Your history with Myst.

[Daikun]

Talk about your experiences with the Myst franchise here.

I remember the first time I saw this game. One of my uncles was having a wedding and he showed off his brand-new Windows 3.1 machine. He loaded up the Myst disc and my cousins and I were blown away by the (at the time) amazing graphics and sound. We played it for hours and had a blast at the wedding. I played it like crazy every time my folks drove us back over to his house. Then the game exploded with popularity and my elementary school had it on their computers! Of course, they had time limits, but it was still fun to play. Finally, in Christmas of 1995, we got ourselves a Windows 95 machine and I finally got Myst on my own. I played the hell out of it.

In late 1997, Riven came out and I bought it as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, I was never able to finish it; the game kept crashing on the third disc.

Years passed and I grew out of video games late into high school. (I stopped during the time of the GameCube era; I had to save up on money for more important things in life.) Then YouTube came around and I was feeling nostalgic for checking out that cool game again that fascinated me during my childhood, so I watched various Let's Plays of each game in the series.

After seeing realMYST, I can't stand to look at the original Myst anymore. The graphics for the original game have aged pretty badly in my eyes, yet Riven still holds up pretty well. I was wondering why there wasn't an updated remake of that game, so I searched for it and came upon the blog, where I was lurking--and occasionally commenting--for the past few years.

So, what's your story?

[nick]

Cool idea!

I grew up on adventure games, starting with text adventures on the Commodore 64, but I really got into the genre when my family bought a PC with Windows 95. One game I was particularly enamored with was called 'Goosebumps: Escape from Horrorland'. It was a first person adventure game with simple puzzles and a lot of exploration in cool pre-rendered environments (and is amazing, but that's another topic). After I finished it, I begged my dad into taking me to our nearest software supermarket so I could find something similar. This was where I found Myst.

I don't even remember why I chose it, I couldn't have been older than 8 or 9 so I clearly didn't understand the cryptic note on the back of the box. All I remember is deciding that this was the game for me, and that my Dad tried to convince me that "this was a game for adults", and that I wouldn't like it.

It took me four years to finish it, but I did - and I loved every moment. The Myst series has been the key defining inspiration for nearly every creative endeavour I've undertaken since. I still have sketches of lame puzzles and secret languages (that blatantly lift from the Myst games) I drew when I was 10.

[Daikun]

One game I was particularly enamored with was called 'Goosebumps: Escape from Horrorland'. It was a first person adventure game with simple puzzles and a lot of exploration in cool pre-rendered environments (and is amazing, but that's another topic).

I had that game, too! Such a neat game...

[KellyCoston]

Hoo boy.
Well, my parents brought home a Windows 3.1 machine in 1994 and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego was the first game they bought for it. I wasn't a console gamer, so it was the first game I ever played. Myst had just come out and after a couple months they brought that one home.

Everything changed. I was 10 years old and I found a deep love for this amazing experience. I spent countless hours trying to figure out the puzzles. I have a knack for sound so the Selenitic Age was the first one I discovered. At the time, I didn't know you could get back to Myst, so I would usually load a saved game at that point. Oddly enough the Channelwood Age was the last one I figured out and the first one I was able to get all the way through. That, of course, gave me new drive to figure out the remaining ages and discover the mysterious green book.

One of the coolest parts about the experience was visiting numerous friends of the family and finding notebooks by their computers with Myst notes all over the pages.

Then, of course, we couldn't wait to get Riven when it was released. I still remember my stomach doing flips during the first MagLev ride like I was on a roller coaster. Full screen animations! Woah!

20 years later, I still have my original Myst cd.

Edit:
I wanted to add a story. When I was 11, I had an assignment in class to make a magazine. It was this huge project done in several pieces. Anyway, one of the pieces was a "special report". I wrote a story about how I found a buried chest in my back yard and it was filled with pages from some old burned journals. Then we took paper, my folks helped me burn the edges, and I copied pages from some of the Myst journals. I tried matching Atrus' handwriting as best I could.

It permanently altered my penmanship, even to this day. I don't write like Atrus, but it definitely had a major effect on my style of handwriting.

[philip]

I still remember my stomach doing flips during the first MagLev ride like I was on a roller coaster. Full screen animations! Woah!

Dude, there's no explaining how exhilarating that first MagLev ride is.

I have only vague memories of watching people mess with the clock in Myst (though I do remember being told it was Abraham Lincoln's alarm clock) whilst visiting a family friend, when I was about 4. Many years later I came across a strange new computer game called RIVEN that one of the sons of the aforementioned family had handed down to us. It was so alien and bizarre.

I must've only been 7 or 8, but it made a huge impression on me -- the emptiness, the loneliness, and the beauty of it all. Later as a kid I would (sometimes! :P) pretend (embarrassingly probably to family) that our real-life vacations were Myst adventures, making a pointer hand in real life, "clicking", and stepping forward a few feet. And it found ways into my life in lots of other weird and obsessive ways.

In the end, though, it's hard to explain the feelings you get from Myst. It's just so oddly unique, and I'm still not really sure why!

[archaeo-nemesis]

It might sound a bit sappy, but I feel a deeply personal connection to the Myst franchise. When I was a kid, my older brothers used to monopolize the family computer; they played through and beat every PC game before my younger siblings and I had the chance to. It was the typical sibling rivalry sort of thing, and it irritated me to no end.

When Myst came out, my older brothers played it for a little while but pretty quickly got stuck and lost interest. My younger brother, sister, and I were all riveted by it and kept playing it even after our older brothers stopped. Before long, we conscripted our mother to play it with us, and each of us developed a distinct role in the team. As our natural team leader, my mother controlled the mouse, my younger sister was an excellent navigator, I was the chief "scribe" (keeping notes and drawing relevant clues in our Myst journal), and my younger brother was great at solving puzzles when the rest of us were stumped. We made a great team, and we beat Myst where our brothers had failed to.

Since playing the original Myst, the four of us have continued this tradition and played every single Myst game together. We had an unspoken agreement that no one play a Myst game without the rest of the group, and together we've played through and beaten every game in the franchise. Since discovering The Starry Expanse project, I've shared the news that Riven (my favorite game of the series) is being remade with my mom and siblings, and we plan to play it together too.

[Yali]

I don't remember ever first hearing or seeing Myst, only that I was playing from it as early as I can remember. My dad and I completed it when I was 5 or 6 and it had such haunting beauty. I still remember fiddling with the bird in Mechanical for the first time.

Riven I remember first seeing in my local Future Shop and noticing the word Myst on the box cover and thinking "Wow that Myst thing sure got a makeover!"

My mother bought my dad Riven in early 1998 and I kept trying to get him to play it with me. Eventually he just handed me the game.

Riven really changed how I perceived games and art from a young age. This completely immersive, subtle, deeply rich experience that melded amazing lore and world building with a surprisingly sophisticated and original art syle all woven together by visual storytelling and sandbox style puzzle gameplay - all integrated into the world naturally. There is nothing so brilliantly executed and refined in video game history. Some other games have come close... Morrowind comes to mind and soon No Man's Sky looks like it will rival the brilliance of Riven.

However the aspect I love the most are the photorealistic visuals that drip with visual richness. I swear something about those Albuquerque textures and Softimage's lighting just make this whole game approach if not surpass the richness and sumptuousness of Renaissance oil painting. Try finding some high-res shots from Riven and prepare to be mindblow. I own the Myst to Riven coffee table book with shows so many high resolution screenshots and outtakes that I honestly would save it if my house caught fire.

Check out my site Myst Revival for some of the beautiful imagery. I honestly think Cyan should find a way to re-render all those shots in HD and release a high-res version of the original game. I think that would blow people away.

One of my favorite designs from Riven actually didn't make the cut, and that was Gehn's chair. If Cyan ever make another game where we can explore K'veer, I want to see his chair there as it would better fit Gehn's D'ni home as opposed to his age of exile.

[tjsase]

I was once playing the Bionicle Mata-Nui On-Line Game, when my mom walks in and comments on how it looks like Myst. I found the CD while digging around, and popped it into my Win98 computer my dad made me (XP was around at the time, so I used the family XP mostly). At first the game was kinda creepy because there were no animations, but I later found out it was a glitch and it worked fine on the XP. I used a walkthrough book that my parents had bought years before to beat it, mainly because I was no good with puzzles at such a young age.

I found the discs for Riven and played those too, also with a walkthrough. I had to skip viewing the lights and whark puzzle in the big underwater room because disc 4 froze every time I rotated the chair. I also found Myst III on CD which I also walked-through. I realized we didn't have Myst IV or V, so I asked for it for Christmas and got them. I beat Myst IV (I STILL needed a walkthrough - I try to avoid them now!), but I still haven't played much of Myst V, mainly because it's so different from the other games and doesn't "feel" Myst-y.

I later bought the Myst Trilogy on DVD and RealMyst on GOG.

[rehjee]

Well, I might take time later to talk about my history with Myst, but my thoughts keep revolving, lately, around this: how do I introduce my kids to the worlds of Myst in a compelling way, a way that will capture their imaginations like mine was!!

Should I leave the game running when I leave the house, hinting that there is something important going on and not to go in my room? Make a family mystery game night?

Have any of you good folks had thoughts like this!?

[Dario]

I got Riven on Sega Saturn console in about 1998 , was great !

And i finished it several times since then.