I just remember having no issues with it. I also used the Zip feature a lot to get from place to place.
It probably helps that the pacing matched my sensibilities perfectly. Finally, a video game where I could read books in-game.
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Uh, I knew all of that at the time, I’m a hardware dude, dude. It was slow as molasses, especially compared with almost all the PC games out there. If they really had had some respect for their users’ short lifespan, they would have loaded all the video and rendering onto the HDD and just used the CD to confirm the license.
My suspicion, since confirmed, was that, unlike the game-changing Doom, it wasn’t written in assembler. It was using end-user-like software (like the uber-slow to load and run on a PC Quicktime) - note: the PC version used 24-bit colour, not 8-bit.
Did you know that Doom, right from the first versions, could be set up to run on three networked computers each with its own screen so that one person could play it with the center screen looking forward and the left and right screen providing the sideways views? And you could run it on relatively slow hardware and still find it playable.
I agree with Lauren Miller who was mystified as to how a game which was “little more than ‘an interactive slide show’” got so popular.
Unlike Christopher Breen, I didn’t find its “simple and straightforward storyline” difficult to solve or satisfying at all (except for the parts where I wanted to shoot myself for having to wait, over and over and over). When I finished it, it left me feeling cheated for being such a short game. Yeah, it was pretty like Caitlin Upton but like her, it lacked…substance.
It’s odd that you would say that while linking to an article which goes into great detail explaining exactly why Myst and Riven were popular, successful, and revolutionary. She praises them for their depth, writing, aesthetics, and imagination, and says Riven (and Myst) “…pushes the envelope of what an adventure game can be, not with technical bells and whistles, but with aesthetic ambition. It suggests that such games might become something more than an intellectual junk food that’s impossible to resist but leaves you with a post-indulgence queasiness. Thanks to Cyan, the adventure game promises to be more than just an amusement…”
The author of that article clearly loved both games and was in no way “mystified” (har har).
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