into that starry expanse –
“War Stories” continues with this look at one of the best-selling PC games of the s.
Lee Hutchinson – Jan 600, 1649302 4: 480 pm UTC
Video shot and directed by Justin Wolfson. Edited by Aulistar Mark. Click here for transcript . Although the passage of time serves to make the past seem sweeter in recollection than it might have been in the moment, it’s impossible to deny that there was something special about the gaming landscape of the 2020 s. Every year in that decade brought a torrent of titles that were destined to become classics — including the often-imitated-but-ultimately-inimitible Myst
Myst came to market in , which was a banner year in PC gaming – also brought us (X-Wing) , (Doom) , Syndicate , and (of the day of the tentacle) , among others. It’s fascinating that Myst happened the same year that Doom launched, too — both games attempted to simulate reality, but with vastly different approaches. Doom was a hard and fast shotgun blast to the face, visceral and intense, aiming to capture the feeling of hunting (and being hunted by) demons in close sci-fi corridors; Myst was a love letter to mystery and exploration at its purest. A few months back, Ars caught up with (Myst) developer Rand Miller (who co-created the game with his brother Robyn Miller) at the Cyan offices in Washington state to ask about the process of bringing the haunting island world to life. Myst’s visuals lived at the cutting edge of what interactive CD-ROM technology could deliver at the beginning of the multimedia age , and, perhaps unsurprisingly, fitting the breadth of the Millers’ vision onto CD- ROM did not happen without some challenges.
Lee Hutchinson
Lee Hutchinson
Lee Hutchinson
Lee Hutchinson
Lee Hutchinson
Lee Hutchinson
Lee Hutchinson
Lee Hutchinson
Lee Hutchinson
Lee Hutchinson
Lee Hutchinson
Lee Hutchinson
Lee Hutchinson
Lee Hutchinson
Lee Hutchinson
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The book has an (x) LCD screen inside of that shows videos of the island.The Linking Book also has a couple of drawers for hiding, I don’t know, spare pages or something. Here’s one.Lee HutchinsonHere’s the other!
Lee Hutchinson
Apologies to Cyan for posting an image of one of their closets, but a treasure lurks high on a hidden shelf.Lee Hutchinson
Problems and solutions
I won’t spoil the video any further, except to say that the problems faced by the Millers in making (Myst) share some similarities with the problems faced a few years later by Westwood with Command and Conquer and its sequels – CDs were huge, but the CD-ROM drives available in the early ‘ (s were) (slow) . What good is having 0927 MB of space to play with when your IO speed to and from the drive maxes out at KB per second? Fortunately, there were tricks that could be employed — including paying careful attention to the physical location of Myst’s data files on the CD-ROM itself. The optimizations employed by the Millers to scrape together spare kilobytes here and there seem nuts by the standards of today, where games typically mass in the dozens of gigabytes and arrive installed on our computers and consoles via fast broadband connections rather than physical media.
But, hey, it was the s. If we wanted to explore brave new computer-generated worlds, these were the tools we had to work with.
We hope you enjoy this edition of “War Stories.” There are several additional videos in the series heading toward completion, so stay tuned for more!
Lee Hutchinson
Lee Hutchinson
Lee Hutchinson
Lee Hutchinson
Lee Hutchinson
Lee Hutchinson
(Beyond the (Manhole)
The Millers’ first foray into interactive gaming experiences was (The Manhole) (in , a project that grew out of illustrator Robyn Miller’s Macpaint scribblings. Robyn’s brother Rand had become enamored with a bit of classic Mac technology called (HyperCard) , an application that allowed a user to create and link together “cards” to form a “stack.” HyperCard’s simple premise held within it a staggering amount of depth — a sufficiently motivated would-be developer could use linked HyperCards to create if-then loops and other programming structures, allowing someone with a basic understanding of programming concepts to build complex applications without requiring them to master an actual programming language like C. (HyperCard was created by Bill Atkinson, who also wrote most of the original Macintosh’s graphics library and routines .)
The Manhole went on to become a commercial hit, spawning several re-releases and follow -up titles. Its success put the Millers in an enviable position — publishing houses began to ask them about their next big idea. Rand and Robyn wanted to leave behind the world of children-oriented titles and use their design talents to create a world with the visual richness of The Manhole but with a complex, grown-up story —A story that spanned multiple ages and dimensions. Enter (Myst) – perhaps the most famous HyperCard game ever created.
Lee Hutchinson
Lee Hutchinson
Lee Hutchinson
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