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Video: How Myst's designers stuffed an entire universe onto a single CD-ROM:
Although the passage of time serves to make the past seem sweeter in recollection than it might have been in the moment, it's impossible to deny that there was something special about the gaming landscape of the 1990s. Every year in that decade brought a torrent of titles that were destined to become classics—including the often-imitated-but-ultimately-inimitible Myst.
Myst came to market in 1993, which was a banner year in PC gaming—1993 also brought us X-Wing, Doom, Syndicate, and Day of the Tentacle, among others. It's fascinating that Myst happened the same year that Doom launched, too—both games attempted to simulate reality, but with vastly different approaches. Doom was a hard and fast shotgun blast to the face, visceral and intense, aiming to capture the feeling of hunting (and being hunted by) demons in close sci-fi corridors; Myst was a love letter to mystery and exploration at its purest.
A few months back, Ars caught up with Myst developer Rand Miller (who co-created the game with his brother Robyn Miller) at the Cyan offices in Washington state to ask about the process of bringing the haunting island world to life. Myst's visuals lived at the cutting edge of what interactive CD-ROM technology could deliver at the beginning of the multimedia age, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, fitting the breadth of the Millers' vision onto CD-ROM didn't happen without some challenges.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 03 2020, @03:31AM (4 children)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game) [wikipedia.org]
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger [wikipedia.org]
(but this would probably take too long to unpack on PCs of those era).
(Score: 4, Insightful) by choose another one on Monday February 03 2020, @09:18AM
You beat me to it. As Elite beat Myst by about ten years, and stuffed a universe onto a single floppy.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 03 2020, @01:27PM
A million liberal vegans cry out in horror!
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Monday February 03 2020, @04:18PM (1 child)
The Are Warstories videos are entraning watches. The Myst one reminded me of the Command and Conquer video. Both utilized the relatively new CD rom and had difficulty leveraging the new media. Myst was streaming images off 1x drives fast enough to provide a realtime feel. C&C was providing video cutscenes before standardized codecs made this trivial.
Overall all of the videos are fun to watch and present the challenges these creators handled well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 03 2020, @08:00PM
My favorite trick they used was loading the video while the game was still playing. The lack of load screen made those really immersive. The only real problem I had was sometimes I would notice the CD drive spinning up and that would ruin the surprise of the video or that I was getting close to some key moment.