Just when games were starting to finally come of age, evolving from pixelated diversions to engrossing depictions of other worlds, devleoper Cyan burst onto the computer gaming scene with a little 1993 title called Myst. The premise was simple: you pointed, you clicked, you solved abstract mechanical puzzles–puzzles that made you want to pull your hair out. By today’s standards, it’s clunky and even occasionally nonsensical, its graphics are archaic and its genre has been proclaimed dead several times over (though it keeps coming back like a zombie). On its surface, Myst seems a relic of a bygone era with little to contribute to today’s advanced game design theory and execution; after all, in a day of Mass Effect‘s and Gears of War‘s, who needs to learn from a two-decade-old adventure game?

The Design is in the Details

Myst offered something games today rarely do: a world–not just a place in which gamers accrue experience points or power stars or achievements, but a lovingly created location with a people and a history. The puzzling challenges made up the meat and potatoes of the gameplay, but the setting–the land of Myst as communicated through graphics, sound, and even the instruction manual–made the game come alive and sunk its claws into the imaginations of its players. Solving logic puzzles for hours on end isn’t a fantasy for most people; exploring a vast dimension of magical linking books brimming with possibilities and the remains of long-decayed civilizations absolutely is. While every game takes place somewhere, not every game takes you somewhere.

While every game takes place somewhere, not every game takes you somewhere.

In the literary realm, the difference between J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth and the settings of a hundred homogeneous dime-store fantasy novels lies in Tolkien’s love for and belief in his world. Far more than sketching a quick map on a napkin, the great English author wrote multiple languages and volumes upon volumes of detailed chronicles of the comings and goings of his creations. In fact, Tolkien created the mythology and the backdrop for The Lord of the Rings saga many years before he even started writing The Hobbit–and the love for detail has made the works an enduring classic. This attention to detail and emphasis on world-creating rather than map-drawing or level-creating are the cornerstones of the Myst series and hallmarks of great, immersive game design.

The limitations we faced were for the most part technical. The slow speed of CD-ROM, interface issues. But we knew those limitations when we started and strived to design the game around those issues. Other than those restrictions, it really was a feeling of doing what we wanted – of putting together something that felt like a real world.Rand Miller, Cyan Inc.

The reality of that world defined Myst, as well as Riven and the rest of the series. And while the pre-rendered graphics, synthesized moody soundtrack, and then-advanced CD-ROM technology provided the canvas, in the end it was the details that set Myst’s Ages apart from the pack and put Cyan in the history books.

Hidden From View

The most powerful thing is the thing you can’t see: in horror films, the most fearsome creature is the one lurking behind the door, growing more menacing in the haunted dark corners of the viewers’ minds. In games, the stories with the most impact aren’t the ones delivered in a cutscene or hammered into players’ skulls by the narrator, but the ones not told at all: the glimpses and shadows of epics of which the player plays but a small part. Nothing has pulled this off quite as well as the Myst series, as nothing tugs at the imagination quite like tinkering with the machinations of mighty inventors of ages past, wondering what other mysteries or terrors their cultures discovered. Picking through the pages of crumbling, yellowed diaries offered a tantalizing taste of the thoughts and fears of peoples now but a memory.

No, not every game developer need invent a dozen languages or pen a hundred tomes as backstory for their iPhone Tetris spin-offs or Breakout clones. Some games revel in the simplistic, utliizing presentation as nothing more than feel-good eye candy for their speed or platforming based challenges–and that’s ok. But with the nearly limitless freedom that advances in technology have made available to us, it’s a shame that few developers have really delved as deep as the Millers did with Myst. There have been some: BioShock, while not nearly as detailed, let players in on “examining the shards of broken glass” of Rapture, hinting at a great experiment gone awry. The Elder Scrolls games have for years whisked gamers away to the land of Tamriel, with its complex factions and histories both told and untold.

Unique New York

Although not every one of these universes has a Tolkien level of detail and depth, each is utterly unique. I’d recognize Myst III’s Amateria or the Art Deco-styled halls of Rapture if you drew it on an Etch-a-Sketch; I could pick out the architecture of Vvardenfell on a skyline 40 miles away. In addition to a real, living (if abandoned) set of worlds, Cyan’s Myst was precious and distinct. It’s a special type of game that can sidestep the fantasy and fictional tropes that pervade many games’ settings, but nearly all of the Myst franchise pulls this off brilliantly.

But why do so many game worlds feel so flat in a time when more than ever we have the tools to fully realize designers’ creative visions? Why do developers often resort to the typical collection of ice levels, fire levels, jungle levels, and of course a token forest area? I suspect the answer lies partly in the fact that rising development costs have robbed world creation of the time it so desperately needs and deserves, with many publishers and developers insisting on pouring resources into mechanical level design instead. Ken Levine of Irrational Games touched on this in a 2006 interview with 1UP before BioShock’s release:

...games are the most challenging for a writer. … Every time you want something in a game, somebody has to build the damn thing, animate, program it, et cetera. It also takes forever to see anything you create in games come to fruition. We started working on BioShock five years ago. I was in my mid-30s. I'm going to be 40 when the damn thing comes out.Ken Levine, Irrational Games

The writers’ and designers’ vision aren’t always easily implemented, and for every wildly creative idea they come up with, programmers have to implement it, to the detriment of the game’s budget. But that challenge has always existed in some form, as even Myst was developed with state-of-the-art technology at the time. It’s at the feet of development studios to go the extra mile to create detailed, mysterious, unique worlds for gamers to explore, even against tight budgets and looming deadlines.

What We Can Learn

Myst isn’t a perfect game, nor were its sequels. Even so, it turned the adventure genre on its head and rewrote the rules for PC games for the next decade: until The Sims came along, it was the best-selling computer game ever, spawning four core sequels and gobs of clones. Cyan (now fittingly named Cyan Worlds) succeeded not by innovating mechanically but through crafting deep, believeable worlds and Ages for us to explore–and the gaming industry would be best served not to forget its lessons–that is, the value of creating living worlds and not just digital playgrounds.