Myst

Myst was a mysterious computer-based exploration experience (Note: it was not a game] created in the early 1990s to show everybody how awesome computer graphics were and how boring it would be to actually create them. The game was unbelievable and inexplicably popular. It was bought by ten million people, given as a Christmas present by eight million people, unwrapped by three million people, installed by 120,000 people, played by seventeen people, completed by four people, and enjoyed by one.

This is sad because Myst had an extremely exciting ending. To be exact, it had four, and of the four people completing the game only one saw the "real one", the other three were content living with the fact that the bad endings are kind of funny and uninstalled the game shortly afterwards.

Myst was created by two brothers who liked each other so much they decided to create a game about two brothers who try to kill each other, and then to make sure the irony wasn't lost on people, decided to dress up and act out those characters themselves.

Myst is a silly game, for silly people. The gameplay is very simplistic, as is the plot. It is silly. Very silly indeed.

The Island of Myst, as seen from above. Clearly demonstrating the superior graphics of the Fondant Texture Engine, and ICED Lighting System. Heavens it's tasty!

Story of Myst

In the game Myst, the first thing that happens is a man jumps into a hole, disappears, and then his book falls through space until a man who happens to be standing around there picks it up. This is very mysterious, and to make it extra-mysterious, the reason why is never explained.

Soon, players discover an island built by a man named Atrus who lives in a giant Dunny (that means "toilet" in Strine). For reasons known only to himself, he created an island for his family to live on, comprised of almost no living-quarters or bathrooms, and instead, almost entirely of security mechanisms which would be used should anyone ever burn all but four of his books.

Luckily for Atrus, his forward-planning paid off, because someone indeed did burn all but four of his books (Technically, a fifth book was still intact, if a bit charred. However, it's mostly useless except for this one page). Therefore, the construction of a giant rocket ship with a music keyboard [which is a pain in the ass]in it which can not fly, a massive fake tree with an elevator hidden in it, a sailing ship on a planet consisting entirely of just one small island, and an inexplicable pair of giant cogs, and some other useless puzzles for you to find out.

In addition, Atrus also wrote two special books, one red & one blue, to hold his sons Sirrus & Achenar. The game tells us that they were actually put there because they were blamed for burning all but four of Atrus' books, but there is speculation that they were put in there to prevent them from having gay sex with each other. And to prevent their escape, Atrus tore out 6 pages each from the books, which magically decided to hide in 12 random locations, 1 for each page. The player cannot carry more than one page at a time, either, because he is a weak little girly-man.

In the game, the player must rescue Atrus from the Dunny before it is too late.

Main Characters

Atrus

Paper on which to write these books, you say?

The dad. He wrote all the books. Atrus is a member of The Arts and Letters Club. Atrus has a library card, but has never been able to use it. Atrus once wrestled a three-headed crocodile to death in the swamps of the Tall Tree Age because he looked at him funny, went on a five-month Opium bender with Oscar Wilde, and carved his face into a mountainside with a toothbrush, all in the name of literature.

Sirrus

Sirrus writes erotic short fiction.

The foppy, conservative, and cleanlier of the two brothers. Sirrus reads Shakespeare, and sometimes acts it out in his underwear in each of his rooms in any of the Myst ages. Sirrus has a fairly large collection of Gundams which he keeps locked away in the Big Metal Pagoda Age. Sirrus enjoys a nice cup of wine and is also a heroin addict.

Achenar

We must have the blue pages, precious...

The deranged, meth-addicted psychopath, and older brother to Sirrus. Achenar did shrooms a lot in the Tall Tree Age. Achenar owns a copy of Mein Kampf, which he uses for rolling papers. He is completly insane from eating too much pie . Achenar listens to System of a Down and Iron Maiden [up the irons]. Achenar drinks his whiskey straight. Achenar is a Buddhist. Achenar has seen Natural Born Killers over seventy-three thousand times, in fact it's the only movie he owns. Plus, he also enjoys beheading people.

Catherine

Catherine is Atrus' wife. Normally, Atrus and Catherine get along just fine, but when Atrus wanted to take a month-long vacation to Myst with his sons, she stubbornly refused to go. While Atrus and his sons were visiting Myst, she was captured by ninja-monkeys of death (under the elite command of Chuck Norris himself) and was sold into slavery to Atrus's five-hundred-year-old father, Mr. Genn. But you're not supposed to know that yet anyway so who gives a crap.

Places to go on Myst island

There are many exciting tourist attractions and things to notice that Atrus and his sons built at random.

The Dock

The dock is the first place to visit. Invisible seagulls are calling in the distance, and the player has not the slightest idea what is going on or what he is supposed to do, as is typical of the entire game.

The Underground Chamber

If the player looks hard enough (by turning right three times), the player finds a secret chamber where Methamphetamine is concocted. You can get high off of the meth, causing Atrus to temporarily appear in your delusions as he talks something about how one of his sons is an epic failure but he's not sure which one.

The Cogs

There are big fricken' gears randomly placed on the map that provide evidence that the entire island is actually a big fricken' space ship They serve no purpose whatsoever except grinding noobs to bits.

The Mysterious Building

Going up the stairs, there is an incredible place where dreamy music plays, you can kill the lights, sit back in the chair, and look at very seductive images on the TV above. The database of these images is so large that you can choose the date the person you're looking at was born. Needless to say, the game including the images took up 723 floppy disks of space. Unfortunately, this only appeared in the Macintosh version of the game (which one person bought and nobody played). In the PC version, Bill Gates ordered the removal of all of these images and replaced them with random images of white dots on a black background (nobody actually knows these pictures turn him on anyway).

The Library

The heart (and cholesterol) of Myst. Because minimal time was spent developing the actual plot, not much thought was put into the contents of the library. Therefore, most of the books are destroyed. Four books are about random nonsense. The other book is a puzzle-book given by Atrus as a present to Achenar. Indeed, there are 300 Kakuro puzzles, and Achenar has not attempted to solve even one.

The Tower

In a secret blatantly obvious passage, there is a tower and an elevator that Atrus constructed when Sirrus and Achenar were kids. When Atrus needed some quality quiet time to play God and make new worlds, his kids would play in the elevator! (admit it, even YOU loved riding the elevator in the shopping mall). The tower can also rotate 375 degrees counter-clockwise and upside-down.

The Fountain

The fountain is a seemingly peaceful place run by powerful dark forces of evil-type stuff. Atrus posted Sirrus's childhood drawings of random objects on the walls. They somehow have the ability to turn trippy colors like red and green and make noises like a gorilla. If you roundhouse kick some of the drawings, Michael Jackson will resurrect, causing you to have to run like mad to the Treasure Island Age, unless you are a girl, in which you have more time. (Remember that girls don't play these games anyway)

The Cabin

The cabin is where Atrus usually lives, if he wasn't stuck in Dunny. Because Atrus has no soul, he never eats or sleeps, which is why his house is empty. There is also an enormous, fake tree in the back. If you are lucky, have good timing, and are not a noob, you can open the safe, light the match, place it underneath the furnace, run out of the cabin (HINT: press the Ctrl-Alt-Delete key combination as fast as you can), survive the deafning explosion and dive in the massive hole in the ground and escape to the Black Forest of Doom Age before Smokey the Bear rips you apart.

The Clock Tower

The broken down clock symbolizes that time has stopped in this magical world and you could literally be playing it for hours if you don't stop now. If you somehow manage to cross the water (which is filled with invisible razor-sharp-teeth piranhas, of course), you'll find a strange three-digit mechanism. Clearly, noob players try and enter the combination 2-2-1, which is an obscure hint found somewhere else in the game, but that only causes a Rickroll to occur. The only correct and viable option is to enter 4-2.

The Nuclear Power Plant

The point of the nuclear power plant is for you to push as many red buttons as possible in the time allotted. If the voltage goes over 59 volts (or was it 69?), a nuclear meltdown occurs and the player must contact tech support.

The Spaceship

IF you can figure out how to get into the spaceship, you'll find an organ lining the wall. The goal is to play the Cyan theme song in the key of G sharp. If you miss one single note, the rocket launches and you crash into Mars. Alternately, you can hit random keys on the keyboard until Atrus comes back from Dunny and complains that you're playing way too loud.

The Fireplace

In the fireplace, there is a sledgehammer, in which you can make square-shaped indentations on the fire-place door. Just like computers, if you hit it with the hammer enough, it will actually do what you want. You'll find a green linking book to Dunny, where Atrus quickly pulls up his pants and demands that you bring you a white page or he'll smash you with his fists of steel. The white page does not actually exist, as far as you know...

The Boxy Looking Swtichy Things

These do absolutely nothing. Atrus put them there... well, nobody knows why exactly. Perhaps he was drunk. Perhaps if you count up the number of switches on the island, you might learn something about his wife and kids. But probably not. The actual reason is that they are actually ? boxes that have already been found, just like in Mario. There is a secret path near the clock tower, and you can try to find one of the ? boxes if you click on just the right pixel. Inside is the bunny creature from Myst III: Exile.

Ok, if you promise not to tell ANYONE, not even your mom, I'll tell you what the switches do. If you turn every switch to the ON position, and then head back to the dock and turn the switch to the OFF position, you watch in horror as the library tower opens and reveals a missile silo that launches a multiple-nuclear-warhead rocket which destroys every age in the game, as well as Soviet Russia. Depressing music plays as the bunny jumps across the credits.

Ages of Myst

The four conveniently hidden books take the player to four different worlds, all of which have been affected by global warming. They are:

The Treasure Island Age

How do you know you're not?

A shipwrecked crew of only men with no hope to get back to civilization. They all become insanely stupid and killed each other over who was the craziest. Now they walk the age as zombies looking for some one they can drive insane, too.

Hint: You need the shotgun before you can go to this age safely. You can find it in the Pink Floyd Age.

The Big Metal Pagoda Age

Only $900 at F.A.O.Scwartz

Home to an advanced civilization that makes neat tin toys. They are at war with the Char-Broiled Pirates, and have been able to whop their sorry arses despite the fact that their fortress has NO GUNS.

The Incredibly Straight Trees Age

Those damn monkies!

A world in which the local residents are protesting the building of wind turbines, as it obscures their view of the ocean. Coincidentally, these protesters are primitive monkeys.

The Pink Floyd Age

THE HORROR!

A horrifying planetarium world of lazer shows and projections of planets and meatball showers. The player has only five minutes to escape or he will go mad and die. You must get the shotgun here before you can go to the Treasure Island Age.

The Possible Endings

Here are the possible ways to win the game without using a cheat code (such as Alt-F4):

The aforementioned missile apocalypse.

If you are stupid enough to actually listen to the brothers, and you bring them all 923434534 pages of their favorite color, then you are immediately transported to where they are located (Sirrus is in Purgatory, and Achenar is in Limbo). For whatever reason, they immediately pop out and laugh at how you've been haxed and how epically you fail, you noob.

Atrus demands that you come to Dunny with the white page. As said before, it is literally impossible to find the white page, so if you try to go there, he gets really mad. He challenges you to a manly man contest in which you must fight a lightsaber duel in the ring-shaped room. Use the arrow keys to move, the mouse the swing your lightsaber, and the computer's power button to use the force. The trick, however, is to not mortally wound him. If you manage to incapacitate him, he'll suddenly remember that the white page had nothing on it (or else it wouldn't be white!!!), and he manages to recreate a white page. This finishes his book, which allows you to go back to Myst island and playing the whole damn thing over again.

If you mortally wound Atrus, you lost the game. HA! YOU JUST LOST THE GAME! Anyway, this is a very serious situation. Now you that Atrus is dead, you become the new Atrus, and you are obligated to wait in Dunny until a new human player arrives to finish the game. Because the lazy retards at Cyan did not even code for hotseat mode(let alone online play), you might be waiting for a long time.

Marketing Triumph

It wasn't revealed until much later when the creators of Myst were interviewed by Playboy while rolling in large piles of money with hookers and champagne, that the whole project was a marketing scheme.

"In the end it all paid off, Myst was so Mysterious", laughing briefly
at his own joke while fondlind a wad of $1,000 bills, "and the graphics
so wonderfully rendered, and the puzzles and quests so fucking obtuse
that software pirates, who's brains are pretty tiny anyway, just wouldn't
touch it."

Here our interview was paused as the Creators, as they liked to call themselves,
had to get the pool boy to rescue two of the hookers from the champagne filled
swimming pool.  Apparently they had decided that the bubbles would stop them
from drowning. "Stupid bitches, we've lost six that way so far. Anyhow, Myst was 
never pirated. A fucking major success!"

Global impact

When Myst came out, there was no such thing as CD-ROM. Therefore, the designers had to come up with a way of getting the data to you, so they decided to write all of it to a shiny plastic disc. So, if it weren't for Myst, you'd still be using floppy disks!

When they made Myst, there was no known way to make terrain in the shape of an island. Previously, all terrain was in the shape of bricks and pipes with giant flowers in them. Therefore, the designers had to come up with a height field which let them draw the terrain on paper and it would come alive within the computer. So, if it weren't for Myst, you'd still be only dreaming about islands and height fields, instead of living them, and drawing them.

When they made Myst, there was no concept of infinite sea. All games prior to Myst had only a finite sea. Therefore, the designers had to come up with a way of making an infinite sea, which was basically to make a finite sea really really big so you couldn't notice. So, if it weren't for Myst, we would still be limited by the finiteness of our seas. Myst has shown us that even if our boats are sunken we can still have an infinite sea.

Seriously though, it is a good piece of crap, please look at it. We need more money to build a fence to keep the hookers out of the pool.

Successors

• Riven: The Sequel to Myst

• Myst III: Exile

• Myst IV: Revelation

• Uru

• Myst V: End of Ages

Parodies

• Pyst

• Driven: The Sequel to Pyst

• Missed

• Mylk

• Fyst