Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
It was popular because it was cerebral.
A refreshing change from the usual hack and slash, reflexes had nothing to do with it.
> 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.
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...
I think the industry needs to focus not on what women would enjoy, but on making games less obviously targeted at the young demographic.
Characters in games are so often caricatures - men with lantern jaws and bulging biceps, women with cavernous cleavage and wasp waists. It'd be better to have people who actually look like you could meet them in the street.
Women seem to react more negatively to stereotypes of women than men react to stereotypes of men. That drives them away from many games.
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
Have you looked at magazines targeted to women or ads targeted to women? The thin, attractive, large brested women in them do not appear to be driving them away.
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.
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.
Aw, man. I was being sarcastic, but then everyone took me so seriously and had such interesting things to say that I almost feel guilty for having not been serious in the first place.
My point really was that there's all this clammoring about how there are no female-friendly games, but then the two most popular games in history both happen to be extremely female-accessible and friendly and are made up of a huge population of female players.
I have always felt that a game should be created for playability and enjoyment. Political correctness be damned. I don't really care if the male has unrealistic quantities of muscles and the female is barbie-like in fantasy-level proportions. What, like I want to escape my life as a fat lazy tech dork by playing a fat lazy character? Hell no.
Good games will be good games. Period. There are some games more geared toward women, just like "The Princess Diaries" is a movie girls will flock to. And there are some games geared toward men - just like Tears of the Sun or something are geared to.
Then there are great games that, like movies, everyone will flock to.
Maybe what would help is if women would EXPLAIN what kind of games they think should be made for them? I have heard countless complaints about how games are so male oriented (possibly because there are so many MALES in gaming? Nobody claims that Magick: The Gathering is too male oriented). But I never hear a single one lay out what is so unique and different about the gameplay they want.
So girls, what is this amazing female-friendly game that will revolutionize the world that every female is just dying to get her hands on, if only someone would make it? Or - has it already been made and everyone is complaining about nothing? (A Tale in the Desert, Myst, The Sims, Nintendogs, etc).
They made Myst, which is something. A lot of people even really liked it, which is something else. But they're not, say, Nintendo.
influentialWhat did they influence? It's not like they came up with a genre... adventures have been around since Zork, and point-and-click ones had been around since Sierra and Lucasfilm Games (if not before). The fact they made a point-and-click adventure with prerendered graphics and a storyline was nothing new. Even the fact it was good was nothing new. But it did make it worth playing. It's not like new genres have sprung up because of them.
Unlike, say, Nintendo. (And before you think I'm just a Nintendo fanboy, go look at my posts.)
long-runningSince when? 1995? You realize video games have been around since like the 50s? That today's "senior" gamehouses have been around since the 80s?
not worthy for the front page?Myst is a nice little series of puzzle games with neat graphics and a story to go along. But Cyan's been dying forever (obvious when they couldn't deliver on Uru). Even the story's "most popular game series evar" hyperbole even sounds silly.
In short, this is a tiny footnote in gaming history, and hopefully the adventure genre can recover now.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Someone pissed in your cereal this morning. I think you're discounting the importantance of Cyan a bit too much.
> But they're not, say, Nintendo.
No, but good lord, they sold more copies than anyone else at the time and really was a major contributor to the quick adoption of the CD-ROM format... something that Nintendo lagged behind on for nearly 10 years and the failure of which caused Sony to enter the marketplace. Then again you're comparing a publisher to a single developer. Nintendo has greater influence to be sure, but Cyan did at one time carry major street credential in developer circles.
> What did they influence?
You're kidding right? Tell me that low ID of yours isn't saying this. Cyan did inspire a whole horde of copycats and invigorated the adventure genre. You're correct that they didn't put in some new mindbending technology or that prerendered graphics hadn't been done before. They raised the bar to a whole new level with the adventure genre, causing Sierra and Infocom to bring their A game. Are you going to say next that Blizzard isn't influencial because they didn't invent the RTS genre and stuck to a 8-bit palette until Warcraft 3?
> You realize video games have been around since like the 50s? That today's "senior" gamehouses have been around since the 80s?
Check your dates and the video game developer graveyard sometime. While Wally's Eletronic Tennis in the '50s was technically the first, it wasn't commericially available. (Have a conversation with Ralph Baer or Bill Kunkel sometime about video game history. I know I have.)
What you see today as "senior" gamehouses are the lucky few that managed to swallow up the dying ones. Go visit the graves of Infocom, Sierra On-Line, Westwood, Dynamix, Origin, Sir-tech, the undead lich that is Interplay. The EA and Activisions you speak of survive only by sucking the lifeblood of individual development houses.
In retrospect, perhaps Myst isn't the end all be all game that some might make it out to be. (I liked it, didn't love it, but liked it.) But I wouldn't shamlessly discount the influence they had on the industry. Every game developer I've worked with, talked to or emailed (and that number is in the hundreds) has admired Cyan and studied their games and company to find their "secret".
Disagree if you will, but your assertion that they will be a "tiny footnote" is greatly, greatly mistaken and completely wrong.
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.
Cyan did inspire a whole horde of copycats and invigorated the adventure genre.
It is never valid to use any word based on "vigor" in relationship to Myst!
Myst was bought by non-gamers, which is precisely why it was so popular.
Myst was the highest selling game before the Sims. Would you consider Maxis to be a 'tiny footnote?' before The Sims came out? Because Maxis was -less important- than Cyan was.
The Myst-clone (first person FMV point and click) basically wasn't important before Myst, and for years after Myst was like a third of all games being released. Even PC gamer based their games disc interface on the style for a while.
I'm not saying it's the most long running, but it's a studio that's been around for 10 years. A lot of 'big' importnat game companies are younger than Cyan.
to say it's a 'tiny footnote' just sounds like cyan-hating more than anything thought through well.
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
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