Introduction
On Halloween evening, 1997, when most children had been out trick-or-treating and teepeeing homes, I used to be locked in my bed room with the lights turned off, hunched over a 40-pound CRT monitor, obsessing over each pixel of Riven: The Sequel to Myst.
I found 5 islands ripped aside by mysterious forces. An historical civilization with the facility to create bridges between worlds with books. A person who believed he was a god. A lady decided to free her individuals.
Over the subsequent few weeks, I pulled levers, pushed buttons, and unlocked doorways till I heard their steam-powered pneumatics in my sleep. I learn each journal left behind by the individuals who lived in Riven. I stated “Oh my God” out loud a minimum of a dozen instances and gasped in shock simply as usually.
If Myst was The Hobbit of point-and-click journey video games, Riven was The Lord of the Rings. Constructed by a small studio referred to as Cyan in Spokane, Washington, it had photorealistic graphics on par with its period’s Hollywood motion pictures and the narrative intricacy of a novel.
However for many individuals, it was greater than only a technical marvel. It was a life-changing expertise.
“I can instantly hint my path to the gaming trade again to Riven,” says Sam Winkler, narrative director at Gearbox Software program and co-writer on Borderlands 3.
“I usually credit score Myst and Riven as the primary inspiration of my creativity in the present day,” says David Howe, lead editor of Netflix’s Castlevania sequence.
An engineering lead on Diablo IV, Jeff Stewart, says Riven was “the only most inspirational recreation” he ever performed.
However in 1998, a couple of months after Riven got here out on October 31, 1997 – earlier than it bought 4.5 million copies and have become the runner-up to Myst because the best-selling PC recreation of all time till 2002 – the sport’s three inventive leads parted methods.
Rand Miller, the developer who performed franchise protagonist Atrus on-screen, stayed at Cyan and have become CEO of the oldest surviving unbiased recreation studio in America. His brother Robyn Miller, the artist and composer behind a lot of Myst and Riven’s sights and sounds, left the corporate to pursue different pursuits. Richard Vander Wende, the manufacturing designer of Disney’s Aladdin who pushed the Millers’ sequel to new heights in iconic imagery and character-driven realism, went again to the movie trade.
20 years handed earlier than Rand Miller requested a query.
What if we went again to Riven?
After which, What if we made it greater and higher?
Rebuilding A World
Rebuilding A World
Twenty-six years after the unique Riven was launched, I arrive in Spokane on the peak of autumn, when the forest surrounding Cyan’s headquarters is vivid with crimson and gold leaves. I instantly acknowledge the entrance door from Richard Kadrey’s 1997 espresso desk ebook, From Myst to Riven – an otherworldly arch that appears prefer it was torn away from the remainder of the Arts-and-Crafts-style constructing by an earthquake.
“The bricklayers cherished that,” the voice of Atrus tells me. “They stated it was essentially the most enjoyable factor they’d ever finished.”
In individual, Rand Miller doesn’t remind me of the bespectacled scholar (and questionable father) he’s performed in six consecutive Myst video games. Now 64 years previous, with lengthy locks of grey hair and a penchant for Birkenstocks, Miller exudes the easygoing and paternal heat of a browsing teacher. He speaks with the slightest trace of a southwestern drawl, little doubt from his years residing in New Mexico and Texas.
Miller exhibits me across the Home That Myst Constructed. I see mannequins wearing costumes from the unique Riven, a show case stuffed with awards, and a large knife prop constructed by Adam Savage earlier than Mythbusters made him well-known. Behind the constructing, overlooking an algae-filled pond and a grove of ponderosa pines, we attain a convention room with a cyan-blue ceiling.
“Why remake Riven in any case these years,” I ask.
Miller takes a deep breath. “Riven was sacred to us, so we waited till the know-how lastly caught as much as the purpose the place we might make one thing that regarded even higher than the unique, however in 3D,” he says. “[And] my first thought was, we have to make it look exactly the identical.”
However then Miller reached out to Vander Wende, the unique recreation’s co-director, with a tantalizing query: “For those who might change something about Riven, pie-in-the-sky, what would you modify?”
Vander Wende arrives at Cyan a bit later within the morning, contemporary off a aircraft from Hawaii. He’s in his 60s now, too, and tall like Miller however extra soft-spoken. He additionally appears like each little bit of the perfectionist he was within the ’90s.
“I can’t do one thing half-assed until any person places a gun to my head,” Vander Wende says. Turning to Miller, he continues: “I used to be actually doubtful while you approached me about coming again to Cyan. Why would I wish to remake one thing I already did? I by no means even performed the unique recreation after it got here out. Doing an imitation of it held no curiosity for me.”
Consequently, the brand new Riven isn’t a carbon copy of the unique. There are new puzzles, new areas, and new items of lore alongside structural adjustments to make the world extra narratively constant. And this time, it’ll be totally traversable in real-time 3D as an alternative of an interconnected sequence of 4,000 nonetheless pictures and fast time occasions.
“We regarded on the backstory that gave rise to the world of Riven and the characters that inhabited it,” Vander Wende says. “We discovered discrepancies and corrected these and embellished issues that wanted to be stuffed in.”
I elevate my eyebrows. Miller notices. “This can be a harmful query, however while you heard we had been remaking Riven, what sorts of issues did you hope we’d do?” he asks me.
I give it some thought for a couple of seconds. I inform him all of the components of the world I wished to discover extra, in addition to the 2 further worlds we solely glimpsed within the authentic recreation. I wince, worrying I’ve simply described an impossibly grand imaginative and prescient for the brand new Riven.
However Miller smiles. “To this point? Test, examine, examine, examine.”
Rewriting A Reminiscence
Rewriting A Reminiscence
“Was there at all times a stairwell over right here?”
I’m exploring Ebook Meeting Island, also referred to as Crater Island or Boiler Island. I can hear the turquoise water lapping in opposition to the shore of its volcanic caldera and the wind pouring over the cliffs above me. The sky is similar blue I bear in mind from my childhood, however now I can stroll anyplace and look in any path.
Seven or eight “Cyantists,” together with Miller and Vander Wende, are sitting behind me, watching me play their new model of Riven.
Hannah Gamiel, Cyan’s growth director and one of many two individuals who will lead it when Miller retires, informs me that there was not, in actual fact, at all times a stairwell over right here. I descend right into a darkish cave, the place a wholly new location presents a brand new sequence of puzzles, in addition to new insights into the world.
Inside seconds, I’m misplaced. “All the time observe the pipes,” Gamiel says, sitting to my proper. “Our video games ought to have been referred to as Comply with the Pipes 1 and Comply with the Pipes 2.”
Gamiel first performed Riven when she was 4 years previous, sitting in her mom’s lap. “I used to be the designated disc-swapper,” she says. The unique recreation was cut up throughout 5 separate CD-ROM discs, one for every island. Gamiel’s mom, Robin, would later meet and marry Rand Miller.
Gamiel began working at Cyan in 2013, first within the QA division after which as a programmer. “These had been tremendous lean years,” she says of the time earlier than Obduction, the corporate’s Kickstarter comeback in 2016.
Later, elsewhere on the identical island, I break right into a regal laboratory constructed by Gehn – Atrus’s father, a world-conqueror with a god complicated who’s been trapped on Riven for many years – solely to find that the inside has fully modified in comparison with the unique recreation.
“One of many first issues I did once I got here again was write a tough define of Gehn’s 30 years on Riven, which we had by no means finished earlier than,” Vander Wende says. “As soon as I did that, it was simpler to make choices [about what to change or add].”
After a white-knuckle experience on Gehn’s magnetic levitation tram, I attain the opposite island Cyan made out there throughout my demo, the place Gehn spied on the Rivenese individuals from a Gothic underwater stronghold. On the floor of the island, one of many buildings I bear in mind is lacking fully, and there are new puzzles to unravel, however Miller assures me the opposite islands maintain even greater – and wilder – surprises.
“What do you assume,” Miller asks me. “You’re the primary individual to see any of this exterior the corporate.”
I’m surprised. “In some methods, it feels an identical to my reminiscence of Riven,” I say. “However in different methods, it’s like I’m enjoying it for the primary time as a result of there are new locations and new issues I don’t perceive.”
Vander Wende frowns. “All I can see are the errors,” he says however laughs together with everybody else.
Technical Difficulties
Technical Difficulties
“It’s a puzzle,” Miller says.
A couple of hours later, we aren’t in Riven anymore. We’re within the Cyan parking zone, and I can’t work out methods to open the passenger door on Miller’s Tesla Mannequin Y. Vander Wende can’t determine it out both, and I feel Miller, who might be one of the well-known puzzle designers in America alongside Will Shortz and that man who buried a treasure chest within the Rocky Mountains, is sadistically having fun with our confusion.
As soon as we clear up the puzzle (I couldn’t let you know how for the lifetime of me now), Miller drives us by means of the Douglas fir forests north of Spokane to a restaurant for lunch, the place I get to know Cyan’s inventive director, Eric A. Anderson, the opposite one who will lead the corporate alongside Gamiel after Miller retires.
“I found Cyan once I was in artwork faculty gathering problems with Cinefex journal,” Anderson tells me. Now in his 40s, he nonetheless has the hardly bottled vitality of a Cyan fan whose desires have come true. “There was a help-wanted advert within the again that stated one thing like, ‘We’re making Myst II, and we’d like 3D artists.’” Anderson emailed Cyan asking if it employed school interns, however destiny wouldn’t carry him to Spokane till the yr 2000 when Miller was spearheading the bold, aforementioned MMORPG.
A long time later, within the early days of the Riven remake, Anderson and Gamiel thought they may be capable to reuse a number of the authentic recreation’s 3D fashions, regardless that most of them had been misplaced to the tech-death of SGI workstations, the identical now-defunct computer systems that Industrial Gentle & Magic used to make Jurassic Park. However once they lastly managed to find and open a single file from the ’90s, it was too low-resolution, forcing them to recreate each inch of the islands from scratch in Unreal Engine 4.
Cyan additionally met with a grassroots workforce of Riven followers referred to as the Starry Expanse, which had been painstakingly translating the sport’s previous fashions into its personal model of a 3D Riven for greater than 13 years. “We referenced a few of their property for measurements, however they had been replicating the previous Riven,” Anderson says. “As soon as Richard [Vander Wende] got here again, we knew issues had been going to alter, so it was simpler to simply construct the whole lot ourselves.”
One of many largest technical challenges for Anderson and Gamiel has been bringing Riven’s characters again to life. The unique recreation featured live-action video performances by a number of actors, together with Rand Miller as Atrus, Sheila Goold and Regina Altay as his spouse Catherine, and Royal Shakespeare Firm alumnus John Keston as his father Gehn.
But it surely’s actually inconceivable to graft a 2D video from 1997 right into a real-time, high-resolution 3D setting. Cyan’s earlier remake, 2021’s award-winning VR and PC model of Myst, featured computer-generated characters in lieu of the unique live-action performances. “It was… an experiment,” Miller laughs, however for the brand new Riven, Cyan employed a full-time animation lead, Autumn Palfenier, to boost the uncanny valley.
“For Gehn, we tried analyzing the [old] video and monitoring sure options, however the decision was so low, and it’s not even a full shot, so it simply wasn’t doable,” Anderson says. As a substitute, they’ve been filming performances in Cyan’s basement utilizing motion-capture know-how.
“I can say on the file that it is a union manufacturing with SAG-AFTRA,” Gamiel says, referring to the identical labor guild that represents Hollywood actors. “We wished to get some unbelievable expertise into this recreation.”
She received’t inform me who’s enjoying who however does affirm that Miller will return as Atrus and that the studio managed to salvage an previous audio recording of John Keston, who died from COVID-19 problems in February 2022 on the age of 97. “We had an actor examine John’s efficiency after which do it in sync with the unique audio, so we bought Gehn’s full physique,” Anderson says. They present me a work-in-progress close-up of Gehn’s face, which exceeds my expectations.
For Gamiel, working with skilled actors has been essentially the most rewarding a part of the mission. “Once I watched a few of these performances, I used to be shook. They introduced us to tears. Persons are going to be impressed.”
The Ending Has Not But Been Written
The Ending Has Not But Been Written
Again at Cyan’s headquarters, I attempt to get yet another shock on the file earlier than leaving Spo‑ kane behind.
“Are you able to affirm a launch yr for Riven?” I ask.
Miller, Gamiel, and Anderson take a look at one another and make a number of faces. “It’s popping out earlier than individuals may assume,” Gamiel says. Additionally they can’t affirm or deny (but) that there are any plans for a VR model, solely that it’ll be out there for PCs.
“After Riven, will we revisit the D’ni universe in a future Cyan recreation?” I ask, referring to the fictional civilization chargeable for Myst and Riven’s “linking ebook” know-how, of which Gehn and Atrus are working towards descendants.
“100%,” Anderson and Gamiel say in unison. “Star Wars discovered methods to inform extra than simply the story of the Skywalker household, and we’re making an attempt to do the identical factor,” Anderson says. “There are extra tales to inform within the D’ni universe that aren’t instantly about Atrus’s household. There are different characters on the market that [our fans] are conversant in, and it might be a disgrace if we didn’t leverage these to our profit.”
It’s time for me to go, however I preserve serious about one thing Vander Wende stated the day earlier than. “When Riven got here out, most of my family and friends didn’t play as a result of it was too troublesome. I simply didn’t know whether or not what we made actually meant something to anybody,” he stated.
Days later, again at residence in North Carolina, my 7-year-old daughter walks as much as my desk whereas I’m penning this story. She notices a picture of the unique Riven on my second display – a dramatic vista of a large golden dome surrounded by vertical sea stacks.
“The place is that place?” she asks, her eyes broad.
I nearly inform her it’s from a online game. I take into consideration enjoying Myst with my dad and enjoying Riven with my brother. I take into consideration how comfortable my mother was once I advised her I used to be flying out to Spokane. I take into consideration Vander Wende, Miller, Gamiel, and Anderson and what it means for artwork to make an impression on individuals.
“I’ll take you there quickly,” I say.
This text initially appeared in Problem 362 of Recreation Informer