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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

#121

Post by gchucky »

giobox wrote: post #69
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 adven…

Cyan also put out a game called Obduction a little over a year ago that's very much in the same vein as Myst (the Wikipedia article calls it a spiritual successor), only updated to fit the current times. It's really well done, and worth a look.

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

#122

Post by mortenjorck »

symfoniq wrote: post #120
glandium wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (only a single world was unfinished) I'm curious. Was that preventing to finish the (hacked) game?

It did not prevent me from finishing the game. As I recall, it was the tree world that was unfinished (Google says it was called "Channelwood"), and at some point, the floating walkway just ended, and there were floating icons in the air representing the blue and red pages, and some apologetic text from the developers acknowledging that the world wasn't finished yet, so just go ahead and pick a free page.

Ha! While this has probably been common knowledge from various interviews, articles, and featurettes over the years, I never knew Channelwood was the last age the team created for Myst – yet I recall thinking as a child that its level of visual sophistication meant it must have been the one they made with the lessons learned from creating the others. Selenetic, I thought, must have been the first one.

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

#123

Post by annadane »

Terr_ wrote: post #112
da02 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did the story within Myst end?

The canonical "good" ending of the first game? You rescue Atrus (the author-father-figure) by bringing him what he needs to return to Myst. Then he asks for your (further) help, sending you to Riven, the next game in the series.

I played Riven first, before Myst. You can imagine the utter confusion.

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

#124

Post by StevenRayOrr »

Karunamon wrote: post #108
joshschreuder wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't recall the puzzle you're talking about, but there are a massive variety of types of puzzles in the Witness. Was it early on? I loved Talos Principle also, and I genuinely think the Witness is one of the best games of the last decade. Hopefully you can give it another go :)

IIRC it may be one of the water reflection puzzles. You see the solution reflected in one half of the room, and have to repeat it on a panel in the other half. One of a small handful of puzzles I cheated - my short term memory is horrid.

You should have seen my camera roll on my phone while playing through some areas. It was an incredibly helpful tool for getting through the game.

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

#126

Post by MilesTeg »

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.

I had the same tin ear problem. Then I returned to Myst as an adult and I realized that the position on the spaceship slider corresponded to the position of the key on the piano and I solved the puzzle by counting!

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

#127

Post by haloux »

giobox wrote: post #84
mikepurvis wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 on The Witness, but there's an entire genre now of walksim games that follow on the pattern of puzzles, story, exploration and non-combat engagement: https://www.slant.co/topics/6377/~walking-simulator-games-on... And really this is just a continuation of the larger "adventure game" genre that Myst itself is a part of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_game

That is a good list, even if some fall more on the “walking simulator” side more so than “puzzle game”. Games like “What Remains of Edith Finch”, “Firewatch” and “Gone Home” etc I loved, but these aren’t really puzzle games in the way Myst was, although I do see a common thread in the idea of an intricately made world to slowly explore.

The developers of gone home have another game, Tacoma, that has the same walking simulator style. Excellent feel as well.

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

#128

Post by subcosmos »

da02 wrote: post #99
steveklabnik wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fellow Myst and HyperCard enthusiast who used to have a CodeWarrior t-shirt, checking in. I wouldn't be where I am today without all of that stuff too. I would love to see that stack...

How did the story within Myst end?

It's a Myst-ery

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

#129

Post by duskwuff »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #92
symfoniq wrote: post #89

It's entirely possible that the only reason I'm a programmer today is because of Myst. For reasons that I either never fully learned or fail to remember, my father received a CD in the mail from Myst's publisher (Broderbund?) containing a demo of the game. Only, someone screwed up, and instead of the CD containing a demo, it actually contained almost the entire game in a just-before-release, playable state (only a si…

Have you ever thought of uploading that HyperCard stack somewhere? I mean it would probably be taken down in a heartbeat, because the disclosure of the source code was very likely unintentional, but, you never know!

The release version of Myst was a Hypercard stack, too, at least on the Mac. If you changed the type/creator on the right data files, you could open them in Hypercard. The images wouldn't display without some extra jiggery-pokery, but I do recall being able to view the scripts. Hypercard didn't support any sort of source code encoding, so the scripts were out there in the open.

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

#130

Post by duskwuff »

zbentley wrote: post #117
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…

Weirdly, the games that felt to me the most like Myst were not of the same genre (instead, they were D2-ish), graphical detail (they were glorified board games with a few frames of animation) or mechanic (they were RPGs). They were called the "Avernum" games. They started their life as flash games. They had bottomless writing and story behind the franchise, to compensate for their near-total lack of visual splendour…

I think you've got something mixed up. The Avernum series was a set of RPGs, but they were a remake of the creator's earlier Exile series, not a Flash game. (Exile I: Escape from the Pit was released in 1996, long before Flash was viable for this sort of game.) They weren't procedural at all, either; the content was all handmade.
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