Myst Co-Creator Rand Miller: Extended Interview | Ars Technica

[Applause] I got into gaming when I was in junior high and I'm not young so this was a long time ago and the games I got into on computers were not what people know today like okay so what really hooked me and this is appropriate for like the 50th anniversary of Apollo was a lunar lander game I remember it to this day there are 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 you know just a number how fast I was going at 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 it you know 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 I mean it changed everything I wanted to do from that point on I had had a little consulting firm I was doing computer consulting on personal computers in a small town in Texas and when we trained so the earliest game we did was still under the name of that consulting firm which was prologue and when my brother Robin and I decided to do this more seriously we we used the name cyan I'm trying to think of the transition when we actually took that name it was probably in the 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 had this had this idea of a blue sky and we liked that so we picked that as a name for the games we started with were oddly enough not really games I had done some games obviously I was hooked on game so I'd done some in junior high just as a hobby that was all I wanted to do but when we got serious the first game we did was was for kids I had had a daughter Children's software at the time was it felt like not to insult anybody but it felt like if you couldn't do other kinds of games on PCs you would just kind of throw something together for kids it didn't have that magic feel that children's books had you know a good children's book you're an adult you don't mind reading it it's interesting 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 and I said we should do something that's an interrupt interactive book remember writing in that letter a couple times and he finally sat down in HyperCard and started sending these images to me hypercard which is an amazing platform and just come out on the Macintosh but he drew the first page of a book which was a manhole cover and a fire hydrant in the background and what happened was 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 you know 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 he probably had already linked him because hyper code was easy to use and we suddenly realized that we weren't we weren't doing in an interactive book we were making a world and and it wasn't a planned world it was a very it was a very chaotic random just stream of conscious in this world for children and it kind of felt magical another one of those magical feelings like when I first played a computer game like this felt like a place it felt like we were able to explore this place and it just we did all this and had some loops that looped in on themselves and ended up having this game called the manhole we took it to a to an expo in San Francisco this was these were crazy heady times we're back in the day you could put your work on floppy disks take it to an expo and sell it for probably 20 bucks or 30 bucks and we sold out and a publisher came to us and said hey we'll give you a lot of money for the rights to publish this game that was the beginning and we thought that was really cool the amount of money they offered us by the way was it was nowhere near the amount of time we had spend making it but it seemed like a huge amount was like twenty thousand dollars and we've taken a full year of our time to do it both of us and so it was but it was like twenty thousand can you man in twenty thousand dollars I mean this is it we made it we started with the manhole and had this interesting success with it we the first thing we did with the manhole was make it larger add music to it because we had some additional funding to do that and put it on the cd-rom and I think it was it was one of the first entertainment CD ROMs if not the first entertainment CD ROMs that was intriguing for us we didn't really know what that meant other than we had plenty of storage for it meant we could put some really fun music it was our first chance to go into a studio and actually write some music ourselves and use real musicians and put that in it felt very professional from a couple of brothers just you know you know in their their spare bedrooms doing stuff to actually go into a studio studios I recall was in some guys garage so you know was it super professional but what happened after that was what comes next by the way I didn't I still had my my real job working at a bank so I hadn't this wasn't actually our living yet but cosmic Cosmo was how we evolved it was it was a very natural transition we had learned so much about our platform HyperCard in the meantime 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 I mean it's very close to both my brothers and and my heart it was a tour de force of what I think at that point HyperCard could do and what computers could do everything was interactive and their animations and there were things you could move the screen and things you could build and you could write your name in one spot and it witch or draw a picture in one spot it would show up in a frame and another spot you can type on a typewriter somewhere it which open a book in another spot and it had this whimsical a first chance kind of weaving a story into a world as well and it was it was trivial but it was all felt like a experimental testbed for how complex we could make a world what what could we do what interactions worked what what didn't work and I to this day I think people who've played cosmic Cosmo loved it sidenote on that it was actually published by activision we stopped getting royalty checks this is I mean every indie developer or development house back in the day could probably tell similar stories but we we just stopped getting checks for that we still don't to this day know how many of those sold activision went through a bankruptcy and as fate would have it we got the rights back so we we own that and at that point we we actually settled with them by saying don't pay us any money we don't care how many you sold just give us our just give us a Cosmo Cosmo back that's the kind of mindset we had it was not about money it was just we love doing this at that point after Cosmo Cosmo we realized that there were a couple options we had couple paths we we could take both of us dropped out of college I don't know why we thought that maybe that's why we thought it was interesting it's like wow we should should do something productive here with these games so he thought educational would be interesting and we did and and the other was something for an older audience and we designed we had ideas for both of those as again fate would have it the project for an older audience we called it a gray summons we proposed it to a couple publishers and and they didn't buy it so we went with the educational route and we did something called speed lungs now our take on education was it really care about teaching kids or anybody else anything we were more interested in in making them curious or motivated about things so speedlings was was our first foray into just trying to make something that that was a little more sophisticated we built a much more complex story into it we'd had a book at one point in the game a book on a shelf that had the whole backstory to what went on here which see how this progresses we toyed with color for the first time in speelunk both spot color and then a version that was full color so we were learning how to do color we didn't know just where this would end but we were honing our skills a little side note on this we built speelunk on the Mac with hypercard there was no hyper card on the PC we sent our version of feelings to brooder bond who was our publishers and at the time and said they said well we'll make the PC version we went down a few months later to see how that was going really wasn't much she went down six months later really wasn't much I think a year later and I'm probably off on that but they finally said well we can you know we just haven't been able to make this on a PC and we didn't understand it at the point at that point but it had to do with just how easy it was to get things done at HyperCard we we were doing things that were trivial for us but there was no platform to map that to so all had to be done in some in some fairly low-level code on the PC and it was a strenuous exercise to make it happen so there was never was a speelunk version on a PC hypercard was enabling technology and I think every everybody who does any kind of development on computers realizes that you're built on enabling technology what hypercard was that for us I mean in fact it was a thing that that gave us the idea to begin with our very first project the manhole and it was it was 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 prod that product it was it was a database but obviously when we did all of our games in it so it was not we didn't look at it as a database program I was just one of the things that could do that 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 card and it was so easy a child to use in fact my daughter's grew up using it building those very simple linked cards 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 it was just that was it was trivial that's the easiest part of hypercard you can see how that then evolved into what we do a link of still pictures there's a button on the left side of the screen when you click it you there's a transition that looks like you're turning to the left and there's another picture on that side that looks like you're looking to the left hypercard did much more as well and I think cosmic Cosmo and speelunk kind of were more of a homage to all the things that hypercard could do from a from a interactive point of view but it was absolutely the technology that enabled us to do what we did hyper again I should mention this hyper card was exclusive on the Macintosh at the time so we maybe we didn't know anything about pcs or how we would convert stuff to PCs because this was for us labors of love on the Macintosh in HyperCard and it actually came on every Mac is shipped with every Mac at the time and I think that was part of the deal the guy who basically invented it said that as long as he was at Apple it should come for free on the on the Mac and I think if you look back in history it shaped a lot of the early software that came out of came out of the fact that that that everybody got HyperCard on the Mac hypercard was so instrumental in in doing what we did that it was it was almost just part of the project well so much so that on our on the manhole disks it actually said a hypercard program or a hyper card game we actually put the name hyper color on there in fact that the the earliest expo that we went to sell the manhole at was the hypercard Expo in San Francisco was like it was the first Expo for all things hyper card and that's where we got you know discovered but it it honestly was part of our DNA at that point there was a real conscious effort on our part to really tune every element of this game I mean this especially on the Mac version I mean we we were looking at every little piece a good example is that a good example of that is moving from one scene to the other and this is something that everybody probably glosses over or doesn't even think of but remember hyper card doesn't do color so we had to move from one color image to another and we wanted a really nice blend like it would fade out one image and fade in another image and that seems like it would that's just easy that should be trivial but it wasn't we actually had a guy who he contracted with who who built these these add-on external they were called X commands and X functions for HyperCard that would do color because HyperCard didn't do it and luckily he was as had a kind of the same meticulous attitude as we did his name was John Miller and he would scent no relation he would send us examples of these blends that he would and there would be five different examples like which of these do you like blending from one card to the next and some of them looked like you know it was like this shutter that would blend and some of them work fast enough and some of them and then there was one that was like just perfect it was just such it was it was like cinematic it would blend in so well from one to the other and then we asked you know alright or he had already built in so that there was a there was the ability to control how fast it blended from one to the other and but we didn't want it to just went you know do it in pieces by slowing it down it needed to then add more gradations as it blended and he did all that as we worked with him and that was important to us I mean those those transitions were important and if you you can too if you go back and look at the game the Mac version versus the PC version you can see where where we were babysitting that Mac version brooder bun did a wonderful job of creating the PC version from our from the files we handed off to them and they were you know machine readable files of meticulously where every button was in every picture name and have where everything was but we weren't babysitting those transitions and some of those transitions weren't as elegant I mean the the blends do just the thing I I didn't like on the Mac and the things that we bucked up against they have this weird shutter kind of flow that's like on the PC wasn't wasn't it didn't you know it was fine and it worked and it was wonderful but on the Mac we were gave us this great outlet outlet for for OCD where this felt like it was every bit of our focus you can imagine that as we evolved the games that we were making it was actually wonderful to be able to use the funds from that were coming in from the previous product if they were coming in to fund our computer platforms to upgrade that was always as well always wonderful days when you could get the next machine that came out and we started on the early maxim just black and white our games were just black and white and as we progressed we were able to kind of get some early color machines and I remember specifically on when we finally started mist which was an interesting story on its own but 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 and Robin's machine was it was a black-and-white Macintosh but it had been hacked with a with a clip like oh 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 monitor that was color and so that's how we started mist with an early Mac se I think it was hacked to do color when the funding came in a lot of that was used to buy updated Mac's that would that had color as part of it and by the way those were days that were magical I feel like I've lived through these amazing periods where where we got to I got to start on the crazy green screen with just text and I remember the I remember getting a Mac box it did color with a 8-bit color and a color monitor and turning that on and bringing up a photo of you know it was probably it was probably those those clear clear balls that people used to render cuz it would be raytrace and it would show all the reflections and and it was like a photograph on my screen and it's a to this day I remember where I was when I did that because it was it was one of those those leaps and Technology that suddenly seemed impossible previous but now it was like well we can do photos on this this is there's you know anything will work now we our images are not black and white they are not just cartoons this is a wheel this looks like a real photo that was huge and that obviously influenced where we went when we decided to do something for an older audience which was yes 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 you could embed pieces of story in your game we didn't we didn't know that at all on the manhole 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 everything in the real world has a story to it it's there for a reason we realized when we when we were ready to do something for an older audience that that that was important we needed to have stories to things and we're excited about that it was amazingly exciting don't get me wrong Myst was still an experiment I mean we didn't really know what we were doing in fact the earliest solution for the images of Myst if we thought we would hand draw them Robin would hand draw them the same way we've done all our other projects but very early then after the when we were getting ready to draw up the proposal we got our hands on some 3d rendering software boy another one of those another one of those pivotal moments in where you realize the future is 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 saying render 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 and and then it was we can do this we can render the images for Miss we don't have to hand her all these that again was a very that was one of those things that we weren't sure would work at all there's a huge difference between putting a glass ball on a table and rendering it and making an entire island in 3d and rendering it and we weren't sure it would work at all and I I remember doing some tests Robin did some tests just with trees making a landscape rendering it and it worked and then and we knew we weren't over the humps the technical challenges of making that at the time because of the equipment but we also it gave us enough feedback that we thought okay this was possible interestingly enough mist was we had a great relationship with our publisher brooder bund we had we'd gone down a bad path with activision and they went bankrupt and we moved away brooder bun was a was it was completely different they were a great publisher to work with though Carlston was the owner of the company and it's such an amazing difference nevertheless it was not burger bun who funded miss Myst was basically started because this Japanese company sunsoft who got in touch with us just out of the blue they've been trying to get in touch with us for years but the active mission would not give them our contact information so finally they found 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 they flew to Spokane Washington in the middle of nowhere a team of Japanese people who we rented a hotel room because we were just working out of our houses 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 you 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 a 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 that now this is gonna be good like seventh guest will it be better than seventh guest and if if you don't know seven seventh guess you should look it up is one of the products that we 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 they gave us the money we bought our amazing equipment max high-end max to do this we did our tests it all seemed feasible and we started work we hired even hired a couple people for the first time in our history we had more than just my brother and I working on stuff we hired another artist to help him we hired a person to do both accounting and sound and interestingly enough we also did something for the very first time that was kind of unique we played people through the game on paper because it was more of a game and it had goals and it had stories we were probably a little bit unsure of how it would work and so we actually essentially dungeon mastered the game with our first two employees and said you're I mean basically describe to them you're standing on a dock there's water to your side you can hear it lapping there's a seagull flying in the distance to your and up in the distance you see a gear on a hilltop what do you want to do and they would tell us we tell them what happened explain where they went and what happened and we tested the puzzles we tested whether they were interested in any of it we tested whether it actually worked and they seemed to enjoy it although they were our first two employees so there was some pressure but from there we just jumped in and started building it we started with 3d software was called strata vision and I'm telling you I remember specifically Robin and I I'm sure we just experimented in strata vision because it was it was again one of those magical moments sorry I keep using that word but it it felt like these some of these transitional moments were magic and that was another one where I have this image that I did early on it's an orange on a tile kitchen tile cabinet that or a kitchen tile countertop with the Sun coming in a window and shadows and and I rendered it and it's a simple image but you render it and it's like that feels like a photo and that was easy it was it was just a very constrained space with a with a shiny little apple or orange that you could get reflections on and those were I mean it still took 15 minutes to render that little scene but it was so magical to see that and that's what people were doing people are doing simple things you know clear transparent balls that reflected some kind of weird checkerboard square was all very technical anybody who was rendering stuff and so with Myst we were we were amping that up to beyond just a shiny ball or shiny Apple on a on a table - okay how did you do a tree how do you do it a tree with all of its branches how do you do an entire building how do you do and the apiece were you know this wasn't in the movies yet I mean there was very trivial stuff in the movies just wireframe CG at the time and yet here we were trying to do something that was near photorealistic on a grand scale and it was it was exciting as we progressed in myst's development the worlds were very sophisticated I mentioned that we started by testing with an island with some trees on it and some buildings you know what what miss Thailand kind of evolved to but the the island kind of got bigger and bigger and there were more trees and more trees and how many trees can you put and there were lots of polygons and there were lots of textures and what's the rule that says that your crap expands to full to fill horizontal spaces well there's some kind of correlate corollary for 3d rendering I'm our models got to the space where they were filling every bit we'd add more memory add another hard drive but these were not massive machines these were just Mac's that were pcs you know but I don't know that they were made for this so what what ends up happening is Robin is sitting at his house we worked out of our houses we didn't have offices and he's tweaking these models that at some point are just massive the number of polygons are this is these are way too big for what we're doing and you have to picture this now he's not seeing these you know the the bedroom say the brothers bedroom in real time from from stone ship age he's seeing a wire frame transparent with it's just a mass of black lines on a white screen I mean it's hard to even tell where you're looking he's trying to set cameras because the only way you can even even partially move these screens in real time is by getting the lowest possible setting which is just wireframe and even then he's and I remember this because we would both do this or tweak it but especially Robin you would move the camera a little bit to try and get your am your camera adjusted correctly and maybe adjust it so you could see a little more detail than the wireframe and then just pick up a magazine and read it because it was gonna take minutes just to do the real-time modeling portion of that just waiting for the screen to refresh so you could see if this angle was correct or if it was even close to where it needed to be and that then you would click render and it would take hours and no exaggeration hours sometimes sometimes all night to render a single image that and again that was that was the the place we lived at that at that point at some point Robin had to adjust from traditional just painting with a brush black and white oddly enough to color painting with a brush early versions of Photoshop or pixel paints um you know whenever tools were available at the time to 3d rendering and honestly I mean and I brought this up before Robin is amazing because he no he's he's an incredibly talented artist and musician but he's he also knows enough about the technology that he's interested in intrigued by it and and he's curious enough that it was worth the effort to move forward and so I from my point of view he made it an amazing transition to to 3d I mean from my point of view coming from the programming side I mean 3d is what it I'm not an artist you know I touch on that but I could make art with 3d I mean I can make shiny balls on it on a table or whatever but when he made the transition with his skillset it was it was I think he was he would probably say that it was one of those magical moments where it was a tool that enabled him to do things that he couldn't do otherwise are set up for doing missed was we were definitely a Mac shop and Robin 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 now and okay this gets kind of crazy because hyper cut doesn't do color at the time and these are all full-color images that Robin sending so we can get into that but suffice it to say that 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 Ellora a lot of hard drive space and we were still working in mud it was incredibly slow especially for Robin rendering those images and it was 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 it 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 the from what he had queued up and and I and same thing at my place we would get suspended renderings who'd send to me and every machine we had had to be running all the time to render these images and there just wasn't enough time it was taking hours and hours per frame to do these things one frame you know at the minimum it was a couple hours to do it and there were hundreds and hundreds of these images so we had to keep we had to feed the beast we had to feed the beast everything if one of the machines ran out of something to do we were doing something wrong it's like there's this panic like no give me more images we got to get him in there or we grabs him from another machine and feed it to the one that was emptied everything had to be rendering all the time in order to try to get this get this work done strata vision was that was an amazing tool and it was one of those as I mentioned crazy magic moments where it felt like you were actually building stuff in a world instead of just painting pictures but it also was this major shift in in how we worked because before you're thinking in pixels I mean we literally started with black and white pixels and now here we are building what it felt like entire worlds of volumous space in a virtual place and we need to learn whole new ways to think of things all new ways to think of things like for example well I'll give this example if you don't put enough detail into your world it just looks like plastic flat nastiness I mean there are there are studied subtleties in the real world that make us know that's real we have to make that happen in a in a 3d rendering software and I remember the first time I mention I mentioned this this kitchen countertop with an orange on it that I did and I'm not an artist but it was oh this is cool and the tiles were completely flat and shiny and it's really great because it reflects everything and it's good but they they looked ridiculous I mean no tiles are that way tiles reflective tiles on a kitchen counter have these weird you know inconsistencies in them where the were they there were that makes them real well we learned about things called bump Maps back then bump maps were was were were it was a shades of grey that you could apply to your texture that would make the renderer that would fake the renderer as you as you rendered it into thinking that parts of the geometry were actually higher or lower and it only worked with it worked with the textures it didn't actually change the geometry itself but for example all I did was take some some very subtle grayscale noise that was blurred out like crazy and mapped that to the to the kitchen tile surface and suddenly it looked real well bump maps for something we had no idea what bump bump maps were until we started using strata vision I mean I think the guys at strata were they were taking with them these guys were they were heavy into CG but they were taking the tools from from a much more sophisticated platforms and mapping them onto the Mac and we were having to learn a language of 3d CGI stuff that we had no idea what it was until we got into strata and it was that was great times because we also were taught we were in contact with strata at the same time and we were saying well how would I do this what could I do now and I know there were some things that we talked with him about bug I'm sure there were bugs that we were like hey this is not rendering right this is doing weird stuff and they go we'll fix this and sent it to us and I know there were seems like there were features weird features with with alpha channels that at some point we suggested a place to fix or where they would put that and it was not something you would naturally put it in anyway so I feel like there was some back-and-forth but really it was it was their work that we were learning all these new things now I'd like to say that you know we were we were helping them add features but I don't think we were smart enough to add features we were just again looking at what things they would give us I mean I remember consuming their manual what what the possibilities were in strata and using those as best we could and I'm sure Robin must have felt the same way I think the artistic feel of missed that that that uh you know I mean I'm definitely speaking for Robin here but so much of that was informed at least at the beginning from from kind of the book that inspired it which was I think jules verne mysterious island which was you land on this place and it looks like it was inhabited you get hints there was people here or there's a person here or there's something here you know connected pieces of equipment or you stumble upon something and and but you're intrigued by it it doesn't seem to fit in an island in the middle of nowhere that was that was the major motivating point beyond that I think Robin was motivated by things at hand the fact that we had a spaceship in a Romanesque architecture library in the same space was just a matter of both learning the tools and what visual inspiration he might have had you know in a in a National Geographic or or an article he was reading in a sci-fi magazine so some of that was very eclectic especially at the beginning on mist island but it was all based on a design our kind of design and top-down map of this place of the spaceship here in a library and the books will be in the library it was just we probably got better at the design as we went on but even like the bedroom like Cirrus his bedroom and stone ship it's this beautiful lush one of my favorite spots in the game the bedspread and the plants in the corners and the woodwork that just looks so beautiful it feels like at that point in in in Robin's ability as he had reached kind of the peak of what strata could do especially in interiors it was like oh this I mean you go back I still go back now and look at that and it's they're just gorgeous it's got that photo real photorealistic look that is hard to surpass you get to a certain point and it's like well it looks like the photo looks real and so but I know that was informed by even by patterns in books he had and and wood textures that he would have found in magazines that he used for reference as he was as he was you can imagine that if you're building a real world you want there to be some dynamic elements in it and we'd played with that in our earlier children's software and from the very beginning in manhole we had done moving objects by just flipping from one card to the other and that whole idea that hyper card was just cards but it allowed you to flip cards quickly enough to run through those where some things seem like they were animated I mean it was you know a couple frames per second but it at least did that illusion and then when we did cosmic Cosmo we realized you could do you could animate icons and make things seem like they were really moving or and there were other ways to do animation but they were all fairly low-end and it was black and white for speed links we tied with for the black and white version different elements and for the color version we started getting other tools but there were these rumors or at the same time I don't remember the exactly the timing but sometime during mists either planning or production applehead blessed us with quick time and for anybody who now all of this by the way is crazy for people now and we just take so much for granted but QuickTime was this technology that it would synchronize sound with movies and you could play postage stamp basically sized movies on the screen we always knew that any animations we we would do would be small because we thought we'd either have the flip cards or do the animation write that ourselves the code for that but this allowed something very different suddenly we could take video of real people and insert it or video of renderings and this much this is gonna sound weird but we could render fullscreen videos you know fullscreen images that I mentioned earlier would take hours to render but a tiny postage stamp animation you could get a lot of frames done so it still took forever I mean some of those animations took days to render but it was but it was possible and so simply say this QuickTime allowed us to consider making elevators that had windows that looked like when you moved up and down you got full rendering of what you would see with a full perspective because we had a camera in our 3d software that was moving down and doing every frame so we built those doors with a tiny little window in them just for that reason and then QuickTime allowed us just as well to put those images in the books that weren't just voice or still images of a person but an actual animated actor ourselves because it was a shoestring operation saying and it was synced with the video or with the video in the and the sound was synced and and it was in a postage stamp-sized window on him on the books all that was generated by the technology the technology boy this is a whole different side discussion but the box of the technology is the constraints of the technology it's never a bad thing for us it never felt like those are things that that kept us from doing things it just felt like kind of those were the constraints you lived within and you made cool stuff within those constraints it was those were the boundaries and you pushed it right up to the edge and QuickTime the size of those movies would just well let's push it light up to the edge what can we do with that the missed production flow was intriguing because we weren't in an office we each worked out of our homes and I mentioned we hired a few other people but we all worked out of separate places and the files we were generating were fairly large and there was no internet at the time I think the Internet one was the internet like 93 probably the same time Myst actually shipped so we were pre internet there may have been like CompuServe and AOL starting sometime in there as well but honestly our files were so big that the modems at the time were we weren't able to transmit stuff we bought the best motives you can buy and again this is crazy stuff but they had compression and I lived out in the country I lived up on the you know on a hill in a double-wide trailer at the time and with a nice view and the phone line going to my trailer was multiplexed and as a result I got no speed at all so I called the phone company and they said well we can we can we can give you the copper to your house because you need it and they did I don't know how that works but I got a copper line unmultiplied all the way to my house and so my modem speed was like full speed I was only I'm sure the only only one on that road who cared but it was nice of them to give that to me but still it was not anywhere enough so we used tire net I mean it's what other people are called sneakernet in a in an office but it was tire net we had somebody who worked for us who would just drive around at the time we had different forms of disks there were jazz disks at the time that would hold I don't know how many meg boy would have to look back but it was small amounts but it was large enough for what we did and it was much more efficient than trying to transfer these files on a modem so rendered file pictures that came from Robin and from Chuck Carter or other artists would come on a jazz Dru disk to me I put him in rent files to render would come from both of them to feed the beast and then I would send versions of the game back to them either yeah probably on the same thing on the Jazz Drive so that they could look at it if they had spare time but there was a lot of that but it was just however we could transfer files and it was it's funny because what happened was the the actual we live in such generous times with transferring data that it's weird to look back and think that okay we had these we had to actually move the physical data it was the only efficient way to do it we were happy when we got larger disk that would store more because we could do more chunks at a time we're not sending the stack of them you know to people to our up to the other employees living within constraints is probably it's 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 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 because it's you're just gonna have problems but that so it shaped what we could do it defined the limits the quick time limits the color limits like how many how many bits of these days you send a photo you don't even think about how many bits you're using you know to express that photo but we had eight bits that was the standard amount that a monitor had at the time that means you had 256 colors that was another limit we had sound cards what were the sound cards how how much can you compress the sounds what were the limits how could you sync that well one of the big constraints large constraints that we that I don't know we had we didn't have answers for was CD ROM CD ROM had been around for just a very short time and it was both enabling and somewhat frightening you'd think that if you had this ability to have a 600 you know the large storage medium which we were counting on to do this large world called missed that it's like oh well we're flush this won't be a problem at all but hard drives for the time were fast cd-rom at the time was notoriously slow it came out you could store 640 K or there abouts at the time but CDs were made for music they were not made for data it was just this really nice hack job that allowed you to use it the zeros and ones to store data on hard drives were indexed you could go to any point almost immediately move the head to any point cd-rom drives because they were made from music that was played sequentially it was just a long spiral going from the inside to the outside of the day and they weren't made to index they weren't made to jump to any part of the of the drive quickly and yet here we are massive amounts of color information color images that we have to move from one image to the other we have to be playing music simultaneously off the cd-rom drive continuously there can't be breaks in that we have to also do sound effects if they click buttons or activate certain elements of the game and all of that has to happen streaming from a thing that doesn't really seek doesn't stream a lot 150 K per second and doesn't seek well so and this is one of those problems that it was really hard to test again cd-rom burners were not readily available there were thousands of dollars for a cd-rom burner and they were notoriously difficult to use I mean we didn't have one it was it was our publisher brew Dublin that may have had one and may have and we didn't even use it until we were well into the project not knowing for sure if this was even gonna work if 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 a side note I worked at a bank for years before doing this and we had this this great psychological kind of play that I probably heard at some IBM conference that said you know two seconds is how it's how long 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 ten seconds to move to the next image we just didn't know while we were building this it worked great on the hard drive we could test people on the hard drive and it was wonderful and it was clean and it was everything worked like a charm we had no idea what would happen when we burned this onto a cd-rom this is one of those scary moments but I don't want to I mean looking back it's kind of crazy but there had been some kind of intuitive feel we had for this as well because we put some of our really not so complex games onto cd-rom and so it felt like we had some kind of basic feel for it but honestly we were streaming so much more stuff at this point that it was it was you know somewhat scary it's one of those intuitive feelings of jumping off a click cliff and feeling like well I don't think I'm gonna hit those rocks down there I think I can make I think I could just get past those you don't know the physics of it and those are far away and you don't do this normally in life but I think I can do it and you know that it was one of those moments so if it had taken if it had taken a lot longer to go from one image to the other I'm not sure we would have had to do we would had to we would have solved it we would have gone back and said well we got to cut the music rate down or the each image has to be compressed more and 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 what 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 because when we have it it's this weird process where we sent hard drives probably a hard drive down to Berta bond and they burned the first gold master CD of Myst and I'm sure it wasn't complete it had to be you know we had a bunch of the world's complete but nowhere near beta yet but they burned a gold master and by the way this came back and it was gold I you know we have this we still call things here at the company gold masters as we approach their completion and I think it all comes from the fact that those early cd-roms were gold when you press them so we got the gold master we put it in our CD drives we click play and we all cross our fingers and give it a try and it comes up and for the most part it's working and we're under a two second thing and it's and the music's playing and the music and believe me the music was a huge part of this because in the sound effect and the sound effects and music because up till this point in our games we had actually done the music by breaking it up ourselves into chunks and then playing it by hand a chunk at a time this was something that was gonna be handled by quick time now and so we're depending on Apple's QuickTime to stream the music at the mount we'd compressed it from the disk and be able to click and the head on the CD goes to where the music is then it goes back to where we are had we laid out the images in the right spot not far enough and the music and the sound effects and all this is stuff that Oh God was was non-trivial I I could go into some of the details of this 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 discs in alphabetical 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 used 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 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 some 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 it even the streaming wasn't even the main problem the the seek time was the biggest with that crazy spiral so Luxur people with lots of money and had double speed drives or I fit I don't even think quad speed drives had been invented yet but you could see where this is going but it doesn't matter because we have to sell to the most basic people and it's not even a sell thing we wanted we wanted people to experience this who had the basic multimedia computer and so this had to somehow work on that and a lot of that was just plain unknown it was just we didn't have enough experience feeding this much data to a monitor through the software to know whether it really was gonna get us that that response time we needed to make this thing even playable from one slide to the other one screen to the other if that was too slow we everybody knows how this works if it's too slow you wander wait is it me is it me that the computer work did it just die what's going on so that was those were interesting times with no testing whatsoever I don't remember a moment of being frustrated with the cd-rom speed because we didn't even know what we would end up with there were moments of concern and probably you know waking up in the middle of night sweating we didn't test it's not like what we could do with 3d rendering stuff that where there were moments of concern with that because we at least knew what the limits were but we had our hands on it and if it got if things were too bad it's like well we need another computer we're just we can't render this we're gonna have to get another Peter we all those concerns all felt like they were solvable at some level but the cd-rom stuff was intriguing because it was just late in the game that we'd get a chance to test it we had to depend on our instincts and hope that we were hope that we were right cd-rom was a was a great enabling tool for us it was an interesting tool for everybody at the time but most people were at that stage where they were just mapping things from the old way of doing things to cd-rom there were a lot of encyclopedias she had a lot of storage what could you put on there well we'll just put words on there you know put some encyclopedias and we can add some pictures but it was people weren't thinking of what they could do uniquely with a cd-rom expell like entertainment people were thinking a little bit that way more than anyone else and we were looking at it like will we have to do cd-rom this world that that sunsoft was we had pitched to them it was big there was no way to do this on floppy disk you it wouldn't fit and part of the part of them a 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 that depended on doing this on cd-rom so we looked at this as as incredible opportunity we knew there were constraints we weren't sure exact believe what the solutions were those constraints but this is where we were going this is what we were gonna do the only thing we wanted to do was more sophisticated worlds that were larger more intriguing had more story had more realistic images that really felt like you were in this world and cd-rom was our answer to that question if if it were this incredible enabling technology of cd-roms I think it started in the late 80s I think that's when people started getting them they were way too expensive we were already toying with them at that point just just because it was interesting and and but not because they were necessary but it was the it was the late 80s and then mist under the proposal for mist itself was like 1991 I think is where we did the proposal and I think at that point you know just to put things in context that's like I think that's the year that the internet first came online 91 I think somebody can check me on that but and then computers were starting to get color at that point and they were starting to build computers that had cd-roms built in at that point and I don't know where Windows was the operating system I know Doss was probably still the most prevalent PC operating system Windows was starting to overtake it and all of this felt like it was you know again one of those pivot points where the technology was getting ready to change I know that shortly right around that time there were also these things called multimedia pcs that were starting to come out where people were saying hey hey we've got color and we've got just enough processing to do live small videos and we've got CD ROMs and and all of this kind of comes together and it makes this magic box it can seems like it could do more than what we're doing with it with just encyclopedias and we were right on the edge of that of that with what we were with what Myst was we felt like we were designing just for them just for that time period except anticipating where it might be a couple years from then we were developing mists like in 1991 the proposal came out and I think that's the same time the world wide web got turned on I mean I could be wrong but I think that's the time frame for it 1991 so here here we have this large project that we've got a assemble and there there are pieces parts so many pieces parts that we've got to put together onto this cd-rom and all of them have to be small enough to stream quickly and and move too quickly but 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 quickly as possible so starting with the images I mean that's number one these images we didn't have JPEG compression I think there was JPEG but it's interesting because our images weren't they were 8-bit images because most people's computers couldn't do more than 8 bits what that means is that we could show 256 colors on the screen at a time that sounds like a lot until you start seeing images with 256 colors on the screen you could choose which 256 colors you could use that was called your palette and every time you changed your palette the screen would go blank you would have to go to black and then come back up so we couldn't allow that between images so we so what we had to do first is compress the images by getting them down to 8 bits and and we had to pick a pallet for an entire world of images so so we had to decide ahead of time which 256 colors could describe every image in this world as as best as possible it seems like a ridiculous thing to have to do but we had to do it and there were tools available at the time so we feed in all these images into something called D Babel Iser which don't ask and it spits out a palette of 256 colors and says okay here are the most used colors in those images you gave me and you know there were hundreds of images in safe on say Myst Island it spits out 256 colors these are best for mist Island we would use that I would convert all the images to those colors and I would walk around the island I would look at it and it was terrible I'd go to a place one card where there was a purple pillow on a seat cushion and it looked disgusting because purple cuz it was like well there's nothing else as purple so you don't get you get one purple of your 256 colors so anyway long story short one of the first exercises he went through by hand was going through and replacing one of the 40 shades of green that were in the palette with a few shades of purple by hand so that the purple cushion would actually look okay alright so step one is we're converting every image to the right 256 colors that gets it down to a small a relatively small size then we have to choose a compression to actually go beyond that would have been nice if we could just JPEG compression compress these images everybody knows you can JPEG compress images and they look pretty good and it makes them fairly small but since we're only using 256 colors when we convert the images what happens is they become dithered what that means is if say for example for a blue sky you've got light blue and dark blue you don't want banding you don't want a light blue shade than a lighter than a darker blue and then if you've only got three colors so you you use this great dithering technique that's puts dots of the other one in within it and makes it look like it's a really nice gradation from the light to the to the dark with only three shades of blue but those dots in there mean that JPEG compression is just can't do it because JPEG takes my blocks and it takes a whole it uses a different way to compress images and and the defeats it's defeated by the dots let's just leave it at that so we use another kind of compression that was part of quick time but gets it just a little bit smaller because remember we're trying to get these images on a cd-rom that a single speed drive is gonna read off at 150 K per second and we want to get everything done at under two seconds to try and make this happen so okay we get the images down to I think seems like we got them down to 50k maybe each and we're thinking okay that that should be okay and some of them were larger some of them were small smaller but that's decent all right 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 the 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 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 Andale 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 so we're trying to put them 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 kachunk sound that mean and I Phi if I open a door I want a squeaking sound and if I turn on a generator I want 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 they need to be close on that cd-rom well okay there's a number of ways we we go about solving this problem other games at the time have this wonderful wonderful ability to almost take an entire game and just put it on a hard drive I mean that that's that's the luxury is even though the hard drives were say I think 20 Meg 40 Meg maybe 80 Meg you could get her a hundred mega at the time most games were fairly small you could just the hard drive and you didn't have any of this stuff to worry about but our game was big remember this is like we have to keep you busy in the real estate so there's no way we can put all of this in the hard drive but we're trying to determine like okay what which pieces can we put on the hard drive which ones can we so we don't have to we don't have to interrupt the CD to go to a different spot to find these things and one of the first solutions we came up with is these these ink these one-shot sounds a button push a door open and close a lot of those little sounds it's like hey we can copy those to the hard drive and then we don't have to bother the cd-rom at all so that was one of the first things we started dividing up resources like these are small enough we don't want to take too much of the room off the hard drive but we can install these things and at least make that work and this is all before testing this is all just in our minds things we're anticipating like okay well let's let's assume that this is gonna break things we'll put that over on the drive and see if that'll help things um and then on top of all that we've got QuickTime movies and on occasion not all the time but on occasion the users gonna gonna run across and that's huge amounts of data that are gonna have to stream from the cd-rom it's too big to copy to the hard drive so we've got to play those a good example is as soon as you arrive as soon as you arrive on the dock in mist there's seagulls that are flying out that's that's just a QuickTime movie that's running but it means that it's on that dock image as soon as we get there we've got to start streaming the seagull QuickTime movie and playing sounds and you know all those things so those are things that are unknown we've got we've got all this stuff on the on the on the disk laid out that what we think is a is the correct order if people are walking relatively straight forward if they turn around it might take a little longer but it's close and and we lay it all out we and we have what we think is a solution but we have no idea we have no idea if this is gonna work on a single speed drive we think you know our best instincts is that it might work but no idea at all our backups are we're gonna have to copy large portions to the hard drive or we're gonna have to make the image even smaller or we're gonna have to make the sounds less quality we actually compress the sounds use compression on the sounds and I think we think we went down to a like 11 kilohertz on some of them I think it's rare that we used a 22 kilohertz sampling rate I don't think we did stereo on much of it the QuickTime movies were 12 frames per second because we figured that was a good trade-off that that would work yeah anyway it was all just guesses we just guessed and send it down to broody one to press onto a CD that's on level you would think that normal people would feel an immense amount of pressure over this I mean there's some there was a lot of expectations on us but I I honestly think that like naivety or stupidity I don't know what it was we were just I to assert that we were intoxicated by this project this was like we're just gonna make this work there's no I mean if if there's gonna if there's an issue we should we should have been I should not have been sleeping at night there was so much on the line people waiting for this money that we were using our own money at this point we didn't know you could go back to the publisher to the people who gave you the money to begin with and we were way over budget way over time we told tons off it would cost 250,000 or something like that and we easily doubled that but we didn't know we can go back to them and say you know this is good but it's gonna cost twice as much so we were like okay well we we got some let's sell some cosmic cosmos because and we'll pay for more of this on our own so we just did so there's tons of money just going out all of this normal people should have been medicating themselves over but if 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 weird thing to think about there's a some kind of power and that but maybe that's what keeps you on musk going maybe it's like well I'm gonna make a rocket and land the things I mean it maybe it's it's not knowing the Cano all the things that could go wrong or not acknowledging them completely so that you do sleep at night so that you can solve them you've got at least some energy left to solve those problems that keeps you going because we were not as concerned as we should have been laying out the structure on the disks is an interesting challenge because and this has to do with a lot of problem-solving I mean problem-solving is always like this it's it's it's return on investment we knew we had to get the proximity of these resources that pictures the the sounds the whatever whatever things make up the game close close to each other because the the head can't see too far and it's it's inefficient so they have to be close but then there's this certain element that if you if you if you go to OCD on this you're just you're not getting a big enough return we didn't have to get it down to a quarter second we just needed under two seconds and so there's this trade-off so at some point we decided that the solution to this was just our naming structure because if we can name the images in a certain area close enough and the sounds in that certain area close enough and then sort things by alphabetically that just naturally we would have the correct order so that was rather than meticulously laying out everything exactly where it needed to be and remember this is free format that the user can turn around at any point and go the other direction or you know so we can't really it's not linear it's not like we really can lay these out exactly how every user is going to play so we just have to get it within those constraints and we felt like that that alphabetical naming or keeping things within a particular area would work and that was our instinctive solution to that rather than going diving in deep and laying out every single thing meticulously where it belonged it was just sort them name them where they were in the general area that then will be pressed onto the cd-rom the interesting thing about this is that it we were building the Mac version it was completely our version we he was our baby and we polished it and we everything about it was was ours we don't have anybody else touching that so what we sent to brooder Mun for the Mac version was the done deal here's a hard drive this is exactly what you need to do is copy this we could create essentially a a disk image for the cd-rom put it on a hard drive send it to him and say just burn that to a CD and it was the way we wanted it exactly the way we wanted it for the PC version they were doing you know that their own version for that and and we weren't as in touch with that and that's why the Mac version came out first but that's what we were sending them as a disk image that nobody could screw up do this we began work on mist in 1991 it was the proposal list dates as milestones beginning in 1991 the first check we got was probably in 1991 and then we shipped at the end of the Mac version at the end of 1993 I don't know the exact month but it was at the end of 1939 1993 and that PC version came in early 1994 sunsoft was instrumental in making mist happen they contacted us out of the blue and said we want to make we want to take what you've done with manhole and apply it to an older audience for CD and we were we were blown away because that was one of our next possible projects we had thought educational or something for an older audience and we had done educational we were ready for something for an older audience so it was perfect timing sunsoft had done they were into other games they were doing things for consoles at the time the PlayStation I think one of the Playstations had been announced with CD support cd-rom support and I think they were very interested in and that was that was essentially what we were building for them and some of Mis designs were affected by that because the consoles had a whole different structure that had to be paid attention to very small memory amounts and all everything off the CD had to be had to work that way and in a lot of ways that's what made us made missed a set of very different self-contained ages is because we felt like again the design box you have to live within one of them was ok for consoles we have to load an age in at a time and so we'll just make these self-contained ages that you play you go back to the hub you go to an age you go back to the hub and we can take those chunks we felt like they would work on a console on this small memory footprint miss was really interesting because we could clay threw versions of the game as we went I would get pictures from Rob and I would put them together and I was the first one to be able to walk around this world I mean it's on hard drive but I could immediately assemble them and walk in fact it was hypercard allowed me to almost assemble them interactively I would it was this if I hit a dead end in HyperCard I would create a button that said go forward I would go forward to a blank card I would put that image in and now I could go a step further so I was assembling this as I went and it that's it was I was interesting but it also allowed us to do testing before the game was complete we didn't have to compile it we didn't have to do anything along that in that regard so we have you can imagine that it was a it was a very dynamic thing there were there weren't builds of the game we didn't have to have this process where there was a nightly build to create the game it was at any point in time we could play the game and at some point and I think it was probably in early 93 we shipped this in late 93 and it probably wasn't until early 93 that we decided okay we've got to take what we've got so far send it down to brew Durban and do this test on a cd-rom so we were well underway we had already made some decisions and and anticipated that this was gonna how how it was gonna work I probably from my naive point of view I probably felt like early 93 would give me enough time to have to adjust if I needed to switch things around and I loved some of my narrative a naivety is always having a backup and it felt I must have been my mind thought well I've got enough backups here that I can anticipate if it's not gonna work but yeah it would have been early 93 probably before we tested so one of the interesting facets facets of this is that we had various partners with Myst sunsoft was the instigating company to make Myst happen they were the ones who drove it they said we want something for an older audience but they were only interested in console that's what they had done that's what their expertise was and that's what they wanted to build for they knew that new consoles were coming that had cd-rom drives and that's where they saw their market part of the deal we cut with them is that we still had the rights to the PC / Mac versions and we kept those so at some point along the line we had built enough of the game that we decided we needed to pitch the PC and Mac versions to public to a publisher as well and I remember going to a few publishers taking what we had to a few publishers down in the Bay Area and sitting down and trying to explain this weird collection of still images to them as we played through it and with it was so strange because some people would sit in front of the screen I remember you know there were there was one instance in particular or was the two principles of a company and one of them said this is freaking amazing we want this and the other one was like I don't get it but if he wants it I guess we'll do it and we were like yeah okay if they don't both get it we you know let's move on show it to someone else at some point we went to brooder Bund and we had we had done some children's stuff with them so it was a natural fit and we liked them they were great people to work with but this was this was bigger larger project and we sat down with them as well showed them the game and I don't remember who it was but one person in particular brutal and said this this is freaking amazing we want this we absolutely want this and that's that's all we cared about I mean now Robert and I again we were doing this because we had a passion for it this was and when somebody was so excited it's like okay well then we'll just we'll work with them we'll work out the contract stuff it doesn't matter we'll work with them and so we continued to our relationship and it was it was great really good doing something for an older audience after doing all the children's software children's entertainment stuff was definitely on our mind we had toyed we had had a proposal for that earlier gray summons a gray summons project and it was really it was interesting but it was all hand-drawn and but it definitely had a goal and a weird interesting kind of feel to it so we were definitely moving in the direction of making something for an older audience made a more sophisticated audience some something that had taken everything we had learned and and had a goal and a story and much more coherence to it than what we had toyed with with the children's stuff so as I've mentioned I remember specifically Robin and I during the design of mist discussing okay this is weird weird we're not gonna die and we're not gonna kill people but realizing immediately that that was a problem because without dying you don't make people start over we hated I mean I was a gamer Robin was really not a gamer but both of us were so frustrated with starting over you know just died I've got to start over like it was one of those things were like well let what if we just take that out completely and that was weird that was really weird you just you couldn't put enough gameplay and if you didn't make people start over and how are they gonna feel like they achieved anything and I mean without knowing the details of game design and entertainment and frankly any kind of entertainment where you've gotta have just enough frustration and just enough relief to keep people moving forward I mean we didn't know but that's that's what music is based on in movies and storytelling and every other kind of entertainment seems to be based on that same kind of frustration and and release it it felt like we we were missing that if you don't die in this you're just gonna explore and that was just like our kids stuff the kids stuff you just explored and it was fun but it was like what what did you achieve how do you achieve how do you know you're making progress and so we drew on a bit of some stuff we had these ideas we when we were younger where we had played D&D and I remember early on playing D&D I was you know I'm still I was in my twenties I wasn't that young but playing D&D my first experience with somebody else leading me through a pre-existing dungeon and rolling the dice and blah blah blah but it had this interesting feeling and it felt like I was solving things and it felt like I had to overcome something and but my first impression was that well I don't want to play this again I want to make this I want to make a world and D&D so I did I built this world D&D and I was the dungeon master and I took people through it it was it was in some ways what led to much later the idea that you would put friction in with puzzles because I didn't in in my dungeon I didn't use dice there was very little random I put puzzles in that they needed to solve and so I think we we kind of extrapolated that outward and said well let's put puzzles in it puzzles that seem to fit with the environment we wanted to make it seem real we wanted to make it seem like it was valid like it was a place that had history and if you if you've played missed you know that we got better at it but just because you get better at it doesn't mean you can throw away the stuff you did at the beginning miss Thailand is like this conglomeration of us experimenting with stuff and then as we got better it feels more integrated in the other ages you get to channel wood and there's a big windmill that's pumping water and you turn on the water and it goes into these channels and the channels the channels go to the switches and that can control pumps then and motors that raise and lower elevators and it all feels very logical and connected the Miss Thailand it was less so but nevertheless that was all shaped by these things and these puzzles the friction that we used couldn't be bad guys with guns it would be a a logical connection that you have to make in your mind to get a door open or to see what was around the next corner balancing the puzzles was was a problem it was not something that we had experience with other than those early days of building in D&D world and that was building a D&D world really didn't apply because I dungeon mastered it and if they had problems I could give hints or do whatever I wanted dynamically on the fly this had to be burned and sent off so we didn't know how people would respond so one of the things we did was play people through it over and over and over both with the early D&D version where where we dungeon mastered and played them through and wrote notes about what they had problems with but then later on even as we built the game we would sit behind people's back there was no QA there was sitting behind people's backs two at a time because they would talk with each other and we could get in their heads and we could realize what they had had problems with them what they wouldn't have problems with they would talk we would write notes and in many cases in fact most of the cases if they had problems we could fix it right then it was you know I'm gonna open this fix this and close that done next and so it was it was a there was a process a long process of tuning those things if they were too complicated and there was some that in many people's opinion we didn't get right there's still a few puzzles in there that because I because of our inclination they we thought they were easy enough and the general public at large depending on what you're good at it not good at didn't get and got frustrated with but I think it was it had a lot to do with the honestly hours and hours of sitting behind people and watching what frustrated them I'll speak a little from Robins point of view with regard to creating these images only because you know he's we've talked about this quite a bit over the years but you have to realize that from his point of view he's building worlds he's in these 3d worlds these wireframes but he's putting textures on these and building these places it didn't feel like like his earlier children's games where he's just painting one picture at a time he's building a place but once that place is built he gets to meticulously set the camera angle he gets to put a camera in that virtual world and place it and give it a name and then put another camera to a right angle of that and it's essentially you you're covering the four cardinal directions of where you look now you'd think that you you it's another one of the weird things that you'd think you would just set the camera and rotate it but that's not how our perception is when you're looking at a small screen you actually have to pull the camera way back so that you get some sense of you know you rotate it kind of around us around a pulled back circle but in addition to that it wasn't just the cardinal directions Robin realized early on that that was the default position but sometimes you would need to tilt the camera a little bit left or right or up or down to get not only a very a much better aesthetic viewpoint something that looked beautiful and and Frank was framed well but also to give a hint that you could turn left or right or what might be there something to entice you to move left or right so all of those were were set by hand every camera angle was defaulted to you know all the Cardinals but then yeah adjusted accordingly there was a camera for every image in the game we there would there was a separate camera for every image in the game and on mist Island there were probably I'm just I can't remember I'm sure I could look it up but I'll bet there were 300 cameras just scattered about the island something like that probably so if there's 300 cameras on mist island or there abouts every one of those images full screen images probably took average of four hours I would think and some of those also required what we called correction shots where we had this it was important to us to not just make doors close in some cases or make switches go back to a default position but if you left to switch on you saw it on even from a distance or off you saw it off for a distance so all those had to be little shots from far away that had the switch in both the on and the off position so all those had to be rendered as well and those took less time but yeah there were hundreds and hundreds of those shots at four hours each and some of them took longer a lot of it was again where we're making stuff up as we go but we had a lot of trees on mist Island and that was those were very a big part of the rendering problem so what we realized early on is we did things were behind us we could hide them and the problem with that is that there are shadows that are cast for those and and one of the interesting little side notes is frankly as soon as you start the game you're at the dock and there are trees behind you the Sun should be casting shadows on you but we hid those trees because it was much easier to move around and render things if those if all that stuff behind you was was just hidden there is no way that we anticipated what mist would end up being we had I when I look back at the documents that we wrote it even at the proposal we were again somewhat naive and telling sunsoft that what we were aiming for it was a mass-market I think we knew at least ahead of time that we thought we could that this would appeal to a broad range of people that it you know demographic wise we didn't think it would it would insult anybody that it was a safe purchase and that because you weren't killing things are dying that it might be kind of broad and then that's what we were shooting for but beyond that Robin and I had discussions where we said man if we sell a hundred thousand copies can you imagine if we sold 100,000 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 and 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 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 cool still had no idea of the success it had just launched but the fact that it was there meant something important and it was such a crazy heady time giddy kind of time I think our discussion between Robin and I was you know 100,000 copies would be amazing just amazing amazing amazing and we hit that mark fairly quickly I mean within months and then it just kept selling it kept selling it was on the top 10 10 chart was 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 and multiple millions of copies over you know it was a it was a building and just kept going for so long that yeah so unanticipated and and remarkable one of the ironies of the of the game is that is that the I think that I mean we have to guess this but I think that probably only 50 percent 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 have played 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 from Miss 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 kind of evolved in many ways it led to Riven because Riven was we realized that the things we liked in Myst 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 that was on our mind it's 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 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 and here's the interesting thing about the industry to have everything is shifted in the industry in 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 I mean it was literally two of us in different parts of the country at some point starting and then coming together doing these this little indie kind of thing that we felt we could do by ourselves and then we've 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 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 who could program we should make a game and I love that that's to me that whole indie rise again has kind of reinvigorated in 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 we've the last two projects we've done or the last we beget abduction which was a Kickstarter where you just ask the internet for money and they give it to you and then our current project firmament is the same thing we've twice we've gone back to the to the 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 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 the same 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: 96,933

Keywords: ars technica, war stories, myst video game, extended inteview, cyan worlds, myst, rand miller, myst rand miller, rand miller interview, myst behind the scenes, myst game, myst cd rom, ars technica myst, the making of myst, cyan worlds video game, ars technica myst war stories, making of myst, myst walkthrough, ars, technology

Id: 5qxg0ykOcgM

Length: 107min 5sec (6425 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 21 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/sudin]

Marvellous, the initial interview was in itself a joyride to watch, getting an almost full 2 hours with Rand is just wonderful beyond words. Guess someone heard the last comments on the previous thread about "I could listen to Rand for hours" :D

For anyone curious, the new parts actually start at 1:18.

[u/GregLittlefield]

From the video description:

lorem ipsum dolor sit amet

Good ol' lorem ipsum sneaking up..

[u/[deleted]]

Still probably my favorite game of all time.

[u/Brickwright]

Yes! I loved the extended Lorne Lanning one they did, and wished for extended versions of the Miller or Meier interviews. This is great!

[u/thomasg86]

I could listen to Rand talk about the "old days" forever. If there were an eight hour interview all about Myst and Riven I'm sure I'd be glued to every second. He probably gets tired of talking about it though!

[u/Digirama]

watching the 6 minute cut of this interview last week inspired me to seek out a copy of the game and play it for the first time. I heard about it as a kid, but I was still too young to play (I was 3 when it was released, and probably 7 when my uncle showed it to me). Anyway, I downloaded the original last week and had a marvelous time exploring and solving the puzzles. Finished it last night.