All six Myst games will soon be available on Windows 10 for the first time

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/04/12/all-six-myst-games-will-soon-b.html

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And for those of us who dislike the direction Windows has taken the past several years and are still running Windows 7?

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But does it run on Wine?

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Was the first computer game my son and I played together, he is now a Game Designer. Who’d a thunk?

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I’m sorry, but Myst was meant to be played on a mid-90’s, post-Jobs Macintosh.

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I did. Well, the original one at least, not those cheapass sequels.

There’s a project afoot (with the official backing of Cyan) to remake Riven in the style of realMyst, but it looks a lot like one of those things that will putter around forever without ever quite dying.

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I, for one, am a little excited because I was a broke college student 25 years ago and never had the chance to play the game. Come to think of it, I was broke when Bioshock came out.

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Playing Riven was a better experience for me than playing Myst, for whatever reason. I don’t think I’ve played any of the others.

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You can get all of them on Good Old Games except for 3 and 4- for some reason, they couldn’t get the rights for those two. I already had three (which actually runs fine off the CD on Windows 7), but have still never played the fourth one.

Hell - I still haven’t finished playing Manhole.

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puts on his fandom hat
This is my time… :wink:

As far as I can tell, GOG is handling the technical compatibility work for Win10, and they already have versions of Myst, Riven, End of Ages, and Uru that are Win7 compatible. As long as GOG hasn’t dropped Win7 support entirely and doesn’t do anything to deliberately exclude Win7, I imagine the Win10 versions will work fine. If you’re worried about future updates breaking them, though, it might be worth it to invest in a few DVDs or a thumb drive to back up the installers if you don’t throw down for physical copies in the Kickstarter. (Of course, this applies to any game you buy through a storefront that auto-updates.)

Myst and Riven actually both run fine in ScummVM, and Exile runs in ResidualVM. I’ve also run Revelation, End of Ages, and Uru in WINE bottles on my Mac with varying degrees of success (Revelation has weird-but-not-game-breaking glitches in some of the realtime 3D overlays, End of Ages has some intermittent framerate issues, and Uru is limited to 1024x768).

I actually know a few of the people working on Starry Expanse. It’s a slow-moving project because they’re doing it in their off time, but they will absolutely not stop until it’s actually finished, and they’ve made a ton of progress over the last couple of years. They also show up to Mysterium every year with a new status update and demo.

UbiSoft owned those two, and their approach to the Myst franchise - which they acquired when they bought out Mattel Interactive - has always basically boiled down to

so the fact that they’ve never been published digitally, even on UPlay, is pretty much par for the course. While Cyan got publication rights to their own games back a few years ago, they only managed to wrestle/buy the rights to 3 and 4 off of Ubi this year, which is why they’re finally coming to GOG and Steam. (I don’t know why UbiSoft were such dicks about it since they weren’t doing anything with the games anyway, but I stopped trying to understand them a loooooooong time ago.)

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I bought one of the Myst games (or maybe it was Riven) on Steam a few years back. Very frustrating. It constantly crashed, was extremely slow at times, and the sound never worked.

I hope they do a better job with this revival.

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Same here. I never got into Myst, or Riven, or other puzzle-solving games. I will say that, although I loved Warcraft2, Total Annihilation, and Doom, and still can play them, I don’t. Today’s games are often so much better, that every time I try to play a 90s game, I quickly get bored/frustrated. The Ancient Art of War was very good; The Total War line is much better. Doom line good; Battlefield line better.

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Yeah, I’m using a chinese tablet with a keyboard that runs DDO at a middling resolution, but I’m wondering if I’d even have enough space on the drive for Myst.

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You can have it if you want it! Unfortunately I already scrapped the mac.

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First of all, you wake up every morning and thank whatever deity you believe in that you’re not one of microsoft’s beta testers (all users) on windows 10.

Informative! Thank you.

How do you feel about Obduction? I really enjoyed what I had time to play. And, hey, there’s a puzzle where you need to figure out an alien numbering system. Classic! :slight_smile:

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I think Obduction is spectacular, and for $30 it’s a steal even when it’s not on sale. Lots and lots of fabulous “aha” moments. The puzzles that center around the spheres are especially great, and it’s just drop-dead gorgeous to look at (Kaptar is my absolute favorite place). There are a handful of fun little nods to the Myst games in it, too - the outline of the canyon you arrive in after the intro is the same as the Star Fissure, and part of one of the generators is lifted straight from Channelwood, for instance.

@werdnagreb I just discovered today that Myst and Riven run in ScummVM when you buy them from GOG. Running it that way seems to be the most reliable approach these days, and it sounds like the plan is to standardize those releases across all storefronts as an update to existing purchases, so you might have better luck with it once these updates ship. :slight_smile:

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On a related topic, I really wish to see some great classic games like Thief updated to hi-resolution and game mechanics (this is the important part), and re-released.