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It's entirely possible that the only reason I'm a programmer today is because of Myst. For reasons that I either never fully learned or fail to remember, my fa
by symfoniq 8y ago
It's entirely possible that the only reason I'm a programmer today is because of Myst.
For reasons that I either never fully learned or fail to remember, my father received a CD in the mail from Myst's publisher (Broderbund?) containing a demo of the game. Only, someone screwed up, and instead of the CD containing a demo, it actually contained almost the entire game in a just-before-release, playable state (only a single world was unfinished). And all the HyperCard scripting was unlocked and viewable by the player.
Myst was amazing for its era, so of course, wanting to know how such a game was possible, I took full advantage of being able to read all of the HyperTalk code. And I'd be lying if I claimed I didn't use this access to "solve" a few of the more difficult puzzles. The times spent understanding and "hacking" Myst are among my fondest memories.
All of this led to me learning HyperCard and HyperTalk myself, and eventually moving on to CodeWarrior/C, Perl, PHP, Ruby, etc.
So thanks to Robyn and Rand Miller for the awesome memories. It had a huge impact on my life.
- AdmiralAsshat 8y agoHave you ever thought of uploading that HyperCard stack somewhere? I mean it would probably be taken down in a heartbeat, because the disclosure of the source code was very likely unintentional, but, you never know!
- symfoniq 8y agoUnfortunately, the CD is long lost to the "mysts" of time...
- duskwuff 8y agoThe release version of Myst was a Hypercard stack, too, at least on the Mac. If you changed the type/creator on the right data files, you could open them in Hypercard. The images wouldn't display without some extra jiggery-pokery, but I do recall being able to view the scripts. Hypercard didn't support any sort of source code encoding, so the scripts were out there in the open.
- steveklabnik 8y agoFellow Myst and HyperCard enthusiast who used to have a CodeWarrior t-shirt, checking in. I wouldn't be where I am today without all of that stuff too. I would love to see that stack...
- da02 8y agoHow did the story within Myst end?
- steveklabnik 8y agoI don't remember, to be honest, I was a child. I haven't wanted to go play it again because I just know that it's not going to be the same, and I don't want to ruin amazing memories.
- yosefzeev 8y agoIt had several endings, depending on whether you provided red pages, blue pages, or did something else entirely.
- Terr_ 8y agoThe canonical "good" ending of the first game? You rescue Atrus (the author-father-figure) by bringing him what he needs to return to Myst. Then he asks for your (further) help, sending you to Riven, the next game in the series.
- annadane 8y agoI played Riven first, before Myst. You can imagine the utter confusion.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- subcosmos 8y agoIt's a Myst-ery
- glandium 8y ago> (only a single world was unfinished) I'm curious. Was that preventing to finish the (hacked) game?
- symfoniq 8y agoIt did not prevent me from finishing the game. As I recall, it was the tree world that was unfinished (Google says it was called "Channelwood"), and at some point, the floating walkway just ended, and there were floating icons in the air representing the blue and red pages, and some apologetic text from the developers acknowledging that the world wasn't finished yet, so just go ahead and pick a free page.
- mortenjorck 8y agoHa! While this has probably been common knowledge from various interviews, articles, and featurettes over the years, I never knew Channelwood was the last age the team created for Myst – yet I recall thinking as a child that its level of visual sophistication meant it must have been the one they made with the lessons learned from creating the others. Selenetic, I thought, must have been the first one.