"[Myst] was [released] the year I was born", damn Alanah - way to burn Mike (and me). Lol.

The most groundbreaking thing in Myst, imo, were the audio puzzles. It used then-advanced sound hardware to create realistic sounds, but it also has cleverly designed audio clues that the player must rely on to solve the puzzles. The most memorable one is the maze you have to find your way through by listening to the audio tones from your vehicle. I had never seen a maze puzzle done that way before, and maybe haven't since.

Thank you to everyone on the podcast, Alanah, Mustache Mike and Austin. also Troy. This podcast really helps me, the conversations are always super interesting and engaging , it is my favorite podcast. i have Schizophrenia and i trouble socializing but watching people converse like this really helps me get into gear to (try) do it myself. you guys are awesome, i have your t-shirt. please keep this going as looooong as possible!

As a kid I spent so much time exploring Myst and Riven. I also spent an inordinate amount of time in The Journeyman Project 3. Never got anywhere but I enjoyed it anyway.

So crazy that you make an episode on Myst just when the Riven remake comes out, and even more crazy to me, since I worked on the LATAM Spanish translation of that remake 🥹

11:39 7th guest also has a sequel, the 11th hour. Also another fun slideshow puzzle game with random cartoon ghosts: shivers

Oh sick. Alanah is Riven ready.

Although Myst wasn't quite Cyan and the Miller brothers' first game, it's still amazing how they revolutionized game design with it. It's even more amazing how they perfected the game design with the sequel Riven. It's not just Myst++, it's a completely different approach to the puzzles and how they are integrated with the world and the story. I love Myst for the nostalgia but I absolutely adore Riven. I just finished playing the remake, and apart from some CG characters that can be improved upon it's amazing. It's even more coherent, (a little) less frustrating, and even richer in environmental storytelling.

Myst in the title gets an immediate listen! Myst and Riven are two of my favorite games from the early PC days.

The Starship Titanic game was written by Douglas Adams if Hitchhiker's Guide fame, and the Starship Titanic novel was written by Terry Jones of Monty Python fame

Bodycam is an asset flip prior to the original releasing. It's ripping off UNRECORD, a game that showed up on Twitter last year. UNRECORD is still in development, whereas Bodycam was made by two people who went as far as getting the same environment assets UNRECORD was using temporarily in their first demo videos on Twitter.

7th Guest just got remade for VR. It has FMV ghosts that walk around the mansion. Yes. Holograms of real actors in VR except they're 3D, I can move around them and the angles change, it's not flat FMV video projected on a plane.

One of the best Myst clones is Quern (2016), which copies a lot of the same recurring elements in the Myst series: rotating towers or rooms, exotic machinery, exotic fauna and flora, audio puzzles, etc. Even Cyan has made a couple of Myst clones: Obduction (2016) and Firmament (2023).

Right there with you Mike. I was one of those cool kids making stuff in TrueSpace, fighting off all the attention.

This episode is not to be Myst. (I'll see myself out)

Amazing time to be getting into Myst!! I wasn’t in love with the recentish Myst remake, but the Riven Remake is a whole other story: it’s phenomenal! I think it’ll just play like a fantastic game to new players, and for returning players there is so much joy brought to being able to more freely explore the world and some surprise additions/modifications to puzzles and world elements

Mike is really aging like fine wine. That’s all i have to say

I used to love the Myst Novels growing up! Especially the first two. Riven, Myst 3 and 4 were my favorites. I don’t remember enjoying Myst 5 and Uru was an unfinished project that never saw its potential realized but the lore is interesting.

The 7th Guest was my favorite game in the 90s. They just released a VR version with a different story, but similar mechanics. The sequel, The 11th Hour, didn't hit as well and looked very campy, but was ok. Another game in the same vein, created by the design team behind Kings Quest, was Phantasmagoria. Also, the Bowie game Mike mentioned is called Omicron: The Nomad Soul. That was interesting because the main mechanic was that you could jump between characters you've identified as a playable character, but if a character "dies" they're inaccessible for the rest of the game. If you died without discovering any other playable characters your "soul" would jump to an as yet unidentified character.

The 7th Guest has one of the most iconic soundtracks in videogame history. Check out the songs The Game and Skeletons in My Closet and the track Dolls of Doom. There was a recent remake, but it's very different, including the music. The original is undoubtedly dated and may be frustrating without a guide at times, but it's worth experiencing! Also, if you want to play something sort of like Myst or The Witness but music-oriented and shot through with neon, check out Fract OSC.

When you said Quicktime..a memory flashed in my age raddled head on how videos use to play in games. I remember so many games a box would pop up and play their video, border and all. All the old grainy videos and I was amazed by them

Loved Myst and all the subsequent Cyan World games. Myst was designed in HyperCard on the Mac. So that is why it was 2d images with minimal interaction. Story and puzzles was most important. My wife & I played together when it first came out, was great because it was not a shooter killing game.

There is a sequel to The 7th Guest! It's "The 11th Hour." And I want a MYSTcast so bad!

Just finished the Riven remake. Simply amazing.

I worked LQA on the Quest version, it was fun, I remember my dad playing it back in the day and liking it, he had a few point and clicks and I loved watching him play even though I didn't understand anything, it felt very nice to work on a game I know he liked.

14:25 It's strange to me that Bryce3D and Myst seem to have a shared history - possibly because they came out around the same time. It's pretty common to find those that played Myst in the early days that have also played around with Bryce. I recall trying to make my own Myst-like game with it. Of course, it was just a bunch of basic shapes that I was trying to pass off as doors. structures, and the like since - if I recall correctly - Bryce by itself didn't offer much for 3d modeling within the software except for basic Boolean operations and grayscale map landscapes. I think it was possible to import objects from other more robust 3d modeling software, but that was well beyond my skill as a tiny kid. I remember renders taking forever to finish as the pixelated image slowly filled itself in. Nothing real came from my attempts at making a Myst game, but it was my first foray into 3d art so I'll forever have a fondness for Bryce.

Woaah! New quality, new logo?? I'm loving these changes. Especially the audio quality, it was really hard to listen to in the background before, this is awesome!

I was 12 when Myst came out and had it on PS1. I remember finishing it and was so proud of myself. I found it hard and intriguing with the weird mystery. A great memory.

52:27 This is true for everyone except Mizyzaki, apparently. No one does a better job of underestimating the size/length of their games than him lol

I remember "playing" Myst (and a bunch of other puzzleventure games) when it came out with my parents. That whole series was both of my parent's favorite game series, and they played all of those games together. One of my favorite childhood memories of them.

I've been playing riven all this week. Remake is so good. Its beautiful It's mindblowing going back to it and having it look so good, the original I played when I was 6 years old 24 years ago. And I grew up looking at this game. Because my dad was really into pc games in the 90s. So 7th guest, 11th hour, all the Lucas art point and click adventure games, little big adventure. All great 90s pc games I ended up growing up with

I am fine with this becoming a Myst only podcast. I'm all for you all revisiting, or playing for the first time, old seminal games and discussing their impact. Great episode.

The 7th Guest was also remade in 2019 -- the remake is called "The 13th Doll," and it has freedom of movement, modern graphics, and FMV. I consider Myst a cut above The 7th Guest because of the "out-of-the-box" puzzle design. In 7th Guest, nearly all the puzzles are derivative of traditional ones like sliding puzzles, Othello, chessboard puzzles, mazes, etc.

I’m so excited for past you, Alanah! I remember getting Riven for Christmas that year and playing it for hours. I recently realized the remakes just came out and am loving diving back in. Might even see if I can find the Myst novels they made. I was so cool.

Bryce 3D! I learned that in high school. We had a guy make a Roman coliseum fly through, and it took, I think, a full week to render? Insane. I was not nearly so good at Bryce.

I remember games like Myst way way way back in the day... they were magical during the era of DOS gaming. CD-ROM games with pre-rendered CG graphics seemed so advanced to a lot of us back then. Nostalgia for such games get me all myst-y eyed

You should read the 3 myst novels. It definitely adds to the lore

Myst was one of the first games I ever played. Used to play it with my Dad, we spent ages trying to complete it but never got there. Just bought the 2021 version, looking forward to playing it again.

I think one of the things that made Myst have the impact it did was that it signalled the moment when games were able to actually show fantastic environments in good quality. At its time, Myst showed what felt like photorealistic environments. Of course, it could only do that without free movement - but at that time, no one expected graphics to get good enough to allow free movement in photrealistic spaces. Doom at that time showed the other end of the spectrum in a way: It allowed free movement through spaces but the graphics and especially the geometry still felt abstracted. I remember that Myst attracted interest in the mainstream press, too. The articles usually stressed how the game felt "more adult" than previous games because of its subject matter but I think it actually garnered that kind of attraction because it was very accessible to non gamers. The game looked great and its setting intriguing at a glance, and the gameplay was easy to grasp for anyone who new how to use a mouse.

Myst sounds pretty cool, I didn't know anything about it before this episode. Also, really awesome that you managed to go to the Pop Out show, Alanah, that also was looking pretty dope. And hard agree about Alan Wake 2, it's SO FUCKING GOOD. I thought the first Alan Wake was just okay and very repetitive, but oh my god, did they step up for the sequel. So good

Hearing Ahati talk in Control/AW2 is identical to listening to my Finnish aunts / uncles / grandparents talk. The "finn-glish" where they fumble back and forth and stumble on english and spout these crazy sayings that don't make sense in English is so freaking nostalgic.

As a newly christened PC player I did in fact go a buy a bunch of Mike's games (been meaning too but there's just so much to wishlist/play). Let my meager funds fuel your Remedy Games binge vacation

I still can't forgive Myst for utterly destroying the entire genre of text adventures. Myst was so primitive and static in design compared to the worlds of many text adventures, it didn't even have NPCs you could interact with. But once people had seen those graphics, many were lost forever to purely text-based games. (Also, granted, text adventures had been a declining market ever since point-and-clicks had emerged, but it was Myst that drove the final nail into their coffin.)

Enjoy Shadow of the Erdtree, Alanah!! It’s honestly phenomenal, but the bosses are no joke (especially the final boss who I’m currently stuck on 🙈)

I remember playing Lighthouse as a kid and i loved that game, still to this day decades later i randomly remember scenes from the game like when you remember movies and shows and books you watched or read. It was a Myst-like as well. Interestingly enough i didnt played Myst at that time, i played it only much much later, recently few years ago because i considered that this is gaming history i have to experience purely for culture if nothing else.

I started and finished Myst this weekend for the first time and I'm so excited to start Riven next 🎉 I love these types of games and we need more like this and The Witness.

Just a few corrections for historical purposes... Myst was not their first game, they had made a few others already using Hypercard, which maybe only came out for Mac... "The Manhole (1988), Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel (1989) and Spelunx (1991) were whimsical fantasy adventures for a young audience." Same sorts of game, but done with illustrations instead of 3D art. (PS: Go Bryce3D!)

The original Myst was barely a game - a nice-looking slideshow with Quicktime videos that frequently made players feel stuck and confused. I remember the puzzles and paths being fairly unintuitive and guilty of "Guide Dang It" throughout. Rand and Robyn Miller had released games previously: The Manhole, Cosmic Osmo, and Spleunx (for Macintosh, I think) - to say they had no development experience at the time of Myst isn't quite genuine. Myst didn't quite sell by word of mouth alone; the recent adoption of CD-ROM drives had a substantial part in the popularity of the product - if you were in the market for a new PC around that time with a CD-ROM drive, Myst would have been mentioned or featured running on a demo PC in a shop.

For anyone interested, there’s a Myst book a while back that I read many years ago. Was an interesting read.

Myst is my absolute favorite game. Very happy to listen to this episode

I worked for Trilobyte Video Games as their social media intern while I was in high school in Oregon. They made me play through the 7th guest to make a KZfaq video of all of the puzzles and make a full play through, because they didn’t have one.

I was 21 when it came out. I remember thinking Myst was barely a game, but all my friends were amazed by it.

Instead of calling a game a Myst-like, we should say it's a bit mysty.

7th Guest has a VR version on the Occulus Quest. Well worth a play-through.

32:00 The original graphics only feel like a downgrade from our current perspective because we can compare it with our current gen. I remember what they felt like when the game came out, and it was revolutionary. Even a person who was already into games and game design at that point and who understood the limitations of Myst's tech, it was impressive and felt like a breakthrough.

7th Quest, the 11th Hour, Blackstone Chronicles, the Gabriel Knight games... I used to be all over the Adventure genre back in the day.

Alanah's reaction to Starship Titanic with not a whiff of recognition might be the oldest she's ever made me feel lol

I played Myst a couple of years after it came out as a little kid and it literally took me maybe 5 years to figure out there were different ages you visit. I thought the whole game was on that one island and I thought it was the hardest game ever because I obviously couldn't solve anything lol.

I remember watching my Dad play Myst on the computer and I thought it was so cool! Great games, definitely do future episodes on the sequels would love to hear what you think.

I remember getting bryce off a PC format or similar disc back in the day. First time using 3d software. I used to setup a render and leave the pentium 1 running for 4-5 hours to finish a single frame. What a nostalgia trip 🤯 these days rendering in c4d using redshift and the difference is night and day. It's wild how far we've come.

Alanah having an amazing gaming month! Riven is one of my favorites of all time

I'd already seen Alanah's video on Drake, but I'm genuinely glad to know Mike was invested in the Hip-Hop Civil War

Funny when she was stuck trying to remember 7th guest. I could already hear the music in my head.

MYST and Riven were my life when I was high school!

WHAT'S BEST IS HIDDEN, OBVIOUS, AND CORRECT.

i still have my copy of '93 Myst on CD, its buried somewhere in my closet along with my flobby disk copies of Doom '93

Just want to point out that modern 3D renderers still can take hours to days to output an image. Modern processors are more powerful but they still can't output a high resolution photo realistic render at real time speeds. Game engines are getting better but they still have to take a lot of shortcuts graphically.

My wife just beat Myst recently in VR on Oculus. She was very happy as it was a game she poked at over the years.

'Troy was probably in it,' had me spit take-ing.

I love Myst so this is a very good episode for me!

I played Myst as a kid and got stock in the Rocket with the piano. Maybe I should give it another try!

The 7th Guest is awesome.

I loved Bryce 5. It was my first 3D program.

I really wish they would do a proper remaster of The Journeyman Project series for the modern era. It was a similar Mystlike game, had educational elements without getting heavy handed, a great story about saving time, a usually pretty funny sidekick. Was one of the best of the genre but it didn't get quite the same hype as Myst (pretty much nothing did to be fair). Hopefully these Myst series remasters will inspire some of the others to do something.

Im just here to join the mass of people saying Myst and 7th Guest are also out in VR!

i dont know why no one is talking on how the song at the end of every chapter in the "alan wake 2 night springs DLC slaaaaps soo hard

Alanah I know you’ve read the Warhammer books. Myst has books too! After you play Riven, you should see if you’d be interested in them :D

Dude, when Myst was on game pass, I loaded it up cuz I love the witness. I walked around for like an hour just trying shit cuz I also apparently missed this fucking note. Also thought it was just hard af. Told myself I'd come back to it, forgot, and it left game pass shortly after. Been wanting to give it another crack for a while now so this is reassuring

I'm 26. I remember trying to render an image on pirated Cinema 4D and it took hours

You might want to check out Lighthouse: The Dark Being. It was developed as a Myst clone, is cheap, and on GOG. It has a lot of flaws, but the beginning of the game in particular has an excellent creepy/mystery atmosphere.

Myst was on mac if I remember correctly, and that is the reason, I think, I've never played it (pc gamer from the start). (I think that, and Bungie's Marathon were the two must have games you should own if you had a mac) But after its success, there were so many Myst inspired games, like The seventh guest and The eleventh hour, that also had their charm. And then, all the mediocre CD-ROM adventures kind of killed the classic point and click adventure game. (Except for the Ripper, anything with Christopher Walken is godly by default) 😛 As for Deus ex machina, it's an exact translation of "Από μηχανής Θεός" (in Greek) to Latin.

Even if it's just Alanah and Mike it's still damn fine infotainment. You can call it Piffel with Bethel.

Depending on the age of your friend's son, an adventure game like Book of Unwritten Tales might be great to play D&D style as well.

If you like puzzles, have you tried chip’s challenge? another late 80s, 90s, game.

Mike: I was 13 in 1998 Me: I was 7 Random person in the comments: I wasn't even born yet

How did it take 155 episodes before Mike dropped the lore that he was lectured at university by *THE* Douglas Adams?!! Am I wrong or has he never mentioned this before?

Opportunity missed to call this episode 'Myst tracks'

Awesome episode, I was wondering if it is possible to update this podcast so it shows up as a podcast on yt music. It only shows the old videos before the new channel. It would be very much appreciated.

I remember trying to get myst to work on our crapoy family comouter but it was just too beefy. I could load the first screen then it would crash as soon as i tried to move 😁

They remade 7th guest in VR and the sequel was 11th hour

Im surprised she didnt play the Myst remake instead. It was so good and beyond faithful

Great Myst talk, it's a game I've always been fascinated by but have never gotten to play. The KZfaq algorithm did the work and after I watched this video, and recommended Ars Technica's Myst War Stories episode about how the developers struggled with CD-ROM. A great follow up to Alanah and Mike's chat for anyone who's interested: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/e72IaKVnyKqYj2g.html

Ok, before I even watch, if youre obsessed with Myst, Riven is the real MUST PLAY and they just released the remake (I still prefer the old version actually though). Edit after having watched: So, if you want the "slideshow" experience, you should definitely just play the original Riven. It still looks great imho (obviously with a low resolution, but still) and plays without problems. There also is a Myst documentary in the works with never before seen footage and stuff from back then. I would totally enjoy another Myst episode, maybe after having finished Riven? I can imagine you could even get Rand Miller to join a podcast. I will add something that people may disagree with: I think the only game that did world building as well as Riven is Outer Wilds. If that doesnt tempt anyone to play Riven, I dont know what will.

I would recommend Quern - Undying Thoughts and Obduction next.

That era... Yes there were these new FMV games but for me, the biggest draw was Lucasfilm games with v/o acting. My local PC store had Day of the Tentacle on demo and I'd often play for 5 minutes just to hear the v/o. That was the future (not this FMV bs 😂)!

Okay but did you get the red or the blue pages? GET ME THE BLUE PAGES

You forgot Terragen, Mike ! :D

What about VISTA PRO Mike?!! :D That was another fun program, kinda like Bryce 3D. :)

Tangent, does anyone else think she looks like Hayley Mills? (Original parent trap actor)

Riven is also good