Myst

• 1. Introduction

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  Myst, a 1993 adventure game from the studio Cyan, opens with a book. The player, an unnamed person, finds a volume titled Myst and reads its detailed description of an island. Resting a hand on the last page carries the player into that world, leaving no choice but to explore. Nobody explains what to do. No objective is announced. The game has no enemies, no violence, no time limit, and no threat of dying. Its world is a set of pre-rendered pictures joined together by clicks. Even so, it found an audience far larger than its makers expected. Who were the two brothers behind it, and why were they once told to stay with children's games? What happened on the island before the player arrived? And how did a game built from still images, running on painfully slow discs, change the industry around it?

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• 2. Two Brothers, No Publisher

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  Rand Miller spent the late 1980s as a bank programmer in Texas, while his brother Robyn took a year off from university in Washington state. Rand suggested an interactive storybook built with HyperCard. Robyn did not own a computer, so he drew in the basement of their parents' home. The result was The Manhole, their first game. Cosmic Osmo and Spelunx followed, and all were aimed at children. They shared black-and-white art, point-and-click play, a first-person view, and worlds to wander. Robyn later said: "In the projects we did for children, we didn't really tell stories... They were just these worlds that you would explore." The brothers were not big players of games themselves. They knew Dungeons & Dragons, and they had played Zork.

  Around 1990, the brothers decided to make a game for adults. Their wish list included believable characters, a non-linear story, and ethical choices for the player. They pitched the idea to Activision under the title The Gray Summons. Activision told them to stick with children's games. Money was scarce, and Robyn remembered it this way: "we were eating rice and beans and government cheese and that was our diet." Then the Japanese developer Sunsoft approached them, wanting an adult-oriented game. The brothers also wanted far better graphics than before, and at one point they considered a game drawn entirely by hand. They already knew it would be a mystery.

  Their proposal to Sunsoft ran seven pages and consisted mostly of maps of the islands they had imagined. Cyan asked for $265,000. That was more than double their own estimate of the cost, yet less than the final bill. Sunsoft asked whether the game would match The 7th Guest, a CD-ROM game already shown in public previews. The Millers said it would. After the go-ahead, Cyan play-tested the entire game as a role-played session of Dungeons and Dragons, hunting for large flaws before full production began.

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• 3. Atrus and His Sons

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  Two books wait in the island's library, one red and one blue. Each is a trap holding one of Atrus's sons, Sirrus and Achenar. Atrus once lived on Myst island with his wife Catherine. He writes linking books, which carry readers to the worlds they describe. Through the panel of each book, the brothers tell the player that Atrus is dead. Each blames the other for the death of their family and for wrecking much of the library. Both beg to be freed. But pages are missing from the books, so the messages arrive broken and full of static.

  Linking books to further Ages sit hidden behind elaborate mechanisms and puzzles. In each Age the player must find red and blue pages and carry them back to Myst. Every page placed in a book makes the brother's image and voice clearer. After four pages, the brothers reveal where the fifth and final one is hidden. Completing either book frees that brother. The player may help Sirrus, help Achenar, or help neither.

  A green book sits beside the brothers' final pages, and both men plead with the player to leave it alone. They call it another trap. In truth it leads to D'ni, where Atrus is imprisoned. When the player opens it, Atrus asks for one last page, hidden somewhere on the island.

  The game has several endings. Hand a son his final page, and the player swaps places with him, trapped in the prison book while he rips out its pages. Link to D'ni without the page Atrus wants, and the player and Atrus are both stuck there. Bring the page, and Atrus finishes his own Myst book and returns to the island. He goes back to his writing and lets the player roam freely, asking only for help later, since he faces a greater foe than his sons. Back in the library, the red and blue books are gone, and burn marks darken the shelves where they stood.

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• 4. Puzzles Without Punishment

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  Four Ages, named Selenitic, Stoneship, Mechanical, and Channelwood, form the heart of the puzzle structure. Each is a self-contained mini-world with its own chain of interlocking logical puzzles. All four must be explored to solve the main puzzle back on Myst. The Millers believed most people did not enjoy puzzles. So a good one should feel like part of the world, the way working out a household circuit breaker takes only observation and common sense.

  Rand described a balance of three elements: the puzzles, the environment, and the story. Clues had to be visible enough for players to connect them. He framed the test in terms of blame: "once the player finds the solution, if they blame us, then we haven't done a good job. But if they blame themselves, then we have."

  Moving through the game meant clicking a spot in the scene, which crossfaded into the next frame. An optional Zip feature showed a lightning bolt cursor and let players skip several frames at once. The shortcut was fast, but it could make players overlook items and clues. Journal pages carry the backstory, yet the player can hold only one page at a time. A dropped page returns to where it was found.

  Cyan tested with two people sitting at the screen, because pairs talked aloud about what they liked and hated. A lone player stayed silent. Rand and Robyn sat behind the testers taking notes, and sometimes fixed problems on the spot. Early decisions had ruled out an inventory. A save system came later, a concession to the fact that most players would need months to finish. Testers also noticed that the story had no inciting incident. Cyan answered by adding a note that points players to a chamber, where a message explains the game's objectives.

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• 5. Building the Ages

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  The name Myst came from The Mysterious Island, a book by Jules Verne, which also inspired the island's solitary and mysterious mood. Other influences were Zork, the Star Wars mythic universe, and the portals to other worlds in C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia. Much of the early work went into inventing places and puzzles, with the story trailing behind. "We were place designers … and the maps kind of fueled the story," Rand said. The plot grew building by building. Cyan soon saw that the setting needed more history than any player would encounter. The climactic ending with Atrus came later, once the team wanted a more complicated finish. Looking back, Robyn felt the game never quite produced the emotional reaction and ethical dilemma they had intended.

  The team worked on Macintosh computers, chiefly the Macintosh Quadra 700. Rendering software proved faster than the hand-drawn figures of earlier titles, and it allowed color. Terrain began as grayscale heightmaps, which were extruded into changes in elevation. Textures were painted onto a colormap wrapped around the landscape, and objects such as trees completed each scene. Rendering used StrataVision 3D, with some modeling in Macromedia MacroModel. Rand then placed the images into HyperCard to link them together and test the puzzles. In all, Myst holds 2,500 frames, one for every area a player can explore. Some took hours to render and others took days. Photoshop 1.0 handled the final edits.

  Rand argued that small touches mattered, such as bumps on a tapestry or screws in a fixture. Missing details, he said, "would flag to your subconscious that this is fake."

  The slow CD-ROM drive was the toughest constraint, since few consumers owned anything faster than a single-speed model. Images were stored as 8-bit PICT resources with custom color palettes and QuickTime compression. Animated elements were QuickTime movies using Cinepak compression, totaling more than 66 minutes. Stills shrank from 500 kB to about 80 kB while still looking like truecolor. The Millers also placed related scenes close together on the disc's spiral track to cut the delay between scenes. Sunsoft's console focus, with no hard drives and small memory buffers, pushed Cyan to split the world into separate Ages. In the original version, each Age was its own HyperCard stack, linked by HyperTalk scripts.

  Believable characters were a hurdle, because communication could only run one way and a player could walk off and break the spell. Video was at first out of reach. The trap books were the solution, one-way messengers tied to a single location. QuickTime arrived halfway through development and solved the video problem. Ports to other platforms would later need a brand-new engine.

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• 6. Sounds of the Island

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  Chris Brandkamp, Cyan's sound engineer, also served as its chief financial officer. He made most of the ambient and incidental sounds, and he had to wait until the visuals were in context to be sure the sounds fit. His sources were unlikely. Recordings of real fire did not sound like fire, so the roar of a boiler came from driving slowly over stones in a driveway. A wrench stood in for the chimes of a large clock tower, then was transposed to a lower pitch. Bubbles, which he recalled as "the most hateful sound", came from blowing into tubes of different sizes in a toilet.

  At first Myst had no music, because the Millers did not want it to interfere with play. A few tests showed that music did no harm and deepened the mood of certain areas. Robyn composed 40 minutes of synthesized music, mixed on an E-mu Proteus MPS synthesizer. He recorded it over two weeks of evenings. Cyan first sold the soundtrack by mail order, as Myst: The Soundtrack. Before the sequel arrived, Virgin Records acquired the rights, and the CD was reissued on the 21st of April 1998. In April 2021 a limited two-LP vinyl edition appeared, pressed in pink and blue. It carried a previously unreleased track, plus documents, photographs, maps, and artifacts.

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• 7. Hit and Backlash

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  On the 24th of September 1993, Myst reached Macintosh computers, marketed with the tagline "The Surrealistic Adventure That Will Become Your World". Sample discs carried a demo of the Myst Island portion. A Windows port followed in March 1994. Publicity leaned on word of mouth, especially over the internet.

  Before release, Rand Miller had thought selling 100,000 copies would be "mind-blowing". The game sold double that in seven months. It became Broderbund's most successful title, passing 500,000 copies by the end of 1994 and one million by March 1995. For 52 months it was the best-selling computer game in the United States. By 1997 it had sold 3.5 million copies, and by 2000 more than 6.3 million worldwide, including more than 4.3 million in the United States. It was the top-selling PC game of the 1990s until The Sims overtook it in 2002. Together with The 7th Guest, it was a killer application that accelerated sales of CD-ROM drives. It was also the first CD-ROM title to sell more than two million units.

  Computer Gaming World told readers that Myst was not like other CD-ROM games "high on glitz and low on substance". In April 1994 the magazine called it an "artistic masterwork". Reviewer Jeff Koke wrote in Pyramid: "It is the first adventure game in which I left feeling as though I had visited a real place." Macworld named it the best game of 1994, praising how it dropped the usual irritations of adventure games, such as moves that get you killed. Wired and The New York Times were among the publications that cited Myst as proof video games could become an art form.

  Not everyone agreed. In 1996, Next Generation called Myst "gaming's bleakest hour", blaming its static graphics and trial-and-error puzzles. The magazine said its success came mainly from non-gamers who wanted a CD-ROM showcase, and that many games then copied its worst habits. Edge said the engine was nowhere near as sophisticated as the graphics. In a 2000 retrospective, IGN said the game had not aged well. Critics were also split on whether it mattered that the player could not change the plot.

  Myst won Best Adventure/Fantasy Role-Playing Game at the 1994 Codie awards. In 1996, Computer Gaming World ranked it 11th on its list of the most innovative computer games.

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• 8. Clones and Return Visits

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  As early as December 1994, Newsweek compared Myst to "an art film, destined to gather critical acclaim and then dust on the shelves". The prediction missed badly. Other critics called it the "ultimate anti-arcade game", since it demanded no special skills and kept no score. Stephen Kline and his coauthors called it the "anti-Doom". Where Doom was violent, Satanic, and built on shock and speed, Myst was tranquil and created by Christian developers.

  Imitators followed. Some developers marketed their games by comparison to Myst, and others made outright "Myst clones". When adventure games went into decline, Gamecenter laid the blame squarely on Myst. It argued that players wanted eye candy over storytelling, and that Grim Fandango, Blade Runner, and Gabriel Knight 3 all failed to sell. Designer Josh Mandel put the responsibility on publishers, who now expected every adventure to be a Myst-sized hit. Edge, writing in 1998, judged the impact mixed but ultimately more helpful than harmful, since it helped PC gaming develop.

  The CD-ROM also changed how games were presented. Earlier games were mostly "games of emergence", where elements combined in surprising ways. Myst was one of the first "games of progression", leading the player through predefined encounters. That helped lay foundations for the more experimental indie games of the 2000s. It also foreshadowed casual games and walking simulators, and its sequels indirectly popularized escape the room games.

  The Miller brothers appeared in advertisements for The Gap. Actor Matt Damon refused to lend his voice to The Bourne Conspiracy when it became a shooter, because he had wanted a puzzle game like Myst. Becta recognized the primary school teacher Tim Rylands for literacy gains made by using Myst in class, and researchers used it in studies of aggression. A 1996 parody, Pyst, let players roam a Myst Island apparently vandalized by frustrated visitors. In 2013, the Museum of Modern Art added Myst to its video game collection, where it is shown as a video presentation.

  Riven, released in 1997, continued the story. Myst III: Exile came in 2001, from Presto Studios and Ubisoft. Myst IV: Revelation followed in 2004, made entirely by Ubisoft, and Myst V: End of Ages in 2005, from Cyan Worlds. Cyan also made Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, whose multiplayer component was canceled, revived by GameTap as Myst Online: Uru Live, and later released as open source. With David Wingrove, the Millers wrote three novels for Hyperion: The Book of Atrus, The Book of Ti'ana, and The Book of D'ni. They were packaged together as The Myst Reader. By 2003 the franchise had sold over twelve million copies, with Myst accounting for more than six million.

  The game itself kept being rebuilt. Myst: Masterpiece Edition in 1999 re-rendered the images in 24-bit truecolor in place of the original 256 colors. In November 2000, realMyst offered free-roaming, real-time 3D, weather effects, a day and night cycle, and a new Age called Rime. Players praised the interactivity, but the game ran poorly on most computers of the time. Cyan called it the game they would have made originally, while Robyn Miller later voiced frustration that it was not how they had envisioned Myst. In September 2020, Cyan announced another remake in Unreal Engine 4, for virtual reality and high-definition screens, with randomized puzzles. It reached the Oculus Quest on the 10th of December 2020. In March 2025, an update brought the world of Rime into that version too.

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