Myst is a graphic adventure computer game created by the brothers Robyn and Rand Miller. It was developed by Cyan, Inc and published and distributed by Broderbund. The Millers began working on Myst in 1991 and released it in 1993.
Myst has sold over 9 million copies. Its popularity led to:
| Table of contents |
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2 Gameplay 3 Ages 4 Books 5 External links |
Development
The game was created entirely on Apple Macintosh computers, especially Quadra models. The entire game was essentially a very large, color HyperCard stack, with each card consisting of a three-dimensionally rendered scene. The game was later ported to Microsoft Windows
The gameplay of Myst consists of a first-person journey through an interactive world. The player moves the character by clicking at the outside border of the game display and can interact with specific objects on some screens by clickinging or dragging them. Unlike some computer games, there are no enemies or threat of "dying" or a "game over" event. The only competition is the player vs. the puzzles presented in the game. To complete the game, the player must discover and follow clues to be transported via books to several Ages, each of which is a self-contained mini-world. Once traveling through the Selenitic, Stoneship, Mechanical, and Channelwood Ages, the player would return to the starting point of the game, Myst Island, with all the information necessary to complete the game. For those less patient, this information could be obtained from an outside source and the game objective could be completed in a matter of minutes.
Ages in the game include:
Gameplay
Warning: Spoilers follow.Ages
Some clues in the game lead the player to special books. They have a viewing window that shows a scene from an Age, a separate universe within the game. By touching the pages of one of these books, the player links to Age associated with that book. In Myst, the player always links to an island in the Age, because designing an entire universe is a very hard task for a software company like Cyan.
A race called the D'ni learned the Art, a way of writing books that describe and link to Ages. The former are called Descriptive Books, and the latter Linking Books. The D'ni had their own Age for a time, and then they travelled (why?) to an underground cavern in Earth. Myst shows only a single scene from this cavern near one of the endings. Uru, another game made by Cyan, features the D'ni cavern as a major setting. D'ni primarily use a base-5 number system. Most D'ni believe that they do not create the ages that Descriptive Books link to, rather that these books simply link to Ages created by the Creator. Gehn was a notable exception, and this might have caused his apparent belief in his superiority over the people in the Ages he believed he created. The Book of D'ni tells, a similar story: The Terahnee believe they are superior to everyone who does not know the Art. Atrus (with 1/4 D'ni heritage) wrote the Ages (except for D'ni) seen in Myst.