Monday 5 September 2005 — This is exactly 19 years old. Be careful.
Ryan “Grey Dragon” Warzecha reports that Cyan Worlds has laid off all but two employees. Cyan Worlds is the company that made the original Myst game, and all of its sequels. Another Cyan worker posted a letter from Chris Brandkamp, a Cyan VP, detailing how there’s No room for creativity in the gaming industry.
I think it’s a crying shame that games like Myst aren’t as successful as the shoot-em-up games are. I’ve never been interested in twitchy shooting games, and I found Myst incredibly involving. As Brandkamp says, the Myst-style games, with their puzzles and animations are too labor-intensive to compete with first-person shooters which are essentially giant physics engines.
The closing of Cyan is a big deal in this household. How did we commemorate the closing of a very cool company? How else? We made a cake:
Comments
Couldn't you do an entire Myst game in a web browser? How interactive does it need to be? The original Myst was a bunch of screenshots with pre-rendered interstitial "movement" that was totally irrelevant to the actual gameplay.
> I think it's a crying shame that games like Myst aren't as successful
Myst was successful because it was one of the first CD-ROM games; it demonstrated what 650mb of optical content could do for a game and not much else. That's why it was bundled with so many PCs and drives.
I'd also argue that there wasn't much "game" there to begin with... but that's just my opinion.
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