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Myst Creator Closes Doors
ComputerSherpa writes "Cyan Worlds closed its doors today. Cyan was the creator of Myst, the game that was partially responsible for popularizing the CD-ROM format. Until it was recently overtaken by The Sims, the Myst series was the most popular computer game series of all time. The last game in the Myst series, End of Ages, is scheduled to be released September 20th by UbiSoft."
I remember taking a tour of their "studio" way back in the early Myst days... I worked at a similar shop, and we'd been talking about doing stuff like that for months, and then BOOM! there it was... better than we could have imagined. They used all the common tools of the day in fantastic ways... after I got that game, I spent the rest of my workdays playing it. Research, y'know. But they weren't just crazy minds, they were very nice guys, too.
Then again, it's not like they've died or anything... but it's still sad to see them go.
The world's only surviving livewriter.
It was the game that mostly women played and got addicted to, before it was replaced by the other most popular game ever made that mostly women play and get addicted to (The Sims).
I sure wish the game industry would stop being so sexist and start focusing on games that women would enjoy.
Support Cyan: http://www.mystembassy.net/supportcyan.html
Being an avid Myst fan myself, I was hit hard by the collapse of Uru Live in February 2004, then the fact that Cyan seemed to deteriorate due to financial pressures...and now this. 'Tis a shame -- while I have nothing against violent videogames (I love Halo immensely), Myst was able to create a new kind of game. And the fan support has been amazing; the Myst community is one of the most closely-knit ones I've ever seen. Shorah, Cyan, and may the ending never be written.
It's sad to see them shut doors, but... if their purpose was to tell the story of Myst, and End of Ages is the last chapter of the saga, they have accomplished their mission. Acta est fabula, plaudite!
Circumcision is child abuse.
Games that make you think... what's next?
Its sad to see them go.
Though this wasnt entirely unexpected. They put alot of money into URU only to have it never get off the ground.
So they ended up relying on publishers to fund new projects, and most publishers won't fund a triple AAA adventure game.
Its sad to see them go, but such is life.
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
As someone who used to be a heavy gamer and still plays in between programming and sleep, I have never played this series. I remember when it came out and have heard it mentioned a few times since then, but never thought it was popular. Anyone in the know mind telling what Myst was about, and why it was so popular?
> Until it was recently overtaken by The Sims, the Myst series was the
> most popular computer game series of all time.
I'm really struggling with this one, in terms of definitions. I'm not sure exactly how the word "popular", for instance, could be defined to make this true. Popular in terms of how many people have played it? No, that would be Solitaire/Freecell, hands down. Popular in terms of how many hours people have wasted on it? The Mario series probably has that sewn up, if you count it as a "computer" game; if you restrict it to just the PC platform, then we're probably back at Solitaire/Freecell again, but Myst would be _way_ down the list, far below Doom. Popular in terms of what percentage of the people who played it rave about how great it was? I'm not sure what gets that honor, but I'm fairly certain Myst isn't it. The Enchanter series maybe. Popular in terms of money spent on it? That's gotta be one of those MMORPGs you pay a monthly subscription fee for, probably. I can't think of any way to measure popularity that could put Myst on top.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Myst would be _way_ down the list, far below Doom
Myst, at its peak, was far more popular than Doom at its peak.
Most copies sold. Not so hard to come up with...
if you restrict it to just the PC platform, then we're probably back at Solitaire/Freecell again, but Myst would be _way_ down the list, far below Doom.
What about restricting it to the MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows platforms and excluding games packaged with the operating system?
Yep. Until it was overtaken by The Sims, Myst and its sequels had the "most copies sold" award, hands-down.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized!
This is hideously off topic, but your sig is... well, in-your-face.
Your sig is: Circumcision must be outlawed
Now, I understand this is a contentious issue, and all, but I'm coming from the standpoint that I happen to like my circumcised penis, I'm perfectly happy with it, and I just shake my head in wonder at the rhetoric on the site you link to. What is the big deal?
INsigNIFICANT
Could they open source it? I never played and wouldn't mind checking it out. Could it become abandonware so we could try it for free?
But I have to say that I'm glad.
They pretty much killed the adventure game genre. Before Myst, we had great adventure games from Sierra, LucasArts and a few other companies. Granted, they escaped the notice of the general population, but when Myst came along and became super popular, it became fixed in the minds of the populace as the definition of what an adventure game is supposed to be, and REAL adventure games were automatically regarded as 'too complex', and now it is nearly impossible to get them published (Sam & Max 2 and Full Throttle 2, anyone?)
Technoli
> Myst, at its peak, was far more popular than Doom at its peak.
I have a pretty hard time believing that. Every gamer and 5% of the rest of the PC-owning world has a copy of at least one of the Doom games. I only ever actually met (IRL) *one* person who owned a copy of Myst.
But, again, how do are we defining "more popular"? More people played it? They spent more hours on it? They liked it better? They talked about it more? What exactly are we talking about here? You're making an assertion, but it's vague, and you neither explain it nor back it up with any reasoning or evidence.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
> Most copies sold. Not so hard to come up with...
Did Myst really sell more copies than, say, Doom 2? I'd find that a fairly surprising statistic, and if it's true, Id must have suffered a terrible piracy rate, because I'm pretty sure there are about fifty times as many copies of the Doom series floating around, as compared to Myst.
(Not that I'm a Doom fan; I actually loathe the whole FPS genre. But that's another matter.)
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
sigh ... in the sense that at the time of its release, it outsold all other games being sold.
Oh, and yes, personally I know this to be true as I managed a Chapters Bookstore when the original was for sale. In fact, for a period of time, Myst and Riven sold more copies than all the other games combined.
Why is it that the sudden closing of one of gaming's most important, influential, and long-running game developers just before the release of the end of their long running saga not worthy for the front page?
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
Myst was on a CD, Doom on 4 floppies. Guess which one got pirated? (Hint, this was before the CD-R).
Yes, everyone and his dog has Doom. But I never actually paid for my copy (bought Doom 3 though, since I have a salary now).
Also, Doom was shareware, you got episode 1 for free... therefore many, many more players than sales.
so sad to see them go. Played the games, enjoyed the book, became part of the community. It gave me a world to escape to.. They were really creating worlds. It's ashame that after the first it didn't really catch on as much anymore...
There exists some positive integer N that you are the Nth person to read this signature.
Might be totally off-base, but try this page and look at units sold. If you knock the games off the list that came out, say, after 2000, then it's a pretty decent standing.
Of course, that was just the first hit I found after looking on Google, so it could be totally off.
The world's only surviving livewriter.
As gaming is making way in terms of mass appeal it seems that, more and more, independent developers are being pushed aside. Independent studios made PC gaming, and it's a real shame to see what is happening to so many of them.
I'm sure that Cyan has become a different company in the years since Myst was released - they might have moved away from the spirit they seemed to have back in the day - but, speaking as someone who has played more than their share of videogames, this (and the relatively recent closing of Black Isle and a bunch of other good studios) seems like a sign of more bad things to come for videogames in general.
"Think you can take me? Go ahead on. It's your move." --Joe Don Baker in Final Justice
I am going to be honest -- and, not to be a troll -- but I never could figure out the excitement engendered by the Myst games. They seemed like a slide-show with puzzles, to me, and I hold them partly responsible for the deterioration of the genre.
I started out playing the Zork games, and later Dungeon Master (MUCH better than Eye of the Beholder), and finally Monkey Island and all of its successors/spin-offs. Myst, IMHO, didn't compare with the least of the games I've just mentioned. It was even sub-par when compared to the Sierra games, which we really adventure games for people who didn't like adventure games.
Once again, why the excitement?
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
http://archive.salon.com/21st/feature/1997/11/cov_ 06riven.html
Read a couple paragraphs down. As of the release of Riven, the first sequel to Myst, the game had sold 3.1 million copies, more than twice the number of copies as Doom 2, the distant second-place best-selling game.
I agree with your point that the definition of "popular" needs clarification. I personally am just going off my memory of the time, which is that, as you say, it seemed like every gamer and 5% of the rest of the PC-owning world had a copy of Doom 1. However, my memory is that maybe 10% of gamers but 50% of the rest of the PC-owning world had a copy of Myst 1.
Googling seems to indicate that 3 million copies of Doom were sold, and 7 million copies of Myst were sold.
I can imagine that is because Myst was/is played by older people who could afford to buy it. Doom to me looks more like a game highschool kids and students would play.
-- Cheers!
The biggest selling computer game ever is Super Mario brothers .. the Mario games are the biggest selling series by a wide margin .(Super Mario brothers sold 40 million in the USA alone ,, SMB3 sold 18 million or so and Super Mario 64 sold around 10 million)
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Super Mario Brothers are the biggest selling videogames, but they're not computer games. They don't run on home computers normally (emulators notwithstanding). Myst was the biggest selling game for home computers for a long time before it lost the record.
Furcadia - A free online game with user created content, DragonSpeak scripting, & more.
Myst was bought by non-gamers, which is precisely why it was so popular.
It's "most popular computer game series" as in "pc game series with most copies sold". For quite some time (still?), Myst was the PC game with the most copies sold.
"Computer" means "not console" in this context.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
In my part of the world the term video games and computer games are interchangeable ... referring to PC games and console games for specifics .
A translation problem between English and English I believe heh
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Maybe there's a lesson in this. Want to sell a lot of copies of a game? Try making one adults and play and put down as time allows.
> Every gamer and 5% of the rest of the PC-owning world has a copy of at least one of the Doom games.
Oh ? Really ? I have a copy of myst, (and riven), but no Doom. Q3A, yes, but no doom. I know other people that have Myst. You only know hard-core games. Myst was one of the very very few games (like the Sims) that were playable by non-hard core gamers. Unlike mario.
The myst demographic was older than the doom demographic, and mostly included non-gamers. I suspect that you are younger than I am (I am near 40), hence, the people you knew at that time were both young and gamers, and not interested in myst.
But, in late 90's, it was the highest selling game of all time. In number of units, beleive it or not.
The reason the Myst series (Riven in particular) are so incredible is that they aren't games. They're complete worlds ready for exploration and discovery, with a HUGE backstory and gigantic mental scope (much of this didn't arrive until after Myst, but the original game is still a classic). They're the kind of adventures where you can literally just stay in an area for 10 minutes "breathing in" the atmosphere. There are places I've visited in various Cyan-made worlds that feel more real to me than many real-life places.
The puzzles and "gameplay" are not the main emphasis -- they're simply a means to an end: story, environment, discovery, adventure. The sound and the music play as big a role as the graphics. There are sounds and musical motives in the Myst "games" that are now encoded in my DNA. I will never, ever, forget my experiences playing Myst, Riven, Uru, Myst IV, etc. They were events in my life not to be duplicated, even though I've played all the games dozens of times over. I've also read all of the Myst books and look forward to the Book of Marrim when it comes out. These books helped reinforce the history of the Myst and D'ni saga and give an added dimension to the worlds in the games.
The loss of Cyan to the game/computer industry is overwhelming. This art form, this incredible technological creative genre -- virtual worlds with beauty and mystery waiting to be explored -- was established by Cyan in a way no, I mean NO, other company has ever done. The future of the game industry is bleak indeed when a group of artists this influential are left begging for crumbs. For someone who has talked so much in this post, I am speechless.
Jared
That's all I can say about this. Maybe someday the computer adventure genre will recover from the damage that Myst did to it, but I would be very surprised if it happened.
Rob (Quoting Green Day's "Time of Your Life" makes me even less sympathetic)
And, yes, the game was adored. You should check out the Wikipedia entry.
Again, the /. community needs to break out of the shell that it continually finds itself in. The world, not even the computing world for that matter, revolves around us. Look beyond your experience.
It was an obvious joke, mods.
"Sufferin' succotash."
I really can't say that I'm surprised, given how spectacularly they dropped the ball with Uru. The netcode was such a joke that it was virtually impossible to move in the single main 'city' zone that was shared by hundreds of simultaneous users. The bandwidth eaten by just standing around in there, and the fractional frame rates that had nothing to do with the power of one's video hardware, strongly suggested that instead of relying on the client to animate and display player avatars, every single animation was piped through to the server and then back out to the clients.
Then there were the other bugs, like timing scripts going awry (and ruining several puzzles) if you installed the game somewhere other than C: drive.
Finally, there was the sheer awfulness of Path of the Shell, the final nail in the Uru coffin. Reviews suggested that there were roughly seven hours of gameplay, but didn't mention the fact that roughly four of those hours were relentless backtracking, and another forty minutes(!) of that was standing stock still while waiting for things to cook in one puzzle, fall in another, and finally just standing around in mute obeisance of some D'ni ritual that some dumbass decided had to take 16.25 real minutes, with no feedback to suggest that you were actually doing something putatively constructive.
All of this points toward a massive disconnect between the guys at Cyan and reality. Instead of providing beautiful games with fiendish puzzles, they sailed off on a masturbatory flight of fancy wherein the player, not the player's avatar, was forced to endure not just the incompetence of yet another MMOG live team that crammed their servers beyond bursting, but the egotism of a design team that clearly couldn't conceive of players that didn't want to wait and watch while their avatars stood doing nothing. There are some things that total immersion is really damned bad for and that is emblematic of them.
Sad to see them go
Probably because the game was mostly given away free with new CD-ROM drives (and Riven was mostly given away free with new DVD-ROM drives)
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
As far as Doom goes, keep in mind that it was released in a day where Shareware versions of it were readily available. People didn't have to purchase Doom in order to play it or to experience it. They could legally download the first episode from their local BBS. Just because they didn't buy it doesn't mean they didn't enjoy it. Myst, on the other hand, required a purchase to play, so the number of 7 million is probably about correct and reflects the number of people who played it. I would estimate that another 3 million people downloaded the demo of Doom, if even that few.
:)
That's right, I said BBS.
(Offtopic: I got my shareware copy from 'Shareware South', if anyone remembers that BBS other than me.)
To the darkened skies once more, and ever onward.
Ah, good point. I'd forgotten about that.
> You only know hard-core gamers
No, actually, I only know one hard-core gamer. Most of the people I know who own Doom only own half a dozen PC games or so. The *one* person I know who owned Myst also had at the time, I think, Freecell and Encarta.
A lot of people here are saying non-gamers bought Myst, but this must be non-gamers in some demographic I've never encountered. I know more non-gamers who own copies of the PC version of Wheel of Fortune than ones who have Myst. I know more non-gamers who own copies of Reader Rabbit than ones who have Myst.
And I still think the Mario series has "most popular computer game series of all time" totally sewn up.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
No I don't think that 7 million number is correct either. Myst eventually came bundled with CD-Rom drives, so it also came with new PCs.
It definitely was the "killer app" to justify a CD-Rom for games.
Labyrinth of Time came a year or two before, but was nowhere near as polished as myst.
Nouvelles de jeux et technologies en français. TC
The Sci Fi Wire has an article up about it right now:
Myst Developer Closes Doors
It claims that it could theoretically reopen in the future, but don't hold your breath.