WHEREIN WE REMEMBER
The Myst Fan-Game That Never Was
Somewhere around 2003 I’d started a fan-game project based on an unrelenting devotion and love of the 1993 hit video game Myst. I’ve detailed the wild amount of weirdness involved and what ultimately led to its failure in one of my wordy little essays right here.
Spoiler alert: I tried to make a video game in a world before YouTube, a world where I didn’t know exactly how to do it, and in part of my life where me my undeveloped frontal lobe bit off more than I could possibly chew.
Here’s a peek at what little survived. Opening 23 year old modeling files from an archaic version of Maya 3D wasn’t exactly smooth, but I found a way to dust things off, just a little.
Today, this would all probably take a week to make.
I don’t remember where I’d acquired a copy of Maya 3D, but the software was intimidating and difficult, doubly so for someone who barely graduated high school. I lost sleep for weeks trying to understand how to model things, apply textures, rig lighting, and render out images and videos. Arguably I never learned how to do it properly, but I made a few things that looked sorta kinda right.
I’d obsessed over every corner of the original game’s artwork, and created few libraries of reference imagery to try and faithfully recreate some of the elements and textures of the original Myst, which at the time was still only around a decade old itself. I modeled with as much detail as I could muster things like the Myst library (seen below in disrepair), the clock, rocketship, and most of the Mechanical Age.
A teenager with a copy of Unity or Blender or whatever they use these days could probably create what took me two years in but an afternoon.
Lights, Camera, Render
I’d arguably only ever learned the very basics of the 3D software, but showed off nearly everything I’d rendered as soon as it was done. The project’s website had a somewhat cohesive narrative based in Myst’s universe, hence why so many of those original Myst set pieces found their way into my work. The rule from Cyan (the company who made Myst) was that fan projects had to make everything by ourselves and promise not to sell the completed work - but they actually did link to my and many other fan projects from their corporate website, a fun little feather our caps.
Close Enough
Most of the original project has become lost media, scrubbed from the internet in the deserving way these things used to do before every last pixel of every last everything put on the internet these days becomes cemented forever. I’m super glad YouTube was invented after I was already an adult.
To the right: what Google’s AI whatever says Sehv Tsahno was. Pretty close.
It was starting to work. Sort of.
Most of these materials came from around 18 old DVDs I’d burned decades ago when I didn’t have a better way to store things, so you can imagine the chaotic and unreliable things I’d recently discovered on them. I remember recording a couple of gameplay videos by standing up a VHS camera and pointing it at my CRT monitor, and the only surviving footage is the incredibly processed stuff you see below. I think I’d actually wired up a few of the puzzles, too.
Yet, an adventure was had.
I started to lose my hair shortly after I turned 23. Part of me wonders if the non stop stress over a problem entirely of my own making helped start the process, but I know that while shuttering Sehv Tsahno definitely improved my schedule, it’s one of those weird pieces of personal lore I’ll never forget.
