Myst
is a graphic adventure video game designed and directed by the brothers Robyn and Rand Miller. It was developed by Cyan Worlds, a Spokane, Washington-based studio, and published and distributed by Brøderbund. The Millers began working on Myst
in and released it for the Macintosh computer on September 24, 1993; it was developer Cyan's largest project to date. Remakes and ports of the game have been released for Microsoft Windows, Sega Saturn, PlayStation, Jaguar CD, AmigaOS, CD-i, 3DO, PlayStation Portable, and Nintendo DS by publishers Midway Games, Sunsoft, and Mean Hamster Software.
Myst
puts the player in the role of the Stranger, who uses an enchanted book to travel to the island of Myst. There, the player uses other special books written by an artisan and explorer named Atrus to travel to several worlds known as "Ages". Clues found in each of these Ages help reveal the back-story of the game's characters. The game has several endings, depending on the course of action the player takes.
Upon release, Myst
was a surprise hit, with critics lauding the ability of the game to immerse players in the fictional world. The game was the best-selling PC game of all time, until The Sims
exceeded its sales in . [1] Myst helped drive adoption of the then-nascent CD-ROM format. Myst
's success spawned four direct video game sequels as well as several spin-off games and novels.
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MYST TICKETS
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Gameplay
The gameplay of
Myst
consists of a
first-person journey through an interactive world. The player moves the character by clicking on locations shown in the main display; the scene then crossfades into another frame, and the player can continue to explore. Players can interact with specific objects on some screens by
clicking or dragging them.
[2] To assist in rapidly crossing areas already explored,
Myst
has an optional "Zip" feature. When a lightning bolt cursor appears, players can click and skip several frames to another location. While this provides a rapid method of travel, it can also cause players to miss important items and clues.
[3] Some items can be carried by the player and read, including journal pages which provide
backstory. Players can only carry a single page at a time, and pages return to their original locations when dropped.
[4]
To complete the game, the player must explore the seemingly deserted island of Myst.
[5] There the player discovers and follows clues to be transported via
Linking books to several "Ages", each of which is a self-contained mini-world. Each
Age—named Selenitic, Stoneship, Mechanical, and Channelwood—requires the user to solve a series of logical, interrelated puzzles to complete its exploration. Objects and information discovered in one Age may be required to solve puzzles in another Age, or to complete the game's primary puzzle on Myst. For example, in order to activate a switch, players must first open a safe and use the matches found within to start a boiler.
Apart from its predominantly nonverbal storytelling,
s gameplay is unusual among adventuring computer games in several ways. The player is provided with very little backstory at the beginning of the game, nor are any goals or objectives laid out. This means that players must simply begin to explore. There are no obvious enemies, no physical violence, and no threat of "dying" at any point,
although it is possible to reach a few "losing" endings. There is no time limit to complete the game.
The game unfolds at its own pace and is solved through a combination of patience, observation, and logical thinking.
Story
The game's instruction manual explains that an unnamed person known as the
Stranger stumbles across an unusual book titled "Myst". The Stranger reads the book and discovers a detailed description of an island world. Placing his hand on the last page, the Stranger is whisked away to the world described, and is left with no choice but to explore;
[6] the player then gains control and is allowed to wander the new surroundings.
Myst, the island world described in the book, contains a library where two additional books can be found, colored red and blue. These books are traps which hold
Sirrus and
Achenar, the sons of
Atrus, who lives on Myst island with his wife Catherine. Atrus uses an ancient practice to write special "linking books", which transport people to the worlds, or "Ages", that the books describe. From the panels of their books, Sirrus and Achenar tell the Stranger that Atrus is dead, each claiming that their brother
murdered him, and plead for the Stranger to help them escape. However, the books are missing several pages, so the sons' messages are at first riddled with static and unclear.
As the Stranger continues to explore the island, more books are discovered hidden behind complex mechanisms and puzzles. There are four books in total, each linking to a different Age. The Stranger must visit each Age, find the red and blue pages hidden there, and then return to Myst Island. These pages can then be placed in the corresponding books. As the Stranger adds more pages to these books, the brothers can speak more and more clearly. Throughout this process, each brother maintains that the other brother cannot be trusted. After collecting four pages, the brothers can talk clearly enough to tell the Stranger where the fifth page is hidden. If the Stranger gives either brother their fifth page, they will be free. The Stranger is left with a choice to help Sirrus, Achenar, or neither.
Both brothers beg the Stranger not to touch the green book that is stored in the same location as their last pages. They claim that it is a book like their own that will trap the Stranger. In truth, it leads to
D'ni, where Atrus is imprisoned. Upon opening the book, Atrus asks the Stranger to bring him a final page that is hidden on Myst Island; without it, he cannot bring his sons to justice.
The game has several endings, depending on the player's actions. Giving either Sirrus or Achenar the final page of their book causes the Stranger to switch places with the son, leaving the player trapped inside the Prison book. Linking to D'ni without the page Atrus asks for leaves both the Stranger and Atrus trapped on D'ni. Linking to D'ni with the page allows Atrus to complete his Myst book and return to the island. Upon returning to the library, the red and blue books are gone, and there are burn marks on the shelves where they used to be.
Development
40%
— "We started our design work and realized that we would need to have even more story and history than would be revealed in the game itself. It seemed having that depth was just as important as what the explorer would actually see."
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The
Myst
creative team consisted of the brothers Rand and Robyn Miller, with help from sound designer Chris Brandkamp, graphical artist Chuck Carter, Richard Watson, Bonnie McDowall, and
Ryan Miller, who together made up
Cyan, Inc. The company had previously only made children's games.
Myst
was conceived by the brothers as a challenging but aesthetically simple game that would appeal to adults;
was not only the largest collaboration Cyan had attempted at the time, but also took the longest to develop.
[8] According to Rand Miller, the brothers spent months solely designing the look and puzzles of the Ages,
[9] which were influenced by earlier whimsical "worlds" made for children.
According to the creators, the game's name, as well as the overall solitary and mysterious atmosphere of the island, was inspired by the book
The Mysterious Island
by
Jules Verne.
At first, the developers had no idea how they would actually create the physical terrain for the Ages.
Eventually, they created grayscale
heightmaps, extruding them to create changes in elevation. From this basic terrain, textures were painted onto a colormap which was wrapped over the landscapes. Objects such as trees were added to complete the design.
Rand noted that attention to detail allowed
Myst
to deal with the limitations of CD-ROM drives and graphics, stating "A lot can be done with texture…Like finding an interesting texture you can map into the tapestry on the wall, spending a little extra time to actually put the bumps on the tapestry, putting screws in things. These are the things you don't necessarily notice, but if they weren't there, would flag to your subconscious that this is fake."
[10]
The game was created on
Apple Macintosh computers, principally
Macintosh Quadras. The graphics were individual shots of fully rendered rooms; overall,
Myst
contains 2,500 frames, one for each possible area the player can explore.
Each scene was modeled and rendered in
StrataVision 3D, with some additional modeling in Macromedia MacroModel.
The images were then edited and enhanced using
Photoshop 1.0.
The original Macintosh version of
Myst
was constructed in
Hypercard. Each Age was a unique
Hypercard stack. Navigation was handled by the internal button system and
HyperTalk scripts, with image and
QuickTime movie display passed off to various plugins; essentially,
Myst
functions as a series of separate multimedia slides linked together by commands.
As the main technical constraint that impacted
Myst
was slow
CD-ROM drive read speeds, Cyan had to go to great lengths to make sure all the game elements loaded as quickly as possible.
Images were stored as 8-bit
PICT resources with custom color palettes and QuickTime still image compression.
Animated elements such as movies and object animations were encoded as QuickTime movies with
Cinepak compression;
in total, there were more than 66 minutes of Quicktime animation.
This careful processing made the finished graphics look like truecolor images despite their low bit depth; the stills were reduced in size from 500
KB to around 80 KB.
Audio
Chris Brandkamp produced most of the
ambient and incidental sounds in the game. To make sure the sounds fit, Brandkamp had to wait until the game's visuals were placed in context.
Sound effects were drawn from unlikely sources; the noise of a fire in a boiler was created by driving slowly over stones in a driveway, because recording actual fire did not sound like fire burning.
The chimes of a large clock tower were simulated using a wrench, then transposed to a lower pitch.
At first,
Myst
had no music, because the Millers did not want music to interfere with the gameplay.
After a few tests, they realized that the background music did not adversely affect the game and in fact "seemed to really help the mood of certain places that you were at in the game."
Robyn Miller ended up composing 40 minutes of
synthesized music that was used in the game and later published as
Myst: The Soundtrack
.
Initially, Cyan released the soundtrack via a mail-order service, but before the release of
Myst
's sequel
Riven
Virgin Records acquired the rights to releasing the soundtrack,
[11] and the CD was rereleased on
October 6,
1998.
[12]
Remakes and rereleases
PC remakes
200px
A pre-rendered still from Myst
200px
The same scene in realMyst
, rendered in real-time
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