Any Grantland article that links to Tolkien Gateway is a winner in my book.
Oh gosh. I was 3 or 4 years old when this came out. My brother I had a habit of sitting on my dad's lap, one on each knee, playing Nightmare 3D. I would hit the spacebar to open the doors. My brother and my dad each had a ctrl button to shoot the bad guys. And my dad would move around with my brother and I telling him where to go. I would also control the red and green potions which revealed the map. So much fun. OH! And Commander Keen. Remember that guy? Then we got Myst because, as the article says, it was supposed to change gaming. I don't think we ever got past like 10 minutes. I remember we would go up to the compass or sundial and then nothing. My dad got a bit further by himself but it didn't work with us as a group and so we went back to Nightmare 3D. A few years later, maybe 5 or 6 years later, before we had internet in the house, I tried again. Still nothing. I remember the feeling that this was an epic game. It was so eerie and cool and confusing and I always felt drawn to it. But I never got very far. I forwarded this to my dad and he just said "blink 20 years blink...oh my," Even I feel old reading this. :/
I haven't been able to get a chunk of time to play games in ages and ages. I wish!
I think the biggest legacy of Myst is not so much what that game did and didn't do, as it was just to show that it was possible to create new kinds of games and succeed. It didn't really end up defining a new genre; more like its success enabled other out-of-the-mainstream games. After Myst, a game developer could plausibly say "yes, there's nothing like this game out now - but people WILL buy a game that's like nothing before, if it's compelling - just look at Myst!".
But I was disappointed that it never mentions Shadow of the Colossus, which definitely couldn't have existed without Myst, and is one of the single greatest games ever made.
Now that you mention it, I can see the connection. Loved Myst; Riven, not so much. I played through SOTC for the first time, just a couple of months ago. Great game! Incredible soundtrack too. Only a couple of downsides - the PS3 version has freeze/lag problems sometimes; and there's almost no replay value there. Small defects for such a masterpiece, though.
and there's almost no replay value there.
Yes. I've seen that article. Hunting down glitches in a game is not my idea of replay value; but, to each his own. Compared to, say, GTA:SA - I still fire that up on my old Xbox (original! not 360!) once in a while, climb in to the Hydra or some other plane, and buzz downtown SF for kicks.