How Myst Almost Couldn't Run on CD-ROM | War Stories | Ars Technica
Ars Technica4 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2020-2024
2M views · 6 years ago · interview · evergreen
Myst co-creator Rand Miller recounts how the HyperCard-built game struggled to run on 1x CD-ROM drives. He and his brother Robyn compressed image and audio data heavily to get acceptable performance. Part of Ars Technica's War Stories series.
HN commenters point to it as the first-person story of how Myst grew out of HyperCard and fit on CD-ROM, especially in threads about HyperCard and retro game constraints.
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6 comments from Hacker News
One of the creators of Myst (Rand Miller) credited the original game with being why he got into game development in the first place [1] Myst inspired many people to go into computer science and game development as well, so it's interesting to see how much of a snowball effect this Lunar Lander game had [1] ▶ this video
CD-ROM didn't make Myst a no-brainer, as Rand Miller discusses in this excellent Ars Technica piece: ▶ this video More info in the extended cut starting at this timestamp: link
If you want to hear more about this from the man himself, Rand Miller has a great video with Ars Technica: ▶ this video And extended edition: link
I love the artistry and creativity around the HyperCard community. Years ago I stumbled on this (wonderfully dorky) episode of Computer Chronicles, that focuses on HyperCard: link I love how the used-car salesman created his own application to help potential buyers find the right car. This was truly the “bicycle of the mind” era for computing; the user base was fairly self-selected, and people wanted to take full advantage of this new tool. [1]. The range of HyperCard was pretty amazing — famously, Myst was originally created with it: ▶ this video 1: link
Related, the video How Myst Almost Couldn't Run on CD-ROM[1] is actually more fascinating and entertaining in my opinion. [1] ▶ this video
The game Myst was originally written in HC, and a game engine (Mohawk) had to be written for Windows to provide similar functionality in order to port it. There's a documentary about it: ▶ this video Definitely one of the rare indie game success stories. They really poured themselves into making it as awesome and expansive as technology would allow. IIRC, they're still writing games for fun.