Myst

Myst is a first-person graphic adventure game developed by Cyan and published by Broderbund. Created by brothers Rand and Robyn Miller, it was first released for the Macintosh in September 1993 and later ported to Windows and many other platforms. The player is transported to a mysterious island with no instructions, no conventional inventory, no enemies, and no way to die, and must explore, observe, and solve environmental puzzles to piece together the story of Atrus and his sons through books and journals scattered across the world. Built in HyperCard on the Mac and presented through pre-rendered still images with the occasional video clip, Myst was designed as a showcase for the emerging CD-ROM format, delivering a level of visual fidelity and atmosphere that floppy-based games could not match. Its slow, contemplative design divided a games press accustomed to action and scorekeeping, but it found an enormous mainstream audience, including many people who had never bought a game before. Myst became the best-selling PC game of its era, a record it held until The Sims surpassed it in 2002. It spawned sequels, novelizations, and remakes, and is frequently cited both as a defining product of the multimedia CD-ROM boom and as an influential, if debated, milestone in adventure game design.