The first time I booted up Myst was at my friend Tony’s house in the winter of 1994. His family had just gotten this absurdly expensive Compaq Presario that came with a CD-ROM drive—something that seemed like alien technology to me at the time. “You gotta see this game,” he insisted, sliding in a disc with a simple blue cover featuring a weird floating island. He clicked through a few menu screens, and suddenly we were watching an intro sequence that looked more like a movie than any game I’d ever seen. When the game actually started and I realized I could click around this 3D-rendered world, I think I actually gasped. “Can I try?” I asked, already reaching for the mouse before Tony could answer.
Three hours later, Tony’s mom brought us sandwiches because we’d completely forgotten about lunch. I was hunched forward, nose practically touching the screen, frantically scribbling notes in a spiral notebook I’d borrowed from Tony’s backpack. He’d long since given up on getting a turn and was just watching over my shoulder, occasionally offering suggestions when I got stuck. “Try pulling those switches in a different order,” or “I think that symbol was in the tower we saw earlier.” When I finally looked up, my eyes hurt from staring at the screen for so long, and I realized with a start that it had gotten dark outside. “I need to get this,” I told Tony with the solemn conviction of someone who had just found religion.
The Myst CD-ROM technology breakthrough cannot be overstated for anyone who didn’t live through this era. Prior to this, PC games were mostly pixelated affairs running off floppy disks, with limited colors and sound that consisted primarily of beeps and boops. Suddenly here was this game with photorealistic (for 1993) pre-rendered environments, video clips of actual human actors, and atmospheric audio that made you feel like you were actually standing on that mysterious island. The 650MB capacity of a CD-ROM might not sound impressive now, but coming from 1.44MB floppies, it was like jumping from a kiddie pool to the ocean.
It took me three weeks of lawn-mowing, leaf-raking, and shameless begging to scrape together enough money to buy my own copy. The day I finally brought it home, I instituted a family-wide “nobody touch the computer” policy that my parents indulged with bemused confusion. My dad, who used the PC primarily for spreadsheets and Solitaire, couldn’t understand why I needed to commandeer it for entire weekends. “What’s the goal of this game?” he asked after watching me click around the island for about fifteen minutes. “You win by solving puzzles,” I explained. He watched a bit longer. “But nothing’s happening. You’re just…looking at things.” He wasn’t wrong, but he also couldn’t see what I was seeing—a mysterious world full of secrets that needed to be unraveled.
The Myst environmental storytelling technique was unlike anything I’d experienced in gaming. There was no inventory menu filled with random objects, no sidekick character explaining the plot, no quest markers pointing you to your next objective. Just this abandoned island filled with strange mechanisms, cryptic notes, and books that transported you to even stranger worlds. You had to pay attention to everything—a scrap of paper could contain a vital clue, a sound could indicate you were on the right track, the position of a switch could be meaningful. The game respected your intelligence in a way that felt revolutionary.
My Myst notebook became my most prized possession during those months. I filled pages with sketched maps, copied symbols, and recorded clues. The notes initially started out neat and organized, then gradually devolved into frantic scribbles as the puzzles got more complex. “Mechanical Age – rotation sequence: 2nd: 2 right, 3 left, 1 right” sits next to a hastily drawn diagram of the fortress rotation mechanism. “Water level in Stoneship = access to lighthouse key” is underlined three times with multiple exclamation points. Looking at this notebook years later, it reads like the ravings of a conspiracy theorist, complete with arrows connecting seemingly unrelated observations and occasional curse words when I hit particularly frustrating impasses.
The Myst brothers conflict storyline was a masterclass in ambiguous storytelling. Encountering those trapped books containing Sirrus and Achenar, each brother pleading their case and insisting the other was lying, created a moral dilemma that went beyond simply solving puzzles. Who was telling the truth? Was I releasing a villain if I collected all the pages for one brother? The way this narrative unfolded entirely through environmental clues—the bizarre instruments of torture in Achenar’s rooms contrasted with Sirrus’s displays of stolen wealth—let you piece together the true story without ever explicitly telling you what had happened. I remember debating the brothers’ guilt or innocence with friends at lunch, arguing over who seemed more trustworthy, analyzing their rooms like amateur detectives.
Each of the Myst ages puzzle solutions required lateral thinking that made me feel simultaneously brilliant and stupid. The moment when I finally understood how the Mechanical Age fortress rotation worked—after literally hours of trial and error—gave me a rush of accomplishment that few games have matched since. The Selenitic Age’s sound puzzles had me humming tones to myself while riding the school bus, trying to commit them to memory. And that damn subway system with the directional sounds? I still have nightmares about it. But the satisfaction of finally figuring it out, of feeling that click in your brain when the solution became clear, was worth all the frustration.
Playing Myst in the pre-internet era meant that being stuck was a genuinely maddening experience. There were no YouTube walkthroughs, no GameFAQs to consult. If you hit a wall, your options were: 1) Keep trying different approaches until something worked, 2) Call the absurdly expensive hint line (which my parents had explicitly forbidden), or 3) Try to find a friend who had already solved that puzzle. I resorted to option 3 exactly once, when the Stoneship Age had me completely baffled for nearly two weeks. My friend Jason had finished the game and took pity on me, offering a single cryptic hint: “The water level changes more than you think.” That vague statement was enough to send me back to my computer with renewed determination, and when I finally solved it, I felt like I’d earned that victory despite the hint.
The Myst point-and-click adventure innovation seems obvious now, but it removed so many of the frustrations of earlier adventure games. Gone was the parser interface where you had to guess exactly what verb the game wanted you to type (“OPEN DOOR” “You can’t open that.” “UNLOCK DOOR” “You don’t have a key.” “USE KEY ON DOOR” “I don’t understand that command.”). In Myst, you simply clicked where you wanted to go or what you wanted to interact with. This streamlined interface put all the challenge in the puzzles themselves rather than in fighting with the game’s communication system. The interface got out of the way and let the world take center stage.
Myst’s commercial success was something nobody predicted. The Myst sales records 1990s PC market shattered expectations, eventually selling over 6 million copies. It was the best-selling PC game of all time until The Sims came along in 2000. I remember being shocked when I started seeing Myst boxes at mainstream stores like Target, not just specialty computer shops. For a brief window in the mid-90s, it seemed like everyone with a CD-ROM drive owned Myst, whether they were “gamers” or not. My high school English teacher mentioned playing it during class once, which immediately elevated her to coolest-teacher status.
When Riven, the Myst sequel, was announced, I pre-ordered it immediately—something I’d never done for any game before. The Myst sequel Riven comparison discussions started among my friends months before release, our expectations building to probably unreasonable levels. When it finally arrived on five (five!) CDs, I cleared my entire weekend schedule. Riven was bigger, more complex, and even more beautiful than Myst, but somehow it never captured quite the same magic for me. Perhaps it was because the original had been such a paradigm shift, or maybe because by 1997, the internet was becoming more accessible, and the temptation to look up hints when stuck was harder to resist. Still, those first few hours of exploring a new linking book world gave me that same feeling of wonder that the original had.
The legacy of Myst has roots deeper than many players realize. The Myst legacy adventure game design principles can be seen in everything from environmental narrative games like Gone Home, to puzzle games like The Witness, to walking simulators that emphasize atmosphere and discovery. Its DNA is even present in big-budget titles that incorporate environmental storytelling and puzzles that require observation rather than reflexes. Every time I play a game that trusts me to pay attention to my surroundings, that doesn’t explicitly tell me where to go or what to do next, I feel a little echo of that first trip to Myst Island.
I’ve revisited Myst many times over the years—the Masterpiece Edition with improved graphics, realMyst with full 3D environments, and most recently, the VR version that somehow manages to make those familiar places feel new again. The puzzles themselves hold no challenge for me anymore; their solutions are permanently etched in my memory alongside my childhood phone number and my first computer password. But I still get a chill walking into that library, hearing that ambient soundtrack, and seeing those linking books waiting to be opened.
What stays with me most about Myst isn’t any specific puzzle or visual, but the feeling of quiet isolation it created. There was something almost meditative about exploring those empty worlds, with no enemies to fight, no time limits to worry about, nothing but you and the environment and the mysteries it contained. In today’s games, even single-player experiences seem desperate to fill every moment with action, constantly worried you might get bored. Myst had the confidence to let you be alone with your thoughts, to stand still and just listen to the waves lapping against the dock or the mechanical groaning of the rotating fortress.
The physical objects in Myst felt significant in a way few game items do. Each page you found, each lever you pulled, each dial you adjusted had weight and consequence. Compare that to modern games where you might collect hundreds of meaningless trinkets or activate dozens of identical switches throughout a playthrough. Myst’s minimalist approach made everything feel important—because it was. There was no filler, no collectibles for collectibles’ sake. Every object had a purpose, even if that purpose wasn’t immediately clear.
Sometimes I wonder how my relationship with gaming might have been different if Myst hadn’t come along at precisely that moment in my life. Would I still be drawn to puzzle games and atmospheric adventures? Would I have the patience for games that don’t immediately tell you what to do? Or would I have gravitated exclusively toward more action-oriented experiences? It’s impossible to know, but I suspect Myst permanently rewired something in my teenage brain, teaching me to slow down, observe carefully, and take notes—both in games and in life.
A few years ago, I attempted to introduce my nephew to the original Myst. He’s a bright kid who enjoys puzzle games, so I thought he might appreciate this piece of gaming history despite its dated graphics. I watched him click around the island for about ten minutes before he turned to me with a slightly pained expression and asked, “What am I supposed to do?” I started to explain that he needed to explore, to look for clues, to piece together the mystery for himself. He nodded politely but was clearly confused by the lack of direction, the absence of an objective marker, the fact that nothing was highlighted when he hovered his cursor over it. After another five minutes, he asked if we could play something else. I wasn’t disappointed—how could I expect the game to have the same impact on him, growing up in an era of instantly accessible information and games that carefully guide players from one objective to the next?
When I play modern adventure games, I still catch myself reaching for a notebook, still feel that old urge to map things out by hand, still resist the temptation to look up solutions when I get stuck. These habits, formed during those long weekends with Myst, have become part of how I engage with games. And occasionally—not often, but sometimes—a game will drop me into a mysterious environment with little explanation, trust me to figure things out for myself, and give me that same feeling I had back in 1994: I am 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 sense of isolation and discovery, haunted in the best possible way by what those worlds taught me about patience, observation, and the joy of solving something truly challenging.
