Look, I’ll give it to you straight – I was always Team Sega in the early 90s and my Genesis was my baby, home to Sonic and Streets of Rage. While my friends were playing Super Nintendo, I was basking in the glory of Sega, doing what Nintendon’t. However, sometimes a game will come along and be so revolutionary and different that even a die-hard console fan like me has to take notice. That game was Myst, and it totally flipped my world upside-down as far as what video games can be.
My first time experiencing Myst wasn’t even at my house. My buddy Marcus had this super-fancy Macintosh rig set up in his bedroom — his mom is an architect and had all the latest computers for work. I’m guessing it was sometime in the spring of ’94, and I was over at Marcus’s house complaining about how bad Sega handled the launch of the Saturn, when Marcus says “Man, you gotta see this crazy game I have.” Marcus boots up Myst and I’m instantly confused. Where’s the Sega logo? Blast Processing? Attitude? Nothing. Just this eerie-looking island that isn’t doing anything on it.
“Where are all the enemies?” I ask, completely stumped. Marcus is clicking around on some books and contraptions on the screen and frowning at it like he’s working through a math problem. “There aren’t any enemies,” he says. “You just… figure it out.” I’ve never heard of a game that didn’t require you to defeat something or collect something or beat a level. How do you figure out anything on an empty island?
However, something about the atmosphere of Myst immediately grabbed me. The sound of the waves crashing against those wooden docks, the strange humming of machines you couldn’t see, the feeling that you’d stumbled upon someone else’s abandoned dreamworld — it was nothing I’d ever seen before. Although nothing was blowing up or going fast, I couldn’t tear my eyes away. Marcus had been stuck on the same puzzle for over a week, which should have been a huge warning sign, but instead it only made me more curious. What kind of game could keep someone engaged for that long without giving them any type of reward?
About two weeks later, I’m at Babbages begging the clerk to hold a copy of Myst for me until I could scrounge up enough cash to buy it. $60 is a lot of money for a 15-year old in 1994, especially for a PC game when I didn’t really identify as a PC gamer. But I was obsessed. We recently got our first family computer with a CD-ROM drive — a Gateway 2000 purchased by my dad specifically for educational purposes and tax software. Installing Myst felt like crossing the line and cheating on my Sega loyalty for something entirely foreign.
That first night of playing it alone in our computer room totally changed everything. With everyone else asleep and the house was quiet, Myst became a very immersive experience. I’m clicking through these amazing pre-rendered backgrounds, writing down clues and notes on scraps of paper, and trying to make sense of the symbology and mechanisms that seemed both ancient and futuristic. The game didn’t provide any explanation — no tutorials, no helpful hints, just raw discovery. By 2 AM, I had filled notebooks full of crude drawings and I was totally hooked.
So, what the Miller brothers created with Myst wasn’t just a game — it was a brand-new philosophy on what interactive entertainment could be. Instead of testing your reaction speed or recognising patterns like most games, Myst challenged you to think hard and observe carefully. Those puzzles weren’t just barriers to clear; they were windows into how the mysterious world worked. The rocket ship control systems, the clock tower mechanisms, that confounded subway system — each one told you something about the people who designed and built them.
I remember spending three consecutive nights on the Mechanical Age’s rotation puzzle — filling notebook pages with drawings of gear positions and fortress alignments. When I finally solved it, I literally shouted loudly enough to wake my parents up. My mom came downstairs in her bathrobe, saw my face alight with triumph, and just shook her head. “That Island Game Again?” she sighed. She never understood why I would intentionally subject myself to this type of mental torment, but she recognised that look of accomplishment.
The technical achievement was stunning too. Those pre-rendered 3-D environments made everything else look archaic in comparison. I had spent years defending the Genesis’s graphics superiority over the SNES crowd, but Myst made graphics debates seem quaint. This was photorealistic graphics at a time when most PC games still resembled cartoons. Each and every screen was like a painting of detail you could step into, which made exploring feel like walking through an interactive art gallery.
What really caught me was how unique each Age felt. Channelwood, with its natural, organic wooden pathways and treehouses, Selenitic with its cold, industrialized technology, the grandiose mechanical complexity of the Mechanical Age — each one had its own distinct personality and logic. The sound design was also incredible. I started playing with headphones to try and pick-up on the subtlest of audio cues, and there were moments when ambient noises would scare the crap out of me. The soft creaking of wood in Channelwood, the ominous hums and whirs of machinery, the way your footsteps sounded differently in each area — it all contributed to a feeling of presence in these areas.
Not everyone in my social circle was a fan of Myst’s more contemplative approach. My Genesis buddy Tony tried it for maybe 20 minutes before calling it “the most boring thing I’ve ever played.” He couldn’t wrap his head around the idea of deliberately struggling with the same puzzle for hours when you could simply play Gunstar Heroes and blow stuff up instead. But for the rest of us who were under Myst’s spell, Myst was an addiction that went above and beyond typical gaming.
Those linking books were pure magic — the portal between worlds opened by tapping a moving image on a page. That animation of jumping into the book and popping-out into a different Age never lost its awe-inspiring qualities. I remember thinking that this was the future of gaming, and in many ways I was right. Myst wasn’t just showing off new technology; it demonstrated that games could be contemplative, atmospheric, mentally demanding. They could entrust players to use their minds and reason instead of simply acting on instinct.
This was also the height of pre-internet gaming culture, and Myst was that much more remarkable. You couldn’t simply Google walkthrough videos or visit GameFAQs when you got stuck. You either figured it out yourself, bought a pricey hint book, or found someone who had actually completed it (which was rare since the game was actually hard). There was this kid at school named Derek who swore he completed Myst in one weekend, but we all knew he was bullshitting us because it was mathematically impossible unless he already knew all the answers. The average completion time for Myst was something ridiculous like 50 hours broken across weeks of frustration and infrequent breakthroughs.
What made those breakthroughs so rewarding was how legitimate they felt. Many modern games spoon-feed you through even moderately challenging segments, and over-explain everything for you. Myst simply dumped you onto the island and said “Figure it Out.” That philosophy seems almost radical today, considering every game has waypoints, objective markers, and NPCs telling you exactly what to do next.
Its impact on the industry was tremendous. Myst became the number one selling PC game of all time, with sales exceeding six million units when that number was unheard-of for a computer game. It fueled CD-ROM adoption, since suddenly everybody needed that tech to play this must-play title. It spawned an entire sub-genre of first-person puzzle-adventure games, although most of them failed to capture the essence of Myst.
Personally, Myst widened my perception of what types of experiences Interactive Media could create. Prior to Myst, games were mostly about developing your skills — beating levels, killing bosses, improving your timing. Following Myst, I realised they could also be about setting atmosphere, storytelling, and cognitive engagement. They could make you feel like an explorer discovering ancient secrets rather than just a player advancing through a series of developer-made experiences.
I’ve revisited Myst numerous times throughout the years in the form of remakes and enhanced versions. The realMyst version featuring free movement and the recent VR update both provided additional technical features, however, I still don’t believe they’ve recaptured the exact magic of that original experience. There was something about the static image format that added to the dreamlike quality. Having the ability to move freely around the island somehow diminished its sense of size and majesty. The original’s point-and-click method of movement created this odd disconnection from the world that helped add to the mystique.
Additionally, those original pre-rendered images are still incredibly impressive today. They possess a timeless quality that few real-time 3D environments can match. Sometimes limited technical capability can lead to creative resolutions that ultimately prove better than limitless processing power.
What strikes me most about Myst in retrospect is how much it raised gaming’s cultural stature. For many non-gaming enthusiasts in the 90s, Myst was one of the first computer games that they considered worthy of taking seriously. It wasn’t about cute cartoon characters or meaningless action — it was about discovery, observation, and figuring out mysteries. It appealed to individuals who enjoyed reading novels, solving crosswords, and engaging in deep challenges. Even my normally anti-gaming English teacher, Mrs. Patterson, recommended Myst to our class as “interactive literature.” That was a major endorsement from the academic community.
The story itself was fantastic in its simplicity. You’re transported to a mysterious island via a magical book, and you find out that Atrus, the creator of the various Ages, had built a number of self-contained worlds accessible through the linking books. Something has gone terribly wrong, however, because Atrus is missing, and his children are trapped in prison books. One son claims the other son committed a terrible crime, and vice versa. Myst doesn’t lay any of this out initially — you slowly figure out the larger mystery through a process similar to an archaeologist piecing together ancient historical information from scattered pieces.
That style of storytelling was revolutionary. Most games at the time introduced their narratives via opening cinematics or manual explanations. Myst made story discovery part of the gameplay. Every puzzle you solved revealed a new aspect of the larger mystery, making you feel like you were actually unearthing hidden truths rather than simply progressing through a series of predetermined plot elements.
I still have my original Myst CD somewhere in storage, along with my notebooks full of diagrams and symbols I used to solve the puzzles. Occasionally I think about displaying them as gaming memorabilia — as physical proof of a time when solving puzzles required you to actually solve them yourself, not follow online walkthroughs or watch YouTube tutorials. There was something pure about that experience of true discovery that is rapidly disappearing in today’s hyper-connected gaming world.
As someone who spent most of the 90s arguing for Sega’s creative risks and innovative approaches, I have a tremendous amount of respect for what the Miller Brothers accomplished with Myst. They took an enormous risk developing a product that was completely unlike anything else available in the market, and it paid off in ways that forever changed the entire gaming industry. That type of creative boldness is the same type of courage that made Sega so great in its heyday.
Samuel’s been gaming since the Atari 2600 and still thinks 16-bit was the golden age. Between accounting gigs and parenting teens, he keeps the CRTs humming in his Minneapolis basement, writing about cartridge quirks, console wars, and why pixel art never stopped being beautiful.
0 Comments