IamTheFloydMan: I remember that after Cyan's Mysterium Q&A last year, I wished there was a transcript to refer to to save time and ensure accuracy, so I thought I'd take a short break from my vacation (is it even a vacation if I need to take a break?) to transcribe Rand's recent AMA for the 25th anniversary Kickstarter. Rand, like most of us, does not speak as if he were reading a prepared statement, so I have taken a lot (A LOT) of liberties in removing filler words and restarted sentences in order to make everything easier to understand. But this should cover more than just the gist of everything.

Oh, hello, I didn’t see you there. Excuse me while I sip a coffee.
Can you guys hear me? Is this working now? Because we had some severe problems with technical issues and computer and setups. And we did everything we were supposed to do: We did the setup, we did the testing, and it all worked fine in the setup and the testing, and then we get here and we click “Go on Air” and y’all know what happened. It’s like 20 minutes later we finally get stuff working, so thank you for your patience.
You can hear me. You can see me. I can see your chats scrolling by so quickly I don’t know how I’m going to work with those. But I do have seventy questions that you guys have asked and I can start replying to.
Hey, thanks for your support! This is crazy, isn’t it? We are higher than we thought we would be. Granted, we started with kind of a barebones amount because we wanted to just make sure we could do it. But great! This is awesome!
25 years of Myst is crazy. I am happy to be doing this AMA. I’ve got Ryan Warzecha. I don’t know how radio works, but it feels like you need somebody in the room with you, so Ryan’s like my guy across the room/table who will keep me from answering things wrong and yell at me if I say something I shouldn’t say.
Alright, I’m going to get to the questions because we have a lot of them. Ryan is going to be watching your chats and the comments. There’s a lot of stuff scrolling through, so please be patient, and we’ll try and do what we need to do. I’m going to go to Q&A first, and we’re going to go just in the order that they are. If I can figure this out.

Any chance of Kickstarting an HD version of Riven?
That’s like asking a woman who is in the process of giving birth if she’s ready to have another baby. It’s probably not the best time to ask if she’s ready for another one of these. We don’t just sit here and watch this stuff roll in. It’s so much work. We’re going crazy.
In fact, just yesterday somebody said I need to help Ryan because he’s canceling his Tuesday lunches with other people he’s supposed to go out with. But we’ve been busy. This is like doing a project.
Anyway, with all that said, there are issues with doing an HD version of Riven. Number one: All of that was done on a platform that there’s no more hardware to and software to. Number 2: The backup tapes were all backed up to that platform and other things that are hard to get access to. So all those things are hard (or impossible).
With all that said, of course we would like to have a better version of Riven—an HD version of Riven—but you’ll have to wait and see what that means the same way we have to wait to see what that means. This whole “Myst 25th Anniversary” has given us a chance to go down in the vault and dig through hundreds of tapes that are kind of fun. We don’t know what we can get off of those. We’ve tried things before. We’ll try again. But I don’t know if it’s a Kickstarter. I don’t know how that happens, but either way we’d be as excited as you guys would be.

Will the fourth novel ever be released?
Good question. I don’t know. It’s the Book of Marrim. We have a great story, but we’re having a hard time moving it from the backburner to the front burner. I hope it is because it’s a great story. But I have gray hair now, and I have a few things I want to do that are a little more in the front of the Book of Marrim, so it depends on how long I live, I guess.

Myst was a big part of my childhood. Is there any chance we would see the previous behind-the-scenes [videos]?
This is very apropos (for those of you who speak French) because just yesterday we ordered a Hi-8 camera off of eBay because we didn’t have a Hi-8 camera to check some 8-millimeter—whatever they’re called—video tapes that were in the vault. And it’s really interesting stuff.
Do you guys remember that original little “making of” that was about this big (postage stamp size), and it was Robyn and I doing interviews outside. It was a little outtake of a belt falling off of me as Achenar. And the scene where Robyn is making Myst and he’s sketching the stuff in grayscale and the island extrudes from that grayscale. It’s all on these tapes that I found, including stuff you guys haven’t seen, and other outtakes and fun stuff. This has given us a chance to dig around in the vault and we will definitely want to share that stuff with you guys.

[RAWA says:] I may or have may not been playing Prince of Persia.
I saw that video yesterday! RAWA was in that “Making of Myst” playing Prince of Persia. And there are other interviews with RAWA. If you know RAWA, he is not a big talker, so it’s kind of interesting. He doesn’t have any hair right now because he shaves it and back during those interviews you won’t believe it because he doesn’t have much hair back then either! Right, RAWA? I’m right, aren’t I?

Is there any chance for Myst VI in the future? (And will there be other Myst stuff?)
Yes, but again, it has to do with my age and gray hair and how long I live. But we talk about stuff like that all the time here. What do we want to do next? Since we’re small and our population of employees goes up and down, we have to try and plan according to how successful our last project was. Obduction was great, but it took a lot out of us, and it didn’t quite pay back what we needed it to. We had to pull back and let the natural ebb and flow take place. With that, we plan what we want to do next.
We have great employees the same way we have great fans. I love working with these people. In the future we’ve got a couple things. I really like VR, and I mentioned that, and I know a lot of you don’t have it yet. That’s okay; I don’t have it in my house either. But it makes worlds that are amazing. Obviously, something in the plate is something related to Myst and VR. We have more definite talk about those kinds of things and where they are in the timeframe, but planning ahead is kind of hard because you don’t even know what tomorrow holds much of the time.
I will say that the thing we’re talking about for the future, which is related to Myst, we look at it as a larger kind of project, not something that would be a smaller scale. It’s something we build up to and do really well if and when we’re ready to take that on. I know you guys will get excited about that, but again: It’s hard for us to plan. For example, this time yesterday, we had no idea the Kickstarter would have such a bump in it from the announcements we made and the emails we sent out. Every day we adjust to what’s going on. I don’t want to give too many details about that, but rest assured that we do talk about that stuff here and have some stuff in mind for that.

What was the very first idea that would eventually grow into Myst?
This is an interesting question. It’s a bunch of ideas that grew into Myst. Those of you who followed us over the years know that we did these kids games, and there wasn’t a lot of continuity in those. It just kind of was a stream of consciousness. But it affected us. And the fact that we had a ship in Manhole, we realized how cool ships were.
The things that Robyn did along the way made us want to do those things when we sat down to design Myst. We knew we wanted an island, and we knew we wanted the puzzles to try to fit naturally in that island. Beyond that, the puzzles were just there—as far as we were concerned—as a type of friction. Otherwise, you’d blow through the contents so quickly. We started designing this as something that we wouldn’t use killing you to slow you down. We would use these puzzle frictions to slow you down. And we wanted it to look beautiful.

Robyn has indicated Myst originally had a different ending. Can you elaborate on that?
I remember specifically when this happened. The initial proposal was just that there were two brothers and we would choose between them in the end.
SPOILER ALERT: If any of you haven’t played Myst, just quit now and go play Myst. Somehow. Or just mute for a bit.
We did it so that the two brothers: you had to choose. And it wouldn’t be easy to choose. And then—geniuses that we were back in those young days—we decided that in the ending: “Hey, a good movie and a good book always has a twist in it. We should totally put a twist in this.” And that was our twist. We decided that, “Oh my gosh, imagine that this whole time you’re trying to decide whether you’re going to release this guy or this guy and at the very end they both tell you not to do this other thing and—oh wow!—people would love that.
This is a cool story. I’m looking through these tapes—this is related to that—we had the two brothers: I played Achenar; Robyn played Sirrus. And then because this was low budget, we filmed it in our basement. We didn’t have any money—very little money. What better choice to play Atrus—our father—than our father in real life.
His name’s Ron. I’m looking through these tapes—and I’ve told this story only a few times—we actually recorded him doing the Atrus part. A lot of you may not know he’s like a pastor. He’s a really interesting guy, a really interesting speaker. People love to hear him speak. He’s really cool. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that that emerges to natural acting. He’s more of a presenter—a speaker—than he would be an actor.
It was fun watching that on tape, but it just didn’t work out. I ended up playing both roles probably because I’m older, and it was easier for me to look older. We may [release the tapes]. I’ll have to get his permission to do that. But it was fun watching because he’s reading the Atrus script that you see in the game, but he’s doing it in such a different way.
I think a lot of this stuff will be part of “Myst 25”. We’ve got a long time to celebrate here. Part of this is what we can release and what you guys will get by being part of this.
I should mention, too: The people who’ve done the dollar thing [donated $1 on Kickstarter], we want to include you guys in a lot of this stuff. Some of this digital stuff that we’ll be releasing: you guys are on the list. If you out a dollar in, thank you so much! I know it’s because at this time you couldn’t do more, or you’ve got the games, or you’ve got everything you need, or whatever. But thanks for the support!
You’re part of the team, so you’ll be getting this stuff, too. And if you know anybody who’s like, “I can’t afford all this stuff,” tell them to do the dollar because that way we can be in touch with them, they can get this digital download stuff, and we can let you guys know when we’re putting stuff up. It’s a great way for us to be in contact with you. It’s a small price for $1.


Will there ever be a Myst movie? I’d like to see the entire series in a feature film, even an amateur film. What about a television show?
We’ve had lots of these questions over the years, and you guys who have followed us know they’ve been up-and-down, up-and-down. I’ve always said I don’t really understand Hollywood. But every time this happens—every time we head up and then down again—we don’t feel like it’s a failure; we feel like we’ve learned something new about how this works.
We went down a few month ago (maybe six months ago), and we learned some things, and we started doing more ourselves as a result. We started to take a little more control because we had kind of “let go”, and we decided we would maybe take control a little more of things or set a direction for a story that we thought would be interesting to tell.
So we’re back on an upturn. It’s kind of interesting. Now, with all that said, I’ll tell you my preferences here are to make this a series. I’d love to see the novels as films someday, but the whole idea of these books and worlds and Ages and writing and how it corrupts and all that stuff—man, that’s a cool story that would make a great series. That is the track we’re on now.
The caveat is, again, there’s lots of things that have to fall into place for Hollywood to work, but right now we’re kind of excited. Stay tuned, and we’ll see where that goes. I wish we had something definite, and believe me: when we do, I will be the first to let you know because I will be excited about all that.


[Ryan says:] We just passed 10,500 Backers.
Sweet! Wow, 10,500 Backers! You guys are rocking it! By the way, we’re trying to push people to that Writer’s Tier, and it’s awesome. You guys are doing a great job of bumping up there. We have calls all the time with IdeaPlanet to make sure we’re doing these things right for you guys.
I have video panels on my desk that I plug batteries into, and I’m making movies I’m putting on them and testing them on the video panels to make sure that we’re doing this right, and we’re listening to suggestions you guys have said. We’re doing things I’ve wanted to do for a long time.
To get this back to the Writer’s thing: Everybody wants that inkwell to be done well, as well, so we’re all paying close attention to that. Anyway, thanks for the support on that one. It’s really cool. We’ve said this before, part of this is because we’re in the game software business—we’re in the bits business, not the atoms business. Atoms are not on our comfort level. We’re doing this in a Kickstarter because we don’t want to do inventory. Because this year is the celebration.
We want these things. We’re doing a book with a real linking panel because we’ve wanted one ever since Rium did his. We decided we want the inkwell as well. Gehn’s inkwell. Those are the things we want.
But we also want to limit it. When it’s done, it’s done. We have no grief in cutting it off and saying, “Yep that’s the end of that. We;’ll go back to making our games.” And this was the best way for us to go about doing it. We don’t want to have extra inventory. We don’t want to have extra atoms all over our office where we’ve got boxes of things we need to send out. That’s not what we like doing.
So get it if you want it. We really aren’t kidding. It’s just not what we do. We’re excited to get ours, and hopefully you guys will get yours, too.

Will you release the Firmament demo publicly?
No. Probably not. The Firmament demo was a great mixture of us proving some concepts for ourselves—both visual performance and VR-related things. Interface things. Seeing what we could pull off with some real constraints. And it was real difficult; much harder then what we thought. But it turned out very cool. But it’s such a small little snippet, and it’s not ready for public release.
It is fun to play in and see, but it would need a lot of tuning, and what we would hope for with the demo is that we get a chance to do the larger game. That’s what we’ll hold out for for now.

Can you elaborate on the digital goodies being included in the Maintainer Tier?
Scans of things. We have stuff in the vault that we found. The Maintainer Tier will have stuff as part of digital goodies that will be in the book. Lest you think my gray hair keeps me away from the office, I’m actually digging around in the Strata files: the old Stravision which are now Strata Design.
I’ve got Myst kind of working. I’ve had to fix a lot of things and clean up a lot of things. Believe me, when Myst was done it was hard to do. And it’s still slow now, and I managed to speed some things up. But its much better than when Robyn had to work on it before. I was looking at the videos again, and he’s got videos of just the wireframes coming up on the screen of Myst Island. The trees are just appearing like that [very slowly]. We’ve come a long way.
I won’t elaborate more. Suffice it to say that we’re trying to be generous with our digital goodies; trying to get stuff out there so you guys can enjoy it. And we can’t think of any better time to dig around the vault than the 25th anniversary, so that’s what we’re doing.

Will there be a vinyl release of any Myst soundtracks?
This is an interesting one. The Myst and Riven music is amazing. We all know that. Robyn did such an amazing job on those pieces. That’s what made a lot of these areas feel so special. They’re all his. That is stuff that he wrote, and as he moved away from Cyan, and we kept going, he got all the soundtrack stuff. That’s all his.
And I haven’t chatted with him about vinyl, but I think he probably would love that. I know his kids were—maybe are—into vinyl. Alex was, I think. Possibly he’d do that. You guys should be bugging Robyn about that. Ask him about vinyl on those soundtracks. By the way, see the gray hair? I grew up on vinyl. I’m the wrong guy to ask this because I don’t want vinyl. I remember the scratches and clicks, and I know you guys want your tactile vinyl. No, I want nice clean sound. I don’t want to clean my record. I used to get my record pristinely put it on my turntable, turn on my cassette player, and record it once so that if I wanted to play it again because every time you play a vinyl record you degrade it. The little things in there get worn down every time you play it. Ask Robyn about vinyl. See, you’ve come to the wrong place.

Could the Myst Remastered Edition include a multiplayer mode where 100 people parachute onto the island and construct puzzles that must be solved in some sort of battle royale?
You must have read our minds! How did you—Is this somebody from inside? Oh my gosh! That’s exactly what we were planning to announce. So much for that announcement. No surprises there. That question probably came from Ryan Warzecha. He’s trying to get the word out.

Will there be versions of the games ported to the Nintendo Switch or other platforms?
You never know. We have no aversion to any platforms. A lot of this has to do with what I mentioned earlier. It has to do with how much time we have, how much money we have, not knowing what happens tomorrow. Without going into details, I will tell you that—just within the last two weeks—I was brought into someone’s office here, and they showed me things running on a platform that they hadn’t been running on before. Cool! We might be able to add that platform. Again, we’re small, and I would love to tell we could plan those things—that we have spreadsheets about exactly how this is all going to play out—but no, we act and respond on a moment’s notice. Ryan knows. Ryan has a small whiteboard instead of a tablet or a computer he’s been carrying around a whiteboard that’s like this big [about two feet square]. Last week he was carrying it around, writing things on it, and then erasing and writing because, you know, we’re in flux, and that was a useful tool. Right, Ryan? It’s like a giant tablet that only did one thing.

What’s your most fundamental drive behind Cyan?
Wow, that’s a tough one! Let’s face it: I’ve been doing games for a living for a long, long time. Longer than most of you are old. I don’t want to stop. This is great. Somebody just said, “Do you do games for a living?” I said, “Yea, it’s a great way to make a living.” And then I stopped and said, “No, this is not a great way to make a living.” I feel that way—I love working with these people—we’re all really inspired—the same way you are I hope—by what Myst was and all of those games and how they’ve evolved.
I like making those worlds. I started way back in this D&D world that I made the first time I learned D&D. I played it and I was like, “I don’t want to play a world in D&D, I want to make one.” I think that’s what drives me: I just think that’s a cool idea. It’s hard, but it’s a great way to make a living.
I also love problem solving. There’s something really cool about that challenge. There’s a lot of this right now about how hard making games is. You guys should know this: it is really hard. Hats off to anybody who makes games. I don’t ever want to diss any game because I know how hard it is. It takes extraordinary amounts of problem solving and for our little team here, that’s what we do every day and that’s one of the reasons I can’t predict what we’re going to do tomorrow because I don’t know what problem’s going to come up and how to solve it tomorrow. We have any number of problems every week, and it’s enough to knock the wind out of your sails if you can’t deal with problem solving, but I love problem solving.
That’s another thing that I enjoy. That keeps me going, and it inspired me to be part of this. It takes all kinds. Not everybody here can be a problem solver. Some people do. Ryan and I are opposites in one particular regard. It whittles down and you need both of these people. I have what is called send anxiety. I will write an email, a lot of the updates you’re seeing, I’m writing. You should know that. I’m not out of the office. I’m part of this thing. I know you guys have seen pictures and said, “Oh, I’m glad Rand’s involved.” It’s not a token involvement.
[interruption in broadcast]
Ryan and I have very different personalities. It takes all kinds to do this. I have what I call “send anxiety”. I’m involved not just as a token player on this project. I’m involved here. Almost all the updates, I’ve had my fingers in or I write them. The emails we’ve sent out; all the stuff, I’m part of that.
When it comes time to press the send button, I have real hard time doing that. I’ve got to check it one more time; got to check it one more time; got to check it one more time. That can be really good, and it can also be really bad. As you can imagine its debilitating. I’ve got to check it one more time. Ryan, on the other hand, does not have “send anxiety”. He has “don’t send anxiety”. He’s like, “Done. Send! Don’t check it. Don’t look back. Next!” That has some positives to it and some negatives to it as well.
But it takes all kinds. I love working with all these variety of people. It’s just amazing. Over the years we’ve had such amazing people to work with. We’re small now, and Cyan is a crazy place to work, but we have great people.

Is there ever going to be a realRiven Masterpiece Edition?
We have to get realRiven first before we do Masterpiece. Starry Expanse is, right now—they’re working on that as much as anybody is because we don’t have models. They’re building that all from scratch. If we get anything from those tapes I mentioned—if we get anything off of those—maybe we can contribute or help or speed that process up, but I don’t have a lot of hope.

How much of the original Myst and/or Riven models, audio, textures, were you able to recover?
Myst is interesting because we actually have more of Myst than we do Riven, which is weird. A tape I found yesterday has Robyn and me against our bluescreen or greenscreen that we recorded on our little Hi-8 camera of doing our Sirrus and Ahcenar roles, so that’s a nice find. I found that in a drawer in a vault. We call it the vault. It’s just a room downstairs. It’s locked. It’s locked up. And I think it’s fireproof. It’s got bricks all the way around it, so it’s vault-like. We found those things on a tape, which is kind of cool.
The Strata models—again, this 25th anniversary has been a good motivator to try and recover some of those—we’ve got the latest version of Strata Design 3D, and I’ve opened almost all the Myst models. The Myst models are not as pristine as you would think because the interiors and exteriors are different. A lot of the animation files are separate.
Anyway, I’ve opened almost all of those. A lot of things don’t carry forward. The water is red because the texture doesn’t work, and other things just don’t show up, or the texture maps not quite right. Selenitic was really messed up, but over the course of last week I did a lot of this. I got a lot of pieces of Selenitic where I feel like I’ve got the exterior in at least a decent shape.
That sounds really encouraging to you guys: “Oh sweet! Rand can just render these things again.” And Robyn, my brother, would be the first to tell you, “Yeah there was a lot of handwork on those that had to be done, and a lot of pieces had to be reassembled.”
With all that said, A few years ago I had spare time, I may have rendered a few of those, just not knowing if we’d ever be able to get them, but Myst is probably in the best shape for being able to recover things here and there. Don’t get your hopes up because it’s still a big push.
Riven, on the other hand, like I mentioned, is tough. It’s just tough. We’ve got some raw files, but there were forty people who worked on Riven at one point, and they were all SGI workstations. Sorry! Or not sorry. Riven is a good piece to be what it is. I think everybody’s very proud of that, and we don’t want—even updated versions—I don’t think we want to mess with too much. It’s a beautiful work of art.

How was it getting rights from Ubisoft?
We have good relationships with everybody we’ve worked with over the years. It’s just a matter of getting people’s attention and getting to the right people. It’s a big deal for us and not a big deal for them, and we managed to finally work our way through it all. It’s not something that’s free—it costs. Luckily, we’ve paid that bill with the Kickstarter. That was our goal. The original amount we put in there wouldn’t have paid that bill, but with the amount we’ve gone over, we have at least managed to pay that bill, and I think we’re on the plus side. Not as much as you guys think we are, but we are definitely on the plus side.

I used to skip school when a new Myst game was released.
Very cool. Good idea. I’m not a school person. I remember skipping college when I got my first computer and just writing games on it. And this was in hexadecimal, for those of you who are older like me. Seriously, I would just not go because I was busy writing a game for a computer that you couldn’t sell games on, but it was just so much fun. Skip school, kids! Stay in school. Don’t do drugs. But skip school every now and then if you’re—playing games or making games? I don’t know. Just learn something, okay? Learn something!
I’ll tell you my new philosophy on life. I have an open channel here to speak to you people, and you have to listen to me. Watch, the numbers are going to drop off severely!
We have a skewed view of failure, people. I’m looking at you! The only way people fail is if you don’t do two things. It has nothing to do with money. If you haven’t done these you should consider that you’ve failed: If you haven’t learned something and you haven’t made the world a little better. You don’t even have to do both of them. Just do one of them. But if you don’t do either one of them, you can consider you’ve failed.
I look back at Uru—that was a tough experience for us because we put everything into that. We borrowed for that. We had big plans for that. And for whatever reason—you know there were plenty—from an outside view it was a failure. From my view that was not a failure. It’s still running here. I am still so proud of what we did. It has nothing to do with money and those things. It was a success. I learned a lot, number one, and I think it made the world a little bit of a better place. It was an interesting take on entertainment on a computer.
Keep those things in mind. Plan for that. As far as making money in everything you do, that’s not going to happen, and if you think that’s failure, you’re off to a bad start. That’s not a failure, that’s just a learning experience. That has to do with school because you’ll learn a lot when you’re out of school or skipping school. If you skip school you ought to still learn something and make the world a better place.
How about that? Yes! If you’re going to get an F in school—if you’re going to fail school—at least you should learn something somewhere and make the world a better place, right? Am I right? Ryan agrees. I hope no parents are watching this. My daughters are all out of school, so I can say that now. I’ve got my grandkids. My grandson’s coming to the office today. I can’t let him watch that. He’ll be telling my daughter he can quit school or something.

Is there a possibility of a resurrection of Uru Live?
We all would love to see a resurrection of Uru Live. We still love the idea here. At the office, we still are convinced this is such a cool idea: Go into a world where you don’t have to level up. It’s not about a treadmill. You just go in and every day there’s cool stuff happening. New worlds are happening. People are in there—live people—and things are happening.
That’s a cool idea! Somebody’s still going to do that. We were ahead of our time. It’s just a lot to bite off, and it would take a lot of money. We’re very small right now. Predicting the future is near impossible. We’ll keep it running as long as we can, but it’s not exactly alive, as those of you who play it know it is. But still, I go in and am blown away.

Will you ever release a spiritual successor to the games like Manhole and Spelunx?
Probably not. Those were really interesting learning experiences and evolutionary items for my brother and I. Our hearts went into those. He was learning a lot of what went into Myst. He’s an incredible artist, an incredible musician. I was toying with programming and hopefully got better at it as we did those. I think one thing we’d love to do, though, is get some of those rereleased. Cosmic Osmo’s always one that’s just everybody’s favorite. And I know it’s out there in some versions. But we’d love to do something more with that. I don’t know what. Cosmic Osmo VR! I just made that up. Unless Jess is listening. Jess—you in there, Jess? We’ll talk later.

You’re my hero, Rand.
Okay, that is really nice of you. I appreciate it. I hope you have better heroes than me. I’m just a normal guy working hard. You’re my hero if you’re a normal person who’s learning every day and making the world a better place.

Are there plans to provide the soundtracks alongside the games? What about stretch goals?
We read all that stuff. The soundtracks are Robyn’s, and he has those available. Probably—especially this year—he will make his own little kind of resurrection of those things and do some stuff with those. They’re amazing. We do have the rights to some of those.
Some of these stretch goals we may have already done. We’ve got Mac support, for example. I hope you guys know. We’ll send out more [emails] to make sure everybody knows. The release of the 1993 version of Myst exactly as it looked and sounded—we’re with you guys on this. There are plusses and minuses to Masterpiece and the original. The original had to be dithered graphics.
For those of you who don’t know what that means, it means that every world (every Age) in Myst could only be represented with 256 colors. We had to do every image in that world in 256 colors. As a result, we get this kind of weird spectral thing. We had software that did a good job of it, but if you look closely you get dithering. It’s called “dithering”: little dots to kind of simulate colors that are missing.
In the Masterpiece version we used the original ones that had all the colors—millions of colors—so it looks much smoother. It doesn’t have that same dithering in it. With that said, it’s kind of cool to see how we did the original version. So yes, we’re with you guys on it. Some of this is the problem of it’s old software. It was done in Hypercard or a platform that Broderbund built. There is no such thing as source code. We’re trying to get either one of those working as best we can. And hopefully both.
Remember that thing about how we don’t know what’s going ot happen tomorrow? Right now QA—Vicki—came into my office this morning, and they’re testing another version of Myst that I think is the Masterpiece Edition, but they’re going to be testing both, and we’ll keep you informed about whether we can do that.

What are your favorite in-cavern memories from Uru Live?
Uru Live was special. I know a lot of you don’t know that, and I don’t want to spend a lot of time there. Imagine Myst and imagine going into the world of Myst or an Age of Myst and there are areas in Myst that you own. Like you go to a little island that’s all yours. Nobody’s there except you. You own it. And it kind of has a collection of everything you’ve done over time there. You can see all the places you’ve been and everything you’ve done. But from there you can go to a neighborhood and see your friends, and then from the neighborhood you can go to the big bad city and run across homeless people or something—I don’t know what—it’s like what cities are.
You never know what you’re going to run across. So it’s a cool idea. Our view of Uru is really different from your view of Uru because we were in the office watching things happen and responding because we were doing live acting as roles of characters that were walking through the world, and we were behind the person’s back who was chatting with people. We were watching what was happening and adjusting our script accordingly and deciding what would happen the next day because of what would happen and trying to massage that.
That was so cool because it was a big experiment. I mean, who does that? Who has a live show that anybody can walk in on and see what’s going on and then change it and become part of the whole script? That happened numerous times: We’d be surprised about what somebody would do, and the script would change, and then they’d become a character in it—non-willing or willing They became, in some ways, a celebrity that played a role as well. That was so cool!
And then, of course, the test with Wheely and what happened there. That was an epic moment for us because we actually got to test that. We had that planned from the beginning as an event—or something along that line from the beginning. We built years into the Wheely character and then she died in a tragic event. It was unexpected. To have that in a game was awe-inspiring. So that was a big moment.

Could there be a TV series about the kings of D’ni?
Yeah, it would be cool to have all that. I think there’s more to it than that, but yes, all those things kind of merging in somehow and being told is a really cool idea.

Will you be able to remaster the flybys for the physical Linking Book?
Some of them: Yes. In fact, I already have. I have gone in and remastered the first one as a test. I did over 25 renderings of it as a test. The final one I did just the exact size of the screen, so it’s pixel-accurate and looks really good landing on the dock. It took two-and-a-half days to render, which is cool. It was reminiscent of doing a single image back in the days of Myst. It looks nice and I did it in a more recent version of Strata Design 3D stuff, so it looks nicer. And I think I was able to do soft shadows on the trees, so the shadows even on the dock when you land: instead of a spikey-thing, it had a nice little soft shadow there. I don’t want to change too much—you know what I mean? We want Myst to look the same. But, you know, subtle things.

If there was a Myst/Riven film shot in first-person, how would the Stranger he handled?
If there’s a Myst series, it’s going to be live action, not first person, no. I know we call that person the “Stranger”, but in Myst it was supposed to feel like you—like you were there. It wasn’t as much of a role-playing game as a “you-playing” game. You land on this dock. You found that book. So the first-person would wait from an interactive point of view. That has nothing to do with the series. It’s very different. And it would be a storyline in the that would fit the series much better. Characters and all that stuff. Trust me. It’s cool!

What do you think about the parody video game Pyst?
You’re asking my opinion on that?
[Ryan:] Maybe we can remaster that!
Maybe we can get John Goodman. I don’t know how they got him in the first place, but John Goodman was in a hot tub. Was he in a hot tub in one of those shots? Sitting in a hot tub. I don’t know how they got him to do that. I mean for Myst we got Robyn and I. For Pyst they got John Goodman! Man! He’s pretty funny. It’s interesting being parodied. You know you’re popular if you’re parodied. Listen, the popularity of Myst was insane. You can imagine a couple brothers would make this game and then all of a sudden I walk into stores and it’s on the shelf. That’s cool!
[Ryan:] You had a Gap ad.
Oh yeah. How many people get a Gap ad? Oh my gosh! It’s weird. Here I sit chatting with Ryan; living a normal life just like you guys, except I make games.
You know, after this AMA you guys will have no more questions! There will never be any more questions. I won’t need to do Reddit. I was going to do a Reddit AMA, but I won’t need to, unless you think of more questions. Well, I’m not even one third of the way done, so maybe there’ll be more questions.
Have you considered adding developer commentaries to Myst?
That would be fun. We’ve talked about this. Actually playing Myst and doing commentaries as you walk though. That would be a fun thing. We’ll see. We’ll see how tomorrow goes. We’ll see how today goes and how tomorrow goes. That’s just a comment. You’re welcome.

I play the games with my kids.
We get a lot of those these days. Or, “I’m the kid.” I’m surprised at the age of kids who we see and they go, “Yeah, I played Myst,” and I go, “No, you’re too young,” and they go, “No, I played it with my mom and my dad.” That’s really cool.

In the Secret History of Mac Gaming book, were you surprised with Robyn’s decision to leave after Riven because he was unsatisfied with the medium’s potential for storytelling?
I can’t speak for Robyn, but I can address a little. It is a great book. You guys should read it. I did a large interview, and Robyn did, too. This was something we discussed a lot. This person says they find it ironic, but the fact of the matter is a linear storytelling medium gives you a lot more control over the user or the player or the reader or the watcher because you can manipulate them. You can build up to a dramatic moment.
Interactive—by its very nature—there’s free will. And you can put a cinematic in there that does that, but it’s almost like a cinematic feels like you’re out of control. It feels like it’s an exception to the interactivity. So we always tried to not do that, and we had various successes with trying to hold the player’s attention, but they can walk away at any time. Character development has to be done in different ways. You tell the story in a different way in the environment.
Robyn is correct. He went off to tell stories in a more linear traditional form because he had some stories to tell. I loved further experimenting with interactive and seeing what stories we could pull out of it. And I still love that.
I still love Obduction. I think there’s an incredible story to Obduction. Granted, we didn’t have a giant budget. In game-making terms it was basically the same as a Myst budget, which was fairly small. It was nowhere near our Riven budget. But I loved telling the story. When you’re done playing that game, it’s amazing what story you come away with. In spite of the fact that you can walk away and all those things. But it’s still a question of whether we have as much emotional control, which just leads to me—I want to keep trying. I like that.

Is there a possibility of a Myst Online expansion?
We would love to. It is an old engine, so expanding Myst Online doesn’t mean breaking out the old engine. It probably means converting from an old engine to a new engine, and that is hard. There is so much in Myst Online. That thing is huge. If you haven’t played Myst Online, it’s free. Go sign up and get lost. You will not believe how big it is. It just keeps going. It’s such a cool area.

How difficult was it to get the rights back for Myst III and Myst IV?
Not really difficult. It was just a matter of yeah time consuming and getting people’s attention.

Throw in more soundtracks!
We don’t have a lot of rights to soundtracks because music is a different deal and because Robyn got the music for Myst and Riven. We would love to throw in what we can. As you can see, we’ve already done that with Uru. I loved Uru’s soundtrack. You guys see this? You see the Uru soundtrack? It’s beautiful. Isn’t that beautiful? See that? See this wood? See that tree? That is an actual wood burning by Eric Warmen(?)—(E-Dog?) —for those of you who are curious. It’s a great soundtrack. Really Tim did an incredible job on that music. I love Tim’s music. Hey Tim! Tim’s not watching.
I hope this is informative and entertaining. I’m trying my best. Good, we’re not getting people dropping off. We’ve got a few more minutes. I’m going to try to get as many questions as I can in. If there’s any things that really need to be answered—Oh! I get popup messages when people become a Backer. Way to go, John Hur! I probably shouldn’t mention his name. Darnit. That’s weird, isn’t it? That’s cool. That’s awesome.

Is there any chance of an unabridged audiobook version of the Myst novels?
Yes. That is a good idea. We would love to. The Myst novels, by the way, just recently are something that we have reobtained the rights to. So again, every day we don’t know what’s going to happen, but that is something that’s happened recently, and you can see what we’ve done with it already. It always seemed appropriate for Atrus to read that book. Atrus just has to find the time. And the Atrus accent to read those. But unabridged: yes. Unabridged: Yes! Isn’t that cool?

Atrus really likes Hawaii.
We need a separate Kickstarter: a “Send Atrus to Hawaii” Kickstarter. Then while he’s there, with the sound of the waves and the birds and the wind and the breezes in the background, Atrus can read those, unabridged , several times.

Atrus sure loves islands!
Oh, Atrus loves islands. Yes, he does! Islands are fun. Although, Atrus loves Spokane. I was wearing my “Spokane doesn’t suck” t-shirt yesterday because that’s a hashtag here in Spokane, and we really believe it. Although I don’t know why we’re trying to convince people. You don’t have to come here. We don’t need to force it to be bigger.
I know, isn’t it cool? My wife wants to play the games, and she’s like, “I can’t play the games.” I’m like, “I know! I can’t even play them.” Now we’re going to be able to play them. I’m so excited. We’re fans of our work, too! We’re all just fans of this stuff. It’s awesome.

Do you have concept art from Exile or Revelation you can release?
Did we already get some stuff? Concept art from Exile and Revelation?
[Ryan:] Let’s just say there will be some updates coming.

Any spin-off projects in the works?
We haven’t thought about that, really, because we still are excited about it ourselves. It wouldn’t be more of a spin-off, but more of a major thing. The series is kind of a spin-off. We tell a different story, but oh, yeah, cool! Spread the word. I don’t know what word you’re spreading, but it’ll be really cool.
I need to make a pitch video. By the way, if I seem kind of amped, it’s because right before I did this I had coffee in my Uru mug. Caffeine helps me. I’m an introvert. You people don’t think I’m an introvert. I know that. My own wife doesn’t think I’m an introvert, but I really am. I’m an introvert. I like answering questions. It’s fun, and I’m so comfortable with you. I know there’s almost 1000 of you, and I feel like I’m here with just one other person.

Will you release the games on PS4?
I mentioned the platform thing before. We don’t limit anything to any platform. It is resources. Sometimes we’re surprised by resources. You guys know that we did the PS4 version of Obduction. That took a long time for us to do. And the PSVR version took a long time to do. Those are things we have no aversion to doing, but it could take time. So we’ll find out today or tomorrow. No, not really.

Would you please add lost high-resolution images from the games? I would especially love to have images from the Riven calendars.
That’s a great idea! I think I have all those Riven calendars. I have models that I did for those Riven calendar images when I rendered them. That is something we can put as digital goodies. Definitely.

During the ending of Myst, did Atrus grant ownership of Myst Island to the Stranger?
Robyn may have a different view because I don’t know that this was ever spelled out completely, but I think Atrus was worrying about other things at the time. As he was in many of the games and needed your help. As such, with his writing, he needed to stay in D’ni and continue writing. But he realized that you had done a great service with what you had provided to him. And he also realized at that point that he could trust you to a certain extent.
I don’t think it was an ownership thing he was giving you, as the player. He was giving you, as the player, a little bit of time to explore at your leisure without the puzzles to impede you. Time to sit on the bridges in Channelwood and drink a Coke and enjoy the view. That’s how we pictured it.
But we all know that in Myst lore, it follows the multiverse kind of model. When you link, you link to different branches of the tree. When I answer questions RAWA lives and dies by the branches of the tree! The branch that Rand answered the question wrong. I don’t know if RAWA was happy or sad about me answering that. RAWA’s okay. He gave me a thumbs up.

I want the Writer Tier, but I can’t afford it.
Do you have anything you could hock, or children you could sell? It’s just one suggestion. I’m just kidding. The problem is we don’t do atoms very well. It’s hard. We learned important lessons during the last Kickstarter we did. One of those is add-ons and all the things Kickstarter’s not meant to do naturally when you do those things get complicated really quickly. I feel your pain, and if we could come up with some sort of solution that also doesn’t penalize the people who have put money in to get that thing, we’ll come up with it. But it’s hard. I’m not complaining, but we don’t make a lot of money off these things either. We’re really psyched about getting them. We are going to make some money, yes, but we’ve tried to keep the prices low as well. That pen-and-ink things is pretty costly for us to make. That’s why it’s top-tier.

Are you planning on selling Cyan, Inc. to Ubisoft?
Nope. Unless the price is right [big grin].

Will there be translation of the games into other languages?
We’ve addressed this in some of our FAQs. We’re dealing with versions of the software that are very hard to modify. We’re trying to wrap them in real efficient ways that make them play well and are transparent to you guys when you play them because it’s the only thing we can do. What that means, though, is that we can’t go back in and edit the assets. It’s really difficult.
The localized versions that we have, we can consider doing the wrappers with, but if we don’t have it, it probably won’t be there. With that said, we’re trying to find out what we have and what versions they are and how well they work and those kinds of things. I can’t make promises. At some point we’ll have a matrix that will say which games and what languages they’re in. Vicki’s already started that. We’ll be letting you guys know what’s there and what you’ll get with those.

My fourth grade teacher first showed me Myst in detention, and I fell in love with the rich and immersive worlds Cyan has created.
Again, my aversion to school. More power to you. It’s kind of you get rewarded for going in to detention, so good for that teacher. I really do like school now that I’m an adult and I don’t have to take tests. I guess I would like school if I didn’t have to memorize and I didn’t have to take tests. I like learning. But I just want to audit school. That’s all I want to do.

[Ryan:] We might do one of these again towards the end of the Kickstarter.
This was our first Kickstarter Live feed, so we’ll wrap this up. I didn’t get to all your questions. I thought I would. There was only like ninety of them or something. If I could just churn through these, but I talk too dog-gone much. Blah blah blah blah blah. We’ll end this one. Hopefully we can do another one. We’ll do it maybe from Hawaii. Probably not. Probably from this office that isn’t even my office. Conference room. Maybe outside. I think we would like to do another one. We can get some more questions, try and get some more things answered.
I’ll end by saying this. We are so excited about this—one more time—because we’re fans and we get this thing. I am so excited about what movies we can put on this book because I’m like you guys. The suggestions you’re saying: “Can we get this in the book? Can we get that in the book?” Yeah, I want those things in the book, too! I want to open the book and have Sirrus in there going, “Burn the books!” That kind of stuff.
We’re going to give you more specs of the book. I totally want to do that. But we have a call with them today that’s going to nail down some of that stuff. We don’t want to give you specs until we’re for sure. In the last week we’ve made some changes based on suggestions that they’ve had and things we’ve wanted to do. You guys want the same thing we want with the book. I want to put little movies I make in there, right? Open the book and it’s a little thing. We’re desperately trying to make those things happen. We made some changes even in the last week, so every day things change.
Thank you so much! This is great. I hope I answered a lot of questions. I can’t say thank you enough. It’s kind of exciting because it’s 25 years later and this is still fun. It’s fun to play the games; fun to talk about them; fun to see you guys excited about them. That whole crazy “The ending hasn’t been written”—How prophetic was that, you know? Wow! How cool! I should put that on my tombstone.
I feel like I’m young. Look at that gray hair! My dad got gray hair early, too. At least I have hair, but it’s like white. It’s not you; it wasn’t you who gave me white hair. Ryan said it was my daughter. No, they were good. Thank you, guys. Thank you so much. We’ll do this again. Let’s do this again real soon. Bye! I’m trying to figure out how to turn it off. Oh no! I can’t figure out how! What does this do?