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Myst's legacy is that if something is pretty, people will buy it, play it, talk about it until the newest pretty thing comes out, then forget about it. This ar

Myst's legacy is that if something is pretty, people will buy it, play it, talk about it until the newest pretty thing comes out, then forget about it. This article is completely delusional. Myst was not this huge, influential masterpiece the way it paints. The Sopranos changed television. Myst did not change video games. It was talked about like the Sopranos, but only for a year after it came out. And it didn't have a lasting impact on the games industry. It looked good for the time, then quickly became outdated and is clearly a relic of its time, like wide, ill-fitting jackets and pleated pants. The gameplay offered nothing new - better adventure games (like those offered by LucasArts and Sierra) were doing more for longer. But its influence was an illusion. Graphics have always been getting better and striving for more photorealism. Myst didn't have any affect on that mindset, it just had decent graphics for when it came out. Myst's legacy is that if you make something pretty enough, the buzz it generates will lead to huge sales until people realize it's an illusion. Which is why these guys weren't able to do anything after Myst. Meanwhile, Grand Theft Auto, Half Life, Assassin's Creed, and Zelda and Mario, these games that Myst apparently enabled, continue to move people and make huge amounts of money.

seiji 13y ago
Breathe. Calm down. It'll be okay.
baddox 13y ago
Serious question: if Myst didn't actively influence games, why is it that I have heard of Myst despite it being "before my time" (I was 6 when it was first released)? I've never played the game or seen anyone play it, and yet in my mind's eye I can see the iconic art style, the iconic "M Y S T" logo, etc. Does it just have a cult following that I've been exposed to due to my participation in online communities and other PC gaming communities?
- jlgreco 13y ago
  > Does it just have a cult following that I've been exposed to due to my participation in online communities and other PC gaming communities? I think that would be fair to say. It left an impression on people, just not necessarily on gaming.
- eric_cc 13y ago
  You've heard of it because guys who grew up in that area suffering from extreme bouts of nostalgia produce "Best Games of the 90's" lists featuring Myst or make grand statements about the game on forums/twitter/facebook/blog/etc. I played it when it first came out and really it's not all that noteworthy these days unless you are talking about 1993 specifically.
- TylerE 13y ago
  It was a popular "pack in" title with things like CD-ROM drives, so there were a gazillion copies distributed, even though it probably didn't sell that many at full retail. Edit since someone downvoted this: "Released in 1993, it became the non-gamers' game. "Oh, I don't really like videogames, but I did like Myst." It sold more copies than Kinkos - well over six million. Everyone with a PC in the nineties had a copy, you'll be told. And you know why? Because it was given away with absolutely everything. If you bought a PC, you got given Myst. New printer? Myst. Upgrading your RAM, here, have a copy of Myst. Vast piles of Myst were causing terrible landslides, killing hundreds of children, all around the world." http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010-11-20-retrospective-myst-article http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010-11-20-retrospective-m...
  - lotu 13y ago
    The guy seems to have a personal vendetta against Myst I might take what he says with a large grain of of salt.
bobbles 13y ago
"Myst was generally praised by critics. Wired and The New York Times suggested that Myst was evidence that video games could in fact evolve into an art form.[36] Entertainment Weekly reported that some players considered Myst's "virtual morality" a religious experience.[37] Aarhus University professor Søren Pold pointed to Myst as an excellent example of how stories can be told using objects rather than people.[38] Laura Evenson, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, pointed to adult-oriented games like Myst as evidence the video game industry was emerging from its "adolescent" phase.[39]" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst
- pjbrunet 13y ago
  That style of art did influence me in art school back in the 90s, I was working with a free beta version of Rhino3D. Rhino3D.com only a few years ago removed my 1990s models from their galleries but here's what I'm talking about, thanks to Wayback Machine! http://web.archive.org/web/20030707154940im_/http://www.rhino3d.com/gallery/images/ship2.jpg http://web.archive.org/web/20030707154940im_/http://www.rhin...
herdrick 13y ago
> This article is completely delusional. Myst was not > this huge, influential masterpiece the way it paints. Did you read it? The big point was that everyone at the time thought it would be influential and widely imitated, but it wasn't.
sho_hn 13y ago
Myst: * Got the mainstream to talk about games in a way that it hadn't before. * Enabled many other games by selling the hardware it needed to run. * Is a tentpole in a (now again growing) subgenre of games that focus on ambience. It may not do Grand Theft Auto numbers, but the medium is richer for its existence. It's a valid way to use a computer to provide an experience many people find compelling. * Intrigued many artists enough to start viewing the computer as a credible art tool and dive into 3D computer graphics. It didn't do all of these things all alone, no. But it was part of the times, and a significant one at that. If you ask me, that's enough of a legacy to call it interesting.
- mikeash 13y ago
  My memory is hazy enough that I can't quite remember what sort of uncommon hardware Myst would have needed to run. Are you referring to CD-ROM drives, or VGA graphics cards, or something else?
  - sho_hn 13y ago
    The former; Myst and Wing Commander 3 are usually held up as the two titles that significantly accelerated/drove the roll-out of CD-ROM drives into consumer's homes.
    - mikeash 13y ago
      It's funny. Optical drives basically scream "obsolete!" at me now, such that it's hard to remember when they were so important, even though I was around for it.
      - laureny 13y ago
        They never were important, although Steve Jobs certainly tried to make them so (see his failure with NeXt).
        6thSigma 13y ago
Terretta 13y ago
As an owner of every game you mentioned, and completionist of most of them, I couldn't disagree with you more. Myst defined its own category and I'm still looking for an open other-world of curiously interwoven discovery to carry its mantle.
- glenra 13y ago
  "The Room" on iOS is a puzzle game with a very similar feel, albeit on a much smaller scale. (with no outdoor scenes - you're just figuring out a complicated multi-part artifact inside a room, complete with an ominous backstory that gradually gets pieced together).
- GarvielLoken 13y ago
  I haven't played it, but i have read the review and Proteus is a new open world game. http://www.destructoid.com/review-proteus-244224.phtml http://www.destructoid.com/review-proteus-244224.phtml
  - dcre 13y ago
    It's a lovely game, but it's not the same kind of thing. There isn't really a plot and there are no puzzles.
nilkn 13y ago
> Which is why these guys weren't able to do anything after Myst. And yet many regard its sequel, Riven, as one of the best puzzle games ever made.
- SwellJoe 13y ago
  I would love it if there were a whole category of games like Riven.
  - wolfgke 13y ago
    There was. Examples are the adventure games that were produced by Detalion (a Polish studio) (most popular ones: - Schizm: Mysterious Journey - Mysterious Journey II (also known under the name "Schizm II: Chameleon" and in Germany "Schizm II: Trügerische Wahrheit") - Sentinel - Descendants In Time (also known under the name "Realms of Illusion" and in Germany "Sentinel: Verborgene Existenzen") (To my knowledge) mainly in Germany also the RHEM series (an indie game series) had its followers. What all these games did - in my opinion - wrong, is that they concentrated a lot on puzzle solving (often with really hard puzzles; especially about the Schizm/Mysterious Journey series some people say that you'll probably only like them if you either study mathematics or physics ;-) ) and not so much on exploring. Myst and especially Riven mainly concentrated mainly on exploring, while not so much on puzzle solving. This IMHO made the huge appeal Myst and Riven made, which other studies "didn't get".
  - nilkn 13y ago
    As wolfgke points out, there are a lot of games that were inspired by Myst and Riven, but unfortunately I've never found one that got it right the way Riven did. The thing about Riven, for me, that made it so compelling was that the puzzles were mostly integrated seamlessly into the world. Even Myst didn't really accomplish this to the same extent Riven did. In Riven, exploration was not distinct from puzzle solving. Rather, the two terms were nearly synonymous. Some of the hardest puzzles could only be figured out by wandering around the world and soaking everything in; staring at the marble puzzle without realizing what anything on it represented about the world around you wouldn't get you anywhere. Myst IV came closer to replicating this, and by God it was and is gorgeous. But I personally found some of the puzzles in Myst IV to simply be too brutal, and the world overall was broken into pieces like in the original Myst rather than one more seamless environment.
king_jester 13y ago
> Myst's legacy is that if something is pretty, people will buy it, play it, talk about it until the newest pretty thing comes out, then forget about it. One of the things that I enjoy most about Myst is its atmosphere, even today when its graphics are considerably outdated. As an adventure type game, interacting with the game and the story it tells is a huge part of keeping you interested in playing the game, so I don't really buy that this was just some "ooo shiny" fad game. > This article is completely delusional. Myst was not this huge, influential masterpiece the way it paints. The Sopranos changed television. Myst did not change video games. It was talked about like the Sopranos, but only for a year after it came out. And it didn't have a lasting impact on the games industry. It looked good for the time, then quickly became outdated and is clearly a relic of its time, like wide, ill-fitting jackets and pleated pants. The gameplay offered nothing new - better adventure games (like those offered by LucasArts and Sierra) were doing more for longer. But its influence was an illusion. Graphics have always been getting better and striving for more photorealism. Myst didn't have any affect on that mindset, it just had decent graphics for when it came out. Myst has most certainly influential to a good degree. This game has been ported A LOT and is still talked about. It definitely has some influence on modern game designers (The Witness and Gone Home come to mind). It also spawned 4 official sequels over 14 years (Myst 5 came out in 2005). That the gameplay is not wholly original or that Myst isn't the absolute genre-defining title for adventure games doesn't mean it isn't influential. > Myst's legacy is that if you make something pretty enough, the buzz it generates will lead to huge sales until people realize it's an illusion. Which is why these guys weren't able to do anything after Myst. Plenty of game devs and designers do not release many games or only have 1 or 2 hits, but that doesn't diminish anything about those games. > Meanwhile, Grand Theft Auto, Half Life, Assassin's Creed, and Zelda and Mario, these games that Myst apparently enabled, continue to move people and make huge amounts of money. Mario and Zelda were things before Myst and all of those games series have had their own transformations and changes over sequels. But we know the adventure games, including first person types, are not dead and are having a bit of a resurgence right now, esp. in the indie scene, so I wouldn't write Myst off so easily.
SwellJoe 13y ago
"Myst's legacy is that if you make something pretty enough, the buzz it generates will lead to huge sales until people realize it's an illusion. Which is why these guys weren't able to do anything after Myst." Riven was also a pretty big success, huge even for its time (though not as big as Myst), and I found it to be a much better game. I found Riven simply enthralling, in a way that no game before or since has been.
code_duck 13y ago
I agree, while Myst pulled in a lot of casual gamers, they didn't become gamers after playing the game. Personally I never played r, as I found the mechanics to e entirely unengaging. The game is essentially a raytrace slideshow. I'd rather play Zork or say, Lunar 2.
DanBC 13y ago
> Myst's legacy is that if something is pretty, people will buy it, play it, talk about it until the newest pretty thing comes out, then forget about it. Myst - 1993 Rise of the Robots - 1994 People not aware of RotR should do some googling. The pre-release hype was impressive. The game was shiny and looked nice. It was appalling to play. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_of_the_robots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_of_the_robots) > Rise of the Robots was announced early in development, and generated considerable buzz for its advanced graphics. On release it became notorious in the video gaming industry for myriad crippling gameplay problems. Today it is generally considered one of the least successful and most critically reviled fighting games of its time.

seiji 13y ago

Breathe. Calm down. It'll be okay.

baddox 13y ago

Serious question: if Myst didn't actively influence games, why is it that I have heard of Myst despite it being "before my time" (I was 6 when it was first released)? I've never played the game or seen anyone play it, and yet in my mind's eye I can see the iconic art style, the iconic "M Y S T" logo, etc. Does it just have a cult following that I've been exposed to due to my participation in online communities and other PC gaming communities?

jlgreco 13y ago
> Does it just have a cult following that I've been exposed to due to my participation in online communities and other PC gaming communities? I think that would be fair to say. It left an impression on people, just not necessarily on gaming.
eric_cc 13y ago
You've heard of it because guys who grew up in that area suffering from extreme bouts of nostalgia produce "Best Games of the 90's" lists featuring Myst or make grand statements about the game on forums/twitter/facebook/blog/etc. I played it when it first came out and really it's not all that noteworthy these days unless you are talking about 1993 specifically.
TylerE 13y ago
It was a popular "pack in" title with things like CD-ROM drives, so there were a gazillion copies distributed, even though it probably didn't sell that many at full retail. Edit since someone downvoted this: "Released in 1993, it became the non-gamers' game. "Oh, I don't really like videogames, but I did like Myst." It sold more copies than Kinkos - well over six million. Everyone with a PC in the nineties had a copy, you'll be told. And you know why? Because it was given away with absolutely everything. If you bought a PC, you got given Myst. New printer? Myst. Upgrading your RAM, here, have a copy of Myst. Vast piles of Myst were causing terrible landslides, killing hundreds of children, all around the world." http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010-11-20-retrospective-myst-article http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010-11-20-retrospective-m...
- lotu 13y ago
  The guy seems to have a personal vendetta against Myst I might take what he says with a large grain of of salt.

bobbles 13y ago

"Myst was generally praised by critics. Wired and The New York Times suggested that Myst was evidence that video games could in fact evolve into an art form.[36] Entertainment Weekly reported that some players considered Myst's "virtual morality" a religious experience.[37] Aarhus University professor Søren Pold pointed to Myst as an excellent example of how stories can be told using objects rather than people.[38] Laura Evenson, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, pointed to adult-oriented games like Myst as evidence the video game industry was emerging from its "adolescent" phase.[39]" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst

pjbrunet 13y ago
That style of art did influence me in art school back in the 90s, I was working with a free beta version of Rhino3D. Rhino3D.com only a few years ago removed my 1990s models from their galleries but here's what I'm talking about, thanks to Wayback Machine! http://web.archive.org/web/20030707154940im_/http://www.rhino3d.com/gallery/images/ship2.jpg http://web.archive.org/web/20030707154940im_/http://www.rhin...

herdrick 13y ago

> This article is completely delusional. Myst was not > this huge, influential masterpiece the way it paints. Did you read it? The big point was that everyone at the time thought it would be influential and widely imitated, but it wasn't.

sho_hn 13y ago

Myst: * Got the mainstream to talk about games in a way that it hadn't before. * Enabled many other games by selling the hardware it needed to run. * Is a tentpole in a (now again growing) subgenre of games that focus on ambience. It may not do Grand Theft Auto numbers, but the medium is richer for its existence. It's a valid way to use a computer to provide an experience many people find compelling. * Intrigued many artists enough to start viewing the computer as a credible art tool and dive into 3D computer graphics. It didn't do all of these things all alone, no. But it was part of the times, and a significant one at that. If you ask me, that's enough of a legacy to call it interesting.

mikeash 13y ago
My memory is hazy enough that I can't quite remember what sort of uncommon hardware Myst would have needed to run. Are you referring to CD-ROM drives, or VGA graphics cards, or something else?
- sho_hn 13y ago
  The former; Myst and Wing Commander 3 are usually held up as the two titles that significantly accelerated/drove the roll-out of CD-ROM drives into consumer's homes.
  - mikeash 13y ago
    It's funny. Optical drives basically scream "obsolete!" at me now, such that it's hard to remember when they were so important, even though I was around for it.
    - laureny 13y ago
      They never were important, although Steve Jobs certainly tried to make them so (see his failure with NeXt).
      - 6thSigma 13y ago

Terretta 13y ago

As an owner of every game you mentioned, and completionist of most of them, I couldn't disagree with you more. Myst defined its own category and I'm still looking for an open other-world of curiously interwoven discovery to carry its mantle.

glenra 13y ago
"The Room" on iOS is a puzzle game with a very similar feel, albeit on a much smaller scale. (with no outdoor scenes - you're just figuring out a complicated multi-part artifact inside a room, complete with an ominous backstory that gradually gets pieced together).
GarvielLoken 13y ago
I haven't played it, but i have read the review and Proteus is a new open world game. http://www.destructoid.com/review-proteus-244224.phtml http://www.destructoid.com/review-proteus-244224.phtml
- dcre 13y ago
  It's a lovely game, but it's not the same kind of thing. There isn't really a plot and there are no puzzles.

nilkn 13y ago

> Which is why these guys weren't able to do anything after Myst. And yet many regard its sequel, Riven, as one of the best puzzle games ever made.

SwellJoe 13y ago
I would love it if there were a whole category of games like Riven.
- wolfgke 13y ago
  There was. Examples are the adventure games that were produced by Detalion (a Polish studio) (most popular ones: - Schizm: Mysterious Journey - Mysterious Journey II (also known under the name "Schizm II: Chameleon" and in Germany "Schizm II: Trügerische Wahrheit") - Sentinel - Descendants In Time (also known under the name "Realms of Illusion" and in Germany "Sentinel: Verborgene Existenzen") (To my knowledge) mainly in Germany also the RHEM series (an indie game series) had its followers. What all these games did - in my opinion - wrong, is that they concentrated a lot on puzzle solving (often with really hard puzzles; especially about the Schizm/Mysterious Journey series some people say that you'll probably only like them if you either study mathematics or physics ;-) ) and not so much on exploring. Myst and especially Riven mainly concentrated mainly on exploring, while not so much on puzzle solving. This IMHO made the huge appeal Myst and Riven made, which other studies "didn't get".
- nilkn 13y ago
  As wolfgke points out, there are a lot of games that were inspired by Myst and Riven, but unfortunately I've never found one that got it right the way Riven did. The thing about Riven, for me, that made it so compelling was that the puzzles were mostly integrated seamlessly into the world. Even Myst didn't really accomplish this to the same extent Riven did. In Riven, exploration was not distinct from puzzle solving. Rather, the two terms were nearly synonymous. Some of the hardest puzzles could only be figured out by wandering around the world and soaking everything in; staring at the marble puzzle without realizing what anything on it represented about the world around you wouldn't get you anywhere. Myst IV came closer to replicating this, and by God it was and is gorgeous. But I personally found some of the puzzles in Myst IV to simply be too brutal, and the world overall was broken into pieces like in the original Myst rather than one more seamless environment.

king_jester 13y ago

> Myst's legacy is that if something is pretty, people will buy it, play it, talk about it until the newest pretty thing comes out, then forget about it. One of the things that I enjoy most about Myst is its atmosphere, even today when its graphics are considerably outdated. As an adventure type game, interacting with the game and the story it tells is a huge part of keeping you interested in playing the game, so I don't really buy that this was just some "ooo shiny" fad game. > This article is completely delusional. Myst was not this huge, influential masterpiece the way it paints. The Sopranos changed television. Myst did not change video games. It was talked about like the Sopranos, but only for a year after it came out. And it didn't have a lasting impact on the games industry. It looked good for the time, then quickly became outdated and is clearly a relic of its time, like wide, ill-fitting jackets and pleated pants. The gameplay offered nothing new - better adventure games (like those offered by LucasArts and Sierra) were doing more for longer. But its influence was an illusion. Graphics have always been getting better and striving for more photorealism. Myst didn't have any affect on that mindset, it just had decent graphics for when it came out. Myst has most certainly influential to a good degree. This game has been ported A LOT and is still talked about. It definitely has some influence on modern game designers (The Witness and Gone Home come to mind). It also spawned 4 official sequels over 14 years (Myst 5 came out in 2005). That the gameplay is not wholly original or that Myst isn't the absolute genre-defining title for adventure games doesn't mean it isn't influential. > Myst's legacy is that if you make something pretty enough, the buzz it generates will lead to huge sales until people realize it's an illusion. Which is why these guys weren't able to do anything after Myst. Plenty of game devs and designers do not release many games or only have 1 or 2 hits, but that doesn't diminish anything about those games. > Meanwhile, Grand Theft Auto, Half Life, Assassin's Creed, and Zelda and Mario, these games that Myst apparently enabled, continue to move people and make huge amounts of money. Mario and Zelda were things before Myst and all of those games series have had their own transformations and changes over sequels. But we know the adventure games, including first person types, are not dead and are having a bit of a resurgence right now, esp. in the indie scene, so I wouldn't write Myst off so easily.

SwellJoe 13y ago

"Myst's legacy is that if you make something pretty enough, the buzz it generates will lead to huge sales until people realize it's an illusion. Which is why these guys weren't able to do anything after Myst." Riven was also a pretty big success, huge even for its time (though not as big as Myst), and I found it to be a much better game. I found Riven simply enthralling, in a way that no game before or since has been.

code_duck 13y ago

I agree, while Myst pulled in a lot of casual gamers, they didn't become gamers after playing the game. Personally I never played r, as I found the mechanics to e entirely unengaging. The game is essentially a raytrace slideshow. I'd rather play Zork or say, Lunar 2.

DanBC 13y ago

> Myst's legacy is that if something is pretty, people will buy it, play it, talk about it until the newest pretty thing comes out, then forget about it. Myst - 1993 Rise of the Robots - 1994 People not aware of RotR should do some googling. The pre-release hype was impressive. The game was shiny and looked nice. It was appalling to play. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_of_the_robots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_of_the_robots) > Rise of the Robots was announced early in development, and generated considerable buzz for its advanced graphics. On release it became notorious in the video gaming industry for myriad crippling gameplay problems. Today it is generally considered one of the least successful and most critically reviled fighting games of its time.