Almost 4 years in the past, developer Cyan reimagined the legendary Myst for Apple Silicon, and now it’s giving the identical remedy to the whole franchise.
Whereas Apple Silicon delivered sufficient groundbreaking efficiency enhancements over prior Intel chips to show the Mac right into a gaming powerhouse, many recreation builders nonetheless haven’t embraced it. Nonetheless, it appears solely becoming that Myst, one of many first video games to be launched completely for the Mac over thirty years in the past, has been reintroduced for the Apple silicon era.
The brand new model of Myst introduced native assist for Apple’s M-series chips, but additionally Steel 2.1 and AMD FidelityFX Tremendous Decision, giving it a 50 % efficiency increase, even when working at 4K decision. Nonetheless, the builders went an enormous step additional, rebuilding it from the bottom as much as reap the benefits of improved modeling, textures, and dynamic lighting results to create new artwork, new sound, re-imagined interactions, and even the flexibility to randomize the puzzles for an additional problem. They constructed it utilizing the Unreal Engine to offer “recent takes on the visuals in each space of the sport.”
Now, the builders are doing the identical for the remainder of the sequence, with new variations of Myst: Masterpiece Version, Riven: The Sequel to Myst, and Myst III: Exile. A month in the past, additionally they added the Age of Rime to the basic Myst.
Along with optimizing the video games to run natively on Apple Silicon, the updates additionally supply recreation controller assist, remastered scores, enhanced sounds, and higher save recreation assist.
The transition is considerably apropos, contemplating that Myst debuted in Apple’s pre-Intel days. In 1993, Apple was transitioning the Mac from the Motorola 68k chips to the PowerPC structure that might kind the muse for the early OS X period following Steve Jobs’ return to the corporate. The Intel transition was nonetheless over a decade away at that time.
Myst launched on September 30, 1993, and remained Mac-exclusive for the primary six months. Throughout that point, it bought a staggering 200,000 copies — a big quantity contemplating Apple was barely promoting two million Macs a 12 months again then. Following its March 2024 PC launch, it racked up gross sales of six million copies, making it the best-selling recreation in historical past for practically a decade till it was overtaken by The Sims in 2002.
The sport was developed by Rand and Robyn Miller of Cyan Worlds. It was revolutionary for being one of many first CD-ROM video games, benefiting from the optical disc format that supplied 700 MB of storage at a time when the most important shopper exhausting drives topped out at 300 MB. The sport was additionally credited with serving to to drive the adoption of CD-ROM drives in Macs and PCs, because it was the one means you might play the sport.
The Miller brothers have been enormous Mac followers who have been impressed to create Myst by the Macintosh Hypercard growth program. The unique Myst supplied a pre-rendered world of extraordinarily high-quality graphics by the requirements of the day, and it ushered in a brand new period of CD-ROM (and later DVD-ROM) video games.
In 2000, the corporate launched realMyst, a full-motion graphics model of the sport that additionally included the Rime age, however the workforce at Cyan wished to make sure that the reimagined 1993 Myst stayed as true as potential to the unique, and it has adopted the identical playbook with the remainder of the sequence. These aren’t about creating new worlds however fairly increasing them to incorporate these issues that all the time ought to have been there, comparable to clouds within the sky as a substitute of a plain grey background, higher lighting results, and extra reasonable motion when manipulating objects within the puzzles.
The reimagined video games can be found on the Mac App Retailer, with Myst: Masterpiece Version and Riven: The Sequel to Myst priced at $6 every, and Myst III: Exile going for $15. The basic Myst is $35 for those who haven’t already bought it, however those that have can get the Age of Rime as a free replace.