Review by: Jonathan Houghton
Published: December 1, 2000

Back in 1993, the PC entertainment industry was just beginning to grow in popularity. With the introduction of a new media-delivery system in the form of CD-ROMs, developers found that much larger titles could be produced at an equal cost to the older floppy diskettes. Since they had the capacity of holding literally 450 times the amount of information, developers used the programming tools they had to create vast game worlds. Many of them, however, turned their eyes to the fledgling art of FMV technology, creating many memorable titles like 7th Guest and Return to Zork. The original MYST is almost in a category of its own among its contemporaries, with unusually long gameplay and a unique storyline. It was the brainchild of two brothers: Rand and Robyn Miller who had a collective dream about magic books, betrayal, greed and a hauntingly beautiful island which was a gateway between worlds; a place that would become well-known to gamers across the world as MYST.

The Miller brothers were obviously quite pleased with the success of their game as it traveled across multiple platforms, branching out beyond just the Mac crowd onto IBM-compatibles everywhere. As the never-resting army that is time marched on, technology continued to advance at exponential rates until we were graced with the likes of fully 3D rendered polygons in products like Quake. At some point along this developing continuum, Rand and Robyn decided that they could finally make the game they wanted to in the first place. Back in 1993, the power simply didn’t exist to make a fully functional 3D world that could be explored at will by players. The designers were left with the option of creating still images, which would act as ‘hotspots’ where players would automatically walk to by clicking a mouse button when the cursor changed into an appropriate arrow. Instantly they had a best seller with the formula of dreamlike locations and stellar graphics. Fast forward to the 1998 era and computer advancements had made beautifully detailed real-time 3D worlds a real possibility. Finally MYST could become the game it was originally meant to be, and Cyan Interactive launched into the process of developing a new engine and recreating most of the original content. As a result, realMYST was born.

MYST possesses a very different kind of story, in that most offerings give you some type of backstory or plot being written with varying degrees of quality. MYST, on the other hand, just drops you off onto this deserted island with no real knowledge of how the island was created, where the people who built the fantastic structures disappeared to, or even what your objective is. Piecing together as much information as is made available, it becomes clear that Myst is a world of dreams, connected to other magical realms by way of special books. How these worlds came into being is never explained; all we know for certain is that a man called Atrus was one of the first people to cross the dimensional bridge and end up on the island of Myst. He created a series of books, each one of which could send the reader to the realm contained within. Somewhere along the line, Atrus disappeared with his family, leaving the island uninhabited. Your task is to explore the island and discover if at all possible what exactly went wrong on the puzzle laden shores; and hopefully decipher the workings of the magical books on the way.