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gaming & entertainment

Myst: The challenges of CD-ROM | War Stories

Cyan Worlds co-founder Rand Miller goes behind the scenes of the development of one of the best selling PC games of all time, Myst. The HyperCard-developed title ran into some snags when trying to run on the CD-ROM format. Rand and his brother, Robyn, compressed the image and audio data as much as they could so the game could run smoothly on 1x CD-ROM drives.

Released on 1/28/2020

Transcript

00:00
[dramatic music]
00:07
You'd think that
00:10
[laughs] normal people would feel
00:14
an immense amount of pressure over this.
00:17
We were way over budget, way over time.
00:19
I should not have been sleeping at night.
00:22
There was so much on the line.
00:23
Hi, I'm Rand Miller, the co-creator of Myst.
00:26
We set out to make the real world of Myst
00:29
and ran smack into the real world limitations of CD-ROM.
00:32
[fire roaring and crackling]
00:41
I got into gaming when I was in junior high,
00:45
and I'm not young, so this was a long time ago.
00:48
The games I got into on computers
00:51
were not what people know today.
00:55
What really hooked me was a lunar lander game.
00:58
I remember it to this day.
01:00
There were no graphics to it.
01:02
This was a line of text on a CRT screen
01:05
that said how high I was off the lunar surface,
01:08
you know, just a number,
01:09
how fast I was going, and how much fuel I had left,
01:11
and then a question mark.
01:13
You put in how much fuel you want to burn,
01:14
you hit return,
01:16
and rinse, repeat, till you basically crash on the surface.
01:20
In junior high, a college friend took me
01:22
to the University of New Mexico computer center,
01:25
I saw that on the screen, and it was magic.
01:28
This was magic to me.
01:31
And he said, There are other games,
01:33
and you can make your own games.
01:36
This, you write programs to do this.
01:38
It changed everything I wanted to do from that point on.
01:42
Cyan was probably formed in mid-'80s,
01:45
that we used that very,
01:49
what we thought at the time would be a very open-ended name,
01:52
so we could get into anything we wanted.
01:53
My brother Robyn and I had this idea of a blue sky,
01:57
and we liked that, so we picked that as a name.
01:59
I wrote to my brother and said,
02:00
We should do this interactive book.
02:02
We should do a book that's amazing.
02:04
He was an artist, a musician,
02:05
knew enough about computers to be dangerous,
02:08
and I knew enough about art and music to be dangerous,
02:09
and it was a great team.
02:12
We started with The Manhole.
02:14
He drew the first page of a book,
02:16
which was a manhole cover
02:18
and a fire hydrant in the background.
02:20
And what happened was,
02:21
was this really interesting transition for us,
02:24
and it was what shaped us into what we were.
02:27
He didn't turn the page.
02:28
We didn't, after drawing the manhole cover
02:30
and the fire hydrant,
02:31
we didn't care about what was on the next page.
02:33
We cared about, Well, what's under the manhole cover,
02:36
and what's, you know, what is that fire hydrant about?
02:39
And so, the pictures that I got from him were,
02:42
the manhole cover slid aside,
02:44
and a vine growing up to somewhere,
02:46
and a picture closer to the fire hydrant
02:49
with a little door, a tiny little door in the bottom.
02:52
And these were just still images that he sent me
02:55
that we linked together, and we suddenly realized
02:57
that we weren't doing an interactive book,
03:00
we were making a world.
03:01
I think it was one of the first entertainment CD-ROMs,
03:04
if not the first entertainment CD-ROM.
03:06
So Cosmic Osmo was how we evolved.
03:10
It was a very natural transition.
03:12
We had learned so much about our platform, HyperCard,
03:15
in the meantime, doing Manhole,
03:16
and about what this world did well, Manhole,
03:19
and what it didn't do well.
03:22
Cosmic Osmo was a chance for us
03:23
to push things a little further,
03:25
and it still is very close
03:28
to both my brother's and my heart.
03:30
It was a tour de force of what I think
03:34
at that point HyperCard could do
03:36
and what computers could do.
03:37
Everything was interactive.
03:38
And to this day,
03:40
I would be doing projects in HyperCard if it was available.
03:44
It was so, such an elegant, amazing tool
03:48
that I don't think Apple understood
03:51
even how to market that product.
03:53
At its core, HyperCard was,
03:57
just picture a stack of cards,
03:59
stack of, a virtual stack of cards
04:02
that you could put a button on any card,
04:06
an invisible button on any card.
04:08
If somebody clicked on that button,
04:09
it would go to another card.
04:11
And you could draw a picture on a card,
04:12
draw a picture of, say, a fire hydrant,
04:17
and put an invisible button on it,
04:19
and when you click on it,
04:21
you go to a picture of a close-up of that fire hydrant.
04:24
That then evolved into what we do.
04:27
A link of still pictures.
04:29
There was a Japanese company
04:31
who got in touch with us.
04:32
They had loved The Manhole,
04:34
and they want to do something for an older audience.
04:37
They wanted to fund something for an older audience.
04:39
And we had this meeting with them where they said,
04:41
You know, can you do something for an older audience?
04:44
And we were like, Oh, hell yeah.
04:46
We can do something for an older audience, you bet.
04:49
With a proposal that was like seven pages,
04:51
and the proposal for Myst, the seven pages,
04:54
if it was seven, I don't remember,
04:56
it was basically top-down maps of every island
04:58
with little notes on it, that was it.
04:59
We didn't know how you did a game proposal.
05:02
We would just, kinda did our thing up till then.
05:04
They said, Okay, we'll give you,
05:07
I think we asked for $250,000 at the time,
05:11
and they said, Now, this is gonna be good,
05:13
like '7th Guest.'
05:14
Will this be better than '7th Guest'?
05:15
And if you don't know 7th Guest,
05:17
you should look it up.
05:18
It was one of the products that had,
05:20
it wasn't done at the time,
05:21
but it was being touted.
05:22
They were showing some previews for it
05:24
as this media project on CD-ROM,
05:26
and we went, Oh yeah, yeah, you bet.
05:28
And from there, we just jumped in and started building it.
05:32
Myst was a very natural evolution
05:37
from our earlier worlds, as I've mentioned,
05:39
but it was also a leap.
05:41
Because what we'd learned doing our earlier worlds
05:45
is that you could embed pieces of story in your game.
05:48
We didn't know that at all in The Manhole.
05:52
Catherine, my love, I have to leave quickly.
05:55
Something terrible has happened.
05:57
But we realized we liked it as we moved forward,
05:59
and those pieces of story
06:01
felt like they kept you honest.
06:03
They kept the world somehow realistic
06:06
because everything in the real world has a story to it.
06:08
It's there for a reason.
06:09
We realized when we were ready
06:11
to do something for an older audience
06:13
that that was important.
06:15
That we needed to have stories to things.
06:18
And there was no way to do this on floppy disk.
06:21
It wouldn't fit.
06:22
And part of the very appeal of this was that
06:24
we had made a game that you don't die,
06:27
you don't level, you don't start over,
06:29
and so the only way we were gonna give people
06:32
the amount of time for their money for the game
06:35
was just sheer brute force amount of real estate
06:39
that had to be available for them to explore,
06:41
and CD-ROM was our answer to that question, if it worked.
06:46
Very early, then, we got our hands
06:49
on some 3D rendering software.
06:52
Another one of those pivotal moments in,
06:53
where you realized the future's different from now on,
06:57
because I remember,
06:58
and I'm sure Robyn has the same recollection
07:01
of sitting down with that software,
07:03
putting a ball on the screen,
07:04
putting a table, putting a light source,
07:05
it's all in wire frame, very simple,
07:07
and clicking the Render button,
07:09
and out comes something
07:10
that generates shadows and reflections,
07:12
and the refraction through glass,
07:15
and, Oh, this is different now.
07:18
We can do this.
07:19
We can render the images for 'Myst.'
07:21
We don't have to hand-draw these.
07:23
We realized that this would be in color.
07:25
This would be the first product we would do
07:27
that would only play on color machines.
07:29
There would be no black-and-white option.
07:31
[laughing] Robyn's machine was a black-and-white Macintosh,
07:35
but it had been hacked with a clip.
07:37
It didn't have any expansion slots.
07:39
You'd take off the back and you get this crazy board
07:42
that was a clip that would clip onto the processor,
07:45
all the pins of the processor,
07:46
and give you a monitor that was color.
07:49
That's how we started Myst,
07:51
with an early Mac SE, I think.
07:53
It was hacked to do color.
07:55
[dramatic music]
07:58
The problems we faced were really interesting,
08:03
and the largest of those was
08:07
this crazy idea of CD-ROM.
08:11
It was relatively new,
08:13
and what that meant is
08:14
that most people had just basically something like,
08:18
called a single-speed CD-ROM.
08:20
It was streaming at 150K per second, which is nothing.
08:25
150K per second is all you could get
08:29
off that single-speed disc,
08:30
and we had to make the game work for that.
08:33
The streaming wasn't even the main problem.
08:35
The seek time was the biggest.
08:37
People with lots of money had double-speed drives,
08:40
or I think, I don't even think quad-speed drives
08:42
had been invented yet.
08:43
But it doesn't matter
08:44
because we have to sell to the most basic people.
08:47
And it's not even a sell thing.
08:49
We wanted people to experience this
08:50
who had the basic multimedia computer.
08:54
Not knowing for sure
08:55
if this was even gonna work,
08:57
if it was gonna be playable.
08:59
How long would it take on Myst Island,
09:02
when you were on the dock and you clicked
09:04
to move from one picture to the other?
09:06
And side note, I worked at a bank
09:09
for years before doing this,
09:11
and we had this psychological kind of play
09:13
that I probably heard at some IBM conference
09:17
that said, Two seconds is how long you want people to wait
09:20
before they get feedback
09:21
from clicking something on the screen
09:23
or from hitting a button on the screen,
09:25
and after two seconds,
09:26
they start to recognize that they're not getting something.
09:28
They start to wonder if it's them or if it's the machine,
09:31
and so you kind of want to keep it to that.
09:32
Well, we had no idea if we were gonna move,
09:34
how long was it gonna take?
09:36
It might have taken 10 seconds
09:37
to move to the next image.
09:39
We just didn't know.
09:40
CD-ROM burners were not readily available.
09:44
They were thousands of dollars for a CD-ROM burner.
09:46
We didn't have one.
09:48
It was our publisher, Broderbund, that may have had one,
09:50
and we didn't even use it
09:52
until we were well into the project.
09:54
Those were interesting times with no testing whatsoever.
09:58
Robyn was generating images.
10:00
I mean, this was how we had always worked,
10:03
it was just on steroids at this point.
10:05
He was at his house generating images, feeding them to me,
10:09
and I was linking those together in HyperCard.
10:12
And these are all full-color images that Robyn's sending.
10:14
So he had a really powerful Mac with a lot of memory
10:18
and a lot of hard drive space.
10:20
I had a really powerful Mac with a lot of memory
10:22
and a lot of hard drive space.
10:24
And we were still working in mud.
10:31
It was incredibly slow,
10:32
especially for Robyn, rendering those images.
10:35
It was wonderful times
10:36
when Apple would come out with a new machine,
10:37
and we thought we might be able to afford it
10:39
because we could add that to our collection.
10:43
What would happen is,
10:47
Robyn would stack up
10:49
[laughs] a lot of images to be rendered.
10:54
In other words, he couldn't be rendering as he's working.
10:56
He had to stack those up in a queue,
11:00
and at some point, we added another computer.
11:02
If he got a new computer, the old one would go to the side
11:04
and be used as part of this rendering queue,
11:06
and maybe another one would be added to the rendering queue,
11:09
and then as soon as he stopped working
11:11
or would go grab a bite at dinner or a cup of coffee,
11:15
you would immediately turn on rendering on his machine
11:19
to add it to the other two that were rendering.
11:20
And you could have this distributed rendering
11:23
with whatever machines were available
11:24
to try and keep generating those images
11:28
from what he had queued up.
11:30
Everything had to be rendering all the time
11:32
in order to try to get this work done.
11:36
I hope I pushed the right button, my dear brother.
11:41
Living within constraints is probably,
11:44
it's like the name of the game for what we did.
11:46
And I don't think we looked at it that way at the time.
11:48
There were tons of constraints,
11:50
and those were just problems to be solved.
11:52
I love problem solving,
11:54
and I think that's part of what you have to do
11:56
if you're gonna do games.
11:57
I mean, if you're not a good problem solver,
11:59
you just go do something else.
12:04
So the two problems, you gotta find it on the CD-ROM,
12:06
and you've gotta get it off of the CD-ROM
12:08
as quickly as possible.
12:09
So starting with the images, I mean that's number one,
12:12
they were 8-bit images because
12:16
most people's computers couldn't do more than eight bits.
12:19
What that means is that
12:21
we could show 256 colors on the screen at a time.
12:25
So just the images alone
12:26
had to be laid out on the spirals in close proximity.
12:30
We didn't want it seeking to some faraway spot.
12:32
So it's not like you just lay 'em
12:34
and put 'em in the disc in alphabetical order,
12:35
every image in the game.
12:36
So we organized those by ages in close proximity.
12:39
We put our names of these things,
12:41
so that the close-by images
12:44
would be relatively close on the spiral.
12:46
We used two levels of compression for the images.
12:52
One was, we used only 256 colors to do the images,
12:57
which made them smaller,
12:59
but we also used a compression technique as well
13:01
to make them small so they would stream faster.
13:03
We got 'em down to 50K, maybe, each.
13:06
So that takes care of the image problem.
13:08
Now we have a music problem,
13:10
and let's just call it a sound problem.
13:13
We have music or sound effects
13:15
that are playing in the background,
13:16
and they're streaming all the time.
13:18
So if, for example, I walk down into this generator tunnel
13:22
and I need this weird, eerie sound to play,
13:25
[machinery clanging]
13:30
we could do the music in several different ways,
13:33
but the easiest would be
13:35
to just put the tracks of music somewhere on the CD-ROM
13:38
and let it go to those music tracks
13:41
and just stream it on its own.
13:42
Let the OS and the operating system kind of handle,
13:46
or QuickTime, handle streaming those things.
13:48
But can it get to those, and seek back to the next picture,
13:52
and get to those, and seek to the next picture
13:54
without chopping the sound off?
13:56
'Cause there's a very real possibility
13:58
that I load that sound,
14:00
I go to seek the next picture,
14:02
and depending on the chunk size of sound,
14:06
I can't get back to the sound fast enough
14:09
for it to load it into a buffer
14:12
and play it without all of a sudden cutting off the music,
14:15
having a blank space of sound,
14:17
and then finally finding the music,
14:18
getting back to that, and streaming it again.
14:20
So we're trying to put the music pieces close enough
14:23
where it doesn't have to go too far to get to 'em.
14:25
On top of that, if I push a button,
14:28
I've got to have a ka-chunk sound,
14:30
[door slamming]
14:31
and if I open a door, I want a squeaking sound,
14:34
[door squeaking]
14:35
and if I turn on a generator,
14:36
I want a ramp-up sound [generator whistling]
14:38
or a slow-down sound,
14:39
or all those little one-shot sound effects as well
14:43
that I need to happen quickly,
14:47
and they need to be close on that CD-ROM.
14:49
And these are all things we had done meticulously
14:53
to try and get our data rate very low,
14:56
but we would have had to just shrink it more,
14:58
so we, there was, you know,
15:01
I guess experience is one of those weird kind of things
15:03
where you can't put your finger
15:06
on exactly the calculation that,
15:08
where you think it's gonna work,
15:10
but because we'd been doing it for five years or six years,
15:14
we just kinda had this feeling, and luckily, we were,
15:18
we were kind of right.
15:21
It's this weird process where we sent hard drives,
15:24
probably a hard drive down to Broderbund,
15:28
and they burned the first CD of Myst,
15:32
so we got the gold master, we put it in our CD drives,
15:35
we click Play, and we all cross our fingers
15:39
and give it a try.
15:41
And it comes up,
15:43
and for the most part, it's working.
15:47
Normal people should have been medicating themselves over,
15:51
but we didn't have this really weird naivety
15:53
that just kept us oblivious
15:59
to the distractions of the fact
16:02
that this might not work at all.
16:05
And what a weird thing to think
16:07
that that's what, in some ways, saved us.
16:10
I mean, I don't know that we even
16:11
would have taken on the project
16:12
if we didn't have that.
16:14
Robyn and I had discussions where we said,
16:15
Man, if we sell 100,000 copies,
16:17
can you imagine if we sold 100,000 copies of this game?
16:21
Oh, I mean that was mind blowing, 100,000 copies.
16:25
So there was no way in the world
16:27
that we could have anticipated the success.
16:30
No way in the world.
16:35
Look, I remember going into my first,
16:39
you know, media store back in the day.
16:42
After Myst, I took a long vacation.
16:44
I went to New Mexico and took a five-week vacation,
16:47
and I remember in New Mexico, we'd just shipped.
16:50
I went into a store in Albuquerque that's a media store,
16:53
and I'm like, I wonder if the game's here,
16:54
I wonder if the game's here.
16:56
And I walked to the back, and it was like covering
16:59
the whole top shelf of the gaming section.
17:06
And I was in awe.
17:08
I was, my mind was blown.
17:10
Like, Oh my gosh, this is crazy.
17:14
This can't be happening, this is so cool.
17:17
I think our discussion between Robyn and I was,
17:22
You know, 100,000 copies would be amazing.
17:25
Just amazing, amazing, amazing.
17:27
And we hit that mark fairly quickly.
17:31
I mean, within months.
17:33
And then it just kept selling.
17:34
It kept selling.
17:36
It was on the top 10 chart.
17:39
It was number one for a long time,
17:41
but then it was on the charts for years.
17:43
And so we very quickly got to millions of copies.
17:47
Multiple millions of copies.
17:49
One of the ironies of the game is that,
17:52
I mean, we have to guess at this,
17:53
but I think that probably only 50%
17:55
of the people who played it
17:56
even made it off the Island of Myst
17:58
because of the puzzles involved.
18:00
But for some reason, that didn't dampen enthusiasm.
18:04
I think because that first island was so intriguing
18:08
and you got enough of the story to kind of be tantalized,
18:11
and because maybe some of the audience was young at the time
18:15
and it just felt magical, that was,
18:17
it left a great taste in people's psyche
18:21
about what the game was,
18:22
which is really nice, even to this day.
18:25
I mean, I get people who are
18:26
way too young to have played Myst
18:28
who come up to me now and say,
18:31
Yeah, I remember as a kid,
18:33
my mom or dad playing 'Myst,'
18:36
and I was watching those places on the screen,
18:40
and I didn't really understand it,
18:41
but it just felt so interesting to see that.
18:43
And that is really satisfying,
18:47
to still have that kind of resonance to this day.
18:50
I can't tell you how, you know, as a creator of that,
18:54
how satisfying and wonderful that is.
19:01
So here's the lessons we learned from Myst
19:03
that we tried to evolve this thing for.
19:05
We still feel like Myst was an experiment.
19:07
As much as every one of the previous kids' games
19:11
that we did kind of evolved,
19:14
in many ways, it led to Riven.
19:16
We realized that the things we liked in Myst
19:20
were the things that came a little later,
19:22
where the story came out a little more,
19:26
where the story was revealed in the environment
19:29
or the people that were there,
19:31
but a little more integrated well.
19:33
And Myst budget didn't allow it,
19:37
Riven would allow it,
19:38
so we could put more people,
19:39
we could have that story kind of revealed,
19:42
but more than that, the puzzles themselves
19:47
and the friction itself
19:49
needed to not just feel like it was,
19:53
I don't know, arbitrary.
19:56
And as much as people said that Myst,
19:57
you know, I think for its time,
19:59
even Myst Island felt like,
20:00
Oh, these puzzles make sense, and they weren't,
20:03
The 7th Guest kind of would just throw some puzzles in.
20:05
Not to diminish it, it was amazing,
20:07
but it was, at that time,
20:10
they just kind of threw some puzzles in
20:11
to play chess or whatever.
20:13
We were trying to integrate 'em,
20:15
and so it felt good,
20:16
but we realized that that wasn't enough.
20:17
That was not enough.
20:18
And the puzzles needed to feel
20:20
like they were part of the history of this place.
20:22
And so Riven was really a challenge to make that happen,
20:24
and during the design, that was on our minds.
20:27
Like, How are we gonna build the history,
20:28
the storytelling, into this world?
20:30
How are we gonna build the puzzles into this world?
20:32
And how are we gonna really integrate that?
20:35
And it was one of the greatest challenges,
20:38
and it was, all the lessons we have learned
20:41
kind of led to Riven,
20:42
to try and do that as, to the best of our abilities.
20:46
Atrus!
20:49
[wind howling]
20:51
Here's the interesting thing about the industry, too.
20:53
Everything has shifted in the industry.
20:56
In a lot of ways, I'm really happy
20:57
in the ways it's shifted.
20:59
I mean, I started with my brother
21:01
in this, in making games.
21:03
It was just the two of us
21:04
doing this little indie kind of thing
21:07
that we felt we could do by ourselves,
21:09
and then we've watched the trend in gaming
21:12
go to a place where the only people who could make games
21:16
were enabled by large amounts of money
21:19
from large corporations who were publishers,
21:22
and that was in some ways sad because,
21:26
I mean, luckily, we were on the right side of that.
21:27
We were, we had our funding from Myst
21:30
and we could keep going.
21:32
But it felt like the whole industry
21:34
lost some kind of innovation
21:36
by the guys in the garage.
21:37
By that indie feeling.
21:39
And with the advent of the internet,
21:42
and in particular, the advent of downloadable content,
21:45
where the need to press CDs and have stock,
21:50
and manage that stock and distribute it to stores,
21:55
and have things on the shelf,
21:57
that suddenly brought in a whole new influx
21:59
of young, two-person shops again,
22:03
where, Hey, I got a person who can do art,
22:05
I got a person who can program.
22:06
We should make a game.
22:07
And I love that.
22:08
That's, to me, that whole indie rise again
22:12
has kind of reinvigorated the industry,
22:14
and I love what that's done.
22:16
And in some ways, it's kind of come full circle for us.
22:20
I mean, we don't now depend on a publisher anymore.
22:24
We've, the last two project we've done,
22:27
or the last, we did Obduction, which was a Kickstarter,
22:31
and then our current project, Firmament,
22:33
is the same thing.
22:34
Twice, we've gone back to the well,
22:36
the Kickstarter well, and our fan base has said,
22:40
Yeah, we're willing to risk it for a new game from you.
22:43
From a new title.
22:44
And there's a lot of pressure with that, but it's also this,
22:47
Here I am, getting to do a whole new idea for a game.
22:52
So it's, the struggle kind of continues,
22:55
and here I am, 60 years old,
22:56
trying to anticipate with Firmament
22:58
where things are gonna be two years from now.
23:00
With the same struggle,
23:02
fighting the same battles,
23:04
and having to realize in my mind
23:06
that I'm not, I may not get it right,
23:08
but again, that's just how it is, and it's okay.
23:17
[gentle music]