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Myst at 25: How it changed gaming, created addicts, and made enemies

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Re: Myst at 25: How it changed gaming, created addicts, and made enemies

#61

Post by geerlingguy »

drdeadringer wrote: post #49
Eyght wrote: post #35

The article didn't make mention of the role of sound in Myst. I remember people setting up their big 90's stereos with massive speakers to fully immerse themselves in the Myst world. The game really built a strange, otherworldy atmosphere.

I remember seeing a TV special on how they came up with the sound effects. One of them was created by something along the lines of rotating a vibrating wrench just inside a toilet bowl... and all the sound effects was stuff like that.

It was amazing learning all of that back when the game was new... and it's still a great lesson today: http://www.mystjourney.com/myst/studies/

The video has the bubbles-in-the-toilet-bowl explanation (see 7:30 onwards), along with a ton of other great nuggets.

Re: Myst at 25: How it changed gaming, created addicts, and made enemies

#62

Post by geerlingguy »

wmeredith wrote: post #13
wycy wrote: post #11

I don't know if I was just too young at the time, but I had Myst/Riven as a kid and never even began to understand what the objective was or what I was supposed to do. Aside from a little bit of walking back and forth, I don't think I accomplished a single thing in game. Given the article references 6 and 8 year olds playing, maybe I was just a dumb kid.

Nah, I think you were just too young. Sure there were outliers, but it was targeted at an older gaming crowd.

We played it as a family; one of us would take notes, another would be 'at the controls', and the rest would be observing and helping solve the puzzles. Social gaming back before everyone had their own pocket-sized computer :-)

Re: Myst at 25: How it changed gaming, created addicts, and made enemies

#63

Post by geerlingguy »

duskwuff wrote: post #40
annadane wrote: post #3

Riven was absolutely captivating for its time. It still looks gorgeous today. They did an absolutely incredible job.

Riven was also a huge improvement in worldbuilding. The world of Myst was often rather contrived; the places it depicted didn't always seem particularly "lived in", and the puzzles were often rather contrived in nature -- in many cases, their motivation was simply that the world itself was created as a puzzle. The rocket ship piano puzzle falls squarely into this category, for instance! Riven , on the other hand, dep…

It also had 5 CDs, and you'd have to swap between them all the time. But it was definitely worth it!

Re: Myst at 25: How it changed gaming, created addicts, and made enemies

#64

Post by schoen »

Alex3917 wrote: post #42
sdegutis wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I was like 9-12 at the time I played Myst and I got maybe 10 minutes into the game and spend countless hours trying to find something I couldn't find. Really frustrated me and made me hate the game. I think I eventually found it or figured it out, but the very next "clue" or whatever was even harder and after a while I just gave up on the game completely.

Myst wasn’t actually a very good game for this reason. A lot of the ‘puzzles’ were just clicking every pixel on every screen of the island to find some hidden thing. Riven was a good game though, with challenging but fair puzzles. It’s basically like how Super Mario 3 is one of the greatest games of all time, but the only real was to beat the original was by cheating since the last level was an invisible maze with no…

I think it's visually apparent in Bowser's Castle when you've made progress vs. being sent back, which is kind of similar to some of the earlier maze fortresses like the first fortress in World 3. There are other levels that have doors or pipes that either do or don't send you somewhere useful.

But solving any of these mazes without a strategy guide will probably call for multiple lives because you almost certainly won't be able to find the complete solution in a single run-through. I think that's characteristic of many Super Mario 3 levels, though, because pipes and doors that send you backwards aren't that uncommon.

Other examples of tricky maze levels where you have to explore a lot:

6-5 (you have to fly while holding a Koopa shell in a place where it's not particularly obvious)

7 first fortress (again, you have to fly in one particular place in order to escape)

8 fortress (lots of backtracking, several different ways to solve it)

Edit: I didn't realize that when you said "the original" you were referring to Super Mario Bros. rather than Super Mario 3. I agree that 8-4 in the original Super Mario Bros. is a huge nuisance to figure out although I think you can get it with a degree of discipline, probably in only 1-3 lives. If I remember correctly, there are three branching points where you have to repeatedly choose passageways and you can be sent back if you chose the wrong one. I think the hardest branching point gives either 8 or 9 total possibilities, of which only one is correct.

Re: Myst at 25: How it changed gaming, created addicts, and made enemies

#65

Post by MrMember »

geerlingguy wrote: post #63
duskwuff wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Riven was also a huge improvement in worldbuilding. The world of Myst was often rather contrived; the places it depicted didn't always seem particularly "lived in", and the puzzles were often rather contrived in nature -- in many cases, their motivation was simply that the world itself was created as a puzzle. The rocket ship piano puzzle falls squarely into this category, for instance! Riven , on the other hand, dep…

It also had 5 CDs, and you'd have to swap between them all the time. But it was definitely worth it!

CD swapping, there's something I had forgotten about. I remember playing one of the Tex Murphy games and having to swap CDs all the time.

Re: Myst at 25: How it changed gaming, created addicts, and made enemies

#66

Post by giobox »

weaksauce wrote: post #43
abakker wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've said to several of my friends that this would be the killer VR game for me. Just give me a giant world to explore!

if you haven't played it obduction is also in VR and is also made by cyan. I thoroughly enjoyed it but it's definitely harder than myst was.

Yep, this basically is the VR Myst, no need to hold off.

It’s of course compromised in all the usual ways 2018 VR typically is, but if you want a Myst style adventure in an expensive, low res vomit inducing uncomfortable headset, have at it! (I say this as a very disgruntled Oculus Rift + Touch owner...)

Re: Myst at 25: How it changed gaming, created addicts, and made enemies

#67

Post by jeremy7600 »

wycy wrote: post #11

I don't know if I was just too young at the time, but I had Myst/Riven as a kid and never even began to understand what the objective was or what I was supposed to do. Aside from a little bit of walking back and forth, I don't think I accomplished a single thing in game. Given the article references 6 and 8 year olds playing, maybe I was just a dumb kid.

My experience exactly. I went back and tried to do a walkthrough, but I couldn't even follow that.

Re: Myst at 25: How it changed gaming, created addicts, and made enemies

#68

Post by netwanderer2 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #52
Eyght wrote: post #35

The article didn't make mention of the role of sound in Myst. I remember people setting up their big 90's stereos with massive speakers to fully immerse themselves in the Myst world. The game really built a strange, otherworldy atmosphere.

The music and the sound in Myst and Riven were both outstanding - absolute classics of the genre, and even more amazing given that they were an amateur effort by one of the creators, and not the work of a full-time composer or game sound designer. There was one location in Riven where I spent about fifteen minutes listening to a short-ish music loop over and over and watching a simple atmospheric location animation,…

This really proves in the arts and creative business, it's really an individual's work that connects the souls. You can have a team of thousands of people, but if no one has any vision or creativity then their work can go straight down the toilet.

Re: Myst at 25: How it changed gaming, created addicts, and made enemies

#69

Post by giobox »

gdubs wrote: post #19

I vividly recall playing Myst, headphones on, snow falling outside, in a time before cellphones and (for our family) high speed internet. Cliche as it is, I felt transported. At times I felt spooked. I also remember getting a hold of every magazine I could that went into the making of Myst, transfixed by the creators’ sketches and drawings. Few cultural artifacts — not limited to games — have had as lasting an impact…

For me, this is where memories of Myst are best left. At the time I loved it, but in the early 90s one was willing to forgive a game a great many short-comings in sympathy to the state of modern games technology. Myst was very much “state of the art of the possible at the time”. I’d argue that much of the appeal of 90s Myst for some was that such a world could be made at all, let alone be a reasonably competent adventure game to boot. It was also one of the first to give us an excuse to do something cool with our fancy new CD-ROM drives.

Timing was critical too for Myst too I think; it came at the point when many ‘ordinary’ (for want of a better word) families were buying their first home PCs. My experience was that Myst and Riven found fans among people not traditionally PC gamers, often via word of mouth that this was something interesting one could do on their relatively expensive new fangled PC investment.

This might be an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think it holds up all that well as a ‘game’ in 2018, our expectations of video games are rightly so much greater. The standards of adventure games improved dramatically in subsequent decades. If you are looking for a Myst style puzzle world to lose one’s self in in 2018, Jonathan Blow’s game “The Witness” is arguably a strong modern spiritual successor.

Re: Myst at 25: How it changed gaming, created addicts, and made enemies

#70

Post by rleigh »

jandrese wrote: post #25
wycy wrote: post #11

I don't know if I was just too young at the time, but I had Myst/Riven as a kid and never even began to understand what the objective was or what I was supposed to do. Aside from a little bit of walking back and forth, I don't think I accomplished a single thing in game. Given the article references 6 and 8 year olds playing, maybe I was just a dumb kid.

I made decent progress solving the puzzles in Myst until I got to that rocket ship and discovered that my tin ear was a showstopper. It didn't help that my machine (A Mac LC with 4 MB of RAM) was only barely powerful enough to run the game, and when it ran out of resources the first thing to go was the sound.

The sound is not a requirement. You can complete it with a pencil and paper, mapping it out pretty quickly.
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