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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.
Support Cyan: http://www.mystembassy.net/supportcyan.html
In case any of you are wondering if this guy has any idea what he is talking about, I googled it up and here it is http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3889773.stm Indeed a quarter of its players are female, according to publishers Ubisoft, which is a much higher proportion than most other video games.
Most copies sold. Not so hard to come up with...
As far as popularity, I'm pretty certain it held the title of largest selling game of all time for several years.
It gained that popularity because it told an interesting story with very simple mechanics; two necessary ingredients for getting attention from the casual gamer audience (which makes up probably 80+% of the total gaming market).
Personally I wasn't a big fan of the series. I prefered the adventure genre from Sierra and Lucasarts point of view, but you can't argue with it's success.
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.
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.
You greatly overestimate how old Myst is. N00b. I *remember* reading the reviews when it came out. Bland, no plot, etc.
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.
Uru had some major problems.
1.The engine was really bad at supporting more than a few avatars at a time. In the several months I beta tested, it just seemed to get worse. 15 or so avatars in an age would make it go down to a couple of frames a second. Soon before release, we were to have a meeting with Rand Miller, and only about 40-50 people got into the age before it crashed.
2. The action elements were poor and out of place. There were trial and error jumping puzzles. And walking into physics objects to herd them into place puzzles.
3. The beta didn't show why we needed multiple people. How are you going to do multiple person puzzles without ruining the puzzles for some of the people? How can you make enough new content to justify a monthly fee?
4. I don't want a collection game
I had fun using URU as a (small) graphical chat room, but that is about it.