7 ms·

The Myst Graph: A New Perspective on Myst

253 points by tobr 2y ago

deater 2y ago
when making the Apple II version of Myst I more or less generated graphs like this by hand based on playing through the game (in order to hook up the data structures for the custom 6502-assembly language engine) I wonder if it would have been easier to automate it like this.
- tombert 2y ago
  I hadn't heard of the Apple II version of Myst, so I looked it up...it's very cool, and pretty impressive!
  - djmips 2y ago
    It's fairly new.
- lawlessone 2y ago
  Is this yours? http://www.deater.net/weave/vmwprod/mist/ http://www.deater.net/weave/vmwprod/mist/ It's cool
  - deater 2y ago
    yes. I also made an Atari 2600 version but that one's only a subset of the game (though it's enough can beat it using the speedrun route)
- deater 2y ago
  if anyone is curious, the data structure used in the Apple II version had the idea of "locations" which just hold 4 of the nodes described here. Usually this would be for North/South/East/West, plus there would be an additional clickable area that would call a function callback, usually used for puzzles but it could also be used as a hack to take you to an additional location. This setup was more or less enough to implement the whole game, the one problem area was Channelwood where the pathway platforms are pentagons and thus had more than 4 backgrounds. There were also a few areas where a location could have used an additional clickable area but had to make do without. Also to fit on 3 disks about half the nodes were left out: generally when walking a straight path every other node was left out for both disk space and also time-consuming-rotoscope reasons.
- bsenftner 2y ago
  Myst strikes me as a milestone of lost human opportunity. Myst is an incredible creative literary tour de force. I hoped for an entre genre to form around literary hypertext with diegetic narrative, but it never did, and popular culture never even seem to recognize the unique literary structures at play in Myst. Well, now, decades later it s clear Myst is intellectually an Everest to most people, and all they did was stare up in uncomprehending awe.
  - thoroughburro 2y ago
    > I hoped for an entre genre to form around literary hypertext with diegetic narrative Twine and other interactive fiction engines provide this to some degree, though I think Cyan’s visual aesthetic is also intrinsic to the feel of the games. https://twinery.org https://twinery.org
  - piltdownman 2y ago
    I mean far be it from me to extinguish someones hyperbole about literature, but it's simply not that unique or groundbreaking - as for its supposed intellectual insurmountability, it's hardly Finnegan's Wake. Games like 'What Remains of Edith Finch' handles the literary and primary source based diegetic narrative, with games like Firewatch or similar expanding on the premise as genre-games. Then you have the likes of Journey or To The Moon serving to upturn expectations on concepts of traditional narrative and structure, and things like The Stanley Parable satirically prodding the nature of choice and narrative viz a viz a player's actual agency. In the ghetto of SCUMMWare point and click games with cartoonish graphics and themes I'm sure Myst was a breath of fresh air. Intellectually, however, any number of games make it look like a remedial student. Take 'The Fool's Errand'- a 1987 computer game by Cliff Johnson which presents itself as a point and click meta-puzzle with an overarching narrative extrapolated through various visual and logic puzzles and a cryptic treasure map. The game is structured as a storybook divided into five parts, each containing a large number of different chapters; the storybook can be paged through and read as continuous prose on screen. Starting to sound familiar? No doubt, as both it and Myst lift a lot of their inspiration wholesale from Masquerade by Kit Williams https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fool%27s_Errand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fool%27s_Errand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masquerade_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masquerade_(book) Jumping back to the soft-core philosophical gum-chewing, we can see the same themes emerge in a far more articulate sense as early as the Gibson/Dick-esque dystopian nightmare of Deus Ex in 2000. Deus Ex played with any number of interesting literary vehicles including a 'novel within a novel', the agency of man vs AI and its textual interaction with the world, the inversion of symbols and signifiers, and a huge debt owed to both Gravity's Rainbow and Foucalt's Pendulum structurally and thematically. Hell, G.K. Chesterton's metaphysical thriller 'The Man Who Was Thursday' is included in excerpts throughout the game simply for flavour! Nowadays there's plenty of easy and lazy comparisons to make based on similar mechanics and core gameplay loop - The Talos Principle or Soma for example - but I'd go more recently with Disco Elysium, which owes huge amounts thematically to China Mieville's 'The City and the City' and Émile Zola's 'Germinal'. I would like to go on (for thousands of words) but I would only spoil people's enjoyment of a TRUE creative literary tour de force and game that requires appropriate and actual intellectual rigour to engage with.
- marssaxman 2y ago
  I did the same when building the screen saver. It never occurred to me that the task could have been automated. It's difficult to imagine what tools I could have used for that purpose, thirty-odd years ago.
guerrilla 2y ago
Would even better if it was an interactive graph (with zoom) using the actual scene images somehow.
- lanternfish 2y ago
  I think that's called Myst (1993)
  - escapecharacter 2y ago
    Thank you for this guffaw
- adastra22 2y ago
  I’m not sure if this is serious or tongue in cheek. Did you play the original?
  - rendaw 2y ago
    I second the request. Sing the images spatially related to eachother would be really cool. Like: this room is only 2 nodes from this room. Or like, you see one node with a ton of links and wonder which room that is. The article itself shows some nodes and their corresponding images, but it'd be cool to have it for all of them.
    - guerrilla 2y ago
      Exactly.
  - guerrilla 2y ago
    I mean having them flat. Yes, I played all versions and sequels.
tantalor 2y ago
[flagged]
- mmooss 2y ago
  That's in the OP.
hoten 2y ago
I made a similar thing but for Silent Hill 2: https://connorjclark.github.io/sh2-graph/ https://connorjclark.github.io/sh2-graph/ It's much more linear. source: https://github.com/connorjclark/sh2-graph https://github.com/connorjclark/sh2-graph
anon84873628 2y ago
For those, like me, wondering how to play it today. It seems the original studio has released a modernized version available on many platforms (including VR): https://cyan.com/games/myst/ https://cyan.com/games/myst/ I missed out on Myst in its heyday, but have always wanted to check it out after hearing so many great things. Curious if any superfans think it would be better experienced as the original in an emulator or similar.
- maxsilver 2y ago
  > Curious if any superfans think it would be better experienced as the original in an emulator or similar. (superfan checking in) -- I still believe the definitive release is the original `realMyst (2000)` (Sunsoft). https://archive.guildofarchivists.org/wiki/RealMyst https://archive.guildofarchivists.org/wiki/RealMyst . If you only ever play one version, that's the one to play. GOG maintains a beautiful version of this (that works well even on modern Windows), but Cyan de-listed it from GOG a while back, so you can't technically buy fresh copies anymore. Don't mistake this for "Real Myst: Masterpiece Edition", which is (sorry Cyan), not very good. They imported the old assets into Unity for the re-release, and then did some random texture/asset swaps, the lighting and mood didn't survive the import and is all randomly weird -- strongly recommend ignoring this one. The original release is good if you want the original experience - https://www.gog.com/en/game/myst_masterpiece_edition https://www.gog.com/en/game/myst_masterpiece_edition And the new Myst (2021/VR, Unreal Engine) release is wonderful and beautiful, but is more of a re-make to modern gaming sensibilities.
  - Svip 2y ago
    > Don't mistake this for "Real Myst: Masterpiece Edition", which is (sorry Cyan), not very good. I know you link it further down, but there are two Masterpiece Editions, one for Myst (1999) and one for realMyst (2014). The one you link is the MPE of Myst, and technically not the original 1993 game, though as far as I can tell, it's just an upgrade of graphics and sound, whilst remaining faithful to the original. I couldn't get realMyst to work back when I got it on GOG, so I'll admit I haven't tried it (nor its Masterpiece Edition), but I did enjoy the 2021 remake, although I noticed that even though it had been over a decade, I sped through that game (I mention this, because I actually visited it after having played the 2024 Riven remake, where the changes to the puzzles did stump me from time to time). Though, personally, I am more of a Riven fan.
doublerabbit 2y ago
Also going to throw this interesting article where someone debugged and eliminated the loading times of Myst 4. https://medium.com/@tomysshadow/fixing-the-loading-in-myst-iv-revelation-86e2814afbf8 https://medium.com/@tomysshadow/fixing-the-loading-in-myst-i...
gwbas1c 2y ago
> owing to the relative freedom it affords players That's really not "true". The 3D games at the time let you go anywhere, view anything. Myst only let you move to predefined locations. The difference is that you didn't have enemies trying to kill you all the time, or extremely difficult bosses to defeat in order to advance to other levels. Instead, Myst let you generally explore most of the game as you wished. You could explore quite far without technically "advancing" because you could ignore the puzzles. This made the game quite fun if all you wanted to do was look around. It's kind of similar to the actual freedom in Breath of the Wild / Tears of the Kingdom, where you don't need to advance in the game to explore the world.
- MBCook 2y ago
  > The 3D games at the time let you go anywhere, view anything. In 1993? I don’t remember any full freedom games back then. Certainly nothing could begin to approach the visuals for a very long time.
  - gwbas1c 2y ago
    Wolfenstein 3D came out in 1992
  - amatecha 2y ago
    I remember a fully 3d game from quite a bit earlier than then! Spectre for Macintosh, from 1991: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(1991_video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(1991_video_game) , and some gameplay at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-F3XISR3ME https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-F3XISR3ME
    - sleepybrett 2y ago
      I mean wizardry was technically a 3d game if you just consider the way they show the geometry of the dungeon. Stuff like bards tale and some of the ultimas took that and ran with it.
  - qingcharles 2y ago
alex1138 2y ago
Please, engineers, invent actual linking books that work
NBJack 2y ago
Is the graph file available as raw data? This looks like fun.
- glth 2y ago
  Author here: In a few weeks, I will publish the graph generator's source code and a DOT file encoding the Myst graph in this repository: https://github.com/glthr/DeMystify https://github.com/glthr/DeMystify. I would love to see how others render the graph and how the generator can be improved. A follow-up article will also dive deeper into the technical details. Stay tuned!
  - NBJack 2y ago
    I'm looking forward to it! Will try to share if it turns out well with what I have in mind.
gcanyon 2y ago
The second article: https://glthr.com/myst-graph-2 https://glthr.com/myst-graph-2
immibis 2y ago
The last sentence in the Directions section is reversed. in Part 2, Visual Indicators, the icons are not as described and are also reversed.
- glth 2y ago
  Author here: good catch, thank you! I have fixed the two errors.

253 points by tobr 2y ago

when making the Apple II version of Myst I more or less generated graphs like this by hand based on playing through the game (in order to hook up the data structures for the custom 6502-assembly language engine) I wonder if it would have been easier to automate it like this.

tombert 2y ago
I hadn't heard of the Apple II version of Myst, so I looked it up...it's very cool, and pretty impressive!
- djmips 2y ago
  It's fairly new.
lawlessone 2y ago
Is this yours? http://www.deater.net/weave/vmwprod/mist/ http://www.deater.net/weave/vmwprod/mist/ It's cool
- deater 2y ago
  yes. I also made an Atari 2600 version but that one's only a subset of the game (though it's enough can beat it using the speedrun route)
deater 2y ago
if anyone is curious, the data structure used in the Apple II version had the idea of "locations" which just hold 4 of the nodes described here. Usually this would be for North/South/East/West, plus there would be an additional clickable area that would call a function callback, usually used for puzzles but it could also be used as a hack to take you to an additional location. This setup was more or less enough to implement the whole game, the one problem area was Channelwood where the pathway platforms are pentagons and thus had more than 4 backgrounds. There were also a few areas where a location could have used an additional clickable area but had to make do without. Also to fit on 3 disks about half the nodes were left out: generally when walking a straight path every other node was left out for both disk space and also time-consuming-rotoscope reasons.
bsenftner 2y ago
Myst strikes me as a milestone of lost human opportunity. Myst is an incredible creative literary tour de force. I hoped for an entre genre to form around literary hypertext with diegetic narrative, but it never did, and popular culture never even seem to recognize the unique literary structures at play in Myst. Well, now, decades later it s clear Myst is intellectually an Everest to most people, and all they did was stare up in uncomprehending awe.
- thoroughburro 2y ago
  > I hoped for an entre genre to form around literary hypertext with diegetic narrative Twine and other interactive fiction engines provide this to some degree, though I think Cyan’s visual aesthetic is also intrinsic to the feel of the games. https://twinery.org https://twinery.org
- piltdownman 2y ago
  I mean far be it from me to extinguish someones hyperbole about literature, but it's simply not that unique or groundbreaking - as for its supposed intellectual insurmountability, it's hardly Finnegan's Wake. Games like 'What Remains of Edith Finch' handles the literary and primary source based diegetic narrative, with games like Firewatch or similar expanding on the premise as genre-games. Then you have the likes of Journey or To The Moon serving to upturn expectations on concepts of traditional narrative and structure, and things like The Stanley Parable satirically prodding the nature of choice and narrative viz a viz a player's actual agency. In the ghetto of SCUMMWare point and click games with cartoonish graphics and themes I'm sure Myst was a breath of fresh air. Intellectually, however, any number of games make it look like a remedial student. Take 'The Fool's Errand'- a 1987 computer game by Cliff Johnson which presents itself as a point and click meta-puzzle with an overarching narrative extrapolated through various visual and logic puzzles and a cryptic treasure map. The game is structured as a storybook divided into five parts, each containing a large number of different chapters; the storybook can be paged through and read as continuous prose on screen. Starting to sound familiar? No doubt, as both it and Myst lift a lot of their inspiration wholesale from Masquerade by Kit Williams https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fool%27s_Errand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fool%27s_Errand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masquerade_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masquerade_(book) Jumping back to the soft-core philosophical gum-chewing, we can see the same themes emerge in a far more articulate sense as early as the Gibson/Dick-esque dystopian nightmare of Deus Ex in 2000. Deus Ex played with any number of interesting literary vehicles including a 'novel within a novel', the agency of man vs AI and its textual interaction with the world, the inversion of symbols and signifiers, and a huge debt owed to both Gravity's Rainbow and Foucalt's Pendulum structurally and thematically. Hell, G.K. Chesterton's metaphysical thriller 'The Man Who Was Thursday' is included in excerpts throughout the game simply for flavour! Nowadays there's plenty of easy and lazy comparisons to make based on similar mechanics and core gameplay loop - The Talos Principle or Soma for example - but I'd go more recently with Disco Elysium, which owes huge amounts thematically to China Mieville's 'The City and the City' and Émile Zola's 'Germinal'. I would like to go on (for thousands of words) but I would only spoil people's enjoyment of a TRUE creative literary tour de force and game that requires appropriate and actual intellectual rigour to engage with.
marssaxman 2y ago
I did the same when building the screen saver. It never occurred to me that the task could have been automated. It's difficult to imagine what tools I could have used for that purpose, thirty-odd years ago.

guerrilla 2y ago

Would even better if it was an interactive graph (with zoom) using the actual scene images somehow.

lanternfish 2y ago
I think that's called Myst (1993)
- escapecharacter 2y ago
  Thank you for this guffaw
adastra22 2y ago
I’m not sure if this is serious or tongue in cheek. Did you play the original?
- rendaw 2y ago
  I second the request. Sing the images spatially related to eachother would be really cool. Like: this room is only 2 nodes from this room. Or like, you see one node with a ton of links and wonder which room that is. The article itself shows some nodes and their corresponding images, but it'd be cool to have it for all of them.
  - guerrilla 2y ago
    Exactly.
- guerrilla 2y ago
  I mean having them flat. Yes, I played all versions and sequels.

tantalor 2y ago

[flagged]

mmooss 2y ago
That's in the OP.

hoten 2y ago

I made a similar thing but for Silent Hill 2: https://connorjclark.github.io/sh2-graph/ https://connorjclark.github.io/sh2-graph/ It's much more linear. source: https://github.com/connorjclark/sh2-graph https://github.com/connorjclark/sh2-graph

anon84873628 2y ago

For those, like me, wondering how to play it today. It seems the original studio has released a modernized version available on many platforms (including VR): https://cyan.com/games/myst/ https://cyan.com/games/myst/ I missed out on Myst in its heyday, but have always wanted to check it out after hearing so many great things. Curious if any superfans think it would be better experienced as the original in an emulator or similar.

maxsilver 2y ago
> Curious if any superfans think it would be better experienced as the original in an emulator or similar. (superfan checking in) -- I still believe the definitive release is the original `realMyst (2000)` (Sunsoft). https://archive.guildofarchivists.org/wiki/RealMyst https://archive.guildofarchivists.org/wiki/RealMyst . If you only ever play one version, that's the one to play. GOG maintains a beautiful version of this (that works well even on modern Windows), but Cyan de-listed it from GOG a while back, so you can't technically buy fresh copies anymore. Don't mistake this for "Real Myst: Masterpiece Edition", which is (sorry Cyan), not very good. They imported the old assets into Unity for the re-release, and then did some random texture/asset swaps, the lighting and mood didn't survive the import and is all randomly weird -- strongly recommend ignoring this one. The original release is good if you want the original experience - https://www.gog.com/en/game/myst_masterpiece_edition https://www.gog.com/en/game/myst_masterpiece_edition And the new Myst (2021/VR, Unreal Engine) release is wonderful and beautiful, but is more of a re-make to modern gaming sensibilities.
- Svip 2y ago
  > Don't mistake this for "Real Myst: Masterpiece Edition", which is (sorry Cyan), not very good. I know you link it further down, but there are two Masterpiece Editions, one for Myst (1999) and one for realMyst (2014). The one you link is the MPE of Myst, and technically not the original 1993 game, though as far as I can tell, it's just an upgrade of graphics and sound, whilst remaining faithful to the original. I couldn't get realMyst to work back when I got it on GOG, so I'll admit I haven't tried it (nor its Masterpiece Edition), but I did enjoy the 2021 remake, although I noticed that even though it had been over a decade, I sped through that game (I mention this, because I actually visited it after having played the 2024 Riven remake, where the changes to the puzzles did stump me from time to time). Though, personally, I am more of a Riven fan.

doublerabbit 2y ago

Also going to throw this interesting article where someone debugged and eliminated the loading times of Myst 4. https://medium.com/@tomysshadow/fixing-the-loading-in-myst-iv-revelation-86e2814afbf8 https://medium.com/@tomysshadow/fixing-the-loading-in-myst-i...

gwbas1c 2y ago

> owing to the relative freedom it affords players That's really not "true". The 3D games at the time let you go anywhere, view anything. Myst only let you move to predefined locations. The difference is that you didn't have enemies trying to kill you all the time, or extremely difficult bosses to defeat in order to advance to other levels. Instead, Myst let you generally explore most of the game as you wished. You could explore quite far without technically "advancing" because you could ignore the puzzles. This made the game quite fun if all you wanted to do was look around. It's kind of similar to the actual freedom in Breath of the Wild / Tears of the Kingdom, where you don't need to advance in the game to explore the world.

MBCook 2y ago
> The 3D games at the time let you go anywhere, view anything. In 1993? I don’t remember any full freedom games back then. Certainly nothing could begin to approach the visuals for a very long time.
- gwbas1c 2y ago
  Wolfenstein 3D came out in 1992
- amatecha 2y ago
  I remember a fully 3d game from quite a bit earlier than then! Spectre for Macintosh, from 1991: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(1991_video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(1991_video_game) , and some gameplay at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-F3XISR3ME https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-F3XISR3ME
  - sleepybrett 2y ago
    I mean wizardry was technically a 3d game if you just consider the way they show the geometry of the dungeon. Stuff like bards tale and some of the ultimas took that and ran with it.
- qingcharles 2y ago

alex1138 2y ago

Please, engineers, invent actual linking books that work

NBJack 2y ago

Is the graph file available as raw data? This looks like fun.

glth 2y ago
Author here: In a few weeks, I will publish the graph generator's source code and a DOT file encoding the Myst graph in this repository: https://github.com/glthr/DeMystify https://github.com/glthr/DeMystify. I would love to see how others render the graph and how the generator can be improved. A follow-up article will also dive deeper into the technical details. Stay tuned!
- NBJack 2y ago
  I'm looking forward to it! Will try to share if it turns out well with what I have in mind.

gcanyon 2y ago

The second article: https://glthr.com/myst-graph-2 https://glthr.com/myst-graph-2

immibis 2y ago

The last sentence in the Directions section is reversed. in Part 2, Visual Indicators, the icons are not as described and are also reversed.

glth 2y ago
Author here: good catch, thank you! I have fixed the two errors.