Sept. 24, 1993: Beautiful ‘Myst’ Ushers In Era of CD-ROM Gaming

1993: Broderbund Software releases Myst, a game for the Macintosh computer that becomes a record-setting best-seller and the killer app that sparks sales of CD-ROM drives.

Brothers Rand and Robyn Miller founded a software-development business called Cyan Worlds in 1987, and they started making history. The pair partnered in 1989 with game-publisher Activision to create a CD-ROM version of Cyan’s first game, The Manhole, which was the first entertainment product released in the fledgling format.

More CD-ROM games followed, including follow-ups from Cyan, but few consumers bought expensive CD drives for their home computers, because there were no truly compelling applications — that is, until Broderbund published Cyan’s Myst in 1993.

Myst‘s dreamlike world and simple gameplay appealed to what we would now call “casual gamers.” Its graphics were so polished and its world so entrancingly designed that it hooked a wide audience. Copies flew off the shelves. But perhaps more important, CD-ROM drives flew off shelves. To play Myst, you needed the hardware.

The underlying technology of the new game wasn’t that different from Manhole‘s — both were programmed using HyperCard, a free Mac application that gave amateur programmers a user-friendly, visually oriented creation tool.

What separated Myst from the pack was the game’s beautiful, “pre-rendered” 3-D world.

The mid-’90s were videogames’ puberty, a strange and awkward time spent trapped between child and adult. Computers were able to render 3-D worlds, but the videogame consoles in people’s homes couldn’t come close.

As a result, game designers often created 3-D worlds on their workstations, then took 2-D bitmap snapshots of the worlds and dropped them into their games as pre-rendered graphics. Nintendo would later use this technique to great effect in Donkey Kong Country for the Super Nintendo.

As its box art signified, Myst dropped the player into a remote, deserted island with little in the way of prelude. The player’s goal: Explore the island, find the fragments of story that explain the situation, and solve puzzles.

Writing about the game in the early days of Wired magazine, Jon Carroll described the appeal of Myst‘s atmosphere: “The game is remarkable for its sense of control and mood; it is internally consistent in a subtle and layered way. There are interlocking themes: sound, water, gears, energy. The interface is transparent and minimal; it works like a glove. There are no packs or bags or baskets; players carry almost nothing with them. They use what they find on the ground; mostly they just use their minds.”

A Windows edition of the game quickly followed the Mac version. The New York Times and Rolling Stone praised Myst to the heavens, asking if videogames had, at this moment, become Art.

Myst moved 6 million copies and quickly became the world’s best-selling computer game, a record it held until it was surpassed by The Sims in 2002.

Cyan has continually attempted to recapture Myst‘s spark with a number of sequels and expansions to the franchise. None has sold nearly as well as the first game, which has been remade for a variety of platforms including, most recently, Nintendo DS. Games-on-demand service GameTap used to offer a massively multiplayer online game called Myst Online that as of this writing is no longer available.

Myst was so popular and well-known during its heyday that it inspired the release of a parody version, starring actor John Goodman, that poked fun at the sometimes intense frustration that players felt when trying to solve the game’s often obtuse puzzles. It was called: Pyst.

Source: Various