Building a Myst-ery | Why I Love
Why I Love is a series of guest editorials on GamesIndustry.biz intended to showcase the ways in which game developers appreciate each other's work. This entry was contributed by Andy Cargile, lead designer at Smart Technologies, which launched the rogue-like strategy card game The Last Kids on Earth: Hit the Deck last month on PC.
Have you ever been to a movie where it's completely genre-changing and forever memorable? That's happened a few times for me.
It happened in 1977 when I saw Star Wars in the theater. It happened in 1979 when I saw Alien opening night. And it happened again in 1993 when I played Myst. I just remember seeing this beautiful immersive world, and thinking "Oh my god! What do I do? Where's the UI?" I'd never seen anything like it before. What's fascinating is that 20 (nay 30!) years later, it still feels so utterly different from anything else out there.
There's so much I can say about Myst, so let's start at the beginning. Myst features a cold open that simply drops you on a strange island without any idea of who you are or what you should be doing. The game simply trusts you to wander around and figure these things out for yourself.
It's not long before you encounter a library containing two magical books, each imprisoning one of two feuding brothers that have been exiled to a void – represented to the player as staticy live-action FMV recordings on the pages. One brother says to bring him blue pages to free him, the other says to bring him red pages instead. They both say not to trust each other. Oh dear! So already we've got an interesting story predicated on a central question: get to the bottom of this and figure out who's lying. A mystery is afoot!
What's so fascinating here is that the
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