"So if it resonated with a larger audience, or an audience that wasn't used to video games, it was probably because we weren't necessarily just trying to fit into a mold, maybe. "It was all kind of an experiment to improve what we were doing," he adds.
So in our mind it was like, 'well this is going to be for an older audience so it does need a certain level of sophistication,' but we certainly weren't thinking artsy-fartsy or something. "I knew we were trying to make something interesting, because we'd basically done kids' games up to that point.
"We were not looking for sophisticated gaming," Miller says. It's bizarre," Miller says.ĭespite Myst's somewhat avant-garde reputation at the time, Miller considered the game more of a playful toy box than a piece of high art. Today, combined with its sequel Riven, that number stands at over 12m. So we thought that might appeal to a broader group, but our 'broader group' meant that we were thinking 'oh, maybe we'll sell 100,000.' The reality was that it was a lot more than that." We wanted everything to kind of fade away so you could be lost in this world. You would just sit in front of it and there was a mouse and one button and there weren't a lot of menus on the screen and there weren't a lot of keyboard commands. "We wanted the interface to be really intuitive and easy. "We were trying to make something that would appeal to people who didn't necessarily always play games," Miller tells me. According to Miller, Myst was merely an experiment in making traditional adventure games a little more accessible. This was never part of the plan for Cyan. Suddenly gaming - or at least Myst-playing - was no longer considered a guilty pleasure, but rather a worthwhile academic pursuit.
Artists, academics and grandparents alike all looked to Myst as a sophisticated piece of media. As such, it drew attention from an audience otherwise uninterested in video games in those games. It traded traditional forms of navigation for a static art style that was almost photo-realistic (or as close as could be attained in those days) and it did away with genre conventions like inventory puzzles, dialogue trees, or a typically told sci-fi or fantasy narrative that front-loads the player with flavour text. Not only did it eschew combat, platforming or any competitive element, it didn't even resemble other adventure games. Myst didn't look like other games back then. It appealed to puzzle fans and technology enthusiasts the way one would expect of any early 90s graphic adventure game, but it drew in a much larger audience beyond that scope. It's strange to think back on now, given how much the world has changed in 23 years, but there was a time when Myst was the game. Like Myst island itself, it became an enigmatic hotbed of creativity languishing away in an isolated retreat. At a distance it may seem like Cyan withdrew from society after Myst's sequel, Riven, but really the opposite is true: Cyan didn't leave the world, the world left Cyan. His story is a tragic one of ambition, bum luck, and a woeful miscalculation of where the gaming zeitgeist was heading. To understand Cyan's troubled history I spoke to Rand Miller on Skype last Wednesday, the very day the studio launched Obduction. So where was he? Where did the money go? How did the developer of one of history's most popular computer games fade into relative obscurity? Neither did Cyan, for that matter, despite serious financial woes nearly killing the company off 11 years ago. What a lot of people don't realise is that Miller never left. Now Cyan is back and it's swinging for the fences harder than it has in ages with Obduction, the crowdfunded spiritual successor to its record-setting first-person puzzler Myst.Īs the Obduction Kickstarter campaign was fond of reminding people, Cyan's CEO, co-founder and Myst co-director Rand Miller is still in charge. By 2005 the studio was on the verge of bankruptcy.
#Myst 3 digital download Pc
In 1993 Cyan released what would go on to be the biggest-selling PC game of all time for nearly a decade.
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