Well hello. We have to stop meeting like this. Is anybody on this thing? Is anybody watching this? [This is] Ryan, my producer. It’s all working. I’ve got my crazy streaming stuff going. I’ve got my producer, Ryan, across the table. I’ve got a much nicer background behind me this time. (No offense to my wife, whose office I was in last time. Love you, sweetie!)
And I have my broken Uru mug just like last time. See? It’s broken on me, but it has coffee. This was so much fun last time, we thought we would try it again: try and get some of your questions that we didn’t get to last time. The Kickstarter just is going up really nicely. It’s exciting. Thank you, guys. We’re excited.
Okay, let’s see here. I’m going to scroll through these questions, and we’ll see what we’ve got going on. My coffee has not kicked in. You can probably tell I don’t have quite as much energy as I had last time. I got a late start on the coffee. I was trying to do some things, so let the caffeine [inaudible].
[Ryan:] Why don’t tell them what you were doing?
What I was doing: Some of you may or may not know this, but digging in the archives is fun, and I’ve found really cool stuff. One of the things I found was the thing Ryan’s mentioned: Back in the day, sometime in [19]92, Robyn and I, in our infinite wisdom—since we were playing Sirrus and Achenar—figured it would be great for our father to play our father, Atrus—our real father, whose name is Ron. We were like, “Okay, Dad, you should try this,” and he was like, “Alright,” because he’s a really good sport. We went down to the basement and put up our green paper just to try some tests. (We didn’t have a final script or anything.) I found those “auditions” on an old Hi8 video tape.
[Interruption in broadcast.]
Everybody’s back? Good? Do I need to start the story again? Did you guys hear any of that? That was the better version. If I start it again, it’s going to be lame, but I’ll start it again just to in case. Here we go.
Robyn and I were playing (obviously) Sirrus and Achenar in Myst, and in our infinite wisdom we decided, “Who better to play Atrus—our father—than our father?” Ron is his name. We said, “Hey Dad, you should just be in this. You should do this. We’re being the sons; you should be the father.” He was like, “Okay,” because he’s a really good sport, and he’ll do anything. I think that’s where we get that from. We’ll try anything. Supportive parents—naïve, crazy parents—who make naïve, crazy kids. Anyway, he said, “Okay.”
It was early on in the process. We put him in front of a greenscreen. We gave him scripts that weren’t done—some early Atrus scripts—and said, “Give it a shot,” and he did. I—recently digging around for this “Myst 25” stuff—found this old Hi8 video tape with that gem on it. That’s what I was doing just moments ago: putting that up on Reddit. And I tweeted it. Go look at it. It’s awesome!
Our dad turned eighty [years old] last month. That’s pretty cool. Happy birthday to him and to Myst at this point. I did not know we had that footage, so that’s a real treat: finding that. I asked him, by the way, if I could put it up. He was like “Sure. Whatever. Go ahead.” He’s a good sport. You guys should enjoy that. That’s pretty epic, crazy stuff.
Here we are back again to try and get questions answered. I know there’s pertinent questions; some of them have bubbled to the top. We’ll try and get to those, and I’ve got a few things I should mention, too. I can’t remember now—there’s a few things we were going to talk about. I remember one, but we’ll get to that.
It’s crazy. This Kickstarter stuff is crazy. We’re getting stuff built right now, but we don’t have final quantities until this thing’s done. Then we “boom” and that’s all that’s made. Somebody came into my office today and said, “People should know: five years from now there won’t be more of these things.” I’ll probably be selling mine on eBay just so I can have a cup of coffee. Maybe I should get two. Maybe I’ll get two. One for me; one for eBay for a cup of coffee.
Check the FAQs. It would be nice on Kickstarter if could just go, “I want to go one, two, three—I want seventeen of these,” but there is no little dial to order more of something (that we know of). If you want to order more for eBay—like me, for a cup of coffee in five years—I think you just have to make another account. That’s convenient.
Let’s get to some questions because you guys are awesome, and you’re rocking it. By the way, if you see me do this with my glasses [place them on the end of my nose], I’m going to fill you in on why I do that. My eyes have been really bad since I was very young. I remember getting glasses in first grade—in first grade I got glasses—and having the “oh, trees have leaves!” experience that those of you who have glasses may know. I thought it was unique to me at the time, but I’ve heard other people say the same thing. I have really bad eyes, and now that I’m getting older—I’m not old. My wife has told me, “Stop saying you’re old.” I’m not old. I don’t feel old. I feel young. I’m getting older. I didn’t say old*. Old*er. Nature has this great way of playing a trick on you I can [inaubile] hear without glasses that I can see. I’m not exaggerating. It’s about that wide [fingers about an inch (2.5 cm) apart]. Anyway, the cool thing is I don’t use bifocals—
My producer says we’re having problems. Are we uploading big things?
[Ryan:] Not that I know of. It’s fine now.
Okay. Back again. Anyway, I’ll cut this short. I don’t have bifocals, but if I move these [glasses] down, I can see things up close. My optometrist said I could do that. It doesn’t hurt anything. He said, “You can do that until”—and this is pretty serious—“until you run out of nose.” Then I’ll have to get bifocals.
Okay, we’re having technical issues evidently. We’re wired into our high-speed ethernet. There’s people in other parts of the office getting things done. [Ryan leaves.] I’ll keep talking.
When I put my glasses down like this [on the tip of my nose]—for those of you who can see me—it’s just so I can read things on the screen that are a little closer. Works like a charm. Highly recommended until you have to get bifocals.
How about the two million mark people? Isn’t that crazy? I’m going to go through some questions. You guys are awesome, by the way, to show up again for this and listen to me jabber.
Are there any Easter eggs in any of the games you're aware of that have yet to be discovered? Do you have a favorite Easter egg? [Submitted by Kailyn.]
All the games have Easter eggs. I think one of my favorites is—this is not Myst-related—but I do love the Obduction Easter egg mode only because that whole Russian machine and being a red herring and having to put a number in that to get an Easter egg. And then how [Kickstarter] Backers have their Easter eggs in there, too. I love how that works. It’s kind of cool. It personalizes the whole thing. But for (I think it was)* Uru—we’ll see if Ryan knows this when he’s back—I think fo*r Uru we had a guy, Kyle, who’s one of our programmers here. Everything that Kyle programmed, he put a Pong game in. [Ryan returns.]
[To Ryan:] Was Uru the one that we had a Pong game in? Didn’t we have a Pong game, or was that realMyst?
[Ryan:] realMyst.
realMyst. The original realMyst has a Pong game in it.
[Ryan:] It’s clear now. I told everyone to go offline.
We have brought productivity here to zero because we kicked everybody off the Internet. Well actually, we probably improved productivity. Now they’re all having to get back to work. Anyway, that’s another one of my favorites: that Pong game. Way to go, Kyle.
Would you consider adding a remastered Cosmic Osmo**? [Submitted by laurie11111.]**
Yeah, Cosmic Osmo’s amazing. I’m sure I’ve brought this up before, but it came up this morning because I was digging around in old hard drives—I mean, literally no case, just hard drives from places—and I found color Osmo resources from way back when. We had some artists colorizing Osmo in a really meticulously detailed way—keeping the essence of that. We still have that; we just have never converted it.
Yes, but we’re treating that one gently. We love Osmo. We’d love to remaster that somehow.
Wait, colour Osmo resources existed? WHAT? [submitted by trevor-martin.]
Yeah. Yeah, I know. Oddly enough, Osmo’s one of the more complex things we’ve done because there’s so many interactive things. Ryan and I were talking about this morning that you go in that one basement area and vegetable area and there’s a canvas there and you can paint on it. You can draw on that canvas and paint whatever you want. You have tools to paint on there. And then when you go into the mouth of the mackerel, there’s a framed picture, and it’s whatever you painted on that canvas that’s far away.
That’s really cool stuff, but it’s also not just clicking buttons. HyperCard was great for that kind of stuff. It allowed us to do a lot of really fun, complicated things in Osmo, but it also makes it hard to recode all of those details in it from scratch again. We’ll see what happens. But yes, we love Osmo. Hopefully we can get to it.
Did you get the rights to Exile and Revelations, or just for this collection? [Submitted by Kailyn.]
We have the rights to continue selling them, which is great because that’s what was missing. The timing was perfect for this collection. We really wanted it to happen for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Myst, but what we were looking for is “ongoing”—as we move forward. Yep.
Will there ever be an official guide to the Dn'i language or 'The Art'? [Submitted by Reno.]
We can’t tell you that! I mean, that’s valuable stuff. That’s how we stay in business: We write links to worlds full of gold. Imagine if we gave that information out. Imagine how that would corrupt people and families—destroy families. It would change economies. It would destroy families. And big government entities would be after that.
We’ve talked about encyclopedias and dictionaries and all those fun things for D’ni stuff. Back in the day for Uru we wrote reems—I’ve said this before—reems of information on the D’ni economy and their religion and their schooling and their marriage traditions; all kinds of stuff. You guys have seen some of that. But RAWA is also the keeper of up-to-date D’ni everything. Someday it might be nice.
[RAWA:] That’s my retirement fund.
RAWA’s watching us. We’ll see if he can pull that one off. Hey RAWA!
[Sidebar about trackpads and mice.]
What was it like to work with John Keston (Gehn)? [Submitted by Tradley.]
Great and pertinent and timely questions because I’ve got a bunch of footage of him—behind-the-scenes stuff—of him doing stuff. He was incredibly professional. He’s one of those guys that—I joke around quite a bit, in case you couldn’t tell; I’m just a goofball—but he’s got this British accent and personality that you just want to be dignified around. Everybody on the shoot was goofing around the whole time and when John’s up there it’s like, “Why yes, Mister Keston. Can we get you some tea?” Suddenly it was very professional. He was awesome.
I have behind-the-scenes footage because when we were filming the bluescreen work for Riven, one of the guys had a small camera—Hi8, which is what I was doing this week. We have behind-the-scenes footage of him singing his opera stuff, which was cool. I think we’ve got that as an Easter egg* in R*iven, but not from behind-the-scenes with the camera showing the other angle where we came in on the bluescreens. We’ll have to make that available. A good place to put that would be in the book. We’ll put that in the book.
So yes, it was great working with John Keston. I understand John is still alive. I don’t know if he’s still running marathons or singing opera, but what a great guy to work with.
How was the tablet mechanic in Myst V developed? Was it around when the Ages were being developed for Uru, or was it incorporated to replace some mechanic that was missing without Uru? [Submitted by Daniel.]
This is really cool. There’s two ways for me to approach that question. It was developed by the Bahro. I’ll give you the inside [answer] from a technical point of view. Myst V was, as you all know, this real weird mixture during time period here at Cyan because we had built up for Uru, and all that content was to move forward* in* Uru. Then all of a sudden it got chopped, and we made it into a different game. We tried to think of exciting and interesting things to do.
The tablet came out of that. It was the early days of machine learning. Machine learning has been around since I was in college or even before. It’s grown little-by-little over the years, but it wasn’t until recently during the last few years that it’s started to skyrocket because of the power we have at our fingertips these days.
We decided, even for Myst V, that we would use machine learning for the tablet. One of the guys—and I don’t remember which programmer it was—wrote the neural net software learning stuff so that it could be trained. To be trained, we got everybody at the company, basically—I think for a day; I don’t remember specifically—drawing those symbols on a tablet over and over and over in a number of varieties.
For machine learning you’ve got to have your test data and you’ve got to have your crazy sample data from people and then you train it on which one matches which one. That’s what we did. We spent the whole day doing that. Everybody in the company. It was kind of cool. Some people took it to an extreme and drew little versions on the top of the tablet. Some people did them poorly. It was a great experience making that work because neural nets are cool. You don’t know exactly how they recognize it. That’s why most of the time it works pretty good, and on occasion, you think you’ve got it perfect, and it’s like, “Nope,” because [of] something down in the neurons.
Was Esher part of the Uru Live story?
Yes. The bahro stuff was the main storyline in Uru. That was going to play through in a big way. Esher was, I think, a smaller character, and we made him into a larger one for Myst V. He was more of a bit player, but when Myst V rolled off on its own, we decided to needed to have a larger role.
[Possible Wi-Fi problems.]
It’s really hard, by the way, not seeing you guys. I love Q&A, but I love feedback. It’s nice having Ryan here, but it’d be nice if I could see all of you, too. I need Skype with hundreds of little pictures of you guys. That would be very cool.
A very reliable source told me you put your grandmother's address in Obduction. Is it Farley's address? [Submitted by Daniel.]
That is correct. That is my grandmother’s address. I wish I could remember right now what it was. Farley’s address is my grandmother’s address, and it was a request of someone. It was not a specific request to do that, but to do something with my grandmother’s house, so that one seemed like a perfect one to do. My grandmother was a real matriarch in our family, and her house was a gathering place for lots of cousins. We would go there, so we all knew her house. She died fairly recently, and we don’t have that anymore, so it’s nice to have that remembered in perpetuity in an interesting place. And she had a white picket fence.

After this kickstarter is over is there any chance you might make a new myst game to add on the the series? [Submitted by Michael.]
You guys heard me say last time: Yeah, I think there’s a chance. I don’t know when it all comes out, but yeah. Yes. I don’t even know specifics, but we have some ideas that are cool.
Why did you change from live action characters to full CG in Myst V? [Submitted by desertfern.]
There’s a lot of ways to go on this one. One is: We had the technology because we had done it for Uru, so we were trying to utilize what we had done. The second was: We looked at it as a little more of a challenge to say, “What if we mixed the two?” We were trying to almost hybridize that where we were capturing facial expressions so that they weren’t as flat. That’s why we used the crazy helmet. I think Bill Slease called it an “octopus helmet” thing that we designed and built with this big thing and cameras and lights and all this stuff.
Crazy thing about that. Here’s a cool little fact about that that everyone should know. We had our actors—David—wear that thing, and it was nice because you can move your head around and the camera would stay locked on and we would get a really clean locked-on texture. You could emote a little and move your head. It had counterweights on it, but the counterweights weren’t quite enough, so over time it [the camera] starts slipping down. If you notice in Myst V, a lot of those captures are pretty good at the beginning.
It was funny because I actually did the motion capture for those, not David. He did the face capture, and I went down to a bluescreen studio. We’d play that over a loudspeaker, and I’d do the actually motion capture. As he was working it [the camera] would move down, so in the game, you start noticing this weird nose shadow later on. Of course, with somebody of his caliber, you can’t exactly just say, “Hey should come back over here and ring more wine and do this whole thing again.” Lesson learned. It turned out really well. We were happy with how it turned out except for that slippage.
If I understood you correctly, you played Atrus in Myst mostly because of your budget. Did you enjoy playing Atrus in your games, or did you wish someone else could have done it? [Submitted by desertfern.]
Most of you who know me know that I played Atrus in the games for budgetary reasons, and it’s fun with your brother in a basement. That’s easy. That’s not too intimidating. It ramped up for Riven, and there’s a whole camera crew and people you don’t know. Oh no, that’s not my personality. I love chatting with people, but memorizing lines—that is out of my comfort zone.
There’s something intriguing about it, and the older I get, the more intrigued by acting [I become]. I think some of it is just watching good actors and actresses onscreen. One of the things I never realized—and this is because I’m kind of naïve and stupid; that’s why I do this to begin with. It’s like, “Sure, I’ll make a big game and whatever.” One of the things I think I never realized when I was playing those roles—because I never took this in school—is you have to fill in a lot of the holes with stuff that’s not on the script. Good actors and actresses do that in really great ways with pauses and subtle emotions and facial things and even where their hands go and stuff.
I didn’t know all that, so my performances are a little flat. I’m a slow learner. I do wish someone else would have done it. It would have been a better project. Although the story—with me playing it—is kind of cool now that it’s done.
Can we please please PLEASE have some removable red pages and blue pages in the KS Linking book? [Submitted by Alien.]
Of all the crazy things, we’ve actually discussed that here because we’re fans like you guys. We have the same ideas you have, and somebody brought that up. The hard part is the logistics of all of this. Please believe me: This is not like doing things virtually. Everything has layers of sludge to it. We have IdeaPlanet that we’re working with in Dallas, and they’re incredible! But you kind of get blurred lines because we work with IdeaPlanet because they work with the manufacturers, a lot of which are in China. In fact, I think people from IdeaPlanet representing our stuff are in China right now for some of this stuff to make sure we’re locking down some things. Anyway, long story short: There’s every little leap with what has to be done. We try to line things up for the Kickstarter. Then we think of changes, and they say, “Oh, that’s different. We may or may not be able to do that.” Rest assured that things that you guys want, we want, too. It’s just a matter of—I’m going to get into this right now.
[Rand holds up a finger.]
This is a meter. This is the meter. This way is schedule: getting it done quickly. This way is quality: getting it done better. We, like you, would really like this soon. We would like the book and the inkwell soon—especially before the holidays. That’s one of the things we set out: “We have to get this before the holidays.” Now we’re getting to things like: we’ve changed some things on the screen to make it better. What will that cost us? We just found out yesterday or the day before it costs us ten days. Ten days. Now, that seems like nothing, but that ten days has pushed us in a way that one of the guys in the conversation went, “What? Wait. No! Ugh!” because it takes this many days to come on a boat from China, and then we’ve got to assemble things. Anyway, that’s the point. Now, with all that said, I’m telling you guys right now:
[Rand holds up his “meter” finger again.]
This is schedule and timing, and this is quality. Forget what I said before. This is the schedule, and this is the quality. Look at my meter. We’re tipping this way [toward quality]. Some of you are going to say, “No, I want it sooner.” I think most of you are going to say, “No, do as it good as you can.” There are limits to how good we can do it, so give us some grace. We are like you: We want it done better.
We also sent some change requests to China in the last week for little things that we’re trying to fix as well. I know those are going to comes back, and the guys going to go, “Okay, well that’s going to add another five to ten days if we change those.” And we’re going to say, probably, “Okay, go ahead.” And suddenly we’re at twenty days. In working days, that’s however many per month, and we’re a month behind. You have to trust us. We’re doing things as fast as we can—as quickly as we can—but also we want quality.
As a fan of Uru: have you ever considered making some of the content once available on the DRC site accessible again? [Submitted by Klein.]
That stuff is so cool. Yeah, we should look into that. I don’t even know where all that is. I’m sure we’ve got it backed up somewhere. Yes. That stuff was so much fun, by the way, because the game was not just played in the world, as though of you who were involved in that know. We played it in this world, too. You checked the websites. Love it. So very proud of it.
Would you (Cyan) please put together a Myst calendar every year for fans to purchase? [Submitted by Bryon.]
[Ryan:] We have some announcements coming, and maybe that will be one of them.
Stay tuned. Merchandise is not something we’ve ever been into doing. I mentioned we do bits and not atoms. Some of that is because even back in the Myst days where you think, “Oh my gosh; it’s the biggest thing ever; we should make a ton of money,” it doesn’t make money. Merchandise doesn’t make money. We make merchandise things because we like having them, like you. Again, we’re just fans. I have this stuff. I love having this stuff. With that said, I’m not sure we can do this, but we can be involved. Stay tuned. We should do more of this. You’re right. We’re going to do more of this.
Least favorite age in the entire series? [Submitted by Tradley.]
Oh my gosh. Wow. Wow, wow, wow. Hmm.
[Ryan:] That’s a hard one. You designed all of them!
I didn’t have my fingers in all of them. Some of those were done by other people. I knew what they were doing, but I can’t say any of those were my least favorite because that’s just rude. It needs to be one of the ones I was involved in that’s my least favorite. Wow. I don’t know. That’s a really good questions. There’s so many Ages in Uru, and I keep trying to think of which one I don’t like, but they all had essence of things that, as the design team, we loved.
I’m sure people hated Minkata. I love that whole [inaudible] probably like food. I tell my wife when she makes something [and asks], “Do you like it?” I’ll tell her, “I don’t like this,” but then I have to preface it by saying, “No, really, actually I like everything. Some things I don’t like as much as other things, but there’s nothing I really dislike. Except liver.” The essence of this story is I don’t really have an Age that’s my “liver”. If I come up with one I don’t like, I will let you know.
We're working very hard to get to the 3750 Writer's Tier number. At present, we've moved from 1875 backers to 2742 backers - almost halfway to the intended goal! Will you consider including the supplemental audio material (URU Soundtrack + extra tracks) if we come up short in the end? [Submitted by Horatio.]
That is a good question. How short? We’re trying to wiggle that number as best we can. One of the reasons that number’s there is because there’s some good goals for us to make that incrementally lower our cost of goods. It’s all just nickels and dimes to a certain extent, but we’re trying to do the best we can. We’ll see if we can wiggle something and make it work. We’ll see how close we get.
The URU soundtrack is almost impossible to find. [Submitted by Horatio.]
Which is crazy kind of cool. That’s one of the reasons we would hate to just put it out there unless we’ve reached some kind of really cool goal. We would like to make it available. Even if we don’t make the goal, we’d like to bring that back out because I love that soundtrack. Tim did a great job.
With the updated URU being included in this Anniversary, will this include Path of the Shell and To D'ni story lines? [Submitted by Brandon.]
Yeah, it’s the Complete Chronicles, so yes.
A lot of the modern generation of video games influenced by Myst have taken the approach of skipping puzzles altogether - games like Gone Home, Dear Esther, and Firewatch, among others. Is this a sort of game that Cyan ever considers making, where you could create explorable worlds without the 'friction' of puzzles, or are puzzles something you consider essential to your style? [Submitted by Max.]
No, puzzles are not something we consider essential to our style. I think we’ve almost, in some ways, been misconstrued as a puzzle game. That’s not how we got started. If you look at our kids’ adventures, there weren’t puzzles in those. We were building worlds. The puzzles for us were something that, when we added them, gave this real sense of satisfaction. If they were built into the world well, it started having this intricate, magical feel to them when people accomplished them. It’s not at our core, but it started being this thing that we enjoyed doing.
With all that said, yes, we have considered doing games that are much less difficult—we’ll call it that. There’s less friction. The reality of it is that the amount of time spent on those games is less, but today’s generation—we’ve had these huge discussions about this—doesn’t expect necessarily to have forty hours in this type of game as these indie studios rise. Yeah, there’s wiggle room in that. Great question, though. Other people may think differently, but I don’t think of Myst as a puzzle game.
It’s cool because people like Jonathon Blow thought of it as a puzzle game, and that’s the part he liked the best, so when he made his game, he concentrated on the puzzles, and I love that. We definitely could skew with less puzzles and more story. The puzzles, by the way—it does make building these things difficult because you have to build the reason for that puzzle into the world. At least we feel like you have to. In our particular little niche that we do things, we’ve got to build that in wisely so it feels like it’s part of the world. That gets really difficult sometimes.
Can we do a kickstarter to make the two books that never happened a reality? I need me some of those. I would also back a kickstarter for VR Myst games. Any chance on that happening? What do we have in store for the future of Cyan as a whole? [Submitted by David.]
I like doing this for a living, so I’m going to ride this wave as far as I can. I enjoy doing it. We have plans, but we learned long ago that anything beyond a couple years is silly to plan unless there’s some large funding involved. We do a step at a time. Right now, we’re on the “small step” part of our existence. Those small steps sometimes lead into big things.
Kickstarter is a difficult choice for any of those: books or games or Myst VR. Myst VR is a no-brainer. I’ve said that before, but it’s also something that needs to be done really, really well. I don’t think that’s small potatoes, and I don’t think Kickstarter would give us the budget we need. That’s not something we look at trivially. That’s something we’re definitely serious about, but we’ll have to see where it fits into the timeframe of everything. That what the future holds. Who knows? We’ll see.
I remember seeing a post on the MOUL forums by Chogon a long time ago that referenced an early design for DIRT. Can you talk about what DIRT was originally going to be before it became Uru? [Submitted by Jordan.]
They were the same thing. In our minds, DIRT stood for “D’ni in Real Time”, and it was a real-time version of D’ni that we always toyed with the idea of doing multiplayer—or very early on toyed with that. Because broadband was increasingly prevalent, and we needed broadband to deliver our content. I don’t know where the one might have merged into the other, but we weren’t really interested in doing DIRT—so far as I can remember—ever as a single-player. That would just feel like another Myst sequel, and that’s not what we rolled off into after Riven. It was, “Let’s make adventures that never end.” That was our whole point, and, “Let’s bring this into current day.” It’s really the same thing. Just the name changed over the years from a code name to a real name. We love our code names.
What is your favorite myst game? [Submitted by Yeet.]
I think I’ve been asked this before. I love Myst the same way I love Star Wars—the original Star Wars Episode IV—not because when you look at it in the current day goggles it holds up, but because my emotions with it are so strong. I remember it in really good ways. I’d say Myst. Beyond that I love Riven because exhausting and we had a huge budge, but I have to say Uru is right up there. It was so amazing what we accomplished. I’m so proud of it. I’ve said it before. I just really love what that is, and I would still love to see that type of gameplay where it’s done—maybe not by us, but by somebody. I think that’s still coming, somewhere. A new form of entertainment kind of a thing.
What are the physical items (rewards) that you and/or others at Cyan are most excited about? Are then any items or things (either physical or digitial) that you wanted to include as rewards but weren't able to? [Submitted by Christopher.]
That’s a great question. We’re all excited about the book. The book was the first thing that came up: “Let’s put this in a book.” I love gadgets and geek things, and we had a fan who, a couple of years ago, sent us a little sample thing they had got in the mail. We’ve got a couple of these things as well. When you open it up it has a little LCD screen in it. As soon as we saw the book design and thought of that, we realized, “We’ve got to put an LCD screen in there with the flybys.” That just was exciting. That one is really cool. That’s a “gimme”—everybody loves that, especially the fact that you can customize it, that you can put your own videos on there, that you can tweak things, that we might in the future have things we can give you. Gotta love that.
We had discussions about what the other items would be. We were trying to keep this Kickstarter very simple. This is not made to make us rich. I know it looks differently out there: “$2 million woooo!” That’s okay. That’s not what we’ll have when this is all done. The point is we wanted to do cool things.
Gehn’s inkwell came up early because it’s so interesting. I mentioned this, I think, in one of the updates that it’s very representative of that whole thing that Gehn did where you monopolize the world. You destroy the world in order to get what you need. That beetle inkwell kind of signifies that. We all knew that thing was beautiful.
One of the options we came up with was an actual Myst Island—a little cast Myst Island thing that is pretty cool but incredibly complicated and expensive to make. We even had it checked out, and it like, “Yeah, that’s expensive.” We would have had to raise the price considerably on the highest tier. It becomes prohibitively expensive if the price of this thing—you only have 100 people buying it—tooling was crazy. I still think that’s a cool idea. I love it. In fact, I liked it so much I got a 3D printer for my birthday and did some experiments with that. Someday I’ll show you guys. It was just fun. They’re not anything perfect, but it was kind of fun.
By the way, I love calligraphy. I’m one of those guys who took calligraphy in high school, and I was a font geek before people knew what the word “font” was. I’ve mentioned that before, too. I had the Letraset font catalogue in high school. That’s just weird. That is so messed up. People don’t do that, but I did. Having the inkwell and a pen that’s actually—I had ink and did calligraphy. That was fun.
Will the Age flybys you're preparing for the Myst book include the Ages of Uru and Myst V? That would be new content for us since those games didn't use flybys in their books [Submitted by AndrewW.]
That’s hard. The first goal in all this is to collect the flybys we have. You guys know I’m rendering some new ones of Myst Island, but the first goal is collecting everything we’ve got. Some of these we can’t re-render, but we’re doing some fun things as well. Some of the flybys from Exile—because it was done later—they’re larger; they’re more fullscreen—but the framerate on those are a little slower because QuickTime wouldn’t handle it back then, or the computers wouldn’t handle it. With some tools that we have, we can do some really intelligent flow—adding frames to those—and smooth out that animation in really good ways. It seems to be working well on some of those.
Rest assured, we’re trying to get the best version of all the ones we have that we can. Some of those are going to look very bad because we can’t do anything. It’s got this really old grainy retro feel that is just like those Myst books looked like. That should be interesting. Beyond that, I’m going to try and render stuff from Myst Island. That’s the one we have most fixed up, and we’ll see what we can do with the other ones. For Uru, we don’t have a lot of access to those models. We might have a couple little things.
Some of this is we have to get these flybys done to get them baked in for production soon—in a few weeks. The cool thing is we can bake a bunch of those in, so when you open your book it’s going to have a bunch of those. But we can also have a site—a web address—that you guys can go to—in fact, we already have (we don’t have anything there yet)—that you can go to and we can upload new things. If we find ways to make new flybys in the future, you guys will all have access to those. You can drop those in your book whenever you want.
What format will the Myst digital novels be in? [Submitted by Aidan.]
I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. I looked into a couple options. Tony has, too. We’re still investigating. Personally, I use Kindle, and you can do PDFs on a Kindle. They have apps for everything. That one seems likely, but we’ll make sure we try to keep everyone in mind, and we’ll keep it as flexible as we need to for that.
Will there be support for Linux? [Submitted by David and Josh.]
You know, we’ve been investigating Linux. Honestly, we’ve been trying to find out what it would cost, and we just found out this morning. It’s prohibitively expensive. I know there’s a group of people who want that, but believe me, it’s not anywhere big enough to pay the bill for this. Some of that to do with the diversity of the particular Linux setups and how many would need to be supported. It’s not us doing it. It would be someone else, so I think we’re going to have to bail on that for this Kickstarter. It doesn’t mean in the future we can’t revisit it, but timing-wise and debugging-wise, it’s just beyond the scope for this. I hate to disappoint Linux people, but stay tuned for future things. We’ll see if we can revisit that now that we have some resources that might work.
Where should we post questions for Rand to answer later?
I might poke into Reddit. I just posted a thing on Reddit today. I might poke in there and answer some questions there, too. That seems like a good thread to answer stuff on if you guys want to meet me there. I don’t know if I can do it today. I’m might be able to get in there some today. Yeah, I’ll try to get over there today. It’s in the Myst Subreddit.
Does Atrus ever get any free time for other hobbies or is it just books books books all day long? [Submitted by Connor.]
That is pretty funny. From the look of things, it’s books, books, books or inviting people to help him save his incredibly fractured and dysfunctional family that makes us all feel like we’re normal.
I have a question about the screenshot on the last page of the Art of Cyan PDF from the Obduction Kickstarter. The one page says 'Perhaps...' and then there is a screenshot of Myst island. But this render is not from any of the current games. What is it from? Myst VR maybe? Also, the D'ni text on the library translates to 'Riven'. Is that significant in any way? [Submitted by Devon.]
Nope. Other than the “Perhaps…”—and you all know what that means; we may have addressed this elsewhere—we have things going here all the time that we’re trying. That was from a VR version of Myst Island that we tried, but it’s cheat. It all looked good from just a few locations because we had to do it in a week. Our artists are freaking amazing. They pulled that off.
Anyway, it looked cool. It is what it is for weeks worth of work. We all kind of thought it was cool to stick in there a small place. I think there’s some larger versions of it on the web now that some of our artists have put up. It was really cool to see in VR—having that depth. It was nice to whet the appetite, but the point of it was, “This thing’s not ending,”—the “Perhaps…” thing. Bill put it onto his post—if you guys haven’t read any of Bill’s posts, you should read them. They’re so great. I learn stuff. But Bill put it on his.
This whole series started with, “Perhaps the ending has not yet been written,” and we set our course. As much as we keep wrapping it up, just like any good story it starts writing itself. That’s why that’s on the back cover. This story keeps writing itself. We have some fun plans that we hope we can pull off in the future. They involve VR and Myst and fun things.
I’m going to say, “Thank you.” We’ve been going an hour. I’ll try and do more questions probably on Reddit, like Ryan said—The Myst Subreddit. Check out that post of our father doing Atrus. That’s a gem right there. It was so funny. Notice as he’s looking down—I just put a few cuts of it in there—but as he’s looking down, he’s reading the script. We were just testing, and he was having to look down and read some of that stuff. He ended up having other, more important things to do than play around with his crazy sons’ stupid video game—which, at the time, I’m sure everybody thought it was. Nobody knew Myst would be what it was. He was a good sport. Check that out. I’ll try to pop in there and answer some more questions.
Thank you, guys. This was awesome. We appreciate all your support, and we’ve got a few more days. Let’s bump this up. Thanks!