“Myst.” Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past half-decade, you’ve played – or at least heard of – this bestselling game. Released in 1993, Myst is a true phenomenon and has sold over 2.5 million copies. Sales are still strong, unheard of in a market where the average product’s lifespan is six months. The dynamic duo behind Myst’s creation, brothers Robyn and Rand Miller, have been producing innovative entertainment software for almost a decade.
Cyan traces its origins back to 1987, when the brothers teamed up to create The Manhole, an explorable world for children. “When you examine The Manhole,” says Rand, “you can see already the seeds for Myst. It’s a free form exploration. Children of all ages can go wherever they want, they can’t die, and they often find new things each time they come back to explore.”
How were the brothers pulled into the computer entertainment world? Rand was the computer expert, while Robyn excelled in art and music. “Robyn was more of an influence into the virtual worlds then I was,” says Rand, who tossed around ideas for an interactive storybook but they never got off the ground. When he asked his brother if he would be interested in illustrating it, Robyn began developing the pictures with more and more depth. Soon, the book’s illustrations had become a complete environment. “He kept wanting to go deeper into the picture. And so ‘The Manhole’ was born. We didn’t set out to change gaming, and the term ‘interactive entertainment’ wasn’t even around. We just made our products to satisfy our own desires and curiosity.”
After releasing The Manhole, Robyn and Rand continued on with similar projects, including the ever-wacky “Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel.” The game allowed children to explore seven strange and unique worlds. Not all players were kids, though; the game’s quirky style appealed to many Mac gamers as well. Back in the days when the Mac Classic was just a gleam in Sculley’s eye, I recall a friend going off to college toting a spanking new SE with copies of Cosmic Osmo and MS Works. Care to guess which one she talked to friends about?
After several children’s products, both Robyn and Rand turned their attention to a game for adults. Both had considered creating a world for older audiences, but elements hadn’t fallen into place. “We even submitted a proposal to a company for one (it was rejected) as early as 1989,” Rand says. A few years later, though, things started clicking. “The technology and the funding came together at a key time to enable us to do what we did. After being approached by Sunsoft (our Japanese partners) the first time, it was only several months before we had submitted the full proposal and got their blessing to proceed.”
Cyan’s staff immediately doubled when they hired two more people to help with Myst. The new game was a natural evolution from their earlier programs, with a point-and-click interface and detailed worlds to explore. “The difference with Myst was that we created much more of a story and gave it a goal and attached much more realistic pictures and sounds.”
That meant detailed planning BEFORE they began creating actual content for the game. “[That’s] something that we didn’t have to worry about as much with the children’s titles,” Rand says. Myst’s detailed, interweaving worlds required meticulous design, but its interactive nature meant that traditional methods of laying out plot development were ill-suited. “Our design documents were for the most part maps. Storyboards just don’t work well in a non-linear environment.” Soon, two more people had been hired, bringing Cyan’s staff to a total of six. Even their younger brother joined in, writing the text for all of the books in Atrus’s library.
Myst’s trademark detail and realism required significant computing resources. The size and complexity of the 3D models for each scene brought the machines to their knees. Changing the view of a simple wire frame took minutes, and many of the single frames for the game took 48 hours to render at full detail. According to Rand, “We leased extra Macs and had all of the computers rendering all of the time. Plenty of reading material was on hand.”
When the game was finally released under Brøderbund’s label, it was a smash success – again, if this is news to you, then you’ve not been gaming for long.
In the years following Myst’s release, numerous fan clubs have sprung up around the game, a Windows version was created, and spoofs mimicked Myst’s distinctive style. It was a product with perfect timing, hitting shelves just as CD-ROMs were gaining widespread support. In addition, the game’s ‘feel’ was unique. “The story line is a catch because it is different. It isn’t a typical time-travel, battle warrior type game, and I think that’s what appeals to the broad audience that Myst has captured. Our goal when designing Myst was to step out of the more normal scenarios.”
A line of merchandising based on Myst is in the works, positioned as ‘artifacts’ from the D’ni civilization. On rumors of a Myst movie, Rand says, “[It] would be nice, but we are trying to be as conservative as possible. We don’t want to loose too much of the creative control over the storyline, and we want to work with someone who will let us present the story as how we see it. We are not concerned about making a blockbuster, it’s more important to keep the same level of quality (or better) that is in the game.”
Cyan’s staff has grown to a total of 23 employees now, and the sequel to Myst is approaching completion. Some fans have expressed concern that the sequel may not live up to the original’s success – with technology advancing at such a rapid pace, how can the Miller brothers stay on the cutting-edge they pushed with Myst?
Rand isn’t concerned. "From an outside point of view I can understand the concern about the sequel being outdated, but from an internal point of view, it’s a bit different. There are two distinct elements that we work with when building our worlds. The asset creation (the 3D models, pictures, animation, design, sound, etc.), and the asset delivery (how you present the assets to the player). Both involve technology, and both have the potential to be out-dated. We’ve spent most of the time since Myst concentrating on the asset creation, making sure that the assets we’re working with are state of the art. The delivery mechanism has the potential to be outdated more quickly than the asset creation, and we save that for the end.
“We feel that for our products, asset creation is a higher priority than asset delivery. So our money and effort lean in that direction with the sequel just like they did with Myst. It’s also interesting to note that movies don’t have the asset delivery part. There’s only one way to deliver a movie, so movie production only concentrates on the creation part.”
What lies beyond Myst II? “We have some ideas but are not actively working on them right now. One thing at a time, please! As for Myst III, I think everyone here would be more motivated working on the next big thing, and we have certain feelings that after Myst II, the Myst story will have been told. We’ll be as interested to see what the future holds as everyone else.”