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?"
The graphics were simply brilliant (Score:5, Interesting)
And turned brass was everywhere. I loved the puzzles, the incredible transport monorails, the sheer quiet brilliance. And quiet it was, and cerebral. Still looking for something quite that good again.
Re:The graphics were simply brilliant (Score:5, Informative)
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FWIW, in the same genre I preferred Obsidian.
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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.
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Myst was more than just graphics though. What was also different, or at least very rare, was the emphasis on puzzles and non-combat within a world simulation. Ie, it's genre would be an explore the world and figure out puzzles to find more area to explore game. So games like The Longest Journey would seem to be descendants of Myst (even though Myst puzzles weren't adventure style puzzles). That genre is still around though it's dwarfed by the "shoot it if it moves" 3D games.
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Agreed about the 3D shoot-em-ups.
Myst-like games still live on with some changes [I've played Myst/Riven and all of the following]:
- 7th Guest/11th Hour (historical) -- lots of puzzles
- Lara Croft series -- shoot em up, but that wasn't the whole game
- Nancy Drew series (20+ games) -- solve a murder mystery
- Art of Murder series -- be a female FBI agent and stop a serial killer
- Yesterday -- play various characters (including one with no memory) with a progressive mystery storyline
All of these have tough pro
Re:The graphics were simply brilliant (Score:4, Interesting)
I never got the hang of Myst. Partly because the puzzle weren't adventure style. They were completly detached from the story! The graphics were great, but I never had any motivation why I should open these valves or turn that sundial. And finding out what the story is about at all by reading those text fragments at a 1995 monitor was a PITA!
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One of the things that I found most delightful about Myst - and continue to marvel at - is that the core of the gameplay had nothing to do with killing things. I find Minecraft increasingly appealing because the emphasis is more on building and exploring. Myst really gave the impression of a bigger world around you and used the literary technique of "show, don't tell" to exhibit it. I guess I can admit to being a little bit jaded. There are quite a few "show, don't tell" elements hidden in a game like G
Re:The graphics were simply brilliant (Score:4, Informative)
Oh, then this is probably my cue to turn up and point you to Mystcraft [binarymage.com]. Mystcraft is just as the name implies: a mod for Minecraft that adds Myst-like mechanisms for creating and exploring Ages. Yes, it's just about as fantastic as it sounds. (And by God, don't forget to bring a linking book if you don't want to get forever stranded.)
And to answer the question raised by the article, I just spent my lunch break playing Mystcraft. Today, in 2013, 20 years after the release of Myst. So I'd say, pretty relevant indeed.
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I think a bigger problem is that the "Game made me lose" crowded out the "I lost to the game" mindset and people are just too goddamn thick to enjoy a game that *hard*.
Re:The graphics were simply brilliant (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, called realMyst [gog.com]. The graphics are actually better in realMyst than the prerendered Myst graphics were. Myst's graphics were actually pretty bad, we just didn't notice at the time.
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Re:The graphics were simply brilliant (Score:5, Informative)
What happened was they tried to go online more, and Uru happened.
Wonderful graphics and levels, with online bits and pieces (I don't know if it was really multiplayer, but there was some social component to it). But all this before most internet connections were capable of dealing with it (5 minute load times for zoning between sections was a really serious deal breaker).
It died, hard, and I think that took the wind out of their sails for a bit. Not sure they ever recovered much after that.
(I was in the early beta and stuck with it pretty much through that, and it was never ready for prime time at all. Last I checked I was still listed in the credits, I'll have to check that again some time).
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Re:The graphics were simply brilliant (Score:5, Interesting)
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Holy fuck, you're stupid. Half-Life was complete crap with a lame story and horrible, generic gameplay.
I find it pretty ludicrous that you think Unreal had better story and gameplay than Half-Life. How so?
The Unreal multiplayer was quite fun, but the single player was one of the most boring and repetitive shooters I've ever played.
as it turns out... (Score:4)
because for teenage boys shooting things and blowing stuff up is a lot more fun over the long hall
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Not only teenage boys like shooters. And if you're right, then that only goes for AAA titles from big studios. Where are the myst-like games from indie developers?
Re:as it turns out... (Score:5, Funny)
Stop with the hipster hate. It's the cool thing to do now, so hating on hipsters makes YOU a hipster.
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Re:as it turns out... (Score:5, Interesting)
because for teenage boys shooting things and blowing stuff up is a lot more fun over the long hall
For the long hall, you'll need to haul the sniper rifle with you. For the short hall, a shotgun or assault rifle will do.
Speaking as someone who was a teenaged boy when Myst came out, I can honestly say no game interested me less than it did. I saw demos of it at the video game stores, and all the clerks would gush over it being amazing, groundbreaking, etc. I'd nod my head, say "okay dude, yeah, do you even know what you're talking about?" and go home to play Ultima VII. To me it looked like the Sierra * Quest games without the things that made those games fun.
The game that I believe was the most influential from that period in time was Wolfenstein 3D, which was the seminal FPS game in my opinion. As a shareware game, it reached an audience of "anyone who had a modem and the number of a BBS with a halfway-decent files section." It was over the top, just a bit camp, and a thousand percent fun. You can even play it on Facebook now. [facebook.com] I got banned from my high school computer network for installing Wolf3D on the server. A teacher walked in and our entire Turbo Pascal class was slaying Nazis. My only defense was that it was more useful than learning Pascal. They were not amused.
I agree with the parent poster that the attributes of FPS games are very alluring to teenaged boys, but I wouldn't necessarily consider that a bad thing (or a good thing, either). It is what it is.
Obligatory (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm surprised no one has brought up Jonathan Blow's upcoming game The Witness it's heavily influenced by Myst. Check it out.
http://the-witness.net/news/ [the-witness.net]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Brd0F7rlXCI [youtube.com]
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.
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
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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.
Right!
I remember back when Maniac Mansion was all the rage! We solved 80% of that game outside the actual game during breaks at school, mostly by discussing the individual progress we made the evening before. That was fun I never had again until later at university, the whole dorm joined "Planetarion". Most of the game didn't take place in our browsers, but on the kitchen table and in the local pub where we would discuss strategy. I still remember the pub owner taking that one phone call... A message for th
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.
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I think you're responding to a criticism other than the one I made. And radically so, given that I am pretty much on the opposite end of the game-playing spectrum from the straw man you're arguing with.
My complaint has nothing to do with the logic of the puzzles. The puzzles aren't even remotely, in any way, a factor in what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the interface.
Your mouse pointer is over an object -- say, a box, or a book. If you click on it, will you:
1. Open it.
2. Pick it up.
3. Throw it.
You d
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There were not-quite-real-time games before Myst. Myst just exploited the available hardware of the time. Of course a newer game is going to look better than an older game.
The same goes for everything that followed Myst.
The not-quite-real-time aspect just got buried by games that were real-time.
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The game Syberia was a bit like Myst but the puzzles weren't quite as bizarre, although I did end up having to look for how-to's I wasn't as stumped as I was with Myst.
~S
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.
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I should have mentioned this in my post above, but I actually do treasure Myst as my first introduction to a deep storyline in a game (I was 10). It was *the* game that got me into serious PC gaming, thinking about gameplay and design, and keeping up with game news. I was so excited for Riven that I had bookmarked this silly webcam that had a view of the offices where it was being developed with a countdown timer.
And yet while it was *a* high water mark, there is no question that it's been surpassed. It had
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Of course, on the other hand, they answered their own question when they compared the hype to "The Sopranos", as far as I can tell, "The Sopranos" changed nothing about television shows.
I don't know; it sure seems like there are a lot more serial dramas on American TV in the post-Sopranos era. In the first few years of the millennium it was almost all sitcoms and reality shows. (Not that there's a shortage of those today, but when I was a kid, it seemed like *every* TV show as purely episodic.)
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Serial drama? Sounds a lot like Babylon 5.
There's probably a lot of stuff in between too...
Plus there's the King (or rather Queen) of all serial drama. Beats them all to the punch by decades. Probably shouldn't call it out by name.
The hipsters will spontaneously combust.
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Well, it's clear that they never played "Myst".
Myst was basically a "click on things until you figure out what the puzzle was" game. Its legacy is the Flash game variant of "escape the room".
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.
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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.
I disagree. There were several games that predated Myst that were much more open. The Ultima series comes to mind, especially. Play any of the Ultima 7 games (which you still can do, search engine search "Exult Ultima," and be prepared to find a torrent for necessary data files). You could go so far afield, nowhere near where your plot-driven objective was, and find crazy mysteries and adventures (and if you were crafty enough, the Hoe of Destruction). There were dungeons that had nothing to do with the plo
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.
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Indeed. That's what Doom did. Doom made that suggestion, albeit indirectly. Doom suggested Quake and Quake suggested Half Life.
Myst was a genre more or less to itself, a genre aimed at non-computer game players. A low-stress "experience" that included no real failure, and no rules for success. If you clicked enough, you'd eventually get it. I think more aptly, Myth's legacy is Bejewelled. Or Diablo. :*)
My $0.02, YMMV.
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Myst was the end-goal for the point/click adventure games.....Doom was near the beginning of a genre.
At this point, point/click adventures aren't going to get a whole lot better than Myst, but FPS games continue to get better.
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I take it you're from Chicago? Killing meatspace hookers is frowned upon where I live.
I know why (Score:2)
No explosions. No strippers. No guns.
Not that I don't like my GTA fix. But I also thoroughly enjoyed the Myst series as well. Just making an observation.
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Great game. Wish there were more like it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Great game. Wish there were more like it. (Score:4, Informative)
You must be thinking of later games in the series which were developed by other studios. Every puzzle in the original game was solvable without brute force by either applying simple logic or making use of the clues available to the player. That's actually a large aspect of what set it apart and continues to set it apart.
Not a money maker (Score:2)
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.
Myst DID change the face of gaming... (Score:3)
...its legacy lives on in the strength of game sales to casual gamers who aren't looking for real-time stress, true open-world experiences, or multiplayer competition.
I don't intend this as a general argument, but in my own experience, Myst was incredibly popular among people who didn't play a lot of computer games, but none of the people I knew who were regular computer gamers played it at all. Again, just an anecdote, but it wouldn't surprise me if there's a wider truth in it.
I loved those games (Score:3)
As far as I'm concerned, Riven was the pinnacle of the series. The art was incredibly detailed, the music and sound work top-notch. Scene construction was incredibly dense with story - everything had meaning, everything was a clue. It was obsessively detailed. I remember reading somewhere that the artists didn't do any low-poly models at all; single frames took days to render back in 1996 on then-top-of-line SGI hardware.
I bought the GOG version [gog.com] a few months ago in a fit of nostalgia. It's kind of sad how low-resolution and overcompressed the in-game renders are by current standards. I'd love to see a modern take on Riven - even re-rendered high res stills would be sweet.
You can play with the remnants of the Myst Uru MMO for free here [mystonline.com]. I think you can even download and run a server if you want.
Re:I loved those games (Score:4, Interesting)
It's kind of sad how low-resolution and overcompressed the in-game renders are by current standards.
They actually aren't compressed at all; they are stored on the CD as uncompressed 16-bit images. Perhaps what you notice is the dithering? Myst was the same way, but 8-bit. Computers of the day weren't fast enough to decompress images during game play with decent speed.
I have the original CD version, which still works on XP with a few tweaks. Have loved it since day 1. :) There is a project that is attempting to re-create the game in a real-time 3D engine: Starry Expanse [starryexpanse.com]. They have a small tech demo available.
Graphics were great, software, not so much (Score:2)
The biggest problem with the Myst games is that to run it on Windows you had to install the buggy Quicktime software. It was always breaking, either because of upgrade issues or just plain bugs. I think a lot of people gave up on it because of how hard it was to keep running if you had other games on the system.
The game was ahead of its time. It would have been much better with a 3d render software engine like Unreal. (Which did not exist at that time.)
Also, you did not get to kill anything. Modern gamers
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I'm not so sure that they do (need a body count, that is) - in fact, I'm pretty sure that Portal and Portal 2 are basically what Myst's legacy are at this point, and neither of those has you racking up a body count (other than deaths by failure, ha ha).
No killing (Score:3)
Myst sold incredibly well because it was a novelty and people had never experienced something like it before. Unfortunately it lacked anything to retain people's attention. Sure it had puzzles, but the puzzles weren't part of the environment, and puzzles could be solved with cheap games that didn't require the then expensive hardware. Myst lacked anything that would lock you into engaging within the environment itself. The result was that it became nothing more than the pretty picture that may as well have been a background picture.
Because Myst never did take advantage of what it had and as a result the novelty quickly wore off. However other people in the industry quickly realized that what the beautiful scenery needed was guns, swords and zombies. The net result was that you had something to engage your attention in the beautiful scenery and adding pretend violence was the perfect recipe. The result has been years of first person shooters that have all been wildly successful by using open environments, beautiful scenery and violence.
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Yeah, I never really saw what the appeal of Myst was myself. It wasn't a new genre, really, it was just Zork with pictures. It was STATIC, that was the whole problem. The pictures were pretty, but lots of pictures are pretty. The puzzles were OK, but Zork had equally intricate puzzles, that wasn't new. The story line was somewhat better than that of other games of the same vintage, but given the static nature of the game state (nothing evolves without player interaction) there's not a lot that you can do wi
Didn't age well (Score:2)
Let down (Score:2)
I remember being excited waiting for it to come out, then it turned out to not be a real 3d game. I was so disappointed. Doom and Duke Nukem 3D were the ones that changed gaming.
Plastic guitars (Score:3)
Myst had an incredible impact on computer science (Score:5, Funny)
Myst required a CD-ROM drive, and a bunch of RAM. This meant I had to put a CD-ROM drive and RAM on my credit card. This led to my having so much credit card debt that I had to drop out of grad school and get a real job to pay it off. This kept me from finishing my Ph.D. This is why P=NP hasn't been solved, and why we don't have flying cars.
Thanks a lot, Myst.
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.)
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> Why did we sneer at Myst?
We don't sneer at Myst. We sneer at hipsters trying to put it on some kind of pedestal. It's the mindless hype machine we sneer at.
Game changer in people. Not in gaming. (Score:2)
In other words, it allowed gaming to be considered on level footing with books, movies and tv shows because it was something almost anyone could relate to and find interesting. It made gaming a respectible type of personal entertainment. Where as, prior to Myst, gaming was a very very niche market.
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.
Modern Descendents (Score:2)
I would say that games like Trauma and (I believe, as it hasn't actually come out yet) The Witness tap a similar vein from the player perspective.
As I don't often play video games, I would imagine that others could find plenty of other examples that fit. Of course, then I fear (this being Slashdot) you would have to deal with pendants who ignore subjective "feels like" perspectives... which are actually relevant in this case, as we are dealing with art. Still, there are spiritual successors out there that
Anyone Remember Strata 3D? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 o
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No, you just didn't pay attention. All Myst took to beat was a notebook. Go everywhere, write down everything unusual, use the clues in the obvious place. If anything it was too easy, I beat it in one sick day home from school. You want frustrating? Try a Sierra adventure game.
WTF? (Score:2)
Myst was a breakout game for its level of atmosphere, immersiveness and pre-rendered graphics. I still enjoy it and boot up ScummVM (development build) every so often to get a hit of nostalgia. Riven's even better in that regard, since it's fun to see if I can finish both games (particualryl the latter) without referring to a walkthrough.
But wtf is this article going on about? New worlds and open-ended gameplay? We have tons of sandbox games now such as GTA, Saints Row and Skyrim. The article doesn't make i
Myst was boring (Score:2)
It was visually impressive and had voice acting and actors... but was the game play great? Not so much. There were some puzzles and some mysteries. But it was a point and click adventure game. And from a gameplay stand point, most of its competitors were better.
Which would you rather play again... Myst or Monkey's Island? Exactly.
Myst was pretty. That was what it was... And since there have been prettier games. So yeah... no one cares about myst anymore.
Myst was an adventure game ... (Score:2)
... and adventure games died out because they depended upon puzzles to regulate the flow of the game.
If you thought like the game designer, that was great because you could explore the world and think your way through the puzzles that you encountered.
If you didn't think like the game designer, it was a nightmare because you would be trapped in a small part of that world without being able to figure out how to escape. In some cases you didn't even know that you could escape. In other cases you knew exactly
Myst did it's thing, games are better now (Score:3)
Anyone who thinks modern games are all dumb shooters should take a stroll through some of the independent games on Steam. We're in the middle of a great period in video games. If you're not having fun, wake up and smell the Kirbal Space Program.
Myst isn't special (Score:3)
As much as everyone may like Myst, it's not technically special. The only thing going for it would be the use of multimedia/FMV. Even if FMV appeared in other games, it doesn't mean those games are any good.
Gameplay-wise, Myst takes an Alpine Encounter [textfiles.com] approach to the puzzles - you can bypass most of the game if you already know what to do.
The puzzles themselves are mostly control-room puzzles - click on something, and something happens some distance away. The back and forth travelling, although a good way to examine the landscape, isn't good for those who want to get along with the plot.
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It was at least half a decade before real-time 3D graphics were able to match Myst's pre-rendered ones.
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Good enough happened.
While Myst had superior graphics... It is pre-rendering made the world feel less immersive. Compared to Doom and Quake, while the graphics were primitive, you were more immersed in the game.
Re:Better games came along right after? (Score:5, Funny)
It is pre-rendering made the world feel less immersive.
I've seen way too many people write "it's" instead of "its". But changing "its" to "it is"? That's a new one.
Re:Better games came along right after? (Score:5, Informative)
and that's the thing: pre rendered just isn't that fun, breaks the immersion. flat shaded realtime can be more immersive.
basically "oh why aren't games like myst??" can be answered with a simple line: Philips CD-i sucks ass.
heck.. what I want the answer to is what the fuck happened to under a killing moons promise of good games?!?
Re:Better games came along right after? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, exactly!
I worked at a software store when Myst came out, and we sold MOUNTAINS of it. That at the 7th Guest (and Encarta, LOL) were the go-tos when people added a CD-ROM to their system and wanted something to do with it. But the feedback was universal - after a couple hours in Myst and the visual excitement wore off, it turned out there wasn't much game. It wasn't much more than a graphic Choose Your Own Adventure book.
Doom came out shortly later, and everyone forgot entirely about Myst. We sold mountains of Doom, and then we sold mountains of those *terrible* compilation CDs that had bazillions of maps downloaded off the internet. And then Doom2, and then more add-on maps (and not long after we started selling NICs and 10Base2 terminators ;). Being able to go anywhere and engage anything was what Myst didn't do, a step we had *expected* Riven to take... but it didn't.
Under a Killing Moon was also a big seller - and there were other games in the vein, too. All very interesting to play, but like the LucasFilm-style games they got murdered by FPSs and RTSs. I never quite understood why - Day of the Tentacle and Monkey Island were great games with broad appeal. Strange they didn't survive longer.
heck.. what I want the answer to is what the fuck happened to space combat, and the X-Wing & Wing Commander promises of good games!
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heck.. what I want the answer to is what the fuck happened to space combat, and the X-Wing & Wing Commander promises of good games!
Star Citizen [robertsspa...stries.com] will hopefully answer that question.
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I bought pretty much all of the titles you mention and enjoyed playing them. Being in my thirties I wasn't much interested in FPS so that's when I stopped buying. The market discovered teenage boys and the rest is history, its not worth investing in any other demographic because the return isn't worth it.
Re:Better games came along right after? (Score:5, Interesting)
I blame Doom for unintentionally being the spark responsible for the stagnation of the entire video game industry for many years, spawning an ever-increasing multitude of insipid, uninspiring, mindless FPS where the only thing that ever improved were the graphics the video card could pump out.
Re:Better games came along right after? (Score:5, Insightful)
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And the new FPS games may look great but they're dumber than the old ones. Everything's on rails, there's no sense of exploration or puzzle solving. I was never a big fan of them to start with but I want something with a bit of interest to them; like Deus Ex, No One Lives Forever 2, Tomb Raider, or best of all Thief.
I did like Doom, but it was dirt cheap and extremely simple play style, with a LOT of levels to play around with, so it was more like playing rogue in that you just fired it up when you were b
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And me without mod points... dammit.
I have found out that if I check Slashdot frequently (multiple times in a day) I get virtually never any mod points. But if I am occupied with something else for a couple of days and then come back to /., I often find a five-pack bounty. It works quite consistently like this. Does anyone else experience this behavior? Is it intentional? It might also be related to some parameters specific to my account.
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where the only thing that ever improved were the graphics the video card could pump out.
Doom and its ilk used software rendering... in fact it was 2D ray-casted with a cheap 3D facade ("walls this far away are this tall, draw a one-pixel-wide strip of that height") on top of that (just like Wolf3D, but doom used more complex 2D BSP-based geometry))
...but you for some reason think there was a GPU race in 1993 (the year Doom was released), even though the first consumer-grade 3D-accelerated cards didnt hit the market until 1995...
Even when 3DFX finally got out their Voodoo Rush card (1997,)
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Re:Better games came along right after? (Score:4, Interesting)
where the only thing that ever improved were the graphics the video card could pump out.
Doom and its ilk used software rendering... in fact it was 2D ray-casted with a cheap 3D facade ("walls this far away are this tall, draw a one-pixel-wide strip of that height") on top of that (just like Wolf3D, but doom used more complex 2D BSP-based geometry)) ...but you for some reason think there was a GPU race in 1993 (the year Doom was released), even though the first consumer-grade 3D-accelerated cards didnt hit the market until 1995...
Well, they may have been off base with the "video card" statement for a couple of years, but otherwise more correct than you care to admit, or know.
Think back to the "Doom Clones" which where so pervasive it was the name everyone used for many years instead of "FPS". Then examine the landscape that followed. If you didn't have an established 3D engine licensed, publishers didn't want to talk to you. In that era of software rasterization we were able to pull off some pretty slick and interesting things (in the demoscene) as CPU speed and RAM size progressed. Hardware fixed function pipeline discrete graphics made everything look pretty much the same for a good long time. Only recently with heterogeneous computing will we be getting back much of the graphical & physics freedom we had with software rasterization.
Now, think back before Doom. The Fully 3D Virtuality VR Arcade had Dactly Nightmare and Exorex. The PCs had Starglider2 (those guys went on to make starfox). We had Real 3D, though untextured (and on 386 machines). On 486, and Pentium one could do a whole hell of a lot more, the loads of RAM helped overcome lots of slow CPU calculations (look up tables everywhere). However, we had sacrificed "real" 3D for textures+2.5D (faux 3D). After the 3D HW boom there were so many different vendors to customize your code for really only the bigger shops could swing a stable widely supported engine... And when they did make an engine, it looked like every other engine out there... If someone did try something new looking, chances are no publisher would touch it, and if it was untextured most players wouldn't either.
Say what you want, doesn't change reality. You're focusing on HW accel BS, when in reality anything untextured after Doom did suffer. You might not realize we did, in fact, lose a lot in gameplay over textures. And it WAS a graphics race, starting in the software rasterizer era, but those who had the money to come to market first carried it on into the 3D graphics card era. And Carmack did have a big part to play in the monotonous landscape of games for decades, beginning with Doom (though it wasn't the first shooter, Catacombs, Hovertank, Wolf3D, etc, it was the one that spurned the textured lust).
To this day, publishers largely won't talk to you unless you've licensed ID or Unreal, or some other engine. A few indie games with custom engines are starting to turn their heads now though -- See: infini/Minecraft, etc. Look up stuff like Atomontage [youtube.com] (running on a meager laptop, primarily in software calculations / immediate mode), and wonder why that tech's not in any games yet, at least for world geometry -- Consoles don't have the RAM, and so established engines don't do it.
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Hardware fixed function pipeline discrete graphics made everything look pretty much the same for a good long time. Only recently with heterogeneous computing will we be getting back much of the graphical & physics freedom we had with software rasterization.
The real victim of the 3D card was space combat. The last generation of software rendered space games was all shiny and vacuumy thanks to phong shading. It all went plasticky when the hardware forced gourad on us.
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.
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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: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).
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.
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To me the revolutionary thing about Myst was that the artwork looked like Art. It was beautiful. Haunting. Not quite immersive, but gee 20 years ago, what would you expect? The music wasn't bad either.
Re:What? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yep; the graphics were pretty but single solution set-piece puzzles are not all that fun. Myst was a tedious exercise in figuring out exactly in what order to do what the designers wanted you to do.
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This. I like puzzle games, and remember playing Myst shortly after it came out - And I really just didn't find it all that entertaining, aside from the novelty of the level of eye candy. And eye candy wears off way too quickly to base a whole game, much less a whole genre, on it.
And today? Hell, we have casual "nuisance" puzzles in games consisting of columns of rippling water that more-or-les
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.