Myst turns 32 (released September 24, 1993)
Like, the single most clarifying fact about Myst, the one I'd staple to the front of every "games as art" retrospective, is that it's a HyperCard stack. The best-selling computer game of its decade, the one your aunt owned, was wired together in the free hypermedia thing that came in the box with every Macintosh, the same tool dentists used to build appointment databases. Two preacher's kids glued a few thousand still pictures to each other with digital index cards, and the result outsold everything in the industry until The Sims finally passed it in 2002.
And every step of how that happened is machinery, and the machinery is better than the retrospectives.
Start in 1987. Bill Atkinson builds HyperCard at Apple and insists it ship free with every Mac: cards, links, click a region of a picture and you go to another card. Hypertext, in shrinkwrap, years before the web is even a memo. Apple never figured out how to charge for the thing and starved it to death over fifteen years, which is its own post for another time.
Rand Miller, 1987, is a programmer at a bank in Texas. His younger brother Robyn is drifting through college in Washington state. Their father was a nondenominational preacher who moved the family wherever the next congregation was (Pennsylvania, Hawaii, Haiti), and the brothers came out of it with the specific skill set of kids who learned to entertain themselves: drawing maps of places that don't exist. Rand calls Robyn and proposes they make a children's program in HyperCard. The Manhole, 1988, a black-and-white world with no score and no goal. You click the fire hydrant, a beanstalk grows out of it, you climb the beanstalk.
In 1989 Activision presses The Manhole onto CD-ROM, the first computer game on the format. And here the story stops being about two brothers and becomes about the disc, because the disc is the whole thing.
1985: Sony and Philips publish the spec. 650 megabytes on a piece of polycarbonate that costs maybe a dollar fifty to press, in a year when a hard drive that size cost more than a car. The entire content industry looked at that ratio and lost its mind, in stages, for about a decade. The catch was the drive: seven hundred, a thousand dollars, single-speed, and nobody owned one. No drives means nobody presses discs means nobody buys drives. The industry's answer was the Multimedia PC standard, 1991, Microsoft and Tandy and a consortium of clone makers agreeing on a sticker (a 386SX, a CD drive, a sound card) so that a family could walk into Sears and buy "multimedia" as a noun.
What actually moved the drives into houses was guilt. The multimedia PC was sold to parents as an education appliance, and the flagship product of the guilt economy was the encyclopedia. Microsoft went to Encyclopaedia Britannica in the late '80s about licensing the text for a CD version. Britannica said no, and the no had nothing to do with prestige. Britannica was a door-to-door operation: roughly two thousand salesmen moving a set that ran $1,500 to $2,000, each sale paying a commission in the hundreds of dollars, revenue peaking around $650 million in 1990. A $99 disc would have put the sales force in open revolt, so the answer stayed no. Microsoft shrugged and licensed Funk & Wagnalls, the encyclopedia supermarkets sold one volume a week at the checkout, dressed it up with audio clips and video, and called it Encarta, 1993. By 1996 Britannica had been sold off for a fraction of its peak value and the salesmen were gone. The text on the disc was the same text the salesmen carried. What the disc destroyed was the commission.
Hold onto that mechanism, because it builds Myst too, from the supply side.
The money behind Myst is Sunsoft, the game label of Sun Corporation of Nagoya, whose core business was pachinko boards. The brothers were almost incidental to the deal. Sunsoft was betting that the CD consoles then being announced (Sega CD, CD-i, the 3DO) would be starving for content, and that the one genre a single-speed disc could do beautifully was the prerendered slideshow. So pachinko money, roughly $600,000 of it, funds two years of development in exchange for the console rights; Brøderbund (Carmen Sandiego, The Print Shop) takes the computer rights; and Cyan, half a dozen people in Mead, Washington, starts rendering an island on Macintosh Quadras left running overnight.
Every design decision the canonization later filed under artistic vision is disc physics. Still images instead of motion, because a single-speed drive needs most of a second to find anything. Almost nobody on screen, because video eats megabytes; the few characters you meet live inside QuickTime windows a couple of inches across, trapped in books, which the brothers turned into the plot. No death, no inventory, no combat. Some of that is temperament, preacher's kids who liked walking around imaginary places. But a game you cannot lose can be played by someone who has never held a controller, which is to say by the exact adults who had just bought the guilt appliance.
September 24, 1993, Macintosh first. Six million copies and change over the decade.
The number that explains that number: an enormous share of those copies moved as bundles, packed in with the drive or the whole machine or bought the same afternoon, the disc that proved the $2,500 purchase had been wise. Myst was the demo. It was what the Packard Bell ran when the neighbors came over. There's an entire genre of mid-'90s anecdote about copies that never got past the first island, and the retrospectives treat those as a melancholy fact about casual players in over their heads. The Britannica sets sat unread on the shelf too. Both purchases did their job.
Ten weeks later, December 10, 1993, Doom goes up free on a University of Wisconsin FTP server. Fits on floppies, real-time 3D, propagates through office LANs and BBSes and shareware racks without asking anyone's permission. People love the fork-in-the-road framing, Myst versus Doom, the gallery versus the gun, and fine. But the split that matters is underneath: one shipped on unit economics and one shipped on a network, and the one on the network is the future, though it takes the people selling discs another three years to feel it.
Because through 1994, 1995, the utopia is peaking. Philips is in the process of losing (the standard figure thrown around is a billion dollars) on CD-i, a living-room disc appliance for encyclopedias and golf instruction. Time Warner and Viacom stand up new-media divisions. The trade press says "Siliwood" without blushing. Bill Gates calls The 7th Guest the new standard in interactive entertainment. The Voyager Company does the highbrow version: A Hard Day's Night with the full screenplay on the disc, expanded books, a CD-ROM in every museum gift shop, bands putting out interactive albums where you click around the studio.
All of it runs on one premise: content is a SKU. Press for a dollar fifty, shrinkwrap at $49.95, forty retail points, shelf space at CompUSA, returns, a catalog, a fall list. Publishing people understood it on contact, which is why they all piled in. It was books. The whole CD-ROM utopia was the culture industries betting that the digital future would keep the unit economics of the warehouse, just shinier.
Riven, October 1997. Four years, a budget an order of magnitude past Myst's, five discs, four and a half million copies. And it's the last harvest off that ground. Within a year the 3D accelerator card makes prerendered stills read as antique, and the web does to the $50 content disc precisely what the disc did to the encyclopedia salesman. The new-media divisions close between 1996 and 1998. Voyager gets broken up. Encarta itself, the disc that killed the salesmen, gets killed in turn by Wikipedia and shuts down in 2009. The mechanism keeps running; it just takes new tenants.
Nobody stopped liking pretty islands. The SKU died, which is a different kind of event.
Cyan's next thirty years are the long aftermath, which the anniversary pieces mostly skip. Uru in 2003, Myst as a persistent online world, canceled mid-launch when Ubisoft ran the subscriber math; the company nearly dies. Then it finds its actual business: re-pressing the island. realMyst. Myst Masterpiece Edition. Ports to the Saturn, the Jaguar CD, the CD-i, the PSP, the Nintendo DS, your phone, a full rebuild in a modern engine for VR headsets in 2020. The same 1993 island re-sold on every format the industry has invented since, and I don't say that as a knock; it's the most honest catalog business in games, every reissue a dividend on the island the brothers capitalized in HyperCard.
And in 2013, Kickstarter: Obduction, $1.3 million from twenty-two thousand backers. Look at the shape of that. Direct sales, in advance, on a promise, to a named list of households. The door-to-door model came back. The salesman is an email list now.
May 2024, the Strong Museum puts Myst in the World Video Game Hall of Fame, next to SimCity and Resident Evil. March 2025, Cyan lays off twelve people, half the studio, citing the month-to-month realities of making games in 2025, and another round follows in the summer. The museum case and the layoff notice arriving inside the same twelve months sounds like irony and is actually the standard life cycle of a catalog company caught in a platform shift; ask whoever was holding AM radio stations in 1962.
So when the 32nd-anniversary essays get wistful, read closely for what they're wistful about. The islands themselves are fine; they're on your phone for a few bucks. What the nostalgia keeps reaching back for is the margin: the moment when one cultural object could be an appliance justification, a shelf SKU, and a commissioned sale all at once, when content had a box and the box had a price, and half a dozen people in Mead, Washington could ride the hardware industry's chicken-and-egg problem into six million living rooms.
Sun Corporation of Nagoya is still around, by the way. The pachinko-board company that paid for the gentlest blockbuster ever made now lives substantially off its stake in Cellebrite, the Israeli firm that unlocks phones for police departments. Restless money finds the format of the era.
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