Ars Technica: Although the passage of time serves to make the past seem sweeter in recollection than it might have been in the moment, it's impossible to deny that there was something special about the gaming landscape of the 1990s. Every year in that decade brought a torrent of titles that were destined to become classics—including the often-imitated-but-ultimately-inimitible Myst.
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I have never played Myst, but I do remember playing Doom (both the original and reiteration) when I was little with my brother on the home computer. Both he and I have moved away from a game like that but have continued to play together in world games. Getting to exist in a new world and then learn to conquer it was a great way for us to spend time together but also escape from the boring math and science homework. I’m surprised that I had never heard of Myst before, and from the description in the article I might have liked playing it more than Doom. My brother was much more into the conquering and war and I just wanted to explore the world. I really liked at the end of the article the writer also mentioned about the difficulties of putting so much on a limited tool (CD-ROM), because that’s why personally I have ventured away from my classic PC games to newer platforms because their support is higher quality - however it seems like the developers have moved with this in order to make their games more accessible.
Myst is one of those games that everyone who was part of the original gaming crowd talks about. I grew up in a family of gamers. Every Christmas my uncles, parents, and I would all gather around the dining room table with our laptops, take down our firewalls, and play Age of Empires. When I say we played Age of Empires I mean ๐ธ๐ฆ ๐ฑ๐ญ๐ข๐บ๐ฆ๐ฅ ๐๐จ๐ฆ ๐ฐ๐ง ๐๐ฎ๐ฑ๐ช๐ณ๐ฆ๐ด. Often for many days in a row, all night only stopping to eat and sleep during the day. For most of my uncles, Myst was were their love of gaming began back in the 90s. Even now they bring it up from time to time with glazed looks off into the distance. Having played one of the remakes I really understand the appeal. Like Adera or Obduction (also created by Cyan Worlds) its an explorative puzzle solving game with amazing and fantastical graphics so why wouldn't people be so enraptured seeing it for the first time? What they accomplished with Myst was truly incredible given the technology and brought about a shift in gaming that resulted in the creation of an entire genre.
I remember Myst. Granted, I jumped on the Myst train ages after it came out. My sister Caela, who is now in her mid 30’s, played the original Myst, no doubt from one of the additional CD-ROMs. She thought I would like the game, so she recommended it to me, and I obsessed over it for weeks. Looking back on it now, and getting this insight onto the little trick and workarounds to get the game to fit on a CD is quite interesting, and in a way, almost fulfilling now that I know more about storage and storage limitations. Looking at a comment on the article itself, a former employee of Brรธderbund who burned the disks, mentioned that a single disc cost $50, and a disk burner cost $25,000. For a 600MB disc, $50 is a significant sum compared to today’s storage standards. Nowadays, one can get a 256GB flash drive for only $34. Granted, they are two different types of storage, and technology and processing has significantly progressed since Myst’s release in 1993, but this price versus capacity dichotomy is still remarkable.
Woah. I’ve never been much of a gamer, but when my dad first got an iPad, he found a port of the original Myst that Cyan had created, and I was entranced. I played all the way through it, and started the sequel, although I never finished it (to this day I refuse to look up solutions and I come back to it every year or so). Even in the early 2010s, this game holds up, and it’s amazing what they did with such basic rendering and programming technology. It’s truly a beautifully designed game, and I think it can serve as an example for game designers (and experience designers generally) today. It’s too easy to lean on the technology and graphics available to just beat entertainment value out of a game with a hammer. Yet the few games that have actually drawn me in are all pretty simple, and rely more on storytelling than technology. Playdead games out of Denmark is a great example. Their game “Limbo”is a beautiful piece of art that draws you into the story, and the whole thing is 2D and the only controls are left right jump and grab. Their followup “Inside” has a slightly larger production value, adding slightly more sophisticated graphics, but each game simply drops a character into a world with no context or instructions and leaves them to discover the world for themselves. With a well constructed, artistically well thought out game, that’s enough. That idea was pioneered by Myst.
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