Man, October of 1997 was an amazing month to be a gamer. I had recently purchased a brand new Pentium 166 MHz PC (yeah, back then PCs were rated by clock speed, and “Pentium 166 MHz” was basically the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti of computers). And I was pretty damn proud of my 32 MB of RAM. Enough bragging. Point is, I thought I was ready for whatever games could throw at me. I strutted into my local Babbages in the mall and right there on the shelf waiting for me was Riven. Five glorious CD-ROMs encased in one of those huge, thick jewel boxes. The kind of packaging that makes you feel like you are actually buying something important rather than just another video game.
See, I was a Myst fanatic. Obsessed. I think I played through Myst at least half a dozen times, bought those awful novels Miller wrote (Rand, WTF?) and would spend hours just exploring each of the “Ages” trying to take it all in. So when Cyan announced they were working on a sequel to Myst I was first in line. Popped my quarters in and waited. Had my money saved, circled the release date on my calendar, bought the game as soon as it was out, etc. But when I picked up my five CD-ROM copy of Riven and held it in my hands, I knew I was in way over my head.
Installing the damn thing was half the adventure. Seriously, with five CDs you were literally chained to your computer for nearly an hour swapping disks and watching that stupid progress bar slowly creep across your screen. Half way through installing mine my buddy Jake called me — we had both bought it the same day and were geeking out like fools over it — and we spent about 20 minutes talking back and forth about how far we had gotten with installments as if we were competing against each other. “Disk 4,” Jake would say proudly. I was still on disk 3 and began to grow worried I wouldn’t have enough room on my hard drive, so I ended up deleting Wing Commander III and a slew of other games I no longer cared about to clear up some space. I have never regretted deleting a game more in my life.
After Riven installed and I watched the opening cinematic of Atrus giving me the linking book and explaining his father Gehn is trapped on Riven, I got that same feeling I got when I popped in Myst back in 1993. You know the feeling. That you were about to experience something special.
And then the linking effect happened – that warping visual and audio distortion that every Myst player knows and loves – and suddenly I was trapped in a strange metal cage on another planet.
No tutorials, no hints. Not even a “Press F1 for instructions” legend anywhere. Nothing. Into the unknown you were thrown with zero guidance. This game wasn’t going to hold your hand. 1997 gaming at its finest.
Holy crap did the game blow me away visually. Myst was groundbreaking for its time, no doubt, but Riven was something else entirely. The first time I escaped that cage and saw the ocean sprawling out before me with those tiny islands poking through the mist I said “Holy Crap!” out loud. My girlfriend thought my computer was broken. Nah…it just exploded my mind with its pre-rendered goodness that actually looked more realistic than most games out there.
And don’t even get me started on the detail. Every single screen in Riven was composed as if someone had spent days lighting it, framing it, and finessing all the tiny details to make it look so real. How the water rippled, how light refracted off the trees, how worn down metal and stone looked. Video games had never looked like that before. No where close. It wasn’t simply better graphics than most games, it felt like you were exploring a living photograph.
Getting lost became part of the fun, but also legitimately terrifying. Not scary scary, but “what the hell am I doing” scary. Like, I was so unsure of what to do that I was legitimately afraid I was going to mess something up permanently. It felt so real that I believed pressing the wrong button would make the world explode or something. This was not just a game with a visually pleasing backdrop to admire as you solve puzzles. This world had consistent rules and everything felt like it had purpose.
Those damn D’ni numbers. I will forever hate you D’ni numbering system. Random symbols littered everywhere (carved into walls, engraved on machines, etc.) and I KNEW they were important to decipher. Puzzle pieces that would help me understand this world. I filled half a notebook trying to decode what each symbol meant before I finally understood it – base 25. No joke guys. When I finally understood how all those dots and lines translated to numbers, I felt like an archaeologist who just deciphered an ancient civilization’s numbering system. Charlie Francis, eat your heart out.
The jungle island village was where Riven started to open up its secrets to me. See, this wasn’t some game where the puzzles merely acted as window dressing to some kind of story. No this was history being told to me THROUGH puzzles and visuals. Empty homes with carefully placed clues hinting at what happened to their inhabitants. Architectural design principles that told me about an entire aesthetic and culture. And don’t even get me started on those unsettling gold mask Wahrk statues that lead me to believe there was some sort of religious ceremony going on that I was far too inept to understand.
I spent hours just wandering the jungle village wandering around NOT trying to solve puzzles but just soaking it all in. My girlfriend would walk into my room to find me sitting there staring at my computer screen blankly, not even playing…just staring. “What are you doing?” “Um…I’m trying to figure out what happened to these people.” My girlfriend thought I had lost my mind. Half-jokingly she may have been right.
Those books. Whoever thought of those books were freaking geniuses. The way that metal clasp clicked open when you grabbed them, the pages literally animating as they spun that trippy spinning pattern…every detail felt like I was actually interacting with ancient relics from another world. When I discovered my first of Gehn’s crappy knockoffs I instantly knew something was wrong with it simply by how it looked. Game devs these days could learn a thing or two about storytelling purely through visuals from just that aspect of Riven.
Getting stuck was part of the adventure. In 1997 there was no GameFAQs, no Youtube walkthroughs, and damn sure no Google. When you got stuck there were only three options: keep trying until you figured it out, call up Jake and see if he made it past whatever puzzle was stumping you, or suck it up and buy the $15 strategy guide. Oh how I became stubborn over minor puzzles. Too stubborn.
I literally spent an entire weekend trying to figure out the Wahrk Gallows and how it connected to…the submarine system WHAT?! My girlfriend walked into my room at like 2 AM to find stacks and stacks of notebook paper covered in scribbled drawings and me murmuring to myself about “rotating domes” and “Wahrk Calls.” She was seriously worried about me. She should have been.
That Marble Puzzle. You knew it was coming. If you’ve played Riven you understand the trauma I’m about to describe. If you haven’t played Riven please just stop reading this article and go buy it immediately. Ok now that we got that out of the way…I fucking hated that puzzle. Seriously, staring at those colored balls going in and out of those stupid bottles trying to recreate some pattern I glimpsed at hours before in a completely different section of the island. It took me THREE DAYS to complete that stupid puzzle. THREE DAYS THAT I WILL NEVER GET BACK. But when I solved it, man did it feel good. Like completing the hardest level of the toughest crossword puzzle.
Those submarine rides were straight up cinematic. Having water rise around you as you moved through underwater tunnels with schools of fish swimming past you on the outside view cameras was storytelling at it’s finest. Games these days are still trying to capture a “cinematic” feel and Riven did it in 1997. I even took it out and showed it to my dad who thinks video games are a total waste of time and he was blown away. “It’s like watching a movie!” He exclaimed. And coming from a guy who hates video games that is literally the highest praise I could have received.
It wasn’t just about the puzzles or the visuals though. What made Riven so great was how EVERYTHING was connected. Sure there were individual puzzles to solve, but you couldn’t simply solve one and move on to the next you had to know how everything worked. How the island was laid out, how the power was routed, understand the intricacies of the D’ni numbering system, and piece together obscure clues you may have come across hours before that may or may not make sense at the time. This was Gameodge yelling at you “This isn’t OPTIONAL reading!” gaming.
Gehn was the perfect antagonist because he was NEVER portrayed as purely evil. There were no maniacal laughs, no telling you how evil he is speeches. He was just a man who had been alone too long, truly believed he was God, and became insulated in his own delusions of grandeur. By the time you finally got to his office and had that encounter with him I had learned so much about him through exploration that was horror struck by what he had to say. Storytelling and character development that games still struggle with today.
The audio of Riven was top notch. For most of my playthrough I had my headphones on. Immersing myself not just in a visual adventure but an audio one as well. Each creak of the pipes, each humming of machines, each Wahrk Call was designed with care and attention to detail. Oh and another thing, about half the puzzles revolved around listening to what you heard and not just what you saw. Revolutionary back in 1997.
The ending of Riven felt satisfying in a way that very few games can make you feel. Locking away Gehn, deciding Catherine’s fate, it all felt weighty because I took the time to learn about the world, its history, and how everything worked. By the time I linked back to my cabin for that final time I felt like I was leaving HOME.
I’ve gone back and played Riven multiple times over the years. Hell I even went out and built a OLD WINDOWS 98 machine just to play it in all its glory a few years back. And it STILL holds up. Sure it doesn’t look as good as games these days graphics wise BUT the art direction and design Riven used to craft those environments far outshine 99% of games graphics today. Great art is timeless.
You can see Riven’s influence in gaming today. Environmental Storytelling. Puzzle design that REQUIRE you to stop and actually observe your surroundings in order to solve. Games that trust you the player enough to explore and learn about the world WITHOUT holding your hand. The Witness, Outer Wilds, heck even portions of BioShock and Portal learned something from what Cyan unleashed upon gamers way back in ’97.
For years now I’ve heard about a remake of Riven. Part of me would love to see those islands in glorified rendered 3D, but another part of me is afraid we may lose that inherent feel the original Riven gave you. Each screen, those pre-rendered jewels of artwork, were framed as if someone took a photograph of it. Obsessive attention to detail was poured into every screen. Do you really think we can replicate that kind of detail with real-time rendering? I have my doubts.
What I remember most from Riven wasn’t any one puzzle or visual setting. What I remember most was how it felt to play it. Those dozen plus hours I spent in October of 1997 camped out in my room with my plethora of notebooks filled with puzzles and diagrams was no longer in Kansas. I WAS AN EXPLORER stranded on this alien planet and my only task was to figure out how the hell I could survive using logic and my wits.
When folks ask me why I still care about games as an adult. When folks tell me games will never reach some magical level of “Art”. I shove a copy of Riven in their face. Five CDs worth of proof that games can be just as thought provoking and wonderful as any other art medium. And to this day, 25 years later, I still have yet to play anything even remotely like it.
Marcus is a retired software engineer from Seattle who spent his career debugging games before the industry transformed beyond recognition. He writes with technical precision about the engineering elegance behind classics, from Z80 assembly language to Mode 7 scaling tricks, treating code like archaeological artifacts worthy of study. His articles are deep dives into why certain games pushed their hardware to breaking points, paired with the dry humor of someone who’s actually shipped titles and understands the impossible constraints developers faced. For readers interested in the “how” behind their favorite games, Marcus is essential reading.
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