Hacker Cinema
The Making of Myst
1993 · Film · documentary · 14 min
A mini-documentary showcasing interviews with Cyan staff on the artistic and technological processes behind the classic adventure game Myst. Originally included as a featurette in CD-ROM copies of the game.
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8 comments on Hacker News
> at the beginning the player should have a clear vision as to what he or she is trying to accomplish. Nothing is more frustrating than wandering around wondering what you should be doing and if what you have been doing is going to get you anywhere.
I disagree. Discovering what it is you're supposed to do is one of the most exciting parts of such games. Myst is the classic example of this. It's like those movies, like the Bourne Identity, where the character wakes up and doesn't know who they are or what they are supposed to do, and has to figure it out as they go along.
That sounds plausible. Or at least it was part of it, because at least Myst would never have sold anywhere near as many units if it didn't look so impressive (in 1993).
Though there is also the simple fact that pure puzzle games can't compete with puzzle+action games (e.g. Zelda), even if the puzzles are somewhat reduced.
You can see a similar thing in movies: Highly successful Pixar movies are typically comedy+action, because mixing in action beats pure comedy in terms of entertainment.
The trend towards action is also present in other genres: Turn -based strategy games got mostly replaced with real-time strategy games, and turn-based RPGs got replaced with action RPGs where fighting is done in real time.
This is the main reason why I’ve stopped playing games the last ten years. Everything looks like a movie that you barely interact with. Great cinematics and graphics, but the gameplay is too damn easy. And it affects all genres even adventure games are too easy these days. I remember back in the days the first time I got my hands on Myst I really had to put my brain to work to understand what I had to do. And I liked it that way because the game was a challenge, not just entertainment.
I'm gonna react to the 2004 date instead of the original 1989 publication date.
Runaway was released in 2001, Myst in 1993 and the sequel in 1997, Lucasfilm Indiana Jone in 1992 (a game of such quality that fans demanded a movie based on it), Broken Sword 1996, etc.
These are just the few I bothered looking up. There has been a good amount of adventure game masterpieces between 1989 and 2004. Lots of bad ones, but also a fair count of great ones. There have been rough times for adventure games, but they were not dead between 1989 and 2004.
I know many people have very fond memories of it, and I don't want to disparage that, but I remember finding it dreadfully dull. And I liked the slower-paced games of the time, like the Infocom text adventures, or SimCity. But Myst just didn't engage me at all. I felt like I was looking at movie set posters with marginally-designed minigames attached, and it just didn't do it for me.
There were a lot of pointless "interactive movie" shovelware titles in the early CD-ROM era, but Myst was not one of them. Gameplay-wise, it was a direct descendant of the classic Infocom/Sierra/LucasArts adventure games, just with a strong focus on atmosphere that the genre hadn't really seen before. It had some FMV, but not a lot, and only ever in small windows.
And, honestly, saying that the only good games are "highly kinetic" is just ridiculous. Some of the best games in history have been turn-based or very deliberately paced. If you only like twitch games, there's nothing wrong with that, but don't project your preferences onto the rest of us.
Re: "Gaming pretty much died for a while", Myst came out in the same year as Doom. The FMV-shovelware era was pretty cringey, but at the same time there was an explosion of high-octane action games on the PC.
> Thanks to games' inferiority complex and desire to look "more like movies", we temporarily ditched most of the things that made games unique in favor of a bunch of laughable full motion video.
FMV is barely relevant to Myst at all. And 'highly kinetic' is hardly the only unique experience videogames bring - Myst brings the experience of exploring an unknown environment and uncovering the puzzles/narratives within, in a way you can't do in other media.
I don't even think it's that good, to be honest, but decrying it as just 'laughable full motion video' is straight up inaccurate.
Those giant 800k floppy disk games, those really amazing 160x120 QT movies at 8fps, remember how colossal Myst was, a whole CD-ROM!