A look back At Myst (1993)

With so much time passing since it’s release, it’s hard to get across just how big Myst was back in 1993. It became the highest selling video game at the the time, selling over 3 million copies world wide, and was only surpassed by the original Sims 9 years later in 2002. And while the series has unfortunately gone to the wayside since it’s original game, it still has a place in gaming history.

When Myst was first released, it was so popular that it was the thing that finally got people to move on from the old 3 and a half inch Floppy Disks, which contained a meager 1.44 megabytes, to the then brand new format of CDs, which contained up to 700 megabytes on a single disc, hundreds of times bigger than what a Floppy Disk could ever hope to achieve, and Myst was the flagship title that really showed off what that extra space could do. High quality music, better looking graphics, characters being able to have voice acting that gave the characters more of a personality, and it even allowed for videos.

The version of Myst that I’ll be checking out is Myst: Masterpiece Edition because it’s the version that is the most widely available version of the game. It’s a remastered and updated version of the original game that came out 7 years after the release of the original version with remastered graphics and sound. Plus there isn’t any real reason to go back to the original version beyond nostalgia, curiosity, or if your a mega Myst fan.

Your first real look at Myst Island.

In Myst, you play as “The Stranger”, a nameless person who is a stand in for anyone playing the game, who comes across a book with the word MYST on it’s cover. After reading through the book, which describes a fantastical island, you come across the final page, which, to your surprise and confusion, contains a moving picture of the island that was described in the book.

After touching the image, you find yourself being teleported to the island. Now stuck there, you have no choice other than to explore the island. Located in the center of the island is a library that contains shelves of mostly burned books, which a few have survived and contain a brief history of the island, along with two other shelves containing one book each, a Red Book and a Blue Book.

When opening these books, you come to find that each has someone trapped inside them. Sirrus, who is stuck in the Red Book, and Achenar, who is stuck in the Blue Book. Both tell you to not trust the other one and to find the corresponding missing colored pages from their books and to bring them back to them. And this is where the game picks up.

You’re not only left to explore the island, but across the island are similar books to the one you originally came across called MYST, called “Ages”, in which colored pages are located. To gain access to each Age, you have to solve a puzzle to get to the book linking to that Age. Hints to these puzzles are not only located in the few normal books that survived being burned in the library in the middle of the island.

Myst is a first person point-and-click adventure game and it’s gameplay is about as basic as you would expect from a game likes. You point and click on certain parts of the screen to make your way through each location. It can be more accurately be described as interactivity than gameplay. There are a few spots that are a little confusing to navigate because it places you a direction that doesn’t always do a good job of setting up where you can and can’t go, but it’s few and far between. The game also comes with a feature called ‘Zip Mode’, which lets you quickly move around whatever location you’re in by hovering over where you’ve previously big and pressing a hot spot on the screen that’s indicated with the cursor changing from a hand to a lightening bolt. It can come in handy for those who don’t have the patience to click through each screen.

You can complete each Age in whatever order you want, who is both a burden and a blessing, which I’ll get into in a minute. You can read up on each Age in the previously mentioned library on Myst Island, so you don’t have to go into each new location blind.

But despite the fact that Myst is so simple in it’s gameplay and concept, it’s execution is where it starts to waver a bit. For starters, you can’t pick up both the Red Page and Blue Page at the same time. I don’t know if this was a deliberate design decision or a limitation of the software and/or hardware, but it effectively means you have to ‘complete’ each Age twice to get both pages to see what both Sirrus and Achenar have to say. Thankfully the game seems to leave all of the puzzles how you left them from when you played through each Age, so replaying them isn’t too bad.

A few of the Ages are easy to get through on a second play. The Channelwood Age (The one with all the trees) isn’t too bad since it’s just flipping a couple of switches and you’re back out of the Age in less than 2 minutes with the second page, but other Ages are a lot more aggravating. Thankfully, Myst also places you right back at the beginning of whatever Age you play no matter how many times you’ve played it before, which means that you can just skip replaying some puzzles, which helps speed the process along.

There are also a few other minor problems that scattered throughout the game, such as the telescope in the Stoneship Age (the one on the boat) being a bit finicky because in order to move it around you have to drag the screen to the left or right and there were a few times that I rushed and I accidentally clicked away from it a few times.

But the low point of the game for me is the Selenitic Age (the one with the rocket ship). A portion of The Selenitic Age has you playing through a maze. And for the players who might have picked this as their first Age to try and complete probably weren’t expecting to have to revisit locations on their first play through, resulting in some people not having mapped it out or not have it memorized. Unless you were one of the few who actually thought to map it out first time around, it just becomes a tedious slog. Having yo navigate a maze through sound cues sounds is a neat idea, but there has never been a good maze, even in the best of games.

It does actually fit with the rest of the Age, with there being noises for clues on how to get through the maze, but I had trouble discerning them from other noises in the maze and it was one of the rare times that I had to look up a guide for a game. I wasn’t going to spend hours of my life to grind out the maze or try to map it out, and I know it wasn’t just me because when I look up reactions to this game, it’s the only section for the game that other people used a guide for.

So the game does help guide you through the maze, but because mazes suck even in the best of games, it was still the worst section of a pretty enjoyable experience.

Myst: Masterpiece Edition also added a general map for whatever location you’re in that highlights anything that you need to pay attention to, which is great for those who are struggling to remember whats located where.

Myst was not the first game to make use of pre-rendered CGI stills for it’s graphics, with games such as ‘Alice: An Interactive Museum’ (1991) and ‘L-Zone’ (1992) coming out the previous years, and ‘The Journeyman Project’ (1993) and ‘Gadget Invention, Travel, & Adventure’ (1993) coming out the same year. But unlike those games, which go for more complex CGI and distinct art styles, Myst instead goes for both a more simplistic art style and more basic with it’s CGI. I’m pretty sure this was due to Myst having a smaller team size that reigned in the scope a bit, but it ends up working in Myst’s favor. And that’s not to say that the other games from the same time period looked bad or aged worse.

Douglas Adams, author of ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ and eventual writer of his own pre-rendered adventure game ‘Starship Titanic’, was quoted as calling Myst a “Beautiful Void”, naming the trope in the process, when the game originally came out and it’s easy to see why. Interactions with other characters are kept to a minimum and in very specific circumstances, so you’re entirely left to exploring places that empty and have even been abandoned, essentially creating something akin to the feeling of kenopsia, having an eclectic aura, or being a liminal space a few decades before those terms took off and giving it this really distinct feeling.

This was also around the same time that polygons were starting to finally take off more on home computers and consoles. 1993 also had games like the original Star Fox for the Super Nintendo, which was also graphically impressive, and the previous year had the likes of the original Alone in the Dark. But as impressive as they were, no game at the time was going to come even remotely close to showing off what Myst was doing in real time. So the trade off is that while it wasn’t running in real time, it did make the game look impressive in other ways.

It looked so good that Cyan, Inc. released a screensaver with screens from the game, which was back when screensavers were a thing because computers didn’t go into a standby mode that turned the screen off, preventing the image to be burned into the monitor. And this screensaver even has exclusive images that didn’t make it into the game along with behind the scenes content. It’s the equivalent of a company today releasing a 10 hour video onto their YouTube video that’s just game ambiance.

1993 even had ID Software’s Doom, but it wasn’t until 3 years later in 1996 with Quake that having games running smoothly with polygons in real time that it was even feasible for both developers and consumers to work with, so Myst’s graphics were making the best of a very limited situation in multiple ways.

And to add to the other worldly feeling of the game is the memorable soundtrack of the game. Done by Robyn Miller, one of the two brothers who founded Cyan, Inc, a lot of the tracks from the soundtrack adds to the ambiance of each location you’ll visit as well as add to some emptiness that some of the levels create. But it’s not a constant throughout the game, as there are times where it pulls back and lets you just take in the ambient noises of each location, which includes the wind blowing through the trees, water lapping up on the shore, and whatever wildlife resides in a location to walking through some empty caves or through the empty corridors of abandoned buildings.

Both the music and ambient soundscapes show just how alone you are in these locations. Don’t worry, it’s not as creepy as I’m making it sound.

If you want to track down a copy of this game, I would recommend getting the GOG version since it comes with a program called SCUMMVM that means you don’t have to fiddle with anything to get the game running on modern systems. Just boot it up and play.

The original Myst is from a unique period of time where the technology of video games were making giant leaps, which Myst help to make popular. It might be a little rough around the edges compared to more modern games and somewhat limited by the technology of the time, but it’s an enjoyable little adventure game that clearly has the markings of a small team who had some big ideas.

Due to the previously mentioned success, Myst managed to become a franchise, with multiple sequels, remakes, and spin-offs, along with a book series, a comic series that was cancelled half way through its run, and a potential TV mini-series and movie projects that never seemed to get off the ground. After looking back at the original Myst, it’s pretty obvious that it was never really intended to be a franchise, but the developers took advantage of the success that they were given and ran with it.

It even spawned a trend of what were called “Myst Clones”, which all involved going through a series of pre-rendered images, or even worlds made up of photographs of actual locations or real-world sets, in a similar style to Myst. Adventure fans thought that Myst’s popularity would kill the adventure genre by making it “dumbed-down” and making the genre more accessible to more people, along with Doom, which came out the same year, which, according to adventure game fans at the time, required no thought at all to play. The irony is that Myst making it more accessible to people probably made it better because you didn’t have to deal with the genre’s non-stop use of awful logic for puzzles.

Considering that a lot of previous adventure games required brute forcing your way through a game, either because you could easily screw yourself over, wasting hours and even days of your life (I’m looking at you Sierra), or because it only made sense in the designers head and they didn’t take in consideration that that other people would be playing it, or both at the same time, both could mean that you could end up wasting tens of hours of time only to get frustrated and often confused, so a game that made logical sense was a warm welcome.

Myst was even popular enough for Disney to get in contact with Cyan to build a Myst themed island as Disneyland Florida, in which only a limited amount of people would have been allowed onto the island in any given day, with park goers having to figure out what happened to the islands last inhabitants over 11 acres of land, with the whole thing being non-linear, meaning that no two people would have had the same experience. But alas, that never came to be. But from the sounds of it, it probably would have had more success in the modern world of geo-caching and escape rooms.

The library from Myst Island even made it’s way onto an episode of The Simpsons, in the background of the ‘Homer3’ segment of ‘Treehouse of Horror VI’ along with a snippet of the soundtrack, which in turn was featured in the IMAX film Cyberworld 3D, which was the film used to promote the then new IMAX cinemas. Unfortunately, you can’t see the film anymore since it only gets used to test out new IMAX theater before they’re opened to the public.

Looking back at the original Myst, it’s quaint compared to other games that have come out since it’s release, not only on a technical level, with games being able to easily be rendered in real time that look much better than even some of the later Myst games, but with how adventure games are now designed to be more accessible roughly 30 years later (as of this look back at the original Myst), which the original Myst helped to some degree, even with it’s own series, with it’s sequels leaning from the mistakes made in the original.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/63660/Myst_Masterpiece_Edition/

https://www.gog.com/game/myst_masterpiece_edition