Myst, Myst Island, by Josh Millard.

This game.  This game.  Did anybody not play it?

I kind of hate it for being, as an actual game, kind of a tepid antithesis of all the dynamic excitement of so many of the other games I grew up loving — even compared to other adventure and text adventure games, Myst was so static and sluggish, a game that played almost like sitting through a family vacation slideshow where Dad keeps forgetting where the “next slide” button is on the controls.  And this was the wild success that everybody leapt to emulate.  This was the New Gaming, the monetizable, broad-appeal approach that became damnably pervasive in the following years.

And yet I kind of feel sorry for it because, had it not been so wildly successful, had it not been so thoroughly overexposed, it’d probably be remembered fondly as a quirky thing out of the past, a unique and atmospheric bit of gaming history rather than the sire of a thousand play-alike knockoffs. 

The overgrown-Hypercard-stack-on-a-CD-ROM model that it bootstrapped was a doomed branch of game technology from the word go, though it’d take many years for that evolutionary dead-end to properly play itself out as gaming hardware and software matured and found better ways to present compelling graphics and atmosphere.

But all of that context, all of that hoopla about the game as a cultural artifact and a touchstone in the video game industry notwithstanding, there was a game under there, a game that for all its stodgy opacity and clumsy FMV drama still had its moments and was at least a little bit genuinely weird in a fun way.

I haven’t played it in years and years; I never played any of the sequels (other than five minutes of Riven and then a crash to desktop) or any of the remakes.  But it’s still there, in my brain, and I can still draw at least a poor, partial overhead rendition of an island that I never even had an overhead of in the game.  For all the shit it has gotten over the years, Myst was primordial; it made some sort of fundamental impression on me.  It’s exactly the sort of thing that Mapstalgia is about.

Myst, Myst Island, by Brian Castro.

*SPOILERS* Dont look at it if you have not beat the game. you have not played it. You should.

I played this game in the mid 90s, so I was no probably 5 or 6 when I first gave it a shot. I never beat it when I was that young myself, but did watch my brother and father beat it, and eventually beat it a few years later, and most recently about a year ago (I’m 22).  Anyway, I spent so much time traversing this island that I am rather confident I left out no details, or, at least none of particular importance.

This is the main island that you start the game on, these are the key locations you go to to solve puzzles and transport yourself to the “ages” of Stoneship, Channelwood, The Selectic Age, and the Mechanical Age. 

A great game.

Myst, Stoneship Age, by Mezentine.

This, along with most of the rest of the game, was seared irreversibly into my brain at the tender age of 8.

Myst, Myst Island, by Kyle.

Myst was the first video game I ever fully immersed myself in (even more than Lemmings and Sim Ant). It was a Christmas gift from my uncle Kevin when I was six years old. I still have the old CD-ROM that requires installation of Quicktime 1 to play. The Myst series got dealt a bad hand in the end with Cyan Worlds nearly going out of business, but after nearly twenty years, this is still the map I remember best. Note: Ti’ana’s grave didn’t appear on Myst island in the original version of the game, but I decided to add it.