The Best Myst Game Was Made by the “Wrong” Team
Sometimes, it takes a whole new set of creative talent to make something feel fresh again.
Way back in the early 2000’s, the original developers of Myst at Cyan (sometimes called Cyan Worlds) were busy making a weird MMO thing. It was called Uru, and it was a big budget attempt to turn the iconic point-and-click adventure series into an ongoing live service long before that was a hyped-up concept in the gaming industry.
The game took a little longer to develop than anyone anticipated, and thanks to some weird business dealings around the rights to the Myst IP, the core franchise continued onward without its own creators during that long creative process. This resulted in two different Myst games that had only minimal input from the original team: Myst III: Exile (2001) and Myst IV: Revelation (2004). Both of these games were published by Ubisoft, of all companies, and even though it’s often considered shameful in hardcore Myst fan communities to love either of these “outsider” games — I love them both.
Myst IV in particular is an incredible achievement, on both the technical and design fronts. It was developed by an internal team at Ubisoft Montreal, a studio now most closely associated with the Assassin’s…
