The MYST Legacy

When Cyan Inc. released Myst for the Macintosh in the fall of 1993, they weren’t breaking away from their existing formula for making games- release the player in an immersive world and let them explore it. Cyan’s previous games, most notably Cosmic Osmo, applied that formula successfully. What made Myst stand out was that it was not just marketed to children like its predecessors; it was made for a wide and diverse audience, which is exactly what it received. Furthermore, it demonstrated that a game does not need to be flashy, gory or fast-paced to be compelling. Myst contributed largely to the games-as-art discussion.
Originally, Cyan’s formula was forced on them by technical limitations. Their first release of Myst and their earlier games were all implemented in HyperCard, a simple hypertext-authoring environment that preceded the web. HyperCard’s projects are called “stacks”, like a stack of index cards; to script your application, you would link cards in the stack together. As a result, Cyan tended to pre-render images of its game worlds and then link them together into nodes in space, almost like an interactive slideshow. Simple video and animation sequences were supported, and HyperCard could be scripted to exhibit more complicated behaviors, but stack developers tended to format their work in a slideshow fashion. Myst was no exception.
Myst was the first of Cyan’s games to include 3D graphics, but more importantly, it was also their first foray into full-color graphics. The original renderings of their world were too bulky to fit on their target medium, the novel CD-ROM; the process they chose to compress the images’ sizes- a kind of dithering- preserved their quality as well, signifying Cyan’s prioritizing of Myst’s immersive value. These images are literally the face of the game- they had to be as beautiful as possible.
A wonderful consequence of Myst’s “slideshow” format and high production quality was that people everywhere, who did not consider themselves avid computer game players, could be captivated without having to learn to mash buttons or apply tactics. Nearly anyone can play Myst- and because the game was so simple, the people who played it could converse casually about it as if they were talking about a television show. Myst was a cultural phenomenon that could be shared with friends, family, and coworkers. Not many people at that time outside of the video gaming community had experienced a game before that they could play and then talk about. Word of mouth definitely contributed to Myst’s success.
The Myst series has continued using its founding principles. Players with no knowledge of common game mechanics can still partake in the narrative, and the ever-increasing level of visual quality has made Myst synonymous with immersive games. This was also brought on by the release of Myst “clones” by other companies, which reinforced the game’s underlying principles without usurping Cyan as the king of the genre. People who otherwise would not use their computers for entertainment have done so through these interactive narratives.
Myst also challenged the industry’s notions of what type of game is commercially successful. Despite its runaway success, Myst is just a well-thought-out slideshow, and its performance in the marketplace had little to do with its technical achievements. Its slide-like format made it rather versatile, and it was ported from the Macintosh to several diverse gaming platforms. The original Myst is still being released on various mobile devices. Despite having decidedly no violence and no timed element, the Myst franchise was the most lucrative in the game industry for nine whole years, during which time we saw major contenders such as Descent, Quake and Half Life.
It is important to note how Myst also spurred the growth of the CD-ROM. The potential for storing multimedia on CD like Microsoft’s Encarta was not shared with existing formats, and Myst’s CD-ROM requirement was for many consumers the selling point for adopting the new format.
But most importantly, Myst prompted us to ask the following question, as the New York Times did in 1994: are video games Art (with a capital A)? Is the concept of art or literature compatible with interactive systems? And how should the work of the game’s artists be valued? Perhaps for the first time, game players were interacting directly with that artwork. Every action you take in a video game is at some point authored by somebody, but Myst’s format makes this very clear to the player. It is an experience similar to reading fiction- the creative effort of the writer is vaguely detectable beneath the narrative. Once we became aware of this stuff, we had to define just what it was. Today there are developers devoted to producing games that exist on the game/art boundary, to continue the dialogue between game developers and artists.
Myst was not the first adventure game of its kind, and did not traumatize anyone. But it did change the video game landscape, and called into question our notion of what makes a game worth playing.

Works Cited

Atkinson, Bill. HyperCard. Vers. 2.4.1. Computer software. Apple Computer, Inc. Cupertino, CA.

Carroll, Jon. "Guerrillas in the Myst." Wired Archive. 1994. Wired Digital. 4 Sept. 2008 http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.08/myst_pr.html.

Miller, Laura. "Riven rapt." 21st. 6 Nov. 1997. Salon. 3 Sept. 2008 http://archive.salon.com/21st/feature/1997/11/cov_06riven.html.

ROTHSTEIN, Edward. "A New Art Form May Arise From the 'Myst'" The New York Times 4 Dec. 1994.

Watson, Richard A. "What is "Dithering"?" The Pages of RAWA. Cyan Worlds. 3 Sept. 2008 http://cho.cyan.com/rawa/dither.html.