Welcome once again to Tea and History.
I’m what you might call a casual gamer, someone who doesn’t often play games and who, as a result, often plays games on easy to ‘please don’t kill me’. While many of my generation who grew up during the first home console generation often speak of original games like Mario and Zelda, I was mostly a PC Gamer.
Which means I had a PC and when I wasn’t doing homework on it, I was playing MYST.
So I am even more of a casual gamer then you original thought.
MYST was one game that, until the Sims came out, was often bought for PCs and Macs and for the person who didn’t want to deal with shooting things or having twenty buttons to press. It was point and click, but required a lot of notes or the walkthrough to get by. Still, it was a fun game to play and I played the HELL out of it, so much so that I finally figured out the shortest way to end the game before going off adventuring on my own.
MYST itself was created by Robyn and Rand Miller and developed by Cyan. It put the player, called “the Stranger” instead of “add your name here”, in the position of finding a book and landing on an island to figure out what happened and where everyone went. There were three or four possible endings and afterwards, you could continue to explore the various places you’d visited. It was a good way to waste a few hours and often held a great deal of information and hints for the player to find.
At one point, realMYST was released, with the world instead having realistic features and the point-and-click replaced with movement before you clicked. I didn’t play it when it came out (I didn’t have the allowance for it) but it’s on Steam now, so if you want some nostalgia or haven’t tried it, I suggest it. The game was one of the many that helped show what PC gaming could do as well as having some influence to the games that require puzzles now that are PC-only (or, if you got that Sherlock Holmes game on Xbox, that one). The hints and information needed to get to areas or to figure out how to return are all there and the worlds are beautifully rendered and created, now with ‘days’ passing in the areas and water not just being a water-texture.
The world-building itself is interesting and, if you’re a fan or just want another push for more world-building, I suggest playing the game through.
Riven, the sequel, was by and large more successful and full of richer, beautiful environments. It also required, at the time, five CDs to play through, so powerful but fun. Explaining the plot would spoil some of Myst, and I’d rather not, but the basics are you are put on another island and must find someone missing from the last game.
Riven was full of puzzles and, if you want to play things the whole way through to find everything you need, you often have to go through EVERY SINGLE PLACE and hope you didn’t miss anything. Usually you don’t, but that doesn’t mean you won’t. Backstory is heavy in this story, but it’s beautiful and still fun to play…I’m almost done playing it through again (thank you, Steam, for starting me up on my childhood obsession again).
Riven sadly ended the run with Cyan studios, as later games in the Myst series were given over to Ubisoft and only Rand Miller really stayed with the projects. However, playing just both games would be enough, and the games themselves have more then a few fans.
I know I said I’d cite for some of my article, but this is mostly a trip down nostalgia lane for me. Finding Myst and Riven on Steam was a happy point for me because I grew up playing those games and loved them, even today and without my walkthroughs (I’ve grown so much!). My parents knew of the various gaming platforms, and the only one we had was a computer and our imaginations – I didn’t get anything vaguely Nintendo until I had my own disposable income, and currently the only console I own is a PS3, and only because I can play DVDs and Blu-ray on it, which is what I usually play instead of the FIVE titles I have. Most of my gaming and some of my favorite games are on PC or PS3, and honestly I’m glad about that. Myst and Riven were fun to play because you could explore so much of them and simply figure things out, and even playing through once was wonderful as you explored and looked around the beautiful worlds that had been created.
Between Myst and Riven came out three books known as the “Myst Reader”. The Book of Atrus, The Book of Ti’ana were prequels to the Myst series, telling the story of Atrus and his grandmother, respectively, as well as about the odd race that Atrus belonged to, the D’ni. The final title, The Book of D’ni, took place after the events in Riven and is far more action-oriented to a degree, but still keeps with the ideas of exploration, as well as continuing Atrus’ story. All three are available as one big book and, if you’re a fan of the game, I suggest reading them.
Well, the trip down memory lane is done, so I’m going to go finish up the game and hopefully see you back for more tea and history.
Tea 'n History 