For a time, Myst was the video game. Dense, full of obscure puzzles, and with a twist ending, a video game where you wandered around poking at stuff was novel at the time and revived interest in the adventure game, arguably kicking off a golden age of PC gaming. It fell into obscurity, but Myst is coming back with a TV show. And, with a new game, Obduction, coming out, Rand Miller is confirming a rumor about the game that went around for years.
Yes, ’90s gaming fans, it is absolutely true: Disney was, for a while, trying to build a theme park based around Myst. In fact, Miller notes they had a perfect island and a bunch of other aspects pretty much locked into place. So what happened?
Their imagineering team was excited about embracing that and building some stuff into it and tying it into the rest of the park, where you could explore and have this real-world experience. But, the way Disney works, and the way it had to fit in with their bigger scheme of things, and the way we didn’t understand pieces of it, I think it fell apart from their point of view. That was a very exciting time. It was cool to try to pull that off.
That’s a bit of a shame, really. If any video game could benefit from being turned into a genuine, tactile experience, it’s Myst. In fact, being able to fiddle with the buttons and turn the dials might actually make the game’s notoriously tough puzzles a lot easier to grasp. But at least we’ve still got Obduction arriving next week.
(Via Paleofuture)