Video shot and directed by Justin Wolfson. Edited by Aulistar Mark. Click here for transcript.
Although the passage of time serves to make the past seem sweeter in recollection than it might have been in the moment, it’s impossible to deny that there was something special about the gaming landscape of the 1990s. Every year in that decade brought a torrent of titles that were destined to become classics—including the often-imitated-but-ultimately-inimitible Myst.
Myst came to market in 1993, which was a banner year in PC gaming—1993 also brought us X-Wing, Doom, Syndicate, and Day of the Tentacle, among others. It’s fascinating that Myst happened the same year that Doom launched, too—both games attempted to simulate reality, but with vastly different approaches. Doom was a hard and fast shotgun blast to the face, visceral and intense, aiming to capture the feeling of hunting (and being hunted by) demons in close sci-fi corridors; Myst was a love letter to mystery and exploration at its purest.
A few months back, Ars caught up with Myst developer Rand Miller (who co-created the game with his brother Robyn Miller) at the Cyan offices in Washington state to ask about the process of bringing the haunting island world to life. Myst’s visuals lived at the cutting edge of what interactive CD-ROM technology could deliver at the beginning of the multimedia age, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, fitting the breadth of the Millers’ vision onto CD-ROM didn’t happen without some challenges.
The front desk, just inside the entrance to the Cyan offices. Lee Hutchinson
Beyond the Manhole
The Millers’ first foray into interactive gaming experiences was The Manhole in 1988, a project that grew out of illustrator Robyn Miller’s Macpaint scribblings. Robyn’s brother Rand had become enamored with a bit of classic Mac technology called HyperCard, an application that allowed a user to create and link together “cards” to form a “stack.” HyperCard’s simple premise held within it a staggering amount of depth—a sufficiently motivated would-be developer could use linked HyperCards to create if-then loops and other programming structures, allowing someone with a basic understanding of programming concepts to build complex applications without requiring them to master an actual programming language like C. (HyperCard was created by Bill Atkinson, who also wrote most of the original Macintosh’s graphics library and routines.)