How Myst Almost Couldn't Run on CD-ROM | War Stories | Ars Technica

[Applause] you'd think that normal people would feel an immense amount of pressure over this we were way over budget way over time I should not have been sleeping at night there was so much on the line hi I'm Ranma ler the co-creator of mist we set out to make the real world of mist and ran smack into the real-world limitations of cd-rom I got into gaming when I was in junior high and I'm not young so this was a long time ago the games I got into on computers were not what people know today what really hooked me was a lunar lander game I remember it to this day there were no graphics to it this was a line of text on a CRT screen that said how high I was off off of the lunar surface it was just a number how fast I was doing it how much fuel I had left and then a question mark you put in how much fuel you want to burn you hit return and rinse repeat until you basically crash on the surface in junior high a college friend took me to the University of New Mexico computer center I saw that on the screen and it was magic this was magic to me and he said there are other games and you can make your own games this you write programs to do this it changed everything I wanted to do from that point on sian was probably formed in mid-80s that we used that very what we thought at the time would be a very open-ended name so we could get into anything we wanted my brother Robin and I had this idea of a blue sky and we liked that so we picked that as a name I wrote to my brother and said we should do this interactive book we should do a book that's amazing he was an artist a musician knew enough about computers to be dangerous and I knew enough about art music to be dangerous and it was a great team we started with the man hole he drew the first page of a book which was a manhole cover and a fire hydrant in the background and what happened was this really interesting transition for us and it was it was what shaped us into what we were he didn't turn the page we didn't after drawing the manhole cover in the fire hydrant we didn't care about was on the next page we cared about well what's under the under the manhole cover and what's what is that fire hydrant about it so the pictures that I got from him were the manhole cover slid aside and a vine growing up to somewhere and a picture closer to the fire hydrant with a little door and tiny little door on the bottom and these were just still images that he sent me that we linked together and we suddenly realized that we weren't we weren't doing it interactive book we were making a world it was one of the first entertainment cd-roms if not the first entertainment scene you saw him so cosmic Cosmo was how we evolved it was a very natural transition we have learned so much about our platform HyperCard in the mean time doing manhole and about what this world did well manhole and what it didn't do well cosmic Cosmo was a chance for us to push things a little further and it still is very close to both my brothers and my heart it was a tour de force of what I think at that point hypercard could do what computers could do everything was interactive and to this day I would be doing projects in hypercard if it was available it was so such an elegant amazing tool bed I don't think Apple understood even how to market that product at its core hypercard was just picture a stack of cards stack of a virtual stack of cards that you could put a button on any card an invisible button on any card if somebody clicked on that button it would go to another and you can draw a picture on a card draw a picture of say fire hydrant and put an invisible button on it when you click on it you go to a picture of a close-up of that fire hydrant that then evolved into what we do a link of still pictures there was a Japanese company who got in touch with us they had loved the manhole and they want to do something for an older audience they wanted to fund something for an older audience and we had this meeting with them where they said you know can you do something for an older audience and we were like oh hell yeah we can do something for an older audience he bet with a proposal that was like seven pages and the proposal for missed the seven pages if it was seven I don't remember it was basically top-down maps of every island with little notes on it that was we didn't know how you did it a game proposal we would just kind of did our thing up till then they said okay we'll give you I think we asked for $250,000 at the time and they said now this is gonna be good like 7th guest will it be better than 7th guest and if if you don't know 7 7th guest you should look it up there's one of the products that had wasn't done at the time but was being touted they were showing some previews for it as this media project on cd-rom and we weren't oh yeah yeah you bet and from there we just jumped in and started building it Myst was a very natural evolution from our earlier worlds as I've mentioned but it was also a leap because what we've learned doing our earlier worlds is that you could embed pieces of story in your game we didn't we didn't know that at all in the manhole [Music] but we realized we liked it as we moved forward and those pieces of story felt like they kept you honest they kept the world somehow realistic because everything in the real world has a story to it it's there for a reason we realized when we were ready to do something for an older audience that that was important we needed to have stories to things and there was no way to do this on floppy disk it wouldn't fit and part of the very appeal of this was that we had made a game that you don't die you don't level you don't start over and so the only way we were gonna give people the amount of time for their money for the game was just sheer brute force amount of real estate that had to be available for them to explore and cd-rom was our answer to that question if it worked very early then we got our hands on some 3d rendering software another one of those pivotal moments in where you realize the futures different from now on because I remember and I'm sure Robin has the same recollection of sitting down with that software putting a ball on the screen putting a table putting a light source it's all in wireframe very simple and clicking the render button and out comes something that generates shadows and reflections and the refraction through glass and oh oh this is different now we can do this we can render the images for Miss we don't have to hand her all these we realized that this would be in color this would be the first product we would do that would only play on color machines there would be no black and white option Robin's machine was it was a black-and-white Macintosh but it had been hacked with a clip it didn't have any expansion slot you take off the back and you you get this crazy board that was a clip that would clip onto the processor all the pins of the processor and give you a that was color that's how we started Myst with an early Mac se I think it was hacked color the problems we faced were really interesting and the largest of those was this crazy idea of CD cd-rom it was relatively new and what that meant is that most people had just basically something like called a single speed cd-rom it was streaming at 150 K per second which is nothing 150 K per second is all you could get off that single speed disc and we had to make the game work for that the streaming wasn't even the main problem the the seek time was the biggest people with lots of money had double speed drives or I fit I don't even think quad speed drives had been invented yet but it doesn't matter because we have to sell to the most basic people and it's not even a selfie we wanted people to experience this who had the basic multimedia computer not knowing for sure if this was even gonna work it was it was gonna be playable how long would it take on miss miss Thailand when you're on the dock and you clicked to move from one picture to the other and side note I worked at a bank for years before doing this and we had this psychological kind of play that I probably heard at some IBM conference that said you know two seconds is how tall you want people to wait before they get feedback from clicking something on the screen or from hitting a button on the screen and after two seconds they start to recognize that they're not getting something they start wonder if it's them or if it's the Machine and so you kind of want to keep it to that well we had no idea if we were gonna move how long was it gonna take it might have taken 10 seconds to move to the next image we just didn't know cd-rom burners were not readily available there were thousands of dollars for a cd-rom burner we didn't have it was our publisher bruited one that may have had one and we didn't even use it until we were well into the project those were interesting times with no testing whatsoever Robyn was generating images I mean this was how we had always worked it was just on steroids at this point he was at his house generating images feeding them to me and I was linking those together in HyperCard and these are all full-color images that Robin sending so he had a really powerful Mac with a lot of memory and a lot of hard drive space I had a really powerful Mac with a lot of memory and a lot of a lot of hard drive space and we were still working in mud it was incredibly slow especially for Robin rendering those images it was wonderful times when Apple would come out with a new machine and we thought we might be able to afford it because we could we could add that to our collection what would happen is Robin would stack up a lot of images to be rendered in other words he couldn't be rendering these as he's working he had to stack those up in a queue and at some point we added another computer if he got a new computer the old one to go to the side and be used as part of this rendering queue and maybe another one would be added to the rendering queue and then as soon as he stopped working or would go grab a bite at dinner or a cup of coffee you would immediately turn on rendering on his machine to add it to the other two that were rendering and you could have this distributed rendering with whatever machines were available to try and keep generating those images from from what he had queued up everything had to be rendering all the time in order to try to get this get this work done I hope living within constraints is probably it's like the name of the game for what we did and I don't think we looked at it that way it's time there were there were tons of constraints and those were just problems to be solved I'd love problem solving and I think that's part of what you have to do if you're gonna do games I mean if you're not a good problem solver you just go do something else so the two problems you got to find it on the cd-rom and you've got to get it off of the cd-rom as as quickly as possible so starting with the images I mean that's number one they were 8-bit images because most people's computers couldn't do more than what that means is that we could show 256 colors on the screen at a time so just the images alone had to be laid out on the spirals in close proximity we didn't want it seeking to some faraway spot so it's not like you just lay them and put them in the disc in alphabetic order every image in the game so we organized those by ages in close proximity we put our names of these things so that the the closeby images would be relatively close on the spiral we use two levels of compression for the images one was we used only 256 colors to do the images which made them smaller but we also used a compression technique as well to make them small so they would stream faster we got them down to 50k maybe each so that takes care of the image problem now we have a music problem and a let's just call it a sound problem we have music or sound effects that are playing in the background and they're streaming all the time so if for example I walk down into this generator tunnel and I need this weird eerie sound to play [Music] we could do the music in in several different ways but the easiest would be to just put the tracks of music somewhere on the cd-rom and let it go to those music tracks and just stream it on its own let the let the OS and the operating handle or quicktime handle streaming those things but can it get to those and seek back to the next picture and get to those and seek to the next picture without without chopping the sound off because there's a very real possibility that I load that sound I go to seek the next picture and depending on the chunk size of sound I can't get back to the sound fast enough for it to load it in to a buffer and play it without all of a sudden cutting off the the music having a blank space of sound and then finally finding the music getting back to that and streaming it again so we're trying to put the music pieces close enough where it doesn't have to go too far to get to them on top of that if I push a button I've got to have a control sound that mean and I open a door I want a squeaking sound and if I turn on a generator I want it a ramp-up sound or a slowdown sound or all those little one-shot sound effects as well that I need to happen quickly and and they need to be close on that cd-rom these are all things we had we had done meticulously to try and get our data rate very low but we would have had just shrink it more so we there was you know I guess experience is that one of those weird kind of things where you can't can't put your finger on exactly the calculation that where you think it's gonna work but because we've been doing it for five years or six years we just kind of had this feeling and luckily we were we were kind of right it's this weird process where we sent hard drives probably a hard drive down to Berta Bond and they burned the first CD of Myst so we got the gold master we put it in our CD drives we click play and we all cross our fingers and and give it a try and it comes up and for the most part it's working normal people should have been medicating themselves over but we didn't have this really weird naivete that just kept us oblivious to the to the distractions of the fact that this might not work at all and what a weird thing to think that that's what in some ways saved us I mean I don't know that we even would have taken on the project if we didn't have that Robin and I had discussions where we said man if we sell a hundred thousand copies can you imagine if we sold a hundred thousand copies of this game oh I mean that was that was mind blowing a hundred thousand copies so there was no way in the world that we could have anticipated the success no way in the world look I remember going into my first you know media store back in the day after mist I took a long vacation I went to New Mexico and took five week vacation and I remember in New Mexico we just shipped I went to a store in Albuquerque it's a media store and I'm like I wonder if the games here I wonder if the games here and I walked to the back and it was like covering the whole top shelf of of the game section [Music] and I was in Hall I was my mind was blown like oh my gosh this is crazy this can't be happening this is so I think our discussion between Robin and I was you know hundred thousand copies would be amazing just amazing amazing amazing and we hit that mark fairly quickly I mean within months and then he just kept selling it kept selling it was on the top 10 10 chart its number one for a long time but then it was on the charts for years and so we very quickly got to millions of copies multiple millions of copies one of the ironies of the of the game is that I mean we have to guess this but I think that probably only 50% of the people who played it even made it off the island of missed because of the puzzles involved but for some reason that didn't dampen enthusiasm I think because that first island was so intriguing and you got enough of the story to kind of be tantalized and because maybe some of the audience was young at the time and it just felt magical that was it left a great taste in in people's psyche about what the game was which is really nice even to this day I mean I get people who are way too young to say myst who who come up to me now and say yeah I remember as a kid my mom or dad playing mist and I was watching those places on the screen and I didn't really understand it but it just felt so interesting to see that and that that is really satisfying to still have that kind of resonance to this day I can't tell you how you know as a creator of that how satisfying and wonderful that is so here's the lessons we learned four myths that we tried to evolve this thing floor we still feel like Myst was an experiment as much as every one of the previous kids games that we did and have evolved in many ways it led to Riven we realized that the things we liked in mist were the things that came a little later where the story came out a little more where the story was was revealed in the environment or the people that were there but a little more integrated well and missed budget didn't allow it riven would allow it so we could put more people we could have that story kind of revealed but more than that the puzzles themselves and the friction itself needed to not just feel like it was I don't know arbitrary and as much as people said that mist you know I think for its time even miss Thailand felt like all these puzzles make sense and they weren't the seventh guests kind of would just throw some puzzles in not to diminish it it was amazing but it was it that at that time they just kind of threw some puzzles into play chess or whatever we were trying to integrate them and so it felt good but we realized that that wasn't enough that was not enough and the puzzles needed to feel like they were part of the history of this place and so Riven was really a challenge to make that happen and during the design that was I was on our minds like how are we gonna build a history the storytelling into this world how are we gonna build the puzzles into this world and how are we gonna really integrate that and it was one of the greatest challenges and it was all the lessons we have learned kind of led to Riven to try and do that is to the best of our abilities here's the interesting thing about the industry - everything is shifted in the industry and a lot of ways I'm really happy in the way as it shifted I mean I started with my brother in this in making games it was just the two of us doing these this little indie kind of thing that we felt we could do by ourselves and then we watched the trend in gaming go to a place where the only people who could make games were enabled by large amounts of money from large corporations who were publishers and that was that was in some ways sad because I mean luckily we were on the right side of that we were you know we had our funding from mist and we could keep going but it felt like the whole industry lost some kind of innovation by the guys in the garage by that indie feeling and with the advent of the Internet and in particular the advent of downloadable content where the need to press CDs and have stock and manage that stock and distribute it to to stores and to have things on the shelf that suddenly brought in a whole new influx of young to person shops again where hey I got a person who can do art I got a person because program we should make a game and I love that that's to me that whole indie rise again has kind of reinvigorated the industry and I love what that's done and in some ways it's kind of come full circle for us I mean we don't now depend on a publisher anymore we weave the last two projects we've done or the last we beget abduction which was a Kickstarter and then our current project firmament is the same thing leaped twice we've gone back to the well the Kickstarter well and our fan base has said yeah we're willing to risk it for a new game from you from a new title and there's a lot of pressure with that but it's also this Here I am getting to do a whole new idea for a game so it's it's a this struggle kind of continues and Here I am 60 years old trying to anticipate with firmament where things are gonna be two years from now with the same struggle fighting the same battles and having to realize in my mind that I'm not I may not get it right but again that's just how it is and it's okay

Channel: Ars Technica

Views: 1,300,080

Keywords: myst, cyan worlds, rand miller, myst rand miller, myst war stories, war stories myst, myst war stories ars technica, ars technica myst war stories, myst interview, myst d rom, myst cd rom, rand miller interview, myst behind the scenes, the making of myst, myst making of, how myst was made, war stories ars technica, myst making of game, myst game, myst pc game, rand miller interview ars technica, cd rom myst, myst cd, myst video game, ars, ars technica, technology

Id: EWX5B6cD4_4

Length: 23min 23sec (1403 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 28 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/reebokpumps]

I remember playing Myst at a friends but I had no fucking clue what was going on cause I was a little kid. Still blew my mind. I would stare at encyclopedia encarta for hours so it was a big jump.

[u/wojecire86]

When I was a kid we didn't have a computer that could play Myst, but my dad had one at his office that could. My brother, dad and I used to go to my dad's office a couple times a week and play for a bit. We would bring a notebook for writing down clues and trying to figure out the puzzles.

One of my uncles had already beaten the game, him and my dad would stay in contact and my dad would tell my uncle when we were struggling on a particular puzzle. That next week we would get a letter in the mail hand written on weathered paper and sealed in wax with some cryptic message that would lead us into the right direction on whatever we were stuck on. It was amazing and really set into motion my love for adventure puzzle games and RPG games.

My brother and I really felt like we were exploring this strange island with its seemingly impossible puzzles. It was wonderful and I will never forget those evenings and the occasional weekends with my dad.

[u/[deleted]]

Myst was made in Hypercard?!?!

[u/CipherKey]

Myst WR speed run

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJuKmlBJ5d0

[u/biga204]

Buddy and I got an inside joke from this game.

There's a level with elevators and you have to divert water to run the right one. Not very difficult but it took us ages. Finally out of frustration my buddy started clicking around from inside the elevator. He closed the door and the elevator worked. We literally just had to close the door.

Now "close the door" is code for, you're a fucking idiot because this is simple.

[u/bbucksjoe]

I highly suggest the Masterpiece Edition on Steam. It's cheap and it improves on the game. You get a FLASHLIGHT, which sounds like it wouldn't change much but it makes it much better. The graphics are updated a bit but it still has that old school feel and saving is much easier. Also if you like to cheat you can turn hints on.

[u/Grohlforprez2016]

my brother and i lost days playing this together. we still just randomly text each other "the blue paaageesss."

Two questions for anyone kind enough to answer if they know - 1) is there a (similar) game one would suggest now for a person like myself who loved Myst? bonus points if console/PS4. 2) is it possible to play the original Myst now on a macbook or newer PC?

[u/MIND-JELQ]

I love watching shit like this. Development of games from my childhood. Good ol ID Software, Quake, Doom, Johnny Romero.

[u/viggity]

FWIW, Myst totally was the predominate amazing game at the time, but I personally felt like 7th Guest was way better. I thought the animation was much more rich, and I enjoyed the puzzles more.

Edit: So at the beginning of this video they showed some animations (moving through the world) and that isn't how I remembered it. I remembered still shots that you would "navigate" through. So I thought maybe I had a crappy pc at the time (I would have 11, so IDK), but as this video progresses, it is clear that is how the actual game was played - clicking through still images, the first animation that I saw on this video must have been a cut scene. I double down on 7th guest being better.