Raise your hand if you’ve fallen victim to the escape room craze.
…Yeah, me too. I can’t even pretend that, if I had more disposable income, I wouldn’t be a total escape room junkie. In my defense, however, I’ve been groomed for this. Before there were escape rooms in real life, there were escape room games online. And before there were escape games online, there was an explosion of PC escape games on CD-ROM.
And the impetus for that explosion was Myst, a well-ahead-of-its-time, puzzle-solving, escape-the-island game with a pretty cool story.
To be clear, I can’t put on my hipster glasses and claim that I liked Myst “from the very beginning,” because it was released in 1993, around the time I was learning how to walk. Circa 2002, however, my dad and I stumbled across it in one of those $10 game multi-packs at Best Buy or something (I think it was accompanied by Ultimate Chess and some disc with a lot of classic board games). My dad likes puzzle solving games, thought I would enjoy it too, and we picked it up.
We spent the next five years sporadically playing through Myst, and its two direct sequels, Riven and Exile. We could never quite crack the fourth game, Revelation, and we never picked it back up before I went off to college. My junior and senior years of high school, I replayed the first three games, on my own, and I still found them to be a nice challenge.
Fast forward to this summer. For the 25-year anniversary of Myst’s release, the developers ran a Kickstarter to re-release all seven Myst games. My squee could be heard for miles. I spent far more money than I should have backing that sweet baby to a level that got me some deliciously gorgeous swag. (For reference, I still haven’t received the swag, but the games themselves shipped separately and are amazing). My thoughts on the subject can be summarized in a letter to my seventeen-year-old self as she played back through the games.
Remembered 7/1/18 in response to:
I wrote:
Dear Seventeen,
In eight years, the entire Myst series will be re-released in digital and physical form for the 25th anniversary on Kickstarter (do you have Kickstarter yet? I forget…). There will be swag. You will drop far too much money on this endeavor, because the swag is AWESOME. Anyway, just letting you know that true fans will always prevail, and the series (and its rightfully beautiful storyline) will never die.
Long live the memory of D’ni!
Love,
Twenty-Five
All Myst games are now available on Steam and GOG, if you want to check them out!
Calley Jones, Author 