Add that to the fact that Tim Berners-Lee was also inspired by Hypercard, I feel like the web that we have now really is a big, beefed-up, networked remanufacture of Hypercard.
Whenever I see a Myst screengrab I always think "Look, the Web!" Again, as a non-programmer, this is probably just some useless observation, but its inspirational and evocative to me nonetheless. It gets me musing that there are some uses for what we've got now that we're not seeing, and some folks should be exploring. For me, its storytelling, and I bet we could all do some pretty damn cool storytelling with the toolkit we're sitting on.
Perhaps Myst doesn't actually demonstrate a hidden value, but I always point to Hypercard and its friendliness & useability when smarter-than-me people tell me Javascript is crap. People I know from that era that were technically inquisitive tend to point to Hypercard and go: "Yeah! Hypercard was the shit!" or some variation of that.
Hypercard/HT was just used to stitch it together, most of the presentation was done with the help of a crapload of XCMDs. I doubt the HyperTalk involved was particularly complicated, but I can't say for sure, because they managed to make the stacks resistant to introspection.
How much of a "market" was there in XCMDs? As in, were they commonly exchanged or reused in any sort of open-source way, or were they written in-house? I know we're talking about Myst specifically, but I wonder if there's any community parallel to what we see with libraries & APIs now.
Although I'm just flipping over rocks looking for similarities, it's a blast to see when and how certain structures have been tried-out.
Holy Smokes.. the more I read about Hypercard, the more I realize that Myst was quite a huge hack!
The XCMD part is clutch. I'm curious what that community looked like, and how that code was exchanged. Beyond disks, did anyone ever host anything that looked like a repo on the early Net?
Maybe part of its popularity was the illusion (through pre-rendered images) that your computer could show you more "real" worlds than you ever thought possible. That was certainly one of the things I thought was so cool about Myst.
If that's the case, it partly explains why nothing seemed to follow in its footsteps: you can only pull the rabbit out of the hat once.
I think that really happened with Riven. It's easy to forget, but some of those stills were as beautiful and realistic as anything being done in realtime 3D games today. [1] [2]
I love BioShock and I desperately want modern games to be as immersive as Riven, but this example image illustrates why it's often obvious that I'm in a flimsy world made of huge polygons (the tracks in the sky) and repeated flat low-resolution plant textures with some transparency (lower left). Being willing to spend hours rendering a single frame and having an artist make sure that every viewpoint looks perfect is what made these things possible back then. We clearly have more freedom to physically choose our viewpoint in games today but I can't pretend that freedom did not come at a huge graphical cost (still catching up 16 years later).
From a purely photorealistic perspective, that looks absolutely awful. It's literally a cartoon world.
That was their stylistic choice, of course, and there's nothing wrong with that. But it's off the mark to hold that up as an example of excellence in photorealism. It certainly wasn't trying to look real.
I wasn't trying to hold it up as an example of photorealism. One of the things we've learned since then, by virtue of our ready access to high-quality realtime graphics, is that photorealism was overrated at the time.
Indeed, it is a choice... and that is part of my point. We've not only got very photorealistic graphics, we've got the experience to know we can do better. Odds are Myst, if made today, would not be seeking photorealism itself! I'm sure it would adopt a style too.
But in terms of quality, yes I still say this looks better. Where Myst has a muddy, hypercompressed image that can barely fit the one visual theme in it due to resource constraints, Bioshock here has the visual bandwidth to show multiple focal points of interest, without it having to feel "crowded" because it's so much bigger, and yes, all in realtime.
These days the thing that strikes me about games is not so much the texture and model quality as the jerky, buggy movement. A 1950s 12fps Warner Brothers cartoon has better walk cycles and way better dynamic action than any 3d videogame I've seen.
BioShock is so stylized that it's hard to compare to Riven's attempt at photorealism. But the big difference with prerendered, even 15 years old prerendered, is the lighting. You can't get this kind of light quality in a modern realtime 3d game:
Sure you can; you prerender the lighting information. It's a bog-standard technique. You can't necessarily get it with dynamic lighting in realtime (it depends on exactly what you're asking for), but then again, you definitely don't get dynamic lighting in a prerendered scene, so....
Are you sure? One could argue Myst is not much more than a fairy tale with a set of beautifully rendered illustrations. The illustrations weren't _that_ brilliant on their own, and the fairy tale part wasn't in a league of its own at all.
The combination was quite new, though and execution certainly was very good.
However, I think that rabbit did get pulled out of the same hat earlier a couple of times. At the very least, the first movie and "the wizard of Oz" did the same.
I also think it isn't hard to think of future products that might give the same, if not a much better, 'wow' effect. For example, imagine wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling 300 DPI displays showing a physically realistic world, showing Tranquility Base on July 20, 1969. Now, imagine that in interactive form.
On the other hand, the internet has made it harder to be wowed by new technologies because chances are you will read about a product far before seeing it for the first time. Because of that, I think it takes a much larger jump in quality to be wowed.
> The illustrations weren't _that_ brilliant on their own
The impressive part is that they weren't illustrations, they were individual renders of from 3D models of the worlds, designed, built and rendered on computers with a small fraction the processing power of my cell phone: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94pzx_9LkVI
I think "Walk" is stretching it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst: "The player moves the character by clicking on locations shown on the screen; the scene then crossfades into another frame."
So, just like Google Streetview, with way fewer, way higher quality images.
Back to the 'rabbit out of the hat' subject: I found the 3D view in iOS maps on an iPad way more a 'rabbit' thing than I found Myst a rabbit at the time (the first city I saw it was Rome. I looked at a few others, but still think that is the best)
I think the Cyan Worlds guys might have the right idea at the right time. With the Oculus Rift coming out at some point soon in a more general fashion, it could be very good timing. I think basically this class of games could actually be perfect for the platform. A lot of the video of trying to play Team Fortress and similar on O.R. kind of makes me dizzy.
I think many people (myself included) would be very interested in seeing a O.R powered 'Myst' game of some sort or another. If anyone remembers the movie eXistenZ, I can somehow see worlds like that eventually happening. Would be interesting stuff if actually taken outside of the sci-fi context!
Edit: The right idea at the right time was in regards to Kickstarter.
OpenUru [1] has the source code and the content creation tools required to do something like you are describing. You might have to modify the client, to handle the perspective change, but it would even allow for online multiplayer puzzle solving and user created content.
At Starry Expanse (the remake of Riven, which is the sequel to Myst), we put some of the work we've done into the Oculus Rift... it was absolutely breathtaking. The Myst series is absolutely the perfect genre for that platform, in my opinion.
Yes, more cerebral yet immersive games like The Witness, Kairo, Dear Esther, and Routine are definitely on the rise, and OR support will make some of them really shine, I think. I'm really looking forward to those rather than, say, Call of Duty: OCULUS EDITION.
After a fashion, I think part of the success of Minecraft is because it ties deeply into the open world, build and explore feelings that Myst hit upon. Indeed, the audience of players is similar in how it ranges from young kids to the oldest of us. On the UK Minecraft server I frequent, the average age is late 20s up. Some of us are in their 40's and 50's even.
I seriously doubt that. Myst was entirely unlike Minecraft - it contains a finite amount of content to explore, and your interactions with that content are limited entirely to viewing and exploring what the developers put there. You can't create anything, and you can't go outside the boundaries drawn by the game.
Minecraft's lack of borders is certainly part of why it has managed to outsell the entire Myst series (though it's less impressive when you consider how much larger the market is these days, and how much easier it is to get to 12 million sales). But the atmosphere of mostly-peaceful exploration of a different world is something that Mincraft and Myst undoubtedly share, and something that hasn't been recreated by very many games in between. Bethesda's RPGs do an okay job of allowing exploration, but they come with a heavy emphasis on combat and a very in-your-face plot line that completely changes the mood of the exploration. Minecraft and Myst just drop you into a new world without any preface, challenge, or goal.
I'm kind of perplexed that "adventure games" that consumed much of my childhood seem to have died as a genre.
Myst seemed like another in a long line of fantastic games where the goal was exploration and puzzle solving, like Maniac Mansion, Space Quest, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, etc.
I think Limbo was the most recent game I played that had that same feel.
Why aren't there games like this now? Is there no interest?
There are lots of these games (at least in Germany where they are rather successful, although in its niche). For example I can recommend most of the adventure games that Daedelic Entertainment (a studio from Hamburg/Germany) produced:
- The Whispered World
- Edna bricht aus (Edna & Harvey: The Breakout) (don't be put off by its graphics)
- Harveys neue Augen (Edna & Harvey: Harvey’s New Eyes) - The sequel to Edna & Harvey: The Breakout
The Deponia series from Daedelic is also said to be very good (haven't played it, though).
I could list you lots of other very good adventure games from the last years, also from other studios.
OK, I'll list some older ones, that I can highly recommend (some are older - mainly for the reasons that I had much more time playing adventure games these days):
Games by Funcom (from Norway)
- The Longest Journey
Of all adventures that I've played I consider this as my absolute favorite. I won't spoil the story here. Unluckily it's rather difficult to get to run properly on modern computers. :-(
- Dreamfall: The Longest Journey
The sequel to The Longest Journey. I didn't like it so much, mainly because of the action elements. I'd like to mention that in November 2014 the sequel to Dreamfall called "Dreamfall Chapters" is to be released. This game was funded by a Kickstarter. The developers promised to drop the action elements.
Games by Future Games (from Czechia; now bankrupt)
- Black Mirror: Der dunkle Spiegel der Seele (this is the name under which it was published in Germany)
A rather serious, dark adventure. In Germany two sequels were published, about which I can't say anything, since I didn't play them.
- Nibiru: Der Bote der Götter (this is the name under which it was published in Germany)
Haven't played it, but it has its fans.
The next game that Future Games developed (Reprobates: Insel der Verdammten (for this game I also only know its German name)) was rather bad. I really don't recommend it (although the story wasn't as black as it is painted in many reviews).
Games by Péndulo Studios (from Spain)
- Runaway: A Road Adventure
This is probably the adventure game which brought back the renaissance of adventure games. This game is considered as rather hard (small, difficult to find hotspots) and even lead to the concept formation of "Runaway Syndrome" (meaning that you often have to return to "containers" to look whether you find an item in it, for which now a use could be found). Nevertheless: I consider it as a pretty good serious (despite its comic graphics) adventure.
This game has two sequels
- Runaway 2 – The Dream of the Turtle
Here the developers tried to make the game more funny and bright - which fans didn't like (it's still a good game). It is ending in a steep cliffhanger.
- Runaway: A Twist of Fate
In this game the trilogy ends. More dark and serious as the first part. If you play the game you'll notice that the developers wanted to make part 2 "forgotten" since the cliffhanger at the end of "Runaway 2" is resolved completely differently than you would have expected.
Games by House of Tales (from Germany)
- The Moment of Silence
A science fiction adventure that poses lots of questions about surveillance (which is especially interesting if you compare these to the leaks of Snowden).
- Overclocked: A History of Violence (English title)
A dark story about a former American military psychiatrist who has to treat five amnesic teens suddenly appearing with guns. For this he has to go deep into their subject minds. I highly recommend it.
Games by Deck 13 (from Germany)
- The Ankh Trilogy consisting of Ankh, Ankh: Heart of Osiris (Ankh: Herz des Osiris), Ankh: Battle of the Gods (Ankh: Kampf der Götter)
I only played the first two parts of it. The best way to describe these adventure games is: what Monkey Island is to pirate games are the Ankh games to the ancient egypt. The first part is good, but the second one is IMHO even much better.7
Games by Microïds (from France)
- Syberia & Syberia II
A melodrama about a female lawyer who must find the secret heir of an automaton factory who was a genius inventor.
Beyond what other people have mentioned, check out the Syberia games and The Longest Journey which are a bit older. Frogware put out a series of Sherlock Holmes-based adventures as well. And Gemini Rue, The Raven, Resonance and the Runaway series. Also Time Gentlemen, Please! and Ben There, Dan That! are too funny.
Adventure games didn't die, they just became niche and indie. They moved to Europe, the leading character is more likely to be female these days, and the games are made by smaller companies.
Try out the Special Editions of Monkey Island 1 and 2. Also Monkey Island 5. And the Sam and Max episodes. And, well, basically anything by Telltale Games http://www.telltalegames.com/games/
The "Horror Adventure" or "Survival Horror" genre has spawned off this style of game. They have similar aspects like puzzle solving, no focus on killing enemies.
They are actually quite scary though and that is the focus, so there's less puzzle solving.
Telltale Games has been carrying the torch for these kinds of games for the last decade. Beside resurrecting old LucasArt staples like Monkey Island and Sam & Max, they’ve launched other franchises to the format: Bone, Homestar Runner, and The Walking Dead come to mind. They also occasionally score a big license, like Back to the Future and Jurassic Park.
Personally, when I play a game like Scribblenauts, where I can solve a problem in a variety of ways, I can't help but wish that there were adventure games that allowed for the same amount of lateral thinking.
I'd recommend playing it on a tablet actually, or even a PC. I think for these kinda reasons it might be a good idea to have an iPad besides an Android smartphone, that way you get the best out of both worlds.
So I've been playing through Mass Effect 3 again on the PS3 and can see the sorts of influences Myst had on designers of more "modern" games. One of the more interesting aspects where the 'side' stories, not essential to the game but added depth to some part of it. Reading through the political infighting in the email on data pads, or some of the radio stuff on GTA. All "atmosphere" which, prior to Myst, wasn't nearly so prominent.
Marathon (released in 1994) did the same sort of thing - lots of backstory revealed in drips and drabs via computer terminals. The team that did the Marathon series (originally a Mac-only title) later went on to develop Halo.
Without Myst there's no Grand Theft Auto V or Assassin's Creed
Really? That's a bold statement. I don't agree with it, but it's bold nonetheless.
There's going to be some big publishers out there who will want to do this [too]. There's big money here for them. And I don't think they went after it.
Off the top of my head I can think of 'The 7th Guest'. There were plenty of rendered CD-ROM games just none as successful as 'Myst'.
In a certain abstract sense, blockbuster games of previously unacclaimed genres all enable one another. Without Super Mario Bros 3, there would be no Myst, if you look at it from that angle. Yet without D&D, there would be no Super Mario Bros. And without Tolkien, there would be no D&D! So Without Tolkien, there is no GTA V.
I actually preferred The 7th Guest to Myst. It was a much darker game though, which probably hindered it's popularity with some people. The music/sfx in it were fantastic imho.
If you liked Myst and 7th Guest, you should take a look at The Room, a game that I would say is somewhere between the two both in tone and in puzzle style and intensity.
The 7th Guest also had a story where you interacted with the multitude of other people in Stauf's mansion. In Myst, your brief interactions were with two dudes in books. You were very alone in Myst, not as much in the 7th Guest.
Would it be outrageous to suggest that smaller and narrower (but still exploratory) indie puzzle-solving games like _Machinarium_ occupy a substantial portion of the Myst-like niche in the modern video game market?
It's part of it, but Myst's allure was always more than pure puzzle solving. There were plenty of adventure/puzzle games before Myst, but it was the open world, exploratory nature of Myst that was its unique appeal.
Well, because it seems as if the article suggested that nothing has filled the niche, and because the exploratory nature of Myst is present to a smaller extent, and various other features such as the "unassuming stranger" component are replaced.
And because I'm in a rhetorical mood tonight because of work-related communications sitting in my inbox, since you ask. :P
Some of my most vivid memories regarding video games is playing Myst and Riven with my friends. We took turns controlling the player. We would take notes of things that might be useful in later puzzles with actual pencils and paper. We stayed up all night playing it trying to get as deep into the world as possible.
I still have a copy of the game and play it every once in awhile for nostalgia's sake.
Much was said when Bioshock Infinite came out that such a well-crafted world (though admittedly, a bit more like a theme park than a believable city) deserved to be the setting for an adventure/exploration game, not merely an FPS.
Interesting. Myst was a defining part of my childhood and I reluctantly put up with the shooting and fighting elements of BioShock, Assassin's Creed, Red Dead Redemption, and Mass Effect just so that I can experience and explore the worlds in which they take place. Loved this article.
I felt exactly the same way. I "tolerated" the gun fights in Infinite, but the story and world-building were what I was really there for.
I was talking with a friend today about how interesting it would've been if Elizabeth's "quantum powers" had been explored as a puzzle solving device rather than a "summon furniture" mechanic. I feel like that could've been a Portal-esque revolution in gameplay.
And yet no one seems to do this in games built around this idea like Second Life. Does it take a AAA shoot-em-up title to commission a virtual world worth exploring?
I used to play realMYST (the real-time 3D version) with my 3D stereoscopic glasses back in ~2004 and it was indeed awesome. Exploring the ages was a treat in real 3d.
I love discovery- & puzzle-based exploratory story games. Grim Fandango was another one, which I adore. It came out a few years after Myst, and I really wished that they would make another Grim Fandango (or at least make it playable on today's computers)!
A minor correction: Grim Fandango used the GrimE engine, not the SCUMM engine, and it doesn't work with ScummVM.
However, ScummVM's sister project, ResidualVM, was created to do for the GrimE engine what ScummVM did for the SCUMM engine, so you can still play the game on modern OSs without too much hassle.
The likelihood of Lucasarts classics ever being re-released is miniscule, since why would Disney put effort into putting out The Dig or even Monkey Island when they could make ten times as much money from Star Wars?
Slightly OT, but boingboing have an article [1] today about companies in Beijing that offer real-world "mystery room" scenarios that resemble Myst puzzles:
"...customers are locked into single-room funhouses where they have to solve a mystery in order to escape. Some mysteries are supernatural, others are crime-scenes, and others are "hospital-themed." They're inspired by similar video-games and cost less than a movie-ticket to play."
Other than the graphics the big thing I remember about Myst is the gameplay was so different than arcade style games, it was a thinking game.
It was one of the main reasons I finally took the plunge and got a PC, nearly $4,000 (1993/94 Canadian dollars) to play a game :P well more than that but it was a good part of it.
At the time a PC in a private home wasn't really all that common, at least in my region, so this hot game on this thing called an "IBM compatible personal computer" piqued the interest of many people and drove sales.
Am I the only one who found Myst incredibly sterile and boring coming from LucasArts and Sierra Adventure games? I never played it for more than maybe 20 minutes.
I once heard the upsurge in interest in comic books in the early 90s described as though they thought comic books were becoming as popular as pop music when in reality it was more like jazz: a lot of good stuff, but not widely popular. Adventure games are the same.
There was another game of this genre (static user open world adventure??) that taught intro physics, and you used the learned knowledge to solve the puzzles:
Myst's legacy is that if something is pretty, people will buy it, play it, talk about it until the newest pretty thing comes out, then forget about it.
This article is completely delusional. Myst was not this huge, influential masterpiece the way it paints. The Sopranos changed television. Myst did not change video games. It was talked about like the Sopranos, but only for a year after it came out. And it didn't have a lasting impact on the games industry. It looked good for the time, then quickly became outdated and is clearly a relic of its time, like wide, ill-fitting jackets and pleated pants. The gameplay offered nothing new - better adventure games (like those offered by LucasArts and Sierra) were doing more for longer. But its influence was an illusion. Graphics have always been getting better and striving for more photorealism. Myst didn't have any affect on that mindset, it just had decent graphics for when it came out.
Myst's legacy is that if you make something pretty enough, the buzz it generates will lead to huge sales until people realize it's an illusion. Which is why these guys weren't able to do anything after Myst. Meanwhile, Grand Theft Auto, Half Life, Assassin's Creed, and Zelda and Mario, these games that Myst apparently enabled, continue to move people and make huge amounts of money.
* Got the mainstream to talk about games in a way that it hadn't before.
* Enabled many other games by selling the hardware it needed to run.
* Is a tentpole in a (now again growing) subgenre of games that focus on ambience. It may not do Grand Theft Auto numbers, but the medium is richer for its existence. It's a valid way to use a computer to provide an experience many people find compelling.
* Intrigued many artists enough to start viewing the computer as a credible art tool and dive into 3D computer graphics.
It didn't do all of these things all alone, no. But it was part of the times, and a significant one at that. If you ask me, that's enough of a legacy to call it interesting.
My memory is hazy enough that I can't quite remember what sort of uncommon hardware Myst would have needed to run. Are you referring to CD-ROM drives, or VGA graphics cards, or something else?
The former; Myst and Wing Commander 3 are usually held up as the two titles that significantly accelerated/drove the roll-out of CD-ROM drives into consumer's homes.
It's funny. Optical drives basically scream "obsolete!" at me now, such that it's hard to remember when they were so important, even though I was around for it.
I also remember the time when they were rare, held what seemed like incredible amounts of data and were very expensive as a computer accessory. I have some Amiga magazines advertising disc burners for around $4000 in 1991. My Amiga had a 20 mb hard drive, floppy drives and no optical drive (a read only drive was 600-800 and somewhat pointless for most everyone).
Arcade games based on laserdiscs were quite impressive to me as a child, such as Space Ace. That title seemed quite futuristic in 1988 in no small part due to the giant rainbow disc it flaunted.
They were very important. There was a large gap in the mid to late 90s - early 2000s where we would have had to use floppy disks if not for CDs. Broadband wasn't widely available until the mid 2000s.
Serious question: if Myst didn't actively influence games, why is it that I have heard of Myst despite it being "before my time" (I was 6 when it was first released)? I've never played the game or seen anyone play it, and yet in my mind's eye I can see the iconic art style, the iconic "M Y S T" logo, etc. Does it just have a cult following that I've been exposed to due to my participation in online communities and other PC gaming communities?
It was a popular "pack in" title with things like CD-ROM drives, so there were a gazillion copies distributed, even though it probably didn't sell that many at full retail.
Edit since someone downvoted this:
"Released in 1993, it became the non-gamers' game. "Oh, I don't really like videogames, but I did like Myst." It sold more copies than Kinkos - well over six million. Everyone with a PC in the nineties had a copy, you'll be told. And you know why? Because it was given away with absolutely everything. If you bought a PC, you got given Myst. New printer? Myst. Upgrading your RAM, here, have a copy of Myst. Vast piles of Myst were causing terrible landslides, killing hundreds of children, all around the world."
You've heard of it because guys who grew up in that area suffering from extreme bouts of nostalgia produce "Best Games of the 90's" lists featuring Myst or make grand statements about the game on forums/twitter/facebook/blog/etc.
I played it when it first came out and really it's not all that noteworthy these days unless you are talking about 1993 specifically.
"Myst was generally praised by critics. Wired and The New York Times suggested that Myst was evidence that video games could in fact evolve into an art form.[36] Entertainment Weekly reported that some players considered Myst's "virtual morality" a religious experience.[37] Aarhus University professor Søren Pold pointed to Myst as an excellent example of how stories can be told using objects rather than people.[38] Laura Evenson, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, pointed to adult-oriented games like Myst as evidence the video game industry was emerging from its "adolescent" phase.[39]"
That style of art did influence me in art school back in the 90s, I was working with a free beta version of Rhino3D. Rhino3D.com only a few years ago removed my 1990s models from their galleries but here's what I'm talking about, thanks to Wayback Machine! http://web.archive.org/web/20030707154940im_/http://www.rhin...
"The Room" on iOS is a puzzle game with a very similar feel, albeit on a much smaller scale. (with no outdoor scenes - you're just figuring out a complicated multi-part artifact inside a room, complete with an ominous backstory that gradually gets pieced together).
> Myst's legacy is that if something is pretty, people will buy it, play it, talk about it until the newest pretty thing comes out, then forget about it.
One of the things that I enjoy most about Myst is its atmosphere, even today when its graphics are considerably outdated. As an adventure type game, interacting with the game and the story it tells is a huge part of keeping you interested in playing the game, so I don't really buy that this was just some "ooo shiny" fad game.
> This article is completely delusional. Myst was not this huge, influential masterpiece the way it paints. The Sopranos changed television. Myst did not change video games. It was talked about like the Sopranos, but only for a year after it came out. And it didn't have a lasting impact on the games industry. It looked good for the time, then quickly became outdated and is clearly a relic of its time, like wide, ill-fitting jackets and pleated pants. The gameplay offered nothing new - better adventure games (like those offered by LucasArts and Sierra) were doing more for longer. But its influence was an illusion. Graphics have always been getting better and striving for more photorealism. Myst didn't have any affect on that mindset, it just had decent graphics for when it came out.
Myst has most certainly influential to a good degree. This game has been ported A LOT and is still talked about. It definitely has some influence on modern game designers (The Witness and Gone Home come to mind). It also spawned 4 official sequels over 14 years (Myst 5 came out in 2005). That the gameplay is not wholly original or that Myst isn't the absolute genre-defining title for adventure games doesn't mean it isn't influential.
> Myst's legacy is that if you make something pretty enough, the buzz it generates will lead to huge sales until people realize it's an illusion. Which is why these guys weren't able to do anything after Myst.
Plenty of game devs and designers do not release many games or only have 1 or 2 hits, but that doesn't diminish anything about those games.
> Meanwhile, Grand Theft Auto, Half Life, Assassin's Creed, and Zelda and Mario, these games that Myst apparently enabled, continue to move people and make huge amounts of money.
Mario and Zelda were things before Myst and all of those games series have had their own transformations and changes over sequels. But we know the adventure games, including first person types, are not dead and are having a bit of a resurgence right now, esp. in the indie scene, so I wouldn't write Myst off so easily.
As wolfgke points out, there are a lot of games that were inspired by Myst and Riven, but unfortunately I've never found one that got it right the way Riven did.
The thing about Riven, for me, that made it so compelling was that the puzzles were mostly integrated seamlessly into the world. Even Myst didn't really accomplish this to the same extent Riven did. In Riven, exploration was not distinct from puzzle solving. Rather, the two terms were nearly synonymous. Some of the hardest puzzles could only be figured out by wandering around the world and soaking everything in; staring at the marble puzzle without realizing what anything on it represented about the world around you wouldn't get you anywhere.
Myst IV came closer to replicating this, and by God it was and is gorgeous. But I personally found some of the puzzles in Myst IV to simply be too brutal, and the world overall was broken into pieces like in the original Myst rather than one more seamless environment.
There was. Examples are the adventure games that were produced by Detalion (a Polish studio) (most popular ones:
- Schizm: Mysterious Journey
- Mysterious Journey II (also known under the name "Schizm II: Chameleon" and in Germany "Schizm II: Trügerische Wahrheit")
- Sentinel - Descendants In Time (also known under the name "Realms of Illusion" and in Germany "Sentinel: Verborgene Existenzen")
(To my knowledge) mainly in Germany also the RHEM series (an indie game series) had its followers.
What all these games did - in my opinion - wrong, is that they concentrated a lot on puzzle solving (often with really hard puzzles; especially about the Schizm/Mysterious Journey series some people say that you'll probably only like them if you either study mathematics or physics ;-) ) and not so much on exploring. Myst and especially Riven mainly concentrated mainly on exploring, while not so much on puzzle solving. This IMHO made the huge appeal Myst and Riven made, which other studies "didn't get".
"Myst's legacy is that if you make something pretty enough, the buzz it generates will lead to huge sales until people realize it's an illusion. Which is why these guys weren't able to do anything after Myst."
Riven was also a pretty big success, huge even for its time (though not as big as Myst), and I found it to be a much better game. I found Riven simply enthralling, in a way that no game before or since has been.
> Myst's legacy is that if something is pretty, people will buy it, play it, talk about it until the newest pretty thing comes out, then forget about it.
Myst - 1993
Rise of the Robots - 1994
People not aware of RotR should do some googling. The pre-release hype was impressive. The game was shiny and looked nice. It was appalling to play.
> Rise of the Robots was announced early in development, and generated considerable buzz for its advanced graphics. On release it became notorious in the video gaming industry for myriad crippling gameplay problems. Today it is generally considered one of the least successful and most critically reviled fighting games of its time.
I agree, while Myst pulled in a lot of casual gamers, they didn't become gamers after playing the game.
Personally I never played r, as I found the mechanics to e entirely unengaging. The game is essentially a raytrace slideshow. I'd rather play Zork or say, Lunar 2.
Also, Brendan Eich was inspired by Hypercard/talk as well when he was pushing out Javascript: https://twitter.com/search?q=%40brendaneich%2C+hypercard
Add that to the fact that Tim Berners-Lee was also inspired by Hypercard, I feel like the web that we have now really is a big, beefed-up, networked remanufacture of Hypercard.
Whenever I see a Myst screengrab I always think "Look, the Web!" Again, as a non-programmer, this is probably just some useless observation, but its inspirational and evocative to me nonetheless. It gets me musing that there are some uses for what we've got now that we're not seeing, and some folks should be exploring. For me, its storytelling, and I bet we could all do some pretty damn cool storytelling with the toolkit we're sitting on.
Perhaps Myst doesn't actually demonstrate a hidden value, but I always point to Hypercard and its friendliness & useability when smarter-than-me people tell me Javascript is crap. People I know from that era that were technically inquisitive tend to point to Hypercard and go: "Yeah! Hypercard was the shit!" or some variation of that.