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Myst Obduction from Cyan (Myst, Riven)

Jaesun

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Not one single responce from my email I sent. :(

Oh well, by the time they fix this, It will probably be more optimized.... :M
 

KazikluBey

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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015
Well, I finished it. It took about 15 hours. I never got stuck; partly because there were usually other things to do while thinking over a puzzle. It never really got difficult, though. I enjoyed it, but it's not a hall of fame item.
 

Zarniwoop

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Finished it, only looked at a walkthrough once, to

activate the last bridge on Maray

Otherwise, pretty straightforward, logical and sensible puzzles. NOTHING like Myst in other words.

The story makes no sense and I'm sure stuff was cut out or rushed to meet kikestarter release dates leaving a broken mess. There are some books, notes etc scattered around but about halfway through they dry up and you're just focusing on opening up new areas and suddenly BOOM it's done and you're at the mind-boggling end that looks like it could make sense if it was tied to wtf actually goes on in the game. Disjointed is an understatement. This is literally how the story and backstory of the game plays out:

There are other races, the aquatic Villains that wear power armour, the Mofos that build annoying red laser beams everywhere (and one D20 of mass destruction) and the tiny Arai insects that built FUCKHUEG machines that they can't possibly operate for some reason. Each world/sphere thing has a tree. Their roots are all connected somehow through space and can serve as a portal once you water them. The Mofang planet is BTFO but the tree is still half alive and still works. Also there's a Brian Scorcher thing on Hunrath in the lake called a Bleeder. People are abObducted from different times and places and all arrive at the same time and place. It's also somehow connected to the trees and stuffies. Everyone was brought to this weird place and met each other through bigger versions of the seed swapperoos. For some reason they're supposed to fight for survival or something. Farley goes crazy and thinks she's fitter than everyone and rants about CW's battery. There was some plan to go back to Earth and some people had to remain behind. Some obvious alien is pretending to be the mayor of Hunrath and asks you to come and save him. You never see him again apart from a fuzzy video which then fades out. Never find out who or what he was or what his nefarious plan was. You find a half-dead villain trapped under a collapsed column. You can't interact with him. Also there is a silo full of frozen guys for some reason. What reason? Who the fuck cares, this is a Cyan game keep going. Water the last tree and the roots are all connected.

Blow up the bleeder, why? Because fuck you that's why. What does the bleeder bleed and why does it need to stop? Who cares? There's 2 endings:

1. Explodinate the bleeder with CW's "battery" plugged in. Teleport back to Earth and everything seems fine. Except OH MAH GAWD THERE's NOTHING LEFT, and Farley starts crying for some reason. Why is there "nothing left"? What happened? huh? Fuck you that's what. The buildings in the distance look a bit dilapidated and theres a big dust storm coming. Dust storm apparently consumes everything. The end.

2. Same thing but with the battery/water tower pugged out. All the spheres teleport to a new planet. All near each other. Farley is happy. Shit ends.

My facial expression was somewhere between

:what:

and

:abyssgazer:

The End.

Overall verdict:

Game is decent fun, graphics are good. Load times between worlds are atrocious especially when swapping and there are LOTS of them. Story makes no goddamn sense whatsoever. 2 endings, both equally baffling.

5/10 would WTF again.
 

KazikluBey

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Um, things would be a lot clearer if you bothered to pay attention.

Edit: But yes, you kinda have to look for and read and put a thing or two together. I can certainly see why one might reach the ending and not quite understand why things are happening.
 
Last edited:

LESS T_T

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Codex 2014
Sounds like sales are underwhelming. Well, it's not totally unexpected as there were a very few coverage and discussions about the game even around the release.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-09-28-theres-no-publisher-but-theres-no-publisher

Obduction is a triumphant celebration of everything which made the original so brilliant: the world building, the subtle story, the tooth-grinding puzzles. But co-founder and lead designer Rand Miller says the game's critical success has yet to translate to sales.

"Oh, it's nerve-wracking," chuckles Miller, laconically. "With any creative endeavour you feel like you pour your heart into something and you're going for a particular direction that you think will be accepted and you think people will appreciate but you never know until it's out there. I can imagine writing is the same thing, you finally get it done and tuned and tied up as best you can with whatever deadlines or money you have and then you put it out into the wild and then you just wait. So yeah, I remember when the first review came in that morning that we released, there was a sigh of relief. It was a fairly high rating and I said 'OK that's all, I just need one, I just need to know that one person appreciated it and I don't care if the rest are bad.' And then of course I changed my opinion because they started coming in good and then I have expectations that are higher at that point so I had to remind myself not to get greedy.

[...]I think the press and the reviews don't translate directly necessarily into sales, and because we're just a little indie shop who doesn't have any marketing - well frankly we didn't keep any of the money for marketing stuff - now we have to figure out what the next stage is. I feel with Obduction, like our other games, it might have some legs, it might be able to last a little longer than a trendy FPS but it's...we've got to figure out how to let people know about it. I just feel like there's not a lot of people that know about it necessarily. So that's the next step. By the way, I'm sure it's not unique to us, you can make an incredible product and [flop] unless people know about it. For an indie it's the problem we have with this wonderful equaliser of selling directly to the public. There's no publisher but...there's no publisher."

You can also read about their philosophy on puzzle design and storytelling at the interview. Here's a bit about how they intertwine puzzles and narrative:

Storytelling without storytellers

Obduction is much more than a series of puzzles, however interesting. There's a solid story running through the game, a story in notes and scraps of background information that must be pieced together to fully understand what has actually happened in the world of Hunrath. Because Cyan's games tend to eschew the easy out of extensive NPC exposition, Miller and his team have to ensure that the narrative is woven closely to both puzzle and environment.

"It's incredibly organic," he says of the process. "The way I've described it is that we have these three legs of the tripod that we design with: the environment, the actual place itself, what it looks like; we have the friction, which is the puzzles, what slows you down, what keeps you from getting everywhere immediately; and the story.

"Those three things, in our particular games we love it when those are balanced well. It doesn't mean a game is always better if they're balanced well. There are other games that weigh heavily on one leg or the other and they do fine because people are entertained in various ways but I think what we really like doing is balancing those three legs well.

"It's interesting to me because the way we design is related to the way I've done worlds since I was fairly young... it's very similar to children drawing treasure maps. I don't think I've ever used that particular analogy but that's just what comes to mind. I remember as a kid you'd want to draw a little map and X marks the spot of course where the pirates hid the treasure but it's a top down architectural mapping of space and it starts with that as a child. I remember playing Dungeons & Dragons when I was a kid.

I didn't particularly play that much, I wasn't enamoured with it completely, but I did want to make a world. I remember doing the same thing where I made a world in D&D and my world didn't require dice rolls and it had puzzles and friction and a castle that I basically took people through, but it was designed the same way. I started drawing a place that people were and it's as if the place revealed itself on a piece of paper the same way it would reveal itself to people who were exploring it, a little piece at a time.

"So it's an incredibly organic feeling and it's also incredibly work intensive. If your game mechanic is a shooter you've got this great simplified - well I don't want to over simplify it - but your mechanic is done. I have a weapon, I shoot a bad guy, I get more stuff, so I can get a better weapon and shoot more bad guys. That's a great achievement-oriented friction. Bad guys and weapons. But it's a known one, it's done, your game plays that way and now all you have to do is wrap a loose environment and storyline in there, but the point is killing the bad guys.

"We don't have that luxury. We can only loosely draw on the puzzles we've done before or people will think, 'They did the same puzzle they did in Myst or the same puzzle they did in Riven.' We have to try and give people some fresh puzzles along with the environments that feel like the puzzles belong and the story that's revealed when you get there. It's incredibly difficult to do and may be why not a lot of people do this kind of thing."
 

Crooked Bee

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Codex 2013 Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire MCA Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
AdventureGamers review: http://www.adventuregamers.com/articles/view/31338

4.5/5

The Good:
Large, astonishingly creative places to explore; delightfully offbeat soundtrack; the secret-dense plot gradually draws you in; many clever, multi-stepped puzzles.

The Bad:
Loading screens are (currently) overly long; the labyrinth is a form of purgatorial punishment.

Our Verdict:
Obduction is clearly not aimed at impatient gamers with older hardware. But Myst enthusiasts and exotic-world explorers will find a whole new stupendous universe to fall in love with, and fans of mind-bending challenges will find themselves in paradise… most of the time.
 

Zarniwoop

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Yeah that "labyrinth" (actually called the Gauntlet in-game) sucks donkey dick. So. Much. Loading.
 

LESS T_T

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Codex 2014
http://obduction.com/localization-updates-to-obduction/

Localization Updates to Obduction

Hi all,

We have received suggestions, comments, and changes to our localized files in Obduction since we released about a month and a half ago. While some languages were translated fairly well prior to release, we understand that there may be some mistakes here and there, and really do appreciate all of the suggested changes we’ve received from you all to remedy these problems.

In order to facilitate changes being brought in by the community to existing languages that Obduction supports, we are happy to announce that we are now officially accepting localization tickets on our helpdesk platform. We have a localization task force that will monitor all messages coming in with the intent to improve already existing language support in the game. Since we have limited resources, we do ask that all suggested changes sent in through our help desk platform are only for existing languages, aren’t complete rewrites of files, and are not changes based solely on individual preference of phrasing.

For those who would like to add an entirely new supported language in Obduction, we are also very excited to announce that we are opening up a crowdsourced effort just for that. We are using GitHub for all fan-contributed language support for the game, and ourObduction Fan Localization repository will be where you can submit your localized files for the new language. You are welcome to fork our repository and make a pull request into our main branch with your localized files (under the conditions found in the README). For those who aren’t familiar with GitHub but would like to contribute a new language for Obduction to support, please see our repository’s FAQ on how to contribute the files for your language. We chose to host all entirely new language contributions on a GitHub repository because before each new language support contributed is potentially brought into a future update to the game, anyone who already owns Obduction will be able to readily download someone’s contribution to the repository and use it within their copy of Obduction whenever they’d like.

We are also opening up a completely new subforum dedicated to discussing localization in Obduction. You can find it under our Obduction subforum on http://forums.cyan.com. Feel free to discuss changes submitted by yourself or others via GitHub in that subforum, languages you wish could be supported in Obduction, or small changes that some of you might be considering sending through our Helpdesk platform for already existing localized files. For those who would like a more direct discussion approach to Github submissions, you are also welcome to comment on pull requests that others make into the repository.

Please note that language contributions — whether it be a small change or a completely new language added — may or may not be included in an official update to Obduction. We will contact you directly if we wish to use your new language contribution in an official update to the game.

Thank you all so much for your continuous support, and we hope to work with you on improving localization support in Obduction!

– Hannah
 

Zarniwoop

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Shadorwun: Hong Kong
One of the mistakes is in English. The plot makes no fuckin sense, Hannah Montana
 

Jaesun

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Finally got my key! Had to go through HumbleBundles support, of which they were very fast to respond and help me with this. Much respect to you, Mr. Support dude. :salute:
 

Jaesun

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Played for about 30 minutes. Looks pretty. Happy to see it so far, follow the Myst like theme of just being plopped into a strange place and now just figuring out what all the places are, and what they do, I guess. The Hologram things were amusing too. Couldn't find a way into the house, so I guess I need to probably find some guys bunker. Fun so far.
 

Jaesun

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3 hours in so far. Still enjoying this. Made a ton of progress now. Now just have to figure out how the whole teleport areas work (not the spheres), and familiarize my self with the different areas. ugh. That's a bit confusing. :M
 

Zarniwoop

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I don't think I've ever seen a thread about a new game this quiet on the Codex.
 

Jaesun

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I was feeling so clever. Played around with that projector in the house, and I came up with a 6 digit number that made perfect logical sense to me. Run to the tower, plug the number in....

*BZZZZT!* WRONG!

:negative:
 

Zarniwoop

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How would you compare Obduction's quality of narration and puzzles to Riven and Myst games?

Puzzles - much easier and more logical. Although still more difficult than any other modern adventure games. I'd say challenging but fair. It's usually pretty obvious what you need to do but not immediately. You might walk past an object 10 times before you find a use for it, then suddenly it goes on like a lightbulb, so THAT'S what that thingamajig does. A LOT of backtracking and teleportation mind fuckery.

Narrative - terrible. About on par with the first Myst in terms of WTF level. End of Ages for example explained a lot of stuff and told backstories. This, not so much. In fact by the time you finish the game you will have only a vague idea what happened unless you read a wiki and or walkthrough extensively.
 

Boleskine

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https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction/posts/1717704

ef3f986716ace2abd4dafb2e1f67e268_original.png

Obduction VR Version
Obduction VR

For those of you anxiously awaiting the VR version of Obduction, we have some exciting news! The Oculus Rift VR update of Obduction will be widely available on October 31st - the 19th anniversary of Riven’s release!

But wait… there’s more!

We’ll be making Obduction for the Rift available on the Oculus Store for all Backers a few days before the official release date - on Friday, October 28th. If you helped back Obduction you'll get a notification on the 28th from Humble for an Oculus Store key. (Here is how to redeem the key.)

Obduction will be one of the most extensive VR games available! Obduction in VR is not just a demo or small slice - it’s the entire experience. This updated Obduction will allow you to choose how you want to explore - Rift or monitor. It's so exciting to be able to offer our newest worlds in such an immersive format! We hope you enjoy the experience.

Mac Update
We continue to make good progress on the Mac version. As Epic and Apple have helped out with our Mac endeavor it has become evident that Obduction works best with the latest versions of everyone’s software. There are numerous enhancements in MacOS Sierra and the latest Unreal Engine 4 update that clean up many bugs and improve performance, and more are coming. With that in mind it looks like a December time frame will allow us to include updates that Obduction will need for a good Mac version.

We also want you to be aware that we’ll be moving our QA focus to MacOS Sierra. What that means is that when the Mac version of Obduction is released it may work for you on previous versions of MacOS, BUT we’ll be limiting our support to Sierra.

We don’t want to minimize the cost involved in keeping your computers updated, but those of you who have been fans of Cyan for many years realize that our ability to provide evocative worlds has always been tied closely to current hardware, and the latest OS. Our very first game The Manhole required a hard drive when Macs mostly had floppy drives. It was updated to require a CD-ROM drive - one of the first games to require one. Myst required a newer Mac with color monitor, a CD-ROM drive, hard drive, and the latest OS to run QuickTime. And then Riven required a more powerful Mac and a newer OS than even Myst did.

With all that said, Rand plays Obduction on a late 2013 MacBook Pro - not exactly brand new, AND not exactly a gaming machine. We’ve done our best (with Apple and Epic’s help) to optimize and make Obduction work on older hardware, and we hope your older system will work as well.

Thanks for your support!
 

Aenra

Guest
O.K., before i say anything, will freely admit i'm just.. not into adventures anymore i think. Just so you know :)

- The graphics made me think it's a Unity game (which it is not, it's Unreal).. too flashy, too intense, too bright, too damn colorful. And an eyesore to boot. If i was meant to find anything pleasing in terms of aesthetics, well i wasn't allowed to.
- The FPS/performance made me think it's a Unity game.. this rig right now, you literally can't get anything better, in any component. And yet oops, mini pause, area loading; mini pause, yet another mini area loading; and so on. This despite the fact that most of my cores were asleep and the GPU didn't even find a need to start its fans. Good coding is good coding i guess. It breaks muh immershun, this semi-freezing every odd second.
- The musical soundtrack was cheesy, cliche and so stereotypical (insert 'awe' piece before exposition to 'element a', timed just so) that i killed the music and thanked me for it. Bad start. Sound effects were great though, better than games of much higher budget.
- Dear Esther squared. I walked and i walked and i walked and i walked some more and during all this walking, i did at least have time to think of my dog, other half, the life i've led, my high school sweetheart, that i should shave and what i'm gonna cook tomorrow. I guess that's a bonus.
- For a studio of such past acclaim, i was sorely disappointed. Nothing to grab me, nothing to captivate me in those first and so important minutes. Drab, monotonous scenery with nothing going on/engaging/dynamic in it; just me and these boots were made for walking. So much walking. Should remember to drop by Pete's later on, maybe after i've shaved.

At that time (20 minutes in give or take), i happily uninstalled. Maybe it's excellent, i just don't give a fuck anymore.
Many thanks to katcr.co for assisting in my acquiring a demo. This review would not have been possible without it.
 

Boleskine

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https://adventuregamers.com/articles/view/32583

cyan-fp1__big.jpg

Rand Miller – 30 Years of Cyan Worlds (Part 1) interview
Written by Ingmar Böke — June 8, 2017


In April of 1987, brothers Rand and Robyn founded a small game development studio. It’s probably safe to say that not even in their wildest dreams would they imagine becoming industry superstars just a few years later, releasing a game that would sell more than six million copies. Of course, the brothers in question are the Millers, the game is Myst, and Cyan the studio behind it. While Robyn left to pursue other interests, and the company went on to experience other rises, falls, and rises again, Cyan and Rand Miller are still going strong three decades after the studio’s humble founding, most recently having released the critically acclaimed Obduction in 2016. To celebrate 30 years of Cyan Worlds, I caught up with Rand on Skype for an in-depth discussion of the company’s past, present and future. As it turned out, there was so much to talk about that we’ve decided to split the interview into two parts. In the first installment, Rand takes us back to the early days as he reminisces about how a pop cultural phenomenon was born.



Ingmar Böke: Hi Rand. It’s a pleasure to welcome you back to Adventure Gamers to celebrate Cyan Worlds’ 30th anniversary. That’s very impressive – congratulations!

Rand Miller: Hi Ingmar. It’s amazing, thank you so much! It’s dates like this that make me realize just how long I’ve been in this industry. It’s amazing to have been doing this for 30 years. I never thought, back before we started, that I’d even get to make games for a living. It has its ups and downs, but, boy... it’s been great for 30 years!

Ingmar: What were you doing before you got into the game industry, and how did you turn into a developer?


An unusually camera-shy Rand Miller

Rand
: I actually got into games at a fairly young age. When I was in junior high, a family friend took me to a computer center at a university nearby, and I played my first computer game. As soon as I played it, I was hooked. It was like magic: here was a computer responding to my commands. You know, it was just a terminal, but I was hooked. Of course, at the time I didn’t think you could do that for a living. But you could program, so I went into programming, took a couple of years of college, and then got a job at a bank, doing programming in data processing. I worked there for ten years, and while I was doing this, my brother and I got started in our spare time. Easy enough hours at the bank would allow me to experiment with certain things on the side as well. Then in many ways full circle, I fulfilled my dream of making computer games for a living, which is something I never thought would happen.

Ingmar: Your first game, The Manhole, was released for Macintosh in 1988. It’s interesting to look at it today. It’s a game for children, but you can find elements in there that you can also find in Myst. You took things further later on, of course, but it’s not an entirely different thing.

Rand: Yes, I absolutely agree! I think that probably the most revolutionary thing we did was The Manhole, and this may seem weird to anyone who knows it. We were thinking a bit differently for that product; it kind of set the stage for what we would do. The Manhole was kind of revolutionary, and from there everything was evolutionary, and you’re absolutely right! When I look at the early Manhole scenes… you know, there’s a ship that looks remarkably similar to the ship off at the dock in Myst, and the way you wonder around… The Manhole set our direction, and I think we just spent years trying to hold that and maybe get better at what we were doing.

Ingmar: When you started outlining the concept for your first game, what did your early ideas look like, and what were you trying to accomplish with The Manhole?

manhole_ship__medium.jpg

Hmmm... this ship from The Manhole (Masterpiece Edition) looks familiar

Rand
: Well, it’s interesting. I think with The Manhole in particular, it was much broader strokes; I don’t think we ever laid anything out. There was a new platform called HyperCard on the Mac, and I just had my first daughter. In my mind, children’s software was severely lacking. It cost a lot of money, and there was little or no work of imagination in it. So I wrote a letter to my brother and said, “we should try to do children’s software that’s unique and takes advantage of what HyperCard would do.” In my mind, it was more like an interactive book, where you’d click on things, and they’d become alive, and where you’d experiment with each page, and then you’d turn the page to go on with the story.

I presented that to Robyn a couple of times because he is an incredibly talented artist and musician. He drew a manhole – we had little or no planning – and then he drew a fire hydrant in the background, and thought of it as kind of a first page in the book. Then he drew the next picture with the manhole cover moved off, and the vine coming up out, and then another picture looking up the vine. And very quickly, there was no desire to turn the page because this was not just a page in the book, it was a world that started to define itself. In the early days, with The Manhole in particular, it was very eclectic, because one thing would lead to another just based on whatever whim might come to mind for Robyn. I would get these pictures, put them together, and try to add some additional interactivity to them, but it was kind of a brain dump of imaginative areas to a certain extent. (both laugh)

Yeah, it all worked and tied together, and we made a small version of it first called The Fire Hydrant, which fit on one floppy disk. But then we quickly realized that the fun of this space was when it became larger, when there was more area to explore, and it started to feel more real. It was really strange at the time, but we made the world much bigger onto five floppy disks. The Manhole required a hard drive to play, and that was somewhat extraordinary for the time, as hard drives were just starting. But anyway, it was a nice start, and I’m very thankful it set us on this unique path.

Ingmar: Showing The Manhole to your daughter for the first time must have been a very special moment.


Printed pages of all the images in The Manhole
Rand
: Oh yeah! She was two or three at the time. I don’t even know if she remembers; it would be interesting for me to talk with her about it. I was amazed by how quickly she picked up the mouse on the Macintosh, and she was immediately mapping on the screen, and drawing, and clicking. So, you had this world that started making sounds, and I think we even at some point recorded her voice when we needed to get the voice stuff in. It was very satisfying making The Manhole, and I have to say that I think what we ended up with was to a certain extent what we were looking for.

I belonged to a computer club at the time, and I took The Manhole to the club, thinking it was a children’s game, but the adults were enamored with it. Robyn and I both realized, I think, that any good children’s book or movie or TV show is good enough that it’s also evocative to adults as well. So, I think it was at that point when we realized, “hey, this worked out well; we did something good for a start!” Like I said, it was all an experiment, and not very well documented ahead of time (laughs), but it was a great way to get things going.

Ingmar: The next project, Cosmic Osmo, was released in 1989. What comes to your mind when you look back on it?

Rand: Probably a good way of looking at it is, at least from a production point of view, if Manhole is Myst, then Cosmic Osmo is Riven. (laughs) I think we had learned enough with The Manhole, and had enough of a budget and motivation, that we thought, “oh, we can do this much better! We can do something that’s much more cohesive, has little bits of story in it, and has much more interesting interactive elements, because we’ve learned how to do that more, and we could weave them together in a better, more deliberate way.” Cosmic Osmo for that reason holds a special place in our hearts, because it was a labor of love. It was taking everything that we had learned, and experimented with, and making something special for us. Especially the extended version, Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds beyond the Mackrel, just felt big, and magical, and it felt like you could just go on forever, and it wrapped around on itself in really intriguing ways, and it would surprise you sometimes with the interactivity.


Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel

I remember some of the interesting stuff was you had your hand cursor on the screen you would click with, and in several locations we decided we could play with that, and we would actually animate your hand as if you had moved it to the spot. I remember, maybe when it was hot, your cursor hand would just go off on its own without you moving because we heated it up. I love those. I think those were some of my favorites, where it was kind of unexpected. A lot of fun activities and things to put together in Cosmic Osmo. It stands out, I think, as one of our favorites!

Ingmar At the time you were working on ideas for an older audience called The Gray Summons. You pitched it to Activision in 1990, and I’ve heard Robyn stating they told you to “keep doing games for children!”, which must have been a great motivation. (both laugh) What did your ideas for The Gray Summons look like, and how much of Myst was in there already?

Rand: There was very little of Myst in that game, other than the fact that Robyn and I looked at it as a world for an older audience. We thought we had taken on enough in Cosmic Osmo that we could build an even more cohesive story, something that as you got into it, you realized you were playing a part in. Cosmic Osmo, as much as it was well thought-out, and well designed, it was still whimsical enough to feel very eclectic. Gray Summons was our attempt to say, “wait a minute, we can make it feel as if you’re going into another world for a reason.”

randr__medium.jpg

A younger Robyn and Rand Miller, more than 20 years ago
We didn’t get very far along that path, but I think it set us on a mindset, and we knew that we would eventually get back to that. Gray Summons was gonna be hand-drawn because at the time we presented it, there weren’t really the tools to do pre-rendered graphics on home computers, so Robyn was gonna draw all of them individually. It would have been interesting, but it’s probably good that it didn’t take off, and it served us well to wait a little longer, and to get better at what we were doing.

Ingmar: Fortunately, not too long went by until someone asked you to go in that direction. In 1991, you were contacted by the Japanese company Sunsoft, and were asked if you wanted to make a game for an older audience for them. How did that whole thing come about?

Rand: Oh boy, I tell you what: Software industry is difficult, and making games is very difficult. Even as Robyn and I were having some success, kind of bootstrapping this little company of ours, we were working with Activision, and they declared bankruptcy, so for Cosmic Osmo they just didn’t send royalty checks because, you know, they were going through some legal process. With all that was going on, we always knew that moving forward there were two things we wanted to do. One was something slightly more educational, and the other was something for an older audience. When Gray Summons didn’t work out, we changed publishers, and did Spelunx with Brøderbund.


Spelunx and the Caves of Mr. Seudo
It was a smaller project, but it was also a good way to stretch our abilities a little more. It had some interesting aspects to it, some customizable areas that you could explore down in caves. But anyway, all that is just to say that we were evolving further and further, and then at some point we were contacted by Sunsoft, which was a Japanese company that had seen The Manhole, and I think Cosmic Osmo as well. They had been trying to get in touch with us for years, but our publisher – I think it was Activision at the time – refused to give them our information. (laughs) Anyway, they managed to look it up on their own, and to find us, and we started a very long, and very wonderful relationship with them.

It was kind of interesting because Robyn and I were ready to do something for an older audience, but we also knew it was going to be more expensive, and weren’t sure exactly what it was. Multimedia was the buzz word of the day, and CD-ROMs were just on the edge of starting to roll out, and people were starting to put content on CD-ROMs. It was interesting for us to look at this new technology, and it felt the same when we looked at other new technologies… we looked at hard disks for The Manhole and even color for Spelunx; we were always trying to make our worlds more interesting. With the CD-ROM, it meant that our worlds could be larger.

I specifically remember Sunsoft saying, “we want you to make something for an older audience. This is gonna be good, right? As good as The 7th Guest, right?” Everybody knew about The 7th Guest; that was the hot title coming out. Robyn and I looked at it, and we said, “whoa, it’ll be different, but sure! It’ll be what we do, though. It won’t be like what they’re doing; we’ll just expand on what we do!” So, we wrote them this proposal – fairly unprofessional and very short. (laughs) It had lots of maps in it, and there wasn’t a lot of description. We gave them the budget, and, you know, they hedged a little with the budget, and we said, “well, we’re just gonna take that much!” Well, it ended up taking twice as much, but long story short: we started designing and building it.


For many years, the best-selling PC game of all time
I remember one day having a conversation about, you know, “this is a game for an older audience – should we stray from what we do, and make it so that you die, and have to start over?” We decided not to, and we realized that if you didn’t start over, we had to add other kinds of friction, and the world would have to be very large, because – without starting over – you had to give people plenty of gameplay for their money to make them satisfied. So, all those things kind of congealed into what became Myst. It was a grand undertaking for us with, it was very heady times, and we always designed it thinking that it would appeal to a broad audience, younger teenagers all the way up to an older audience. But we were shocked by the sales, and that it reached such a broad audience. We were dreaming about sales of 100,000 units – that would have been a big hit in the day. We would have been very satisfied to get that number, and then we started getting millions, which is hard to fathom.

Ingmar: One thing I’ll always remember is how Myst starts: that short intro sequence which puts you into the game world directly, enhancing this feeling of, “what the heck is going on here? Where am I? What am I doing here?” Was there much discussion about how the game would start?

Rand: There was some discussion, and I think from our point of view, we never wanted to give very much information. We wanted it to feel like… like basically you had just found this book. Early on in our discussion, I think, we were going to define it as you found it in an old book store in Europe. There was more detail, and then we just got away from that. That wasn’t the important part, the important part was you – not a character but you – found this book, touched it, and then this portal took you to this other place. We made the whole game without the intro sequence, and then we discussed what the intro would be.

We had started coming up with some storylines of what came before Myst as we were designing the game, but it was very little detail. But we knew, by the time that we were getting towards the end, that the art of writing would be a part of this; this father being trapped, and he had this book that somehow ended up in the player’s hands. So we wrote this vague statement that was not meant to inform. We always thought that cinematics were very artificial motivators, that people didn’t really get motivated by a big long cinematic opening or a cutscene opening. They just wanted to get into the game, and so we kept it very vague and short, knowing that it would give us the possibility of getting to where the book came from later. But that wasn’t the important part of the story; the important part was getting onto the dock, and getting into the story.

Ingmar: Another thing I remember fondly is also related to that feeling of, “what’s going on here? Why is this puzzle here? Why can’t I solve it? Is it even a puzzle?” After I started exploring, putting more and more pieces together, there was an immense feeling of satisfaction when I was able to solve puzzles because I started to understand how certain things were connected.

Rand: Yeah, different people are satisfied and entertained in various ways, but there is something about problem-solving that’s innate to human nature. No matter where we come from or what our background is, when there’s a problem that seems vast and we start to unravel it, get the pieces of it, and when we put them together, and solve the problem… I think we have evolved in a way that’s given us this necessary pleasure response to that because the people who do that are the ones that, basically, make humanity move forward in grand ways. So we’re kind of playing on that problem-solving pleasure response. I’d love to say that we planned all that, but I think we were just going on instinct, and experimenting with everything we had learned on the previous projects.

There were some things we were deciding that we felt like, “this is good, this feels like people might like it!” We played it even as a D&D [Dungeons & Dragons] version early on with a couple of people, and as we got places built, we would play with other people, and watch what they did, and we were getting great responses. People were talking about the very thing you just mentioned, that feeling of achievement and satisfaction of having figured out something that you initially thought was unsolvable. You had no idea how those things would fit together, but if you pursued them a bit, and had a little patience, you could do it. To this day, those are still the puzzles we go for. I love the ones especially where you solve it and not only do you get a sense of satisfaction, but also a revelation of information, and you realize, “oh, I see how the world works now, and this will serve me moving forward, too.” Those are great moments, and we would love to do more of them, but they’re also the hardest to achieve as well.


A D&D dungeon from Rand Miller was later incorporated into Myst's Mechanical Age

Ingmar: Another thing that always fascinated me about Myst is that it was created by world-building brothers who created a game containing world-building brothers…

Rand: (laughs) It’s so funny looking back because, honestly – and Robyn may remember differently – but as much as it was parallel, I don’t think we realized it at the time. In fact, when we started Myst it wasn’t even going to be books, and they weren’t going to be making worlds, and it was just going to be portals to other places, but the story kind of wrote itself as we went on. And I think the reason there were two brothers is because we knew with our budget we weren’t going to be able to hire actors, so it would be us who would play those characters. So, a lot of things kind of dribbled out of that, but there were a lot of things in Myst that started to almost be a parallel to the real world. The fact that you write these books, and then we developed this whole system of how they would write these books, and that was almost like what we felt we were doing: we were making these worlds, and we started to love how all that stuff fell into place.

Ingmar: Something that’s very interesting about the success of Myst is that it happened in different waves; it wasn’t an overnight thing. Please guide us through that process.


It was no small feat to fine-tune Myst, as this list of testing notes from Cyan can attest
Rand
: Sure! The Macintosh version came out first because that’s the one we had worked on. Brøderbund was the publisher of the PC version, so when the Mac version was released, Brøderbund was working on the PC version. The Macintosh version came out, and there wasn’t a huge Macintosh base but nevertheless, the response was good. We got a chance to start seeing the response online. It was funny because we had dial-up modems at the time, and we were curious, so Robyn would go into AOL, and I would go into CompuServe, and we would go into the gamer forums there to see what people were thinking of Myst. Generally, the response was very positive, there were these great remarks, people saying “this is a unique thing” or “this is really different”, and it was great for us because it was satisfying to see that some people were getting what we had made, and it wasn’t falling flat.

But this also opened the opportunity for us to discuss things with the critics as well. There were a few people who were saying: “I don’t get this, I don’t see what it is”, and we would hold an open discussion with them and say, “hey, I’m one of the creators. What is it that you’re not getting? Can we talk about it?” You know, we were honestly trying to figure things out, thinking, “maybe we can do this better or learn something from it.” It had a great response because people online realized that the creators were paying attention. Those people who had only tried it briefly or thought, “well, I don’t really get this,” I think they were motivated to give it another shot, and a lot of times they would change their minds.

I think the initial response was a really nice wave of positive feedback. Myst was a slow burner. It was not well advertised, but it just kept selling, getting bigger and bigger, little by little, and it started to branch out of the normal channels that computer games were sold; you know, the computer stores, and the Hastings in the United States or some places you would go to buy your computer games, and it started being in more general media outlets.

Ingmar: I remember reading that one of the earlier reviews was in Rolling Stone magazine.


Love it or hate it: the revolutionary Myst
Rand
: Yeah, that was crazy for my brother and I. I mean, that just doesn’t happen! It was amazing, and we were blown away and humbled by all the response, but I think it had a little bit of a backlash. I think gamers at the time felt like they were an elite group. Like I said, 100,000 units would have been a great number for us at the time, but then Myst started branching out into a much larger group of people, and started hitting the mainstream. I think gamers felt a little like they were losing control of the niche, and something was bringing the masses into this cool little club that they had. As anybody knows when that happens, you build up a little bit of resentment or the inner circle starts to push back a bit. It happens with music, it happens with movies. Especially now with the internet, when you think you’re onto something special, it’s kind of cool when it’s a small group that only you know about, but as it becomes larger it doesn’t feel so elite anymore, so people leave it behind. But to be honest with you, the wave was so large that I think it minimized any kind of a backlash from the gamers. As we all know now, the game industry was basically being created; it was becoming what we know today instead of a niche group.

Ingmar: There are probably very few games that have had a parody made about them; I’m not even sure if there are any others besides Myst. That’s quite a compliment, I’d say. How did you feel when Pyst was released in 1996?

Rand: (laughs) Oh my goodness! First of all, it was exactly what you said. We were like, “wait a minute, somebody is making a parody of our game?” We couldn’t believe it – it was hilarious! Honestly, though, and I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone this, there were two things that drove me crazy. The first thing was how small it was. I think there were 10 images or something like that, and I was like, “WHAT??? They only have 10 images, and they’re charging this amount of money for it? How can they do that???” The second thing was: “And HOW did they get [actor] John Goodman to do this???”

Ingmar: That’s why they only had 10 images!

Rand: (laughs) They spent all the money on John Goodman… (keeps on laughing). It was funny that the parody actually had a much better actor than what we had in the real game – that always struck me as so strange! But, yeah, we loved it! We have a copy of it to this day in our vault. You know, it’s one of these things that we stashed away as reminders of all those years.



So ended our discussion of Cyan’s early years, but stay tuned for part two of our interview with Rand, covering the time from Riven to present day, plus a peek at what's ahead!
 

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Rand Miller – 30 Years of Cyan Worlds (Part 2) interview
Written by Ingmar Böke — June 9, 2017

In the first part of my Skype interview with Rand Miller, the legendary game designer talked about the highs and lows that Cyan experienced during the company’s early years, leading to the enormous success story of Myst. There was far more to come after that, however, and this time around Rand takes us through the additional ups and downs encountered between the development of Riven and present day. And while a 30-year anniversary is certainly a great reason to celebrate such an illustrious history, as you’re about to find out, it seems as if the story of Cyan Worlds is far from being over!



Ingmar Böke: What were the most important lessons the development of Myst taught you when it came to the impact on developing the sequel Riven, as well as the updated versions of Myst that followed throughout the years?

Rand Miller: In every product we made, we learned lessons. Myst again felt like an experiment for us, and Robyn would agree with that, we both talked about that; we didn’t really know what we were doing, we were just continuing to evolve our craft that we had worked on. This time it did feel, though, that we had reached some kind of an interesting level, a plateau that pushed it somewhere else with Myst. I think what we started looking at was a lot of things that we did right, but we were still young, and still experimenting, so I think we jumped right into Riven without really dissecting at that point what was good, and what was bad.

We just said, “well, we did it with Myst, let’s jump in and start drawing the maps for Riven”. We knew approximately where the story went, and we started design on it very quickly. So, I think after Riven is when I personally feel like I learned some lessons with regard to game design. It was funny because people asked us what the puzzles were gonna be like in Riven, and we said that the two critiques we heard on Myst were that the puzzles were too easy, and that the puzzles were too hard, so we told everybody that we would fix that in Riven. (both laugh)

Ingmar: Pretty ambitious!


Riven's puzzles got harder... boy, did they get harder!
Rand
: (still laughing) It was! I think the way we looked at it, though, was with Riven we were going to start easier with the puzzles; we were going to try to get people immersed easier, and try not to put too much friction at the beginning. But then – towards the end – we were going to ramp it up, and we were going to give you some big challenges. I think after Riven we realized there were some pretty difficult ones at the end there; the fire marble puzzle was definitely a biggie as far as people telling me, “yeah, I got all the way through, but didn’t get that one” or, “that was the only one I had to get a hint on.” So, we learned from that, you know, you’ve got to balance.

I think there were a couple of things we did that, looking back, now I like what we did in Myst better than Riven, and that was that we separated the worlds out in Myst very distinctly, and made them very self-contained, so that you didn’t feel like you had to go to another world to complete this world. You just knew, “I have to find a page, and I have to find a book home.” You knew your goals, they were defined well, you did it, and you got on with the next world, and I think that was wonderful. I think it worked well, I think it set up Myst for some very satisfying experiences as far as gameplay friction goes. Riven did disperse things, where you might feel like you’ve got to go to a completely other island – at one point you even did with where the trap and where the frog was.

To be honest with you, making these adventure-type games is very difficult because – we’ve learned this lesson, too – we don’t have a game mechanism. Adventure game makers don’t have a game mechanism they can just plug in again. You can’t just say, “oh well, we’ll use the clocktower puzzle, and we’ll just give it another skin.” You can’t just do that – unlike, say, a shooter. We all know what you do in a first-person shooter: You have a weapon, you kill a bad guy, you increase your weapon rate, so you can kill a bigger bad guy. It’s not a bad game mechanism, it’s a great game mechanism, but it means that at least for somebody designing a shooter they have that part done. We have to be creative with every step along the way. It would be great for us if we could say, “hey, Myst worked really well, the way we put all those puzzles into the worlds worked well, let’s just do that again,” but you can’t do that – you have to be fresh, and you have to be unique. It’s a real challenge, and I think it’s why this particular genre is hard at every step along the way!

Ingmar: I still remember being a teenager, reading a German magazine called PC Joker, which had a very positive review of Riven sometime in 1997. Until this day, I remember looking at the screenshots in that magazine over and over again, thinking, “I’ve never seen something like this before!” The visuals simply blew me away. The funny thing is… when I look at the game in 2017, it still looks great!


Riven set an even higher bar with its photo-realism than its acclaimed predecessor

Rand
: (laughs) Yeah! Honestly, I think Riven was definitely a hard threshold to beat with regard to pre-rendered images. What we were going for with Riven was photo-realism. We were taking all of the resources that Myst gave us, and we bought the equipment that Hollywood used, and we bought the software that Hollywood used, we used everything we could to make those images as convincing as we could. Once you get to photo-realism, it’s hard to get past that, so I think they hold up. To this day, you look back and think, “wow, that looks like a real place!”, and that’s hard to beat.

So the only place to go after that is, “well, ok… what if they’re not still pictures anymore?” You know, we had stayed away from real-time 3D up to that point because it was not able to do the kind of quality we wanted, but that was the direction – at least from my point of view; Robyn went on with his own stuff – but in my mind it was like, “whoa, I can make the worlds even more real now because real-time is starting to approach.” I mean, there were other tricks as well, but yeah, it’s interesting, I feel the same way about Riven when you look back at those pictures. We have some hanging in our office, and wow, these are still gorgeous!

Ingmar: You worked on Riven for quite a few years, and it was a huge project. It’s no secret the development was quite stressful. Please tell us a bit about that aspect. I guess when you finished Riven you probably felt like, “I’ll never do another game in my whole life!”

Rand: (laughs) Yes! To the best of our best knowledge it felt like what it must feel like for a woman to give birth. When we finished the game, people asked us, “hey, are you gonna do another one?” It’s probably not the best time to ask a woman if she’s gonna have another baby immediately after she just had one. (both laugh) She might need some time to forget about the pain. But yes, it was grueling, Riven was intense! And it was an internal pressure; we were setting the bar high for ourselves, and we had plenty of resources to push hard, so it was long hours, a huge team, lots of expenses for renders and equipment that didn’t work, models that were too complex and had to be broken down, movies that weren’t rendering a certain frame… the logistics were crazy, and there were many people who were part of that team who would tell you it was very intense pulling that off. When we were done, it was a good time to take a breath after that!

ngmar: Another difference between the development of Myst and Riven is that – due to the success of Myst – there was a lot of external interest in the development of the sequel. There also was a huge marketing campaign. How did you feel about all of that?

Rand: It was interesting, and my life is still that way to a certain extent. I have a fairly normal life in Spokane, Washington, and we’re not in any kind of a major metropolitan area. We have a great city here, so I live a normal life, but when I went to PAX East in Boston, there’s people who know Myst, and they know me, and it always seems odd when they’re interested, and they want to talk about it. I love it, though. It’s intriguing, and it’s enough of a diversion from my everyday life that it feels exciting. I think there were parts of that with Riven that felt the same way. It was exciting to have magazines ask us these questions, wanting to know what we were doing, and how it was gonna work.

I think the most frustrating aspect of it was – and this is the most frustrating aspect to this day – our worlds are like treasure maps that give up their secrets very reluctantly. That’s part of the game, and we don’t want you to see those treasures before it’s time, but marketing, magazines, and nowadays with the internet… they all feed off those secrets. Even for Riven I remember clearly the marketing department for the publisher saying, “you know, we need 50 still images of Riven,” and Robyn and I looked at each other going, “Noooo! What in the world??? This is not that type of game!” We had to negotiate with them over how many images they were allowed to have, and we tried our best to keep a real lid on those. No sooner than we would give them 10 images that they would give out to various press people as an exclusive, they would come back a week or two later, saying, “ok, we need 10 more!” and we were like, “wait!!!” (both laugh) It happens to this day, you know, and it’s the necessary evil. It’s just harder with our games because we do want to tease people, we do want them to see what they’ll be able to look at, but we don’t want to give away our secrets. Yeah, so it’s a balance, and it started with Riven. It was the first time we had ever experienced that.

Ingmar: Please give us an idea of Riven’s budget numbers – also in comparison to the numbers of Myst.


Cyan is nestled in the scenic woods of Washington
Rand
: Well, I’ll give you general numbers because the specifics were lost over the years. Myst probably ended up being under a million, probably $700,000, $800,000, something like that. That’s pretty specific, I guess. I remember because Sunsoft didn’t give us enough, and so we just found another way to get money, and spent our own money on the other parts that needed to be done. But then, of course, Myst’s success filled our coffers, and there were millions of dollars. Now, with all that said, I think one thing people don’t realize is that the publisher got 85% of proceeds, and we got 15%. It sold millions of copies, but the publisher made the most of the money. I’m not complaining; we certainly got plenty. We got enough to build ourselves a building [the Cyan Worlds headquarters], and we got ourselves enough to buy a house, and I think I paid off my first car sometime around there, but mostly we put the money back into the company, and into Riven. We bought SGI servers because that’s what Hollywood was using, we bought Softimage Software because that’s what Hollywood was using, and we knew what they [DreamWorks] were using to make Jurassic Park, and we were gonna use the same equipment to do Riven because to us it was every bit as important being realistic as that was. So, to answer your question, the budget for Riven was probably somewhere between 5 and 10 million. That’s a really rough estimate because, honestly, Ingmar, I don’t know if we have ever gone back and added it all up. We just kind of put it in the bank, and spent it on Riven for a large part.

Ingmar: In any case, it was a lot!

Rand: It was a lot! These days, it’s not a lot, but back then, it was certainly the most that people would spend on a game. I have to say it’s good and bad having that kind of luxury because it’s amazing how much your perspective on what you’re making is controlled by your resources. Myst was a shoestring budget, so we had to work with that, and we did what we did with that shoestring budget, and it was good for that. Riven had a massive budget, but at some point there’s diminishing returns. You know, a screw-head can only be so realistic, and at some point you don’t want to work on it anymore. I’m exaggerating, obviously, but it definitely gave us the opportunity to really focus on details that we had never been able to focus on before.

Ingmar: It is well known that Robyn let the company after you did Riven. What kind of impact did that have on the company and yourself?

Rand: You know, I don’t know if it had a huge impact, given the fact that I was the one who kind of always wanted to make games, and Robyn was someone who was very talented in a lot of different ways. You know, he liked to write music, books, stories, and he created artworks. It seemed natural for him to want to expand his boundaries a bit. So, he just went into all those different areas. He did an album, he started writing a book – I don’t think it ever came out, but it was good for him because it was something he wanted to do – he did a film… so he’s done all those things over the years that were part of his creative fever. And I got to essentially take the next step in what I considered to be my evolution of making games as well, and I think it worked out. You know, working closely with your brother… working closely with anyone, is not easy, and there’s friction points that you have, and Robyn and I certainly had our friction points over the years. Riven was so intense that it kind of amped those up a bit, but some of the stories that I heard about those issues afterwards were definitely exaggerated, and we continued to chat over the years.

Ingmar: Before we have a closer look at the next huge project you were about to tackle, I’d like to talk about Myst III: Exile and Myst IV: Revelation for a moment. Since both games were not developed by Cyan Worlds, was it difficult to watch someone else work on the franchise?


Presto's Myst III: Exile
Rand
: You know, we had always said that we would not do another Myst. The story was told, Riven kind of wrapped it up, and it was good. We moved onto what we considered not to be Myst, but its larger universe, and what we were taking on as a company was a large, large project. Interestingly, where we found ourselves at one point was, “this is our passion, we want this large, massive world that’s going to continue forever, and it’s going to take a lot of funding.” Then, suddenly, a publisher comes to us and says, “hey, someone wants to do a Myst game. It’s Presto Studios, they’ve got a great idea for it, and we’ll pay you to license those rights.” That’s very tantalizing because in order to fulfill what my passion was, I need resources, and if somebody wants to do a good job with my other stuff, that may help me to get done what I’d like to do. So we decided, “ok, we said we would never do this, but let’s take a look to see what they think the story would be, and make sure it doesn’t infringe on anything in the larger story, so that it’s just a little side-story.” And I think that, honestly, the way we looked at it was that in our minds – and I don’t think this is true – it’s been in this category of fan-fiction, and it wasn’t necessarily canon to us. We were kind of going, “yeah, it will fit in as a side-story, it doesn’t really affect our main story, it’s not gonna hurt anything, so we should let that happen!”

As we went on, Exile was wonderful; it pushed the technology in ways that were intriguing, you could look in any direction, the animations were good, it felt like it was a really nice step, and I think we felt like it was successful in continuing the Myst story but not trampling on any portions that we thought we wanted to hold close. But it also provided us resources to continue our large development, which was very exciting. So, yeah, it worked out – despite our initial response, which was kind of a heady and artistic thing like, “No, you can’t touch our work!” In the end, I think a lot of the work that was done was done well, and worked for all of us.

Ingmar: Let’s move on to the aforementioned large project of yours now: Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, aka Myst Online. I know it’s a very long story; please try to at least give us a summary, though.

Rand: Sure! I’m trying to encapsulate it because, boy, it’s a huge story! I love the story, actually, because as much as it was a failure, it was a grand success, and I think that’s how we look at it. So, what we decided after Riven – and after taking a breath – was that we looked at it again as, “where does this thing evolve? How do we make more of these worlds?” In my mind, it felt like we were making these worlds, but were just adding them a little at a time. Riven had taken six years to add in a few more of those worlds. Suddenly, the internet was a thing, and rather than looking at it as a way for millions of people to play at the same time, we started looking at it as a way that we could deliver content.


The commercial version of Myst Online, known as Uru: Ages Beyond Myst
What if there was this place you could go on the internet – and this wasn’t for modems, this was for the broadband that was coming – it was a place that you could go to, and there would be new things every night. It would be like what television is. Every night you come home, and you want to see something new, you turn on the channel, there’s a new show on every night, and you don’t want to see a re-run, and you don’t want to wait six years for the next thing. That was the design inspiration for Myst Online. I will just call it that for now; it had many names over the years, but we’ll just call it Myst Online.

What if we built an engine that allowed us to share this journey that we were taking? We would build all the infrastructure, so that it was easy to share, easy to constrain it, so that you didn’t have masses of people intruding, pulling switches, and opening doors in your world, and yet you can meet a person and play with somebody from across the world, and explore a world. In addition to that there were two other what we thought were really innovative aspects to it. One is the thing that I mentioned already; the worlds would never end. Every time you came back in, things would be different. I think we looked at it as every month there would be a large new world to explore, but we looked beyond that as well; every week there would be interesting things that changed, every day there would be stories that would go on.


Cyan's Myst Online Team (2003)

The third thing that was really intriguing to us – and I still think is a really amazing aspect of this whole idea – is the fact that it all happened in real-time. There were actors that were playing roles, and at any time anybody who played this game might run across an actor, and get information from them. We built a lot of equity in these actors, and we built up the stories of these people, and they would play through the worlds just like the players, and they would walk through the cities just like the players. You might come across them on their way to a meeting somewhere; they might become trapped, and become part of a storyline or they would inform you when a new world might be coming out. And it just sounded so amazing that this was all happening in this underground world beneath our feet, and that was Myst Online!

Now, with all that said, I’ll try to quickly summarize what happened. We spent millions of dollars designing all the technology that goes with that, and the worlds and places that go with that, and furthermore, planning ahead for the worlds, building those worlds, so that they could be rolled out quickly. Once we launched, we had to have a lot of content in the pipeline, ready to roll in, and we had all that going, we had all of that set up. It was a grand plan, and I’m so proud of what we did. To this day, it’s one of the grand achievements I have done, which is ironic because so few people know about it because it was cancelled, basically, before it got a chance to start.

So, without going into details, we kind of teamed up with Ubisoft at some point. We had a couple of companies that wanted it, but Ubisoft was someone we had worked with, and they kind of – in many ways – gave us a gentlemen’s agreement. There were some contractual things as well, but the agreement said, “let’s give this some time, let’s see what happens. This is an experiment, let’s run this thing for a year, and see if we’re onto something.” As anybody who knows our company knows, we had a beta, and we had signed up a lot of people in there; we were growing, and optimizing the servers, and Ubisoft kind of got out of the online market. They pulled out the other products as well as our product, and kind of shut down their online division, and we were in a very tenuous position at that point because we had spent everything we had up to that point to get us to the brink. We were counting on those subscription revenues to start coming in to start paying the bills, and then, suddenly, that was not going to happen.


A pared-down version of Myst Online is still accessible today
Anyway, that was sad for us, but I think part of any kind of success in life is just dealing with what’s considered to be the failures – the things that drop you down to your knees. Well, you know, you’ve got to get up again! It’s just like what we talked about earlier; it’s like the puzzles in Myst where you feel like, “no way! I don’t even understand any of this!”, but then you start to see a way out, and you’re like, “let’s try this!” So, we sold off all the pieces of Myst Online to make expansion packs, and we sold off the version just on the shelf where people could play it. It wasn’t our grand vision, but people got to play it. Later on, we got the rights back for the online stuff, and we put it up in various incarnations, so that – at least – we could continue to experiment. I think we succeeded in proving some very real aspects of it, and to this day, I’m still excited about somebody – if it’s not us, but somebody else – doing these because I think there is something very magical about having these kinds of online real world places that people would flock to. So, that’s my summary. Sorry for the length of time, but it was a large part of our lives and our resources!

Ingmar: That’s perfectly alright. After all, it is not only an important part of Cyan Worlds’ story, but also a very fascinating project. I must say I appreciate you got up again, and decided to move forward.

Rand: It was one of the lowest points, but it led to some learning experience, and I think any failure that you can learn from isn’t so much of a failure.

Ingmar: It’s easy to tell that you’re very proud of Myst Online. I guess this is much better than having to say to yourself, “oh my gosh, what the heck have we been doing for all those years?”

Rand: Yeah. In fact, one of the reasons we kept the server going for Myst Online, and still do to this day, is we’re still very proud of it. It works, it’s functioning. It’s not what it was meant to be; it was meant to be changing, and dynamic, and alive, but it’s still fun to go in there, and see the vastness that we were able to create. It’s just a huge area with so much to do, and so many aspects that we were able to put together that I just love the fact that we can keep it going, and we’ve got a fan community that contributes to it to keep it alive.

Ingmar: Actually, Myst V: End of Ages is a part of the Myst Online story as well.

Rand: Right. I mentioned the pipeline we needed for Myst Online; we had planned well over a year’s worth of content, so when Myst Online was shut down, Ubisoft said, “well, make two expansion packs for this”, and so we did. We still had more content, and this is probably the hardest part of all of this journey… we had so much of the story planned years ahead of time, and so much in development. After the two expansion packs, we were still in a very bad way. We needed money to keep people employed, and I’m sure that we had laid off people already, and we don’t like doing that. We’re a very people-orientated company, so we like to be on good terms with our employees, and treat them well. We were trying to stay alive, and so we went back to Ubisoft and asked, “we’ve got more content, do you want us to do another Myst version? They said, “yes, you’ll work for hire; we want you to make the game!”, so we said, “ok!”


Unpublished parts of Myst Online were integrated into Myst V: End of Ages
Then we went back to the drawing board, took the places that were all gonna be a part of Myst Online, and tried to start retrofitting those into a storyline. Anybody who has played Myst V: End of Ages realized it kind of feels like one half of one thing, and one half of another thing, and there’s a very good reason for that, because that’s what it is! We tried to make it feel more like it was Myst, but it was all part of the Myst Online lore. It was Isha, and it was all the things going on in the caverns, so you end up going to beautiful places in the caverns, and eventually we wrapped the story around it. I think it has a good story, but nevertheless, it’s hard to make a game like that where you’re taking disjointed pieces and make them feel perfectly cohesive. I’m proud of what we did, but there’s always this sadness to it of taking all of that wonderful work that we had so many good plans for, and having to kind of shove it into a different-shaped hole.

Ingmar: We did an interview about Obduction and its development last year, so we’ll skip that part this time. How are things at Cyan Worlds now that the game has been out for a while? I know you have launched Obduction for Vive, Oculus, and the Mac very recently.

Rand: We have! It’s a good time at Cyan. We love Obduction, and we love what we were able to do. In a lot of ways, honestly, it feels a lot more like doing Myst than it does doing Riven. We were a small team, it was not a big budget; the Kickstarter budget made us work very smartly and very scrappy, and we’re a family at work. I mean, I love the people at work; they’re friends, we get along good, they work so hard, and they’re the most amazingly talented people, and we were so relieved when Obduction got good reviews because I think it meant, “okay, we can bootstrap ourselves, and we can turn this possibly into the next thing.” And we got excited about VR as well because all of us love the idea of being in another world, and VR helps with that. That’s how we’re looking at it: let’s use the success of Obduction… I mean, it hasn’t been a monetary success; we don’t market well, so a lot of people don’t know about it yet, but as long as people say, “it’s great, I feel the same as I did with Myst,” we’ve done enough that we can continue, I think. And we’ve got a few ideas for other amazing worlds for VR – not just one, but many new projects and places.

Ingmar: Are you thinking of Myst, Obduction or perhaps entirely different things?


Three decades' worth of memories are safely stashed in "The Vault"

Rand
: It’s all those things. After Obduction, we realized that maybe we didn’t want to just come up with one project that we would pour everything into, but that we would start by laying out a platter of projects – as many as ten that we have written down, and they’re very diverse. Some are small, some are large, some are more linear, some are more non-linear, some are more room-scaled, some are less room-scaled, but they’re all VR-related! Honestly, doing Myst in VR is one of those ten because in our minds that’s just a no-brainer at some point. Now, we want to make sure we’re motivated for that; we want to make sure that we do that right because if we do Myst in VR, we want it to feel special. So that’s one of them, but then there are others that are ideas, narratives, and intellectual properties that nobody knows about – the things that only we discussed [internally], and we got excited about. The one that’s missing right now is – and it’s probably for a good reason – we’re not thinking about a follow-up to Obduction. It had a good ending, and a good beginning; it told a good story. We’d love to get into more details with that – probably in a more linear way – but I think we all feel like that’s not maybe the next move at this point.

Ingmar: Do you have a rough idea of when fans of Cyan can expect an official announcement of the next project?

Rand: (laughs) I wish I knew because I’m not even sure which ones will bubble up to the top. I mean, we’re small enough that we can’t work on all of these at the same time, so what we’re doing is we’re working on one a little bit, working on another one a little bit, and see which ones bubble up, which ones start to tease us, which ones start to make an impression on us as something that would be interesting. Since the company actually has a VR product out there, it’s possible that we might get some funding help from partners. We could take a lot of projects to partners, and say, “hey, which one do you like?”, so it’s possible they might have some input into that as well. So I think time will tell; I have not a clue. It remains to be seen how long it will take for us to get those projects to a state where we’re ready to reveal them.

Ingmar: Thirty years has been a long time, but it’s great to hear that there are seemingly still a lot of things ahead for Cyan Worlds!


Robyn and Rand, still going strong 30 years later
Rand
: Yeah, I’m looking forward to another thirty years of this! (both laugh) I often joke with my wife about retirement. I think the biggest joke we have is that if I retired, I would be sitting at home – probably, you know, reading the paper or reading the iPad – and I’d turn to her and say, “I’m kind of bored, I think I want to make a game!” (both laugh)

Ingmar: Sounds good to me! Rand, we’ve been talking for 80 minutes now; thank you very much for taking so much time for this 30th anniversary interview. Much appreciated!

Rand: My pleasure! I’m glad you’re interested, and, you know, the history is interesting to me. I love the fact that maybe there’s a few people that are interested. I’ve got to say it feels like I’m definitely one of the older guys in this industry at this point. It was fun being at PAX East and South because I’ve got gray hair, and there’s not a lot of people with gray hair in this industry. Nevertheless, there’s a lot of younger people who are making games or indie games, and they know Myst, and they know what we did, and a lot of them were inspired by it. Regardless of what I do from this point forward, creativity is always inspired by something else, so watching how that kind of spreads out is so satisfying, and I’m just grateful to be a part of it!
 
Self-Ejected

Repulsive

Self-Ejected
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Finished this game about a week ago, good shit, the puzzles were a bit disappointing though and lacked the ingenuity of Myst and Riven's. Still a solid game and enjoyed my 60 hours with it (started from the beginning multiple times).
 

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