THE LEGACY OF: MYST

Lori Nichols

Timelapse's designer

Mark Hamilton

The Room's codesigner

Knut Mueller

RHEM's creator

“Time passes and things fade,” begins Rand Miller, who is trying to comprehend the legacy of Myst, the game he co-created with his brother Robyn way back in 1993. “But we, now as much as ever, are getting people who are saying how much it influenced them.”

Retro Gamer readers will be familiar with how Myst’s cerebral gameplay enabled it to became one of the most successful titles ever and how it took nine years for The Sims to overtake its six million sales in 2002. It was one of the first adventure games to dispense with text commands, instead using photorealistic images to give the player the impression that they were viewing the world through their character’s eyes. It helped spark a golden age of CD-ROM home gaming, alongside trailblazing titles, such as The 7th Guest and Star Wars: X-Wing and Rebel Assault. Most of all, Myst attracted a new audience which was drawn to a visually stunning first-person adventure that offered a different playing experience to shooters and sports simulations.

But as Rand points out, now, more than ever, is an ideal time to look at its legacy as gamers have spent the proceeding decades engrossed by a diverse list of titles Myst helped spawn. We are now well-placed to look at how the game’s fanbase has been served with graphical puzzle adventures in the 27 years since Myst was released by Cyan.

“To this day, there are a lot of people who game in very specific indie categories,” Rand adds. “Maybe because of Myst they don’t play mainstream games, but they are just interested in unique visions.”

attracted numerous developers to computer design who wanted to create games that offered a similar mix of mystery and nonviolent escapism. They decided to make games that were like because they themselves were fans and had, as Rand puts it, “unique visions” for graphical adventures. One of these designers was Lori Nichols, who came from a CGI background, which included working as a background assistant on the original Tron movie. She conceived the time-travelling adventure title Timelapse in 1996 after being shown by Ed Deren, who worked with her on the GTE Interactive Windows and Mac game as a designer. “First-person shooters always made me dizzy and were too fast-paced,” she says. “ was a new approach to gameplay that felt like magic to me. was a great mix of thoughtful, logical puzzles, that often built on something you did or had seen before. I loved the clues, too. It was so interesting to see how the game designers used subtle audio and visual clues to guide the player. However, I confess, I did buy the cheat book!