I have long been a fan of quirky museums and collections, and heard last week about the Museum of Play, based in Rochester NY. They recently awarded their latest round of “hall of fame” computer video games, and on this year’s list is Myst. This 30+ year old game was a significant moment in its day and a big hit back as I wrote on a blog from 2012. It sold more than six million copies and raised the bar from crude graphics and beeping computer generated noises that were found in many of the early games from that era. After hearing about the news, I wanted to dust off my software and try to take it for another spin (which is what I did back in 2012), but alas, I didn’t have the right vintage of OS and drivers to make it work.

As I wrote back then in my blog, I observed that Myst’s graphics were not anything like more modern games. Its genius was giving equal weight to both graphics and audio, and while I was clicking about its landscape, I left the sounds of the ocean lapping up against the rocky island playing while I was working, and it was very soothing. The museum says it was slow paced and contemplative but inspired wonder. I concur.

Myst was not a first-person-shooter, but a game that involved solving puzzles, puzzles that had very inscrutable clues that were easy to miss at first glance. It easily got frustrating, and I often found myself going back over ground that I thought I had covered, only to find another hidden puzzle that unlocked a new landscape. Eventually, I bough a cheater book to get to the end of the game, thereby sealing my fate as a forever-novice gamer.

Myst came along at a time when PCs were just getting CD-ROMs installed: I remember buying this add-on package from Soundblaster because those early computers didn’t have any audio support either. And figuring out that puzzle of drivers, OS updates, and rooting around inside my computer to connect everything up was my first foray into building the kind of computer that we now take for granted where sound and optical media (and writable multi-speed ones at that) are part of the package.

Well, at least we can take the sound features for granted —  we seem to be moving away from having DVD drives as standard equipment in the name of streaming and having ultra-thin laptops and tablets. It also came at a time when color monitors were very new to the Mac world and graphics cards came with very little additional memory. This meant that the ability to do full-motion high-resolution video was still far off. Now we have graphic processors that have more horsepower than the CPUs in the same machine, and companies like Nvidia and AMD are finding new markets in providing the GPUs for doing machine learning and AI processing.

And software such as Photoshop and QuickTime were very much v1.0, barely able to keep up with the demands by the game’s two brothers who created it. Creating the three-dimensional images wasn’t easy: rendering took hours per image, because of software and hardware limitations.

And it especially wasn’t easy because the internet hadn’t yet taken off: the Myst dev team had to resort to “tire net” — meaning driving around the latest builds on removable media that were probably all of a 100MB in capacity and delivering them to various team members.

The Miller brothers would also star as actors in the video segments that a player would uncover in the game itself.

Myst was also ahead of its time when it came to non-linear storytelling: we have since had various feature films that are so constructed, such as Sin City in 2005 and Pulp Fiction, just to name a few of them. Rand Miller in a long interview with Ars done a few years ago speaks about how real life is all about embedding stories, and Myst was the first time that a game used this technique to make it more realistic and compelling. It was as if the made-up world was talking back to you, the gamer, directly. Again, now we take this situation very much for granted in modern games.

So I am glad after all these years that Myst is receiving some recognition, even if it is in a quirky Rochester museum, and even if all of my aging PCs can’t run it because they are n’t old enough. But if this essay has piqued your interest and you want to run Myst for yourself, act now and offer to pay the Fedex delivery and it could be yours. I will pick one reader to get the 3-CD package of Myst and its successor games — if you have a vintage machine that is old enough to run it.