It was an astonishing phenomenon, a computer game produced by some people in rural Washington, not near the Microsoft-shadowed Seattle but way over on the eastern edge of the state, near nothing else. Myst was the best story I had ever stumbled onto. Myst was what kept me coming back to Spokane, Myst and its successor, Myst II (as it was called in the garage days) or Riven (as it is called today). That garage (the walls of the conference room downstairs had been plastic, with tiny clattering space heaters that barely cut the chill - I could remember meetings in that office where all the participants looked as though they were about to mount the final push for the Pole) was in turn bigger and more luxurious than the basement of Robyn Miller's house, where Myst had been created. As tacky and ungainly as the building was, it was a step up from the old Cyan offices in the garage of the man named Chris Brandkamp. I had been in that building one year before, when the company called Cyan had been occupying it. The only sign of its former tenants was a distinctive blue trim that ran along the roof line, a sort of deep aqua that people who work with color might call cyan. In the corner of a strip mall on the northern border of Spokane, Washington, stood a mattress store called Comfort World.
On my last evening in Spokane, after I had wandered Riven's caves and forests, after I had turned a dozen animated valves and seen a dozen Mysterious thrones and eaten of the five-lobed fruit, after I had lingered under the winking planetarium in the basement lair of the creators of the caves and forests and valves and thrones one last time, after I had brooded about landscape and memory and constructed lonely theories on the deserted high-way after all those things, I revisited the place where the story began again. Jon Carroll on the exclusive inside story of making Riven.
Myst was so beautiful, so compelling, so revolutionary, that its sequel created impossible expectations - especially among its obsessed creators.
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