Cyan's Classic 'Myst' Arrives in App Store

[MacRumors]

The classic game of Myst has arrived in the App Store. Myst is a 1993 game that was originally developed for the Mac under Apple's Hypercard tool. While rather simplistic by today's standards, the game was both a critical and commercial success becoming the best selling computer game up until that time.

The game starts you on a strange island where you must explore your surroundings, solve puzzles and figure out the backstory.

The interface is entirely point-and-click driven. Switches, clues and other hints are explored by tapping on interesting items on the screen. There are also many puzzle elements that must be solved in order to complete the game.

A video of the game shows it from the launch which should bring back memories for fans of the original game:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTFyj-L4mrs

The game comes in at a massive 727MB and 1.5GB free on your iPhone or iPod Touch for installation.

App Store Link: Myst, $5.99

Article Link: Cyan's Classic 'Myst' Arrives in App Store

[alexbates]

Awesome, I'm getting that. But 727MB... thats insane! Developers need to make apps a small size because if all the good 3D games were like that, you could only have 5 games. Or Apple needs to make an iPhone with a larger HD.

[DanielKane]

Nice, I'll be buying it

[jmann]

I love that game. I am so excited about this.

[BlizzardBomb]

Originally Posted by alexbates

Awesome, I'm getting that. But 727MB... thats insane! Developers need to make apps a small size because if all the good 3D games were like that, you could only have 5 games. Or Apple needs to make an iPhone with a larger HD.

I'm guessing optimizing it for size would've taken more work than they'd have liked.

[jmaquarry]

Definitely buying this game...
Space is not an issue for me... 700+mb or not -
of course with the hopeful release of spotify in the near future, means i will be able to support many more games/apps this size - i would rather have a brilliant classic opposed to one scaled down and minimised due to size restrictions...

[Fiveos22]

Oh yes, that does jog memories. I love the music from the original Myst.

BTW is this the 3D-ified version of the game?

Edit: Oh no, its the actual original! Woah.

[Jamnabot]

As long as it's such a large size because the music is high quality, I'm fine with it!

Not that I have an iPhone or Touch, but I still approve.

[ViciousShadow21]

oh man i loved Myst. does anyone know where i can get it for Leopard. preferably free.

on a side note does anybody remember the sequel to Myst called Riven? i didnt like it as much.

EDIT: looked around and there does not seem anywhere that one can play it online. but since the iPhone runs os x i would think that pretty soon that one will be available to download or play online.

[rhumbaclave]

I want the 7th Guest now that would bring back memory's. I wonder if I still know the puzzles.

[The General]

Originally Posted by BlizzardBomb

I'm guessing optimizing it for size would've taken more work than they'd have liked.

The game isn't 3D, it's prerendered. "Optimizing it for size" would've been as simple as using Imagemagick and doing something like:

convert -resize 50% -quality 80 input.jpg output.jpg

Which they probably DID do. There are thousands of images in Myst. The original game was massive too. It's the nature of the beast that is Myst.

[BlizzardBomb]

Originally Posted by The General

The game isn't 3D, it's prerendered. "Optimizing it for size" would've been as simple as using Imagemagick and doing something like:

convert -resize 50% -quality 80 input.jpg output.jpg

Which they probably DID do. There are thousands of images in Myst. The original game was massive too. It's the nature of the beast that is Myst.

I didn't say it was 3D I know there are a lot of images in the game, most of the game is basically images. But there's also video and audio to account for too. I'm not saying they didn't optimize it, just I'm "guessing" (key word in my first post ) they didn't fiddle with it as much as they could've given a larger budget and more time.

[The General]

Originally Posted by BlizzardBomb

I didn't say it was 3D

Yeah, I was kind of address you and alexbates in the same post.

[raggedjimmi]

Glad to see the dead horse that is the original Myst is still being beaten.

[Adamo]

Originally Posted by raggedjimmi

Glad to see the dead horse that is the original Myst is still being beaten.

Obviously it isn't dead if people are getting excited about it and wanting to buy it.. there's no other way to play it than getting the original and hoping it'll run.

Here's hoping for 7th Guest, 11th Hour and the Lucasart's classics.

[JGowan]

Originally Posted by raggedjimmi

Glad to see the dead horse that is the original Myst is still being beaten.

Kind of a clever thing to say, but I don't agree with your sentiment. I think if a game is good, keep bringing it to new devices. I wish Nintendo would bring their old SNES games to the iPhone. There's an appeal to having your old favorite with you at all times.

Side note: best game that should be brought to the iPhone is KLAX. I think it would be awesome on this platform.

[rstansby]

Originally Posted by The General

The game isn't 3D, it's prerendered. "Optimizing it for size" would've been as simple as using Imagemagick and doing something like:

convert -resize 50% -quality 80 input.jpg output.jpg

Which they probably DID do. There are thousands of images in Myst. The original game was massive too. It's the nature of the beast that is Myst.

The original game was massive for its time. But that was 1993 when you could buy a mac classic II with an 80MB hard-drive. I believe Myst came on a CD, so it couldn't have been 797 MB.

[TraceyS/FL]

Well i'm ready to buy.

And I don't even own anything to play it ON right now! LOL!!!

I'd love to have 7th Guest and Deja Vu too!

[Kilamite]

Considering how long the intro is, I'm not surprised how big the game size is! Might be good for those long train journeys.

[djgamble]

Originally Posted by rstansby

The original game was massive for its time. But that was 1993 when you could buy a mac classic II with an 80MB hard-drive. I believe Myst came on a CD, so it couldn't have been 797 MB.

Without some kind of compression...

I think another assumption being made is that things would be scaled down because the iPod Touch isn't powerful enough. The original Myst used a 256 colour palette and ran on 640x480 screens that used maybe 72 ppi.

I'd be interested to see if they went the other way... in the Myst days there weren't 480×320 screens that handled 163 ppi and had 3:2 aspect ratio's. Just because the screen's physically, doesn't mean it's cr@p! It's widescreen, supports either millions or thousands of colours and has a decent pixel density.

Myst was originally 256 colours and made for dodgy-as oldschool 256-colour 640x480 monitors.

You also didn't see 533 MHz CPU's, GPU's (at all) or machines with 128mb RAM that weren't big fridges made by SUN that were linked together. The raw processing power of the iPod Touch gives them no reason to scale things back.

---

Have they exported the audio and images at a HIGHER quality than the original? I'd be hoping that they haven't exported the images as 256-colour images and the sound at pre-AAC/MP3 compression days where even dodgy quality files were 50MB+.

[NinjaHERO]

Originally Posted by rstansby

The original game was massive for its time. But that was 1993 when you could buy a mac classic II with an 80MB hard-drive. I believe Myst came on a CD, so it couldn't have been 797 MB.

My thought exactly. Even a direct port shouldn't have been this big. They must of ramped it up quite a bit.

[caseyfw]

Originally Posted by rstansby

The original game was massive for its time. But that was 1993 when you could buy a mac classic II with an 80MB hard-drive. I believe Myst came on a CD, so it couldn't have been 797 MB.

What the hell have they done? I know the original game was made up of highly compressed 256 colour images and video, and dodgy (by today's standards) 8-bit audio. Have they gone and 'remastered' all of the images?

For me, the file size makes no sense - The DS version weighs in at under 128MB (and yes, it looks horrible).

[gr8tfly]

Originally Posted by alexbates

Awesome, I'm getting that. But 727MB... thats insane! Developers need to make apps a small size because if all the good 3D games were like that, you could only have 5 games. Or Apple needs to make an iPhone with a larger HD.

I believe it's that size because of the embedded video clips and pre-rendered scenes (aside from the hq audio). There weren't any machines capable of rendering them real-time back then (these all have fog/shadows/and lighting effects). Every control was rendered and animated. They did do a 3D version, which was real-time rendered - perhaps they will port that eventually. But, it doesn't play like the original and that's what they're brought to the iPhone. It doesn't foreshadow any new development paradigm - this is a unique port. (There are some apps which have embedded video and/or high quality audio - they're large too.)

[winterspan]

Also, because I didn't become a big gamer as an adult, I'm not sure if it was my youth or the actual content, but it seem like many of the old games that used static images, prerendered content, and sometimes live-action video were far more immersive than today's real-time 3D games.

Think Myst and Riven, 7th guest, 11th hour, pandora directive/under a killing moon, etc.. Even those older cartoon style adventure games from Sierra were incredibly immersive in their day..

[NiteWaves77]

This is a terrible game that contributed to the destruction of the adventure genre. Good luck downloading this beast on 3G.