Myst: The challenges of CD-ROM | War Stories

Cyan Worlds co-founder Rand Miller goes behind the scenes of the development of one of the best selling PC games of all time, Myst.

The HyperCard-developed title ran into some snags when trying to run on the CD-ROM format.

Rand and his brother, Robyn, compressed the image and audio data as much as they could so the game could run smoothy on 1x CD-ROM drives.

[dramatic music]- You'd think that[laughs] normal people would feelan immense amount of pressure over this.We were way over budget, way over time.I should not have been sleeping at night.There was so much on the line.Hi, I'm Rand Miller, theco-creator of "Myst."We set out to make thereal world of "Myst"and ran smack into the realworld limitations of CD-ROM.[fire roaring and crackling]I got into gaming whenI was in junior high,and I'm not young, sothis was a long time ago.The games I got into on computerswere not what people know today.What really hooked mewas 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 screenthat said how high I wasoff the lunar surface,you know, just a number,how fast I was going, andhow 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, till youbasically crash on the surface.In junior high, a college friend took meto the University of NewMexico computer center,I saw that on thescreen, and it was magic.This was magic to me.And he said, "There are other games,"and you can make your own games."This, you write programs to do this."It changed everything I wantedto do from that point on.Cyan was probably formed in mid-'80s,that we used that very,what we thought at the timewould be a very open-ended name,so we could get into anything we wanted.My brother Robyn and I hadthis idea of a blue sky,and we liked that, so wepicked that as a name.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 aboutcomputers to be dangerous,and I knew enough about artand music to be dangerous,and it was a great team.We started with "The Manhole."He drew the first page of a book,which was a manhole coverand a fire hydrant in the background.And what happened was,was this really interestingtransition for us,and it was what shapedus into what we were.He didn't turn the page.We didn't, after drawing the manhole coverand the fire hydrant,we didn't care about whatwas on the next page.We cared about, "Well, what'sunder the manhole cover,"and what's, you know, whatis that fire hydrant about?"And so, the picturesthat I got from him were,the manhole cover slid aside,and a vine growing up to somewhere,and a picture closer to the fire hydrantwith a little door, a tinylittle door in the bottom.And these were just stillimages that he sent methat we linked together,and we suddenly realizedthat we weren't doing an interactive book,we were making a world.I think it was one of thefirst entertainment CD-ROMs,if not the first entertainment CD-ROM.So "Cosmic Osmo" was how we evolved.It was a very natural transition.We had learned so much aboutour platform, HyperCard,in the meantime, doing "Manhole,"and about what this worlddid well, "Manhole,"and what it didn't do well."Cosmic Osmo" was a chance for usto push things a little further,and it still is very closeto both my brother's and my heart.It was a tour de force of what I thinkat that point HyperCard could doand what computers could do.Everything was interactive.And to this day,I would be doing projects inHyperCard if it was available.It was so, such an elegant, amazing toolthat I don't think Apple understoodeven how to market that product.At its core, HyperCard was,just picture a stack of cards,stack of, a virtual stack of cardsthat 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 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 aclose-up of that fire hydrant.That then evolved into what we do.A link of still pictures.There was a Japanese companywho got in touch with us.They had loved "The Manhole,"and they want to do somethingfor an older audience.They wanted to fund somethingfor an older audience.And we had this meetingwith them where they said,"You know, can you do somethingfor an older audience?"And we were like, "Oh, hell yeah."We can do something for anolder 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 remember,it was basically top-downmaps of every islandwith little notes on it, that was it.We didn't know how youdid a game proposal.We would just, kinda didour 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 was one of the products that had,it wasn't done at the time,but it was being touted.They were showing some previews for itas this media project on CD-ROM,and we went, "Oh yeah, yeah, you bet."And from there, we just jumpedin and started building it."Myst" was a very natural evolutionfrom our earlier worlds,as I've mentioned,but it was also a leap.Because what we'd learneddoing our earlier worldsis that you could embedpieces of story in your game.We didn't know that atall in "The Manhole."- Catherine, my love, Ihave to leave quickly.Something terrible has happened.- But we realized we likedit as we moved forward,and those pieces of storyfelt like they kept you honest.They kept the world somehow realisticbecause everything in thereal world has a story to it.It's there for a reason.We realized when we were readyto do something for an older audiencethat that was important.That we needed to have stories to things.And there was no way todo this on floppy disk.It wouldn't fit.And part of the veryappeal of this was thatwe had made a game that you don't die,you don't level, you don't start over,and so the only way wewere gonna give peoplethe amount of time fortheir money for the gamewas just sheer brute forceamount of real estatethat had to be availablefor them to explore,and CD-ROM was our answer tothat question, if it worked.Very early, then, we got our handson some 3D rendering software.Another one of those pivotal moments in,where you realized thefuture's different from now on,because I remember,and I'm sure Robyn hasthe same recollectionof sitting down with that software,putting a ball on the screen,putting a table, putting a light source,it's all in wire frame, very simple,and clicking the Render button,and out comes somethingthat generates shadows and reflections,and the refraction through glass,and, "Oh, this is different now."We can do this."We can render the images for 'Myst.'"We don't have to hand-draw these."We realized that this would be in color.This would be the firstproduct we would dothat would only play on color machines.There would be no black-and-white option.[laughing] Robyn's machine wasa black-and-white Macintosh,but it had been hacked with a clip.It didn't have any expansion slots.You'd take off the back andyou get this crazy boardthat was a clip that wouldclip onto the processor,all the pins of the processor,and give you a monitor that was color.That's how we started "Myst,"with an early Mac SE, I think.It was hacked to do color.The problems we facedwere really interesting,and the largest of those wasthis crazy idea of CD-ROM.It was relatively new,and what that meant isthat most people had justbasically something like,called a single-speed CD-ROM.It was streaming at 150K persecond, which is nothing.150K per second is all you could getoff that single-speed disc,and we had to make the game work for that.The streaming wasn'teven the main problem.The seek time was the biggest.People with lots of moneyhad double-speed drives,or I think, I don't eventhink quad-speed driveshad been invented yet.But it doesn't matterbecause we have to sellto the most basic people.And it's not even a sell thing.We wanted people to experience thiswho had the basic multimedia computer.Not knowing for sureif 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 clickedto move from one picture to the other?And side note, I worked at a bankfor years before doing this,and we had this psychological kind of playthat I probably heardat some IBM conferencethat said, "Two seconds is howlong 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 thatthey're not getting something.They start to wonder if it'sthem or if it's the machine,and so you kind of wantto keep it to that.Well, we had no ideaif we were gonna move,how long was it gonna take?It might have taken 10 secondsto move to the next image.We just didn't know.CD-ROM burners were not readily available.They were thousands ofdollars for a CD-ROM burner.We didn't have one.It was our publisher, Broderbund,that may have had one,and we didn't even use ituntil we were well into the project.Those were interesting timeswith no testing whatsoever.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 generatingimages, feeding them to me,and I was linking thosetogether in HyperCard.And these are all full-colorimages that Robyn's sending.So he had a really powerfulMac with a lot of memoryand a lot of hard drive space.I had a really powerfulMac with a lot of memoryAnd we were still working in mud.It was incredibly slow,especially for Robyn,rendering those images.It was wonderful timeswhen Apple would comeout with a new machine,and we thought we mightbe able to afford itbecause we could addthat to our collection.What would happen is,Robyn would stack up[laughs] a lot of images to be rendered.In other words, he couldn'tbe rendering as he's working.He had to stack those up in a queue,and at some point, weadded another computer.If he got a new computer, theold one would go to the sideand be used as part ofthis rendering queue,and maybe another one would beadded to the rendering queue,and then as soon as he stopped workingor would go grab a bite atdinner or a cup of coffee,you would immediately turnon rendering on his machineto add it to the othertwo that were rendering.And you could have thisdistributed renderingwith whatever machines were availableto try and keep generating those imagesfrom what he had queued up.Everything had to berendering all the timein order to try to get this work done.- I hope I pushed the rightbutton, my dear brother.- Living within constraints is probably,it's like the name ofthe game for what we did.And I don't think we lookedat it that way at the time.There were tons of constraints,and those were just problems to be solved.I love problem solving,and I think that's partof what you have to doif you're gonna do games.I mean, if you're nota good problem solver,you just go do something else.So the two problems, yougotta find it on the CD-ROM,and you've gotta get it off of the CD-ROMas quickly as possible.So starting with the images,I mean that's number one,they were 8-bit images becausemost people's computers couldn'tdo more than eight bits.What that means is thatwe could show 256 colorson the screen at a time.So just the images alonehad to be laid out on thespirals in close proximity.We didn't want it seekingto some faraway spot.So it's not like you just lay 'emand put 'em in the discin alphabetical order,every image in the game.So we organized those byages in close proximity.We put our names of these things,so that the close-by imageswould be relatively close on the spiral.We used two levels ofcompression for the images.One was, we used only 256colors to do the images,which made them smaller,but we also used acompression technique as wellto make them small sothey would stream faster.We got 'em down to 50K, maybe, each.So that takes care of the image problem.Now we have a music problem,and let's just call it a sound problem.We have music or sound effectsthat are playing in the background,and they're streaming all the time.So if, for example, I walkdown into this generator tunneland I need this weird,eerie sound to play,[machinery clanging]we could do the music inseveral different ways,but the easiest would beto just put the tracks ofmusic somewhere on the CD-ROMand let it go to those music tracksand just stream it on its own.Let the OS and the operatingsystem kind of handle,or QuickTime, handlestreaming those things.But can it get to those, andseek back to the next picture,and get to those, andseek to the next picturewithout chopping the sound off?'Cause there's a very real possibilitythat 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 enoughfor it to load it into a bufferand play it without all of asudden 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 themusic pieces close enoughwhere it doesn't have togo too far to get to 'em.On top of that, if I push a button,I've got to have a ka-chunk sound,[door slamming]and if I open a door, Iwant a squeaking sound,[door squeaking]and if I turn on a generator,I want a ramp-up sound[generator whistling]or a slow-down sound,or all those little one-shotsound effects as wellthat I need to happen quickly,and they need to be close on that CD-ROM.And these are all thingswe had done meticulouslyto try and get our data rate very low,but we would have hadto just shrink it more,so we, there was, you know,I guess experience is one ofthose weird kind of thingswhere you can't put your fingeron exactly the calculation that,where you think it's gonna work,but because we'd been doing itfor five years or six years,we just kinda had thisfeeling, and luckily, we were,we were kind of right.It's this weird processwhere we sent hard drives,probably a hard drive down to Broderbund,and they burned the first CD of "Myst,"so we got the gold master,we put it in our CD drives,we click Play, and weall cross our fingersand give it a try.And it comes up,and for the most part, it's working.Normal people should have beenmedicating themselves over,but we didn't have thisreally weird naivetythat just kept us obliviousto the distractions of the factthat this might not work at all.And what a weird thing to thinkthat that's what, in some ways, saved us.I mean, I don't know that we evenwould have taken on the projectif we didn't have that.Robyn and I had discussions where we said,"Man, if we sell 100,000 copies,"can you imagine if we sold100,000 copies of this game?"Oh, I mean that was mindblowing, 100,000 copies.So there was no way in the worldthat we could haveanticipated the success.No way in the world.Look, I remember going into my first,you know, media store back in the day.After "Myst," I took a long vacation.I went to New Mexico andtook a five-week vacation,and I remember in NewMexico, we'd just shipped.I went into a store inAlbuquerque that's a media store,and I'm like, "I wonderif the game's here,"I wonder if the game's here."And I walked to the back,and it was like coveringthe whole top shelf of the gaming section.And I was in awe.I was, my mind was blown.Like, "Oh my gosh, this is crazy."This can't be happening,this is so cool."I think our discussionbetween Robyn and I was,"You know, 100,000copies 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 quicklygot to millions of copies.Multiple millions of copies.One of the ironies of the game is that,I mean, we have to guess at this,but I think that probably only 50%of the people who played iteven made it off the Island of Mystbecause of the puzzles involved.But for some reason, thatdidn't dampen enthusiasm.I think because that firstisland was so intriguingand you got enough of thestory to kind of be tantalized,and because maybe some of theaudience was young at the timeand it just felt magical, that was,it left a great taste in people's psycheabout what the game was,which is really nice, even to this day.I mean, I get people who areway 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 thoseplaces on the screen,"and I didn't really understand it,"but it just felt sointeresting to see that."And that is really satisfying,to still have that kindof resonance to this day.I can't tell you how, youknow, as a creator of that,how satisfying and wonderful that is.So here's the lessonswe learned from "Myst"that we tried to evolve this thing for.We still feel like"Myst" was an experiment.As much as every one ofthe previous kids' gamesthat we did kind of evolved,in many ways, it led to "Riven."We realized that thethings we liked in "Myst"were the things that came a little later,where the story came out a little more,where the story wasrevealed in the environmentor 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 themselvesand the friction itselfneeded to not just feel like it was,I don't know, arbitrary.And as much as people said that "Myst,"you know, I think for its time,even Myst Island felt like,"Oh, these puzzles makesense," and they weren't,"The 7th Guest" kind of wouldjust throw some puzzles in.Not to diminish it, it was amazing,but it was, at that time,they just kind of threw some puzzles into 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 feellike they were part ofthe history of this place.And so "Riven" was really achallenge to make that happen,and during the design,that was on our minds.Like, "How are we gonna build the history,"the storytelling, into this world?"How are we gonna build thepuzzles into this world?"And how are we gonnareally integrate that?"And it was one of the greatest challenges,and it was, all thelessons we have learnedkind of led to "Riven,"to try and do that as, tothe best of our abilities.- Atrus![wind howling]- Here's the interestingthing about the industry, too.Everything has shifted in the industry.In a lot of ways, I'm really happyin the ways it's shifted.I mean, I started with my brotherin this, in making games.It was just the two of usdoing this little indie kind of thingthat we felt we could do by ourselves,and then we've watched the trend in gaminggo to a place where the onlypeople who could make gameswere enabled by large amounts of moneyfrom large corporationswho were publishers,and that was in some ways sad because,I mean, luckily, we wereon the right side of that.We were, we had our funding from "Myst"and we could keep going.But it felt like the whole industrylost some kind of innovationby the guys in the garage.By that indie feeling.And with the advent of the internet,and in particular, the adventof downloadable content,where the need to pressCDs and have stock,and manage that stock anddistribute it to stores,and have things on the shelf,that suddenly broughtin a whole new influxof young, two-person shops again,where, "Hey, I got aperson who can do art,"I got a person who can program."We should make a game."And I love that.That's, to me, that whole indie rise againhas kind of reinvigorated the industry,and I love what that's done.And in some ways, it's kindof come full circle for us.I mean, we don't now dependon a publisher anymore.We've, the last two project we've done,or the last, we did "Obduction,"which was a Kickstarter,and then our current project, "Firmament,"is the same thing.Twice, we've gone back to the well,the Kickstarter well, andour fan base has said,"Yeah, we're willing to riskit for a new game from you."From a new title.And there's a lot of pressurewith that, but it's also this,"Here I am, getting to do awhole new idea for a game."So it's, the struggle kind of continues,and here I am, 60 years old,trying to anticipate with "Firmament"where things are gonnabe two years from now.With the same struggle,fighting the same battles,and having to realize in my mindthat I'm not, I may not get it right,but again, that's justhow it is, and it's okay.[gentle music]