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Myst

I had heard of Myst years before I saw it. It was the famous game where you begin with no back story and no information: you're on an island, you're wandering around, you don't know what you're supposed to do and it's a long time before you figure out the ultimate goal of the game (as a matter of fact, you don't really know the ultimate goal of the game until you pretty much finish it).

But it all went wrong for me.

When I visited my sister on my yearly visit to my home town I found that she had bought Myst. Not being a hard-core gamer, she had also bought the cheat book. But things didn't seem to be working right. She would do something the book told her to do and what was supposed to happen wouldn't. So I thought I would try it.

So I would do stuff and it wouldn't work and I'd read the cheat book and say, why isn't this working? Eventually I came to the conclusion that either the CD was defective or my sister's computer needed reconfiguring (she never bothered to contact Broderbund, and hasn't played the game to this day). But by then I'd read half the cheat book.

So when, a couple of years later, I borrowed the game from a friend, I knew how to solve too many of the puzzles. I knew how to solve over half the game. And it breaks my heart that I'll never get to experience Myst fresh.

What was left was a lot of fun. This is an amazingly beautiful game, especially surprising if you look at the other games out at the time. The puzzles are ingenious and cerebral. My game-writing friend says this is probably his favorite game. It was considered revolutionary (which people argue about, the way people argue about everything), and certainly it's had a tremendous influence on other games. The puzzles are pretty damn hard, and I would have needed to cheat even if I'd had a working copy of the CD right away, but I did manage to get through the only section I hadn't read a single thing about in the cheat book (the water pipe puzzles) on my own.

While many games from 1993 look pretty crappy now, this one still looks great.

-- Charles Herold -1997