Myst Creator Closes Doors 112
ComputerSherpa writes "Cyan Worlds closed its doors today. Cyan was the creator of Myst, the game that was partially responsible for popularizing the CD-ROM format. Until it was recently overtaken by The Sims, the Myst series was the most popular computer game series of all time. The last game in the Myst series, End of Ages, is scheduled to be released September 20th by UbiSoft."
Damn... (Score:5, Informative)
Then again, it's not like they've died or anything... but it's still sad to see them go.
I remember that game! (Score:1, Insightful)
I sure wish the game industry would stop being so sexist and start focusing on games that women would enjoy.
Re:I remember that game! (Score:1, Interesting)
Sadly, right now it's just a bunch of grown up 8th graders running the show.
Re:I remember that game! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I remember that game! (Score:2)
Re:I remember that game! (Score:2, Interesting)
Characters in games are so often caricatures - men with lantern jaws and bulging biceps, women with cavernous cleavage and wasp waists. It'd be better to have people who actually look like you could meet them in the street.
Women seem to react more negatively to stereotypes of women than men react to stereotypes of men. That drives them away from many games.
Re:I remember that game! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I remember that game! (Score:1)
There are even reality TV shows now where people get cut up to make them look better. That's so sick and twisted that it's almost beyond comprehension.
Is your point that it's good advertising practice to mutate women's bodies in a way that no women could possibly live up to (through extensive use of Pho
Re:I remember that game! (Score:1)
Re:I remember that game! (Score:1)
I'm talking about the prevalent culture that pervades all aspects of daily life, and how it portrays women and men. A subset of that culture is in video games, and because of the nature of graphics (not being necessarily based in reality) the images of women and men are even worse than you see on billboards.
That's what I believe drives many people away from video games.
It's absolutely nothing to do with violent games, but it's nice o
Re:I remember that game! (Score:1)
I don't see the follow through on the logic there.
Re:I remember that game! (Score:1)
Wow. That's brave.
Re:I remember that game! (Score:1)
Not to mention, I don't want to hear this whiney crap about what women are
Re:I remember that game! (Score:2)
I think you're confusing something: Playboy isn't targeted at women.
Seriously though, there certainly are women's magazines containing picutres of slender, large-breasted women. However, they are mostly health and fashion/lifestyle magazines. If you're writing an article about how to shed some pounds, and you show a picture of a slender woman, t
Re:I remember that game! (Score:2)
Those fashion magazines you dismiss are in fact quite popular, even with women who don't look like the ones on the cover. Cosmo had over 2 million [magazine.org] single-issue sales in the US in 2004, the most of any magazine. Check out their current cover [cosmomag.com] and tell me if that looks like many
Re:I remember that game! (Score:2)
I wish it did.
Re:I remember that game! (Score:2)
I'm not saying when it's okay, I'm only saying when it's sexist.
Showing chicks with huge boobs because men like huge boobs is sexist. Showing sporty women because you're writing an article about women and sport is not.
Women usually don't mind seeing pictures of attractive females. They usually do mind if it's only so you can jerk off.
If you're targeting games at women, that's something you sho
Re:I remember that game! (Score:2)
Actually, although the ads show that sort of thing because it feeds into fear of inadequacy (sales!), the magazines targeted at them usually show small breasted women.
It's one thing to sell a product by showing that it will enhance a woman. It's quite another to get her to willingly purchase monthly a magazine that constantly shows that she'
Re:I remember that game! (Score:2)
Really? Would Star Wars be a better movie if it was full of people you could meet in the street? Would Harry Potter be a more interesting book if it was full of people you could meet in the street? Would Desperate Housewives be a better TV show if it was full of people you could meet in the street?
I think the point is that we can have both. We can have fantasy and reality. You can't just heretofore ban everything with
Re:I remember that game! (Score:3, Interesting)
My point really was that there's all this clammoring about how there are no female-friendly games, but then the two most popular games in history both happen to be extremely female-accessible and friendly and are made up of a huge population of female players.
I have always felt that a game should be created for playability and
Some people are still hoping, it seems.... (Score:1, Informative)
Sigh... (Score:2, Interesting)
The play is over, applaud! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:OT: _outlaw_ circucision!? (Score:1, Offtopic)
Mods (Score:1)
PC Gaming Legacy (Score:2)
Though this wasnt entirely unexpected. They put alot of money into URU only to have it never get off the ground.
So they ended up relying on publishers to fund new projects, and most publishers won't fund a triple AAA adventure game.
Its sad to see them go, but such is life.
Re:PC Gaming Legacy (Score:2)
That's like 9 A's
Myst, Popular? (Score:2)
Re:Myst, Popular? (Score:2)
Re:Myst, Popular? (Score:2, Insightful)
A refreshing change from the usual hack and slash, reflexes had nothing to do with it.
Re:Myst, Popular? (Score:1, Informative)
It gained that popularity because it told an interesting story with very simple mechanics; two necessary ingredients for getting attention from the casual gamer audience (which makes up probably 80+% of the total gaming market).
Personally I wasn't a big fan of the series. I prefered the adventure genre from Sierra and Lucasarts point of view, but you can't argue with it's success.
Re:Myst, Popular? (Score:1)
Re:Myst, Popular? (Score:2)
Never played it, then?
Most popular of all time? In what sense? (Score:2, Insightful)
> most popular computer game series of all time.
I'm really struggling with this one, in terms of definitions. I'm not sure exactly how the word "popular", for instance, could be defined to make this true. Popular in terms of how many people have played it? No, that would be Solitaire/Freecell, hands down. Popular in terms of how many hours people have wasted on it? The Mario series probably has that sewn up, if you count it as
Re:Most popular of all time? In what sense? (Score:2)
Myst, at its peak, was far more popular than Doom at its peak.
Re:Most popular of all time? In what sense? (Score:1)
I have a pretty hard time believing that. Every gamer and 5% of the rest of the PC-owning world has a copy of at least one of the Doom games. I only ever actually met (IRL) *one* person who owned a copy of Myst.
But, again, how do are we defining "more popular"? More people played it? They spent more hours on it? They liked it better? They talked about it more? What exactly are we talking about here? You're making an assertion, but it
Re:Most popular of all time? In what sense? (Score:3, Informative)
Of course, that was just the first hit I found after looking on Google, so it could be totally off.
Re:Most popular of all time? In what sense? (Score:2)
Googling seems to indicate that 3 million copies of Doom were sold, and 7 million copies of Myst were sold.
Re:Most popular of all time? In what sense? (Score:1)
Re:Most popular of all time? In what sense? (Score:2)
Re:Most popular of all time? In what sense? (Score:2)
It definitely was the "killer app" to justify a CD-Rom for games.
Labyrinth of Time came a year or two before, but was nowhere near as polished as myst.
Re:Most popular of all time? In what sense? (Score:3, Insightful)
Myst was bought by non-gamers, which is precisely why it was so popular.
Re:Most popular of all time? In what sense? (Score:1, Insightful)
Oh ? Really ? I have a copy of myst, (and riven), but no Doom. Q3A, yes, but no doom. I know other people that have Myst. You only know hard-core games. Myst was one of the very very few games (like the Sims) that were playable by non-hard core gamers. Unlike mario.
The myst demographic was older than the doom demographic, and mostly included non-gamers. I suspect that you are younger than I am (I am near
Re:Most popular of all time? In what sense? (Score:1)
No, actually, I only know one hard-core gamer. Most of the people I know who own Doom only own half a dozen PC games or so. The *one* person I know who owned Myst also had at the time, I think, Freecell and Encarta.
A lot of people here are saying non-gamers bought Myst, but this must be non-gamers in some demographic I've never encountered. I know more non-gamers who own copies of the PC version of Wheel of Fortune than ones who have Myst. I know more non-gamers who ow
Re:Most popular of all time? In what sense? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Most popular of all time? In what sense? (Score:1)
Re:Most popular of all time? In what sense? (Score:1)
Did Myst really sell more copies than, say, Doom 2? I'd find that a fairly surprising statistic, and if it's true, Id must have suffered a terrible piracy rate, because I'm pretty sure there are about fifty times as many copies of the Doom series floating around, as compared to Myst.
(Not that I'm a Doom fan; I actually loathe the whole FPS genre. But that's another matter.)
Re:Most popular of all time? In what sense? (Score:1, Informative)
Yes, everyone and his dog has Doom. But I never actually paid for my copy (bought Doom 3 though, since I have a salary now).
Also, Doom was shareware, you got episode 1 for free... therefore many, many more players than sales.
Re:Most popular of all time? In what sense? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Most popular of all time? In what sense? (Score:2)
Re:Most popular of all time? In what sense? (Score:2)
Exclude the pack-in game (Score:1)
if you restrict it to just the PC platform, then we're probably back at Solitaire/Freecell again, but Myst would be _way_ down the list, far below Doom.
What about restricting it to the MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows platforms and excluding games packaged with the operating system?
Re:Exclude the pack-in game (Score:1)
In that case, Tetris beats Myst by far.
Re:Most popular of all time? In what sense? (Score:2)
Re:Most popular of all time? In what sense? (Score:2)
Re:Most popular of all time? In what sense? (Score:2)
A translation problem between English and English I believe heh
Re:Most popular of all time? In what sense? (Score:1)
Re:Most popular of all time? In what sense? (Score:2)
It's "most popular computer game series" as in "pc game series with most copies sold". For quite some time (still?), Myst was the PC game with the most copies sold.
Re:Most popular of all time? In what sense? (Score:1)
And, yes, the game was adored. You should check out the Wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org].
Again, the /. community needs to break out of the shell that it continually finds itself in. The world, not even the computing world for that matter, revolves around us. Look beyond your experience.
Open source it? (Score:1)
Re:Open source it? (Score:1)
Re:Open source it? (Score:2)
Re:Open source it? (Score:2)
Re:Open source it? (Score:2)
People are going to hate me for this, (Score:4, Insightful)
They pretty much killed the adventure game genre. Before Myst, we had great adventure games from Sierra, LucasArts and a few other companies. Granted, they escaped the notice of the general population, but when Myst came along and became super popular, it became fixed in the minds of the populace as the definition of what an adventure game is supposed to be, and REAL adventure games were automatically regarded as 'too complex', and now it is nearly impossible to get them published (Sam & Max 2 and Full Throttle 2, anyone?)
Re:People are going to hate me for this, (Score:2, Flamebait)
Re:People are going to hate me for this, (Score:1, Informative)
You grea
Re:People are going to hate me for this, (Score:2)
Also, 1996 was the year both Mario 64 and - ushering in a
Re:People are going to hate me for this, (Score:2)
And guess what there Slappy: Myst came out in 1993 as well. Don't belive me? Think I've been smoking crack? Ah...here's the Wikipedia link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst [wikipedia.org]
Myst didn't kill the adventure game.
# Day of the Tentacle (Maniac Mansion 2) (1993)
# Sam & Max Hit the Road (1993)
# Full Throttle (1995)
# The Dig (1995)
# The Curse of Monkey Island (1997)
# Grim Fandango (1998)
# Escape from Monkey Island (2000)
And that's just the LucasArt
Re:People are going to hate me for this, (Score:1)
Full Throttle, and The Curse of Monkey Island represent the last gasp of the original Adventure genre. The Dig was Very Influenced by Myst, especially in terms of puzzle structure and a lack of interation. Grim Fandango and EMI rely on a completely different and arguably inferior interface (as in those games you end up driving the main character around like a car in Grand Theft Auto 2.
I als
Re:People are going to hate me for this, (Score:1)
Do you even play adventure games?
Plenty (as in hundreds) of non Myst style adventures have been released since 1996.
Sure plenty of first person Myst alike games have been made, but to say that Myst killed adventure games or that no adventure games are being made is ignorant.
Re:People are going to hate me for this, (Score:1)
Hundreds? Is there some underground industry I've been locked out of? The last adventure game of note I played was "The Longest Journey," and that was released four years ago!
Or are you asserting that games in the vein of Mario 64 and Tombraider are adventure games (they're not. They're action games. PERIOD, no discussion, they're 3D-platformers, therefore action games.) Many games released today bear some elements
Re:People are going to hate me for this, (Score:1)
It seams you have not been on the look out for adventure games then. I also am not talking about action/adventure (fade to black for instance) or RPG/adventure (though IMO many RPG adventure games like Fallout should count as the adventure part is primary). Frankly most survival horror games are adventure games, you may not like them, but they are.
Let me give you a list of games that are non MYST alike adventure
Re:People are going to hate me for this, (Score:2)
Re:People are going to hate me for this, (Score:2)
Re:People are going to hate me for this, (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:People are going to hate me for this, (Score:2)
Im looking forward to Dreamfall and Indigo Prophecy. Both expected to be relased later this year.
Re:People are going to hate me for this, (Score:2)
Only on games.? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Only on games.? (Score:3, Insightful)
They made Myst, which is something. A lot of people even really liked it, which is something else. But they're not, say, Nintendo.
influential
What did they influence? It's not like they came up with a genre... adventures have been around since Zork, and point-and-click ones had been around since Sierra and Lucasfilm Games (if not before). The fact they made a point-and-click adventure with prerendered graphics and a storyline was nothing new. Even the fact it was good was nothing new. Bu
Re:Only on games.? (Score:5, Insightful)
> But they're not, say, Nintendo.
No, but good lord, they sold more copies than anyone else at the time and really was a major contributor to the quick adoption of the CD-ROM format... something that Nintendo lagged behind on for nearly 10 years and the failure of which caused Sony to enter the marketplace. Then again you're comparing a publisher to a single developer. Nintendo has greater influence to be sure, but Cyan did at one time carry major street credential in developer circles.
> What did they influence?
You're kidding right? Tell me that low ID of yours isn't saying this. Cyan did inspire a whole horde of copycats and invigorated the adventure genre. You're correct that they didn't put in some new mindbending technology or that prerendered graphics hadn't been done before. They raised the bar to a whole new level with the adventure genre, causing Sierra and Infocom to bring their A game. Are you going to say next that Blizzard isn't influencial because they didn't invent the RTS genre and stuck to a 8-bit palette until Warcraft 3?
> You realize video games have been around since like the 50s? That today's "senior" gamehouses have been around since the 80s?
Check your dates and the video game developer graveyard sometime. While Wally's Eletronic Tennis in the '50s was technically the first, it wasn't commericially available. (Have a conversation with Ralph Baer or Bill Kunkel sometime about video game history. I know I have.)
What you see today as "senior" gamehouses are the lucky few that managed to swallow up the dying ones. Go visit the graves of Infocom, Sierra On-Line, Westwood, Dynamix, Origin, Sir-tech, the undead lich that is Interplay. The EA and Activisions you speak of survive only by sucking the lifeblood of individual development houses.
In retrospect, perhaps Myst isn't the end all be all game that some might make it out to be. (I liked it, didn't love it, but liked it.) But I wouldn't shamlessly discount the influence they had on the industry. Every game developer I've worked with, talked to or emailed (and that number is in the hundreds) has admired Cyan and studied their games and company to find their "secret".
Disagree if you will, but your assertion that they will be a "tiny footnote" is greatly, greatly mistaken and completely wrong.
Re:Only on games.? (Score:2, Funny)
It is never valid to use any word based on "vigor" in relationship to Myst!
Re:Only on games.? (Score:3, Interesting)
The Myst-clone (first person FMV point and click) basically wasn't important before Myst, and for years after Myst was like a third of all games being released. Even PC gamer based their games disc interface on the style for a while.
I'm not saying it's the most long running, but it's a studio that's been around for 10 years. A lot
so sad... (Score:1, Insightful)
Indies Are Dying Out... (Score:1)
As gaming is making way in terms of mass appeal it seems that, more and more, independent developers are being pushed aside. Independent studios made PC gaming, and it's a real shame to see what is happening to so many of them.
I'm sure that Cyan has become a different company in the years since Myst was released - they might have moved away from the spirit they seemed to have back in the day - but, speaking as someone who has played more than their share of videogames, this (and the relatively recent closi
Re:Indies Are Dying Out... (Score:2)
Really, they were pretty lucky Ubi let them live after Uru Live. EA probably wouldn't have.
Re:Indies Are Dying Out... (Score:2, Informative)
1.The engine was really bad at supporting more than a few avatars at a time. In the several months I beta tested, it just seemed to get worse. 15 or so avatars in an age would make it go down to a couple of frames a second. Soon before release, we were to have a meeting with Rand Miller, and only about 40-50 people got into the age before it crashed.
2. The action elements were poor and out of place. There were trial and error jumping puzzles. And walking into physics objects
Truthfully (Score:2, Insightful)
I started out playing the Zork games, and later Dungeon Master (MUCH better than Eye of the Beholder), and finally Monkey Island and all of its successors/spin-offs. Myst, IMHO, didn't compare with the least of the games I've just mentioned. It was even sub-par
Re:Truthfully (Score:2)
Re:Truthfully (Score:2)
It was the first game that had something that more closely resembeled photorealism - that made it popular. Of course, there are flukes:
- In theory, you can complete the game in 15 minutes. (http://www.gamefaqs.com/computer/doswin/game/8946 7.html [gamefaqs.com] - see the first FAQ, section VI / MYS18)
- The main area had a puzzle where you had to press buttons to unlock a book. You can't tell if they are pressed or not: red and green seem like generic colours to me, especially when.
- The
Re:Truthfully (Score:1)
The Monkey Island games and Grim Fandango had much more enjoyable dialog and characters. But they were the only reason to solve the puzzles.... But I guess you could say that pretty graphics were the only reason to solve Myst puzzles.
Myst was NOT a game (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Myst was NOT a game (Score:2)
The only one I could think of is Ultima.
I've yet to learn Gargish though..
"Good riddance." (Score:2)
Rob (Quoting Green Day's "Time of Your Life" makes me even less sympathetic)
Sci Fi Wire confims (Score:1)
Myst Developer Closes Doors [scifi.com]
It claims that it could theoretically reopen in the future, but don't hold your breath.