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Recommended Reading: the legacy of Myst, the fall of BlackBerry and more
Recommended Reading highlights the best long-form writing on technology in print and on the web. Some weeks, you'll also find short reviews of books dealing with the subject of technology that we think are worth your time. We hope you enjoy the read. Lost to the Ages by Emily Yoshida, Grantland Twenty years after its release, Emily Yoshida looks back at the legacy of the landmark game Myst, which has sold some 6 million copies and spawned sequels and countless ports to various platforms over the years. That includes a firsthand account of the making of the game from co-creators Rand and Robyn Miller, who discuss whether they were trying to make "Art with a capital A," and what they'd still like to see more of from video games today.
The 20th anniversary of Myst
Has it been 20 years? Seems like yesterday. In 1993, Myst was a seemingly endless and epic adventure game, with immersive sound and beautifully rendered graphics. I remember eagerly getting my CD-ROM copy at my local computer store and losing myself for hours on the mysterious island of Myst. Originally written for the Mac by Robyn and Rand Miller, the game evolved for just about every computer or gaming platform. It's now even available for iDevices. In the original game, you clicked on objects with the mouse, and explored a world filled with beauty and some tough puzzles that, at first, seemed incomprehensible. In a way, it reminded me of an interactive version of The Prisoner TV show, which was also surreal and took place in "The Village" on an island in an unknown place. (There was a Prisoner game for the Apple II released in 1980 by Edu-Ware, but it was pretty primitive.) The game was developed on Mac Quadras beginning in 1991, with 3D renderings in StrataVision 3D and Macromedia MacroModel. Finishing touches were done in Photoshop 1.0. The game was a monster hit, and I'm sure it sold more than a couple of Macs and a lot of CD-ROM drives. Games were evolving from simple shoot-em-ups to artistic presentations. We've come a long way with games. We're still shooting aliens and bad guys of course, but Myst was something different, and it paved the way for deeper themes and adventures that stretched the imagination and the technology required to render them. Happy Birthday Myst, and thanks for all the great memories. [via The Loop]
Chaos Theory: An adventure game is you!
I grew up on adventure games before I even knew they were called "adventure games." One of my earliest memories of a friend's computer was playing Adventure. Following that, I was hooked. Maniac Mansion. King's Quest. Zork. Planetfall. Leisure Suit Larry. Space Quest. The Secret of Monkey Island. Sam and Max Hit the Road. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Myst. Gabriel Knight. Syberia. The Longest Journey. Back to the Future. The Walking Dead. I've never stopped loving the fun of exploring these worlds, "earning" the next page of the story, and finding out all of the bizarre ways I could die. However, at some point in the '90s, games journalists apparently decided that "adventure games were dead." It's something we started hearing a lot of, especially in comparison to all of the fancy new graphics, gameplay features, and fast-paced shooters. Adventure games were seen as a relic of a time when computers couldn't process heavy graphic loads and players were a lot more patient. I never bought into the "adventure games are dead" mindset. I see them coming back like crazy these days, especially on tablets and mobile devices. And lo and behold, Funcom did something that I would have never thought possible: The studio made an MMO out of an adventure game. That's The Secret World, if you weren't following along.
Oculus Rift first-person adventure game The Gallery hits Kickstarter goal
The Gallery: Six Elements recently reached its $65,000 Kickstarter funding goal before its April 17 deadline. The project from CloudHead Games is a first-person adventure game designed with the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset in mind, though the developer notes that it will not be required to play the game. The Gallery draws influences from the Myst adventure series, and has players traversing through six painted portals that represent the "core elements of life."The project is currently sitting at $70,036, just enough to achieve a stretch goal that grants the game Razer Hyrdra support, Sixense's PC motion controller. The Gallery will launch on PC and Mac, and is currently vying for a spot on Steam through Steam's Greenlight service.[Thanks, Rasmus!]
HTC First announced, coming exclusively to AT&T on April 12th for $99.99
Continuing its obsession with the number one, HTC has officially announced the First, an Android device with a bit more Facebook influence than most other smartphones we've used in the past -- including other handsets given preferential treatment from the social media network during the last four years. HTC's Peter Chou and AT&T's Ralph de la Vega took the stage at the event to announce the phone, which is the world's first Home-optimized device. What exactly that means remains to be seen, but HTC's Chou indicated it will be a "unique experience." There were no specs announced for the device, other than it having LTE, of course. But, earlier leaks have indicated it will be 4.3-inch, 720p mid-range phone, not threatening the HTC One by any stretch of the imagination. It will be available on April 12th exclusively in the US on AT&T for just $99.99. And, it will be available in four colors: red, turquoise, white and, of course, black. You can pre-order yours today at the More Coverage link below, and there's a brief video after the break to explain how the new notifications work. %Gallery-184818%
Facebook phone dev-edition APK reveals details about HTC Myst, new Facebook Home features
Facebook already told us all that it'd be announcing something new and Android-related at an event on April 4th. Android Police has just given us a new heaping helping of evidence, via an APK teardown, that the social network will, at long last, announce an oft-rumored, never revealed Facebook phone and a FB-themed version of Google's mobile OS. The ROM reveals that it's built for an AT&T-compatible HTC Myst handset with a 4.3 inch display, 1GB of RAM and a dual-core MSM8960 SoC. There's also a 5-megapixel rear camera, 1.6-megapixel front shooter, Bluetooth 4.0 and WiFi a/b/g/n radios, which confirms earlier spec leaks about the phone. As for software, it runs Android 4.1.2 and Sense 4.5, and most importantly, a new Facebook program called Facebook Home. As you might expect, it'll serve as the phone's home screen and launcher. To that end, it has more system controls than the existing Facebook app, with permission to turn off the lock screen, start up when the phone boots and control your WiFi connection, among others. The APK also revealed that there's a host of circular Facebook-flavored icons and tight Facebook Messenger integration. Oh, and in case you aren't looking to buy FB-specific hardware, fear not, for the presence of TouchWiz compatibility indicates that Facebook Home will be available for other phones as well.
Facebook planning Android-related event on April 4th
It looks like Facebook's got an Android-related event up its sleeve next Thursday April 4th right here in the Bay Area. So, what's this about? A major revamp of Facebook's Android app? An Android-based Facebook phone like HTC's rumored Myst? Whatever it is, we'll obviously be there to liveblog the announcement in great detail, so be sure to tune in at 1PM ET (10AM PT). While focusing its recent efforts on features like Graph Search and News Feed, Facebook's been clear that mobile is a top priority for 2013. Let's just hope this event brings something more exciting to fruition than HTC's half-baked Status.
HTC Myst specs purportedly leak, hint at a second-gen social phone
We wouldn't exactly call the social networking-focused HTC ChaCha (aka Status) and Salsa resounding successes in the smartphone world when they were quickly overshadowed by... just about everything with a Facebook app, really. Still, there have been murmurs of a comeback, and Unwired View's historically reliable @evleaks has obevleakstained specs for what's supposedly the follow-up. The HTC Myst (Myst #UL, to be exact) wouldn't have any special tricks on the surface beyond preloaded Facebook apps, but it could be surprisingly well-equipped for a mid-range Jelly Bean device: a 4.3-inch 720p screen, a dual-core 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4, LTE and 16GB of non-expandable storage would be nothing to sneeze at. About the only sacrifices would be the 1GB of RAM and a potentially UltraPixel-free 5-megapixel rear camera. While there's no guarantee that these details will reflect a shipping device, there's talk of the Myst reaching the US as early as the spring -- we won't have long to learn the truth. Just don't expect that other Myst in the box.
GDC 2013 classic postmortems: Myst, X-COM: UFO Defense, more
The classic postmortem sessions at GDC are always good for some fun, inside stories of old-school game development, including the likes of GoldenEye 007, Doom, Maniac Mansion and Out of this World. GDC 2013 will add a few more games to the list, with postmortem panels scheduled for Myst, X-COM: UFO Defense, Pinball Construction Set and Crystal Castles.Each panel will feature speakers involved with the development of each classic title, and plenty of secrets and anecdotes are bound to come up. You can bet we'll be attending as many of these as we can once GDC gets rolling in March. Who knows, maybe we'll get lucky and stumble upon another game designer's adorable, prescient childhood video.
NYC Museum of Modern Art opens game collection with 14 classics, exhibiting in March 2013
Given the subject matter, this is usually where the author waxes philosophical about whether -- having been accepted by a major international museum -- games are indeed "art." We're gonna skip that needless exercise today and simply tell you that the New York City Museum of Modern Art is officiating its intake of 14 video game classics as the start of an ongoing gaming collection, set to go on display in March 2013 in the MoMA's Philip Johnson Architecture and Design Galleries -- the same galleries that house an original iPod and more. The games range from Buckner & Garcia inspiration Pac-Man to modern classic Portal, and even includes some lesser known gems (vib-ribbon, anyone?). The MoMA blog calls this initial selection just the "seedbed" for a chunkier collection of around 40 titles, all of which will be part of a "new category of artworks" at the iconic museum. Head below for the full first 14.
Myst linking book replica goes on sale with full PC inside, won't quite take us to other worlds (video)
Most of us who remember Myst are content to relive the halcyon days of click-and-watch puzzle games by loading up the iPhone port. Mike Ando is slightly more... dedicated. He just spent the past six years building a replica of the Cyan game's signature, Age-traveling link books that includes a full Windows XP PC with a 1.6GHz Atom, a 2-hour battery, a 5-inch touchscreen and every playable game from the Myst series stored on a CF card. And while we've seen books hiding devices before, Ando's attention to detail might just raise the eyebrows of hardcore custom PC and gaming fans alike: he went so far as to gut and emboss a 135-year-old copy of Harper's New Monthly Magazine to match Cyan's reference tome as closely as possible. It's tempting for anyone who cut their teeth on CD-based gameplay through Myst, but perfect devotion to one of the better-known fictional worlds will cost an accordingly steep $15,625. We wouldn't have minded seeing some real intra-world travel for the cash outlay.
Apple's original software construction kit: HyperCard turns twenty-five years old today
Twenty-five years ago today, HyperCard was released at Macworld Expo Boston. Apple's software construction kit for the rest of us began shipping on every new Mac as of August 11, 1987; you could also buy it for $49. It required 1 MB of memory (yes, one megabyte) and a pair of 800K floppy drives, or one floppy drive + a hard disk. (Announced at the same time: the ImageWriter LQ, the Apple Fax Modem, and MultiFinder.) Times have indeed changed. For those who haven't been playing along at home for quite that long, HyperCard was an application where you could develop (or download, share or buy) all manner of 'stacks,' and those stacks used individual cards as the metaphor for a screenful of information. Linking those cards together in stacks was how you built things in HyperCard, whether they were stacks of all your recipes, basic presentation decks pre-PowerPoint, or, you know, one of the biggest selling PC games ever. I started dabbling with HyperCard because at one point on the school computers it was the last application I hadn't actually played with. It was sort of intimidating to look at by itself, but as I saw other stacks and figured out how to assemble them, I wrote a Choose Your Own Adventure-style story where you could navigate with buttons at the bottoms of the pages. I adored HyperCard. It let me feel like I had a tiny bit of control over one little piece of that Mac. I did like five or six stories, and then I built a recipe stack, and I played with a variety of other stacks, just to see what they could do. Part of what got my attention about RunRev's LiveCode development suite, when I saw it in action at MacTech this year, was when they mentioned converting HyperCard stacks into LiveCode projects. I'd convert all my old stacks, if I could just find them someplace... Ars Technica had a nice writeup earlier this year, and it prompted our own Steve Sande to reminisce about his experience with HyperCard as well. Speculation about why HyperCard was left to wither and die is also out there, as is a brief chat with creator Bill Atkinson about his feelings towards his brainchild (check out his iPhone PhotoCard app). Robin Sloan and Contents magazine made a web essay into a stack. There's even a HyperCard Twitter account. Sadly, Hypercard was removed from the Apple landscape in 2004, and emulating an environment for it gets fiddlier all the time. There are some similar products if you want to play around a little, including LiveCode and SuperCard. It's also a lovely reminder to the old school among us, because it doesn't seem that long ago until you see that it has been twenty-five years. Now I have to go chase those kids off my lawn...
RealMyst now on the App Store
The original Myst has been available for iOS for a while now, offering up that game's classic click-to-explore puzzles on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad. Now, Cyan Worlds has released realMyst, a 3D re-imagining of the old school title that features the mysterious island of Myst. Unfortunately, the game's only for the iPad 2 or the current iPad (iPad 3), so you'll need one of those devices to play the game (presumably because the graphical fidelity just needs that much power). The title includes the full original Myst in 3D, plus the add-on Rime Age and extras like a hint guide, should you get stuck. Right now it's available for just US$6.99, but the price is set to go back up to $9.99 soon.
Myst gets Real on iPad
There is now yet another way for you to buy Myst. You may already have Myst on your iPhone or iPad, but now you can get an iPad version of RealMyst, the 2000 remake of the adventure game that presents the world in realtime 3D.The new mobile version uses a new interface designed for the platform. "Instead of trying to awkwardly shoehorn a computer mouse interface or game console controller into the new touch environment - we were driven to design a simple touch interface that anyone could use." said producer Karl Johnson in the announcement. "The resulting interface allows the player to explore a 3D world with the ease of 'exploring' a 2D document on the iPad."RealMyst is on the App Store now for iPad 2 and 3, at a promotional price of $6.99. At an unspecified future date, it'll go up to a permanent $9.99 price point.
Save on enough Myst games for a full lifestyle change
Maybe you didn't want cheap Myst games in August, but have since then matured into a person who is all about that. Celebrate the beginning of your "Myst person" phase by picking up Myst: Masterpiece Edition, Riven, RealMyst, and Manhole: Masterpiece Edition for $2.99 each, or Uru Complete Chronicles for $4.99.You have until March 5 at 11:59 am EST to facilitate the birth of the New You as a person with a righteous collection of Cyan Worlds games.
You haven't Myst this great deal on Cyan games
If you're looking to pass a quiet weekend clicking your way through some puzzles, look no further than Good Old Games. The DRM-free retailer has put its whole selection of Cyan games on sale for half off this weekend. That includes Myst 1 and 2, the RealMyst remake, and the pre-Myst children's adventure game The Manhole for $2.99 each, and Uru for $4.99. If you want the whole package, and several lost weekends, you can get it all for $16.95. The offer ends Monday at 11:59 PM EDT, so ... buy the games you want before then, unless you want to pay more for your island getaway.
Myst Online goes open source (again)
If a dictionary entry for the phrase "long, strange road" existed, it likely would feature an image from Myst Online. The fantasy MMORPG began its checkered life as the multiplayer component of 2003's Uru: Ages Beyond Mist before being scrapped and subsequently revived by GameTap in 2007. Cyan Worlds then acquired the title and released it as a free-to-play MMO, a strange move considering that the company also open-sourced Myst Online assets in 2008 but continued to support a commercial-grade centralized shard. This morning, Rock, Paper Shotgun tipped us to the fact that Cyan is once again fanning the flames of open source by announcing that the game's MOULA client engine and associated development tools (as well as a MOULA server replacement called MOSS) will be made available and hosted on OpenUru.org. "The goal of the open source CyanWorlds.com Engine and the MOSS server is to provide a playground where new writers can learn their craft, and new maintainers can inspect it, and new cartographers can map it. The Cyan Worlds MOULA servers will continue to provide a (relatively) safe environment for the D'ni faithful to mingle and share," explains Cyan's Rand Miller.
Riven: The Sequel to Myst now available for iPhone
Riven, the sequel to Cyan Worlds' bestselling game Myst, is now available on the App Store. The original version of Riven came out in 1997 for multiple systems and was widely acclaimed; 13 years later, Riven has an opportunity to reach an entirely new audience of gamers. In August of 2008, Cyan announced that they'd port Myst to the iPhone, and it became available in July of 2009. Following the success of the original Myst on iOS, we heard back in February that Riven would be coming to the iPhone "by early summer at the latest." In Cyan Worlds' defense, they didn't say which hemisphere's summer they were talking about... Riven is available for US$5.99 and is a huge download -- it's over a gigabyte, and due to iOS installation quirkiness, the game requires 2GB of free space before it will install on your iOS device of choice. Riven also has Game Center integration, but there doesn't appear to be an iPad-specific version of the app available. I never played the original version of Riven, but for six bucks I might give it a look... assuming I can find room for it in my monthly download cap, that is.
TUAW's Daily App: Stoneship: The Curse of a Thousand Islands
Stoneship was released earlier this year exclusively on the App Store, and it's got quite a pedigree. It was created by Cyan Worlds, the creators behind the classic game Myst, one of the most-loved PC games of all time. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your gaming tastes), Stoneship is a completely different game. While there are some elements of exploration and puzzles to solve, Stoneship is much more of an arcade title than straight adventure. In Stoneship, you are the captain of a British frigate, and it's your job to not only explore a series of Caribbean Islands but also set up and defend them against the invading pirate hordes. When you start a map, you get a set number of turns to split among exploration, creating and transferring defenses around, and fighting various findings on the map. After those turns end, you have to defend against a set of pirates; if you haven't moved your troops to the right places and cleaned up the map enough, you might lose all of the great towns you've built up. It's an interesting game, but it's kind of lame that things are mostly out of your hands (you do press some buttons to actually run the battles, but mostly you'll make or break them early on). It's also a little frustrating to always have that turn limit knocking at the door, but the game is well-produced and good fun. It just recently got a clean-up update, and the next update is supposed to bring Game Center integration and a few more goodies. If you're willing to put a little thought into the way you play, check out Stoneship on the App Store right now for US$2.99.
Riven coming to iPhone
Here's great news for Myst fans with iPhones -- a port of Riven will be available this year. According to a post on the Myst Online Forums, the game is in development and will be released "...by early summer at the latest." Just in time for gaming at the beach! Riven is the sequel to Myst, the adventure game that revolutionized the industry when it was first released for the Mac in 1993. The goal of Myst is to solve a series of complicated puzzles and ultimately answer the question, "What's going on here?" Riven is the sequel to Myst and describing its plot would reveal spoilers for both, so we'll let you play it for yourself. Myst for iPhone was released last July to the praise of the game's dedicated fans. I've played both the Mac and iPhone versions, and am happy to say that the iPhone port is faithful to the original while the touch interface adds a whole new level of fun (don't click on that lever, go ahead and touch it!). With that in mind, I expect an equally pleasant experience with Riven for iPhone. Of course, they'd both be gorgeous on the iPad (and huge -- the iPhone build of Myst is 533MB!), but we're getting ahead of ourselves. [Via Touch Arcade]
