How it all started

It was the end of summer 1991. Soldiers were leaving the Persian Gulf. The Soviet Union was taking its last gasp. And we had just received the funding for something we would call Myst.

We had it all planned out. The name had been chosen. The story was going to be something about an island. The artwork would be hand-painted. The characters would be hand-animated. There would be no dying. There would be no "save-game" function. And the player would be the protagonist, having to rely on his or her own intuition to work through the story.

Pretty good huh?

A few months into the project we realized that we had no idea what we were doing. Design, graphics, animations, character development, scripting, editing, sound effects, music, interactivity - it was all a mystory to us.

And this is how the creation of Myst became a two-year experiment. Ninety percent of our time was spent figuring out how to do things; the other ten percent was spent doing them. So, by the end of it, we were actually incredibly surprised to encounter such success. Our experiment turned into a so-called "hit", and we started thinking, "Hey, we actually know what we're doing! Let's make the sequel! It'll be easy!"

It wasn't.

Riven ended up being a mammoth undertaking, taking a team of over 20 people almost four years to produce. It has been the most grueling, yet the most thrilling, creative experience of our lives. And now, as we wrap things up, we once again begin to believe we know what we're doing. Strange. Yet, at the same time, it becomes apparent that we are only scratching the surface of this still very undefined medium.

Rand and Robyn Miller, Cyan, Inc.
(From Myst to Riven, 1997)

And that was only the beginning...