testing analyst at work and we always had all the new computer stuff when I was a kid. She played Myst and had a notebook she kept for it. I ended up playing it after her with her notebook. Now I have an Oculus Quest 2 and plan on replaying for thr first time in VR and I can't wait!
Played Myst and Riven as a kid and they were absolutely captivating. My brother and I spent lots of time and notebooks to complete the puzzles. There’s a remaster of Myst with UE4 that’s gorgeous and brings back that nostalgia of the gameplay with modern interface
I was so young but so captivated by these games. I couldnt figure much out, I dont think i ever got off the island....the 7th guest and the 11th hour where also too complicated for my age at the time, so I would visit my older cousin to try to get through them.
Myst destroyed my life. Thankfully I had two more. But truly, Myst was the first game my parents could actually use to force me to do homework. They would hide the disc until I brought then my homework, completed. I hated it. All that annoying junk data "That I was never going to use" that I had to do, just to get my Myst CD back from them.
Please never stop making these videos! These are the very most interesting and well-illustrated interviews with some of the most interesting people imaginable to me.
As teenagers from poor backgrounds my friends and I would club together to buy games or music between us and then we would sit around and ‘share’ the experience. We spent many hours pouring over Myst (as well as ‘the dig, Full throttle, Zork the inquisitor & others) and remember distinctly being blown away by the puzzles.. the underground one with the train.. evil.. just pure evil.. We even played our very first multiplayer game with 2 BBC model B’s hooked up together with one of the thickest interconnects we had ever seen.. and played Ridge Racer the original. It is thanks to Myst in no small that made all 5 of us go on to work in IT in the years that followed. Proud to say we bought a copy (actually several as we all bought our own in time) when it first came out.. was a magical time.. Some years ago my brother died of a heart attack and to this day whenever I think of him I always think of when we were sat around laughing and swearing playing Myst.
This video series is wonderful. Also, I was one of those kids that had the cool experience of appreciating Myst without playing it. My Mom...who is not a gamer at all...fell in love with story driven puzzle games like Myst and Shivers etc and it's been a cool thing that we have bonded over for many years
Absolutely passionate and lovable. You can just feel the flame coming right through him when he speaks about his child. Probably the best interview so far in the series.
this game changed my life back in 1994 when I was ten. remember calling the number to cyan when I was stuck at a particular spot. think it was robyn miller that helped me out. he was really cool. could have been rand but pretty sure it was robyn
Thank you, Miller brothers, for all the happy memories. I was 16ish when this came out and loved it. It's one of the rare games that I have re-purchased multiple times. About every 10 years I'm like "I want to play Myst again." Had the original, rebought on GOG, Steam, and the Switch.
Holy crap!!! It's on the Switch????😲😲😲 Welp...that's it. I'm gonna have at it I got through most of it in my early teens and I always thought about going back.
This game is a timeless masterpiece. I remember sitting there as a young boy trying to figure out the puzzles, at the same time creeped out by the atmosphere of this game which at the time was incredible. Honestly, the game aged well and the remake (latest) is really well done.
I’m 74 years old now. I bought Myst when it first came out, the same year my wife died. I was devastated in my sorrow and barely able to function. But I got sucked into the world of Myst and became lost in exploring those fantasy levels. The game kept me sane, no, honestly, I think it kept me sane. Thank you, Miller brothers.
Hope you are doing well brother
Xeldinn Thank you. Yes, Life smiles again.
This same game was able to allow me to keep my sorrow at bay after my father died in 03. I watched him play it when I was a boy and I played it to remember him. Love and consolation to you my friend.
Ric Cuzner godbless
Eli T We seem to have found a similar respite in the webs wound within this marvelous, suspenseful world of MYST. Did you continue with the other worlds?
Kudos to Ars Technica for seeking out developers to tell these amazing stories. This isn't the kind of material likely to go viral and get heaps of clicks, but it's the definition of quality journalism.
I love watching these! Really happy they made this series
And it's effective advertisement for Firmament. Because odds are if you like Cyan Entertainment you're likely to want to check out their other projects, or at the very least don't mind hearing about them at the end of something related. It's... conversational, in a way that banners and forced viewing just aren't.
Yes
It might not go viral but it definitely gets clicks. IDEK who Ars Technica is but I know Myst and this is the content I live on youtube for
Quality stuff finds an audience. 300,000 views in four days, not bad at all :)
Playing Myst in '93 felt like opening a wardrobe to find the land of Narnia on the other side. What a magical and captivating experience.
had very nice graphic at that time ...i was 8 years old and remember that was so frustrated that i could not solve any puzzle :)
EXACTLY RIGHT
That's exact,y right I was playing this when I was 4 a yeart I had no idea what I was doing and was clicking around with my dad's help but I was so amazed by the beautiful world for me to explore.
Beautifully put. That is *exactly* what playing Myst felt like in '93!
having played Myst and read all 7 Narnia books, I can confirm the OP is correct. to those involved in the making of Myst: thanks for bringing dreams to reality!
I was working in CD-ROM publishing at the time. It's not an understatement to say that everyone I worked with was BLOWN AWAY that this worked so well on a 1x drive.
This game just took over our house. My wife played during the day and kept notes. I got home had dinner and I got to play. Over dinner we discussed what she has learned and I could read the notes. Our kids would stand next to us and point things out. Touch this touch that it was a tremendous help having our kids assist. My wife and I discussed how lucky we were to be alive at a time that all these parts come together computer, we were not rich but our household could afford one, cd rom drives we could barely afford who ever created this game. All came to this point in time that 100% of our family was working on this puzzle, that by no means is a simple game. Myst is a ball kicker game. Our kids 7, 8 and 11 did not want to watch tv. The way Myst is played the & year old could take a turn playing. Our whole family was working on this puzzle for well over 90 days before the kids started to get bored. Maybe the 11 year old did not last as long. But all of the kids to this day, because of this game when they sit down to play a game bring out pencil and a note book for notes. To this day our family talk about the game we all worked on at a family together.
great story.
What we want:-
Myst: Connecting People..
What we get:-
Facebook: Connecting People..
That's really beautiful! :)
Really beautiful story. Reminds me of how much my favourite games meant to me when I was a kid.;whole new worlds to inhabit.
I have the same story and memories as you, except from the kids perspective! My parents played this game all the time when my sister and I was young, and they would keep notes between themselves and my sister and I would watch them play and help them out in the same ways you described. We had so much fun with it and eventually when we finally finished it, my sister and I would play the game for years to come using our parents old notes to help us out. Especially the maze! Thanks for your story, it really brought back some great memories for me.
I remember my grandfather playing Myst back in the early 90’s. He had a notebook full of notes and diagrams trying to get through the world. He was so meticulous with it. He eventually beat it and move on to Riven and Exile. I believe they were just about the only games he ever played.
I remember Myst, and he might have been drawn to it the same way I was. For me it wasn't a puzzle game, it felt like an investigation, or like archeology almost. You found something and didn't just think where you need to use it, but also why you would use it as well. Some of the puzzles were more abstract then others, but at its absolute best it was a mystery in an unfamiliar world, and more importantly a world that did not exist FOR you. It always had the feeling that the it was already there, and that it would continue to be there after you left.
Those buildings were built with a purpose, that mechanism makes sense. It has a mechanical and mystical weight too it so it never felt like puzzles, I never 'completed' a puzzle, instead I understood the world a tiny bit more, and that revelation would lead to another, and another. Everything that the story is about has happened already, and you aren't actually as part of it as unlike in other games YOU are the story, and instead you are learning how it and the world as a whole worked, and how to make your way through technology you didn't understand.
At least that is how I always felt, and I get the feeling he may have had a similar draw too it. Many people have interpreted it in so many ways that there isn't really a right or wrong one. But the stranger in a strange land, just trying to make their way through and the slowly piece together how it all works, that is the emotion and mindset that it put me in, and as curiosity takes over and the human need to understand starts trying to push deeper and deeper and deeper.
I wonder how other people felt playing Myst, it is almost like the story feels a little different for each person, and I kinda love that. Clearly so did your grandfather!
Sorry for the small wall of text, but I hope other people, however they interpreted it loved it just as much as me!
Jordon Burk
I relate. I was young and loved playing it because of just about everything your comment covers.
The mystique of the barren land with many workable components alongside background noise/music captured my attention. Ironically, my failure as a kid to understand the purpose of everything made me enjoy it that much more. Good memories 🙂
Yep, I had several pages of hand written notes I took while playing.
Hardest part of the game was the train tracks for me
My dad was the same way. Only games I ever remember him actually playing. He always supported my gaming though.
I remember when I was playing Myst as a kid, I could "cheat" because I could tell when something important or interactive was nearby because the CD-ROM would take an extra second to seek! I used that to find a lot of hidden buttons or whatever.
he he
lol!!!!!!!!!!!
hackerman
That's awesome.🧠
Same!
I consider Myst an absolute masterpiece of gaming. It still holds a certain magic in my heart today
Me too, and it really is - especially coming out in 1993!! Having played Myst myself so young (age 6-7, a couple years after Myst came out), the enhanting music, surreal animation/graphics, and the fantastical worlds will stay with me forever. Being immersed and all alone in such amazing realms with no one to help me was so unique, and in fact it made it easier for me to get myself through games like The Neverhood, Rayman, Phantasmagoria, Duke Nukem 3d, Shadow Warrior, and Diablo (yes I know, far too young for some of those but most of them had a censor option!), since I was so used to exploring bizarre and eerie locations with no one but myself to depend on.
If museums exist for video games as art (I'm sure there are) then Myst should be in every single one.
Agreed. See my post above.
Never played Myst, cause it costs a fortune in Russia for a kid to have it. All i could do was to reread pc magazine with 2 pages about over and over. Remember walking by CD shop starring at this box, wondering about worlds inside. Now making my own adventure game. Thanks for Myst and this video.
its crazy to think of only knowing the box art. but its very telling from just that one image.
I was the same with computer gaming and video magazine (must look it up to see if it still exists) looking at all the Sega and Super Nintendo games, reading reviews and art work. Ah life :)
Shorah b'shemtee. Greetings from France. You can download Myst online from Cyan's website. It's free. And welcome in D'ni ages. Link to Ae'Gura you will discover a very nice community...
Maybe one day you'll make some money with the skills you learn by creating your own game... and then you can buy all of the Myst games :)
No.... One day Aleksey Loykuts,people one day will watch a video about you being a great game creator inspired by Myst just like We all watched this one for Rand and Robyn and Myst.
Myst's success owes everything to how talented an artist Robyn Miller is. He captured that Victorian/Neoclassical/Baroque aesthetic decades before it became super trendy.
My wife went away for the weekend. As soon as she was gone, I ran to the computer store to buy a cdrom player, for $300 and Myst and spent the entire weekend playing. What a great memory.
Ahahahahahahah
you can buy the digital version on gog dot com so you don't need to buy a cdrom player.
@@singatias guess he s talking about 1994
@@Supercecco85 possibly but it still useful information for nowdays
@@singatias I got realMyst on Steam sale it's a great 3D remaster of Myst
73 years old.... still loved the way the books made noised when you turned the pages ..one hell of a game Rand Miller thank you for creating such a brilliant adventure game..
I just downloaded the game,once again , this time to my ipad. Going to see if I can remember some of the codes. (I’m 76 years old now)
@@MrBcuzbcuz Holy smokes, the legend. 1 year ago to 1 day ago. Hope you are well my dude.
@@MrBcuzbcuz it's crazy that there are so many people in their 70's who are commenting here on youtube about Myst. Myst was just one of those games that crossed all boundaries of age or background, everyone was interested in it at the time.
@@casedistorted Thank you for giving a response. Myst made a huge impact on me, as I’ve already stated. It appealed to me on so many levels. I still don’t appreciate first shooter type of games.
I love the humility of this guy. He has the spirit of a true artist. We need more passionate gaming creators experimenting and breaking artistic boundaries.
Yup first thing I noticed within secs.
Humility? His whole story is about how much of a success it was and how much of an amazing achievement they'd done.
@@McVaio You're reading it wrong.
@@DimitriosChannel I agree Dimitrios. Richard was reading it wrong. Humility and pride are not exclusive to each other.
That lunar lander game was the first computer game I ever saw too. It was open on an Open University terminal at Luton College in about 1974. I was so hooked I went home and plotted dozens of graphs in order to plan the perfect landing. My technique was to let the lander drop under gravity until the point I calculated and then apply maximum thrust in order to reach the surface at zero m/sec. I tried it the next week and it worked and it also spurred me into a change of career from chemistry into computers. Thanks lunar lander, I owe it all to you.
i didn't comprehend the puzzle solving as a kid... but those graphics stayed with me to this day.
the atmosphere of myst, little big adventure, alone in the dark and ecstatica gave me big chills back then.
same. as an 8 year old child i dug this up from my father's old dusty cd cases. he had been unimpressed with the game, but i booted it up anyway on his 2000's mac os and just wandered around the main island. couldn't get into one of the worlds, or solve any puzzle, but i kept coming back to the rocket, because i loved space. many years later i went back into this game with walkthroughs and just got absolutely lost in these universes. it sparked my imagination like crazy.
Little Big Adventure and Little Big Adventure 2 I loved to play... Soo long ago thou ;)
There was a parody game out after it called PYST.
I watched my Dad play this game when I was as young as I can remember and the visuals and atmosphere of the game may have been one of the biggest impacts on my imagination. I'm glad to hear about others who were affected in the same way.
I was too young to get it as well, and I remember being frustrated by how long certain things took to load. I’d love to give it a play now.
The game The Witness reminds me of it a lot.
I became addicted to Myst in my late 30's. I'm 67 now. It was such a wonderful place to"live". My husband and I played all the games. Our little squee still sits on the desktop computer tower. We recently played Myst again on Steam, but not having to click pictures to advance. We still have the CD's but it's too low tech for computers today. The series was a major part of our lives for years. Seeing moving water was fantastic. I enjoyed walking through the worlds not even playing, just living there and listening to the music and sounds.
Have you found a way to download it online and play again? I would love that...
Myst was formative for me. I was 7 when it came out. I remember playing it before school in the mornings and being completely stymied by Channelwood. It, and Riven, remain my favorite games (and I've played a lot.) Really love seeing folks from different walks talk about what these games were (and are) to them.
@@LesismoreFL It's on Steam
@@jaycooper5338 Thanks SO MUCH Jay. I appreciate the info!
@@jaycooper5338 WTF?! I went to Steam, enteterd all the required things, installed everything, and MYST will still not load (click PLAY NOW). I'm SO frustrated that I've requested a refund.
HELP?
"Myst" and "The 7th Guest" basically ran constantly on my Packard Bell 486DX2-66. That was the only time in my life where I wore down a CD-ROM drive to the point where I had to manually spin up the disc with my own fingers.
Finally. UA-cam actually suggested something interesting.
Yeah, remember when UA-cam used to do that? I miss those days.
Right?
That's no joke. Solid truth there.
I hate that about algorithms. They think they know what I want so I don't ever really get recommended new exciting ideas. It just pigeon holes me. Its almost offensive in a weird way.
I have played many violent video games in my life...
...Myst is the game where I learned how to swear.
LOL
Yeah, because it had such bad game design.
TheXev
Thank You for my first outward laugh of the day 😆
While I’m unable to relate, I can understand your perspective.
TheXev I cheated sometimes and used a walk through.
TheXev lmao yup
Myst was a masterpiece. I remember playing it as a kid and the imagery is forever in my memory.
Funny enough that it even was no real game, only a click-book...
@@Andyw1228 Dont be stupid. Anything can be a game.
@@nvrndingsmmr sure it is a game, but beyond the surface it is what I wrote: a click book.
I found it so frustrating!
I was too late to the party. I played more interesting RPGs before so Myst wasn't my type of game. But the visuals were great tbf
also wasnt as easy to just google the solution when you got stuck, you really had to work it out
The phone number for Hints and Tips was on the CD. It's a 1-900 number meaning your phone bill was going to be a thick envelope that month. Those are the calls where you try to set the pace of speaking preemptively. ua-cam.com/video/EWX5B6cD4_4/v-deo.html
Or go to Babbages and pay $20 for the "Strategy Guide".
@@The_Obvious_Solution yes! I would buy the strategy guide if they had it a microcenter. My friend and I would call the 900 number if we absolutely had to. We'd pay for it out of our allowance and get permission first knowing how bad a 900 number would look on the phone bill!
He really nailed how at least I experienced Myst. I never got off the first island, I didn't even KNOW there were more islands lol..I still put DAYS into it just exploring, it was mind blowing.
I didn't play MYst that much. I did play Riven however (sequel) and while I knew there were more places to go, after a while I got stuck with some puzzle. I loved (had a new stereo back then) the sound of going into the tube to travel between some of the island I did unlock. So, the next time I was in a game store, I bought a booklet/walkthrough in a game shop (while I normally played PC, I had this on PlayStation 1, so must have been 1997 or so). But, that kind of ruined it for me in another way. This because after some attempts on other things that might have been solvable when I really wanted, I looked it up just to be able to continue.Self-control was never one of my best features. ;)
Was cleaning out my closets this Sunday and while I didn't come across that walkthrough (probably at my parents house still) but did find Final Fantasy VII. Looking at it now, it says “Free 68-page guide with Powerstation”, I have no clue what Powerstation was, a magazine I guess. Will read it through again this weekend or so, lots of storyline in there, not so many pics. Also found SimCIty 2000 World Edition 164 pages, but I think that game in the CD Rom case. Oh, and found some old porn mags and dvd's :)
@@nlx78 you still want those porn mags? Lmao
There were more islands?
u suk
@@nlx78 I threw my porn mags out. And by "I," I mean my wife! :(
He's a gosh darn genius. Listen to his design theory. It blows my mind. Don't design levels or puzzles; design a "history" to your world that includes those puzzles. Don't just add story arbitrarily, tell the story of the world around you natrually through contextualization.
It's absolutely brilliant.
Dude i ate all books in myst riven and exile so the entire story and worlds were in my head while exploring and solving puzzles!!
Dark Souls
Many modern game developers could learn something from that guy.
He also did what most "developers" nowadays refuse to do -- care about your customers and program your game for them. Specifically, he knew or had a good idea of the computers people would have and he did everything he could to ensure a good-performing experience on that hardware. Nowadays, "developers" just say "upgrade your system". They don't care if their game requires a new $2000 computer or a $600 video card.
The same can be said for "programmers" in general nowadays. Nobody optimizes anything and they all just assume that everyone will be willing (and financially able) to buy a new computer every year to be able to run new software. For some reason, nobody seems to question why software isn't blazing fast when new computers keep getting more powerful. They just accept that each new version of software keeps getting bigger, slower, and more bloated with "features" nobody wants.
The industry has lost the "tinkerers" -- the people who wanted to find out how the hardware works and push it to its limits, the people who wanted to do things nobody had done before. Nowadays, everyone wants to do as little work as possible to get as rich as possible.
The way you summed it up here is personally inspiring. Thanks.
Such an outstanding interview! This game is a masterpiece.
Never seen a War Story that wasn't in a way outstanding.
Jeremy Stone - It really is.
Rand has so much passion.
@Austin Downing Was alive and you're wrong and wrong
Good thing there's a...masterpiece edition. :D
I remember watching my brother and cousins playing this game whenever we visited our grandparents. I was never allowed to play because I was only 5 or 6, but it was magical for me. Thank you for creating something so wonderful.
Same here, I have an insane love for libraries, books and cherry wood finished architecture because of this game.
Yes
The fact this was started on a Mac, that was hacked to make it color, shows why right to repair is so important. Tinkering with things like that, is exactly what modern Apple wants to stop you from doing. They want to force you to buy a new machine every few years and toss the old one in the trash.
Considering the Apple II was a hobbyist's DREAM and fueled the rise of stores like Fry's Electronics and Newegg it's a shame (Woz, we missed you. But I get it.)
The ironic thing is that Apple wouldn't exist today if its longstanding mindset (closed and proprietary ecosystem) was the mindset of the industry when Apple came into existence. If computers were closed systems back in the 60s and 70s, then neither Apple nor Microsoft would exist today; neither would the computers and "smart" devices we all use on a daily basis. Apple also wouldn't exist in its current form if BSD wasn't Free, and yet Apple does everything in its power to limit or remove choice and options for its customers.
Blame greedy share holders as well.
Nah, they just want to own your purchase dollars as well as your repair dollars. Also bad, but different from making computers intentionally disposable.
- Sent from my 2015 MacBook Pro, still chugging along 6.5 years later
@@nomore6167 On the other hand, the very existence of these companies proves the basis for the rights of the end user. If IBM had the legal authority to control what people can and can't do on their hardware they'd have done so.
The Rand brothers are legends in my mind. You knew a game was serious when it included a book for note taking.
Cyan in 1996: let's organize the files by ages and place them strategically close on the cd's sectors to reduce load times.
EA in 2020: Oh, there's a bug on the game that releases next week, let's make a 200 gb day one patch.
In the old day: It has to work before it ships.
In the new day: Work? Meh, it loads and plays the first scene.
1995 :)
EA isn't the only guilty culprit!
Unless it's Warcraft 3, then it won't even make it that far.
@steveo314 not really, it would be more cost effective if they wouldn't have to issue a recall, they'd only give away the patched game on a new cd.
Still, the last time I can recall such a thing happening was Metroid Prime 3, but I don't think there was a mass recall. When I was a kid I remember the Sonic Blast Man arcade had to be recalled because people were breaking their hands when punching the pads, but I can't remember a case in which a bug was so damaging that the entire run of the game had to be recalled because it made it unplayable. Another case was one GTA game for the PSP that allowed to run homebrew.
But my coment about the day one patch is to highlight how incompetent are those companies into patching games, they prefer to make the user download the whole new game again instead of patching the files that cause the issue.
"Most people never got off the island"
Me: "You can get off the island?!"
Great episode! I remember these days!
OMG ITS TAY. CHOCOLATE RAAIIIIIIN
Chocolate Raaaaaaiin.
I think the reason why this game sold so well even if most people never finished it was the look. It was a glimpse into the future of how games will look. 3D raytracing games nowadays are common and graphics allone are no longer a reason to buy a game. But back in the days, render graphics fueled my imagination of what else might be possible in the future. And now I am an adult and a 3D artist. Thank you Miller brothers for paving the way for so many others back in the days.
I bought Grand Theft Auto just in time for Covid because I wanted to drive their universe, which so resembles a photo-realistic Central California. I never got to the point of just driving around, but I still watch UA-cam replays for the scenery....
@@thesoundsmith I finished GTA a long time ago but every now and then, I just take a ride to enjoy the landscape as well :-D
People for sure still buy games for graphics. It's even more important than ever, as we are getting so photo real in some games. It's drawing us into the world and aweing us like never before. Myst had atmosphere like no other. It was believable. You felt like you were there, you felt a part of the world, that was the huge selling point. Never before had games pulled you into the world like that. But yes the graphics too were quite something to look at and helped a lot with that. It did amaze people.
@@VROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM In a few years, graphics will not be able to evolve any further. When we reached a point where we can just show anything on the screen. It´s not far into the future. I hope then, devs will finally come up with good gameplay again. I am bored of photorealism nowadays. It doesn´t make the game better. I still play games from the 90s and they are more fun than modern day graphics showoffs with no gameplay depth
So true. Then we got Trespasser, Half-Life etc....
I bought Myst and Riven. To this day I think "I'll finish those games at some point"
every now and then I dig out my Myst CD and give it a go for a few hours to a few days.
Riven.
@@ebridgewater fair play, I tried to edit it twice and spell checker altered it 😁
Played myst and loved it. Played Riven and loved it but was so bummed that you had to change CDs so often that I stopped playing it.
Myst is great, Riven is awesome but I recommend playing these games with someone together. It's much more fun to figure this out with someone you really like to hang around with and discus things.
37 years old right now and I remember when my cousin and I tried day after day to figure out Myst. What an exciting time!
Riven ignited my passion for gaming as a child, starting 30 years of diving further and further into the industry. I'm now working with a friend to start creating games of our own and I could not be more grateful to this man and his brother. Thank you so much, from the bottom of my heart, for sparking joy in millions.
Rachel S if Riven ignites the passion then I’m definitely excited to see what games you create 👍🏻
It's like a parallel to how filmmakers in the early eras of cinema (Buster Keaton, e.g.) were so inventive in their art, because they had to come up with all kinds of clever ways to circumvent the technological limits in front of them to achieve the vision they had.
Myst is such a great experience just for the fact that I had to write down notes. I still have a self-drawn map of that one underground system where the game tells you that it would take "years" to explore which gave me enough motivation to explore it completely as I didn't want to miss anything because seeing a new image was always such a delight - I believe this aspect is something that many new games have lost nowadays namely that seeing a new section of a game should feel really special
Yes, great feeling in myst, drawings and notes all over the desk of outmost importanse :0)
Yes. I think I still have those same notes and drawings. So awesome.
All games I find worth playing have a notebook. It’s part of the fun!
Omgoodness!! I love finding these videos! Love you Rand! Your videos changed and ENHANCED my life!! I’m 66 this year and I backed the 25 anniversary complete Myst set on Kickstarter! It’s the pride and focal point in my living room!! Thank you 🙏🏽
"Catherine my love, I have to leave quickly..." Just goose bumps all over.
torq21 What do you see, Atrus?
."I realized the moment i fell into the fissure....that the book will not be destroyed as i planned"
Abraxas Voice it continued falling into that starry expanse of which I had only a fleeting glimpse....
@@michaelserebreny454 ..this was more than a game to me!!😪😪😪
Abraxas Voice Myst is a way of living and breathing; a way of seeing and understanding the great tree on which we live every day of this life and the next.
I loved Myst and I'll buy anything Cyan makes forever.
same here huge Cyan fan myself. Myst series was my introduction to videogames back when i was 9 going on 10.
Ditto on all counts! Really looking forward to Firmament.
Then your next Cyan game is going to be Firmament.
@@danielduncan6806 But will I be able to play firmament if I haven't finished myst, riven, exile, revelation, end of ages, uru and obduction?
I have all of these btw
Me too! - Mihshehl
An ingredient of success they completely miss is that in an era where "oh just get the developers to be the actors", most games were terrible and schlocky. But the Millers really kind of nailed the roles.
Rand is and always will be Atrus.
Bring me the blue pages!
@@iinRez He still looks like him! All he has to do is drop his voice a little and bam! My boy's writing linking books again.
Agreed. They probably saved a ton of cash too from not having to hire actors.
Agree completely. Atrus was a great character!
I was obsessed with this game in high school. I just played it on the Oculus for the first time in twenty years and it was so amazing. I had forgotten how to solve most of the puzzles so it was like playing it again for the first time only now I felt like I was literally on the island of Myst. If you loved this game you have to play it in VR.
Myst was my late mother's favorite (only!) Computer game. She would spend hours on it and would ask me to come over to help her resolve the hard puzzles. Myst was such an amazing and captivating world. It really set the standard for this style of game and fantasy art worlds. Truly iconic.
Read the books!
@@suicidebylifestyle9267 I wasn't aware they existed. Just checked them out online. Will definitely get them! Thanks!
@@Xceloverdose You're in for a treat! if you remember this post, let me know how you like them when you're done.
Is Myst only available in PCs? I used to play this ages ago. I now have Nintendo switch just recently, would love to play this on switch
I played Myst when I was maybe 12 years old at a party where the grown-ups leave you alone with the other kids. It was and still is the most haunting, magical game I've ever played. Since then I've played every sequel and nothing is more satisfying than getting a puzzle right and seeing everything come together. The music has always haunted me and especially in Riven, some of those vistas will stay with me forever.
No.... it is not the most haunting and magical game..... RIVEN! the sequel to it was lol. The same format and movie animation embedded into the actual gameplay... and the world.... was.... Myst on sterroids.... But ya.... I still never actually ever "finished" Myst either.... lol.
@@rustykoenig3566 I didn't ask you.
@@harkejuice Hahahaha
@@harkejuice I guess you didn't have the chance to play Riven.... usually the sequel to anything usually sucks.. but Riven's story just literally expands upon the Myst story (not the same world but stories are connected.) They introduced actual "motion" and yet it was the same as Myst... only in some spots instead of a picture fading to the next picture it "takes" you to the next point with actual "motion" of traveling there. Everything Myst was they went over the top of everything that made Myst great and pulled Riven OUT of it. I absolutely LOVED both of the games.
@@rustykoenig3566 Did you even read my post, I've played everything they've made. I love Riven, but we're talking about Myst here. I even played URU when it was online. Yes it was awful.
18:24 I'm one of those!!! RAND and ROBYN, I hope you're seeing this!
I remember my parents in the 90s playing Myst, me being maybe around 7 and way too young to get it but I LOVED it, the places were so beautiful, the music eery, the atmosphere was so stunning and captivating. When I was old enough, computers were too advanced to run the first part, but I did manage to play through the others. When I was 21 I got my hands on a PSP and a copy of the game and boy did I play it through! I spent every free minute on it. I recognized all the places from my childhood, all the impossible puzzles from back then suddenly clicked into place. A thousand light bulbs wrapped into nostalgia went off.
A few years later I built a copy of Myst Island in Minecraft, including most of the puzzles (though crudely simplified).
MYST has been one of the greatest joys of my life. I love the game and everything that came with, all the milestones it represents. Many of my generation don't appreciate it and most don't even know it, but that doesn't change how I feel about it.
That's awesome if you ever get a chance you should upload the minecraft, myst
Boy this brings back memories. I was killing time on a computer at my in-law's house, and they had this game installed. I had never before played a computer game. Myst grabbed me immediately. I couldn't walk away. The mood of the game was completely immersive.
@@Ken.- Wow Ken, what a hot take
@@KarlKatten What'd he say?
I met Rand and Robyn Miller when I was in the 8th grade. The Book of Atrus had just been released, and they were doing a tour-one of their stops was at the defunct Tower Books in Portland, OR. I told them I wanted to be a graphic designer, and Rand encouraged me to steer close to my passions. I did, kind of! But I’ll never forget that meeting. Such cool people, and I’ll always hope for a new MYST.
While it's not a Myst title exactly, they are working on a new game right now called Firmament. If you want a Myst type of adventure game, that is coming down the line.
@@Mewzard thank you
Mewzard ARE YOU SERIOUS!!’ OMG I TOTALLY WANNA TRY IT
Alex Voigt I LOVED that book! It made me want to retry the game but I couldn’t.
@@amandaobrien2405 Yeah, it's still being worked on, though they did put out Obduction back in...2016 as well, if you want something to tide you over until then. You may see a familiar face or two in that game, lol.
I was 12 when Myst came out, I didn't even have a computer, but my friend did. I was hanging out at his house and he showed it to me.
That opening narration blew my mind and still stays with me now.
"I realized the moment I fell into the fissure that the book would not be destroyed as I had planned..."
"It left a great taste in peoples psyche" - Well said, exactly the case for me. Like many others probably, my dad showed it to me and it was magical!
Myst was an amazing game for its day. Love the interview with Rand - what a down to Earth person. You can feel his passion for his work.
For its day? If I plugged it in right NOW I would be sucked into it just like I was back then! Even though it was still images the graphics were still amazing and paired with the ambient sounds and music....
I remember, as an 8-year old, playing on my Uncle's iMac and finally making it off the main Myst Island (and to the Mechanical Age, using the rotating tower). I played that game for ages until I ever made it off the main island. What a setting. It really did feel magical. Maybe a bit too difficult for a kid but really well designed.
You're smarter than me I gave up after like 10 min when I was 10
"I may not get it right, and that's okay."
SO inspiration. Love that mentality.
Great video.
Myst will forever be my favorite game series of all time. I'm still trying to finish Obduction, and I'm drooling over the world of Firmament! I even own the novels, and an art book. Everytime I pick up a book, a CD-ROM box, or hear those iconic Myst sounds, I can't help but be hypnotized.
Kimberly Borge I have Obduction but I feel so bad that I just could not get into it. I’m really looking forward to Firmament though, especially in VR!
I never understood it. It was always so unstimulating to me. But I suppose that was perhaps the thing people like about it? If I explored a world, I had to feel like there was something for me to learn, create, and change. Without failure the place has no expectation of me. Without danger there's no fear of being alone in an unknown world. All the dreariness and mood is pointless if there is no risk and loss. Eventually it just patronizes you. Your puzzles aren't meant to keep you from achieving your goals, they are the goals... Just odd for me, needing as soon many games give why Myst does, and richer. I suppose it came at the right time.
Krystal Myth The fact that there was no danger was revelation in a video game. You were free to explore and figure things out at your own pace, without worry or concern, you could just exist. It was a very new concept at the time and very freeing.
I've been struggling with confidence lately, whether or not I'm cut out to actually fulfill my dream of making video games for a living... but your message at the end really reassured me. The fact that I'm only 30, and you're literally twice my age and still making great games is deeply reassuring to me. I'm glad that this video was made.
I still remember when i had to buy a new videocard to make my old pentium display " thousands of colors" for Riven. Good times
I remember when 128 megs of ram was over 300 bucks. LMAO. VOODOO II accelleration :D
@@gozinta82
I still have my Voodoo ii with that short vga cord and the CD-ROM containing the driver and some decent game demos.
Some guy down my block sold me a Pentium system with the card in it for $50 some time around the late 90s.
I remember finishing Riven was a fricking accomplishment. It took me months. It looked insanely awesome at that time. I had a notebook where I took notes and little sketches because there was so much to connect and to figure out. The notebook had more content than the notebooks for some study subjects :-D
I did the same with the "Zork: Grand Inquisitor" game. I ended up with more than 100 A4 pages of handwritten notes. I was so pleased with myself when I managed to finish the game without cheating (by looking at other people's hints) but only using my notes.
I did exactly that but got stumped someplace well into the game. I think if I had realized it was a Hypercard-based game, I could have figured it out but the grids and outcome tables were a great preparation for Foxpro and SQL...
You frickin had to have a notebook and draw sketches. That's what was so fun about it. Brainstorming with your buds too.
I'd love to see those sketches - and notes to, perhaps!
I was a young guy at the time and remember being excited for Riven to come out. I played a ton of it and got really far, but there was so much walking back and forth, and also there were a few too many puzzles that didn't use logic but mostly just just luck and random clicking. That irritated me too much and eventually I didn't finish it. If I can think my way out of it that's great, but if I'm reduced to pure chance and I'm also wasting a ton of time going back and forth trying to figure out what they even want me to do then that didn't cut it. I need to know why that one pixel in the field of grass (or whatever) should have been clicked on. Seriously that was the breaking point after wandering around for hours and hours and then it was just some random chance clicking on some like blade of grass lol. Most of it was awesome though. Loved the worlds.
I really want to buy one of their newest games but the reviews on steam say the same thing, too many random puzzles that have no logic, just chance.
Ars definitely knows their target demographic, these War Stories are amazing.
I was literally just talking about Myst with my dad the other day! We had it on our family's computer growing up and my little brother and I would take turns playing for hours. It was a great exercise in problem solving and logic based puzzles. We loved it and I think it contributed to shaping both of us into who we are today. Cool getting to hear this backstory years later as a young adult!!
Played myst back when I was a kid. I still love this game. No game has ever stuck with me like myst.
I so agree, I was around 30 when I got it when it was new and Ive played most sequels to it. Still is the best game Ive played and a lost format.
You must also read the novels that was written based on the games. Book of Atrus, Book of Ti'ana and Book of D'ni. Fascinating storylines.
And back then when games launched they were actually finished!
Ryan Franke couldn’t agree more!
My copy had a broken image, but it was a non-interactive one, I think sitting on a throne in Mechanical. Otherwise I don't remember any problems. But as Rand said, they were over budget and over time and then it depends on how much extra the publisher is going to give. Gothic 3 or Trespasser give great testimony on how to run into feature-incomplete at release.
Back then you _had_ to have polished every detail because there was no way of distributing patches. We're lucky to live in a time where games can be tweaked after you've bought the thing.
VodkaHindJelly not sure if that’s a good thing or bad thing haha
No. There were games that were not finished that got published way before Myst. You just don't remember them or even know about them. Dishonest and/or badly organized developers still existed. At most, publishers were more forced to tolerate delays.
You just have to research them because back then, they didn't make hate-controversy-parties that they do today (not that they didn't get hate). Even before CD-roms, there were such games. There were also cases where professional reviewers got a different game than what the costumer brought in the store. Even on consoles, there were cases of very badly made games (look up Angry Video Game Nerd for some).
Please understand that I am not trying to defend the practice of releasing an unfinished games and calling them something other than they are. It's just that comments like these depict the game industry as it never was.
Thank you so much for this. Myst was huge for many of us gamers. I had heard of some of the challenges but this was revealing. I was a big user of HyperCard and Myst inspired our company to build a similar game. 7th Guest was a big deal, but none of us were fans of it. The Journeyman Project was great. We went ahead and built a more pure puzzle game in 1993 called Jewels of the Oracle. There's always a compromise with technology so we opted for more of a 3D walk-through experience, rather than dissolving from still to still. That meant we had no room for story elements, but the Millers were better at it than us, anyway. We had one of two 1-speed CD ROM burners in Toronto. It cost us $7000. Blank CDs were about $40 each so when we ended up with coasters we cried. Macromedia Director was our platform but the workhorse tool was DeBabelizer that let us reduce the colour space down to 256 colours. Infini-D was our 3D program and when things came down to the crunch I would take a hard drive of all our files to a friend's company who had dozens of Macs and I would turn on the distributed rendering option. I would set it up at 10 pm and come in at 6am to collect the rendered .movs so as to not be in any of the employees' way. The game was a sizable hit but the publisher did not pay us our royalties. A bittersweet ending to an amazing project. A project we never would have attempted without the inspiration of Myst.
I loved this game when I was a kid. I was so amazed when it came out. I used to play it until the sun came up the next day! Thank you for sharing. I talk to my kids about how wonderful the game was. I used to sleep to the sound effects by the beach. The crashing of the waves... It was beautifully done. Thank you for the gift you gave us.
dude it wasnt that good, any game you can buy these days has much better graphics and sound design you can sleep to, you only liked this game cus you played it when you were young, no one these days will like to play this trash....
@@amandaburleson2035 dude you are missing the point entirely this game was the first of its kind and very special not only to the people that used it but the gaming industry as a whole you should have more respect for how and why things are the way they are now it of course doesnt have the graphics and sound of todays games but it was freekin 30 years ago mostly likely 3 times older than you oh and guess what i dont have to use capitalization or punctuation either its so wonderful what you kids take for granted.
@@beastslayer9153 at least we agree on somehting, punctuation and grammar are not needed, i didnt even notice you didnt use proper grammar, nor did i care, i still understood what you said, and all im saying is this game was all hype. it was for the normies of the time. much better games were already out.
@@amandaburleson2035 It was much more realistic looking than Duke Nuke'm and everything else out there at the time.
"I realized, the moment I fell into the fissure, that the book would not be destroyed as I had planned. It continued falling into that starry expanse of which I had only a fleeting glimpse. I have tried to speculate where it might have landed, but I must admit, however... such conjecture is futile. Still, the question of whose hands might someday hold my Myst book are unsettling to me. I know that my apprehensions might never be allayed, and so I close, realizing that perhaps, the ending has not yet... been written."
Who the devil are you?!
Hello Dave!
@Mildly Amusing Channel I agree with you. Unfortunately Myst V has been written in a way that rather spells the end of this particular saga.
I kept expecting him to say “Bring me blue pages!”
Loved the books and music CD that were tied to Myst
At 17:00 that's actually Riven in the game store, not Myst when he's talking about being in Albuquerque. However, the fact that I recognize the box art and haven't played Riven in 23 years, and even then it was only at a friend's house, is testament to just how memorable of an imprint those worlds left in your mind.
This game made me want to develop video games. I was in my early teens when I got this game with my first PC.
I was part of that "older audience" in my thirties if that counts, and I *loved* MYST and RIVEN and all the others. Those still are my favorite games of all time. Cheers, Russ
its so fascinating to hear what developers go trough and how they solve their problems
Riven was my introduction to the series, watching Mom play it, then eventually getting into it. I haven't finished any yet due to time constraints, but I own all the Myst games now. We are slowly completing them on our own free time. Such a wonderful game collection. Thank you for that interview.
I played this in ‘93/‘94. It was just so unlike any computer game I’d seen before, and it was completely engrossing. It was this lonely world that you traveled to then quite difficult puzzles were inflicted on you. I gave copies to friends because I was so enthusiastic about it. Those were the days of Spaceship Warlock and The 7th Guest. Gosh, I guess that’s almost three decades ago. How time flies.
@alistairmcelwee7467 Hold smokes...the 7th Guest! I also played and loved that game!!!
I remember doing exactly that (card stack thing) in Powerpoint when I was in Primary school. Used MS Paint to draw every single slide with all the different scenarios and outcomes, and then HYPERLINKED invisible buttons to certain slides based on what you clicked. What a time.
I beat it with a friend over a period of around 4 months, while being enlisted in the military. Played each night after polishing our boots. It felt so great to "win" at long last...
Must have been a big empty feeling when it was over.
It was a magical game. I was hooked immediately and finished it in two weeks.
The Indie scene has definitely come back to a really great place. What we need to come back is the Mid level AA games. That market died and just hasn't returned yet.
Persona, Dark Souls, Nier, etc etc. AA is still out there.
@@williancruz9657 I would consider those AAA games.
@@brpadington They have much smaller budgets though.
Have you maybe considered you don't think of the modern AA games as such because graphics and dev tools have gotten so good that the distinction is just not that meaningful?
@@williancruz9657 Those are smaller budget games for sure but they are by large studios. What I think we are missing is medium size studios that specialize in AA games. I don't know anything about Nier so it my fit that description.
@@brpadington FromSoft and Atlus aren't as big as you think.
Persona5 is by an ENORMOUS margin the highest-selling game Atlus has ever made, and it has sold in the same ballpark as games like The Order 1886, which by this point noone remembers, and less than the original PS1 Twisted Metal.
My best friend and I stayed up almost all weekend playing Myst. A part of childhood I'll never forget. I remember getting so lost within that wonderful world. Thanks for the memories guys!
I was floored that Myst was done in HyperCard. These guys are true artist-storytellers. That game was awesome.
This guy was as important as Spielberg for games in his time, and also he looks and sounds exactly like Spielberg.
Although I love Myst, I would give the title "Spielberg of games" to the amazing Ron Gilbert.
@ ok bommer
Funnily enough, Spielberg himself loved Myst.
Those guys, Robyn's musical and graphical art is so important to the experience.
@@ckkitty bommer
This really brings back memories. I played Myst before I was married, and Riven came out after I was married. My wife had heard about Myst but never played it. So when I started playing Riven, she thought she would just look over my shoulder to see what it was about. She quickly got pulled into it as much as I was, and we solved the rest of it together. She came up with solutions to puzzles I never would have on my own without a hint. We then got to relive those moments by solving Obduction together. We're counting the days until Firmament is released.
Thats awesome, played the games with my brother, solving pussles and drawing, taking notes :)
@@holographic_red Did the same :-)
I have to say I’m really happy for these guys. It makes me happy that they had success and I wish the best for them
I have such a huge respect for Rand Miller. I played Myst and Riven when I had like 10 years old and it always has been such a big inspiration for me. Thank you for this episode !
I remember playing this as a kid... 10 years old sitting down with my older brother. Starting to play the game after dinner on Christmas Day and stayed up all night playing. We beat the game by 8 AM. That's one of my fondest memories of childhood.
I had hdhd, couldnt get past the first stage, went back to crash and tomb raider.
Damn. It took me weeks of off an on play to get it all figured out.
You definitely used a walkthrough lol
Having a very hard time believing this
What I love almost as much as the incredible stories these legends tell us is the fact not a single question is heard. No annoying, pretentious, self absorbed, look-at-me social media posers ... just one guy talking us through gaming history with a camera rolling. It is SO refreshing.
I too played this game at certain points but scoffed at friends who had a mac because there was a stigma you were a massive nerd if you had/used one. Umm... yeah literally everything I have, computer wise now is Apple.. and those same "nerds" rule the world!
When I was a child in the 90's I saw the comic, "Myst: Book of the Black Ships" and bought it immediately. It was then that I fell in love with the story. I then bought the 3 Novels in hard cover and read them repeatedly. If I stopped reading them it was only to try and forget a bit of it so I could read them again fresh. That set was eventually stolen so I bought two new sets to replace them, although their condition wasn't as good as my original set.
I printed out every short story from the website of Atrus' journals and I still have them kept to this day.
I read the books so much that I once had a dream of watching a Myst movie. In the dream I saw an opening cinematic of a camera panning to the left with rock in the background panning to a cave opening a contrast of dark rock and lighter dark background with a bluish tint and then I saw the Myst title and I got so excited I woke up.
I then bought the games. Yes, with my own money I saved up for on my own computer that I saved up for. I must have spent a few years waiting. Honestly, I didn't like the Game play nearly as much as I liked the story, but I still enjoyed it. I liked the online game, but I think I would have liked it more if it was a local network game since it really didn't feel like it fit the MMO model.
I was excited when I learned that a new book was being written, then disappointed when it never materialized. If they launched a Kickstarter to fund the novels continuation I'd buy at least a dozen up front no matter how many years I'd have to wait to read it.
When I learned that Myst reached limited run games for the Nintendo Switch I bought a copy to play and a copy to remain sealed as a collectors edition. I will do the same with Riven and any other game in the series they port.
Suffice to say I'm a fan.
I absolutely love the books as well, in fact, I'm probably more of a fan of the books than the games! I read the books after playing all of the Myst games, and they were so good I've read them all at least 3 times.
My first ever experience with a video game was sitting on my Dads lap "helping him" with Myst. I'm 26 now in 2020, and still think about Myst and Riven often.
I still remember playing Myst on my old XT -- It seemed so real that when remembering parts of it it seemed more like remembering something I saw in real world experience
I'm not a gamer. Never really have been. Never really want to be. But Myst, had me entranced back in the day. It was magical in ways that were hard describe. It was almost mythical in some of the story lines, and paired with haunting soundtracks that hold up to this day. It was a masterpiece. Bravo Rand Miller.
I met Rand Miller at PAX one year and talked to him for a little while. My life is complete.
"Hold down the ⌘ key and push Q to quit."
A sentence from a different time! 😁
I don't even know what key that is.
@@3DJapan Command key on a mac; it's next to spacebar (where alt is on a pc).
LOAD"*",8,1
Well that still works on modern Macs!
Google Chrome says this to me today when I push command Q with multiple windows open.
Rand and his glasses are so iconic... I feel like a Beatles fan watching this, I am so excited and I just want to find these people and hug them and scream and never let go...
Also, I love Catherine.
My good friend and I played Myst on his Gateway Computer, yes the one with the cow print.
Cows are the best programmers
Don't forget the 2000! GATEWAY 2000 is the future!
I had a Gateway!
Wait i had a gateway computer and this myst game too. Was it a bundle
@@autonomy.9463 still remember a MDK game with some Launch media CDs. nostalgic
1988 - the year I was born.. 8 years later my father and I picked up Myst.. We spent months, maybe a year and a half to complete / finish Myst. We made drawings, wrote entire journals to get through the journey that Myst was. We managed to complete the game without using a single hint or walkthrough and it has been one of the most magical times to be able to play through that journey that Myst is. Thank you for the memories of a lifetime! Myst truly was and still is a Masterpiece.
The bit about having to fight the data-rate limitations of early CD drives and how they beat them was probably the most interesting part.
@Dubious I believe that in addition to compression, Rand was talking about working out the physical placement of various files on the CD so the head would only have to travel a minimal amount to access a sound that went with a certain graphic. If the sound is used in multiple places, do you save it in multiple locations on the CD, or just do a lot of puzzle-piecing to keep the distances minimal? Nowadays, if you want to burn a CD you just burn it, but back in the days when CD players were slow and computers had a lot less power, you actually needed to design the data layout on the CD for optimal playback.
Regarding images, when you have a choice of thousands of colors but are limiting each image to 256 of them, and different sets of images use different 256-color palettes, this was definitely an issue in the 1990s. Whenever you went from one palette to another, for example dissolving from one image to another, the PCs of the day did an auto-shift of colors that generally looked awful. And I don't mean a little off, I mean weird color flashes and nightmarish imagery. To make the transition look good, you had to do some manual color gymnastics with the palettes. In fact, I had a job in 1992 where all I did for two months was manhandle color palette transitions for a company that produced corporate training CDs.
That issue went away by the late 1990s, and sadly, I am no longer in demand as a Color Palette Manipulator. :)
@@manyworldsvideo VESA BIOS Extension changed everything for DOS games. Then Windows 95 was released and color modes were handled by Windows and videocard drivers.
Literally in the title of the video…
This was my dad's frustration with the first game. We had a 1x CD drive, but it didn't work particularly well. A lot of games even at the time would install a lot of assets to the HDD, and then stream audio from the disc, but because this was a near fully disc based game it was extremely difficult to play at the time. By the time Riven came out it was no longer a problem, but Myst was the great motivation for my dad to upgrade a lot of computer parts lol. Probably the most expensive game he ever played!
That part starts at 7:58
I remember my Dad had a computer with a CD drive waaay before they were common because he was a doctor and needed it for work, and next to his stacks of medical notes was a notebook filled with codes and maps, and I used his notes to play Myst without understanding but was so engrossed by the graphics, because at the time there really was nothing like it. It truly was magic.
This is almost my exact story but my mom was a software testing analyst at work and we always had all the new computer stuff when I was a kid. She played Myst and had a notebook she kept for it. I ended up playing it after her with her notebook. Now I have an Oculus Quest 2 and plan on replaying for thr first time in VR and I can't wait!
Played Myst and Riven as a kid and they were absolutely captivating. My brother and I spent lots of time and notebooks to complete the puzzles. There’s a remaster of Myst with UE4 that’s gorgeous and brings back that nostalgia of the gameplay with modern interface
miss the days where you had to actually figure out the puzzle and not just go to UA-cam for a walkthrough was fun times.
Oh yeah I think I did have notes I took trying to figure things out lol
I was so young but so captivated by these games. I couldnt figure much out, I dont think i ever got off the island....the 7th guest and the 11th hour where also too complicated for my age at the time, so I would visit my older cousin to try to get through them.
Myst destroyed my life. Thankfully I had two more. But truly, Myst was the first game my parents could actually use to force me to do homework. They would hide the disc until I brought then my homework, completed. I hated it. All that annoying junk data "That I was never going to use" that I had to do, just to get my Myst CD back from them.
Please never stop making these videos! These are the very most interesting and well-illustrated interviews with some of the most interesting people imaginable to me.
As teenagers from poor backgrounds my friends and I would club together to buy games or music between us and then we would sit around and ‘share’ the experience. We spent many hours pouring over Myst (as well as ‘the dig, Full throttle, Zork the inquisitor & others) and remember distinctly being blown away by the puzzles.. the underground one with the train.. evil.. just pure evil..
We even played our very first multiplayer game with 2 BBC model B’s hooked up together with one of the thickest interconnects we had ever seen.. and played Ridge Racer the original.
It is thanks to Myst in no small that made all 5 of us go on to work in IT in the years that followed. Proud to say we bought a copy (actually several as we all bought our own in time) when it first came out.. was a magical time.. Some years ago my brother died of a heart attack and to this day whenever I think of him I always think of when we were sat around laughing and swearing playing Myst.
This video series is wonderful. Also, I was one of those kids that had the cool experience of appreciating Myst without playing it. My Mom...who is not a gamer at all...fell in love with story driven puzzle games like Myst and Shivers etc and it's been a cool thing that we have bonded over for many years
Remember actually getting the old pen and paper out to solve these puzzles. Was great times.
Absolutely passionate and lovable. You can just feel the flame coming right through him when he speaks about his child. Probably the best interview so far in the series.
this game changed my life back in 1994 when I was ten. remember calling the number to cyan when I was stuck at a particular spot. think it was robyn miller that helped me out. he was really cool. could have been rand but pretty sure it was robyn
They just had a customer service number that went straight to the developers?!
Was it channelwood? I bet it was channelwood. Confound that ewok village, no wonder they abandoned it.
Jack are you serious?
@@Supercecco85 yes. very
@@seanreynolds1266 mechanical. channelwood wasn't that hard
Thank you, Miller brothers, for all the happy memories. I was 16ish when this came out and loved it. It's one of the rare games that I have re-purchased multiple times. About every 10 years I'm like "I want to play Myst again." Had the original, rebought on GOG, Steam, and the Switch.
Holy crap!!! It's on the Switch????😲😲😲
Welp...that's it. I'm gonna have at it
I got through most of it in my early teens and I always thought about going back.
This game is a timeless masterpiece. I remember sitting there as a young boy trying to figure out the puzzles, at the same time creeped out by the atmosphere of this game which at the time was incredible. Honestly, the game aged well and the remake (latest) is really well done.
Me too, I played this when I was 7 on a Mac emulator in amiga OS which was insane at the time