Whenever I reminisce about the games that have truly impacted my life, Myst is always one of the first I remember. Devised in 1993, this enigmatic puzzle-cum-adventure game was really the first of its kind. When the state-of-the-art-rendered visuals of its time gave way to a three-dimensional backdrop, and with millions of colors shading in its characters (the Myst games were the first to be played on the then mind-blowing $10 million supercomputers created by Silicon Graphics) anyone could see that the game was truly something special. It impressed a whole lot of people. Its very essence was unadulterated magic, in just about every sense of the word.
The first time I played Myst is still engraved in my mind. It was a drizzly Saturday afternoon in 1994, and I was in my cousin’s house. He had a top-of-the-line computer that was his pride and joy. And so, we sat down to start playing his new favorite game. Almost immediately, as the game started, I was sucked into the world that it presented. This entirely new experience was, at first, just as confusing to me as it was to my character. I was being led into a world where I had no idea of what was going to happen next.
Myst begins in a way utterly unlike any game one has ever played. There’s no lead-in, no overture: just a brief expository setup in which the basic premise is outlined, and then, POW! You’re in. You’re on that pier, standing there next to that one lonely lamppost, the full weight of the night pressing down on you from above, the gently lapping tidal fronds whispering sinister insinuations at the base of your eardrums. Across that water, just barely visible in the lamplight, is the islet whence the voice comes.
The environment captivated me as soon as I set foot on the island. Its pre-rendered graphics, which by today’s standards are pretty basic, were state-of-the-art back then and really held their own in terms of detail and overall loveliness. And every element of the world, from the noises the trees made to the far-off sounds of what can only be assumed to be machinery of some sort, was seemingly there to pull the player into the narrative—mostly one of conjecture, as the game’s story is in no way typified—that had the original Japanese version become something of a cult hit back in 1986.
My earliest recollections of playing Myst are of a particular half-sunken ship. That was my first “aha!” moment with Myst. The sunken ship really wasn’t a puzzle, more an emblem of what Myst’s supreme puzzle piece—the world itself—was. At its heart, Myst wasn’t just a CD-ROM game but a thesis on the art of the puzzle and the ways it could be integrated into a virtual world. And while I didn’t know it at the time, this world, and this game, were teaching me all about good design.
Myst offered an exhilarating new take on digital gaming: fight and fray had almost nothing to do with it. Much as in an adventure story, the game closeted you with a private set of fantastic landscapes and dared you to figure out a way to the next portal, to the next “age.” Age after age, you found that puzzles and a close reading of this rich game text were the nuggets and keys to almost all your progress.
Myst is remembered for many things, but its non-linearity stands out. Unlike many games of the time that led players along a precast path, Myst left its players free to roam through a world that consisted largely, though not entirely, of static pre-rendered scenes. Freedom was the name of the Myst game; no two players were likely to experience the game in quite the same way, though most relied on the solitary pursuit of solutions to problems you’d surmise from the tug of the “limited” number of static scenes.
The conundrums in Myst were very cleverly put together. Each one emerged almost naturally from the place where it was set, blending into the environment in a way that often hid it from immediate view. They could be as simple as finding the hidden button or switch that was somehow, somewhere, “within” a particular location, or as complex as the observatory tower (a building at the top of which existed a series of many rotational levers and buttons) with which the player! character was to solve a puzzle, with the task made up of many stages, each one solvable only if the previous had been figured out.
Delving into the various periods, I was flabbergasted and energized by the diversity and intensity of each and every one of the environments I encountered. A completely different ambiance in each fulfilled their unique role and made my mind wander even more to the nooks and crannies of the possibilities in design and architecture. … I really enjoyed all of the above-mentioned aspects and feel that, in turn, made me enjoy the game to the fullest extent.
I especially liked the Stoneship Age, a place of mystical beauty where a ship found itself ensnared on a rocky island, with a storm-tossed sea as the almost improbably moody backdrop. Wind groaned here, indistinguishable from waves hammering the rocks of the island shore, and waters rose and fell in confinement. Lights appeared here and there. My side loved (and whimpered about) the age for its melancholy, almost eerie, atmosphere and the hard-but-fair water puzzles that let me manipulate and plumb a half-sunken ship and the peril-fraught waters around it—yet another peak moment in a game filled with climactic experiences.
Myst told a great story that felt like it belonged to the world it created. The game itself made sense only within the context of its narrative. You see, scattered throughout Myst Island and the Ages beyond it are journal entries and scraps of paper waiting to be read. But, more often than not, what you think you’ll be reading are clues to what you’ll be doing next to find further entries, or books of the Ages, or the enigmatic messages left by Atrus, the absentee “you’re-trying-to-save-me-from-my-sons” father who sired the story. Sunday school stuff and sci-fi trappings aside, the tale is told with far more subtlety and narrative grace than any other I’ve come across in a game. It’s also told in a kind of peaceable fragmentation, with the game itself parceled out into a wonderful series of recompense moments.
When considering the overall influence of Myst, it is quite apparent that this was not just a game. At the time of its release, it was about as close as anyone came to redefining the adventure game genre, and it achieved all of this in stunning style. In an era of big, clunky graphics, the sheer visual beauty of Myst astounded just about everybody. But its look didn’t simply arise as a by-product of some rough calculation of the tradeoff between image quality and game speed. Graphics were an integral part of what Myst was and why it was so immersive.
Myst made a huge impact with its focus on creating a rich atmosphere and a deep narrative through the design of its game world, and it stands out as one of the most influential early examples of environmental storytelling in video games. Its sequel, Riven, took the principle even further and created beautifully detailed and intricate game worlds, leading to a really convincing appearance of a functional, inhabited world. In the meantime, the core design team of the original Myst has concentrated on puzzle design, with modern titles like “The Witness” taking a few cues from a team that still really knows its stuff when it comes to adventures.
Myst demonstrated that video games could achieve the commercial success associated with historically “blockbuster” formats and established the artistry and vision employed in their design and development as something worth taking seriously. The Miller brothers treated their creation with the utmost care, producing an artistically unique world of both unfathomable beauty and narrative intrigue.
The impact of Myst was quite significant; it is a testament to its innovative puzzle-solving gameplay and exploratory storytelling that Myst (1993) holds up so well and resounds so profoundly and dearly not just with the writers and artists of Cyan Worlds, Inc. but with an entire generation of gamers who first came into contact — in a heavily formative manner for our hearts and minds — with video games through Myst and the series it spawned: Riven (1997) and Myst III: Exile (2001). It’s a testament as well to the integrity of its lessons.
The impact of Myst is clear in the surge of ‘walking simulators’ and narrative-led games. Now, we have video games whose dna seems traceable to Myst—games lauded for being such atmospheric, puzzle-solving, or narrative-driven experiences (with Dear Esther, Gone Home, and Firewatch apparently leading the way). They’re games that Myst fans tend to like and that Myst’s creators tend to praise. They serve as another reminder of the way in which games are now always ‘more than games’—a space where meaning and story trump gameplay and traditional ‘gamey-ness’.
To me, Myst was much more than a game. It was an experience that formed and shaped my love for not only adventure games but also games that tell a story in an incredibly interactive and sinuous way. The very world of Myst felt alive and real. The puzzles in Myst felt like puzzles you might find in a real place that has real stuff in it because, well, it was created by real artist types. And even though I grumbled about some of them along the way, the puzzles in Myst were incredibly satisfying to solve because they felt like real problems that stood in the way of me and the next part of the story.
One of my most cherished Myst experiences harkens back to when my older brother used to sit with me as I played Myst. Indeed, he was slightly obsessed with the game too. And like we did with most games we played together, we didn’t just take turns at the controls. No, we had to kind of co-pilot everything, which was the closest we could get to real life. That setup helped us better appreciate the game, I think.
One of the reasons was that Myst was just mind-bogglingly well-designed. Everything about the game makes you feel that way: as if something great is not just around the next corner but also under every rock you pass along the river of your inspiration.
Even after I finished Myst, I just couldn’t help coming back to it. The timeless world that it was had a pull whose strength was hard to describe. Even when I knew all its deep secrets, nothing in the world lost its luster. If anything, my completed knowledge of the world made it shine all the more in remembrance of what a tremendous storytelling and gaming achievement it forever remains. More and more, with each new time I come to Myst, I find some fresh detail about it that deepens my estimate of its greatness.
Myst has left a long and clear influence on the gaming industry. It gave adventure gaming, for one, a new push. The beautiful graphics showed, for the first time in gaming history, a world that felt real. It was an environment that players had to poke and prod like one of those old adventure games, but Myst gadgets had a lot more life and realism to them. And not only did it feel real, but if it had not been held so tightly together by the designers, it might have even passed for real to the point of a society functioning entirely within the game.
Technology is hardware, but it’s also software. It’s what goes on inside the unfathomable interiors of those machines surrounded by silicon and magical blue smoke and inhabit them with kinetic life in the virtual re-creation of synthetic Newtonian physical principles. A decade ago, I first experienced this life-giving power of technology when I ventured into the truths and forms of two imaginative books: Myst and Riven. Living inside those books was like living inside technology and truly living inside their truth and form.
The Unforgettable Worlds of Myst pays homage to the near-biblical influence that Myst has had over the video game development sphere. The flourishing trees seem to be a siren call to lost sailors. The plaintive cries of deer in the distance say, “Here be deer, not dragons.” And the dragon—the foreboding, enigmatic figure of Cyan’s Blue Period—standeth behind the door that the player cannot open. Is there a more powerful image in the cipher of Myst’s steganography?
My life changed when I first played Myst. It was Myst that made me truly fall in love with video games, and it was Myst that kindled my obsession with interactive digital storytelling. I count my experiences with Myst among my most valuable. I probably spent the better part of a week huddled around my computer when I was 9, mostly clad in pajamas, with my trusty box of Fruit Gushers to keep me fueled. Threshold’s puzzle in the library took me forever, but, hey. Figuring it out is one of my fondest memories.
When I think back to my experience with Myst, I feel intensely nostalgic and thankful. Myst was more than a game to me. It was my portal to a landscape of the mind, an endlessly fascinating space for the art of the possible, an alchemical blend of narrative and puzzle-solving that still exists nowhere else in the gaming universe. Myst holds a place of honor in my personal pantheon, and the remembrance of it is always a short trip away from my current Myst-a-riffic (if you’ll pardon the expression) life. Myst really was, as a computer game, “something completely different.” Having little in common with the shoot-’em-up diversions then in vogue, it was a slow-paced, cerebral journey into the discovery of a tranquil world—a journey peopled with a panoply of characters, discoveries, memories, and mysteries. Yet the enchanting dimension of Myst, memorable as it was, was but a small part of a much larger whole. The wisdom of Myst, as we now see it, was in its prototypes; in the way, it helped change the course of computer technology. And above all, in the way Myst, itself, became a slow act of magic in the unfolding of a brave and beautiful new world.
