- [dramatic music]

- I got into gaming when I was in junior high, and I'm not young, so this was a long time ago, and the games I got into, on computers, were not what people know today. Like, okay, so what really hooked me, and this is appropriate for like the 50th anniversary of Apollo, was a lunar lander game. I remember it to this day. There were no graphics to it. This was a line of text, on a CRT screen, that said how high I was off the lunar surface, just a number, how fast I was going and how much fuel I had left, and then a question mark. You put in how much fuel you want to burn. You hit return, and rinse, repeat, until you basically crash on the surface. In junior high, a college friend took me to the University of New Mexico computer center. I saw that on the screen, and it was magic. This was magic to me. And he said, "There are other games, "and you can make your own games. "You write programs to do this." I mean, it changed everything I wanted to do, from that point on. I had had a little consulting firm. I was doing computer consulting on personal computers in a small town in Texas. So the earliest game we did was still under then name of that consulting firm, which was Prolog, and when my brother Robyn and I decided to do this more seriously, we used the name Cyan. I'm trying to think of the transition when we actually took that name. It was probably in the mid '80s that we used that very what we thought at the time would be a very open-ended name, so we could get into anything we wanted. Had this idea of a blue sky, and we liked that. So we picked that as a name. But the games we started with were, oddly enough, not really games. I had done some games. Obviously, I was hooked on games, so I'd done some, in junior high, just as a hobby. That was all I wanted to do. But when we got serious, the first game we did was for kids. I had had a daughter. Children's software, at the time, it felt like, not to insult anybody, but it felt like if you couldn't do other kinds of games on PCs, you would just kinda throw something together for kids. It didn't have that magic feel that children's books had. A good children's book, you're an adult, and you don't mind reading it. It's interesting. [solemn music] I wrote to my brother and said we should do this interactive book. We should do a book that's amazing. He was an artist, a musician, knew enough about computers to be dangerous, and I knew enough about art and music to be dangerous. And it was a great team. And I said we should do something, this interactive book, and I remember writing him that letter, a couple times. And he finally sat down, in HyperCard, and started sending these images to me. HyperCard, which is an amazing platform, it'd just come out on the Macintosh, but he drew the first page of a book, which was a manhole cover and a fire hydrant in the background. And what happened was this really interesting transition for us, and it was what shaped us into what we were. He didn't turn the page. After drawing the manhole cover and the fire hydrant, we didn't care about what was on the next page. We cared about what's under the manhole cover and what is that fire hydrant about. And so the pictures that I got from him were the manhole cover slid aside and a vine growing up to somewhere and a picture closer to the fire hydrant with a little door, tiny, little door, on the bottom. And these were just still images that he sent me that we linked together. He probably had already linked them, 'cause HyperCard was easy to use. And we suddenly realized that we weren't doing an interactive book. We were making a world. And it wasn't a planned world. It was a very [laughs], it was a very chaotic, random, just stream-of-consciousness world for children. And it kind of felt magical, another one of those magical feelings, like when I first played a computer game. Like, this felt like a place. It felt like we were able to explore this place. We did all this, and it had some loops that looped in on themselves and ended up having this game called "The Manhole." We took it to an expo in San Francisco. These were crazy, heady times, where back in the day, you could put your work on floppy disks, take it to an expo and sell it for probably 20 bucks or 30 bucks, and we sold out, and a publisher came to us and said, "Hey, we'll give you a lot of money "for the rights to publish this game." That was the beginning, and we thought that was really cool. The amount of money they offered us, by the way, it was nowhere near the amount of time we had sent making it, but it seemed like a huge amount. It was like $20,000, and we'd taken a full year of our time to do it, both of us, but it was like, 20,000, can you imagine? I mean, $20,000, I mean, we thought this is it. We've made it. [solemn music] We started with "The Manhole" and had this interesting success with it. The first thing we did with "The Manhole" was make it larger, add music to it, because we had some additional funding to do that, and put it on CD-ROM, and I think it was one of the first entertainment CD-ROMs, if not the first entertainment CD-ROM. That was intriguing for us. We didn't really know what that meant, other than we had plenty of storage for it. It meant we could put some really fun music. It was our first chance to go into a studio and actually write some music ourselves and use real musicians and put that in. It felt very professional, from a couple of brothers just in their spare bedrooms doing stuff, to actually go into a studio. The studio, as I recall, was in some guy's garage, so it wasn't super professional. But what happened after that was, what comes next? By the way, I still had my real job, working at a bank, so this wasn't actually our living yet. But "Cosmic Osmo" was how we evolved. It was a very natural transition. We had learned so much about our platform, HyperCard, in the meantime doing "Manhole," and about what this world did well, "Manhole," and what it didn't do well. "Cosmic Osmo" was a chance for us to push things a little further, and it still is, I mean, it's very close to both my brother's and my heart. It was a tour de force of what I think, at that point, HyperCard could do and what computers could do. Everything was interactive, and there were animations, and there were things you could move on the screen and things you could build, and you could write your name in one spot or draw a picture in one spot, and it would show up in a frame in another spot. You could type on a typewriter somewhere, and it would show up in a book in another spot, and it had this whimsical, our first chance at kinda weaving a story into a world, as well. And it was trivial, but it all felt like an experimental test bed for how complex we could make a world, what could we do, what interactions worked, what didn't work, and to this day, I think people who played "Cosmic Osmo" loved it. Side note on that, it was actually published by Activision. We stopped getting royalty checks. I mean, every indie developer or development house, back in the day, could probably tell similar stories, but we just stopped getting checks for that. We still don't, to this day, know how many of those sold. Activision went through a bankruptcy. And as fate would have it, we got the rights back. So we owned that, and at that point, we actually settled with them by saying, don't pay us any money. We don't care how many you sold. Just give us "Cosmic Osmo" back. That's the kind of mindset we had. It was not about the money. It was just we love doing this stuff. [solemn music] At that point after "Cosmic Osmo," we realized that there were a couple of options we had, a couple of paths we could take. Both of us dropped out of college. So I don't know why we thought that. Maybe that's why we thought it was interesting. It's like, well, we should do something productive here with these games. So we thought educational would be interesting, and the other was something for an older audience. And we designed, we had ideas for both of those. As, again, fate would have it, the project for an older audience, we called it "A Gray Summons." We proposed it to a couple publishers, and they didn't bite, so we went with the educational route. And we did something called "Spelunx." Now our take on education was we didn't really care about teaching kids or anybody else anything. We were more interested in making them curious or motivated about things. So "Spelunx" was our first foray into just trying to make something that was a little more sophisticated. We'd built a much more complex story into it. We had a book, at one point, in the game, a book on a shelf that had the whole backstory to what went on here, which you see how this progresses. We toyed with color for the first time in "Spelunx," both spot color and then a version that was full color. So we were learning how to do color. We didn't know just where this would end, but we were honing our skills. A little side note on this, we'd built "Spelunx" on the Mac with HyperCard. There was no HyperCard on the PC. We sent our version of "Spelunx" to Broderbund, who was our publisher at the time, and they said, well, we'll make the PC version. We went down, a few months later, to see how it was going. It really wasn't much. Went down six months later, really wasn't much. I think a year later, and I'm probably off on that, but they finally said, well, we can't. We just haven't been able to make this on a PC. And we didn't understand, at that point, but it had to do with just how easy it was to get things done in HyperCard. We were doing things that were trivial for us, but there was not platform to map that to. So all that had to be done in some fairly low-level code, on the PC, and it was a strenuous exercise to make it happen. So there never was a "Spelunx" version on the PC. [solemn music] HyperCard was enabling technology. And I think everybody who does any kind of development on computers realizes that you're built on enabling technology. Well, HyperCard was that for us. I mean, in fact, it was a thing that gave us the idea to begin with of our very first project "The Manhole." And it was, to this day, I would be doing projects in HyperCard if it was available. It was such an elegant, amazing tool that I don't think Apple understood even how to market that product. It was a database, but obviously, we did all of our games in it. So we didn't look at it as a database program. That was just one of the things it could do. At its core, HyperCard was, just picture a stack of cards, a virtual stack of cards, that you could put a button on any card, an invisible button on any card. If somebody clicked on that button, it would go to another card. And it was so easy a child could use it. In fact, my daughters grew up using it, building those very simple linked cards. And you could draw a picture on a card, draw a picture of, say, a fire hydrant and put an invisible button on it, and when you click on it, you go to a picture of a close-up of that fire hydrant. It was trivial. That's the easiest part of HyperCard. You could see how that then evolved into what we do, a link of still pictures. There's a button on the left side of the screen. When you click it, there's a transition that looks like you're turning to the left, and there's another picture on that side that looks like you're looking to the left. HyperCard did much more as well. And I think "Cosmic Osmo" and "Spelunx" kind of were more of an homage to all the things that HyperCard could do from a interactive point of view. But it was absolutely the technology that enabled us to do what we did. HyperCard, again, I should mention this. HyperCard was exclusive on the Macintosh, at the time. I mean, we didn't know anything about PCs or how we would convert stuff to PCs, because this was, for us, labors of love on the Macintosh, in HyperCard. And it actually came on every Mac. It shipped with every Mac at the time. I think that was part of a deal. The guy who basically invented it said that as long as he was at Apple, it should come for free on the Mac, and I think, if you look back in history, it shaped a lot of the early software that came. It came out of the fact that everybody got HyperCard on a Mac. HyperCard was so instrumental in doing what we did that it was almost just part of the project. Well, so much so that on "The Manhole" disks, it actually said a HyperCard program or a HyperCard game. We actually put the name HyperCard on there. In fact, the earliest expo that we went to sell "The Manhole" at was the HyperCard Expo in San Francisco. I think it was the first expo for all things HyperCard. And that's where we got discovered. But it honestly was part of our DNA, at that point. There was a real conscious effort on our part to really tune every element of this game, I mean, especially on the Mac version. I mean, we were looking at every little piece. A good example of that is moving from one scene to the other. This is something that everybody probably glosses over or doesn't even think of, but remember, HyperCard doesn't do color, so we had to move from one color image to another, and we wanted a really nice blend, like it would fade out one image and fade in another image. And that seems like, oh, that's easy. That should be trivial. But it wasn't. And we've actually had a guy, who we contracted with, who built these add-on external, they were called, X-commands and X-functions for HyperCard that would do color, 'cause HyperCard didn't do it. And luckily, he had the kind of the same meticulous attitude as we did. His name was John Miller, and he would send, no relation, he would send us examples of these blends, and there would be five different examples, like which of these do you like, blending from one card to the next. And some of them looked like, it was like this shutter that would blend, and some of them weren't fast enough, and then there was one that was like just perfect. It was like cinematic. It blended so well from one to the other. And then we asked, or he had already built in, so that there was the ability to control how fast it blended from one to the other, but we didn't want it to just do it in pieces by slowing it down. It needed to then add more gradations as it blended, and he did all that as we worked with him, and that was important to us. I mean, those transitions were important. If you go back and look at the game, the Mac version versus the PC version, you can see where we were babysitting that Mac version. Broderbund did a wonderful job of creating the PC version from the files we handed off to them, and they were machine-readable files of meticulously where every button was and every picture name and where everything was, but we weren't babysitting those transitions. And some of those transitions weren't as elegant. I mean, the blends do just the thing I didn't like on the Mac, and the things that we bucked up against. They have this weird shutter kind of flow that's like, on the PC, it was fine, and it worked, and it was wonderful, but on the Mac, it gave us this great outlet for our OCD, where this felt like this was every bit of our focus. [solemn music] You can imagine that as we evolved, the games that we were making, it was actually wonderful to be able to use the funds that were coming in from the previous product, if they were coming in, to fund our computer platforms, to upgrade. Those were always wonderful days, when you could get the next machine that came out. And we started on the early Macs that were just black and white. Our games were just black and white. And as we progressed, we were able to kinda get some early color machines. And I remember, specifically, when we finally started "Myst," which was an interesting story on its own, but we realized that this would be in color. This would be the first product we would do that would only play on color machines. There would be no black-and-white option. And Robyn's machine was a black-and-white Macintosh, but it had been hacked with a clip. It didn't have any expansion slots. You take off the back, and you get this crazy board that was a clip that would clip on to the processor, all the pins of the processor, and give you a monitor that was color, and so that's how we started "Myst," with an early Mac SE, I think, and it was hacked to do color. When the funding came in, a lot of that was used to buy updated Macs that had color as part of it, and by the way, those were days that were magical. I feel like I've lived through these amazing periods, where I got to start on the crazy green screen with just text, and I remember getting a Mac box that did color with eight-bit color and a color monitor, and turning that on and bringing up a photo of, it was probably those clear balls that people used to render, 'cause it would be ray traced, and it would show all the reflections, and it was like a photograph on my screen. To this day, I remember where I was, when I did that, because it was one of those leaps in technology that suddenly seemed impossible previous, but now it was like, well, we can do photos on this. Anything will work now. Our images are not black-and-white. They're not just cartoons. This looks like a real photo. That was huge, and that obviously influenced where we went when we decided to do something for an older audience, which was "Myst." [solemn music] "Myst" was a very natural evolution from our earlier worlds, as I've mentioned, but it was also a leap, because what we had learned doing our earlier worlds is that you could embed pieces of story in your game. We didn't know that at all in "The Manhole." But we realized we liked it, as we moved forward. And those pieces of story felt like they kept you honest. They kept the world somehow realistic, because everything in the real world has a story to it. It's there for a reason. We realized when we were ready to do something for an older audience, that that was important. We needed to have stories to things, and we're excited about that. It was amazingly exciting. Don't get me wrong. "Myst" was still an experiment. I mean, we didn't really know what we were doing. In fact, the earliest solution for the images of "Myst" is we thought we would hand draw them. Robyn would hand draw them, the same way he'd done all our other projects. But very early then, when we were getting ready to draw up the proposal, we got our hands on some 3D rendering software. Boy, another one of those pivotal moments where you realize the future's different from now on, because I remember, and I'm sure Robyn has the same recollection, of sitting down with that software, putting a ball on the screen, putting a table, putting a light source, it's all in wireframe, very simple, and saying render, clicking the Render button, and out comes something that generates shadows and reflections and the refraction through glass, and oh, this is different now. And then it was, we can do this. We can render the images from this. We don't have to hand draw these. That was one of those things that we weren't sure would work at all. There's a huge difference between putting a glass ball and a table and rendering it and making an entire island in 3D and rendering it. And we weren't sure it would work at all, and I remember doing some tests. Robyn did some tests, just with trees, making a landscape, rendering it, and it worked. And we knew we weren't over the humps, the technical challenges of making that, at the time, because of the equipment, but also it gave us enough feedback that we thought, okay, this was possible. Interestingly enough, "Myst," we had a great relationship with our publisher Broderbund. We'd gone down a bad path with Activision, and they went bankrupt, and we moved away. Broderbund was completely different. They were a great publisher to work with. Doug Carlston was the owner of the company, and it was such an amazing difference. Nevertheless, it was not Broderbund who funded "Myst". [solemn music] "Myst" was basically started because this Japanese company, Sunsoft, who got in touch with us, just out of the blue. They'd been trying to get in touch with us for years, but Activision would not give 'em our contact information. So finally, they found us. They had loved "The Manhole," and they wanted to do something for an older audience. They wanted to fund something for an older audience. They flew to Spokane, Washington, in the middle of nowhere, a team of Japanese people, who we rented a hotel room, 'cause we were just working out of our houses, and we had this meeting with them, where they said, can you do something for an older audience? And we were like, oh hell yeah, we can do something for an older audience, you bet, with a proposal that was like seven pages, and the proposal for "Myst," the seven pages, if it was seven, I don't even remember, it was basically top-down maps of every island, with little notes on it. We didn't know how you did a game proposal. We just kind of did our thing, up till then. They said, okay, we'll give you, I think we asked for $250,000, at the time. And they said, now this is gonna be good, like "7th Guest?" Will this be better than "7th Guest?" And if you don't know "7th Guest," you should look it up. It's one of the products that wasn't done at the time, but it was being touted. They were showing some previews for it as this media project on CD-ROM. And we went oh yeah, yeah, you bet. They gave us the money. We bought our amazing equipment, Macs, high-end Macs, to do this. We did our tests. It all seemed feasible. And we started work. We even hired a couple of people. For the first time in our history, we had more than just my brother and I working on stuff. We hired another artist to help him. We hired a person to do both accounting and sound. And interestingly enough, we also did something, for the very first time, that was kind of unique. We played people through the game on paper. Because it was more of a game, and it had goals, and it had stories, we were probably a little bit unsure of how it would work, and so we actually, essentially dungeon mastered the game, with our first two employees, and said, basically described to them, you're standing on a dock. There's water to your side. You can hear it lapping. There's a seagull flying in the distance. And up in the distance, you see a deer on a hilltop. What do you want to do? And they would tell us. We'd tell 'em what happened, explain where they went and what happened, and we'd test the puzzles. We tested whether they were interested in any of it. We tested whether it actually worked, and they seemed to enjoy it. Although, they were our first two employees, so there was some pressure. But from there, we just jumped in and started building it. [solemn music] We started with 3D software. It was called StrataVision. And I'm telling you, I remember, specifically, Robyn and I, I'm sure we just experimented in StrataVision, because it was, again, one of those magical moments. I'm sorry, I keep using that word, but it felt like some of these transitional moments were magic, and that was another one, where I have this image, that I did, early on. It's an orange on a kitchen tile cabinet or a kitchen tile countertop, with the sun coming in a window and shadows, and I rendered it, and I mean, it's a simple image, but you render it, and it's like that feels like a photo. And that was easy. It was just a very constrained space, with a shiny little apple or orange, that you could get reflections on. I mean, it still took 15 minutes to render that little scene, but it was so magical to see that. And that's what people were doing. People were doing simple things, clear, transparent balls that reflected some kind of weird checkerboard square. It was all very technical, anybody who was rendering stuff, and so with "Myst," we were amping that up to beyond just a shiny ball or a shiny apple on a table to, okay, how would you do a tree? How do you do a tree with all of its branches? How do you do an entire building? And this wasn't in the movies yet. I mean, it was very trivial stuff in the movies, just wireframe CG, at the time, and yet here we were trying to do something that was near photorealistic on a grand scale, and it was exciting. As we progressed in "Myst's" development, the worlds were very sophisticated. I mentioned that we started by testing with an island, with some trees on it and some buildings, what Myst Island kind of evolved to, but the island kind of got bigger and bigger, and there were more trees and more trees, and how many trees can you put? And there were lots of polygons, and there were lots of textures, and what's the rule that says that your crap expands to fill horizontal spaces? Well, there's some kind of corollary for 3D rendering. Our models got to the space where they were filling every bit. We'd add more memory, add another hard drive, but these were not massive machines. These were just Macs that were PCs. I don't know that they were made for this. So what ends up happening is Robyn is sitting at his house. We worked out of our houses. We didn't have offices. And he's tweaking these models that, at some point, are just massive. The number of polygons, these are way too big for what we're doing. You have to picture this now. He's not seeing the bedroom, say the brothers' bedroom in realtime, from Stoneship Age. He's seeing a wireframe transparent. It's just a mass of black lines on a white screen. I mean, it's hard to even tell where you're looking. He's trying to set cameras, because the only way you can even partially move theses screens in realtime is by getting the lowest possible setting, which is just wireframe. And even then, and I remember this, because we would both do this or tweak it, but especially Robyn, you would move the camera a little bit, to try and get your camera adjusted correctly, and maybe adjust it, so you could see a little more detail than the wireframe, and then just pick up a magazine and read it, because it was gonna take minutes, just to do the realtime modeling portion of that, just waiting for the screen to refresh, so you could see if this angle was correct, or if it was even close to where it needed to be. And then you would click Render, and it would take hours, and, no exaggeration, hours sometimes all night to render a single image. And again, that was the place we lived at that point. At some point, Robyn had to adjust from traditional just painting with a brush, black-and-white, oddly enough, to color-painting with a brush, early versions of Photoshop or Pixel Paint, whatever tools were available at the time, to 3D rendering. And honestly, I mean, and I brought this up before, Robyn is amazing, because he's an incredibly talented artist and musician, but he also knows enough about the technology that he's interested in it, intrigued by it, and is curious enough that it was worth the effort to move forward. And so, from my point of view, he made it an amazing transition to 3D. I mean, from my point of view, coming from the programming side, I mean, I'm not an artist. I touch on that, but I could make art with 3D. I mean, I could make shiny balls on a table, or whatever, but when he made the transition with his skillset, I think he would probably say that it was one of those magical moments, where it was a tool that enabled him to do things that he couldn't do otherwise. [solemn music] Our setup for doing "Myst" was, we were definitely a Mac shop, and Robyn was generating images. I mean, this was how we had always worked. It was just on steroids, at this point. He was at his house generating images, feeding them to me, and I was linking those together in HyperCard. Now, and okay, this gets kinda crazy, because HyperCard doesn't do color, at the time, and these are all full-color images that's Robyn's sending, so we can get into that, but suffice it to say that he had a really powerful Mac, with a lot of memory and a lot of hard drive space. I had a really powerful Mac, with a lot of memory and a lot of hard drive space. And we were still working in mud. It was incredibly slow, especially for Robyn, rendering those images. And it was wonderful times when Apple would come out with a new machine, and we thought we might be able to afford it, because we could add that to our collection. What would happen is Robyn would stack up a lot of images to be rendered. In other words, he couldn't be rendering these as he's working. He had to stack those up in a queue, and at some point, we add another computer. If he got a new computer, the old one would go to the side and be used as part of this rendering queue, and maybe another one would be added to the rendering queue, and then as soon as he stopped working, or we'd go grab a bite at dinner or a cup of coffee, you would immediately turn on rendering on his machine to add it to the other two that were rendering, and you could have this distributed rendering, with whatever machines were available, to try and keep generating those images from what he had queued up. And same thing at my place, we would get suspended renderings he would send to me, and every machine we had had to be running all the time, to render these images, or there just wasn't enough time. It was taking hours and hours per frame to do these things. One frame, at the minimum, was a couple of hours to do it. And there were hundreds and hundreds of these images. So we had to feed the beast. We had to feed the beast, everything. If one of the machines ran out of something to do, we were doing something wrong. It's like there's this panic. Like, no, give me more images! We gotta get 'em in there! Or we'd grab some from another machine and feed it to the one that was emptied. Everything had to be rendering all the time in order to try to get this worked done. StrataVision, that was an amazing tool, and it was one of those, as I mentioned, crazy magic moments where it felt like you were actually building stuff in a world, instead of just painting pictures. But it also was this major shift in how we worked, because, before, you're thinking in pixels. I mean, we literally started with black-and-white pixels, and now here we are, building what it felt like, entire worlds of voluminous space in a virtual place. And we had to learn whole new ways to think of things, all new ways to think of things. Like, for example, well, I'll give this example. If you don't put enough detail into your world, it just looks like plastic, flat nastiness. I mean, there are subtleties in the real world that make us know that's real. We have to make that happen in a 3D rendering software. And I remember the first time. I mentioned this kitchen countertop with an orange on it that I did, and I'm not an artist, but it was, oh, this is cool. And the tiles were completely flat and shiny, and it's really great, 'cause it reflects everything, and it's good, but they looked ridiculous. I mean, no tiles are that way. Reflective tiles on a kitchen counter have these weird inconsistencies in them that makes them real. Well, we learned about things called bump maps, back then. Bump maps, it was shades of gray that you could apply to your texture that would make the renderer, it would fake the renderer, as you rendered it, into thinking that parts of the geometry were actually higher or lower. And it worked with the textures. It didn't actually change the geometry itself, but for example, all I did was take some very subtle grayscale noise, that was blurred out like crazy and map that to the kitchen tile surface, and suddenly, it looked real. Well, bump maps were something, we had no idea what bump maps were, until we started using StrataVision. I mean, I think the guys at Strata, I mean, these guys were heavy into CG, but they were taking the tools from a much more sophisticated platforms and mapping them on to the Mac, and we were having to learn a language of 3D-CGI stuff that we had no idea what it was, until we got into Strata. And that was great times, because we were in contact with Strata, at the same time, and we were saying, well, how would I do this? What could I do now? And I know there were some things that we talked with them about. I'm sure there were bugs that we were like, hey, this is not rendering right. This is doing weird stuff. And they'd go, oh, we'll fix this, and sent it to us, and I know there were, seems like there were features, weird features with alpha channels that, at some point, we suggested a place to fix or where they would put that, and it was not something you would naturally put it, in any way, so I feel like there was some back-and-forth, but really, it was their work that we were learning all these new things. Now I'd like to say that we were helping them add features, but I don't think we were smart enough to add features. We were just, again, looking at what things they would give us. I mean, I remember consuming their manual, what the possibilities were in Strata, and using those as best we could. And I'm sure Robyn must've felt the same way. I think the artistic field of "Myst" that, I'm definitely speaking for Robyn here, but so much of that was informed, at least at the beginning, from kind of the book that inspired it, which was, I think, Jules Verne "Mysterious Island," which was you land on this place, and it looks like it was inhabited. You get hints that there was people here or there's a person here or there's something here, connected pieces of equipment or you stumble upon something, but you're intrigued by it. It doesn't seem to fit in an island in the middle of nowhere. That was the major motivating point. Beyond that, I think Robyn was motivated by things at hand. The fact that we had a spaceship in a Romanesque architecture library in the same space was just a matter of both learning the tools and what visual inspiration he might've had in a National Geographic or an article he was reading in a sci-fi magazine. So some of that was very eclectic, especially at the beginning, on Myst Island. But it was all based on a design, our kind of design of a top-down map of this place, a spaceship here and a library, and the books'll be in the library. It was just we probably got better at the design as we went on. But even like the bedroom, like Sirrus' bedroom in Stoneship, it's this beautiful, lush, one of my favorite spots in the game, the bedspread and the plants in the corners and the woodwork that just looks so beautiful. It feels like, at that point, in Robyn's abilities, he'd reach kind of the peak of what Strata could do, especially in interiors. It was like, oh, I mean, I still go back now and look at that, and they're just gorgeous. It's got that photorealistic look that is hard to surpass. You get to a certain point, and it's like, well, it looks like the photo. It looks real. But I know that was informed even by patterns in books he had and wood textures that he would've found in magazines that he used for reference, as he was producing stuff. [solemn music] You can imagine that if you're building a real world, you want there to be some dynamic elements in it, and we played with that, in our earlier children software. From the very beginning, in "Manhole," we had done moving objects by just flipping from one card to the other, remember that whole idea that HyperCard was just cards, but it allowed you to flip cards quickly enough, to run through those, where some things seemed like they were animated. I mean, it was a couple of frames per second, but it at least did that illusion. And then when we did "Cosmic Osmo," we realized you could animate icons and make things seem like they were really moving. There were other ways to do animation, but they were all fairly low-end, and it was black-and-white. For "Spelunx," we toyed with, for the black-and-white version, different elements, and for the color version, we started getting other tools, but there were these rumors or, at the same time, I don't remember exactly the timing, but sometime during "Myst's" either planning or production, Apple had blessed us with QuickTime. And for anybody who now, all of this, by the way, is crazy for people now. We just take so much for granted. But QuickTime was this technology that, it would synchronize sound with movies, and you could play postage stamp, basically, sized movies on the screen. We always knew that any animations we would do would be small, because we thought we'd either have to flip cards or do the animation, write that ourselves, the code for that, but this allowed something very different. Suddenly, we could take video of real people and insert it, or video of renderings. This is gonna sound weird, but we could render full-screen videos. Full-screen images that I mentioned earlier would take hours to render, but a tiny, postage-stamp animation, you could get a lot of frames of that done. So it still took forever. I mean, some of those animations took days to render, but it was possible. Simply say this, QuickTime allowed us to consider making elevators that had windows that looked like when you moved up and down, you got full rendering of what you would see, with a full perspective, because we had a camera in our 3D software that was moving down and doing every frame. So we built those doors with a tiny little window in them, just for that reason. And then QuickTime allowed us, just as well, to put those images in the books, that weren't just voice or still images of a person, but an actually animated actor, ourselves, because it was a shoestring operation, saying and it was synced with the video, or the video and the sound was synced, and it was in a postage stamp-sized window on the books. All that was generated by the technology. The technology, boy, this is a whole different side discussion, but the box of the technology, the constraints of the technology is never a bad thing for us. It never felt like those were things that kept us from doing things. It just felt like kind of those were the constraints you lived within, and you made cool stuff within those constraints. Those were the boundaries, and you pushed it right up to the edge. And QuickTime, the size of those movies, we'd just, well, let's push it right up to the edge. What can we do with that? The "Myst" production flow was intriguing, because we weren't in an office. We each worked out of our homes, and I mentioned we hired a few other people, but we all worked out of separate places. The files we were generating were fairly large. And there was no internet at the time. I think the internet, when was the internet? Like '93, probably at the same time "Myst" actually shipped, so we were pre-internet. There may have been like CompuServe and AOL starting, sometime in there as well, but honestly, our files were so big that the modems, at the time, we weren't able to transmit stuff. We bought the best modems you could buy, and again, this is crazy stuff, but they had compression, and I lived out in the country. I lived up on a hill, in a double-wide trailer, at the time, with a nice view, and the phone line going to my trailer was multiplexed. And as a result, I got no speed at all. So I called the phone company, and they said, well, we can give you the copper to your house, because you need it, and they did. I don't know how that works, but I got a copper line, un-multiplexed, all the way to my house, and so my modem speed was like full-speed. I was, I'm sure, the only one on that road who cared, but it was nice of them to give that to me, but still, it was not anywhere enough. So we used tirenet. I mean, that's what other people called sneakernet in an office, but it was tirenet. We had somebody who worked for us who would just drive around. At the time, we had different forms of disks. There were Jaz disks, at the time, that would hold, I don't know how many megs. Boy, we'd have to look back, but it was small amounts, but it was large enough for what we did, and it was much more efficient than trying to transfer these files on a modem. So pictures that came from Robyn and from Chuck Carter, our other artist, would come on a Jaz disk to me. I'd put 'em in. Files to render would come from both of 'em to feed the beast, and then I would send versions of the game back to them, yeah, probably on the same thing, on the Jaz drive, so that they could look at it, if they had spare time, but there was a lot of that, but it was just however we could transfer files. And it's funny, because what happened was the actual, we live in such generous times with transferring data that it's weird to look back and think that, okay, we had to actual move the physical data. It was the only efficient way to do it. We were happy when we got larger disks that would store more, 'cause we could do more chunks at a time or not send a stack of 'em to people, to the other employees. [solemn music] Living within constraints is probably, it's like the name of the game for what we did. And I don't think we looked at it that way, at the time. There were tons of constraints. Those were just problems to be solved. I love problem solving, and I think that's part of what you have to do, if you're gonna do games. I mean, if you're not a good problem solver, you'd just go do something else, 'cause you're just gonna have problems. So it shaped what we could do. It defined the limits, the QuickTime limits, the color limits, like how many bits of, these days, you send a photo. You don't even think about how many bits you're using to express that photo, but we had eight bits. That was the standard amount that a monitor had, at the time. That means you had 256 colors. That was another limit we had. Sound cards, what were the sound cards? How much can you compress the sounds? What were the limits? How could you sync that? Well, one of the big constraints, large constraints that I don't know we had, we didn't have answers for was CD-ROM. CD-ROM had been around for just a very short time, and it was both enabling and somewhat frightening. You'd think that if you had this ability to have a large storage medium, which we were counting on, to do this large world called Myst, that it's like, oh, well, we're flush. This won't be a problem at all. But hard drives, for the time, were fast. CD-ROM, at the time, was notoriously slow. It came out. You could store 640k, or thereabouts, at the time, but CDs were made for music. They were not made for data. It was just this really nice hack job that allowed you to use it, the zeros and ones, to store data on. Hard drives were indexed. You could go to any point almost immediately, move the head to any point. CD-ROM drives, because they were made for music that was played sequentially, was just a long spiral, going from the inside to the outside of the disk, and they weren't made to index. They weren't made to jump to any part of the drive quickly, and yet, here we are, massive amounts of color information, color images, that we have to move from one image to the other. We have to be playing music simultaneously, off the CD-ROM drive, continuously. There can't be breaks in that. We have to also do sound effects, if they click buttons or activate certain elements of the game, and all of that has to happen streaming from a thing that doesn't stream a lot, 150k per second, and doesn't seek well. And this is one of those problems that it was really hard to test. Again, CD-ROM burners were not readily available. They were thousands of dollars for a CD-ROM burner. And they were notoriously difficult to use. I mean, we didn't have one. It was our publisher Broderbund that may have had one, and we didn't even use it until we were well into the project, not knowing for sure if this was even gonna work, if it was gonna be playable. How long would it take, on Myst Island, when you were on the dock, and you click to move from one picture to the other? Side note, I worked at a bank for years before doing this, and we had this great psychological kind of play, that I probably heard at some IBM conference, that said two seconds is how long you want people to wait before they get feedback from clicking something on the screen or from hitting a button on the screen. And after two seconds, they start to recognize, that they're not getting something, they start wondering if it's them or if it's the machine, and so you kinda want to keep it to that. Well, we had no idea if we were gonna move. How long was it gonna take? It might've taken 10 seconds to move to the next image. We just didn't know while we were building it, 'cause it worked great on the hard drive. We could test people on the hard drive, and it was wonderful, and it was clean, and it was everything. It worked like a charm. We had no idea what would happen when we burned this on to a CD-ROM. This was one of those scary moments. I mean, looking back, it's kind of crazy, but there had to have been some kind of intuitive feel we had for this as well, 'cause we had put some of our really not-so-complex games on to CD-ROM, and so it felt like we had some kind of basic feel for it, but honestly, we were streaming so much more stuff, at this point, that it was somewhat scary. It's one of those intuitive feelings of jumping off a cliff and feeling like, well, I don't think I'm gonna hit those rocks down there. I think I can make, I think I can just get past those. You don't know the physics of it, and those are far away, and you don't do this normally in life, but I think I can do it. It was one of those moments. So if it had taken a lot longer to go from one image to the other, I'm not sure what we would've had to do. We would've solved it. We would've gone back and said, well, we got to cut the music rate down, or each image has to be compressed more, and these are all things we had done meticulously to try and get our data rate very low. But we would've had to just shrink it more. I guess experience is one of those weird kind of things, where you can't put your finger on it exactly the calculation where you think it's gonna work, but because we've been doing it for five years or six years, we just kinda had this feeling, and luckily, we were kind of right, because when we, I mean [laughs], it's this weird process, where we sent hard drives, probably a hard drive, down to Broderbund, and they burned the first gold master CD of "Myst," and I'm sure it wasn't complete. We had a bunch of the worlds complete, but nowhere near beta yet. But they burned a gold master, and by the way, the disk came back and it was gold. We still call things here at the company gold masters, as we approach their completion, and I think it all comes from the fact that those early CD-ROMs were gold when you pressed them. So we got the gold master. We put it in our CD drives. We click Play, and we all cross our fingers and give it a try. And it comes up. And for the most part, it's working. And we're under a two second thing. And the music's playing, and believe me, the music was a huge part of this, and the sound effects and music, because up till this point, in our games, we had actually done the music by breaking it up ourselves into chunks and then playing it by hand, a chunk at a time. This was something that was gonna be handled by QuickTime now. So we're depending on Apple's QuickTime to stream the music, at the amount we had compressed it, from the disk, and be able to click, and the head on the CD goes to where the music is. Then it goes back to where we are, had we laid out the images in the right spot, not far enough, and the music and the sound effects, and all this is stuff that, oh, God, was non-trivial. I could go into some of the details of this. So just the images alone had to be laid out on the spirals in close proximity. We didn't want it seeking to some faraway spot. So it's not like you just lay 'em, put 'em in the disk in alphabetical order, every image in the game. So we organized those by ages and close proximity. We put our names of these things so that the close-by images would be relatively close on the spiral. We used two levels of compression for the images. One was, we used only 256 colors to do the images, which made them smaller, but we also used a compression technique as well, to make them small, so they would stream faster. [solemn music] The problems we faced were really interesting. And the largest of those was this crazy idea of CD-ROM. It was relatively new, and what that meant is that most people had just basically something like called a single-speed CD-ROM. It was streaming at 150k per second, which is nothing. 150k per second is all you could get off that single-speed disk, and we had to make the game work for that. The streaming wasn't even the main problem. The seek time was the biggest, with that crazy spiral. People with lots of money had double-speed drives. I don't even think quad-speed drives had been invented yet, but you can see where this is going. But it doesn't matter, because we have to sell to the most basic people, and it's not even a sell thing. We wanted people to experience this who had the basic multimedia computer, and so this had to somehow work on that. A lot of that was just plain unknown. It was just we didn't have enough experience feeding this much data to a monitor, through the software, to know whether it really was gonna get us that response time we needed to make this thing even playable, from one slide to the other, one screen to the other. If that was too slow, everybody knows how this works. If it's too slow, you wonder, wait, is it me, is it me? Did the computer work? Did it just die? What's going on? So those were interesting times with not testing whatsoever. I don't remember a moment of being frustrated with the CD-ROM speed, because we didn't even know what we would end up with. There were moments of concern and probably waking up in the middle of the night sweating, because we didn't test. It's not like what we could do with 3D rendering stuff. There were moments of concern with that, because we at least knew what the limits were, but we had our hands on it. If things were too bad, it's like, well, we need another computer. We can't render this. We're gonna have to get another computer. Those concerns all felt like they were solvable, at some level, but the CD-ROM stuff was intriguing, because it was just late in the game that we get a chance to test it. We had to depend on our instincts and hope that we were right. CD-ROM was a great enabling tool for us. It was an interesting tool for everybody, at the time, but most people were at that stage where they were just mapping things from the old way of doing things to CD-ROM. There were a lot of encyclopedias. If you had a lot of storage, what could you put on there? Well, we'll just put words on there, put some encyclopedias, and we can add some pictures, but people weren't thinking of what they could do uniquely with a CD-ROM. Honestly, it felt like entertainment. People were thinking a little bit that way, more than anyone else. And we were looking at it like, well, we have to do CD-ROM. This world that Sunsoft, that we had pitched to them, it was big. There was no way to do this on floppy disk. It wouldn't fit. And part of the very appeal of this was that we had made a game that you don't die. You don't level. You don't start over. And so the only way we were gonna give people the amount of time for their money, for the game, was just sheer brute force amount of real estate that had to be available for them to explore. And that depended on doing this on CD-ROM. So we looked at this as an incredible opportunity. We knew there were constraints. We weren't sure exactly what the solutions were on those constraints, but this is where we were going. This is what we were gonna do. The only thing we wanted to do was more sophisticated worlds that were larger, more intriguing, had more story, had more realistic images that really felt like you were in this world, and CD-ROM was our answer to that question, if it worked. [solemn music] This incredible enabling technology of CD-ROMs, I think it started in the late '80s. I think that's when people started getting 'em. They were way too expensive. We were already toying with them, at that point, just because it was interesting, but not because they were necessary. But it was the late '80s, and then "Myst," the proposal for "Myst" itself was like 1991, I think it's where we did the proposal. And I think at that point, just to put things in context, I think that's the year that the internet first came online, '91, I think. Somebody can check me on that. And then computers were starting to get color, at that point. And they were starting to build computers that had CD-ROMs built in, at that point, and I don't know where Windows was, the operating system. I know DOS was probably still the most prevalent PC operating system, but Windows was starting to overtake it, and all of this felt like it was, again, one of those pivot points where the technology was getting ready to change. I know that shortly, right around that time, there were also these things called multimedia PCs that were starting to come out, where people were saying, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, we've got color, and we've got just enough processing to do live small videos, and we've got CD-ROMs, and all of this kind of comes together, and it makes this magic box that seems like it can do more than what we're doing with it, with just encyclopedias. And we were right on the edge of that with what "Myst" was. We felt like we were designing just for that time period, except by anticipating where it might be a couple years from then. We were developing "Myst" like in 1991. The proposal came out, and I think that's the same time the World Wide Web got turned on. I mean, I could be wrong, but I think that's the timeframe for it, 1991. [solemn music] So here we have this large project that we got assembled. And there are pieces/parts, so many pieces/parts that we've got to put together on to this CD-ROM. And all of them have to be small enough to stream quickly and move to quickly. So there's two problems. You got to find it on the CD-ROM, and you've gotta get it off the CD-ROM, as quickly as possible. So starting with the images, I mean, that's number one. These images, we didn't have JPEG compression. I think there was JPEG, but it's interesting, because our images, they were eight-bit images, because most people's computers couldn't do more than eight bits. What that means is that we could show 256 colors on the screen, at a time. That sounds like a lot until you start seeing images with 256 colors on the screen. You could choose which 256 colors you could use. That was called your palette. And every time you changed your palette, the screen would go blank. It would have to go to black and then come back up. So we couldn't allow that between images. So what we had to do first is compress the images by gettin' them down to eight bits, and we had to pick a palette for an entire world of images. So we had to decided ahead of time which 256 colors could describe every image in this world, as best as possible. That seems like a ridiculous thing to have to do, but we had to do it, and there were tools available at the time. So we feed in all these images into something called DeBabelizer, which don't ask, and it spits out a palette of 256 colors and says, okay, here are the most used colors in those images you gave me. There were hundreds of images on, say, Myst Island. It spits out 256 colors. These are best for Myst Island. We would use that. I would convert all the images to those colors, and I would walk around the island. I would look at it, and it was terrible. I'd go to a place, one card where there was a purple pillow, on a seat cushion, and it looked disgusting, 'cause it was like, well, there's nothing else that's purple, so you get one purple of your 256 colors. Anyway, long story short, one of the first exercises we went through by hand was going through and replacing one of the 40 shades of green that were in the palette with a few shades of purple, by hand, so that the purple cushion would actually look okay. All right, so step one is we're converting every image to the right 256 colors. That gets it down to a relatively small size. Then we have to choose a compression to actually go beyond that. It would've been nice if we could just JPEG compress these images. Everybody knows you can JPEG compress images, and they look pretty good, and it makes 'em fairly small, but since we're only using 256 colors, when we convert the images, what happens is they become dithered. What that means is if, say for example, for a blue sky, you've got light blue and dark blue. You don't want banding. You don't want a light blue shade then a lighter then darker blue, if you've only got three colors, so you use this great dithering technique that puts dots of the other one in within it and makes it look like it's a really nice gradation from the light to the dark, with only three shades of blue. But those dots in there mean that JPEG compression just can't do it, because JPEG takes blocks, and it uses a different way to compress images, and it's defeated by the dots, let's just leave it at that. So we used another kind of compression that was part of QuickTime, but gets just a little bit smaller, because remember, we're trying to get these images on a CD-ROM, that a single-speed drive is gonna read off, at 150k per second, and we want to get everything done at under two seconds, to try and make this happen. So okay, we get the images down to, I think, it seems like we got 'em down to 50k, maybe, each. And we're thinking, okay, that should be okay. And some of them were larger. Some of them were smaller. But that's decent. All right, so that takes care of the image problem. [solemn music] Now we have a music problem, and let's just call it a sound problem. We have music or sound effects that are playing in the background, and they're streaming all the time. So if, for example, I walk down into this generator tunnel, and I need this weird, eerie sound to play, we could do the music in several different ways, but the easiest would be to just put the tracks of music somewhere on the CD-ROM and let it go to those music tracks and just stream it on its own, let the OS and the operating system kind of handle, or QuickTime, handle streaming those things. But can it get to those and seek back to the next picture and get to those and seek to the next picture without chopping the sound off, because there's a very real possibility that I load that sound, I go to seek the next picture, and depending on the chunk size of sound, I can't get back to the sound fast enough for it to load it into a buffer and play it without all of a sudden cutting off the music, having a blank space of sound and then finally finding the music, getting back to that and streaming it again. So we're trying to put the music pieces close enough where it doesn't have to go too far to get to 'em. On top of that, if I push a button, I've gotta have a ca-chunk sound, and if I open a door, I want a squeaking sound, and if I turn on a generator, I want a ramp-up sound or a slowdown sound or all those little one-shot sound effects as well that I need to happen quickly, and they need to be close on that CD-ROM. Well, okay, there's a number of ways we go about solving this problem. Other games at the time have this wonderful, wonderful ability to almost take an entire game and just put it on a hard drive. I mean, that's the luxury, even though the hard drives were, say, I think, 20 meg, 40 meg, maybe 80 meg you could get, or 100 meg, at the time, most games were fairly small. You could just get 'em on the hard drive, and you didn't have any of this stuff to worry about, but our game was big. Remember, we have to keep you busy in the real estate, so there's no way we can put all of this in the hard drive. But we're trying to determine like, okay, which pieces can we put on the hard drive? Which ones can we? So we don't have to interrupt the CD to go to a different spot to find these things. And one of the first solutions that we came up with is these one-shot sounds, a button push, a door open and close, a lot of those little sounds. It's like, hey, we can copy those to the hard drive, and then we don't have to bother the CD-ROM at all. So that was one of the first things. We started dividing up resources. Like, these are small enough. We don't want to take too much of the room off the hard drive, but we can install these things and at least make that work. And this is all before testing. This is all just in our minds, things we're anticipating. Like, okay, well, let's assume that this is gonna break things. We'll put that over on the drive, and we'll see if that'll help things. And then on top of all that, we've got QuickTime movies that, on occasion, not all the time, but on occasion, the user's gonna run across, and that's huge amounts of data that are gonna have to stream from the CD-ROM. It's too big to copy to the hard drive, so we've got to play those. A good example is as soon as you arrive, as soon as you arrive on the dock, in "Myst," there's seagulls that are flying out. That's just a QuickTime movie that's running. But it means that, on that dock image, as soon as we get there, we've got to start streaming the seagull QuickTime movie and playing sounds and all those things. So those are things that are unknown. We've got all the stuff on the disk, laid out that what we think is a correct order, if people are walking relatively straightforward. If they turn around, it might take a little longer, but it's close, and we lay it all out, and we have what we think is a solution, but we have no idea. We have no idea if this is gonna work on a single-speed drive. We think, our best instincts is that it might work, but no idea at all. Our backups are we're gonna have to copy large portions to the hard drive, or we're gonna have to make the image even smaller. Or we're gonna have to make the sounds less quality. We actually compressed the sounds, used compression on the sounds, and I think we went down to like 11 kilohertz on some of 'em. I think it's rare that we used a 22 kilohertz sampling rate. I don't think we did stereo on much of it. The QuickTime movies were 12 frames per second, because we figured that was a good tradeoff that would work. Yeah, anyway, it was all just guesses. We just guessed and sent it down to Broderbund to press on to a CD, at some level. [solemn music] You'd think that [laughs] normal people would feel an immense among of pressure over this. I mean, there was a lot of expectations on us. But I honestly think that like naivete or stupidity, I don't know what it was. To a certain extent, we were intoxicated by this project. This was like, we're just gonna make this work. I mean, if there's an issue, we should've been... I should not have been sleeping at night. There was so much on the line, people waiting for this, money that, we were using our own money, at this point. We didn't know you could back to the publisher, to the people that gave you the money to begin with, and we were way over budget, way over time. We told Sunsoft it would cost 250,000 or something like that, and we easily doubled that. But we didn't know we could back to them and say, well, this is good, but it's gonna cost twice as much. So we were like, okay, well, let's sell some "Cosmic Osmo," and we'll pay for more of this on our own. So we just did. So there's tons of money just going out. All of this, normal people should have been medicating themselves over, but if we didn't have this really weird naivete that just kept us oblivious to the distractions of the fact that this might not work at all, and what a weird thing to think that that's what, in some ways, saved us. I mean, I don't know that we even would have taken on the project, if we didn't have that. It's a weird thing to think about. There's some kind of power in that, but maybe that's what keeps Elon Musk going. Maybe it's like, well, I'm gonna make a rocket and land the things. Maybe it's not knowing all the things that could go wrong or not acknowledging them completely so that you do sleep at night so that you can solve them. You've got at least some energy left to solve those problems that keeps you going, 'cause we were not as concerned as we should have been. [solemn music] Laying out the structure on the disks is an interesting challenge because, and this has to do with a lot of problem solving. I mean, problem solving is always like this. It's a return on investment. We knew we had to get the proximity of these resources, the pictures, the sounds, whatever things make up the game, close to each other, 'cause the head can't seek too far, and it's inefficient, so they have to be close. But then there's this certain element that if you go too OCD on this, you're not getting a big enough return. We didn't have to get it down to 1/4 second. We just needed under two seconds. And so there's this tradeoff. At some point, we decided that the solution to this was just our naming structure, because if we can name the images in a certain area close enough and the sounds in that certain area close enough and then sort things alphabetically, that just naturally we would have the correct order. So rather than meticulously laying out everything exactly where it needed to be, and remember, this is free format. The user can turn around at any point and go the other direction. It's not linear. It's not like we really can lay these out exactly how every user's gonna play. So we just had to get it within those constraints, and we felt like that alphabetical naming or keeping things within a particular area would work. And that was our instinctive solution to that, rather than going diving in deep and laying out every single thing meticulously where it belonged, it was just name them where they were in the general area that then would be pressed on to the CD-ROM. The interesting thing about this is that we were building the Mac version. It was completely our version. It was our baby. And we polished it. Everything about it was ours. We didn't want anybody else touching that. So what we sent to Broderbund, for the Mac version, was the done deal. Here's a hard drive. This is exactly what you need to do, is copy this. We could create essentially a disk image for the CD-ROM, put it on a hard drive, send it to 'em and say just burn that to a CD. And it was the way we wanted it, exactly the way we wanted it. For the PC version, they were doing their own version for that, and we weren't as in touch with that, and that's why the Mac version came out first. But that's what we were sending the as a disk image that nobody could screw up. Do this. [solemn music] We began work on "Myst" in 1991. It was the proposal list dates as milestones beginning in 1991. The first check we got was probably in 1991. And then we shipped the Mac version at the end of 1993. I don't know the exact month, but it was at the end of 1993, and the PC version came in early 1994. Sunsoft was instrumental in making "Myst" happen. They contacted us out of the blue and said we want to make, we want to take what you've done with "Manhole" and apply it to an older audience for CD. And we were blown away, because that was one of our next possible projects. We had thought educational or something for an older audience. And we'd done educational. We were ready for something for an older audience. So it was perfect timing. Sunsoft, they were into other games. They were doing things for consoles, at the time. The PlayStation, I think, one of the PlayStations had been announced with CD-ROM support, and I think they were very interested. That is what they were interested in, and that was essentially what we were building for them. And some of "Myst's" designs were affected by that, because the consoles had a whole different structure that had to be paid attention to, very small memory amounts, and everything off the CD had to work that way. In a lot of ways, that's what made "Myst" a set of very different self-contained ages, is because we felt like, again, the design box you have to live within, one of them was, okay, for consoles, we have to load an age in, at a time, and so we'll just make these self-contained ages that you play. You go back to the hub. You go to an age, go back to the hub, and we could take those chunks, and we felt like they would work on a console, on the small memory footprint. "Myst" was really interesting, because we could actually play through versions of the game as we went. I would get pictures from Robyn. I would put them together. And I was the first one to be able to walk around this world. I mean, it was on the hard drive, but I could immediately assemble them and walk. In fact, HyperCard allowed me to almost assemble them interactively. It was as if I'd hit a dead end in HyperCard. I would create a button that said go forward. I would go forward to a blank card. I would put that image in. And now I could go a step further. So I was assembling this as I went. That was interesting. But it also allowed us to do testing before the game was complete. We didn't have to compile it. We didn't have to do anything along that, in that regard. So you can imagine that it was a very dynamic thing. There weren't builds of the game. We didn't have to have this process where there was a nightly build to create the game. It was at any point in time we could play the game. And at some point, and I think it was probably in early '93, we shipped this in late '93, and it probably wasn't until early '93 that we decided, okay, we've got to take what we've got so far, send it down to Broderbund and do this test on a CD-ROM. So we were well underway. We had already made some decisions and anticipated that this was how it was gonna work. Probably from my naive point of view, I probably felt like early '93 would give me enough time to have to adjust, if I needed to, switch things around, and some of my naivete is always having a backup, and I must've, in my mind, thought, well, I've got enough backups here that I can anticipate if it's not gonna work. Yeah, it would've been early '93, probably, before we tested. So one of the interesting facets of this is that we had various partners with "Myst." Sunsoft was the instigating company to make "Myst" happen. They were the ones who drove it. They said, we want something for an older audience. But they were only interested in console. Now that's what they had done. That's what their expertise was. And that's what they wanted to build for. They knew that new consoles were coming that had CD-ROM drives, and that's where they saw their market. Part of the deal we cut with them is that we still had the rights to the PC/Mac versions, and we kept those. So, at some point along the line, we had built enough of the game that we decided we needed to pitch the PC and Mac versions to a publisher as well. And I remember going to a few publishers, taking what we had to a few publishers down in the Bay Area, and sitting down and trying to explain this weird collection of still images to them, as we played through it. This was so strange, because some people would sit in front of the screen... I remember, there was one instance in particular. It was the two principals of a company. And one of 'em said, "This is freaking amazing. "We want this." And the other one was like, "I don't get it, "but if he wants it, I guess we'll do it." And we were like, eh, okay, if they don't both get it, let's show it to someone else. At some point, we went to Broderbund, and we had done some children's stuff with them, so it was a natural fit, and we liked them. They were a great people to work with. But this was bigger, a larger project, and we sat down with them as well, showed them the game, and I don't remember who it was, but one person in particular at Broderbund said, "This is freaking amazing. "We want this. "We absolutely want this." And that's all we cared about. I mean, Robyn and I, again, we were doing this, 'cause we had a passion for it. And when somebody was so excited, it was like, okay, well then, we'll work with them. We'll work out the contract stuff. It doesn't matter. We'll work with them. And so we continued our relationship, and it was great, really good. Doing something for an older audience, after doing all the children's software, children's entertainment stuff was definitely on our mind. We had had a proposal for that earlier "A Gray Summons" project, and it was interesting, but it was all hand drawn, but it definitely had a goal and a weird, interesting kind of feel to it. So we were definitely moving in the direction of making something for an older audience, a more sophisticated audience, something that had taken everything that we had learned and had a goal and a story and much more coherence to it than what we had toyed with, with the children's stuff. [solemn music] So as I've mentioned, I remember, specifically, Robyn and I during the design of "Myst" discussing, okay, this is weird. We're not gonna die, and we're not gonna kill people, but realizing immediately that that was a problem, because without dying, you don't make people start over. We hated, I mean, I was a gamer. Robyn was really not a gamer. But both of us were so frustrated with starting over. [groans] I just died. I've got to start over, like [sighs]. It was one of those things where like, what if we just take that out completely? And that was weird. That was really weird. You couldn't put enough gameplay in, if you didn't make people start over, and how were they gonna feel like they achieved anything? Without knowing the details of game design and entertainment and, frankly, any kind of entertainment, where you've gotta have just enough frustration and just enough relief to keep people moving forward. I mean, we didn't know, but that's what music is based on, and movies and storytelling and every other kind of entertainment seems to be based on that same kind of frustration and release. It felt like we were missing that. If you don't die in this, you're just gonna explore, and that was just like our kids stuff. The kids stuff, you just explored, and it was fun, but it was like, what did you achieve? How do you achieve? How do you know you're making progress? And so we drew on a bit of some stuff we had, these ideas when we were younger, where we had played D&D. And I remember, early on, playing D&D, and I was in my 20s. I wasn't that young. But playing D&D, my first experience was somebody else leading me through a pre-existing dungeon and rolling the dice and blah, blah, blah. But it had this interesting feeling, and it felt like I was solving things, and it felt like I had to overcome something. But my first impression was, well, I don't want to play this again. I want to make this. I want to make a world in D&D, so I did. I built this world in D&D, and I was the dungeon master, and I took people through it. It was, in some ways, what led to, much later, the idea that you would friction in with puzzles, because I didn't, in my dungeon, I didn't use dice. There was very little random. I put puzzles in that they needed to solve. And so I think we kind of extrapolated that outward and said, well, let's put puzzles in it, puzzles that seemed to fit with the environment. We wanted to make it seem real. We wanted to make it seem like it was valid, like it was a place that had history. And if you've played "Myst," you know that we got better at it. But just 'cause you get better at it doesn't mean you can throw away the stuff you did at the beginning. Myst Island is like this conglomeration of us experimenting with stuff, and then as we got better, it feels more integrated in the other ages. You get to Channelwood, and there's a big windmill that's pumping water, and you'd turn on the water, and it goes into these channels, and the channels go to the switches, and that can control pumps and motors that raise and lower elevators, and it all feels very logical and connected. In Myst Island, it was less so, but nevertheless, that was all shaped by these puzzles. The friction that we used couldn't be bad guys with guns. It would be a logical connection that you have to make in your mind to get a door open or to see what was around the next corner. Balancing the puzzles was a problem. It was not something that we had experience with, other than those early days of building a D&D world, and building a D&D world really didn't apply, because I had dungeon mastered it, and if they had problems, I could give hints, or do whatever I wanted, dynamically, on the fly. This had to be burned and sent off. So we didn't know how people would respond. So one of the things we did was play people through it, over and over and over, both with the early D&D version, where we dungeon mastered and played them through and wrote notes about what they had problems with, but then later on, even as we built the game, we would sit behind people's back. There was no QA. There was sitting behind people's backs, two at a time, because they would talk with each other, and could get in their heads, and we could realize what they had problems with and what they wouldn't have problems with. They would talk. We would write notes. And in many cases, in fact, most of the cases, if they had problems, we could fix it right then. It was, I'm gonna open this, fix this, and close that, done, next. And so there was a process, a long process, of tuning those things if they were too complicated. And there were some that, in many people's opinion, we didn't get right. There's still a few puzzles in there that, because of our inclination, we thought they were easy enough, and the general public at large, depending on what you're good at and not good at, didn't get and got frustrated with, but I think it had a lot to do with the, honestly, hours and hours of sitting behind people and watching what frustrated them. I'll speak a little from Robyn's point of view, with regard to creating these images, only because we've talked about this quite a bit, over the years. You have to realize that, from his point of view, he's building worlds. He's in these 3D worlds, these wireframes, but he's putting textures on these and building places. It didn't feel like his earlier children's games where he's just painting one picture at a time. He's building a place. But once that place is built, he gets to meticulously set the camera angle. He gets to put a camera in that virtual world and place it and give it a name and then put another camera to a right angle of that, and essentially, you're covering the four cardinal directions of where you look. Now you'd think that you would [laughs], so another one of the weird things, you'd think you would just set the camera and rotate it, but that's not how our perception is. When you're looking at a small screen, you actually have to pull the camera way back so that you get some sense of, you rotate it kind of around a pulled-back circle. But in addition to that, it wasn't just the cardinal directions. Robyn realized early on that that was the default position, but sometimes, you would need to tilt the camera, a little bit left or right, or up or down, to get not only a much better aesthetic viewpoint, something that looked beautiful and was framed well, but also to get a hint that you could turn left or right or what might be there, something to entice you to move left or right. So all of those were set by hand. Every camera angle was defaulted to all the cardinals, but then, yeah, adjusted accordingly. There was a camera for every image in the game. There was a separate camera for every image in the game, and on Myst Island, there were probably, I can't remember. I'm sure I could look it up. But I'll bet there were 300 cameras, just scattered about the island, something like that probably. So if there's 300 cameras on Myst Island, or thereabouts, every one of those images, full-screen images, probably took an average of four hours, I would think, and some of those also required what we called correction shots, where it was important to us to not just make doors close, in some cases, or make switches go back to a default position, but if you left a switch on, you saw it on, even from a distance, or off, you saw it off for a distance. So all those had to be little shots, from far away, that had to switch in both the on and the off position. So all those had to be rendered as well. And those took less time, but yeah, there were hundreds and hundreds of those shots, at four hours each. And some of 'em took longer. A lot of it was, again, we're making stuff up as we go, but we had a lot of trees on Myst Island. Those were a big part of the rendering problem. So what we realized early on is, if things were behind, is we could hide them, and the problem with that is that there are shadows that are cast for those, and one of the interesting little side notes is, frankly, as soon as you start the game, you're at the dock, and there are trees behind you. The sun should be casting shadows on you, but we hid those trees, because it was much easier to move around and render things, if all that stuff behind you was just hidden. [solemn music] There's not way that we anticipated what "Myst" would end up being. When I look back at the documents that we wrote, even at the proposal, we were [laughs], again, somewhat naive in telling Sunsoft that what we were aiming for was a mass market. I think we knew at least ahead of time that we thought that this would appeal to a broad range of people, that demographic-wise, we didn't think it would insult anybody, that it was a safe purchase and that because you weren't killing things or dying, that it might be kind of broad. And that's what we were shooting for. But beyond that, Robyn and I had discussions where we said, man, if we sell 100,000 copies, can you imagine if we sold 100,000 copies of this game? Oh, I mean, that was mind-blowing, 100,000 copies. So there was no way in the world that we could've anticipated the success, no way in the world. Look, I remember going into my first media store, back in the day. After "Myst," I took a long vacation. I went to New Mexico and took five-week vacation. And I remember, in New Mexico, we'd just shipped. I went into a store in Albuquerque. It's a media store. And I'm like, I wonder if the game's here. I wonder if the game's here. And I walk to the back, and it was like covering the whole top shelf of the game section. And I was in awe. My mind was blown, like oh my gosh, this is crazy. This can't be happening. This is so cool. Still had no idea of the success. It had just launched, but the fact that it was there meant something important, and it was such a crazy, heady time, giddy kind of time.

- [Interviewer] Can I hear again how many you anticipated and then hear the numbers of how many they actually sold?

- I think our discussion, between Robyn and I, was 100,000 copies would be amazing, just amazing, amazing, amazing. And we hit that mark fairly quickly, I mean, within months. And then it just kept selling. It kept selling. It was on the top-10 chart. It was number one for a long time, but then it was on the charts for years. And so we very quickly got to millions of copies and multiple millions of copies. It was a build and then just kept going for so long that, yeah, so unanticipated and remarkable. One of the ironies of the game is that, I mean, we have to guess this, but I think that probably only 50% of the people who played it even made it off the island of Myst, because of the puzzles involved. But for some reason, that didn't dampen enthusiasm. I think because that first island was so intriguing, and you got enough of the story to kind of be tantalized, and because maybe some of the audience was young at the time, and it just felt magical, that it left a great taste in people's psyche about what the game was, which is really nice. Even to this day, I mean, I get people who are way too young to have played "Myst," who come up to me now and say, yeah, I remember, as a kid, my mom or dad playing "Myst," and I was watching those places on the screen, and I didn't really understand it, but it just felt so interesting to see that. And that is really satisfying. To still have that kind of resonance, to this day, I can't tell you how, as a creator of that, how satisfying and wonderful that is. [solemn music] So here's the lessons we learned from "Myst," that we tried to evolve this thing forward. We still feel like "Myst" was an experiment, as much as every one of the previous kids games that we did kind of evolved. In many ways, it led to "Riven," because "Riven" was, we realized that the things we liked in "Myst" were the things that came a little later, where the story came out a little more, where the story was revealed in the environment or the people that were there, but a little more integrated well. And "Myst" budget didn't allow it. "Riven" would allow it. So we could put more people. We could have that story kind of revealed. But more than that, the puzzles themselves and the friction itself needed to not just feel like it was, I don't know, arbitrary. And as much as people said that "Myst," I think for it's time, even Myst Island felt like, oh, these puzzles make sense. The "7th Guest" kinda would just throw some puzzles in, not to diminish it. It was amazing, but it was, at that time, they just kinda threw some puzzles in, to play chess or whatever. We were trying to integrate 'em, and so it felt good, but we realized that that wasn't enough. That was not enough. And the puzzles needed to feel like they were part of the history of this place. And so "Riven" was really a challenge to make that happen. And during the design, that was on our minds, like how are we gonna build a history, the storytelling, into this world? How are we gonna build the puzzles into this world? And how are we gonna really integrate that? It was one of the greatest challenges. All the lessons we have learned kind of led to "Riven," to try and do that to the best of our abilities. And here's the interesting thing about the industry, too. Everything has shifted, in the industry, and a lot of ways, I'm really happy in the ways it shifted. I mean, I started with my brother, in making games. It was just the two of us. I mean, it was literally two of us, in different parts of the country, at some point, starting and then coming together, doing this little indie kinda thing that we felt we could do by ourselves, and then we've watched the trending gaming go to a place where the only people who could make games were enabled by large amounts of money from large corporations who were publishers. And that was, in some ways, sad. I mean, luckily, we were on the right side of that. We had our funding from "Myst," and we could keep going, but it felt like the whole industry lost some kind of innovation by the guys in the garage, by that indie feeling. And with the advent of the internet, and in particular, the advent of downloadable content, where the need to press CDs and have stock and manage that stock and distribute it to stores and to have things on the shelf, that suddenly brought in a whole new influx of young, two-person shops again, where, hey, I got a person who can do art. I got a person who can program. We should make a game. And I loved that. To me, that whole indie rise again has kind of reinvigorated the industry, and I love what that's done. And in some ways, it's kind of come full circle for us. I mean, we don't, now, depend on a publisher anymore. The last two projects we've done, or the last, we did "Obduction," which was a Kickstarter, where you just ask the internet for money, and they give it to you, and then our current project, "Firmament," is the same thing. Twice, we've gone back to the well, the Kickstarter well, and our fanbase has said, yeah, we're willing to risk it for a new game from you, from a new title. And there's a lot of pressure with that, but it's also this here I am, getting to do a whole new idea for a game. So the struggle kind of continues, and here I am, 60 years old, trying to anticipate with "Firmament" where things are gonna be two years from now, with the same struggle, fighting the same battles, and having to realize, in my mind, that I may not get it right, but again, that's just how it is, and it's okay. [gentle music]