Game That Changed The World

Released in 2014, realMyst: Masterpiece Edition moved Myst from point-and-click to a fully navigable graphical experience. Featuring dynamic water, weather, lighting, foliage, and more, realMyst: Masterpiece edition was an undeniable leap forward from the original Myst experience, providing fans their first opportunity to actually explore every nook and cranny of the Ages. Essentially, all titles including Myst III & IV are available to purchase - the exception being no original realMyst release. GOG has them as a 'buy series' option as opposed to Steam's bundle grouping as the '25th Anniversary Collection' (basically the same thing, just with or without a fancy title in your digital receipt).

Arriving at a time when PC games were barely established, Myst rapidly found favour among early adopters, library users and the kind of people who keep the plastic sheeting on the back seat of their cars. While the gaming world went crazy for Sonic and Mario, it was a brave gamer who would boast of solving lateral thinking puzzles on his dad's home computer'. An acquired taste it may have been, but the original game has shifted a staggering six million copies, arguably proving the viability of the PC as a gaming medium and helping to establish the healthy scene that we have today.

The equivalent of Stonehenge (both aesthetically and in terms of pace), Myst involved a bizarre story about two brothers being imprisoned for crimes against literature. Not entirely coincidentally, it was the work of two brothers, Robyn and Rand Miller, who began working on the game in 1991 following a modicum of success with a pioneering series of childrens' titles. A big fan of text adventures such as Zork, Rand was the driving force, having dabbled with games ever since somebody hooked me on a timeshare system and I would steal passwords out of the trash to play the games.

You Know, For Kids

According to Rand, the partnership began when he wrote Robyn a letter. I told him we needed to write a new kind of children's software - like a good quality children's book that adults actually want to read too. I wanted to do that for software, but I had to convince him. He's an artist and a musician.' Robyn started on the first page of this book, which held a picture of a fire hydrant. I thought it'd be somewhat interactive and you'd turn the page and go to the next interactive stage and tell a story. However, what actually happened somewhat set our future - Robyn never turned the page. There was a manhole in the street, the manhole cover slid away, a vine grew out of it and you could go down the manhole or climb the vine. Once you did that there was no need to turn the page, there were no other pages. It became a world instead of a book and that really defined our future for us.

That game became The Manhole, and was followed by the likes of Cosmic Osmo and Spelunx, each refining the template for what would be the breakthrough of Myst.

However, as Rand concedes: We didn't know what we were doing at that point. There was nothing defined - Robyn was just drawing pictures as he was going and the world was defining itself. He went down in the manhole cover and said, 'I'll put an island here and then a sunken boat there'. So it was just whatever was in his head - there was no rhyme nor reason to it.'But the concept did eventually evolve into Myst? Yes. To cut a long story short: after a few childrens' games in between, a Japanese company approached us and asked us to do something for an older audience. We were ready - we'd been talking about this for a while, about building much more story and building a goal, because previously we never had one.

Money Money Money

Having wangled $280,000 out of SunSoft (development on Myst eventually cost double that), the Millers began work on their opus. A world away from the arcade action of the consoles of the era, Myst represented something of a gamble.

As Rand says: We were looking at things a little bit differently. Our games were based on the worlds and the stories around them. They wanted something for CD-ROM and we said, great, we're going to build a big thing and we think it'll be appealing to a lot of people'. We had no idea it would be as successful as it was, we just thought we'd build another world. It was an evolution for us more than a revolution.'

Developing a PC game in 199I was a very different process to that of today. However, the technical constraints played an integral part in the evolution of Myst.

Ne knew we had to use CD-ROM, says Rand. We knew that memory footprint was a problem, so anything we wanted to load would need to be small. We knew that consoles were a possibility, so all those constraints were taken into account too. We also knew we wanted some live action, but it had to be small. All these things shaped Myst.

The pair used still images because they could render them. Meanwhile, the Ages (the levels within the game) were used because they wanted to make sure they had small elements that could be loaded a piece at a time. Even the design of seeing the pictures of the brothers in small pieces of the books was used because they could only do postagestamp movies at the time. Any good development takes into account what the technology can do and pushes the envelope past the limitations, adds Rand.

Cd-Rom Abuser

One of the first games to appear on CD-ROM, Myst was undoubtedly a pioneering title for the format. It was far from plain sailing though. The brothers had to try and squeeze everything down to the smallest amount so that it would load faster, and making the movies as small as possible was the challenge. We pushed it to the absolute limit for what we had at our disposal, but it worked.'

It certainly did. Indeed, Myst was inevitably described as photo-realistic' by editors of magazines such as the perfunctorily named CD-ROM User. Nobody had ever seen anything like it at the time, but as Rand concedes: If you look back now it's pretty poor, but we had a lot of things working to our advantage. The success wasn't just because of what we did - the timing was right, CD-ROMs were coming out and it had a certain freshness to it.'

Brothers Gonna Act It Out

For all the technical grappling with Myst, Rand admits that the craziest stuff was just us being in it', referring to the Miller brothers impromptu acting debut.

At some point along the way we knew we had two brothers in it. And we're two guys working out of our homes in Spokane, Washington State, so we're thinking, there's no way we're going to pay people to do this'. We didn't have any money to pay people. The brothers didn't think twice about this DIY method:

We just went in the basement and didn't let anybody watch us. Then we set it up and after getting over the giggling and thinking that this is ridiculous, we put a piece of blue paper behind us and tried to act like these crazy insane brothers that were in the books. It was very unique.'

Despite the unusually hands-on approach, Rand is adamant that they wouldn't have done anything differently. Given the constraints, I think Myst is everything it could have been. I mean, if we'd have had another six months we could have done a few more things here and there, but we did everything as efficiently as we could for what we were trying to do. Because we had some history doing some of these kind of games with the childrens' products, we weren't surprised at what we had at our disposal. We knew what the technology would allow us to do.'

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It's In The Game

However, what the brothers can't have expected is the massive success of the game, and Rand admits that it's still hard to believe. As for his biggest achievement, he cites the stories the pair got from people saying that they felt like they were really there, that it began to feel like a real place.

That's what I'm most proud of, because I still remember Robyn and I both talking about doing everything we could to try and make it feel like you were really there when you were working out how to solve a puzzle or what to do next. The fact that we got letters from people saying I turned down the lights, I put up the sound and I felt like I was exploring this place' was really satisfying.

Unsurprisingly, the sequels followed, beginning with Riven, which Rand claims was one of the best things the duo ever did. However, he's big enough to admit that it was also too tricky and the puzzles too hard. The gameplay in Myst was actually better than in Riven.'

As for Myst III, with its innovative 360-degree view, Rand says: It wasn't our development per se. but it kept the same Myst feel.A different - specifically online -approach was taken for the ill-fated Uru: Ages Of Myst, of which Rand wistfully muses: It's almost a spin-off - it was very different from all the Myst games. We wanted to change the world, but primarily for resource reasons, we didn't get a chance to see what it could do. There was some amazing potential there.'

Bringing the series up-to-date, Rand reckons Revelation is an amazing piece of work: It opens up the story and does things we've always wanted to do.'

Send In The Clones

Given the amazing success of the series, it's remarkable how few Myst clones there have actually been.

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As Rand comments: That really surprises me. There's a genre of games that are based on stories and exploration, typically they're called adventure games, but it's a dying breed in some regard. Because of Myst's success, we thought there'd be a whole huge evolution of those games, people pushing it further and further and further. However, I don't think we've gotten there.

Contrary to many people's belief that adventure games are a dead genre, Rand believes that they're actually the final frontier in interactive gaming right now: The gameplay systems we're working with now are all very well known, we're just doing them better now. There's nothing wrong with that, but to me the last vestige is this one, the adventure game, and I think it's waiting for someone to make another innovation.'

New Dawn

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So does Rand reckon that he'll be the one to revolutionise the genre in the future? I don't know that it'll be us, but it'll be done by someone who brings innovation to storytelling. It needs someone to base a game on exploring and storytelling that will then bring in a whole new generation of people, making them say, 'I felt like I was really there'. I hope it happens - that some game somewhere touches that nerve again. There's so much potential there, it feels like it's still the infancy of that part of the industry. There's something inherent in human nature, the desire to explore. I think we touched on that a little bit in the Myst series..