One of times of my life I enjoyed the most was working on realMYST, Cyan's realtime version of Myst. In particular, I enjoyed working on the new age, an icy world named Rime. I will bore you in the future with stories of how Doug McBride and I were allowed to help design this place along with the puzzle(s) leading to its discovery.
Today, Rime in general, and Myst in particular, are on my mind as I see Myst is coming to the Nintendo DS. Hallelujiah, I say, although I have to wonder if a game which was built upon immersive graphics and sound will have the right effect on the DS. The original Myst graphics were around 600 pixels wide. The DS has a resolution of only 256x192 pixels. (For comparison, the graphic above is 400 pixels wide). Although I can see using the DS's double screens for some interesting displays of the journals, with a page on each screen turned sideways ala Brain Age, I think some of the puzzles will be very hard to see.
However, the general disdain with which the game community still seems to regard Myst is evident in the article I saw which announced the DS release. It announces that Empire Interactive, (the people who brought you Big Mutha Truckers) were remaking Myst, "the classic freeware game." Justification for that freeware label is further given: "While it was considered the best-selling PC game until The Sims came along, this is largely due to the fact that Myst often came packed in with new computers." Well, OK. Bitter?
Best-Selling means it was SOLD, not given away for free. Myst and Riven made millions of dollars and were top of the industry for years. I myself paid for the game three times - the original Myst, then Myst Masterpiece when I upgraded from Win98 and the original would no longer play, and then finally the 10th Anniversary edition. I'm not sure if that means I'm an idiot, or that maybe I just missed the announcement where everyone was lining up to get it for free, but either way it was never free to me nor anyone I know. Or maybe the writer of that article was in diapers when the original Myst came out, very likely considering this young industry. Still, the game community has long derided Myst. Face it, anything that popular with the General Public must have been bad, right?
Last, the announcement touts the addition of a brand new Age, "Rime", which as I outlined above, was something I worked on waaaay back in 2000 (see screenshot above). Nothing new about it, but it is very cool, and a much better finale than the original Myst. Perhaps the writer of this article didn't know anything about Rime because he, like 95% of the people out there, never heard of realMYST, because our publisher at the time buried it under the hype for Exile, which was releasing at the same time. Unfortunate because we all worked very hard on that game and built some really great environments that far surpassed the original game and ran in realtime. Shame that so many people never heard about the game, but there we are. What? Me, bitter?
Today, Rime in general, and Myst in particular, are on my mind as I see Myst is coming to the Nintendo DS. Hallelujiah, I say, although I have to wonder if a game which was built upon immersive graphics and sound will have the right effect on the DS. The original Myst graphics were around 600 pixels wide. The DS has a resolution of only 256x192 pixels. (For comparison, the graphic above is 400 pixels wide). Although I can see using the DS's double screens for some interesting displays of the journals, with a page on each screen turned sideways ala Brain Age, I think some of the puzzles will be very hard to see.
However, the general disdain with which the game community still seems to regard Myst is evident in the article I saw which announced the DS release. It announces that Empire Interactive, (the people who brought you Big Mutha Truckers) were remaking Myst, "the classic freeware game." Justification for that freeware label is further given: "While it was considered the best-selling PC game until The Sims came along, this is largely due to the fact that Myst often came packed in with new computers." Well, OK. Bitter?
Best-Selling means it was SOLD, not given away for free. Myst and Riven made millions of dollars and were top of the industry for years. I myself paid for the game three times - the original Myst, then Myst Masterpiece when I upgraded from Win98 and the original would no longer play, and then finally the 10th Anniversary edition. I'm not sure if that means I'm an idiot, or that maybe I just missed the announcement where everyone was lining up to get it for free, but either way it was never free to me nor anyone I know. Or maybe the writer of that article was in diapers when the original Myst came out, very likely considering this young industry. Still, the game community has long derided Myst. Face it, anything that popular with the General Public must have been bad, right?
Last, the announcement touts the addition of a brand new Age, "Rime", which as I outlined above, was something I worked on waaaay back in 2000 (see screenshot above). Nothing new about it, but it is very cool, and a much better finale than the original Myst. Perhaps the writer of this article didn't know anything about Rime because he, like 95% of the people out there, never heard of realMYST, because our publisher at the time buried it under the hype for Exile, which was releasing at the same time. Unfortunate because we all worked very hard on that game and built some really great environments that far surpassed the original game and ran in realtime. Shame that so many people never heard about the game, but there we are. What? Me, bitter?
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