Classic Postmortem: The Making Of Myst
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 ก.ย. 2015
- The best-selling PC game of the 1990s, Myst is also often attributed as the game that sold CD-ROM drives. Since its release in 1993, it has been remade and ported to over 10 platforms, including most recently the Nintendo 3DS and iOS. In his GDC 2013 talk, Robyn Miller, the original co-creator and sound composer, discusses how he and his brother Rand created a game that remains relevant and commercially desirable over 20 years late
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First time I hear Robyn talking about MYst. Usually it's just Rand.
Thumbnail is 'Riven' not Myst. I would however like to see a Riven Postmortem very much.
"I had friends that finished it in one sitting."
Screw you it took me a month.
My father and I were stuck on going up in channelwood. It took us a week to figure out to close the door... we felt stupid, really really stupid.
Same
I got comely lost in channel wood. Trying to figure out the maze of stairs n figuring out which elevator took me were. Took my a month straight to figure it out, month and a half at best.
Hahah
Yeah, that little detail had me stumped for a while too.
Me too! I didn’t actually take me a week, I just went on the internet and asked after a day of struggling, but same same
Such a nice talk. Loved it that both Phil Fish and Jack Wall were in the audience, two heroes of mine.
I remember the first time my dad talked to me about Myst he said that it had taken him a week to solve the final puzzle. He loves the game and we played through much of Riven together. The first game I completed on my own was Exile which will always have a special place in my heart. There is nothing that has whisked me away to another world in the same manner as the Cyan Worlds' worlds and seeing this talk was hugely inspiring.
I remember my dad bringing Riven home and us playing it for the first time. That was the first time I was ever transported completely to a new world. It was amazing even though we never beat it
I'm geeking the fuck out right now.
The first time I saw anything of Myst was in a PC magazine and it had seriously two screenshots of the game plus a review. My dad said he was going to order it and for weeks while we waited for our copy it was all I could think about. All from those two screenshots was I so captivated and eager to play that game.
Yep - Myst and Riven were way too much of my childhood. I still have my Riven mousepad.
My Dad ordered it and gave up on it after a few hours. I asked if I could have a look and noticed he was stuck very early on (the power puzzle - getting power to the rocket ship) neither of us had ever really played a puzzle game before. We sat there and worked it out together on paper. Fast forward 10 years and we had played games like Rama, Lighthouse, Morpheus, a number of Zorks (Grand Inquisitor was my favourite), Riven (all time favourite) and many many others. Each time we would crack out a fresh paper pad and pencil and jot down everything of note. Im 31 now and I yearn for that feeling of discovery again.
u r blessed to have time spent with ur father with great fun. most of us never get moments like this. hope you keep trying to do more like this with him.
+Sada Asda
Play The Witness!
Also, Quern is a good Myst-like.
This is a likable guy and a class act.
Myst is great, but what I really would like to see is a postmortem on Riven. Now THAT is a feat in game development that rarely gets talked about.
The spiritual sucessor to Riven, with the same level of production and detail (maybe not adhereing strictly to the exact point n click mechanic of old) had yet to be made. I remember back in 1998 thinking "this is a revolutionary game world; I can't wait to see what this inspires in people". Unfortunately it didn't seem to change much in the industry at all.
Still, we NEED a Riven postmortem with Robyn and/or Rand and Richard Vander Wende (also responsible for the look and feel of Disney's Aladdin!).
I have Riven on my hard drive, running it through SCUMMVM. Still haven't solved it, but I keep going back to it.
@@thatllputmarzipaninyourpie3117 i got it when i was 12. I couldnt solve it. With my current attention spam i dunno if i could on my own. Its a very hard game.
Myst had an incredible impact on me: My taste of music, my sense for that mechanical puzzles and atmosphere and everything. I'd say that Myst is one of the most important games to me
Myst still stands as my favorite game and favorite game series. Its probably not the one that I play the most, but without a doubt, it's the one that I respect the most. I will forever love the world that these guys created.
mainHERO88 I honestly hated Myst more than any game I've ever played... weird
Kevin Klika when did you play it? If you never played it back in the early 90s and then started just recently, then I can see why you might not have liked it. To each their own.
In like 99... I literally never made any sense of the game in the slightest.
did you like some of the other games from the series more? or is this just not your kind of genre
So... you're dumb. No shame in that, Doom was there for you.
The stunning images at the time, the music and sound effects. It made it one of the best games ever.
Phil Fish! That explains the appearance of the Myst Library in Fez
Love it. And what a great guy. Myst is one of the great aesthetic experiences of my life.
Oh my god, Jack Wall?
That guy's soundtracks are amazing. I love what he did in Myst and Mass Effect.
Oh so THAT's why I liked the ME soundtrack. Who'd have thunk it...
?? It's Robyn Miller
@@tegannorthwood1891 Jack wall did myst 4, and I think 3 and 5 as well. Robyn left Cyan after Riven.
@@ChristopherRoss. Just III (Exile) and IV (Revelation).
Yeah He's talking about near the end of the video when Jack Wall came to the audience mic and thanked Robyn for making the games and helping his own career. But as far as who scored what, here's the list:
Robyn Miller scored Myst (1) and Riven (2)
Jack Wall scored Exile (3) and Revelation (4)
Tim Larkin scored Uru, End of Ages (5), and the bonus Rime age in realMyst
Myst. The first game I played on PC. Grandmother bought it for me for my birthday before I had a PC. She let me play it on her 90mhz Pentium processor w/ like 16 megs of ram. Man times have changed!
16 megs? Your computer was the bomb! I couldn't play MYST at first because my computer only had 8 megs.
I bought this game on a PC magazine and I still have the original cd. I got incredibly happy to be able to finish Myst without being traped in the books. I tried desperately to run it on my win 7 PC through virtualmachines without success. Right now while I am writing this comment I'm buying my version for MAC . Can't wait to see if I'll finish it again as I did more than twenty years ago.
Luckily Myst and Riven and all the other Myst games are all playable on GoG today, which is awesome.
I was a Commodore Amiga user. I built my first PC specifically to run Myst after I saw it running in a store.
Such a gorgeous game, so obviously made with love.
I owe how I see the world to the Miller brothers ❤ Myst was one of the first things I remember as a kiddo. My dad randomly bought us a collection of CD roms for our new computer and Myst was one of them. It molded my mind and I can’t thank the creators and my dad enough.
Thanks for uploading this and thank you Robyn for presenting this history. Love it all!
i know this is old but, rand did an interview over at ars technica. link: th-cam.com/video/5qxg0ykOcgM/w-d-xo.html
His part is more technical and just as good.
That is how we played the game. With two people or more. Myst became a family affair that Christmas we got the game when I was a kid. Very cool video.
He's Like... "Is it over yet?? Has time run out?" Haha. He's not a public speaker but amazing at his job!
i think he is still much better at presenting than the average person
dude knows he doesn't need to be prepared, he's a celebrity in that room
They referenced their first game in Obduction. That's extremely neat.
Ugly upload, you guys should really upload this thing again, there's some frustrating missing moments and it sucks
You never know, they may have lost the source media. Wish the audio was a bit more compressed or something.
Yeah, it's a damn shame. One of the few people responsible for making Quicktime what it was in the 90's and it looks like it's being streamed w/ quicktime, back from the 90's. This guy deserves better quality, especially for the audio.
@@gozinta82 Haha, I was going to say something about a 90's internet connection!
@@gozinta82 Cyan probably have a good copy in there vault
I love the authenticity of the video footage itself buffering
Had a 486sx with 2 megs of ram and a really squeaky 2x cd-rom. It ran.
Interesting that Phil Fish was in the audience that day, makes a lot of sense why Fez has so many puzzle elements in the game and feels like an adventure game.
Nice to see some decent slides for a change.
@7:25, so wild to see the screenshot of a NeXT system. I worked at NeXT in 1993 and vividly remember the day one of the engineers fired up Myst on a Mac we had in the hallway. We would play it in groups of 2-3 people.
For those of you who might be interested, Myst artist Chuck Carter is launching a new game www.kickstarter.com/projects/1368459285/zed/description
The frequent breaks and pauses and skips in the video are irritating, but this was a great video. I guess there were technical issues at the time.
But I remember when my dad brought home Myst for the first time and we played it together every Saturday until we beat it. Loved writing down notes, putting together puzzles, remembering details from another room that helped. It was just the best. Love Myst. And Riven is the best in the series! (despite being a bit more complicated story-wise)
one of the greates gaming experiences in my life.i sat in the attic with a friend playing Riven too.We made all those scribbles and tried to solve the mysteries.It completley absorbed us.until today we regulary listen to the Soundtrack.
I loved Hypercard and creating my own mini game stacks until CrApple decided to remove the individual creator from the equation and made it a viewer instead in the "upgrades" of the OS. I loved my old Mac Plus 6.0.8. more than the Apple II though.
How did they get hypercard to make their game in color. And does hypercard run on the classic OS on a iMac G3 or power Mac g5
Myst was the original escape room game.
It sounds like these guys were a blast to work for, really looking forward to obducted!
51:30 The Legend Himself
I was a little kid when this came out, and it scared me... I called it the scary game (or something like that) but I was old enough to appreciate riven when it came out, and by that time I had seen other people play myst and even though I still thought of it as the scary game, the graphics had made it look more and more unrealistic to the point of becoming cartoony in my mind... the march or graphics progress is striking.
I was 8 when I started trying to design games . A year later Myst came out and trying to figure out how to do everything they did became a life long obsession. Cyan made a masterpiece with HyperCard paired with creative hacks to get color(spent a whole summer figuring that one out) and clunky 3D primitives into wonderfully immersive experience .. trying to catch up for 23 years resulted in becoming an academic pariah, starving artist, unorthodox programmer and dangerously stubborn game designer.
I REGRET NOTHING!
Hey man, are you still making games? I'm trying to make a myst-style game too @pogo575
CazMatazz You do you boo. I’m happy as a clam.
I loved playing Myst. The Puzzles where great and i LOVED the world. Magic!
Oh and "L'ile mysterieuse" - one of my all-time fav books! Nice!
The audio on almost every GDC video cuts in and out every few minutes. I have no idea why this is a thing. You'd think a channel devoted to video game development would get this figured out.
This is the first one I’ve seen that’s this bad :/
Edit: I guess since this was 4 years ago, their audio may have improved since then
Thanks so much for this.
This should be made into a movie. The plot is deep enough and the modes of operation are interesting enough as well. Could rival harry potter if done right.
Great to watch this. Thanks.
God damn I remember my dad loving this game. It was my first video game I ever saw. I tried playing it and couldn't even figure out the first few puzzles when I was younger.
I felt kind of sad, at the ending, after I made the right choice. And I remember not trusting you know who and other you know who, near the end.
The character bits in Myst are some of the most memorable moments too.
I got quite shocked and happy for having made the right choice
The ending has not yet been written!
myst was in my opinion, one the most engaging game I have ever played.
I think sometimes an issue with postmortems is that the creators can identify what the problems are, but they miss where the problem comes from. Like, for the Myst series each of the issues they ran into came from poor workflow and corporate bureaucracy as opposed to creative and design limitations
So he makes a point about how they were very convinced that music wouldn't go well with Myst because they felt it would break the immersion, but then just goes "we included it and it worked". ??? I wish he would explain WHY it ended up working and why they had been wrong to not want to include music. Great video overall.
BuzzKill well because it just... fit. You can't really explain why a soundtrack can enhance an experience until you put it in and see how it works and sounds.
wow haven't seen this. Myst is a huge part of my life
did you read the surprisingly good books they wrote?
When he is talking about rendering and hiding what wasn't needed it brings me back to the "good old" days when I started out doing 3D.. aaaahhh... those where the times... (NOT) haha :)
Around 40:02, are they talking about the car-sub-thing in the Selinitic age? They thought that sucked? ?? I ***LOVED*** that thing!!! for once, it wasn't exclusively for color-sighted people! It was about sound, and it was MY THING!!! It was brilliant and I loved it. So there.
yeah. Fundamentally though, it was a very 'arbitary' solution to that puzzle. It wasn't well foregrounded that listening to sound was an important way to solve puzzles in that age
I've spent about an hour on this puzzle and I am STILL stuck XD Pls no hints though, I really want to finish this game without any hints or tutorials.
@@christianclark2748 Lol, we spent a lot more than an hour. In the end we ended up sticking 4 pieces of paper together to draw a map because we wouldn't have found our way otherwise. I think I still have that somewhere, hehe. We realized it was about sound but honestly with nothing else to orient it was a pain to navigate and remembering all where all the directions would lead to.
@15:50 It's nice to hear him acknowledge that.
Gosh, this is inspiring.
Collect, only the Red pages...
Because, if you're still paying attention to the comments, I am BEGGING you please make the color-coded puzzles have a secondary way of figuring them out. Not everyone can see color, and some of us love your games so much we play them anyway. But it takes us out of the world, to ask someone else for help with a color puzzle. Please help that part of your game be more "for everyone".
I'm a game dev, and I'm thinking about you colourblind folks out there! You're not forgotten!
i feel this way about musical-note puzzles. i can hear just fine, but i'm tone-deaf and cant identify notes and so these puzzles are always just trial-and error
@@onthefence928you can count the keys instead
The music was so good I bought the CD back then.
The movie he describes sounds like What We Do In the Shadows 🧛♂️
I love the art style they used in "The Manhole", I've also seen it in other very-early-90s stuff... does it have a name?
What's going on with the sound?!
When this came out I was probably too young to play it. I looked at it when my brother played it... played it for several hours... and was never able to get any of the things to work... and gave up. Tried to play it 10 years later... got lost again... gave up.
Hmm u dumn
There are two types of people in this world, those that finish Myst and tackle Riven and those that don't.
Thumbnail image is Riven, not Myst, and doesn't appear anywhere in this talk
was around 15 when Myst came out was hooked on the story.
51:30 Phil fish! I love Fez :)
51:31 Phil Fish?
"YOU PLAYED IT?"
Phil's still a douche. LOL
ControlCardPin eh people act like he's a douche but he's just like everyone else and doesn't sugar coat his opinions. Also he had to say his name because he wanted to tell the guy that he followed him on Twitter and it made his week.
This is an amazing talk. If only the sound weren't completely screwed up.
anyone think it's weird that the thumbnail for this isn't even from Myst?
Would love to know how they made the save game functionality In Hyper card i've tried for years in director no but had no success
Great talk, Miller seems like such a nice humble guy, it's just great hearing him explain Myst.
51:30 omg its Phil Fish
Weird.. audio cutting out at the most
Important moments, ooof.
Kind of annoying when the guy asks about the Bathysphere puzzle and the entire question and description of it is cut out 🤦♂️😂
Can someone please explain what is referred to at 39:33 "the bathosphere?" what is he talking about? I googled but can't find the puzzle they are talking about.
I think he's talking about the final puzzle in the Selentic age, the one where you're in the rocket-shaped thing going through the track-like maze with only sounds.
51:30 Phil Fish, the creator of Fez. Good stuff!
I feel like he's defending something that is a masterpiece. He doesn't need other people to validate the game because they already did.
It's called Humility: It's what differentiates people like Robyn & Rand from say someone like... Phil Fish. Phil Fish gave up because his ego couldn't be appeased. The creators of Myst created from a mindset of Humility, not thinking too highly of themselves, and thus benefited from the lack of self-destructive inhibitors.
At 13:20, that diagram says something about a prison on Myst island. Looks like it says "Gehn's Island." What is that? Did I miss something?!
Good catch not sure what that’s about - maybe they meant atrus’s prison? That’s where it ends
'If you look here, it's a drawing of a dungeon'
What? Is it behind the lightened scribbles of half visible lines?
I found it really moving when he said he wanted to know what would happen when you climb the vine but also wanted to know what happened when you climb down the manhole
Wow, Phil Fish turned out for the Q&A. TBH I miss that guy.
This is a question for the guy that left the comment that he used hypercard how did Cyan get their hypercard to make their game in color when they're mostly black and white. And I have a iMac G3 OS classic & a power Mac g5 well Hyper card run on that
its hard to imagine how it was then. My theory is that the internet and how much it is used everyday has decreased creativity in people. Back then e.g. the 90s you had to use your imagination as a kid every day. Because virutal visuals werent available. For an example when you played outside kids would make up their own games or use pieces of wood for a gun and you had to imagine what type of gun or whatever it is, everything was less accessible so you had to use your creativity. Desks were made for reading or doing some creative work, not just for laptops or computers to browse the internet. Scarsity always brings out creativity.
This is the one
"We took inspiration from literally everything..."
35:51 This slogon was too expensive to show it here ?
I never new there was a Zork II; I remember Zork though. "It is dark inside the cave. If you continue you are likely to be eaten by a grue." lol
This is extremely interesting hearing from one of the masters.... side-note: So Myst and Doom were both derived from Dungeons & Dragons... hehe seems like everyone was inspired by it. Everything creative existing today is Lord of the Rings and D&D...
In the Diablo Postmortem its mention too.
Oh, on the Deus Ex postmortem too. It´s quite remarkable.
Bought a Saga Saturn with Myst; spent 13 hours finishing it; took it back to the shop and exchanged it all for a PS1 with Tomb Raider!😬
Horrified to discover the graphics weren't rendered by the console! 😱😂
I don't like you. Why didn't you get Tomb Raider for the Saturn?
@@jeanlundi2141 It wasn't an option - at the time there were only a couple of games on the Saturn. It was a lot better built than the PlayStation though - seemed like VHS Vs BetaMax.
@@kaleygoode1681 So you are basically invalidating the whole of my childhood because I chose to stick with my Saturn?! Shame!! Shame!
@@jeanlundi2141 Neither came close to the joy of an Atari ST and Dungeon Master... I'm fact, I've struggled to appreciate any games since then... Portal was amusing and Band Hero was fun, although I had to grow a whole family to have a sufficiently captive audience to call a band, but I haven't touched a console since Minecraft went on the Xbox 🤔
I wonder if the ST is still in the loft...
He didn't age in 25 years.
What is he using for the presentation ?
Apple Keynote
The question about the bathysphere puzzle is that a reference to the first Myst game? Because the only puzzle that comes to mind is the one of Serenia in Myst IV.. Any fans that can explain that to me?
+Jonas Madsen Im pretty sure he's talking about the maze runner puzzle at the end of the selenitic age; the one where you had to use sounds to guide your direction.
+Sean Mair man, that was the only puzzle that really pissed me off. It was just such a slog
Yeah it was a bad puzzle and to err while navigating the maze was dreadful. And many players didn't even know when they were going the wrong way.
Audio issues are driving me crazy. I'm tempted to dislike this one because of quality but at the same time the content deserves a like. I guess I'll leave it blank :P
Good job flexing your entitlement on this 1st world issue: Make sure you spit on the peasants on your way out.
@@areeyajaidee4085 It's hardly a "1st world issue" if you're here to hear the guy talk and half of the sentences are chopped up. Why even leave this up if they don't care about us listening to it?
Whoever uploaded this video should give the source material to somebody who actually knows what they're doing, e.g. a 10 years old kid.
That guy from Untold got on my nerves. He interrupted to get his question called then laughed at Rand when he said Lucasarts wasn't on his radar. Maybe the laugh was good natured but after his interjection it felt condescending.
My father made me play this game as a child and he was geeking out more than I did about it. I personally loved the way it was rendered but hated how I couldn't actually.. see myself moving during transitions.. but wow what a game.
51:30 - Is this "that" Phil Fish?
Yes, definitely
Phil Fish, not being a douche while interacting with another human being. This talk was pretty good, plus it showed Fish before his ego inflated to enormous levels and turned him.
I dunno, this was 2013, I think he was already pretty notorious at this point. You can even hear the dude saying, "I played your game."
JACK WALLLLL
Terrible upload, lots of audio problems
Its from 2015, I am guessing those audio problems are present in the original file aswell.
You can even see that it's still a 4:3 aspect ratio, so its probably a reupload even.
Mateusz Kuta still watchable and grateful they uploaded it.
It keeps doing this "ummmm" sound for me...
+Auf Fidersson It's from 2013. TH-cam has been around since 2005. There is no good excuse for the shitty quality.
i bet it's been recorded from a livestream, and the issues were with the stream itself
I've seen a better resolution and better quality sound somewhere on TH-cam
Link me!
ok, I'm a MYST lover from way back , I'm sure with all the brainiacs in this world that "MYST" should be re released so I can play it again on wingows 10. along with "EXILE" and MYST II and "RIVEN" I still have my MYST .. T shirt , yeah , ok ....it doesn't fit antmore lol ............I miss these type of games so much , ....I can't be the only one
Honey, the Myst games are now available for Windows 10 on gog.com. :) realMyst: Masterpiece Edition is really good and everything you'd want in a Myst upgrade.
That's fantastic ,.......Thank you soooo much. You have made my day . Cheers
@@rondyson8323 Glad to hear it. Enjoy, and happy playing!
Interesting he not a gamer so much that if HyperCard didn’t exist he thought it be impossible. Love the game obviously but wish someone asked him about criticism of the technical prowess as gamers/reaction from gaming& development community. I guess the good 3D modeling shut them all down at the time
The only thing that’d make this video better is…dF,;______ould be awesome.