How Brothers Behind ‘Myst’ Reunited to Create Mysterious New VR World
For gamers, at least ones with long memories, it may be a reunion as exciting as Nathan Drake reuniting with Sully at the end of Uncharted 3. Rand and Robyn Miller, the brothers behind 1993’s mind-blowingly innovative computer game Myst, haven’t worked together since Bill Clinton was president. But on July 26th, their company, Cyan, will finally release a new collaboration from the Millers: Obduction, a sci-fi adventure that aims to update the trippy world-building magic of Myst for a new technological era – including support for Oculus, which means players who squinted at Myst‘s mysterious island world through fuzzy CRT screens can now walk around a fully realized version of one of the Millers’ creations.
To a young Call of Duty obsessive, the spooky, slow-building approach of Obduction might barely register as a game at all, but the Millers see their atmospheric, cerebral creations as “interactive fiction” that aims to evoke emotion above all. “I love the fact that it feels like we make places that you actually go to,” says Rand. “I love movies and books and all other mediums, but there’s something about interactive that makes your brain feel like you’ve been taken somewhere. That’s magical.”
Obduction deposits its players in a surreal landscape where fragments of Earth and other planets seem to coexist. The object is to find out what happened there and find your way back to our planet by exploring this world, step by step. It feels very much like Myst: beautiful, moody, deserted outdoor scenes, populated by an occasional hologram (an upgrade from the videos-in-books from Myst) and environmental puzzles. Barring a few necessary compromises when it comes to graphics, the VR version is nearly identical to the PC version, though players can choose to warp from one spot to another rather than walking – to avoid motion sickness. The game is clearly written for those who loved Myst, and appears to be more of a technological evolution rather than a revolution in the genre.
Rand, who has never left the gaming world, is the technical half of the brothers’ team; he started programming games in the Eighties as a junior high student on a massive mainframe computer at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, one of the many cities the Millers called home – their dad was a pastor with a highly mobile ministry. “I would steal passwords for the mainframe out of the trash,” recalls Rand. Robyn, meanwhile, was a self-described “art and music nerd.” “During high school,” says Robyn, “I did almost nothing but paint, compose music and practice the piano.” The brothers ended up finding common ground via the early Macintosh, with its user-friendly Hypercard development platform (which had an interface that presaged the World Wide Web): By 1988, they were trying to create an interactive children’s book that became their first game, The Manhole.
They formed Cyan, then known as Cyan Worlds, in their parents’ Spokane, Washington basement in 1987. By 1990, they began work on what would become Myst, aided greatly by new CD-ROM technology that allowed them to incorporate actual live video into their game. The brothers used that tech to create an eerily atmospheric and solitary adventure that boasted stunning, photorealistic visuals, an evocative soundtrack, and mind-bending spatial-reasoning puzzles. And Robyn’s musical skills proved essential, as he created one of gaming’s truly haunting soundtracks, with spooky ambient synths that evoked Brian Eno, not Super Mario Brothers (one of his compositions was so scary that they had to leave it out of the game – players were afraid to enter the area that featured it).