Myst Online man on why his game failed

By Robert Purchese Published 18 September, 2008

He's fed up with "hamster wheel" MMOs.

Creator Rand Miller has blamed the repeated commercial failure of Myst Online on cheap, stereotypical MMOs, which he believes are "setting people in a hamster wheel and saying, 'Run run run run run.'"

"It's frankly cheaper to build a treadmill than a national park," said Miller, as reported by GamesIndustry.biz. "We were building a national park."

Myst Online developer Cyan had lofty ambitions, and approached the online world in a non-traditional way. The aim was to create something that "had the potential to compete with television".

Ubisoft launched Myst Online in 2003, only to pull out a year later. Fans kept the game alive on unofficial servers for three years before digital distributor GameTap waded in. GameTap support also only lasted for a year, after concluding that the small userbase couldn't support the operating costs.

GameTap reached an agreement with Cyan Worlds back in April to hand the Myst Online rights back to the developer. Cyan plans to reopen servers and supply fans with the tools to create content on them.

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (20) Latest comment 3 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • chicknstu #1 3 years ago

    Advertising fail

    I didn't even know this game existed until now.

  • SixFootHalfling #2 3 years ago

    @chickstu that is probably the defining feature of why this game failed, not because it was different

  • tubeoftoothpaste #3 3 years ago

    id never heard of it either and its the sort of thing i'd have got

  • kangarootoo #4 3 years ago

    So if I understand correctly, he is saying that they tried to build a game they weren't actually able to sell.

    Edit:
    "It's a real shame that Rand doesn't accept that the failiure was his responsibility as the designer"

    Nail. Head. Hit.
    Edited by 1 at 18/09/08 @ 10:43

  • DFawkes #5 3 years ago

    I'm with those unaware of it's existence. If you don't advertise, you'll not sell well. I thought that was Marketing 101. They should've got Mr T and Verne Troyer.

  • ZuluHero #6 3 years ago

    But why try and re-invent the (hamster) wheel, Rand Miller?



    /coat

  • Tomo #7 3 years ago

    Blimey. Didn't know this existed either!

  • President_Weasel #8 3 years ago

    Myst is a bag of arse and always has been.
    You can't make an MMO out of a point-and-click series and expect it to be a success.
    You can't think "the vast majority of MMO consumers are ignorant, I will make something they don't want" and expect it to be a success either.
    And yeah, not advertising it doesn't help much.

  • pbz #9 3 years ago

    ...couldnt just be cause it was shit then? =)

  • spudsbuckley #10 3 years ago

    It failed due to it's shittyness.

    Why is this even news?

  • kangarootoo #11 3 years ago

    "You can't make an MMO out of a point-and-click series and expect it to be a success"

    Spoken like a true back seat driver.

  • George-Roper #12 3 years ago

    @Squarejawhero

    "Because Myst, despite some less intelligent people claiming it as a bag of "arse" ;), was at one point one of the biggest selling games ever, and Cyan deserve a bit of credit for it."

    It was only that (if at all) because it was released on the back of CD-ROM, multimedia, FMV hysteria. As an actual gameplay experience is was complete and utter wank.

  • menage #13 3 years ago

    Like television? What's that supposed to mean? Filled with crap hoping to stumble onto something good which get's interrupted with more crap every 15 minutes?

  • kangarootoo #14 3 years ago

    I played the original Myst and I thought it was great. The various multimedia hooks it contained weren't the only thing that made it special, the world it contained and the puzzles within both had depth and appeal (except the maze, which was shite, just like all mazes).

    And also, dismissing something by saying "yeah, but that was only because" is just subterfuge. Myst was what it was, because of all of the parts that made up the whole. You can't dismiss it by referring to what would happen if you hyperthetically started selectively removing parts of the whole. Almost all games of note start to suffer and appear less appealing if you do that.

  • George-Roper #15 3 years ago

    Come on guys, Myst was one of the (if not the first) most hyped 'interactive computer game featuring multimedia environments'. That's why it was so successful, because nothing had ever been seen like it before. A hi-res island, rendered quite beautifully, with a stone-age point and click backend, simply was not enjoyable. IMHO.

    In exactly the same reason why the Mega-CD game 'Night Trap' was so successful. Not because the game was any good but because it utilized FMV to bring a cinematic quality to the experience. I mean, it was 'like being there!'. Right? Multimedia FTW!

    There's a reason why this particular MMO game failed and its not because 'the public just didn't get it' or 'the public don't know whats good for them'. Its because it was based on a series that was successful off the back of the medium it was first released on. Not because it was a good game in its own right.

  • Krun #16 3 years ago

    I hadn't heard of it either.

    But the Myst game world died for me. The first one which was great for its time, then set the rest of the series in stone. Myst then seemed to be stuck back in the early 90s when CDs where a new fangled way to store games, and full motion video was amazing. Well no one impressed anymore. If they'd kept at the cutting edge and kept providing engaging story and puzzles then maybe I'd still be interested, but they didn't. They stayed with the pre-rendered CD load screenshotathon. So any interest in Myst was lost a long long time ago.
    Edited by 1 at 18/09/08 @ 16:50

  • Royal Fool #17 3 years ago

    If you hadn't heard of Myst Online (or Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, the single-player prequel... or Myst IV or Myst V) you were probably not part of the market Cyan were aiming for anyway. They did advertise it pretty heavily with Ubisoft.

    It was a cool idea, had a lot of potential and was completely different from every other MMO... but there wasn't enough funding and it had some problems when launching internationally (even worse when it arrived on Gametap). And, of course, it never got enough subscribers.

  • iokthemonkey #18 3 years ago

    Don't diss Night Trap.

    It had Kim from "Diff'rent Strokes" in it and some well-wicked tennis racquet air-guitar jamming.

  • Azazel #19 3 years ago

    Myst = Fail => Myst Online = Fail

  • SunoffaBeach #20 3 years ago

    "setting people in a hamster wheel and saying, 'Run run run run run.'"

    that same as RL. that why success.