4 ms·
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 te
by 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 agoMy 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 agoThe 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 agoIt'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 agoThey never were important, although Steve Jobs certainly tried to make them so (see his failure with NeXt).
- 6thSigma 13y agoThey were very important. There was a large gap in the mid to late 90s - early 2000s where we would have had to use floppy disks if not for CDs. Broadband wasn't widely available until the mid 2000s.
- ceejayoz 13y agoHuh? Never important? Jumping from 1.44 MB to 700 MB of storage made a pretty big difference in all sorts of media.
- mikeash 13y agoUh, what? Did I just hallucinate software stores filled to the ceiling with optical media?
- thristian 13y agoYou're thinking of read-write magneto-optical drives (like the NeXT cube had), but the rest of the thread is discussing optical drives (CDs and DVDs).
- code_duck 13y agoI also remember the time when they were rare, held what seemed like incredible amounts of data and were very expensive as a computer accessory. I have some Amiga magazines advertising disc burners for around $4000 in 1991. My Amiga had a 20 mb hard drive, floppy drives and no optical drive (a read only drive was 600-800 and somewhat pointless for most everyone). Arcade games based on laserdiscs were quite impressive to me as a child, such as Space Ace. That title seemed quite futuristic in 1988 in no small part due to the giant rainbow disc it flaunted.