Monday, May 4, 2009

There goes the productivity - Myst comes to the iPhone

Back in the dim, dark ages of Macintosh computing I was Associate Editor of Australian Macworld and the big news in games was a small company called Cyan that had released another great game built on HyperCard called "Myst."

Myst was the biggest selling computer game ever until it was passed by the Sims in 2002 - almost ten years on top.

I certainly wasted far too many hours playing Myst and the first sequel, Riven.

The Miller brothers had re-imagined computer gaming with earlier games such as Manhole that had no scoring or plot, just attempted to immerse you in an environment that you had to explore. With Myst they got the right combination of game play, images and sound to capture the imagination of people.

So at the moment I am resisting strongly the urge to download Myst, I know I'll lose a fortnight of spare time before I'll be able to break away.

On a more general note it is good to see games such as Myst and Castle Wolfenstein gaining a revival on the new platform. The classics deserve not to be forgotten and iPhone gamers benefit from decent games at a decent price. Of course Apple won't be complaining, Myst wants 1.5 Gb of space in your phone so it doesn't take many games like this before we'll be eagerly awaiting a 32Gb iPhone to fit them all in.

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