The first time I saw Myst, I wasn’t even playing it. I was standing behind my friend Aaron’s chair in his parents’ study, watching over his shoulder as he clicked around a mysterious island. This would have been… let’s see… early 1994? Aaron’s family always had the latest tech—his dad was some kind of software engineer and brought home gadgets like they were grocery items. They had this Macintosh Performa with a CD-ROM drive when most of us were still shoving floppy disks into our machines.
“What is this?” I asked, genuinely baffled by what I was seeing. There were no enemies, no score counter, no lives remaining. Just hauntingly beautiful pre-rendered images of an abandoned island with weird structures scattered around.
“It’s called Myst,” Aaron said, without looking away from the screen. “You have to figure out where you are and why you’re here.” He clicked on a door that didn’t open, then frowned. “I’ve been stuck on this part for three days.”
Three days? On the same puzzle? My Nintendo-trained brain couldn’t compute this. Games were meant to be conquered in a single sitting, maybe two if they were really tough. The idea of voluntarily struggling with the same challenge for days seemed masochistic. Yet something about the atmosphere—the gentle lapping of waves, the eerie emptiness of the space, the sense that you were truly alone on this island—hooked me instantly.
Two weeks later, I begged my parents to drive me to Babbage’s at the mall so I could spend my saved-up allowance on my very own copy of Myst. We had just gotten our first family computer with a CD-ROM drive—a crucial requirement for Myst, which was way too massive to fit on floppies. The box itself felt substantial, like you were purchasing something important. I remember the clerk at Babbage’s nodding approvingly when I put it on the counter. “Good choice, kid,” he said. “This one will melt your brain, but in a good way.”
That night, I installed Myst on our family computer, which was set up in the corner of the living room. This was unfortunate placement for a game that demanded complete immersion. My mom kept walking by and asking questions like, “Is this for school?” and “Why isn’t anything happening?” and my personal favorite, “Is the game broken?” No, Mom, I’m just thinking, which apparently looks exactly like staring blankly at a screen.
Once everyone went to bed, Myst began to work its magic. Alone in the dark living room, the glow of the monitor illuminating just my face, I was transported. That first night, I made it to the spaceship. I had no idea what I was supposed to do with it, but just finding it felt like a major achievement. I scribbled notes on a legal pad I’d swiped from Dad’s office supplies—crude maps, sequences of buttons, cryptic symbols. By morning, I had five pages of increasingly desperate notes and red eyes from squinting at the screen for hours.
Myst wasn’t just different from other games I’d played—it was from another dimension entirely. Created by brothers Robyn and Rand Miller, it asked something of you that no game had really demanded before: patience. Serious, adult-level patience. There were no hints, no tutorial popups, no friendly NPCs pointing the way. It was just you, your wits, and this beautiful, mysterious world.
The premise was elegantly simple: you’ve been transported to a mysterious island via a special book. On this island, you discover that a guy named Atrus had created various “Ages” (self-contained worlds) which you could visit through linking books. Something had gone terribly wrong, though. Atrus was missing, and his sons Sirrus and Achenar were trapped in special prison books, each claiming the other was responsible for… something bad. Not that the game told you any of this
upfront. You had to piece it together bit by bit, like an archaeologist reconstructing an ancient civilization from fragments.
The puzzles in Myst weren’t just obstacles to progress—they were windows into how this world functioned. Take the clock tower puzzle in the Mechanical Age. You had to rotate the tower to align different symbols, but understanding why you were doing it—how it connected to the fortress rotation mechanism—gave you insight into how this civilization thought and built. I spent three excruciating evenings on that puzzle alone. When the solution finally clicked, I literally jumped out of my chair and did a victory lap around the living room at 1 AM. My dad came downstairs in his bathrobe, saw my face, and just said, “You figured something out in that island game, didn’t you?” then went back to bed. He didn’t get it, but he knew that look.
The subway system in the Selenitic Age nearly broke me. It involved navigating an underground rail system using only sound cues, which meant creating yet another set of notes with little drawings of sound waves. I ended up recruiting my best friend Tom to help because he played piano and had a better ear than I did. We sat together for an entire Saturday, him listening intently while I controlled the mouse. “That’s an F sharp,” he’d say, and I’d dutifully write it down. His mom brought us sandwiches at some point, looked at our scattered papers covered in mysterious symbols, and whispered to my mom later, “Should we be worried? It looks like they’re planning something.”
The fortress rotation puzzle… oh man. For those who never experienced it, this involved manipulating a model fortress to match the rotation of the real fortress in the Mechanical Age. The challenge was that you couldn’t see both at the same time, so you had to memorize positions or—as I did—draw elaborate diagrams with colored pencils showing each possible orientation. When I finally solved it, I called Aaron at 11:30 PM (much to his parents’ annoyance) just to brag. “I did it WITHOUT A WALKTHROUGH,” I told him, which in 1994 was the gaming equivalent of climbing Everest without oxygen.
Speaking of walkthroughs—they existed, but they were rare and precious commodities. This was pre-internet for most households, remember. You couldn’t just Google “how to solve Myst clock tower puzzle.” You either figured it out yourself, bought an official hint book (which felt like cheating AND cost money), or had a friend who knew someone who had beaten it. There was this kid at my school, Patrick, who claimed to have finished Myst in a weekend. We all knew he was lying because it was physically impossible unless you already knew all the solutions. The average completion time was something like 40+ hours, spread over weeks of frustration and occasional epiphanies.
The visuals in Myst were nothing short of revolutionary for 1993. Those pre-rendered 3D graphics made everything I’d played before look like crude stick figures. I remember being genuinely unsettled the first time I entered Achenar’s room in the Channelwood Age, with its torture devices and eerie red lighting. The atmosphere was so convincing that I felt like I was actually snooping through someone’s disturbing private space. Every Age had its own distinct feel—the wooden walkways of Channelwood, the sterile spacecraft of Selenitic, the ornate opulence of Mechanical. The attention to detail was staggering, especially considering the technical limitations of the time.
The sounds deserve special mention too. The ambient audio design in Myst was subtle and masterful—water lapping against wooden supports in Channelwood, wind whistling through stone corridors, the mechanical clicks and whirs of various devices. Most games at that time had repetitive MIDI tracks or generic sound effects, but Myst created an audio landscape that pulled you deeper into its world. I used to play with headphones after everyone went to bed, and there were moments when a sudden sound would make me physically jump.
Then there were the linking books—portal-like tomes that transported you between worlds with a simple touch of a page. That animation of your view zooming into the book’s moving image and then emerging in another world never got old. It was magic, pure and simple. I remember thinking, “This is the future of gaming.” And in many ways, it was. Myst wasn’t just showing off new technology; it was demonstrating new possibilities for the medium. Games could be contemplative. They could be beautiful. They could trust players to think deeply.
Of course, not everyone in my friend circle appreciated Myst’s deliberate pace and obtuse puzzles. My buddy Dave tried it for about 20 minutes before declaring it “boring as hell” and going back to Doom. “Nothing even explodes,” he complained, as if that were the minimum requirement for entertainment. But for those of us who fell under its spell, Myst wasn’t just a game—it was an obsession.
The impact of Myst on the industry was seismic. It became the best-selling PC game of all time (until The Sims dethroned it years later), moving over 6 million copies when that kind of number was unheard of for computer games. It helped drive CD-ROM adoption, because suddenly everyone needed that technology to play this must-have title. It spawned an entire genre of first-person adventure puzzlers, most of which failed to capture the same magic (though The 7th Guest came close with its haunted mansion vibe).
More importantly for me personally, Myst expanded my understanding of what games could be. Before Myst, games were primarily about reflexes, timing, and overcoming increasingly difficult obstacles. After Myst, I knew they could also be about atmosphere, mystery, and intellectual challenge. They could tell stories in ways that books and movies couldn’t—by making you an active participant in unraveling the narrative.
I’ve revisited Myst several times over the years, including the 3D remake realMyst and the more recent VR version. Each iteration adds something new—freedom of movement, enhanced graphics, more fluid interaction—but none have quite recaptured the impact of that first playthrough. There’s something special about the original’s still images, like navigating through an interactive slideshow. The limitations forced your imagination to fill in the gaps, making the world feel somehow both more mysterious and more real.
The modern versions are objectively “better” in terms of technology, but they’ve lost some of that essential Myst-ness. In realMyst, being able to wander freely around the island somehow made it feel smaller, more contained. The original’s point-and-click navigation created an interesting effect where spaces felt both connected and disjointed, enhancing the dreamlike quality of the experience. Plus, the original’s pre-rendered images still hold up surprisingly well—they have a timeless quality that early 3D environments usually lack.
What really strikes me playing Myst today versus modern adventure games is how much respect it had for the player. Modern games often over-explain, over-hint, and generally hold your hand through even moderately challenging sections. Myst just dropped you in the deep end and said, “Figure it out.” There was a belief that players were intelligent and persistent enough to overcome difficulties without constant guidance. That philosophy feels almost radical now.
I still have my original Myst CD somewhere in a box in the garage, along with those legal pad notes. I keep meaning to frame them as a sort of personal gaming artifact—a record of a time when solving a puzzle meant really solving it, not just following waypoints or checking a wiki. When I do public speaking about gaming history at conventions (yes, that’s a thing I do now, apparently being old has some perks), I often bring up Myst as the game that elevated the medium’s potential in the eyes of the general public.
For many non-gamers in the 90s, Myst was the first computer game that seemed worth taking seriously. It wasn’t about cartoon mascots or mindless violence—it was about exploration, discovery, and unraveling mysteries. It appealed to people who enjoyed novels and puzzle books and thoughtful challenges. My high school English teacher, Mrs. Kravitz, who normally viewed video games as brain-rotting garbage, actually recommended Myst to the class as “a game that makes you think.” High praise indeed from a woman who once confiscated my Game Boy during her lecture on Macbeth.
As I write this, I’m tempted to reinstall Myst yet again, to see if the puzzles still hold their challenge now that I’m in my forties. I suspect I’d remember most of the solutions—some of those have been burned into my neural pathways permanently—but I bet I’d still get stuck on something. That damned submarine in the Selenitic Age, probably. Some frustrations never fade.
What’s remarkable about Myst isn’t just that it was popular or innovative or visually stunning for its time—though it was certainly all those things. What’s remarkable is how it created a sense of genuine discovery. Each puzzle solved, each new Age accessed, felt like you were truly uncovering something hidden, not just progressing through developer-planned content. In our era of open-world maps cluttered with activity icons, that sense of authentic discovery is increasingly rare.
I miss finding things without being told where to look.
