Cyan's Myst Series Getting Updates, Coming to Windows 10
A couple of weeks ago, the folks at Cyan started teasing fans with a photo of a book with the word “Myst” on the cover, a post-it note with the number 25 written on it and a pen. The number was easy to figure out, at least – this year is the 25th anniversary of the release of the first Myst game. But what about the rest of the cryptic message? Well, they’ve finally released an official statement to go along with the image, announcing they’re going to update and port all of the Myst games to Windows 10.
Say what you will about the games (there does seem to be a sizeable portion of the population that doesn’t enjoy them, but there’s something fundamentally wrong with these people, obviously), but you can’t deny their cult classic status. The ability to play them on modern systems will allow a lot of people to experience them for the first time. It will also help save them from oblivion – especially the few entries Ubisoft holds the rights to. The first two (and the last one) have been available on GOG for a while now, but easy, legal access to Exile and Revelation has been absent for a decade or so.
On the flipside, don’t expect remasters or anything. The effort seems to be aimed solely at getting these games running on the cursed wretch that is Windows 10. The source files for the first two games have been lost for a while now, so there’s literally no way to remaster them.
The blog post also mentions a physical release of the entire collection in a “unique package with a cool artifact”. No word on the specifics yet, like price and release date, and also not a single mention of the Uru games. Do they count as part of the series in this sense?
Well damn. It”s been forever since I played Myst. I think it was on a 33 MHz Pentium. I don”t remember how much RAM I had but we measured RAM in MB back then. It wasn”t much. It didn”t have a video card. I can”t remember back then if anyone even had a video card. I am cautiously optimistic about this news and want to see more before deciding but the main thing I”m concerned about is they are planning on releasing all 6 updated games this year. According to the article they started trying to procure the rights to the games years ago and managed to finally do so but how much time have they put into updating the games so far? Will they only be spending a few months updating all 6 games? Is that enough time for a small Indie company? And how much funding have they put together? Maybe it would have been better to release one a year and use the profits to really do a lot on the following remasters.
Look up the Myst 25th Anniversary on Kickstarter. It seems as if they have successfully crowdfunded their endeavors to $1.5 million so far, and there’s still 3 weeks left. I am going to safely assume they will get $2 million, possibly $3 million. They are going to be investing a lot of time and probably money in the packaging. My worry is the deadline for release of the physical product (November), but they are promising the actual game downloads in August. II really hope they can meet the deadline, I just dropped $170 on the special edition with the linking book!