The game has sold more than a half million copies this year, with many more expected for the holidays, and it is becoming a landmark in a game industry whose fortunes have had as many ups and downs as an amusement park ride. Its reflective, almost cool esthetic, though, gives a hint of what may eventually be possible as the technology improves: a game that weaves together image, sound and narrative into a new form of experience.
For all its high-tech sophistication, "Myst" can often seem to be a sequence of sluggishly shifting stills and convoluted puzzles. It is so unusual a game it has already inspired an epic number of beard-pulling commentaries about its significance Wired magazine, the bible of the new technology, even thinks that it has defined a new art form. "Myst" is a video game played on a CD-ROM, a computer-constructed world through which the player moves, touching objects, following cryptic instructions, trying to unravel the mysteries of an alternate universe. There is a mixture of the pre-modern and the post-modern, a sense of surreal antiquity recalling early science fiction. Yet in the midst of this pastoral paradise, there are also archaic machines with gears and levers that thump and grind, and giant pre-electronic switches. I am seemingly alone in a world in which ordinary objects are the magical products of an advanced technology.
Each surface has a polish and sheen that makes it seem untouched by human or natural forces. The light is eerie, crisp and slightly unreal. Instead, I am standing in a garden, lulled by the sound of waves from the nearby ocean. I have put aside the laser gun, the bombs, the Asian martial arts weapons, the requirement that I press buttons on a controller to pound a muscle-bound biker into a pulp.
FOR THE TIME BEING I AM IGNORING THE alien pods, the racing cars, the intergalactic battles and the irradiated mutants.
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