Artists, academics and grandparents alike all looked to Myst as a sophisticated piece of media. As such, it drew attention from an audience otherwise uninterested in video games in those games. It traded traditional forms of navigation for a static art style that was almost photo-realistic (or as close as could be attained in those days) and it did away with genre conventions like inventory puzzles, dialogue trees, or a typically told sci-fi or fantasy narrative that front-loads the player with flavour text. Not only did it eschew combat, platforming or any competitive element, it didn't even resemble other adventure games. Myst didn't look like other games back then. It appealed to puzzle fans and technology enthusiasts the way one would expect of any early 90s graphic adventure game, but it drew in a much larger audience beyond that scope. It's strange to think back on now, given how much the world has changed in 23 years, but there was a time when Myst was the game. Like Myst island itself, it became an enigmatic hotbed of creativity languishing away in an isolated retreat. At a distance it may seem like Cyan withdrew from society after Myst's sequel, Riven, but really the opposite is true: Cyan didn't leave the world, the world left Cyan. His story is a tragic one of ambition, bum luck, and a woeful miscalculation of where the gaming zeitgeist was heading. To understand Cyan's troubled history I spoke to Rand Miller on Skype last Wednesday, the very day the studio launched Obduction. So where was he? Where did the money go? How did the developer of one of history's most popular computer games fade into relative obscurity? Neither did Cyan, for that matter, despite serious financial woes nearly killing the company off 11 years ago. What a lot of people don't realise is that Miller never left. Now Cyan is back and it's swinging for the fences harder than it has in ages with Obduction, the crowdfunded spiritual successor to its record-setting first-person puzzler Myst.Īs the Obduction Kickstarter campaign was fond of reminding people, Cyan's CEO, co-founder and Myst co-director Rand Miller is still in charge. By 2005 the studio was on the verge of bankruptcy. In 1993 Cyan released what would go on to be the biggest-selling PC game of all time for nearly a decade.
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