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Cyan Worlds Closes

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the lots-of-loose-talent dept.

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...'"

14 of 184 comments (clear)

  1. Dupe me baby one more time.... by Onymous+Hero · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Dupe me baby one more time.... by Kadin2048 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

      --
      "Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
  2. Re:Call the RIAA... by WilliamSChips · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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

    --
    Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
  3. They will indeed be missed by mackid · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  4. Opinion by Oligonicella · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  5. RIP Cyan by SuperBanana · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.
  6. We could re-do Myst...better, even! by Hosiah · · Score: 2, Interesting
    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.

    1. Re:We could re-do Myst...better, even! by bcs_metacon.ca · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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!

      --

      How appropriate. You fight like a cow.
  7. Wheel of Time turns by Thedeviluno · · Score: 2, Interesting

    "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.

  8. Re:I'm suprised.. by zakezuke · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    --
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  9. Also the last great Mac-only game by 5n3ak3rp1mp · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  10. Adventure games by mr_mophead · · Score: 2, Interesting

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

    1. Re:Adventure games by Tyler+Eaves · · Score: 3, Interesting

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

      --
      TODO: Something witty here...
  11. Re:1997 not 1995 by Pete+Brubaker · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    --
    What's a sig? Pete Brubaker