It was funny because people asked us what the puzzles were gonna be like in Riven, and we said that the two critiques we heard on Myst were that the puzzles were too easy, and that the puzzles were too hard, so we told everybody that we would fix that in Riven. So, I think after Riven is when I personally feel like I learned some lessons with regard to game design.
We knew approximately where the story went, and we started design on it very quickly. We just said, “well, we did it with Myst, let’s jump in and start drawing the maps for Riven”. I think what we started looking at was a lot of things that we did right, but we were still young, and still experimenting, so I think we jumped right into Riven without really dissecting at that point what was good, and what was bad. This time it did feel, though, that we had reached some kind of an interesting level, a plateau that pushed it somewhere else with Myst. Myst again felt like an experiment for us, and Robyn would agree with that, we both talked about that we didn’t really know what we were doing, we were just continuing to evolve our craft that we had worked on. Rand Miller: In every product we made, we learned lessons. Ingmar Böke: What were the most important lessons the development of Myst taught you when it came to the impact on developing the sequel Riven, as well as the updated versions of Myst that followed throughout the years? And while a 30-year anniversary is certainly a great reason to celebrate such an illustrious history, as you’re about to find out, it seems as if the story of Cyan Worlds is far from being over!
There was far more to come after that, however, and this time around Rand takes us through the additional ups and downs encountered between the development of Riven and present day. In the first part of my Skype interview with Rand Miller, the legendary game designer talked about the highs and lows that Cyan experienced during the company’s early years, leading to the enormous success story of Myst.
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