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I was a console gamer and didn't get a PC until my early 20s, but at high school one of our chemistry teachers had a PC with Myst. It was my first PC game, and we would go play it every lunch time trying to figure out the next puzzle.

Dragon quest 6 opening apparently was inspired by myst I think it doesn’t help that myst is usually described as "that game where you see no png, no fighting and most people couldn’t even get out of the starting area", it make it seems like an archaic museum piece.

it was insane how beautiful and groundbreaking and atmospheric it was

It’s been updated and rereleased several times and there are 4 more games in the series, available on multiple platforms. Time to start a grassroots surge of interest! Obduction is another in that vein produced by Cyan. It’s great (but if, like me, you’re prone to motion sickness slip it ).

myst was like the only video game any of the adults in my life played as a kid (except my grandpa who played military shooters lol)

Half the reason Blue Prince blew the fuck up the way it did was because it was functionally Myst's spiritual successor...

myst is also a great angle to discuss how influential hypercard was, basically html, flash, and twine games before it existed.

it’s funny to see everyone being like “Myst is the one game my dad/mom/grandma played” b/c Myst is among the few games my dad ever played and he hated it. apparently his brothers told him to play it but recently i asked them about it and *they* hated it too. not sure why they asked him to play it

Myst was just a old game . The 5th gen oregon trail had superior pre-rendered C.G.I. backgrounds . I am not talking about the 1st game with the monochrome art.

To be fair, I think the significance of FF7 is lost on a lot of people who weren't around for it too. The degree to which it was a step up, and the crossover appeal of it anyway. Particularly in PAL-land, which never got any previous Final Fantasies (or Chrono Trigger)

It's a shame because I hear so much praise for it and then I tried it at a MAGfest display and just bounced right the fuck off of it. I hadn't a clue what I was supposed to be doing, and I grew up in that era of games. How do I approach this thing lol

I'd argue even bigger, it was MOBILE games before mobile games, people who normally wouldn't play computer games were playing it.

Western gaming abandoning the enthusiast dork market in favor of the gun and ball market was the the burning of alexandria

I don't know about calling Myst the FF7 of its day because its success was in a different world. Myst was one of the first ever games to breach the mainstream beyond your typical "nerd" or kiddie demographic. FF7 was still in the bubble of nerds that grew up on Nintendo.

i remember just hearing about it as a kid. such a weird time to think about, for so many people it was a puzzle they'd never solve. no YouTube walkthrus or even gamefaqs

Myst was the game we would gather around the one computer in the library a lunchtime and puzzle over in my itty bitty primary school in a tiny village in rural France. One girl in the class gathered up everyone's paper notes and made them into a little booklet.

I was like 7 years old and learned about it from my uncle who was obsessed with it, who to my knowledge has never played or even talked about games since

I know barely anything about Myst because I am too young to have been there (read: I wasn't alive) but I think the first eye opener to how big it was for me is the fact that it gets namedropped in House of Leaves

people forget how big duke nukem was, or quake, or peter molyneux making an rpg, or command and conquer etc, but I think part of it was: they missed the generational cutoff. a lot of ff7 fans don't seem to have even played the game when it first came out?? or it was their first big game

Yea, alongside the whole killer app that helped popularize games on optical media thing, going through old adventure games there's a very distinct pre and post myst era where suddenly everyone wants to do first person adventure games with fmv transitions and copy mysts presentation

Myst was one of the few games me and my dad played together, each of us took turns when we got to a new age.

The Sims was the most important game of all time for several years but even the owners of the franchise can't successfully iterate on that to the relative level of the first game

and while it seems bad for it to be so niche and forgotten now, that it has been allowed to go back to cyan who remain led by rand miller makes it actually one of the best outcomes comparatively. lets take a look how ultima is doing

it is basically the one video game my dad ever played

only game my grandmother ever installed

If it can't get you hooked on gambling or make you pay a subscription they don't give a fuck about it

they were able to swing john goodman FOR A PARODY GAME BASED ON IT. it may as well have been the biggest thing in the world

Myst was *the* PC game, before Doom came out. My parents got a SVGA card for the family computer specifically so I could play Myst

the only games before ff7 were doom and super mario

hey can you post something that's just a matter of public record and recent memory so that I can just reply "nope" over and over?

i agree strongly with the point that you’re making and honestly I think this is underselling it. My 80 year old dad and his friends could never have told you word one about FFVII but they sure as shit knew what myst was

2000s and early 2010s were brutal. History was written by Nintendo, Playstation and Xbox. All prior legacy was destroyed or mocked. Funding stopped for them. Publishers not doing enough was least of the causes.

PC Gaming is huge now. Classic PC games/franchises (beside handful big ones) have all but forgotten (availability + discourse).

Outside of Tetris, Myst was the only game my grandma played. She had stacks of notes and some sort of massive player’s guide book

I think this comes down to age. I know 20 year olds who have never played a Metal Gear or Castlevania. Time moves on and the game industry does not have a largely agreed upon as gospel institution that’s dedicated to keeping these things relevant after 2 years.

I know it’s a Patreon only video right now but @hbomberguy.bsky.social does a great breakdown of the cultural relevancy of the first Myst game. It had Gap ads! It was featured on the Simpsons before other games! Hopefully it reaches the public feed eventually so everyone can learn about it.

It was so big that I read a couple of myst books despite no owning a computer at a time and never even seeing the game.

there was a PARODY of it that had John Fucking Goodman in it!! www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcIn...

Pyst - making ofYouTube video by Przygodoskopwww.youtube.com

Funny story: Kevin O'Leary, the guy from Shark Tank, made his money with a software company named Softkey that acquired The Learning Company, which had the rights to Myst, Oregon Trail, a bunch of other games. In 1999, he sold TLC to Mattel for US$4.2 billion in stock, and it lost $105M.

Also a lot of major milestone western games were further from the current traditional AAA mold like how FF7 created it so it’s harder to make the mainstream care about them.

I imagine a portion of that is because of corporate ratfucking, see: Sierra Granted as much as I respect him I've heard Ken Williams say pro-AI shit before that was pretty off-putting to me but it's a shame they didn't at least get the chance to fail on their own

Wasn't Myst the best selling PC game of all time from its release until 2000? Like, nothing managed to de-throne it until The Sims.

A big part of it is lack of respect and visibility for classic PC gaming. Myst did get ported to every CD-ROM format under the sun, but it never seemed to be as respected on any platform where the mouse wasn't the primary input device.

It sucks that you can't buy Lemmings or the original Prince of Persia on current consoles. So many big and important games that are just completely unavailable.

As far as I remember no one cared about Myst back then. People were playing SNES and Sega Mega Drive, next to no one had a Mac.

I remember there was a parody game called Pyst that starred John fucking Goodman in FMV, he even sang a theme song.

The western game industry has no respect for authors. They buy a name, fire the creators, and backfill with trash -- then wonder why it doesn't sell. Or worse, financially succeed with that trash, and set a formula in stone for installments III - XVLCVLII.

Hot take: Myst was the Forrest Gump of video games. It was a giant hit at release but looking back, it's almost impossible to see why. Other things from the era have aged far better.

MYST was that era's "everyone played this" game. It's like Tetris or Wii Bowling. Non gamers played that. Your meemaw was playing MYST

Myst was the first game I remember having on PC I literally just finished re-playing them all and just discovered Cyan are keeping Uru Online servers up.

the tie-in novels were a trip

Huh? It was big but it wasn't that big.

When Portal came out, my initial reaction was "this is pretty much joining Myst and Doom".

The west manages to not respect its classics, let's japan take the spotlight and then get weirdly bitter about it Perhaps some Japanese classics are more approachable. But that's partly due to them not letting the language of their design die, which may explain classic fps enduring better than most