Slashdot Mirror
Cyan Worlds Closes
ThPhox writes "Several former employees are reporting on their blogs that Cyan Worlds, the creator of the Myst series of games for Macintosh and PC, has apparently closed. Myst was the best selling PC game of all time, until The Sims, and inspired four sequels, three novels, and a spin-off MMORPG. In 1993, it had amazing graphics, and was one of the first games to be released on CD-ROM. Riven, released in 1995, stunned the world with unparalleled graphics and story. Cyan, you will be greatly missed. But, as they say; 'Perhaps the ending, had not yet been written...'"
Dupe'd/10. Way to go, editors.
Tluin natha Linux xxizzuss uriu olt bwael mon'tun.
Posted yesterday, and the last bit is mangled. Here's the original.
"I realized the moment I fell into the fissure that the book would not be
destroyed as I had planned. It continued falling into that starry expense,
of which I had only a fleeting glimpse. I have tried to speculate where it
might have landed, but I must admit that such conjecture is futile. Still,
questions about whose hands might one day hold my Myst book are unsettling
to me. I know my apprehensions might never be allayed, and so I close,
realizing perhaps the ending has not yet been written."
I remember playing Myst back in the day. I'd make some progress, then somehow end up back where I was, going in circles the whole time. There was this spot where you could read about the news, but when you returned years later, it was always the same ...
Myst: Revelations has even better graphics.
"So, as Green Days Time of Your life is playing on the company intercom system. "
You're welcome
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.
Really now. how difficult is it to check for duplicate stories? At least check the previous day before posting a duplicate story.
Or click on the "games" section to the left, even, there's something like 4 stories between the original and the dupe..
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
...Cyan, you will be greatly missed...
It's like I'm going on a trip that I don't even know about yet.
Hope be with ye,
Cyan
Posted yesterday, and the last bit is mangled. Here's the original.
"I realized the moment I fell into the fissure that the book would not be
destroyed as I had planned. It continued falling into that starry expense,
of which I had only a fleeting glimpse. I have tried to speculate where it
might have landed, but I must admit that such conjecture is futile. Still,
questions about whose hands might one day hold my Myst book are unsettling
to me. I know my apprehensions might never be allayed, and so I close,
realizing perhaps the ending has not yet been written."
Still mangled: expense? Try "expanse".
Among other things they're doing to each other...
Maybe all the employees are just trapped in a book somewhere.
"Lead my skeptic sight."
The reason that studio existed was for Myst. Now that the Myst series has ended, the closed. I'm greatful that they made sure to finish up the series (I don't think it was selling so great, so I'm surprised they were able to finish it). I read the Myst books too. Good reading.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
To all the douches complaining about dupe, this time its on the main page, so stfu about it. cyan is one of those studios rocked gaming, and deserves more respect than you FPS whores are showing.
The Myst series was one of the best point-and-click adventure games of all time. It had the best puzzles, the best graphics of it's time, and it didn't get old, it just sucked you in. Those games could take a long time to finish and therefore had a very high playability value. I think Cyan was an inspiration to other game developers. We shall see if any new games come out that even come close to the Myst series.
Hate to say it, but I bought Myst, my wife and I played it, and we thought it was dull, dull, dull.
OK puzzles (Seventh Guest's were good too), but didn't save it for us.
To each.
When I got a CD drive for my Macintosh LC, it came with a couple of CDs, including Cosmic Osmo and The Worlds Beyond The Mackerel, a Hypercard interactive adventure that was somewhat of a precusor of Myst (Myst and Riven are both, in terms of gameplay UI and whatnot, rather Hypercard-ish), save the intended age group, complexity, etc. Kind of aimed at kids, but even though I was ~15-16, it was fun. Pretty nice bluesy-jazzy music soundtrack too, included as CD Audio tracks on the same CDROM (only fault of the soundtrack was that it was blatantly a bunch of MIDI machines doing the performing. Myst was much worse; cheesy MIDI instruments galore. They got much better at it with Riven, mostly by limiting themselves exclusively to "electronic" instruments, instead of trying to pretend they had real instruments.)
Please help metamoderate.
Didn't i read this before? Oh yea 5 minutes ago on another thread.
That it was so damn popular.. as a young child (I'm 18 now) I played the original Myst and I never really got anywhere (mostly randomly doing stuff as kids do). A few years later I saw a Myst walkthrough guide in a second-hand bookstore and decided to dig out the Myst cds..
Even at 13 or 14 that damn game baffled the hell out of me and my parents (we were deeply sucked into games like monkey island and loom though).
Why on earth did people play this game where the minimum player requirements were aparently an IQ of 180+ and a brain the size of a small planet!
Bitch, moan, whatever, but I 'just didn't get it'.
Of course, the only game I ever saw match the Myst series was Schizm - but then, as the only person on the planet who bought, played, finished (without cheats!) and enjoyed Schizm (or even heard of it), I *would* say that.
If this indeed has truly happened, this is quite a sad day. I have always appreciated and loved Myst for its beautiful graphics, its intriguing gameplay. Myst is one of the few games I actually do enjoy, I have never appreciated the shoot em up or racing type games which are often such passive affiars, but enjoyed a game that had a lot of exquisite intellectual work, plots, and intelligence rather than walking around killing things.
This is not good news as well for those who want to try these games, since I wonder if the games will still be avialable. This is one of the downsides of commercial software development and current copyright laws, that even if an item is no longer being sold, and no one is directly profiting from, it still cannot be redistributed freely. They reall ought to open source this if they are not going to sell it anymore, there is no good reason not to and consumers deserve the right to access publicly published works that the original author is no longer distributing.
Magenta, Yellow, and Black Worlds are doing just fine.
I played Myst when it first came out, and then years later in a fit of nostalgia. I hated it both times. In fact, I've never met anyone who actually enjoyed it. I honestly don't know why it so widely regarded. It felt more like watching a slide-show than playing an interactive game.
In other news, Slashdot readers question if ScuttleMonkey actually reads Slashdot.
I mean... come on! How hard is it to write SlashCode to keep a mysql table of links that appear in the story and then compare them with the links in future potental stories? Check it out, in less than 24 hour ago we had a Slashdot story with a link to:
http://www.thegreydragon.com/2005/09/time-of-your
Now less than 24 hours later we have a Slashdot story with a link to:
http://www.thegreydragon.com/2005/09/time-of-your
Hey, my manual strcmp is returning 0 on this one. It might be a dup! Just a thought.
But as Scuttlemonkey says in his own "Who is Scuttlemonkey?":
Well, you did do that, but that was of interest to the Slashdot community YESTERDAY, not today. I guess I agree with Bob Cat - NYMPHS' reply:
Beyound Atlantis
Schizm: Mysterious Journey.
B. Skokal: Syberia and Amerzone
The Crystal Key.
The entire Zork series.
Cyan closed due to lack of funding. They had additional projects planned but tried for about a year to find funding for them. I don't doubt any of the projects kicked ass but studios like Cyan will always fight Rocky's Lemma of Innovation Prevention: Unless the results are known in advance, funding agencies will reject the proposal. Innovators always will fight RLoI.
Of course, Cyan's recent MMO failure may have scared off investors. I only know this crap from a source within Cyan but I'm scarce on details beyond this. Maybe someone from Cyan can comment?
Cyan, you will be greatly missed. But, as they say; 'Perhaps the ending, had not yet been written...'"
Actually, yes it has. Myst and the Cyan studio are unfortunatly part of the dying 'adventure genre' that saw it's peak years ago and has yet to be embraced in a world of games that require fast paced, gun-toting crime lords set on City X. The inability for the PC to be seen as anything else as a MMO/FPS platform in recent years hasn't exactly helped sales either.
Myst was top dog for a long time as the highest selling game, with Sims alone as the only game to have displaced it. For a small studio like Cyan, they've already engraved themselves in video game history. Today, that's about the best you can hope for.
a hurricane is approaching new orleans!
soon to be posted: Bush's chances for 2004.
You get that wrong. It's a special form of respect by the editors. Cyans demise is worth a dupe in salute! (This is tongue-in-cheek, ok?)
/. take their demise seriously. Many people have chosen their education to, one day, work at Cyan, because their games, or better, virtual environments, were so utterly stunning and beautiful.
As a side note: Cyans games are very dear to a lot ("best selling game of all times, before 'The Sims'", remember?) of people (not "players"), including me, so I'm indeed glad to see
It has shown me a lot of people I know from the Myst-community are slashdotters as well (not the other way around, of course), something I suspected for a long time.
Robert_Kosten
Guild of Greeters
KI: 474650
All right so it's a dupe. why don't you shut you god damned noise holes - some of us didn't read it before today!!!
"The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to MYST, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again.
1997. Riven came out in October 1997 -- I bought it the week it was released!
"Broccoli for brains a plus."
I'd like to apply.
Actually Zonk posted the dupe. There was a bit of a time warp inside slashdot, which kind of skewed the world lines of the two posts.
"Having the tools to do the art is one thing; the artists' work is another -- and that's very time-consuming and takes a lot of talent."
But easy to BT all over the place. And when the artist complains, don't forget to tell them to get "real jobs" like their outsourced buddies. Then sit back and wonder why artists aren't falling all over themselves to join the OSS movement.
Slashdot's doing you all a favor! This one was posted for all of those readers who unchecked Zonk on their Preferences page and consquently didn't see the first one.
I remember I bought a new computer just to play Riven. We upgraded from our LC to a Performa. The day it came out (Halloween) my friend and I had "Riven Day" instead of going trick or treating.
Myst was also the last amazing game to premiere on (and for a time only ran on) Macs first. I saw a demo of it at an old Macworld Expo and it blew me away. I knew it would be something special.
When I saw the first PC versions of it in the early 90's, my little geek heart sank.
Fuck me... Copied and pasted from another site and didn't check their spelling.
Ah. Adventure games. That takes me back. To a time when games were fun and not a graphical pissing contest.
I played Myst, and it was... OK. I mean, the graphics were well-rendered, if no more dynamic for the quality than the technology of the time permitted. But honestly, the whole thing was nothing more than an elaborate Hypercard stack and the puzzles were nothing too difficult. I've always had trouble understanding what all the shouting was about.
And the brethren went away edified.
Not that it matters, but Riven was released in 1997.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
The puzzles are killers of keeping people interested. They actually waste too much time and cause hair pulling frustration.
Please do not introduce this concept.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Myst felt a lot like cocaine to me. . . lots of work to get it, and you're all excited, but the climax. . . meh.
Long run for a short slide. After spending the hours to beat it, the ending pissed me off to no end. "Now you may explore the world to your heart's content! P.S. we reset all the annoying puzzles, do them again, bitch!"
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Very sad indeed.
the kulakovich family
That game was seriously gay. nothing ever moved. You could play the same game without a computer, just use a series of drawings or photographs. Myst was nothing more than a glorified text RPG.
That was one of the finer gaming moments.
...So we lose one of the few companies to produce interesting games that don't involve shooting anything that moves. Yes, perhaps the plot and/or interface of some of their games could have stood a bit of work. But Cyan was one of the few companies producing games that appeal to the intellect and sense of adventure -- rather than to the players' adrenaline levels. Somewhat like complaining that the only sushi bar in town got only mediocre reviews -- when the alternative is the local greasy spoon.
Who's next, Microids??
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Cyan was one of the early excesses of the 90's. After they made their millions on Myst, the company moved to the Oregon desert where they sat around writing email and hoarding cash with no expenses. There were other stories of companies starting up in exotic locations like Phoenix and Hawaii to do work that normally was done in Silicon Valley.
That all ended and residence in Silicon Valley is once again required.
Have you been to Phoenix? It's a city, like any other.
I started playing 'puter games in the 70's, with Adventure and Zork and some of the Scott Adams games.
I've never played any of the Myst series. I would like to, but I have moved completely to Linux. Is there any way for me to play them? Cedega perhaps?
hidden goatse reference
Uru has so much potential. It had the potential to change the face of MMORPGs as we know it. But .. it was not to be.
:(
I consider Myst and Uru to be two of the most innovative games ever seen. It's sad to see this lost.
With so many stories left to tell... what are fans to do?
Why don't you go to http://www.econym.demon.co.uk/ and explain to this guy that the sea-shells he makes with a single object and a well-chosen formula are impossible? And go to this page: http://www.f-lohmueller.de/pov_tut/pov__eng.htm and tell the guy writing these tutorials that show complex rendered scenes in just a dozen lines of code are impossible? And your next stop should be here: http://www.povray.org/ and then compare the images you saw in the POVray hall of fame to this scene from Myst classic: http://www4.ncsu.edu/~dwbruhn/Terragen/Myst.jpg and tell me that they would all take the same amount of time? The scene from Myst runs to 45 boxes, 37 cylinders, 6 triangular prisms, the tree objects (which look like a cone with a bark texture, about 10 cylinders for the branches, a .png texture with transparency and a leaf fractal rendered in green scattered around it, joined together as a merged object and copy 'n' pasted about 16 times), two height fields (one for the ground and another for the mountain...height fields can just be monochrome bitmaps with a random scattering of noise in them, which, when fed to the ray-tracer, get interpretted as white-high-Y-coordinate, black-low-Y-coordinate, grey in-between), and a sky texture (in POVray, that's the Bozo texture with about 0.7 turbulance and a color-map of four colors, two whites and two blues.)
But hey! You got it, that's impossible!!! Isn't this the same damn crowd that screams Linux is too hard to use (which makes my 8-year-old daughter superior in computer skills to you)? http://liw.iki.fi/liw/texts/linux-anecdotes.html Go tell THAT guy that it's impossible for a 21-year-old who starts out with no computer to write an entire operating system that sees global use.
Go tell a literary scholar that it was impossible for Robert Louis Stephenson to write "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde" in three days: http://www.the-wow-experience.com/resources/NEW_Pu blic_Domain_Products.htm
Go to this page and tell this guy: http://www.quandaryland.com/jsp/dispArticle.jsp?in dex=723
that he's full of hooey when he says:
"Slideshow Adventures are cheaper and easier to make than the 3D equivalent. Hobbyists can do them for fun. Small independent developers can produce reasonable (even excellent) games on a shoe string. They're a way to start for those hoping to make the big-time. For the Adventure genre to thrive it needs a supply of Adventures. If Adventures are limited to productions costing tens of millions of dollars there won't be very many of them."
And then go to hell so the rest of us can have a decent conversation for a change.
No way this sucks! The Myst Series is the only game I have ever paid money for, an that was usually for the special editions. Where will I find a game that actually gives some kind of mental challange and looks as spectacular as myst?!? Well I better splash out on MystV given it will be the last. Not happy
I thought URU was terrible, the 3D gets in the way, I never played past the gourge because it was just such a pain walking around. If you didn't point the person exactly in the right direction then she/he would bump against the wall. I thought I knew how to walk, but apparently I have to re-learn walking skills in every 3D game.
It's a pity that companies feel the need to make everything 3D now, Age of Mythology was crap compared to Age of Empires, URU was rubbish compared to Myst. In both cases its the problems of controlling something in 3D on a 2D screen.
I've never played any of the Myst series. I would like to, but I have moved completely to Linux. Is there any way for me to play them?
All Myst I requires is a 386. I can't remember if I played it on one with or without a IIT math/co, but all one needs is a very lame machine by today's standards and windows 3.1. In fact, I played it on an ISA graphics adapter and the only "problem" playing was the fact that transisions where slugish, but aside from that it was 100% playable on a 386-40 or 486-33. IIRC there were issues playing myst on WinNT and Win2K... Cyan was none to hip to the idea of supporting what they claimed to be a professional OS.
Keep in mind that Myst I was released during a time period that not all systems had math co processors, and most of the graphics IIRC were not compressed hince the need for a full CD for a technicaly simple game, so simple a 68030 based mac run it very well.
Riven, which I assume is myst II, i've always been confused on this issue requires a Pentium 100 and is perfectly playable on a pentium 200, there are reports of it being playable on high end 486 machines, but I believe riven requires win95.
Myst III requires a pentium II but I seem to remember it also worked perfectly fine on a pentium I 200.
So... in other words... if you really really really want to play these games you can pickup a 2nd hand machine, which these days i'm seeing $20 pentium III 450s in valuevillage and goodwill and have the ability to play at least 3 out of the 5 games. 4 and 5 might run under 98se, but reccomend at least a 800mhz pentium III.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
I gather that I'm amongst a real nine-to-fiver crowd, here. The assumption must be that I've never touched a computer in my life, or something. Well, folks, I'm telling you what *I* know about.
And they're telling you that know, you don't. Despite all your prattling on about graphics and 3d and such, you missed the point.
Go ahead, make your game. Then when it sucks, you'll understand what everybody is talking about. The graphics ain't what makes the game. The sound ain't what makes the game. The story, the scenery, the cohesion, the plot.. these make the game. Myst was good because it was one of the first of its type and because it had a decent story attached to it that was actually interesting and tied all the bits together.
Like somebody above said, just because you have OpenOffice doesn't mean you can write a bestseller.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I am, to this day, still amazed at the graphics that were produced for the Riven game. All those thousands of intricate 3D scenes, with a huge number of inlaid Quicktime movies for moving parts still remains to me a milestone of what computers are capable of. The riveting story with its sometimes extremely hard puzzles was second to none.
Sigh. Even Cyan couldn't improve on their own quality with the last Myst game which used modern 3D graphics techniques like OpenGL etc.
And thta's not even talking about the designers who came up with all the 19th cenbtury gizmos and doodahs that filled the game.
You guys from Cyan will be sorely missed.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
I am pretty sure MYST V is part of the MYST series, and wasn't released yet. Impressive demo but I guess we won't be seeing any more of that now :(
And got modded up as well. They have always been in Spokane, Washington.
seriously, instead of whining "what could we do?" somebody should convince them of GPL'ing Uru, install a democratic direction decision platform, and make the most successful mmorpg evar! societies, even digital ones, should be free.
"Oh, bother... company again..."
"Bonjour, mon ami -- He said, welcome!"
Herve S.
Original quote:
These days, any one of us could crank out Myst classic inside a month on our desktop.
could 1. pt. of 'can'. 2. an auxiliary verb generally equivalent to 'can', expressing especially a shade of doubt: 'it could be so'.
That's not "any monkey chained to a keyboard could write BSD Unix in a month" nor "we are all as talented individually as the entire Cyan development team" and most definitely not "I could outdo the Myst team myself". It also wasn't "there's no art to the development of Myst" nor "Myst sucked" and while we're at it, not any of the other random phrases that the voices in your head were whispering while you were reading my words.
This phrase amplifies to: "Given:
five extremely talented, creative, gifted users who want to write a game, have written games before, have nothing else to do with their time, and have no physical problems like their arms chopped off or dying of dysentery,
one month,
Five quality (by 2005 standards) computers running the better Linux distributions and the best of Linux development software,
There arrives a possibility that you COULD complete the project, because these machines have increased their processing power and software quality greatly in the past 15 years, and since they have been made available cheaply to the general public and were previously only accessible (financially speaking) to big-time production studios 15 years ago, this empowers each of us home users to be PHYSICALLY ABLE to produce a similar work. The fact that the actual code of a Myst-level program itself would be trivial to write, and that the technical aspects of the game are very basic, lends support to this argument as well."
Do all you Mensa-busting, Fulbright-scholarship-waving, intellectual heavyweights now have the entire idea wrapped up inside your volumous minds all at once?
God, either there must have been some good dope in town this weekend, or everybody's cranky because there wasn't any!
cedega is supposed to support the myst series. but there is NO WAY you are going to play Uru or Revelation without a new graphics card.
Wow! I JUST picked up the 10yr anniversery set with Myst, Riven and Exile. I had played (never beaten) all three in the past, and thought I'd pick them up for the PC.
I had forgotten how much I loved playing these games.
I mourn the loss.
Sig
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