Myst Was Supposed To Change the Face of Gaming. What Is Its Legacy? 374
glowend writes "On 24 September 1993, computer users were introduced to Myst. Grantland takes a look at the game's legacy, two decades on. Quoting: 'Twenty years ago, people talked about Myst the same way they talked about The Sopranos during its first season: as one of those rare works that irrevocably changed its medium. It certainly felt like nothing in gaming would or could be the same after it. Yes, Myst went on to sell more than 6 million copies and was declared a game-changer (so to speak), widely credited with launching the era of CD-ROM gaming. It launched an equally critically adored and commercially successful sequel, and eventually four more installments. Fans and critics alike held their breath in anticipation of the tidal wave of exploratory, open-ended gaming that was supposed to follow, waiting to be drowned in a sea of new worlds. And then, nothing.' Why didn't Myst have a larger impact?"
Probably because it was a sort of mediocre game... (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, yeah, it was gorgeous at a time when games weren't, and it had "new" gameplay.
Only. The gameplay, once you get over the "new", sort of sucks. Yeah, you're supposed to experiment with things to find out what they do, except you don't even know what experiment you'll be trying. There's no way to predict whether clicking on something will try to pick it up, or push it, or turn it, or whatever, so you can't perform interesting experiments to learn about things. And ultimately, it just sorta never gets past that. The writing was interesting, but it worked better as a book than as a game.
Basically, it's like a text adventure with a much worse and stupider parser, but it has graphics.
This isn't the history I remember. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't accept the premise of the question.
For one, Myst had a large impact, as admitted in the question.
For another, when did critics imply that Myst heralded an era of "open ended" gameplay? It was not itself some intensely open ended experience. It was definitely leisurely, but it effectively replaced a game on rails with a game on a Gantt chart. You could approach a few things in any order, but there was usually a limiting factor elsewhere in the world.
Finally, there are numerous games with hugely developed background worlds and interaction with that world that far exceed the slowly expanding maze of puzzle locked doors that made up Myst. I read the Myst books as a kid and loved them, but some LucasArts games of the same era had worlds with a more cohesive character.
Go drive around in GTA V for a while (Score:4, Insightful)
Drive around in GTA V. Visit the beach. Go swimming and dive underwater. Check out the beach walk. Climb the mountains. Fly the blimp. There are about 20 square miles to explore, all with considerable detail.
That's the legacy of Myst.
Great game. Wish there were more like it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Multimedia upgrade kits (Score:5, Insightful)
Asking why Myst is no longer relevant is sort of asking like why people stopped buying Encarta. The reason Myst was such a sleeper hit is that it coincided with the start of the "multimedia era" in the 90's. Once you went out and spent $150+ on a soundcard, speakers, and a CD-ROM drive, then what?
Multimedia features are no fun without software, and Myst managed to be family-friendly and take advantage of your computer's new features. It was the right game at the right time.
It was a casual game (Score:4, Insightful)
Why didn't Myst have a larger impact? The answer is in the article:
Much of the game's popularity was thanks to casual players who found themselves drawn to its evocative, violence-free world; many hard-core gamers found it obtuse and frustrating, its point-and-click interface slideshow-esque and stifling. Maybe Myst wasn't for hard-core gamers. Maybe it wasn't even really a game.
It also explains the distinction and the draw:
I was about 11 when I landed on the island for the first time — a couple years late; CD-ROM technology took a few years to come to our house. NES and Sega were more or less verboten throughout my childhood. That didn't stop me from playing hours of Zelda at my friends' houses, but because I didn't have nearly as much time to practice getting "good" at console games, I remember having a bit of anxiety about navigating a virtual world, feeling painfully inept in comparison with my friends, for whom a controller felt as natural in their hands as a no. 2 pencil. But now, here I was in a world where video game aptitude was irrelevant: rather than a mastery of timing and hand-eye coordination (ah, remember that old argument to get your parents to buy you a Nintendo? "It'll improve my hand-eye coordination, Mom!"), Myst required little more than your eyes, your ears, and a healthy sense of curiosity.
To that I would add that the pre-rendered graphics looked much nicer than most other games available at the time.
I was a gamer when Myst came out. I remember it being sneered at by the hardcore crowd. The people talking about it changing the face of gaming were the ones salivating over its sales figures. But casual games don't seem to create new genres so easily. For a while it was Myst, then it was The Sims, then Angry Birds, Farmville, Plants vs. Zombies, and who knows what else. And they're all different! Whatever makes a casual game popular, it doesn't seem to be easy to clone. At a guess, I'd say it's personality.
(Why did we sneer at Myst? Because every gaming executive secretly wants their company to be a casual gaming money machine. When they start talking about "the future of gaming" being being point-and-click slideshows, it sounds very threatening to us. The modern version of this is "the future of gaming is mobile", i.e. games with a terrible touchscreen interface. But since gaming happens across so many different platforms now, it's less scary. Plus, we're older, so we've seen this pattern a few times.)
(Also, I was 12, so I sneered at everything.)
Because of the Web? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow -- it has actually been 20 years since Myst came out?? That seems unbelievable. I haven't done any "real" computer gaming in a long time, but I spent many hours working my way through Myst and absolutely loved that game.
I wonder if the popularization of the World Wide Web had something to do with the eventual decline of Myst and games like it. I remember that a big part of the satisfaction of playing Myst and other puzzle-based games, such as the King's Quest series, was that you really needed to struggle through the challenges until you figured them out. For example, a staple of those games was a maze that you had to traverse at some point (remember the little subterranean train thing in Myst?). To solve them, you had to spend considerable time exploring and mapping until you finally figured out how to get where you needed to go. If you were stuck, there wasn't much you could do except try harder until you got it. Sure, the game companies had "hot lines" that you could call for hints, but they charged you for it, and nobody I knew ever used them. As a result, the game was much more rewarding because you had to do it all by yourself. This environment also was conducive to playing the game with others, because two (or more) heads are better than one. My brother and I worked through a number of these games when we were kids, and playing them together added to the fun.
Once the Web became mainstream, the situation changed very quickly. Suddenly, game "walk throughs" were widely available for free, and much of the mystique that led to these games' success disappeared. You need to solve that maze? Just look it up on the walk through and you can be done with it in about two minutes. Once the entire game solution was readily available, the sense of accomplishment from solving the puzzles was greatly diminished, in my opinion.
So, imagine a world where there is no quick, easy way to look up game solutions. It seems terribly quaint now, but that was the environment in which Myst and similar games before it became popular. Once that changed, I think the days were numbered for the puzzle-based games, at least as far as their ability to become blockbusters.
I haven't done any research to compare how well actual market trends correlated with the rise of the Web. This is just my recollection of how the gaming world changed during that time.
Re:Probably because it was a sort of mediocre game (Score:4, Insightful)
This is something I agree with. It did feel like a "graphic adventure" game, but the puzzles were made somewhat frustrating. I might have enjoyed the puzzles if they were something I could have played with outside of the game.
I never quite got into myst. Being a FPS player from far earlier than Myst ( Ultima Underworld ) - the openness of a vast free-form 3D world had already demonstrated far greater appeal, but only on the PC platform. The Mac was, at that time, very poorly supported and had none of the games that the PC players were experiencing at that time.
As such, I recall the "excitement" of anyone who had a Mac and could play Myst and while the graphics were pretty for the era ( look at the old screenshots ), the gameplay wasn't very exciting and took too long. Still, people played it, because those of us who had CD rom's needed something to show others that was different to the floppy-loaded games of the time. And at the time, it really was "eye candy".
The 7th guest was similar ( we used to call it the "7th guess" because of the guesswork in solving puzzles ) and arguably more enjoyable, but the concept of being alone in a 3D world was probably recaptured beautifully by the game "portal" which introduced a dynamic element to the puzzles, so if anyone is looking to what happened to games like "Myst" and "Riven" and "The Seventh Guest", they finally came of age in "Portal" in my opinion.
GrpA
I got frustrated and quit (Score:2, Insightful)
Personally I found Myst to be the most frustrating video game I ever wasted money on. There were virtually no clues for the puzzles it presented, which made them an exercise in futility rather than an exploratory challenge of thinking or creativity.
While the graphics were beautiful for the time, they're quite primitive compared to modern games.
Personally I think Half-Life and Deus Ex were far more groundbreaking and open-ended, despite the fact that you could attack the Myst puzzles in virtually any order you liked. Sometimes a bit of direction to the plot improves the story.
Re:Better games came along right after? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Better games came along right after? (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed, I thought the real revolutionary part of Myst was "Hey, so good graphics look nice." I didn't think anyone thought that there would be a flood of games where you explored islands created through books.
I'm seeing a lot of comments here about how the most revolutionary part of Myst was the graphics, and I'm actually surprised. That's not why I like Myst at all (and I still think Myst and Riven are fantastic games). To me, it's about the style of gameplay. There are puzzles, hard puzzles and a story that you're trying to piece together with very little exposition. It was great to just explore without worrying about time limits or things trying to kill you. Every time you discovered something new and progressed, that discovery was its own exciting reward.
I do agree that "doom happened" is the answer to what happened to Myst-style games, and the adventure genre period. I forever curse the rise of FPS games for that reason. I know adventure games are still made, but 3D killed them, for the same reason Myst III isn't as good as Myst or Riven. I don't want a 3D environment. I want the static adventures of old.
Speaking of old, that's what I am. Get off my lawn and whatnot.
Re:Probably because it was a sort of mediocre game (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonsense. I'll grant that it wasn't always clear what interactions were possible, given the choice to use a minimalistic interface in order to produce the most immersive experience possible at the time, but what separated Myst from contemporary point-and-click puzzle games, as well as most of its created-by-other-companies sequels, is that the puzzles actually did have a logic to them that removed the need for guesswork. The gear puzzle that's accessible right from the start is a prime example. It's there in front of you, the mechanisms for controlling the puzzle are simple, yet the actual solving of it is not so trivial. You need to actually figure out how it works and what result you're trying to produce from it, since otherwise brute force and guessing won't do you any good.
There were a handful of "here's the key, now go use it" puzzles, which generally are a cop-out in place of a well-crafted puzzle, but in this case, those puzzles were a part of the larger puzzle: figuring out how the world itself was put together. Each of them had a logic to them that made sense in the context of the world as a whole and contributed to your understanding of how each of the parts fit together with the rest. Sure, figuring out that you need to turn the water on to power equipment in one of the worlds in the game is just a matter of finding the right spot to interact with, but there are clues all over pointing you to the fact that such an interaction must exist (e.g. pipes all over, obvious ways to direct the flow of water, etc.), as well as more clues pointing you towards where you can find that spot (e.g. the pipes all lead to it).
Riven was much the same, though it was even made its puzzles an even more fundamental part of the world. In contrast, Myst III (developed by a different studio) was filled with numerous puzzles that made no sense at all (rather than having the puzzles be a natural part of the world, it relied on the idea that the worlds had been created specifically to be filled with puzzles as a training ground for some of the characters in the story, which the developers used as an excuse to shoehorn in all sorts of nonsensical stuff) and relied on simple brute force or happening to look in the right direction at just the right time to solve. I even recall hearing a quote at one point from the CEO of the company that made Myst and Riven, talking about how he wasn't a fan of the fact that some of the puzzles in Myst III required random guessing to solve. Myst IV was marginally better. Myst V was created by the original company, but it suffered from various issues as well, though it was still better than either III or IV.
If you don't think that the puzzles made sense, then I'd suggest that you simply didn't explore the world as fully as you were meant to. I've found similar opinions in the past from folks that opted to use walkthroughs, usually because they see the puzzles as obstacles keeping them from the story, rather than recognizing that the process for solving them is how you learn about the story most fully.
Re:Go drive around in GTA V for a while (Score:5, Insightful)
"That's the legacy of Myst."
But the question was: "What happened?"
What happened was this: the laptops finally came of age, and later Myst versions were distributed via Ubisoft. Ubisoft, in turn, implemented DRM, requiring the CD to be in the drive whenever you played.
Back when, I sent an email to Cyan, complaining about the DRM. A programmer wrote back, saying he, too, thought the DRM was BS but there was nothing he could do about it, because it was the distributor insisting on it, with his bosses' consent.
I vowed never to buy another Myst release. End of story.
Re:Better games came along right after? (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree with you entirely. The environment was a big draw - and by that I include the sounds and the music, but the puzzles themselves were, at the time, all encompassing. Why didn't it have a bigger impact? Perhaps because creating something so original and unique is rare. The mechanisms of the game were the framework around which the story was wrought. The story, and the puzzles and the way they were integrated, was the thing (IMO).
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The graphics were simply brilliant (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The graphics were simply brilliant (Score:5, Insightful)
It's really too bad that Grand Theft Auto doesn't have a pure sandbox mode, where you could diddle some sliders to make it only, say, as violent as the real world. And where you had access to everything from the get-go. Because there are probably people who would buy the game solely to get access to its sandbox. I personally eagerly awaited a new story in the GTA universe, so beating the game to get access to everything isn't an arduous task for me. I understand not wanting to play a violent game, sometimes I don't want to have to mug people just to street race too. Or whatever.
Re:Better games came along right after? (Score:4, Insightful)
The FPS is popular and common because it's easy to get it to work reasonably well. It's a game design that's easy for players to pick up, easy to balance, and easy to squeeze into nearly any story or setting. That's the same reason platformers, turn-based RPGs and 2D fighters were ubiquitous before the (and still common after) FPS - there are reliable formulas to build them. But within the genre, there's a huge amount of space to work in.
Sure, the most prominent subgenre is the "Hollywood-realistic modern military shooter" - Call of Duty, Battlefield, et cetera. There's too many of them, and most of them aren't all that great (I swear, I only own the latest Medal of Honor because I wanted some other games it was packaged with). They're the most popular even though most of them are uninspired, unpolished or just plain bad, but then again, look at the most popular movies or songs lately and you'll see the same.
Then you've got the more unusual ones. Bioshock: Infinite was amazing - the story is excellent, and the gameplay, while not revolutionary, was certainly better than most. Borderlands mixes FPS with a dash of Diablo, generating literally billions of random guns for you to min-max. Deus Ex tries, and often succeeds, in providing a wide variety of approaches to each situation. Far Cry 3 gives you a massive open world and a huge focus on stealth (and the recent expansion, Blood Dragon, is the most hilarious parody of 80s action movies I've seen in any medium). The shooter portions of Rage aren't particularly innovative, but it mixed it up with vehicle sections that were actually more fun than the shooting. STALKER goes the opposite direction of the arcade-shooter-with-a-realistic-facade - this is a game where one bullet can kill you if you don't patch yourself up. ARMA goes the same way, except removing crazy sci-fi shit in favor of being a military simulator (I find it boring as hell - my experience was twenty minutes of boot camp, a fifteen-minute mission briefing, a five-minute helicopter ride, ten minutes of walking, then about thirty seconds of shooting before I took a round to the arm and bled out while trying to figure out which button to push to yell for a medic. But I can't say it's not trying, and I can't say it's not trying something different).
And if anything, I think we're seeing shooters take up a smaller share of the market right now. Looking at my recently-purchased games, I see plenty of RPGs, dozens of weird indie gems, some racing games, puzzle games, strategy games both real-time and turn-based, lots of open-world games, a handful of 2D fighters, a few third-person shooters, and yes, a decent pile of first-person shooters, but only a few of which are insipid, uninspiring or mindless.
Several of them do, however, look rather pretty.
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Myst was a tedious exercise in figuring out exactly in what order to do what the designers wanted you to do.
I'd say that it was more an exercise in finding the clues spread around the world about how to solve the puzzles, making the connections, and getting it done. The information was all there, you just had to pay attention to find it. You've got a point that each of the games is (on the whole) only really good for one play-through, though. I can't argue with that.
Re:Better games came along right after? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think quite a lot of gamers just won't get it. If you ask them what makes game 1 better than game 2, they will point to better graphics, better sound, etc.
I don't think FPS killed adventure games though, I just think that over time as more and more people started playing games that the type of people who love adventure games are outnumbered by the type of people who love FPS games. And of course there's overlap between the groups. So while the number of adventure games and adventure game players has also grown, it just has grown at a slower rate.
Re:The graphics were simply brilliant (Score:2, Insightful)