This Week In Retro: MYST (Patreon)

September 24, 1993: Take a look, you're in a book

by Diamond Feit

I fell in love with video games at an early age and in some ways, it has afforded me certain privileges. My kids may have access to more games of higher quality than I ever could have imagined in my youth, but they've also grown up in an era where hardware and technological capabilities have crossed a plateau. Games released when my son turned five don't look that different than the ones he'll be able to enjoy on his 15th birthday.

Yet I've seen the aesthetics of video games evolve dramatically in my lifetime. The Famicom did not exist on my fifth birthday, but by the time I reached 15 the Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, and TurboGrafx-16 had all hit the market, with the latter two consoles even offering games in the format of the future, compact discs.

The arrival of CD-based video games tore through a boundary that had held back computer hardware and software since their inception, as the storage capacity of discs dwarfed that of diskettes or cartridges. Suddenly developers could utilize higher-resolution images, pre-recorded audio from actual instruments instead of samples, and even combine the two as full-motion video.

30 years ago, a revolutionary video game used its disc-driven resources to dazzle computer users across the country. It not only looked and sounded unlike anything else in the medium, it played unlike anything else too. Imagine the shock I, a one-time Atari 2600 user, experienced when I first got my hands on Myst, the dream-like first-person adventure game which debuted in September of 1993.

Folks often like to describe books as metaphorical portals to another world, but in Myst, this metaphor serves as meta-fact. After an opening cinema with a man and a book falling into a fissure, the player finds a single tome lying on the ground with MYST written on the cover. The game is entirely controlled via the mouse; clicking on the book opens it and brings it up to the screen where we see that its many pages lack any text. Instead, the book's only content is an animation of a secluded island, and clicking on the full-color vista transports us to the very same island we just saw.

Thus begins Myst proper, dropping the player into a strange environment and letting them find their way forward. The island contains many secrets hidden behind a series of puzzles which the player is free to discover and tackle in nearly any order. Some puzzles grant the player passage to further explore the island, while others unlock new books that lead players to other worlds entirely. The island exists as a hub, one the player consistently returns to after each journey.

While the island features ample signs of human activity such as man-made structures, electrical generators, and objets d'art, it is conspicuously bereft of any people, living or dead. A thorough inspection of a small library turns up two unusual books, one red, one blue. Opening either of these books reveals that they each contain a man; not a recording, but a living being, his words and image distorted. Both men plead for help, asking the player to retrieve color-coded pages to repair their book so that they might escape.

As the player solves more puzzles and recovers these missing red and blue pages, it becomes clear that the two men are brothers telling contrarian tales of what happened to them and the island. Each man claims his brother is dangerous and that they betrayed their family, captured their father and brother in books, and tore out the pages to trap them inside. The player must decide which brother can be trusted and which deserves to remain in his paper prison.

The magic touch that makes Myst so memorable is its willingness to let players roam the island without any restrictions. A lesser game would have had the man from the opening cutscene serve as a constant narrator or worse, a guide who attempts to explain the island, the books, or the conflict that has people locked within those books. Instead, players get to uncover all of Myst's backstory on their own terms and at their own pace, free of a cumbersome timer, inventory management, or the threat of death. In an era when violence in mainstream video games rose to never-before-seen levels, Myst contains no enemies or hazards whatsoever.

The unique look of Myst also deserves credit for wowing players like me who associated games with pixel art. Everything the player sees on-screen was rendered in 3D using then-cutting-edge computer graphics, including the animations that introduce each new environment. However, even with the increased storage of a compact disc, navigating a 3D space in real-time would have taxed any consumer-grade hardware to an unreasonable degree. Instead, the game's graphics were stored as individual frames which the player views one at a time, a trick Capcom would use years later for the Resident Evil games on the Sony PlayStation.

The illusion worked on me; when I first laid eyes on Myst I couldn't believe what I saw. I played most of my games at home on 16-bit consoles in 1993, so I was completely unprepared for the contrast between cartoon-like sprites and "realistic" three-dimensional landscapes. Adding to the surreal nature of Myst was its inaccessibility. I could only play it when visiting tech-savvy friends, since I would not own a computer with a CD-drive until the late 90s. Only after Myst's success resulted in console ports did I finally get a copy for myself to enjoy.

Myst revolutionized the adventure game genre and our perception of what a video game could look or sound like. It became a phenomenon, one only overshadowed by the arrival of a bolder, louder PC game at year's end. While the medium would not become overrun with Myst-clones, its popularity did spark a number of imitators and even a few detractors who responded with Myst-parodies. How many video games in the 21st century reach a level of infamy such that other developers react with playable satirical takes?

Advancing technology has rendered the original's slideshow approach antiquated, but Myst's lasting fandom has given developers cause to remake the game in modern engines. Whether you have nostalgia for Myst or you want to play it for the first time, at this point you can actually look and roam around the island with full control over your movement and viewpoint. If you own a VR headset, you can even beam the world of Myst directly into your eyeballs for extreme first-person puzzle-solving.

The sheer number of games being made today means there may never be another Myst, for I struggle to imagine how any release at this point might offer previously-unseen visuals or innovative interactivity, let alone both at the same time. Yet you can see the legacy of Myst in so-called walking simulators, games that let players explore and enjoy the narrative at their leisure. Modern audiences have grown accustomed to graphics and sound far beyond what Myst could offer three decades ago, but if anything the demand for low-stakes puzzles in welcoming environments has only increased over time. In other words, we don't need another Myst, because Steam and Itch.io are stocked to the rafters with games that owe their existence to Myst.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts about video games, films, and dessert.