Vivid Riven Rich With Details And Atmosphere, Successor To Myst Is More Than A Game, It’s A Virtual-Reality Dream World
Four years ago, working out of their homes and a friend’s garage, local brothers Rand and Robyn Miller created a computerized dream world they called Myst.
It was a lonely place, characterized by vacant classical architecture, haunting background music and a frustratingly slow pace - the result of both technical limitations and frequent obstacles.
Oh, and one other thing … Myst was phenomenally popular. The CD-ROM game sold 3.5 million copies and earned the brothers $25 million, according to industry analysts.
On Halloween, Myst fans can finally get their hands on a new treat - Riven (around $55), the eagerly anticipated sequel.
The game opens one month after the close of Myst. Atrus is trapped on D’ni (pronounced “Dunny”), the land of his people’s origin. His wife, Catherine, is stuck in another world. It’s up to gamers to find her. (Newcomers needn’t worry about about playing catch-up - Atrus reveals all you need to know in the introduction.)
To give you an idea of Riven’s sophistication, the game fills five CD-ROM’s, compared to Myst’s one.
Riven is a much bigger world than Myst, affording players more opportunities to explore. But much of the added data memory is devoted to “texture” - not just more detailed graphics, but hours of animation, live video and a richer audio track.
Another way to gauge the difference is in dollars. While Myst was created on a “shoestring budget” of $650,000, the Millers figure they’ve invested around $10 million in the sequel, when you throw in construction of new headquarters for their private company, Cyan.
More than two dozen full-time artists and technicians, plus a handful of professional actors, contributed to Riven. But the masterminds behind the project were the Millers and Richard Vander Wende, 35, who joined Cyan 3 1/2 years ago. (Before that, Vander Wende directed the visual design of Disney’s “Aladdin,” conjured the two-headed dragon for “Willow” and contributed to “Tummy Trouble,” the first Roger Rabbit short.)
Following a hectic summer of tight deadlines and last-minute glitches, the Millers and Vander Wende are finally catching their breaths - that is, between interviews with Wired magazine, Newsweek, the San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today and local media.
Despite their millions, 38-year-old Rand and 31-year-old Robyn still dress like a couple of budget-conscious graduate students. But then, why overdress for the office when you have a Frisbee golf course right outside the back door, and two handicapped parking spaces out front double as a basketball court?
Those who make the pilgrimage to Cyan enter the Mead headquarters by walking beneath a Stonehengelike brick-and-stone passageway that appears to have burst from the building’s facade. Next, they cross a bridge that spans a “dry moat.” Once inside the 10,000-square-foot structure, they encounter a giant replica of a fanciful sword - a reference to a recurring motif in Riven.
The Millers and Vender Wende greet guests in a conference room that features a massive cherrywood table and a big-screen TV that’s wired to a computer playing scenes from Riven. A faint splashing sound comes from the recirculating waterfall in a nearby courtyard.
The trio looked relaxed one recent afternoon, glad to have Riven finally out of their hands but eager for the public’s reaction.
To date, only reviewers have been given a glimpse, and their impressions can be misleading.
“Reviewers try to play games in a very short time, and that’s not the way to play Riven,” Vender Wende observes. “This game is supposed to take 30 or 40 hours to get through, but they call us and say, ‘I’ve spent four hours with this thing. Can you help me?”’
“So far,” says Rand, “the reaction (with test groups) has been exactly what we wanted. We want people to get into Riven and explore large amounts before they hit a wall. And later on, we want the puzzles, for lack of a better term, to be fairly difficult - to work well with the story, but to be fairly substantial. And that’s what people are telling us.”
Ironically, the two consistent complaints about Riven’s predecessor were that it was either too hard … or too easy.
“Most people never got all the way through Myst,” Vander Wende concedes. “A lot of people never even got off Myst Island.”
Riven solves that problem by allowing players to explore considerably more territory before they hit a barrier. And this time around, the barriers are more smoothly integrated into the environment.
“When we look back at Myst,” says Rand, “the puzzles seem pretty arbitrary - push these buttons and a boat rises out of the water.
“One goal of Riven was for the puzzles to not seem like puzzles. Here’s a piece of equipment - it’s not a puzzle, it’s just that you have to figure out what it does and how it works, and that opens up something else for you.”
Of course, some of those puzzles can be fiendishly inscrutable - a concession to those condescenders who accused Myst of being too predictable. (Darn them!)
But don’t worry, says Robyn. “It’s not like you have to be some super genius to get through Riven. Anyone who’s paying attention can see all the clues.
“Children don’t look at it as an IQ test,” he says, “so they’re more apt to take their time and enjoy the ride, just stroll through and say, ‘Oh, look at that. Isn’t that cool?”’
Which was really the whole point of Myst, and even more true of the sequel. Riven isn’t a game so much as it’s an environment to be explored at your leisure. Scarabs buzz … birds soar … sea creatures crane their brontosaurian necks…. Sure, Riven’s enhanced technology allows anyone with a Pentium 100 chip and 16 megs of RAM to scramble through tunnels and across catwalks at a sprinter’s pace. But what’s the rush?
“If you’re barreling down a pathway,” says Vander Wende, “you’re likely to miss little details that are crucial to game play.”
The Millers also discourage players from giving in to frustration and investing in Riven’s companion clue book (“Riven: Official Hints and Solutions,” Brady Games, $19.99).
“That takes away from the experience,” cautions Rand. “The whole point of Riven is to give you that sense of exploration. Go in and play, and enjoy it. Think about it when you’re not playing - mull it over, and see if things don’t come to you. People who work at Riven and discover something new (on their own) find it extremely satisfying.”
Besides, he says, “You have a long time to get through this game. We’re not rushing anything else out.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 3 color photos
MEMO: A review of Riven will appear in next Monday’s Our Generation section.