Gamer historians are doing the lord’s work for Myst fans

I have listened to Myst creator Rand Miller tell the tale of how he and his brother Robyn squeezed their 3D puzzling masterpiece onto a tiny CD-Rom back in 1993 many, many times and it always leaves my jaw on the floor. If you’ve experienced the thrill of venturing to the Mechanical Age and retrieving a few pages for Achenar, Miller’s anecdotes of developing the game on Mac’s rudimentary HyperCard application are equally as mind-boggling. 

If you also consider yourself a Mysthead, the Video Game History Foundation has arrived with the ultimate gift: hours and hours of unfiltered behind-the-scenes interviews, B-roll, and other videotaped ephemera from Miller’s vault at Cyan Worlds.

The VGHF, a non-profit dedicated to preserving video games and the media made about them, embarked on a quest to digitize Cyan Worlds’ archives after noticing in the trailer for an upcoming Myst documentary that Miller had metric tons of Beta and VHS tapes chronicling the history of the company’s games stored away in an office closet. So VGHF library director Phil Salvador set out to preserve them — and the results span the entire history of the Myst series, with loads of tape from Riven, Uru, and the subsequent sequels and remakes. 

Cyan even logged every media appearance and mention in the company’s history; come for every blue-screened take of Atrus (played by Rand Miller) yelling at you about pages, but stay for a Spokane sizzle reel highlighting the importance of Cyan Worlds to the Washington economy. The Cyan collection is a robust addition to the VGHF database, which includes everything from old gaming mags to game-development production documents, and it’s all free to check out. And like all non-profits, you can get in on the action with a donation.