Myst

Background[edit]

In the late 1980s, brothers Rand and Robyn Miller were living apart in the United States. Robyn was taking a year off from university in Washington state, writing and trying to establish residency, while Rand worked in Texas as a computer programmer for a bank.^[5] Rand approached his brother with the idea of making an interactive storybook using HyperCard.^[7] The brothers were not big video game players themselves, although they were familiar with Dungeons & Dragons, and had played Zork.^[8] In his parents' basement—Robyn did not own a computer himself—Robyn began drawing pictures and creating a nonlinear story that would eventually become their first game, The Manhole.^[7] The Manhole and the games that followed—Cosmic Osmo and Spelunx—were specifically aimed at children and shared the same aesthetics: black-and-white graphics, point-and-click gameplay, a first-person point of view, and explorable worlds.^[5][7] Robyn recalled that the games were more about exploration than narrative: "In the projects we did for children, we didn't really tell stories ... They were just these worlds that you would explore."^[5]


Around 1990,^[9] the brothers decided to create a game that would appeal to adults. Among their goals were believable characters, a non-linear story, and for the player as protagonist to make ethical choices. The Millers pitched the game to Activision under the title The Gray Summons; Robyn recalled that Activision told them to stick to children's games.^[9] At the time of the rejection, they were not doing well financially—"we were eating rice and beans and government cheese and that [was] our diet."^[10] Facing the end of their game-producing career, Japanese developer Sunsoft approached the Millers to create an adult-oriented game. Like with The Gray Summons, the Millers wanted their game to have a non-linear story with believable characters and an ethical choice. They also wanted to produce a game with far more impressive graphics than their previous efforts, at one point considering an entirely hand-drawn game. They also knew their story would be a mystery.^[10][11]


Development of Myst began in 1991.^[5] The game's creative team consisted of brothers Rand and Robyn, with help from sound designer Chris Brandkamp, 3D artist and animator Chuck Carter, Richard Watson, Bonnie McDowall, and Ryan Miller, who together made up Cyan, Inc. Myst was the largest and most time-consuming collaboration Cyan had attempted at that point.^[12] Cyan took inspiration from games like Zork, Star Wars' mythic universe, portals to other worlds like in C. S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia, and the mysterious islands of old literature like the works of Jules Verne.^[8] The game's name, as well as the overall solitary and mysterious atmosphere of the island, was inspired by the book The Mysterious Island by Verne.^[3]


Sunsoft was not interested in the PC market and was focused on the video game console market instead. At the time, consoles had no hard drives and small memory buffers, meaning the game had to be designed around these technical constraints. To solve this issue, they compartmentalized parts of the game's environments into the different Ages.^[13] The Millers decided that most people did not like puzzles. Thus, a good puzzle would feel familiar and part of the world—not like a puzzle, but something for players to figure out like a circuit breaker in their house, using observation and common sense.^[14] Cyan did not have fans to please, and did not know exactly who the game would appeal to; Robyn felt like they did not have to second-guess their choices and could "explore the world as we were designing" and build a game for themselves.^[15] Rand stated that they strived to design the puzzles in Myst and their subsequent games by trying to balance three aspects: the puzzles themselves, the environment, and the story.^[16] They wanted to make sure that clues to the solutions to puzzles were apparent and presented to the player in a manner for these connections to be made: "once the player finds the solution, if they blame us, then we haven't done a good job. But if they blame themselves, then we have."^[16]


The Millers prepared a seven-page game proposal for Sunsoft from their ideas, mostly consisting of maps of the islands they had envisioned.^[11] Cyan proposed Myst to Sunsoft for $265,000—more than double what they thought it would cost to develop the game, but ultimately less than the game's final cost.^[17][a] Sunsoft had asked the brothers if their game would be as good as the upcoming The 7th Guest, another CD-ROM video game that had been shown in public preview demonstrations; the Millers assured them it would.^[11] After getting the go-ahead, Cyan playtested the entire game in a role-played Dungeons and Dragons form to identify any large issues before entering full production.^[20]