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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?"
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.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
because for teenage boys shooting things and blowing stuff up is a lot more fun over the long hall
Skot Nelson music is my saviour / i was maimed by rock and roll
It lives on in minecraft . . . :D
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
I mean, yeah, it was gorgeous at a time when games weren't, and it had "new" gameplay.
Only. The gameplay, once you get over the "new", sort of sucks. Yeah, you're supposed to experiment with things to find out what they do, except you don't even know what experiment you'll be trying. There's no way to predict whether clicking on something will try to pick it up, or push it, or turn it, or whatever, so you can't perform interesting experiments to learn about things. And ultimately, it just sorta never gets past that. The writing was interesting, but it worked better as a book than as a game.
Basically, it's like a text adventure with a much worse and stupider parser, but it has graphics.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
I don't accept the premise of the question.
For one, Myst had a large impact, as admitted in the question.
For another, when did critics imply that Myst heralded an era of "open ended" gameplay? It was not itself some intensely open ended experience. It was definitely leisurely, but it effectively replaced a game on rails with a game on a Gantt chart. You could approach a few things in any order, but there was usually a limiting factor elsewhere in the world.
Finally, there are numerous games with hugely developed background worlds and interaction with that world that far exceed the slowly expanding maze of puzzle locked doors that made up Myst. I read the Myst books as a kid and loved them, but some LucasArts games of the same era had worlds with a more cohesive character.
Drive around in GTA V. Visit the beach. Go swimming and dive underwater. Check out the beach walk. Climb the mountains. Fly the blimp. There are about 20 square miles to explore, all with considerable detail.
That's the legacy of Myst.
I remember other similar games "The 7th guest" and "Monkey Island". Good games that make you think instead of just running around shooting. Wish there were more like that. Leisure suit Larry was pretty good too I think.
Asking why Myst is no longer relevant is sort of asking like why people stopped buying Encarta. The reason Myst was such a sleeper hit is that it coincided with the start of the "multimedia era" in the 90's. Once you went out and spent $150+ on a soundcard, speakers, and a CD-ROM drive, then what?
Multimedia features are no fun without software, and Myst managed to be family-friendly and take advantage of your computer's new features. It was the right game at the right time.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
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.
and that's the thing: pre rendered just isn't that fun, breaks the immersion. flat shaded realtime can be more immersive.
basically "oh why aren't games like myst??" can be answered with a simple line: Philips CD-i sucks ass.
heck.. what I want the answer to is what the fuck happened to under a killing moons promise of good games?!?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Myst required a CD-ROM drive, and a bunch of RAM. This meant I had to put a CD-ROM drive and RAM on my credit card. This led to my having so much credit card debt that I had to drop out of grad school and get a real job to pay it off. This kept me from finishing my Ph.D. This is why P=NP hasn't been solved, and why we don't have flying cars.
Thanks a lot, Myst.
Why didn't Myst have a larger impact? The answer is in the article:
Much of the game's popularity was thanks to casual players who found themselves drawn to its evocative, violence-free world; many hard-core gamers found it obtuse and frustrating, its point-and-click interface slideshow-esque and stifling. Maybe Myst wasn't for hard-core gamers. Maybe it wasn't even really a game.
It also explains the distinction and the draw:
I was about 11 when I landed on the island for the first time — a couple years late; CD-ROM technology took a few years to come to our house. NES and Sega were more or less verboten throughout my childhood. That didn't stop me from playing hours of Zelda at my friends' houses, but because I didn't have nearly as much time to practice getting "good" at console games, I remember having a bit of anxiety about navigating a virtual world, feeling painfully inept in comparison with my friends, for whom a controller felt as natural in their hands as a no. 2 pencil. But now, here I was in a world where video game aptitude was irrelevant: rather than a mastery of timing and hand-eye coordination (ah, remember that old argument to get your parents to buy you a Nintendo? "It'll improve my hand-eye coordination, Mom!"), Myst required little more than your eyes, your ears, and a healthy sense of curiosity.
To that I would add that the pre-rendered graphics looked much nicer than most other games available at the time.
I was a gamer when Myst came out. I remember it being sneered at by the hardcore crowd. The people talking about it changing the face of gaming were the ones salivating over its sales figures. But casual games don't seem to create new genres so easily. For a while it was Myst, then it was The Sims, then Angry Birds, Farmville, Plants vs. Zombies, and who knows what else. And they're all different! Whatever makes a casual game popular, it doesn't seem to be easy to clone. At a guess, I'd say it's personality.
(Why did we sneer at Myst? Because every gaming executive secretly wants their company to be a casual gaming money machine. When they start talking about "the future of gaming" being being point-and-click slideshows, it sounds very threatening to us. The modern version of this is "the future of gaming is mobile", i.e. games with a terrible touchscreen interface. But since gaming happens across so many different platforms now, it's less scary. Plus, we're older, so we've seen this pattern a few times.)
(Also, I was 12, so I sneered at everything.)
Visit the
Yes, exactly!
I worked at a software store when Myst came out, and we sold MOUNTAINS of it. That at the 7th Guest (and Encarta, LOL) were the go-tos when people added a CD-ROM to their system and wanted something to do with it. But the feedback was universal - after a couple hours in Myst and the visual excitement wore off, it turned out there wasn't much game. It wasn't much more than a graphic Choose Your Own Adventure book.
Doom came out shortly later, and everyone forgot entirely about Myst. We sold mountains of Doom, and then we sold mountains of those *terrible* compilation CDs that had bazillions of maps downloaded off the internet. And then Doom2, and then more add-on maps (and not long after we started selling NICs and 10Base2 terminators ;). Being able to go anywhere and engage anything was what Myst didn't do, a step we had *expected* Riven to take... but it didn't.
Under a Killing Moon was also a big seller - and there were other games in the vein, too. All very interesting to play, but like the LucasFilm-style games they got murdered by FPSs and RTSs. I never quite understood why - Day of the Tentacle and Monkey Island were great games with broad appeal. Strange they didn't survive longer.
heck.. what I want the answer to is what the fuck happened to space combat, and the X-Wing & Wing Commander promises of good games!
Wow -- it has actually been 20 years since Myst came out?? That seems unbelievable. I haven't done any "real" computer gaming in a long time, but I spent many hours working my way through Myst and absolutely loved that game.
I wonder if the popularization of the World Wide Web had something to do with the eventual decline of Myst and games like it. I remember that a big part of the satisfaction of playing Myst and other puzzle-based games, such as the King's Quest series, was that you really needed to struggle through the challenges until you figured them out. For example, a staple of those games was a maze that you had to traverse at some point (remember the little subterranean train thing in Myst?). To solve them, you had to spend considerable time exploring and mapping until you finally figured out how to get where you needed to go. If you were stuck, there wasn't much you could do except try harder until you got it. Sure, the game companies had "hot lines" that you could call for hints, but they charged you for it, and nobody I knew ever used them. As a result, the game was much more rewarding because you had to do it all by yourself. This environment also was conducive to playing the game with others, because two (or more) heads are better than one. My brother and I worked through a number of these games when we were kids, and playing them together added to the fun.
Once the Web became mainstream, the situation changed very quickly. Suddenly, game "walk throughs" were widely available for free, and much of the mystique that led to these games' success disappeared. You need to solve that maze? Just look it up on the walk through and you can be done with it in about two minutes. Once the entire game solution was readily available, the sense of accomplishment from solving the puzzles was greatly diminished, in my opinion.
So, imagine a world where there is no quick, easy way to look up game solutions. It seems terribly quaint now, but that was the environment in which Myst and similar games before it became popular. Once that changed, I think the days were numbered for the puzzle-based games, at least as far as their ability to become blockbusters.
I haven't done any research to compare how well actual market trends correlated with the rise of the Web. This is just my recollection of how the gaming world changed during that time.
This is something I agree with. It did feel like a "graphic adventure" game, but the puzzles were made somewhat frustrating. I might have enjoyed the puzzles if they were something I could have played with outside of the game.
I never quite got into myst. Being a FPS player from far earlier than Myst ( Ultima Underworld ) - the openness of a vast free-form 3D world had already demonstrated far greater appeal, but only on the PC platform. The Mac was, at that time, very poorly supported and had none of the games that the PC players were experiencing at that time.
As such, I recall the "excitement" of anyone who had a Mac and could play Myst and while the graphics were pretty for the era ( look at the old screenshots ), the gameplay wasn't very exciting and took too long. Still, people played it, because those of us who had CD rom's needed something to show others that was different to the floppy-loaded games of the time. And at the time, it really was "eye candy".
The 7th guest was similar ( we used to call it the "7th guess" because of the guesswork in solving puzzles ) and arguably more enjoyable, but the concept of being alone in a 3D world was probably recaptured beautifully by the game "portal" which introduced a dynamic element to the puzzles, so if anyone is looking to what happened to games like "Myst" and "Riven" and "The Seventh Guest", they finally came of age in "Portal" in my opinion.
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
It's claim to fame was that Myst used Strata 3D for the scenes. It had a good begining, on its way to become a known name like Maya is now. Then in about 1996 their new multiplatform version became an unmangeable mess with them trying to add too many features at once. Their bank forced them to release it uncomplete and they quickly got a reputaion for releasing buggy crap. Suprisingly they are still around, but after some research I found their company is registered to a humble residential home. The company may be only be a side project for its founder now.
It is pre-rendering made the world feel less immersive.
I've seen way too many people write "it's" instead of "its". But changing "its" to "it is"? That's a new one.
And me without mod points... dammit. If I never see another FPS game it'll be too soon. It seems sometimes they're *all* the industry produces.
Indeed, I thought the real revolutionary part of Myst was "Hey, so good graphics look nice." I didn't think anyone thought that there would be a flood of games where you explored islands created through books.
I'm seeing a lot of comments here about how the most revolutionary part of Myst was the graphics, and I'm actually surprised. That's not why I like Myst at all (and I still think Myst and Riven are fantastic games). To me, it's about the style of gameplay. There are puzzles, hard puzzles and a story that you're trying to piece together with very little exposition. It was great to just explore without worrying about time limits or things trying to kill you. Every time you discovered something new and progressed, that discovery was its own exciting reward.
I do agree that "doom happened" is the answer to what happened to Myst-style games, and the adventure genre period. I forever curse the rise of FPS games for that reason. I know adventure games are still made, but 3D killed them, for the same reason Myst III isn't as good as Myst or Riven. I don't want a 3D environment. I want the static adventures of old.
Speaking of old, that's what I am. Get off my lawn and whatnot.
Nonsense. I'll grant that it wasn't always clear what interactions were possible, given the choice to use a minimalistic interface in order to produce the most immersive experience possible at the time, but what separated Myst from contemporary point-and-click puzzle games, as well as most of its created-by-other-companies sequels, is that the puzzles actually did have a logic to them that removed the need for guesswork. The gear puzzle that's accessible right from the start is a prime example. It's there in front of you, the mechanisms for controlling the puzzle are simple, yet the actual solving of it is not so trivial. You need to actually figure out how it works and what result you're trying to produce from it, since otherwise brute force and guessing won't do you any good.
There were a handful of "here's the key, now go use it" puzzles, which generally are a cop-out in place of a well-crafted puzzle, but in this case, those puzzles were a part of the larger puzzle: figuring out how the world itself was put together. Each of them had a logic to them that made sense in the context of the world as a whole and contributed to your understanding of how each of the parts fit together with the rest. Sure, figuring out that you need to turn the water on to power equipment in one of the worlds in the game is just a matter of finding the right spot to interact with, but there are clues all over pointing you to the fact that such an interaction must exist (e.g. pipes all over, obvious ways to direct the flow of water, etc.), as well as more clues pointing you towards where you can find that spot (e.g. the pipes all lead to it).
Riven was much the same, though it was even made its puzzles an even more fundamental part of the world. In contrast, Myst III (developed by a different studio) was filled with numerous puzzles that made no sense at all (rather than having the puzzles be a natural part of the world, it relied on the idea that the worlds had been created specifically to be filled with puzzles as a training ground for some of the characters in the story, which the developers used as an excuse to shoehorn in all sorts of nonsensical stuff) and relied on simple brute force or happening to look in the right direction at just the right time to solve. I even recall hearing a quote at one point from the CEO of the company that made Myst and Riven, talking about how he wasn't a fan of the fact that some of the puzzles in Myst III required random guessing to solve. Myst IV was marginally better. Myst V was created by the original company, but it suffered from various issues as well, though it was still better than either III or IV.
If you don't think that the puzzles made sense, then I'd suggest that you simply didn't explore the world as fully as you were meant to. I've found similar opinions in the past from folks that opted to use walkthroughs, usually because they see the puzzles as obstacles keeping them from the story, rather than recognizing that the process for solving them is how you learn about the story most fully.
It's kind of sad how low-resolution and overcompressed the in-game renders are by current standards.
They actually aren't compressed at all; they are stored on the CD as uncompressed 16-bit images. Perhaps what you notice is the dithering? Myst was the same way, but 8-bit. Computers of the day weren't fast enough to decompress images during game play with decent speed.
I have the original CD version, which still works on XP with a few tweaks. Have loved it since day 1. :) There is a project that is attempting to re-create the game in a real-time 3D engine: Starry Expanse. They have a small tech demo available.
I agree with you entirely. The environment was a big draw - and by that I include the sounds and the music, but the puzzles themselves were, at the time, all encompassing. Why didn't it have a bigger impact? Perhaps because creating something so original and unique is rare. The mechanisms of the game were the framework around which the story was wrought. The story, and the puzzles and the way they were integrated, was the thing (IMO).
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.
The FPS is popular and common because it's easy to get it to work reasonably well. It's a game design that's easy for players to pick up, easy to balance, and easy to squeeze into nearly any story or setting. That's the same reason platformers, turn-based RPGs and 2D fighters were ubiquitous before the (and still common after) FPS - there are reliable formulas to build them. But within the genre, there's a huge amount of space to work in.
Sure, the most prominent subgenre is the "Hollywood-realistic modern military shooter" - Call of Duty, Battlefield, et cetera. There's too many of them, and most of them aren't all that great (I swear, I only own the latest Medal of Honor because I wanted some other games it was packaged with). They're the most popular even though most of them are uninspired, unpolished or just plain bad, but then again, look at the most popular movies or songs lately and you'll see the same.
Then you've got the more unusual ones. Bioshock: Infinite was amazing - the story is excellent, and the gameplay, while not revolutionary, was certainly better than most. Borderlands mixes FPS with a dash of Diablo, generating literally billions of random guns for you to min-max. Deus Ex tries, and often succeeds, in providing a wide variety of approaches to each situation. Far Cry 3 gives you a massive open world and a huge focus on stealth (and the recent expansion, Blood Dragon, is the most hilarious parody of 80s action movies I've seen in any medium). The shooter portions of Rage aren't particularly innovative, but it mixed it up with vehicle sections that were actually more fun than the shooting. STALKER goes the opposite direction of the arcade-shooter-with-a-realistic-facade - this is a game where one bullet can kill you if you don't patch yourself up. ARMA goes the same way, except removing crazy sci-fi shit in favor of being a military simulator (I find it boring as hell - my experience was twenty minutes of boot camp, a fifteen-minute mission briefing, a five-minute helicopter ride, ten minutes of walking, then about thirty seconds of shooting before I took a round to the arm and bled out while trying to figure out which button to push to yell for a medic. But I can't say it's not trying, and I can't say it's not trying something different).
And if anything, I think we're seeing shooters take up a smaller share of the market right now. Looking at my recently-purchased games, I see plenty of RPGs, dozens of weird indie gems, some racing games, puzzle games, strategy games both real-time and turn-based, lots of open-world games, a handful of 2D fighters, a few third-person shooters, and yes, a decent pile of first-person shooters, but only a few of which are insipid, uninspiring or mindless.
Several of them do, however, look rather pretty.
where the only thing that ever improved were the graphics the video card could pump out.
Doom and its ilk used software rendering... in fact it was 2D ray-casted with a cheap 3D facade ("walls this far away are this tall, draw a one-pixel-wide strip of that height") on top of that (just like Wolf3D, but doom used more complex 2D BSP-based geometry)) ...but you for some reason think there was a GPU race in 1993 (the year Doom was released), even though the first consumer-grade 3D-accelerated cards didnt hit the market until 1995...
Well, they may have been off base with the "video card" statement for a couple of years, but otherwise more correct than you care to admit, or know.
Think back to the "Doom Clones" which where so pervasive it was the name everyone used for many years instead of "FPS". Then examine the landscape that followed. If you didn't have an established 3D engine licensed, publishers didn't want to talk to you. In that era of software rasterization we were able to pull off some pretty slick and interesting things (in the demoscene) as CPU speed and RAM size progressed. Hardware fixed function pipeline discrete graphics made everything look pretty much the same for a good long time. Only recently with heterogeneous computing will we be getting back much of the graphical & physics freedom we had with software rasterization.
Now, think back before Doom. The Fully 3D Virtuality VR Arcade had Dactly Nightmare and Exorex. The PCs had Starglider2 (those guys went on to make starfox). We had Real 3D, though untextured (and on 386 machines). On 486, and Pentium one could do a whole hell of a lot more, the loads of RAM helped overcome lots of slow CPU calculations (look up tables everywhere). However, we had sacrificed "real" 3D for textures+2.5D (faux 3D). After the 3D HW boom there were so many different vendors to customize your code for really only the bigger shops could swing a stable widely supported engine... And when they did make an engine, it looked like every other engine out there... If someone did try something new looking, chances are no publisher would touch it, and if it was untextured most players wouldn't either.
Say what you want, doesn't change reality. You're focusing on HW accel BS, when in reality anything untextured after Doom did suffer. You might not realize we did, in fact, lose a lot in gameplay over textures. And it WAS a graphics race, starting in the software rasterizer era, but those who had the money to come to market first carried it on into the 3D graphics card era. And Carmack did have a big part to play in the monotonous landscape of games for decades, beginning with Doom (though it wasn't the first shooter, Catacombs, Hovertank, Wolf3D, etc, it was the one that spurned the textured lust).
To this day, publishers largely won't talk to you unless you've licensed ID or Unreal, or some other engine. A few indie games with custom engines are starting to turn their heads now though -- See: infini/Minecraft, etc. Look up stuff like Atomontage (running on a meager laptop, primarily in software calculations / immediate mode), and wonder why that tech's not in any games yet, at least for world geometry -- Consoles don't have the RAM, and so established engines don't do it.
Myst was a tedious exercise in figuring out exactly in what order to do what the designers wanted you to do.
I'd say that it was more an exercise in finding the clues spread around the world about how to solve the puzzles, making the connections, and getting it done. The information was all there, you just had to pay attention to find it. You've got a point that each of the games is (on the whole) only really good for one play-through, though. I can't argue with that.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I think quite a lot of gamers just won't get it. If you ask them what makes game 1 better than game 2, they will point to better graphics, better sound, etc.
I don't think FPS killed adventure games though, I just think that over time as more and more people started playing games that the type of people who love adventure games are outnumbered by the type of people who love FPS games. And of course there's overlap between the groups. So while the number of adventure games and adventure game players has also grown, it just has grown at a slower rate.