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April 11, 2013

A Myst History - Speaking at GDC

Screen Shot 2013-04-11 at 11.58.49 AM
I recently had the opportunity to speak at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, at the Moscone Center. This brought back some memories: twenty years ago, Rand and I introduced Myst at a Macworld Expo at Moscone! 
I had a lot of fun and the audience was very welcoming and they had excellent questions. You can watch my talk.

April 11, 2013 | Permalink

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Comments

Great talk. Is it ok if I continue the Q&A here? :) In that case:

If you compare Myst and Riven, what was the biggest creative difference in making them, from your very personal perspective?

Posted by: ttt | Apr 13, 2013 4:59:30 AM

I bought my first PC in 1995 specifically to play Myst - I just loved the game. Really enjoyed this talk.

Posted by: Rangachari Anand | Apr 15, 2013 8:25:46 AM

Rangachari,
So cool that you bought a computer to play Myst! Thanks for letting me know!

Posted by: Robyn | Apr 15, 2013 1:55:33 PM

Hi ttt,
When we created riven there were a lot of creative expectation and limitations. This isn't neccearily a bad thing but it was a big change for us... It made things a lot more difficult. With myst we were starting with a blank slate and had complete creative freedom, which I think is the exact thing we loved most. When we did Riven, we had to adhere to a strict established universe, and that's a challenge. We were inventing the rules with Myst and they could be anything, but with Riven the rules had largely been in invented and we had to abide by them.

Posted by: Robyn | Apr 15, 2013 2:10:48 PM

Awesome!
That was great, and Phil Fish was there! (The indie game documentary he was in was worth watching.)

I think it was actually Walt's idea to do Disneyland as a "pinwheel" design.

Posted by: Benjamin | Apr 25, 2013 11:39:23 AM

Great presentation. Thanks for posting that.

I loved the bit about wishing there was something like HyperCard today. Fortunately there is, available for every popular platform, and now open source: LiveCode.

Posted by: Richard Gaskin | Apr 26, 2013 11:33:17 AM

Great talk about the development of the game. The freedom you guys were given is incredible.

I'm also a huge fan of Riven (even more so than Myst because I believe there is no other game out there in which the complete game world is so coherent and meaningful and thought through) I've just tried to fetch the Riven concept art at the RetroMusicBundle. And then the bidding war ensued in the last couple of minutes ... I came in third - I mean I love all the retro music ... but not THAT much ;)
Anyway, glad to see that there is so much interest in your art.

Posted by: RivenFan | Jun 6, 2013 9:49:42 PM

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