Myst is responsible for a wave of cinematic, immersive games with rich storytelling that are as popular in 2020 as they ever were. The Matrix 4 Already Happened: Revisiting The Matrix Online By John Saavedra It was an odd game, but for me it was huge.” Just like with Star Wars today, when you look back on Myst, it was the first time you ever saw something with that level of detail. “I was 10 years old when Star Wars came out and, in my mind, I was the same age when I played Myst. ![]() Shane previously co-wrote the Sundance Special Jury Prize-winning documentary Being Elmo (2011). “For me, Myst was for games what Star Wars was for movies,” explains Philip Shane, a filmmaker who’s launched a Kickstarter for a documentary about the making of the PC classic. I remember the thrill of watching it run on the new PC my parents bought for me and my brothers in the mid-90s, marveling at the FMV elements combined with the detailed pre-rendered environments. “It was just another experiment along the scale of how to make things a little more sophisticated, and even within the game itself, you can see how we were expanding and building more cohesiveness into the worlds as we went.”ĭespite its humble origins, Myst was a huge deal for a lot of people in the ‘90s, including me. “I’d love to tell you we knew exactly what we were doing, but we didn’t,” Rand says. Instead, Myst tasked players with exploring its world and decrypting its story, eschewing combat for puzzles that challenged and engaged you but weren’t life-or-death ordeals. Indeed, there’s no dying in Myst, a revolutionary idea at a time when “Game Over”s were a staple in virtually every game on the market. “We wanted to add friction that would slow you down but we didn’t think that there were rules to video games necessarily, so we’ll pull out the dying and see if we could do it without that.” We felt like we were building a real world, and in a real world, you don’t just die and start over every five minutes.” Rand says of the initial conceit that led to the creation of the game. “I was more of a gamer than Robyn, but both of us settled with Myst on the idea that, well let’s not have people die and start over, because that irritated both of us. Myst is one of the most unlikely commercial success stories in gaming history, particularly due to the fact that the game was so strange, so notoriously difficult, and was made by such a small team (Cyan Worlds, founded by the Miller brothers in 1987). More than two decades after its release, there are even plans to turn the game into a movie and TV series. ![]() Released in 1993, the game was lauded by fans and critics alike, became a killer app for CD-ROM drives, and went on to become the best selling PC game ever ( over 6.3 million copies sold by 2000) until The Simsdethroned it in 2002. ![]() The game was called Myst, a point-and-click adventure full of infuriatingly difficult puzzles and driven by a twisted, fantastical story about a tragically dysfunctional family In 1991, two brothers-Rand and Robyn Miller-along with a handful of artists and engineers, set out to create a game unlike anything that had come before it, harnessing powerful new PC technology to immerse players in a fantastical island world inside a book.
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