As Myst approaches its twentieth anniversary, it’s a good time to take a look back and try to understand what it all meant. Writing now, seven years after the final installment was published, much of the fan base has gone silent, Cyan Worlds (the creators) have turned to simple iPhone games, and the series itself has become little more than a tiny blip in the history of video games. Its initial meteoric arrival is well-known, selling 6 million copies and contributing to the rise of the CD-ROM drive. Its safe, no-dying approach appealed to small-time gamers and its uniqueness to the more die-hard breed. Myst was an anomaly in the video-game scene of 1993, and its influence was felt across the field. Still, many of those 6 million players never actually finished the game, and as we have observed, the series has languished into relative oblivion today. As a longtime fan, I naturally think this fate was undeserved, but as a critic I can’t help but see some of the factors which brought it about. Over the next few months we’ll be taking a trip through the series, beginning with the first game and ending with the last (with three stopovers to look at the novels). Now, if you’d care to join me, I have just stumbled across a most intriguing book…

When Myst opens, the program does not prompt the player to begin or load a game, it simply assumes you want to start from the beginning. The publisher’s and developer’s logos are shown, followed by the intro movie, which includes opening credits. Likewise, when the game is quit, the credits roll. I will call this “movie envy,” a trope which the series unfortunately burdened itself with from the beginning. I suspect it was an attempt to dignify a medium which (especially back in the early 90s) was often looked down upon. Nonetheless it’s an unfortunate framing device, as it builds up expectations which it is not necessarily capable of fulfilling, and by trying to distance itself from its medium it only reinforces preconceptions.

Still, it’s a good opening: We learn from the voiceover that the Myst Book was meant to be destroyed, and its creator (Atrus) is concerned about who will find it. The player’s interest in the book is piqued, especially as she realizes, immediately following the intro, that she is the person who finds the book. Myst was originally billed as being a game in which the protagonist was you, and that conceit is played to full effect here. (Later the “you” was retconned to be a character called “The Stranger” due to an effect which might be called “canon fatigue.” More on that later.) The significance of the Fissure won’t be explained until later installments; for now it’s just an interesting bit of backstory that suggests the longer narrative which took place before the beginning of the game.

Once the intro ends, the player can pick up the Myst Book and “link” for the first time, arriving on Myst Island. The island serves as a hub for your explorations, containing the links to all the other Ages (places) in the game and the information needed to find them. Naturally Myst Island has become the most iconic location of the series and is one of the few to be revisited in later installments (namely Uru: The Path of the Shell and Myst V). This is somewhat unfortunate, because the island seems more dated than anything else in this first installment. Myst Island is a contrived environment more than a working one; it feels more like a mini-golf course than an actual place where people have lived. Implausibility problems are recurrent throughout the series, but they’re most prevalent here: a tiny island that lacks any of the necessities of life but does have a planetarium, giant gears, and a rocketship (among other things).

Still, Myst Island is not without story, and as a game device it does its job. We learn crucial parts of the backstory: Atrus wrote books that “linked” to incredible worlds, but now most of those books have been destroyed, and he suspects his sons. In the library we find Atrus’s journals, which his exploits in the worlds he has linked to, and we also meet the aforementioned sons, Sirrus and Achenar. They’re locked up inside “Trap Books” and plead with the player to retrieve the red and blue pages needed to release them. (The first pages are placed in plain sight, allowing the player to become familiar this mechanic before the actual exploration begins.) Seeing the brothers’ live-action faces is somewhat startling, the player having become used to vast, unoccupied stretches of relatively primitive CGI. It’s a good moment for the game, reinforcing the realistic effect the creators are striving for.

The CGI, incidentally, has held up surprisingly well, considering that when this game was released few people had even heard of Pixar. Aside from a few extremely low-resolution textures, the graphics are not really at a cringe-worthy level even today. Many of the copycat projects that took after it did far worse. The limitations can be seen in places (the tiny, minimal movie clips, the weird water, the rarity of nonessential shots), but given the constraints of the technology, the team did an incredible job. Granted, the game never looks quite “real” per se, but most of it does not look wholly artificial.

While the CGI generally preserves suspension of disbelief, the design manages to frequently undo it. Many puzzles feel distinctly contrived, serving no in-game purpose other than to slow down the player. Likewise, Atrus eventually begins to come across as an awfully compulsive builder, remaking every landscape with extensive tunnels, large buildings, and complex machinery, most of it serviced by elevators. (This is not even to mention the potentially hundreds of miles of underground Mazerunner track, which lead absolutely nowhere.) Still, as a first attempt we can give the game a pass. The next installment, Riven, would set a new precedent for logical environments, one that future games would strive for and often fall short of.

Back on the story side, the player must read through Atrus’s journals before she can progress to the game’s other Ages. These travelogues serve an ingenious function, allowing the creators to smoothly integrate extensive backstory and infuse meaning into locations which the player will see later. Actually visiting an Age after reading about it has an incredibly powerful effect, a strong sensation of recognition: I just read about this, and now I’m actually seeing it! Later on in the series, Uru took advantage of this same effect when it allowed players into D’ni, the massive underground civilization previously known only from the novels. (Aside from a tiny glimpse of it at the end of Myst.)

Compared to the later games, Myst’s Ages seem strangely tiny. Mechanical especially has a claustrophobic feel, the entire extent of the Age being a fortress with only two sizable rooms. The largest Age is probably Channelwood, with its three levels of walkways, but even it is dwarfed by Riven and (much later) Uru’s Teledahn. This is primarily due to technical restraints, I suspect. Still, the Ages are where the bulk of Myst takes place, and they do their job, providing varied environments to explore, and building the case against Sirrus and Achenar.

Sirrus and Achenar’s true personas, and how they are slowly revealed, is one of the high points of Myst’s storytelling. From the outset we can see that they’re trying to hide something (both of them insist that the player not help the other). We don’t really get a taste of their personalities until we begin exploring the Ages, at which point we learn about them by looking at the things they’ve left behind. The Ages are no longer the utopiastic places described in Atrus’s journals; instead, all their inhabitants are gone and caches of the brothers’ things (neatly identified by their respective red or blue pages) turn up in dark corners. These caches represent a perfect example of defining a character by his possessions. Sirrus’s things invariably include gold, jewels, and finery, while Achenar’s tend to be grotesque trophies, poisons, and weapons. By showing us (not telling us!) what the brothers have been up to, the game slowly builds a strong case against them, leading us to the final big choice of the game.

The “final big choice” was another of the game’s biggest breakthroughs, and it was copied extensively by the later installments. Both the brothers beg to be released and insist that they alone are innocent, and at first the dilemma appears to be who to trust, Sirrus or Achenar. But as it becomes clear that both are reprehensible and guilty, the dilemma changes. When it comes time to make the final big choice, the player can either release one of the brothers, or open a third book which, according to the brothers, is a trap. Now, this isn’t a perfect dilemma, really: after all the brothers’ lies I doubt many people believed the claim that the third book was dangerous, but the fact is that the player must independently decide that the third option (regardless of what it is) is probably preferable to freeing either of the brothers.

Which brings us to the ending of the game. Or, I should say, the non-ending. We choose the green book and visit Atrus in D’ni, and he goes to Myst and destroys the Red and Blue Books. Then he comes back, politely thanks the player for helping, and gets back to work. The player can choose to either wander around the room  (without music or sound effects, even) or go back to Myst Island and revisit places she’s already been. It’s an anticlimax of the worst kind, a “good” ending with less closure than the bad endings. It was corrected a little bit with the remake, realMyst, which added a small bonus Age made accessible after the ending, but did little to change the fact that the ending wasn’t an ending at all. Now, because I am meddlesome, here’s my own suggestion for a better ending: When Atrus returns to D’ni, he should tell the player that there’s one more undestroyed Book and he’s left it out for her to see when she gets back. Upon returning to Myst and linking with the new book, the credits would roll, leaving the player with an unseen adventure for her imagination. Sure, it’s not a perfect ending either by any means, but at least it brings some sort of closure to the story.

So, in the end, is Myst a success or a failure? Like many things, it has elements of both. It has a strong story, atmosphere, and (for the time) sophisticated graphics. On the other hand, it has some downright nonsensical design elements, technologically-imposed issues, and numerous poorly-conceived puzzles that drove many people to simply give up on the whole thing. Still, looking beyond the mistakes, it’s easy to see Myst as a necessary, and largely successful, first step. The format had not been perfected, not quite yet, but the creators managed to build an enjoyable game anyway. The series, as it evolved, built on the successes and failures of this game. Technological improvements allowed for improved visuals and movement, and a new precedent for logical world-building eliminated many problems with irrational puzzles and landscapes. Unfortunately, some of its problems were transmitted to its descendants like bad genes. As the first of the series, Myst set the precedent for all the others to follow. How they chose to do so varied, as we will see.

Other notes:

• It’s sort of refreshing to be reminded how the series felt before becoming burdened down with word-on-high canon decisions. Numerous aspects of the game were later written out as “artistic license,” most notably Trap Books, rendering much of the first game “noncanonical.” The very premise of Myst IV practically wipes out the existence of the events of Myst by retconning out the Trap Book concept.
• Ironically for a game about exploration, Myst has a deeply entrenched message of anti-colonialism. Atrus constantly preaches a distanced, objective philosophy toward the cultures of the Ages, and his sons’ actions are largely imperialistic in nature. There seems to be a sort of guilt inherent in the concept of exploration now, one that necessitates that stories of exploration must also contain an anti-colonialist moral. This theme will recur throughout the games, reaching new heights in Uru, which depicts exploration as being downright evil.
• We don’t learn much about Catherine/Katran in this installment. I can’t help but wonder how much thought the developers had given her at this point.
• What exactly is the point of Selenitic? It’s unlike the other Ages in that it has pretty much nothing of interest to Sirrus and Achenar, and since nothing of theirs even appears in the Age, it’s almost as if they never even visited it. Did it escape their wrath because they thought it was too boring to bother with? Even its associated journal is largely made up of blank pages.
• The only clue about how to solve the Mazerunner is located in a different part of the game, one which is neither accessible from the Mazerunner nor necessarily visited first. That is classic bad puzzle design.
• The piano puzzle inside the rocketship is another well-known bad puzzle, but strangely I never had any problems with it. My guess is that it’s primarily people who’ve never played a musical instrument who have trouble with it. Apparently Cyan’s game testers had musical backgrounds.

Next time: Myst: The Book of Atrus

Screenshots property of Cyan Worlds.

FICTION
Alexie, Sherman. Indian Killer.
Atwood, Margaret. The Edible Woman.
Banks, Russel. Lost Memory of Skin.
Carver, Raymond. Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (part)
Davidson, Lionel. Under Plum Lake.
Coupland, Douglas. Player One.
Eggers, Dave. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.
Evans, Nicholas. The Brave.
Franzen, Jonathan. Freedom.
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
Handler, Daniel. Adverbs. (part)
Jin, Ha. Waiting.
Juster, Norton. The Phantom Tollbooth.
Knowles, John. A Separate Peace.
Mamet, David. Oleanna.
Mamet, David. The Old Religion.
Murakami, Haruki. Kafka on the Shore.
Murakami, Haruki. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.
Powers, Richard. Galatea 2.2
Russo, Richard. Empire Falls.
Russo, Richard. That Old Cape Magic.
Scott, Joanna. Make Believe.
Shakespeare, William “The Bard.” King Lear.
Snicket, Lemony. The Bad Beginning.
Wolff, Tobias. Our Story Begins. (part)
Yu, Charles. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.

Favorite fiction book this year: Empire Falls. This book will keep influencing my work for a long time, I think. Strong sense of place and good character interaction.

Least favorite fiction book this year: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I can’t begin listing the myriad problems with this book. I still can’t believe I read the whole thing. Read Victor Lodato’s Mathilda Savitch instead.

NON-FICTION
Atwood, Margaret. In Other Worlds. (part)
Brunetti, Ivan. Cartooning.
Berlioz, Hector. Evenings with the Orchestra. (part)
Decker, Kevin S. et al. Star Trek and Philosophy. (part)
Ehrman, Bart. Misquoting Jesus.
Mauro, James. Twilight at the World of Tomorrow.
Ross, Alex. Listen to This. (part)
Schumacher, Michael. Will Eisner: A Dreamer’s Life in Comics.
Steinberg, Avi. Running the Books.

Favorite non-fiction this year: Twilight at the World of Tomorrow is full of entertaining characters and enthusiasm drawn from the historic 1939 World’s Fair. I really enjoyed it.

Least favorite non-fiction this year: Hector Berlioz’s diatribes against Chinese music in Evenings with the Orchestra. Debussy, a few years later, would find much inspiration in the same stuff Berlioz dismissed out-of-hand. (The book isn’t bad overall though.)

COMICS
Brunetti, Ivan (ed.). Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories v. 2.
Clowes, Daniel. Ice Haven.
Clowes, Daniel. Wilson.
Cotter, Joshua W. Skyscrapers of the Midwest.
Eisner, Will. The Contract With God Trilogy.
Herge. Tintin and the Picaros. (read before)
Herge. Tintin: Castafiore Emerald, The. (read before)
Herge. Tintin: Flight 714. (read before)
Herge. Tintin in Tibet. (read before)
Hines, Adam. Duncan the Wonder Dog v. 1.
Karasik, Paul et al. City of Glass.
Mazzuchelli, David. Asterios Polyp. (read before)
Novgorodoff, Danica. Slow Storm.
Ottaviani, Jim et al. Feynman.
Powell, Nate. Any Empire.
Powell, Nate. Swallow Me Whole.
Shaw, Dash. Bottomless Belly Button.
Sikoryak, R. Masterpiece Comics.
Tardi, Jacques. Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec v. 1.
Thompson, Craig. Blankets.
Thompson, Craig. Habibi.
Thompson, Richard. Cul de Sac Treasury.
Ward, Lynd. Six Novels in Woodcuts v. 1
Ware, Chris. Acme Novelty Library #20 (”Lint”).

Favorite comics this year: Swallow Me Whole. Beautiful art and a haunting story of two children with schizophrenia.

Least favorite comics this year: Slow Storm. Not bad exactly, but the art’s a little muddy and the story kind of disjointed. It’s a debut, though, and Ms. Novgorodoff certainly has potential. Also frustrating: Craig Thompson’s ill-advised epic Habibi.

I’ve been rereading The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, one of my favorite books as a kid. Naturally I can’t top the original Jules Feiffer illustrations, but I thought I’d try drawing some anyway. Here’s my take on Tock the Watchdog, who I’ve decided is a Doberman. More illustrations to come, maybe.

Size of dot reflects character’s proximity to camera. Orange line indicates the character’s duration within the series. Characters who never appeared on a cover: Stephenson and Ritchie.

Color swatches show basic palette of cover art. Apparently the best way to imitate a Sunrise cover would be to use a lot of gray, a little sky blue, and desaturated colors.

1. Get the monitor config tool “ArandR” ($ sudo apt-get install arandr)
2. Use it to create and save two monitor configurations, one for the laptop and one for the main screen. These configuration files are actually shell scripts.
3. Run gconf-editor and navigate to apps/metacity/keybinding_commands. Set the values of two commands to the paths to your shell scripts. (i.e., /path/to/script.sh)
4. In apps/metacity/global_keybindings, set the hotkey combination for the commands you just set.
5. Enjoy easy monitor configuration!

Thanks to this tutorial for showing how to set the hotkeys. Note that this uses Metacity, so it will not work if running other window managers, such as Compiz.

Speed: 65 MPH.  Following Distance: 3 ft. Observed October 13, 2011, CT-95 N.

Not a real hangar, obviously… a couple hours in Blender and I’ve thrown together this lovely digital hangar which has already saved me endless frustration. For those of you unfamiliar with the technology, this is a digital 3D model which the computer can render from any angle. Of course, the excitement doesn’t end with accurate perspective, because this is also a lit model! Take a gander:

My “people” are made of blocks, yes, but still, it’s nice to know where all the shadows fall.

With this in hand, I can go back to my paper and ultimately produce this:

Accurate perspective and realistic lighting, with no cursing or sobbing required. Computers, ladies and gentlemen. Let’s give them a big hand.

Quick, what’s the difference between Calvin and Hobbes and Star Wars? Naturally, the two have so little in common that the question hardly makes sense. The comparison which I’m trying to draw, though, is this: Bill Watterson ended his series early, when it was still in its prime, while George Lucas’s epic continues staggering along, soiling its legacy a little more with each installment. While I’d like to see more Calvin and Hobbes as much as the next guy, I have to admit that I’m glad Watterson ended it before it turned sour.

You can probably see where this is going. I am going to be ending Sunrise following the completion of Issue 10. This was not an easy decision for me to make, and I’ve given it a lot of thought. Sunrise has served me well. When I started it in 2008, the only long-format comics I’d drawn were my Zark stories. I hadn’t taken any figure drawing or illustration classes yet. I wasn’t yet reading graphic novels(!). Now, ten issues later, my artwork has improved dramatically and my writing has followed suit. (How strange to think that the most recent issue was more than twice as long as the first!) Sunrise has always been primarily a learning experience for me, and I’d like to think I’ve learned its lessons well. It’s time for me to graduate.

But why graduate now, when it’s only just becoming strong? Well, to be honest, I’m getting tired of it. The episodic format doesn’t interest me as it once did. I want to move toward working with long-form stories (e.g., graphic novels) and Sunrise does not lend itself to that. Secondly, I’m interested in moving away from genre fiction. While I do have some ideas for a sprawling space opera (and Realm of course) I think it might be fun to do something about the real world for a change. Finally, Sunrise has some inherent limitations that become more pronounced to me with every issue. It too often tends to have very long passages of dialogue, and in many cases there are no opportunities for interesting visuals. As I’ve said previously, Sunrise is based pretty closely on Star Trek, and Star Trek is not a comic. This kind of storytelling works much better on TV. In short, Sunrise is wearing thin, and I’m ready to try something new.

Which is, of course, what this really comes down to. While Sunrise is ending, I have numerous other projects, at least one of which will move up to take the spotlight that Sunrise is currently occupying. Realm is one possibility. I’m also planning a graphic novel which might be well-timed to start soon. And, dare I mention it, a silly science-fiction gag strip which I may run in the interim. Suffice it to say (and this cannot be stressed enough) I am not leaving webcomics. Sunrise or no, I will be making something, so do stop by and see what it is. Naturally there will be further announcements as the time grows near.

Oh, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that Issue 10 is going to be awesome. It’s got airships. It’s got action. It’s got drama. It’s got over 70 pages. It’s also the most Tintinesque issue yet, so some of you will appreciate that I’m sure. So don’t be glum. Buckle up and thanks for coming along for the ride.

Jonah Robinson, Raven, Albee… how can I ever forget them?