Look, I’ll be straight with you – as a dedicated Sega fanboy, I wasn’t supposed to care about PC games. But sometimes life throws you a curveball, and mine came in the form of a blue CD case at my buddy Tony’s house in early 1994. “Dude, you gotta see this,” he said, waving around this disc like it was some kind of holy relic. His family had just dropped serious cash on a Compaq Presario with a CD-ROM drive – which, let me tell you, was basically like owning a spaceship back then.
I was skeptical. I mean, I had a Genesis. I had Sonic. Why would I need some computer game? But Tony was insistent, so I humored him. He popped in the disc, clicked through some menus, and suddenly we’re watching what looked like an actual movie. Not FMV garbage like we got on Sega CD – this was something else entirely. When the intro ended and I realized I could actually click around this photorealistic world…man, I think my jaw literally dropped. “Let me try,” I said, already grabbing for the mouse.
Three hours later, his mom brought us sandwiches because we’d completely spaced on lunch. I was hunched over that monitor like a caveman discovering fire, scribbling notes in Tony’s algebra notebook. Poor guy had given up on getting his computer back and was just watching me click around, occasionally throwing out suggestions when I hit a wall. “Maybe try those levers in a different order?” or “Didn’t we see that symbol somewhere else?” When I finally looked up, it was dark outside and my eyes felt like sandpaper. “I need this game,” I told him with the kind of desperate certainty usually reserved for teenagers talking about their crushes.
See, here’s what you gotta understand about 1994 – PC games mostly looked like…well, like crap. We’re talking chunky pixels, maybe 256 colors if you were lucky, and sound that would make a Game Gear weep. Myst was running off a CD-ROM with 650 megabytes of space. Coming from 1.44MB floppies, that was like going from a shot glass to a swimming pool. Suddenly here’s this game with pre-rendered environments that looked more realistic than anything I’d seen outside of movies, actual video footage of real actors, and atmospheric audio that made you feel like you were really standing on some mysterious island.
It took me three weeks of yard work and shameless parental manipulation to scrape together the sixty bucks for my own copy. The day I brought it home, I basically declared martial law on our family computer. My dad, who primarily used the thing for QuickBooks and the occasional game of FreeCell, couldn’t wrap his head around why I needed to monopolize it for entire weekends. “What exactly are you trying to accomplish?” he asked after watching me click around the island for maybe twenty minutes. “You solve puzzles,” I explained. He watched a bit more. “But nothing’s happening. You’re just…staring at pictures.” Technically he wasn’t wrong, but he couldn’t see what I was seeing – this incredible mystery that was begging to be solved.
The thing about Myst was how it respected your intelligence. No tutorial. No helper character explaining every little thing. No giant arrows pointing you toward your next objective. Just this abandoned island covered in weird machinery and cryptic notes, with books that somehow transported you to even weirder places. You had to actually pay attention – every scrap of paper could be crucial, every sound might be telling you something important, the position of every switch could matter. Coming from action games where you mostly just ran around shooting things, this was like discovering a completely different language.
My Myst notebook became my Bible during those months. Started out all neat and organized, with carefully drawn maps and precisely copied symbols. By the end it looked like the manifesto of a madman – hastily scrawled notes like “Mechanical Age rotation: 2-3-1 clicks right then left IMPORTANT!!!” next to completely illegible diagrams of the fortress mechanism. “Stoneship water level = key to lighthouse???” is underlined about fifteen times with increasingly frantic exclamation points. I found this notebook a few years ago while cleaning out my old room, and honestly, it reads like I was trying to crack the Da Vinci Code.
Then there’s the whole brothers situation – Sirrus and Achenar trapped in those red and blue books, each one swearing the other was the real villain. This was moral complexity I’d never encountered in a game before. Who was lying? Was I about to release some psychopath if I collected all the pages? The genius was how the story unfolded through environmental details – Achenar’s rooms filled with torture devices, Sirrus’s chambers stuffed with stolen treasures. The game never explicitly told you what had happened; you had to piece it together like a detective. I remember heated lunch table debates about which brother seemed more trustworthy, analyzing their rooms like we were criminal profilers.
Each puzzle in those linking book worlds was this perfect mix of logical and completely insane. The Mechanical Age fortress rotation system had me stumped for literally weeks. When I finally figured it out – that magical moment when everything clicked – I actually yelled out loud and probably scared my mom. The Selenitic Age with its sound puzzles had me humming weird tone sequences on the school bus, trying to memorize them. And don’t get me started on that subway system…I still have stress dreams about those directional audio cues.
Here’s the thing about getting stuck in Myst circa 1994 – you were truly, completely stuck. No internet walkthroughs. No YouTube guides. No GameFAQs. Your options were: keep bashing your head against the puzzle until something worked, call that expensive hint line (which my parents had banned under penalty of death), or find a friend who’d already solved it. I cracked exactly once, when the Stoneship Age had me stumped for two solid weeks. My friend Jason took pity on me and offered one cryptic hint: “Water levels can change more than you think.” That vague statement sent me racing back to my computer, and when I finally cracked it, the victory felt completely earned despite the help.
The point-and-click interface was revolutionary after years of fighting with text parsers. You know what I’m talking about – “OPEN DOOR” “I don’t understand.” “UNLOCK DOOR” “You don’t have a key.” “USE KEY” “Use key on what?” “USE KEY ON DOOR” “That doesn’t work.” Myst just let you click on stuff. Simple. Elegant. No more guessing what exact combination of words the programmer wanted you to type. The interface disappeared and let the world be the star.
Nobody expected Myst to become the monster hit it became. Six million copies sold, making it the best-selling PC game until The Sims knocked it off the throne. I remember being shocked when I started seeing it at Target and Walmart, not just computer stores. For a brief moment in the mid-90s, everyone with a CD-ROM drive seemed to own Myst, whether they considered themselves gamers or not. My English teacher casually mentioned playing it during class one day, which immediately made her the coolest adult I knew.
When Riven was announced, I pre-ordered immediately – first time I’d ever done that. The anticipation among my friends was incredible. When it finally arrived on five CDs (five!), I cleared my entire weekend. Riven was bigger, more complex, more beautiful…but somehow it never quite captured the same magic. Maybe because the original had been such a revelation, or maybe because by 1997 the internet was becoming more common and the temptation to look up hints was harder to resist. Still, those first few hours exploring a brand new linking book world gave me that same sense of wonder.
You can see Myst’s DNA all over modern gaming. Environmental storytelling games like Gone Home, puzzle games like The Witness, walking simulators that focus on atmosphere and discovery – they all owe something to what Cyan accomplished. Every time I play a game that trusts me to pay attention to my surroundings, that doesn’t hold my hand or explicitly tell me where to go next, I feel a little echo of that first trip to Myst Island.
I’ve revisited Myst countless times over the years – the Masterpiece Edition, realMyst with full 3D movement, and recently the VR version that somehow makes those familiar locations feel fresh again. The puzzles hold no mystery for me anymore; their solutions are burned into my brain alongside my Social Security number and my first phone number. But I still get chills walking into that library, hearing that ambient soundtrack, seeing those linking books sitting there waiting to be opened.
What sticks with me most isn’t any specific puzzle or visual – it’s that feeling of profound isolation Myst created. There was something almost zen about exploring those empty worlds with no enemies to fight, no time pressure, nothing but you and the environment and its secrets. Modern games seem terrified of letting players be alone with their thoughts, constantly filling every moment with action or dialogue. Myst had the confidence to let you stand still and just listen – to waves against the dock, to the mechanical groaning of that rotating fortress.
Every object in Myst felt meaningful. Each page you found, each lever you pulled, each symbol you decoded had real weight and consequence. Compare that to modern games where you might collect hundreds of meaningless trinkets or flip dozens of identical switches. Myst’s minimalist approach made everything important because everything was important. No filler, no busywork, no collectibles for the sake of padding gameplay time.
I sometimes wonder how different my gaming tastes might be if I’d never encountered Myst at that exact moment in my teenage years. Would I still be drawn to atmospheric adventures and brain-bending puzzles? Would I have the patience for games that don’t immediately explain themselves? Hard to say, but I suspect Myst permanently rewired something in my developing brain, teaching me to slow down, observe carefully, and always keep a notebook handy.
A couple years back, I tried introducing my nephew to the original Myst. Smart kid, loves puzzle games, so I figured he might appreciate this piece of history despite the dated graphics. Watched him click around the island for maybe ten minutes before he turned to me with this confused look and asked, “What am I supposed to do?” I started explaining about exploration, about looking for clues, about piecing things together yourself. He nodded politely but was clearly baffled by the lack of direction, the absence of waypoints, the fact that nothing lit up when he moused over it. After another few minutes, he asked if we could play something else. Can’t blame him – how could it have the same impact on someone who grew up with instant information access and games that carefully guide you from objective to objective?
When I play modern adventure games, I still reach for a notebook out of habit. Still feel that urge to map things out by hand, still resist looking up solutions when I hit a wall. These habits, forged during those long Myst weekends, have become part of how I approach games. And occasionally – not often, but sometimes – a game will drop me into a mysterious place with minimal explanation, trust me to figure things out myself, and give me that same feeling I had in 1994: I’m somewhere strange and wonderful, and it’s up to me to unravel its secrets.
In those moments, I’m right back on Myst Island, hearing those ambient sounds, feeling that mix of isolation and discovery, haunted in the best way by what those worlds taught me about patience and observation and the pure joy of solving something genuinely challenging. Sometimes the best games aren’t the ones that give you everything you want – they’re the ones that make you work for it.
0 Comments