Video: How Myst’s designers stuffed an entire universe onto a single CD-ROM
"War Stories" continues with this look at one of the best-selling PC games of the 90s.
Lee Hutchinson - 1/28/2020, 11:05 AM
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 1990s. 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 1993, which was a banner year in PC gaming—1993 also brought us
X-Wing,
Doom,
Syndicate, and
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 didn't happen without some challenges.
Beyond the Manhole
The Millers' first foray into interactive gaming experiences was
The Manhole in 1988, 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.
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 '90s were
slow. What good is having 600MB of space to play with when your IO speed to and from the drive maxes out at 150KB 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 90s. 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!
