More about Myst for the DS

My friend just sent me a link to another, much more balanced article trumpeting the impending release of Myst for the Nintendo DS. Unlike previous articles that alternately bashed Myst and called it a "shareware" game, explaining away its unprecedented sales as a factor of its many lucrative and successful OEM bundlings, this one seems to recognize Myst for the impressive cultural phenomenon it was. This one also correctly attributes the development of Rime Age to 2000's realMYST release.

They even correctly ascertained the reasons why most people have never heard of realMYST. The parting line is great, really hit the nail on the head:

[realMYST's] 3D engine proved detrimental to the experience and so it was largely ignored even by fans.

And the hell of it is, I wish I could argue, but I believe the article summed things up nicely. Ignored even by fans! realMYST was a spectacular, glorious failure. Partly this was due to the fact that realMYST was buried under the other Myst title released at the same time, the illustrious Myst III: Exile. For years, I've been blaming the publisher, because that's what developers do. The publisher, for their part, of course blamed us for creating an unsellable game that no one wanted. Not even the solid golden reputation of the best-selling franchise-spawning name of Myst could rescue realMYST.

But it wasn't the publisher, was it? Not really. Read the reviews from the time of its release. The fact is, we released realMYST on an engine that had not yet matured, and it was beset with seemingly un-fixable physics bugs (fall through the world, anyone?) and a punishingly low frame rate on the typical consumer-level computer. This ensured that those few people who actually did buy the game and play it would up with a thoroughly unrewarding experience. That earned us tremendously bad word-of-mouth.

My friend Richard Rouse III once famously said to me: "A slow game is only slow until the processors improve, but a bad game is bad forever." The obvious conclusion to draw is that you'd be better to make a good game that ran slow than a bad game that ran smoothly. But there is a Pyrrhic truth here. realMYST was a good game and still is. And, true, you could play realMYST on today's computers and have a wonderfully fluid experience. But slow games get killed by the marketplace the same as bad games, and who really cares about the distinction? If a game doesn't run on the machines available in the time it's released, then the point is moot: it might as well be a bad game as a slow game. It will sell the same, which is to say, poorly. Ignored even by fans, indeed.

Lessons, boys and girls? Bad technology will kill you. Here's to mature, stable technology and the brainiacs who create it efficiently. Go tell your kids to read a book and do some math. We need 'em!