Myst was big news when it first came out (was it really only 1993?)--the first game on those new-fangled CD-ROMmy things, the first game with decent graphics, and so on. It became a phenomenon.
You (being the player: the viewpoint is first-person, meaning you see what you would see if you were actually there) start by watching a book fall towards you through a hole in the sky, and land on the ground in front of you. When you open it, you see a moving picture of a deserted island full of strange constructions, such as a rocketship, a log cabin, a Grecian-style library, and several others. If you touch the picture, everything goes black, there is a strange sound and when the screen clears you are on the island itself.
This is the key concept of the Myst games: books that actually take you to other worlds. As you explore the island, you find more of these books, and two in particular which seem each to contain a prisoner. As you go through the game you'll find a way to free one or the other of these prisoners. The question is, which one?
The story of Myst is complete in itself, but there are sequels, four of them (Riven, Exile, Revelation and End of Ages), each one expanding on the original story and adding more depth to the history of the race that possessed this art of Writing worlds, or Ages as they called them. This sense of history grows more and more palpable as you go through the games, and reaches its zenith in Uru.
Uru, while set in the same universe, gets away from the characters featured in the Myst games (well, mostly) and allows you to be yourself (or not if you prefer) and explore some more of these Ages. There is a stand-alone version, which was released prior to the first attempt at going online; I think that was a mistake, but there we go. The then publisher, Ubisoft, pulled the plug on Uru Live mark one before the beta was even finished.
What Cyan did then surprised everybody; they made the source code available to their fans, so that a form of online Uru could stay in being. Untíl Uru was at that point mostly a community rather like Second Life is now (only much better-looking); there was no possibility of new content, and most of the players had already completed the stand-alone version and so knew the playable part of the game backwards, but we kept coming to meet and talk and cling to the faint hope that something would happen to bring it back.
What happened was that the last Myst game, End of Ages, sold poorly, and Cyan closed their doors and laid off all but two of their workforce. It looked like the end. Untíl Uru could go on indefinitely, but without any hope for more, what was the point?
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2008-02-19 09:55 pm (UTC)You (being the player: the viewpoint is first-person, meaning you see what you would see if you were actually there) start by watching a book fall towards you through a hole in the sky, and land on the ground in front of you. When you open it, you see a moving picture of a deserted island full of strange constructions, such as a rocketship, a log cabin, a Grecian-style library, and several others. If you touch the picture, everything goes black, there is a strange sound and when the screen clears you are on the island itself.
This is the key concept of the Myst games: books that actually take you to other worlds. As you explore the island, you find more of these books, and two in particular which seem each to contain a prisoner. As you go through the game you'll find a way to free one or the other of these prisoners. The question is, which one?
The story of Myst is complete in itself, but there are sequels, four of them (Riven, Exile, Revelation and End of Ages), each one expanding on the original story and adding more depth to the history of the race that possessed this art of Writing worlds, or Ages as they called them. This sense of history grows more and more palpable as you go through the games, and reaches its zenith in Uru.
Uru, while set in the same universe, gets away from the characters featured in the Myst games (well, mostly) and allows you to be yourself (or not if you prefer) and explore some more of these Ages. There is a stand-alone version, which was released prior to the first attempt at going online; I think that was a mistake, but there we go. The then publisher, Ubisoft, pulled the plug on Uru Live mark one before the beta was even finished.
What Cyan did then surprised everybody; they made the source code available to their fans, so that a form of online Uru could stay in being. Untíl Uru was at that point mostly a community rather like Second Life is now (only much better-looking); there was no possibility of new content, and most of the players had already completed the stand-alone version and so knew the playable part of the game backwards, but we kept coming to meet and talk and cling to the faint hope that something would happen to bring it back.
What happened was that the last Myst game, End of Ages, sold poorly, and Cyan closed their doors and laid off all but two of their workforce. It looked like the end. Untíl Uru could go on indefinitely, but without any hope for more, what was the point?
(to be continued in our next)