Spokane firm cuts Myst down to size
A north Spokane software development company has created a visually dazzling game built around the challenge of getting off a mysterious island called Myst.
No, this isn’t Cyan Worlds, the company that rocked the game world in 1993 with their best-selling CD-ROM game, Myst.
This north Spokane company is Mean Hamster Software, a small operation that’s just finished a Pocket PC-version of Myst for handheld computers or personal digital assistants.
Chris Brandkamp, who works at Cyan, said Mean Hamster’s founder and chief programmer John Swiderski tackled a task no one thought could be done easily. Swiderski took the entire Myst package — about 600 megabytes of pictures, sound and complexity — and shrank it down to 26 megabytes for the smaller Pocket PC platform.
At one point, Swiderski had managed to get about 95 percent of the original game finished and wanted to call it good. He went to Cyan and they told him to push on until he had it all. “Chris made me go all the way, and we do now have all 100 percent of Myst in this version,” said Swiderski.
Pocket PCs have become an increasingly popular format for gamers. Brandkamp said the format opens up a whole new group of users who can play Myst and future Pocket PC versions of other Cyan games.
The mini-version of Myst can be downloaded from www.pocketgear.com or from RegNow.com. It sells for $24.95.
Brandkamp said Cyan and Mean Hamster will share revenue from sales. He declined to offer specifics of the arrangement.
“This is a good deal for both of us,” Brandkamp said.
The original game came on a single CD disk and became what many call the most popular video game ever. It’s sold more than 3 million copies.
Swiderski said the idea of transferring Myst to Pocket PC actually came in a dream.
He took his idea to Cyan Worlds and initially didn’t get a positive response. “I had to call them like 16 times. They probably saw a lot of people coming to them with ideas,” he said.
He then developed an introductory short snippet of Myst and showed it to Brandkamp and to Richard Watson, the Cyan worker who is the unofficial historian and archivist of all things related to the Myst franchise.
They liked what they saw and the deal was signed.
Swiderski cut his chops developing PC versions of games that had been favorites on the old Amiga and Commodore computer systems, both of which are no longer made. He was in California at the time.
In 1994 he moved his company to Deer Park, where he and his wife also run Deer Park Computer as a second business.
With Myst behind him, Swiderski is looking to hire more programmers and illustrators to tackle additional projects.
The five-person Mean Hamster operation is cranking away on the next big Pocket PC product. That’s a 1 gigabyte version of Riven, the Cyan sequel to Myst.
Shrinking sound files mostly involves using the latest compression software that’s part of mp3s.
Shrinking the video and image files onto the Pocket PC platform is trickier. How he does it, Swiderski said, “is my secret. I guess I’m smart.”