Alright, let’s get one thing straight right out of the gate – I was a Sega kid growing up in the early 90s and treated my Sega Genesis like it was my own personal video gaming deity. Sonic was king and Streets of Rage had it’s nice rappin’ beat, but I spent most of my time shooting fools while my friends played Super Nintendo games. Sega did what Nintendon’t, and we held that mentality proudly. However, there’s always exceptions to every rule, and every once in a while a game comes along that’s just so ground-breaking and different that even I had to pause and take notice. For me, that game was Myst.
I didn’t get to play Myst on my own Genesis-attached-to-the-TV setup. My friend Marcus had an overpriced Macintosh computer hooked up in his bedroom (his mother was an architect and had access to all of the latest work computers). It was probably spring of ’94, and I was sitting at Marcus’ house griping about how Sega screwed up the Saturn launch when he says “Dude, you HAVE to see this game I got.” Marcus loads up Myst, and I’m sitting there confused. No Sega logo. No Blast Processing. No attitude. Just…this creepy island that wasn’t doing anything on it.
“What happened?” I asked. “Where’s all the bad guys at?” Marcus was clicking around at some books and doodads on the screen scowling thoughtfully at it. “There are no bad guys,” he said. “You just…solve it.” Up until this point I didn’t know you could play games where you didn’t have to defeat something or collect something or beat a level. How was I supposed to solve anything on an island devoid of life?
What drew me into Myst right away though were the atmospheric qualities. Listening to the waves crash against those wooden docks, listening to the humming of machines you couldn’t see, feeling like you had just discovered someone else’s forgotten dreamworld. It was truly unlike anything I had ever experienced. Sure, nothing was blowing up or going fast, but I couldn’t look away. It also didn’t hurt that Marcus had been stumped on the same puzzle for over a week, which should have alerted me to how difficult this game was but only made me more intrigued. How could a game that made you work this hard at puzzles capture someone’s attention for over a week with no gameplay rewards?
Fast forward two weeks and I’m at Babbages pleading with the cashier to hold my copy of Myst until I could scrape together enough money to purchase the game. $60 was a lot to ask of a fifteen year old kid in 1994. Especially when it was a PC game and I didn’t really consider myself a “PC gamer.” But from that moment I was hooked. We had just gotten our first family computer with a CD-ROM drive around that time (a Gateway 2000 my father purchased solely for “school related use” and Tax Software) and installing Myst felt like I was cheating on Sega and sleeping with something foreign.
That first night playing Myst by myself in our computer room was life-changing. At night when everyone else was asleep and the house was quiet Myst became this incredibly absorbing game. I was clicking through these glorious pre-rendered backgrounds, scribbling clues and notes down on random pieces of paper, and piecing together ancient symbolism and futuristic technology while my own brain try to connect the dots. Myst wasn’t holding your hand. There were no tutorials or tip guides. You literally had to Figurate™ things out yourself. I fell asleep at like 2 AM that first night with notebooks full of scribbled drawings.
Look, what brothers guessed ICED (later known as the Miller Brothers) didn’t invent with Myst was a new ideology of gaming itself. Other games tested your hand-eye-coordination and pattern recognition skills; Myst tested how well you paid attention to details and how intelligent you could problem-solve. Puzzles in Myst weren’t obstacles to get you from one cheesy loading screen to the next – they were there to teach you how the world operated. Why those rocket ship control stations worked the way they did. How the clock tower worked. What the fuck that subway system was supposed to do. Each puzzle was another piece of the larger puzzle that was Myst’s world.
I remember spending three days straight on that stupid rotation puzzle in the Mechanical Age — drawing out each angle of the gears and fortress position on notebook paper after notebook paper. When I finally solved it I jumped so high out of my seat I probably woke my parents up. My mom walked downstairs holding her robe open, looked at me with my eyes gleaming in excitement and simply sighed. “That Island Game AGAIN?” She never understood the appeal of wanting to torture myself like that, but she knew that look in my eyes when I solved a puzzle.
Graphically, Myst was leaps and bounds above any game I had ever played. Those pre-rendered 3-D backgrounds made everything on my Genesis look like shit in comparison. I spent years arguing to friends how superior the graphics of the Genesis were over SNES and here comes Myst changing the conversation. PC graphics were badass. No more pixel characters. Everything in Myst looked like a painting you could just step right into.
I was also mesmerized by how each Age felt unique. Channelwood gave off these natural, organic vibes with it’s wooden platforms and treehouses. Selenitic felt more industrialized and mechanical. Even each Age had a different feel to the puzzles. The Mechanical Age felt grand and glorious like solving those puzzles were meant to be there main form of entertainment. I was also sold on the audio design. I remember playing Myst with a set of headphones after a while to really pick-up on the subtle audio cues. I legit jumped out of my seat a few times when random ambient sounds popped out at me. The rustling leaves and branches of Channelwood, the low humming/building sounds of new technologies, even the way your footsteps sounded depending on where you walked – Myst sold you on exploring every square inch of its world.
Not everyone was enthralled with Myst’s pace. My friend Tony played Myst for about half an hour and proclaimed it “the most boring thing I’ve ever played.” He never understood the concept of willingly scratching your head at the same puzzle for hours on end when you could just play something like Gunstar Heroes and blow stuff up. Myst became this cult among my friends who fell in love with it. If you haven’t guessed it by now – Myst was my drug of choice.
There was something magical about those linking books. After studying that blinking arrow for what felt like days, you punched it and a portal would transport you to another dimension. That animation of yourself running into the book and coming out into another Age never lost it’s magic for me. The very first time I heard of this game I knew Gaming was going to head this direction. Myst wasn’t only showing off tech nobody had every seen before – it was showing you what gaming can BE. Slow-paced. Atmospheric. Brain-meltingly difficult. Fun as hell.
Also remember, this was at the peak of the pre-internet gaming era. If you got stuck on a puzzle in Myst, you couldn’t just Google it or look up a walkthrough on GameFAQs. You learned to accept the possibility that you MAY NEVER FIGURE IT OUT. You could either purchase a $20 hint book (and they were legit Hint Books – not like walkthrough guides today), FINALLY figure it out on your own…or know someone who actually beat the game (a rarity considering Myst was actually HARD). My friend Derek boasted that he beat Myst in a weekend – something we all knew was impossible due to the games vast size unless he LOOKED up the answers. Rumor had it that the average person took 50 hours to complete Myst.
AND those 50 hours were rewarding as hell. Myst didn’t babysit you through puzzles or hold your hand through simple moments. YOU had to Figurate™ things out. These days it almost feels insulting how some games feel like they do everything for you. Hell, Myst just dropped you on an island and said “Surprise!” That’s a philosophy many modern games could learn from. Everything is explained to you. Where to go is marked with an arrow. NPCs outright tell you what you need to do next.
Thanks to Myst, PC gaming took off. Myst became the best selling PC game of all time at the time with over six million copies sold when that was just unheard of for Computer Games. CD-ROM drives became much more popular since, well, everybody needed that tech to play Myst. It inspired a whole genre of walk-around-and-click-on-stuff first person adventures, though none of them ever really captured the magic that Myst had.
Myst expanded my horizons on what Video Games could be. Before Myst, games were about challenging your reflexes and getting better. Completing levels. Killing bosses. Improving your timing. After Myst, games could also be about immersion, storytelling, and challenging your brain. Playing Myst made me feel like an explorer discovering a world, rather than a gamer playing a game.
Over the years I’ve replayed Myst on remastered versions and upgraded ports. Both the realMyst version with free-roaming capabilities and the recently released VR version of Myst added nice bells and whistles to the gameplay, but neither of them quite clicked with me the way playing the actual game did. I think it had to do with how static everything was. Being limited to clicking from one spot to another made the island feel bigger than life. When you could run around freely, the mystery of exploring every inch of the island wasn’t there. There was something charming about being stuck in that first-person perspective and slowly guiding your avatar through each area.
Don’t get me wrong – those pre-rendered backgrounds still impress me to this day. They have a certain charm that very few realtime 3D worlds can live up to these days. Sometimes limitations can actually inspire creativity that takes games to the next level rather than having limitless processing power.
What fascinates me now looking back on Myst is how much it elevated videogames in popular culture. For a lot of casual non-gamers out there in the 90s, Myst was likely one of the first “serious” computer games they had ever heard of. “Games are too silly” people would say. “They don’t have any substance.” Myst proved them all wrong. There was no story about saving princesses or worlds from colorful monsters. You were piecing the puzzles OUT of the story. It was a game that appealed to nerds who enjoyed reading books, playing City Solver, and doing mentally challenging puzzles. Myst was such a hit that even my Grandma asked me to teach her how to use the computer just so she could play Myst. “It’s like one of those books you can jump into,” she said. My notoriously anti-video-game English teacher even went as far to endorse Myst to my class one day as “interactive literature.”
As you unravel the story of what happened to Atrus and his two sons you discover that there was MORE than one Myst. Myst was simply the book that transported you to the island, but inside Atrus had created tons of other Age’ that you could explore by using the linking books. Only, something had gone wrong. Atrus is nowhere to be found, his two sons are imprisoned inside books, and one son is blaming the other for killing their father. It’s not until hours into the game that you discover the truth behind what happened. Myst dumps you into the story and makes you UNRVEL it piece by piece.
Storytelling like this was unheard of at the time. Games would front your with their stories through cutscenes or manual instructions. Myst rewarded you for learning about the story. Each puzzle you completed taught you something new about what was going on. It made you feel smarter for playing Myst.
I actually have my original Myst CD laying around in a box somewhere. Along with my notebooks filled with scribbled codes and drawings I used to decipher each puzzle. Sometimes I think about framing them up and hanging them in my office as proof that videogame puzzles used to actually require you to solve puzzles rather than look up walkthroughs online or watch some guys play through it on YouTube. There was such purity in solving puzzles back then that I fear will never be replicated in this age of instant information.
I like to think that had I grew up in a household with PCs instead of consoles, I would have loved Sega just as much as Myst. The Miller Brothers took a giant risk creating a gaming experience that hadn’t been seen before and it paid off BIG. They are the same guys who thought Sega would be better off taking creative risks instead of playing it safe. Risks that ended up cutting both Sega and The Brothers short, but that’s a story for another day. Myst is what made Sega GEnesis great.
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.
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