If you’ve been gaming since the early days of Mario (or beforehand), you remember Myst. The 1993 point-and-click adventure eschewed a lot of popular concepts in games at the time (and still does, arguably), with a narrative motivation built around puzzles and exploration.
Myst was an enigmatic island full of secrets, and for the developers at Cyan, a tiny studio in rural Spokane, Washington, it was an incredibly unlikely success. The surreal adventure was so successful and groundbreaking that when it came time to make the sequel, Riven, the sky was pretty much the limit.
““A painting is finished if you run out of money and run out of time,” said lead designer Rand Miller in a recent interview with the Pacific Northwest Inlander. “[But] Riven, in a lot of ways, had kind of this unlimited budget. It was being funded by Myst.” But it wasn’t so smooth sailing – the follow-up to Riven never released in its intended form, an MMO of sorts.
If you want to hear more about one of the most influential games of all time, check out the link below. (There’s also a great Grantland retrospective here.)
Via The Pacific Northwest Inlander
