Myst Was Supposed To Change the Face of Gaming. What Is Its Legacy?

glowend writes "On 24 September 1993, computer users were introduced to Myst. Grantland takes a look at the game's legacy, two decades on. Quoting: 'Twenty years ago, people talked about Myst the same way they talked about The Sopranos during its first season: as one of those rare works that irrevocably changed its medium. It certainly felt like nothing in gaming would or could be the same after it. Yes, Myst went on to sell more than 6 million copies and was declared a game-changer (so to speak), widely credited with launching the era of CD-ROM gaming. It launched an equally critically adored and commercially successful sequel, and eventually four more installments. Fans and critics alike held their breath in anticipation of the tidal wave of exploratory, open-ended gaming that was supposed to follow, waiting to be drowned in a sea of new worlds. And then, nothing.' Why didn't Myst have a larger impact?"

Comments

The graphics were simply brilliant

[Nefarious Wheel]

And turned brass was everywhere. I loved the puzzles, the incredible transport monorails, the sheer quiet brilliance. And quiet it was, and cerebral. Still looking for something quite that good again.

Re:The graphics were simply brilliant

[Another, completely]

What killed Uru for me was that it stopped being pure puzzle-solving, and added technical run-and-jump obstacles. Sure, sometimes the solution was to push a chair off of a cliff above to create something to step on in the water, but then they also required pressing the jump button at just the right time. The brilliance of Myst and the sequels was that you had all the time in the world to think about the puzzle, and when you knew the answer, you could pretty much get it to work first time. Another great thing about it was that nobody ever explained the rules, and it wasn't always obvious whether an object represented a puzzle that would help you progress, or if it was just an interesting piece of scenery.

Re:The graphics were simply brilliant

[hairyfeet]

Try Just Cause II as it has EXACTLY what you are describing. You can start a new game and after the first mission? You can just drive through the countryside if you desire and as long as you don't go running down cops or blasting people nobody will bother you. You can drive to the airport, pick up a plane or chopper and just fly around without being bothered, you can go down to the docs and get anything from a speedboat to a Junk and just go cruising, or if you buy the parachute thrusters DLC (just 99c) you can just jump into the air and fly your parachute all across the place, even use the grappler to grab onto boats and cars and go parasailing.

Anyway as long as you have Vista or better (requires DX10) and even an average gaming card (it plays over 30FPS on my HD4850, a card you can get for less than $40 on Amazon) you can go where you want and do whatever you want, the entire world from the mountain tops to the ocean is 100% open from the get go. Sounds like exactly what you are looking for....but you really should go apeshit in that game at least once, nothing wilder than riding on the hood of a car going 165MPH+ and grappling a pursuing cop car to the ground and making it do the T3 car flip, tying a cop bike to a lamppost like Jedi, or blowing out the tires of a jeep and watching it cartwheel a dozen times before becoming a fireball, VERY cool.

Re:Better games came along right after?

[Anonymous Coward]

I blame Doom for unintentionally being the spark responsible for the stagnation of the entire video game industry for many years, spawning an ever-increasing multitude of insipid, uninspiring, mindless FPS where the only thing that ever improved were the graphics the video card could pump out.

Re:as it turns out...

[electron sponge]

because for teenage boys shooting things and blowing stuff up is a lot more fun over the long hall

For the long hall, you'll need to haul the sniper rifle with you. For the short hall, a shotgun or assault rifle will do.

Speaking as someone who was a teenaged boy when Myst came out, I can honestly say no game interested me less than it did. I saw demos of it at the video game stores, and all the clerks would gush over it being amazing, groundbreaking, etc. I'd nod my head, say "okay dude, yeah, do you even know what you're talking about?" and go home to play Ultima VII. To me it looked like the Sierra * Quest games without the things that made those games fun.

The game that I believe was the most influential from that period in time was Wolfenstein 3D, which was the seminal FPS game in my opinion. As a shareware game, it reached an audience of "anyone who had a modem and the number of a BBS with a halfway-decent files section." It was over the top, just a bit camp, and a thousand percent fun. You can even play it on Facebook now. I got banned from my high school computer network for installing Wolf3D on the server. A teacher walked in and our entire Turbo Pascal class was slaying Nazis. My only defense was that it was more useful than learning Pascal. They were not amused.

I agree with the parent poster that the attributes of FPS games are very alluring to teenaged boys, but I wouldn't necessarily consider that a bad thing (or a good thing, either). It is what it is.

Re:What?

[magarity]

Yep; the graphics were pretty but single solution set-piece puzzles are not all that fun. Myst was a tedious exercise in figuring out exactly in what order to do what the designers wanted you to do.