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Sept. 24, 1993: Beautiful 'Myst' Ushers In Era of CD-ROM Gaming
Posted: September 24th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Chris Kohler
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1993: Broderbund Software releases Myst, a game for the Macintosh computer that becomes a record-setting best-seller and the killer app that sparks sales of CD-ROM drives. Brothers Rand and Robyn Miller founded a software-development business called Cyan Worlds in 1987, and they started making history. The pair partnered in 1989 with game-publisher Activision to create a CD-ROM version of Cyan's first game, The Manhole, which was the first entertainment product released in the fledgling format. More CD-ROM games followed, including follow-ups from Cyan, but few consumers bought expensive CD drives for their home computers, because there were no truly compelling applications -- that is, until Broderbund published Cyan's Myst in 1993. Myst's dreamlike world and simple gameplay appealed to what we would now call "casual gamers." Its graphics were so polished and its world so entrancingly designed that it hooked a wide audience. Copies flew off the shelves. But perhaps more important, CD-ROM drives flew off shelves. To play Myst, you needed the hardware. The underlying technology of the new game wasn't that different from Manhole's -- both were programmed using HyperCard, a free Mac application that gave amateur programmers a user-friendly, visually oriented creation tool. What separated Myst from the pack was the game's beautiful, "pre-rendered" 3-D world. The mid-'90s were videogames' puberty, a strange and awkward time spent trapped between child and adult. Computers were able to render 3-D worlds, but the videogame consoles in people's homes couldn't come close. As a result, game designers often created 3-D worlds on their workstations, then took 2-D bitmap snapshots of the worlds and dropped them into their games as pre-rendered graphics. Nintendo would later use this technique to great effect in Donkey Kong Country for the Super Nintendo. As its box art signified, Myst dropped the player into a remote, deserted island with little in the way of prelude. The player's goal: Explore the island, find the fragments of story that explain the situation, and solve puzzles. Writing about the game in the early days of Wired magazine, Jon Carroll described the appeal of Myst's atmosphere: "The game is remarkable for its sense of control and mood; it is internally consistent in a subtle and layered way. There are interlocking themes: sound, water, gears, energy. The interface is transparent and minimal; it works like a glove....
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