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...'"

Comments

Dupe me baby one more time....

[Onymous Hero]

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.

Re:Dupe me baby one more time....

[Kadin2048]

I remember that the original Myst was actually written in Hypercard, which was a pretty common program and had been covered in my junior-high 'computer science' class. Seeing a game like Myst, and realizing that the whole gameplay was actually implemented using Hypercard, just blew me away. Somehow it makes a thing like that seem more brilliant, when you know the frontend was done using (for the time) a pretty ubiquitous and common tool.

Actually, there used to be a "cheat" in Myst, where you could press Command-backslash (maybe it was Command-shift-backslash), which was the menu shortcut for 'Hypercard Help,' and it would bring up a prompt asking you to locate the Help stack. If you then pointed it to one of the other Myst island / worlds stacks, you'd be transported there. Pretty amusing.

I think that the breakup of Cyan, while of course too bad for the people who were working there, is not necessarily bad for the industry as a whole. I mean it's been a while since we've seen anything really innovative out of Cyan. Maybe it's better that it go away now, and let the talent disburse and move on to other new startups with interesting ideas.

Cyan always struck me as basically being "Myst, Inc." -- most of their later products, at least those I've ever heard of -- were basically derivatives or sequels to this one original, groundbreaking idea they had. Sure, they were brilliant, but at the end of the day they were sort of a one-trick-pony.

Re:Call the RIAA...

[WilliamSChips]

The song name is "Good Riddance(Time Of Your Life)", however, the people playing it on the radio and such cut off the "Good Riddance" part. On their greatest hits album, International Superhits!, they called it "Good Riddance".
Wikipedia

They will indeed be missed

[mackid]

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.

Opinion

[Oligonicella]

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.

RIP Cyan

[SuperBanana]

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.)

We could re-do Myst...better, even!

[Hosiah]

These days, any one of us could crank out Myst classic inside a month on our desktop. KPOVmodeler and Blender for graphics stills, Audacity for sounds, gcc with the SDL game programming library. One month, tops. A small five-person Sourceforge team could do it with *style* in a month, at the very least. What I don't get, is why this genre is so often praised and so seldom successfully imitated?

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.

Re:We could re-do Myst...better, even!

[bcs_metacon.ca]

The graphics and sound would be technically pretty easy (although Robyn Miller's soundtrack would be hard to replicate!) and certainly the gameplay straightforward -- I used to have my students write a Myst-like game in Flash as a project in my course on multimedia. But what my students could never replicate, and what I doubt "a small five-person Sourceforge team" could do would be to get the backstory, the atmosphere, the vibrant characters and tricky yet not impossible puzzles to gel "just right" to create that sense of being part of a bigger, deeper, more involved world.

Anyone can write a novel, but only a talented few can write a brilliant novel!

Re:We could re-do Myst...better, even!

[Anonymous Coward]

The original Myst was developed on Macs in early 1990's using what was less than state of the art even then. You don't even need state of the art graphic card to truly enjoy the game since it was all still, pre-rendered graphics with bits of QuickTime video embeded here and there. The engine was HyperCard.

What was amazing about Myst was not the technology. It was the creative force behind it: drawing the design of the Ages, writing the music for the soundtrack, writing the innovative story line. But above all, it's the creative force behind the puzzles:
- Creating pieces of puzzles that are challenging but not impossible.
- Bringing those pieces of puzzles together to form bigger puzzles and to fit them into story lines.
- Making sure that the puzzle is cultural independent yet solvable if you use enough senses, e.g. using lights, colors, sounds, animals, base-25 numeral system, etc..

Knowledge of D'ni writing and culture is not required and yet these puzzles still have some alien world feel to them. This is the kind of things that sucks people into the game. Beautiful graphic is just complementing the puzzles and it never was a main draw. Many people have the skill to create 3-D world with some basic soundtrack, but not many can get the puzzles right.

To me it was the anti-Castle of Wolfenstein and other mindless FPS. You don't die. There is no time to beat. You solve whatever puzzle you feel like solving first. You don't worry about health or collecting points. It is simply about fun (in a frustrating sort of way).

Wheel of Time turns

[Thedeviluno]

"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.

Re:I'm suprised..

[zakezuke]

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!

The same reason people to crossword puzzles. It provides a chalange. If you complete Quake II, that's nice. But you complete Myst... that's something to be proud of.

It reminds me of the realy text adventures by Scott Adams. These things you typicaly couldn't complete in a day. My usual method was to play for a week or so, put it aside when I couldn't figure something out... then later on a little lightbulb would light up and figure out a little piece of the puzzle and then return to the game. The key difference with text adventures is the fact that the difficulty wasn't always figuring out a puzzle but rather figuring out how to phrase things in a way the game could understand. This was my problem with Scott Adams games (how do I say put bubblegum on the stick in only two words).

Probally the best thing about Myst is the fact, other than the surreal music sucked you into the game, was the fact that it could be enjoyed by two or more people at the same time trying to figure out these puzzles. Given the choice between watching "Must See TV"(tm) or what is basicly an interative story that requires thought to figure out... i'd pick the interactive story.

On a side note... Myst was the game that encouranged me to actually buy a freaking CD-rom drive, PCI video card, and something a 16bit sound card. Before that I didn't have much need for a rom drive as anything I needed I could get on floppy.

Also the last great Mac-only game

[5n3ak3rp1mp]

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.

Adventure games

[mr_mophead]

Ah. Adventure games. That takes me back. To a time when games were fun and not a graphical pissing contest.

Re:Adventure games

[Tyler Eaves]

Funny you should say that, since Myst was like the ORIGINAL style-over-substance game.

Re:1997 not 1995

[Pete Brubaker]

Wow. If the last thing that a company did was in nearly 10 years ago (8 for Mr. Picky here.) then maybe closing their doors wasnt a bad idea...

I thought they closed up shop a long time ago.

Fine, it's impossible. Go snivel!

[Hosiah]

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.

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.