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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

#41

Post by OrwellianChild »

toast0 wrote: post #29

I never owned a copy, so inevitably I only played Myst at computer stores -- it looked interesting, but I never really understood what was going on. Games of this era would tend to come with an instruction manual that was book sized and could really help with understanding what was going on. For the Mystics? out there, what's the best way to play the game for a person who knows of Myst, but hasn't every played it? Wh…

Myst is kind of defined by it's lack of boundaries and structure. The point is to just boot up the game and start exploring and interacting. The story will slowly unfold as you explore the world. The only think you really need to understand is that all the buttons and switches do affect the world, so observe the results of all your tinkering.

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

#42

Post by Alex3917 »

sdegutis wrote: post #23
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.

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 internal clues on which way to go.

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

#43

Post by weaksauce »

abakker wrote: post #14
NickBusey wrote: post #7

I can't wait for the inevitable Myst VR remake.

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.

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

#44

Post by dmschulman »

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.

Some of the best music ever composed for a computer game I'd argue.

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

#45

Post by magicnubs »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #36

Myst required a CD ROM drive — one of the earliest games to do so. This when optical drives were new, add-on devices that few people had. This should have been an obstacle to the game's success but lesson learned: it seems that everyone that had a CD ROM drive bought the game. I'll never to fall for the least-common-denominator school of marketing. Ship your games and require the most high-end of hardware. :-) Oh, an…

> I'll never to fall for the least-common-denominator school of marketing. Ship your games and require the most high-end of hardware. :-)

Worked for building hype for Crysis, for a while anyway

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

#46

Post by elorant »

The one thing that I remember about Myst is how damn hard it was. Adventures games of the time were all about combining items and trying things. To solve Myst you had to immerse yourself in the story. You couldn't just try dumb luck, it wouldn't work like that. This along with the spectacular graphics and the storytelling was that made it a milestone in video games.

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

#47

Post by jfrankamp »

apercu wrote: post #5

I sort of got sidetracked in the article when I read this: "As we collaborated over puzzles played out on vintage machinery, my older daughter said, “People back then must have been incredibly creative to make something like this." I don't know any 6 or 8 year olds that talk like that.

Not saying you're wrong, its anecdotal on both our parts. But I do! If you say to a kid "They built all of this by hand on pen and paper from ideas in their head! (amazed expression)" they'll parrot back to you the above sentence if they catch the meaning and context. My 3 year old does this already, although she'll say "fantastic" instead of "incredible".

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

#48

Post by gnulinux »

elorant wrote: post #46

The one thing that I remember about Myst is how damn hard it was. Adventures games of the time were all about combining items and trying things. To solve Myst you had to immerse yourself in the story. You couldn't just try dumb luck, it wouldn't work like that. This along with the spectacular graphics and the storytelling was that made it a milestone in video games.

Maybe I'm a stupid person, or maybe it's just that I'm not a native English speaker or that I get bored of games super quick. Myst was one of the first games I ever bought (I mean... bought with my parents money :-) and played for maybe something like 10 to 15 hours? The only thing I remember about Myst is that I made absolutely no progress. Like none. I couldn't even get the premise. I was stuck at the very first stage of whatever puzzle the game had. I suppose I was something like 12 years old.

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

#49

Post by drdeadringer »

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.

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

#50

Post by phaedrus »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #30
jandrese wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Despite playing the piano, I never could get past that puzzle until I figured out how to make the computer record itself. I recorded playing the notes on the spaceship's keyboard, then played it back as I adjusted the sliders on the other side of the ship. Did anyone else solve it this that way?

Yes! I had forgotten that I did this.
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