The first computer game that I remember playing was called Cosmic Osmo. It was a black-and-white exploration game with no objectives. You traveled around in a space ship to one of I believe four worlds, and could meet funny characters with bulbous bodies and very simplistic animations. It was goofy and fun, and perfect for a small child like I was (I probably played it first when I was 3, so this would be 1989 or so).
Later, we got a new version of it called Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel (the last "world" of the original game was a giant spacebound fish, though of course you could visit them in any order.) This added another four worlds (again, if I remember correctly,) but in addition, the game advertised the next project by the creators of Cosmic Osmo, a little game called Myst.
If you are too young to remember when Myst game out, you might not realize how huge a deal it was. No other game looked remotely like it. It was the first game (or at least the first popular one) to have computer-generated 3D graphics that had rendered textures (as opposed to flat colors), making it look more like a real world you could inhabit than anything that had ever come before.
The game came out when I was 7, and it was a phenomenon. Computer and video games had mostly been considered something for children, but Myst, with its tricky puzzles and beautiful but empty world attracted a wide audience of adults.
Now, Cyan Worlds (which had been just Cyan at the time of Myst's initial release) has come out with an update of it. This is not the first update - far from it. As computer games have grown far more sophisticated, Myst's initial selling points don't seem so revolutionary. But it's a true classic of a game. The latest release is designed to allow you to play the game in VR (though you can, like I have been, play it on a normal screen as well.)
My sister works in VR, and despite the fact that people have been talking about VR for longer than Myst has been around, it seems like it's finally starting to get rolling as a games medium. But with the exception of Half-Life: Alyx, we haven't really seen the AAA video game industry jump onto this new medium.
What I find interesting is that I think the sort of games VR developers have focused on seem to be more akin to Myst than the action- (and, to be honest, testosterone-) fueled "mainstream" game industry. Myst seemed like an obvious thing to bring to VR (though given how many rereleases it's gotten in the decade since its release, I'll be shocked if we don't get or already have a Skyrim VR port.)
Myst was hugely foundational to my fantasy aesthetic - it's one of the main sources I could cite for my interest in non-medieval fantasy, the surreal cross-section of a kind of 19th century sci-fi with magic sticking with me.
The game has a puzzle randomizer, which changes certain values and such in the game so we can't just do the whole thing from memory, but I've got to be honest, I've blown through it without looking up any guides. The only times I've gotten "stuck" have been forgetting that you could search the drawers in Achenar's room for his blue page in the Stoneship Age and getting a bit turned around in the Channelwood Age (I mistook the elevator to the Myst book for one I had already used.) These puzzles are basically hardwired into my brain, so in 2 and a half hours of game time, I've already cleared through the Stoneship, Mechanical, and Channelwood ages.
The most notable difference playing now is that you have freedom of movement. Originally, you would warp from one tableau to another to move around the islands of the game, whereas now you have what is clearly a VR-style movement (you can go forward and backward or sidestep with keys and you aim where you're looking with your mouse, which presumably is just turning around and looking in VR).
I have noticed that some of the puzzle "consoles" have been changed, though that could have happened in other releases over the last 28 years. For example, the three pump buttons in the Stoneship Age have been replaced with this funny sliding lever and a single button to activate it. And Atrus has apparently upgraded the cabin in the "woods" on the main island to have an electric starter instead of requiring you to light a match.
The biggest change, which I didn't even realize until I was in the Channelwood Age, was that you can actually carry both Sirrus' red page and Achenar's blue page at the same time, meaning that you don't have to navigate back to the Myst linking book twice (glad I realized that before I did the Selenitic Age - that maze is a big one.)
Of course, with foreknowledge and also just the benefits of 30 years of game development, the game is sort of shockingly small. It's still gorgeous, though this release does not have the cutting-edge graphics the original had for its era. Also, they've replaced the blue-screen footage of Rand Miller playing Atrus and his brutish son Achenar and Robyn Miller (who also wrote the music) playing the conniving other son Sirrus. These have been replaced with CGI animated characters instead, which... I'll be honest, I always kind of liked the blue-screen live action stuff. Their performances were perfectly good for the characters (I believe, though I could be wrong, that the audio is preserved at least.)
The detail of the world is far greater now - the smooth polygons of the rock spire from which the big tower (the one where you find your initial hints to get to each age) rises are now jagged and treacherous-looking, and the hexagonal basalt columns that make up the area where you arrive in the Mechanical age looks a lot clearer. And there are birds and frogs and such that give the areas a bit of life.
Of course, another big change is that I'm five times older than I was when I first played this. The journals about the various ages found in the library, some of which carry necessary clues to reach them, I now find a lot more interesting, as they're the clearest area where the story is actually illustrated. I feel like you could do a whole exploration of the theme of colonialism - Atrus sets out to simply explore and meet new people, but his sons turn the whole exercise into domination and exploitation, and, given how empty these worlds are, likely also genocide. In Riven, the sequel, we find a world in which Atrus' father has come to dominate a terrified populace that views him as a god - it's implied that there are a ton of people in Riven, but that they are actively hiding from you for fear of either you or Gehn's retribution, or both.
Way, way back (probably when I was 8 or 9,) I bought one of the three books that the Miller brothers wrote about their world, this one being The Book of Atrus. I never actually read it, but it's sitting on my bookshelf. I'm given to understand that it's actually a lot better than most tie-in novels, and the fact that Myst (at least at that time) really was a project by a pair of brothers (and a few other people, of course) makes me think this is more about exploring the ideas and themes of it than generating excitement for the brand.
Anyway, after spending a couple weeks back in my childhood home with my dad, this is another fun nostalgia trip to go on.
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