Some of my earliest memories are of playing this 1993 adventure classic. Its eerie atmosphere still haunts me.
A seashore on a cold, gray day, with smudges of distant islands beyond surging waves.
A bench, alone on a high ridge, with wind whipping across barren plains.
A desert, bare and vivid red rock, empty except for buzzing power lines connecting horizon to horizon.
Sometimes, as I go about life, I’ll stumble upon images like these and get struck by a feeling. A connection to something remote and mysterious. Flickers of childhood impressions of strange worlds filled with unknown symbols and inscrutable machines. Empty worlds: eerily, ominously empty.
I’m reminded of Myst.
To me, Myst isn’t just an excellent adventure game, a prime example of video games as art. It’s an aesthetic: Mystlike, which I define as “austere, lonely beauty.” When I see something Mystlike, for a moment I’m transported to distant worlds.
In early 1995, my family got our first computer: a Compaq Presario CDS 520.
The Compaq, as we called it, sat permanently on our dining room table in North Spokane. It was a neat machine: a cream-colored box with a monitor, CD drive, floppy disc drive, and speakers all built into one unit. To Laura and I, two and four respectively, it was a fascinating new toy, but by no means the center of our lives. This was before the Internet took off, when personal computers were novelties owned by middle-class families with geeky dads. Since the Compaq was never connected to the Internet, we just played around with it for a few minutes at a time: writing nonsensical notes in the word processor, tinkering with simple games like Solitaire and Minesweeper. That’s one thing I deeply miss about those days: the computer was just another toy, unintrusive, nonaddictive, and nurturing rather than overpowering.
My Dad had a coworker who was into computer games, who tipped him off about the newest, coolest titles. (At this point in gaming history, there was a distinction between computer games, played on a home PC or Mac, and video games, played on consoles like the Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis. Video games were marketed to kids, while computer games were marketed to adults.) And at the time, there was no cooler computer game than Myst. Released in September 1993, Myst had already sold a million copies by the time we bought it, and would remain the best-selling PC game until The Sims surpassed it in 2002. As a CD-only game, it spurred mass adoption of the CD-ROM drive, rendering floppy drives gradually obsolete.
Myst was said to be so enthralling, so immersive, that people dreamed about it. And indeed, I did. I once dreamed that I walked into the living room of our North Spokane house, where, on the shelves where I normally stashed my Star Wars playsets, I found miniature dioramas of the worlds of Myst. I peered down, fascinated, at the redwoods and buildings and walkways, like a perfect snowglobe world.
People became obsessed with solving the game. If you could finish it in under a week with no guide, you were a certified genius. My Dad was one of those who got hooked. We played the game together, beginning to end. Sitting on my Dad’s lap playing Myst is one of my earliest memories. And the funny thing is, even though I’m sure he was the one figuring out all the puzzles, I still think of it as us playing Myst, solving it together.
I remember Dad pointing out how the “sad” credits music changed to “happy” credits music after we finished the game. And how he let me choose which color pages to gather and therefore which brother to trust: Sirrus or Achenar. I picked Achenar because I thought he looked friendlier with his round face and crazy giggle, and felt absolute devastation at the reveal that he was evil and had trapped us in his book prison forever.
This was also the age of computer gaming where the player was expected to take notes. No in-game hand-holding. I view my Dad’s Myst notes as precious artifacts and have saved them through many moves and many years. I was always impressed that he diagrammed the entire underground maze in the Selenitic Age (apparently missing the audio cue that’s supposed to guide you through!).
One of Laura’s first memories is watching me play Myst. More than twenty years later, we were hanging out in our parents’ living room. I hooked up my laptop to the big HD TV and started playing Myst, which Laura hadn’t seen in years. From that very first view of Myst Island, and those first sounds of the sea lapping around the docks, she had an intense, visceral emotional reaction. As I explored the island more, she kept exclaiming, “The wind! Oh my God, that wind sound!” It got so intense for her that she actually had to leave the room. When I asked later what was up, she explained, “Just hearing those sounds again triggered something so deep. This overwhelming sensation of bleakness and loneliness.”
I even tried showing the game to my friend Alex sometime during college (yes, another Alex). Usually, he liked to watch me play video games; we spent many an afternoon chilling while I played Zelda to entertain us both. But Myst struck a dark chord in him too. He watched me click around for about ten seconds and physically backed away: “Oh, no, no, no. This game is like my nightmares.” He said that his personal nightmare was being all alone, trapped in a confined space, and being forced to solve puzzles or else. “That plus the jerky motion…” he actually shivered. (Needless to say, Alex is not the biggest fan of escape rooms.)
As you’ve gathered, one of the central features of Myst is its lonely and eerie atmosphere. The premise of the game is that you appear on a mysterious island filled with puzzles to solve and have to figure out what’s going on and what to do. That’s it. Its brilliance is its simplicity. The game is played in first person; the main character is you. All you do is point the mouse and click. Better than any game before it, Myst lowered the barrier between yourself and the game world, allowing you to feel like you were there.
The game engine allows you to click through pre-rendered scenes of evocative 3D worlds, but the technology didn’t yet support realistic characters you could interact with. So aside from three characters who mainly appear within screens (portrayed by actors in FMV – Full Motion Video), the worlds of Myst are empty, which the designers brilliantly utilize as a thematic point.
As you explore more, you discover that you can travel to other worlds using magical Linking Books, and that you’ve stumbled into a dark family drama. Atrus, one of the last survivors of a civilization that perfected the art of bookmaking, uses his books to explore, learn, and establish benevolent contact with the peoples he finds. But his sons Sirrus and Achenar, behind his back, cruelly dominate and exploit those peoples. And so, when you arrive in each world, which you know from Atrus’ journals used to be richly inhabited, you find them empty. Chillingly empty.
The result is one of the best works of art demonstrating the evils of colonialism (a theme explored even more effectively in the sequel Riven). In the Mechanical Age journal, you read that a fortress used to shelter a small group of survivors weathering an onslaught of pirate attacks. The gray sky will never be blue, the people say, until the pirates are defeated. When you arrive in the Mechanical Age, you find that the sky is blue… but the fortress is empty. Evidently the pirates have been defeated… but where are the people? You look through a telescope and see a skeleton hung from a mast. Is this one of the pirates… or one of the people?
In the Channelwood Age journal, you read about redwood trees growing directly from the water, with a society of people living in treehouses and walkways built halfway up the trunks. When you get there, you find the village abandoned. Were the people driven off… or killed?
There’s a concept in video games called “environmental storytelling,” which is when the game world itself tells a story through the placement of objects, small details, mood, and atmosphere. Myst and Riven do this brilliantly. Aside from the Selenitic Age, which is more about pure puzzle solving, the Stoneship, Mechanical, and Channelwood Ages each tell a silent story of how Sirrus and Achenar disrupted or destroyed the lives of the people living there. In Channelwood, you see how they built their own layer of treehouses above the rest, with a terrifying altar / execution chamber to force the locals to submit in fear. Their bedrooms in Channelwood and Stoneship are grim testaments to their different flavors of depravity, with Sirrus’ lust for riches contrasted with Achenar’s naked barbarity.
This environmental richness is what has compelled me to return to Myst for thirty years and counting. To me, it’s less about the puzzle solving and more about the atmosphere. I’m the type of player who just wants to explore beautiful, imaginative worlds forever (in the classic Bartle taxonomy of player types, I’m an Explorer to the core). Every so often, I just need to visit the worlds of Myst again. They’re compelling in themselves, yes, but they also connect me to thirty years of personal history, right back to sitting on my Dad’s lap in North Spokane.
And I don’t think Myst will ever leave my dreams. Recently, I visited Capilano Suspension Bridge Park in Vancouver, BC. I’d been wanting to go for years; as a bonafide Explorer, it was irresistible. The park features a breathtaking (and very wobbly) pedestrian bridge across a ravine, and a series of walkways built halfway up massive trees in a small patch of temperate rainforest. Wandering among the walkways was a surreal and moving experience. Because it felt like I’d stepped straight into a dream. It was Channelwood come to life. I could practically hear the brooding wind, creaking wood, and chirping birds straight from the game. It felt like visiting a fantasy land I’d imagined all my life, but also coming home.
You could almost call it Mystlike.
