/vr/ - Retro Games

It sold well because it was something new at the time, it was built on atmosphere and visuals

>>4827903
6.000.000 is more than well though

>>4827910
as I said, it was successful because it was something new, there really weren't any games like it at the time.

Beats me. You could say it was visually impressive but The 7th Guest came out the same year and that was the title that blew my socks off.

>>4827889

The graphics at the time were stunning, even if they were prerendered. The game also pushed a lot of really immersive things that just weren't done very much in video games at the time, like ambient sounds everywhere, loads of little details and things you could examine, and a well fleshed out story that relied on you exploring things in the game world to understand.

It also showed off a ton of new technology at the time, with the massive capacity of cd-rom discs letting it have movies and thousands of still images. Getting a computer that could run Myst at the time really felt like you were entering the future.

I think the puzzle design and actual gameplay is mostly pretty good as well. It's neither too hard or too easy, and apart from a couple bad puzzles (the selenitic maze in particular), everything is quite logical.

In short - great atmosphere, brand new technology that was jaw-droppingly gorgeous and did things that no one had ever seen before, solid worldbuilding and excellent puzzles.

>>4827889
>why did this game sell so well?
>these games didn't sell well!

The questions here get stupider every time I come.

>>4827976
Alright genius. Name me another myst like game that sold millons

>>4827889
Myst is obviously exactly the sort of game that sells 6 million units in the 90s. Not only was it breathtakingly beautiful, it successfully spun that into a "mystique" if you will.

>>4828018
Riven, Full Throttle, Return to Zork

>>4827934
I don't get why people praise 7th Guest so much.
>acting and spooks are corny, not even goosebumps-tier
>the "puzzles" aren't particularly creative, they're mostly just based on common games and newspaper puzzles, like word scramble
>exploring the mansion would be fun, but the animations are so slow that they get tedious after seeing them for the first time, and I don't remember being able to skip them
>ending made no sense
Also I remember while trying to figure out one puzzle, the bad guy's voice kept going "yawwwwn what's taking you so long" and "this is so boooring."

>>4828036
It was many of our (myself included) first experience with a multimedia game. Myst used the CD format in a more subtle way that (ugh) "aged better" but T7G had FMV up in your face blended with CGI and tons of voice over. It was more showy at the time.

I played Myst for the first time on a small netbook. For reasons unknown, the image was upside down every time I started the game, and I found no way to fix this.

I resorted to simply turning my Laptop 180 degrees and balancing the screen on a level surface (such as my bed), looking down on it as you would otherwise look at the keyboard.

>>4828045
7th Guest was really cheesy and campy, a lot of the puzzles felt like stuff you'd find in magazines, and the gameplay was entirely about entering rooms and solving the single puzzle there to "clear" the room and unlock more rooms.

Myst felt much classier and made you feel like you were actually having an adventure. 7th Guest felt like you were watching an ancient B-movie and occasionally getting interrupted by puzzles.

>>4828060
Did you try using ctrl+alt+arrowkey to turn your screen upside down?

It was definately something new, but it was also hyped to the moon. It was in almost every gaming and computer mag of the time, and comics, etc.

it had actual graphics

>>4827889
PC gaming was just hitting its stride in the mainstream, it was released at the right time.

I heard it was because it appealed to people who were interested in computers but didn't like the nonstop violence/action of the most popular PC games at the time
Besides the excellent graphics

>>4827889
Top tier graphics for the time. Plus word of mouth since the puzzles were hard and gamefaqs didn't exist.

>>4828174
This too. 7th Guest's cheesy B-horror movie feel was a lot less appealing to an older audience than Myst's more relaxed atmosphere .

>>4828245

>>4827889
Schools.

>PC and Mac
>ye advanced CDROM
>it had a relaxed atmosphere, and smarmy mystique (ehehe pun) that let you feel smart when you solved something, moreso than 7th Guest

>>4827939
This. Even for casuals, it had an aesthetic quality that made them appreciate it as virtual tourism even if they didn't make much progress on the puzzles. Much like Doom was not the first game with 3D graphics but one of the first that really grabbed normies would otherwise have little interest in games and said "hey check out THIS". Myst was gorgeous and immersion and committed to feeling like you're exploring a real place--more so than most games of any genre at the time, and especially compared to anything with similar graphics. It hit the right sweet spot (and timing) to wow a broad range of people.

>>4827889
Good marketing.

>>4827889
They gave it away for free with a lot of CD-ROM drives and SoundBlaster bundles at the time. I have 3 copies of it, I'm sure they counted them towards the 6 million. I played it for about 10 minutes and got bored.

Not to mention literally every device with a compact disc drive had a port. Even Japanese only consoles got one.

>>4829208

It took 14 fucking hours for somebody to finally give the real answer. /vr/, everybody.

>>4829208
Worth noting that this was a time when the default was floppy drives and digital distribution wasn't really a thing (people were still using dial-up internet, really slow download speeds... like an hour or more to download ONE song, and you would be done reading an internet video game review article before all of the screenshots of the game had finished loading in your browser).

>>4829217
>>4829208
It's not a real answer, it's a meme answer. It's something people say to hate on Myst. As if Myst selling 1 million instead of 6 million or whatever wouldn't still be enough to make it an extremely notably video game. Even 500,000 would be pretty damn popular for an adventure game back then.

>>4829242

Bruh, I love Myst. OP asked why it sold 6 million copies. That's why.

>>4829242
no vidya game sells that much without a great marketing plan, normies don't buy vidya like gamers do. The quality of a game has astonishingly little to do with how well it sells, just look at CoD.

>>4829245
Bruh, it's just an answer people made up. Yes, Myst was bundled with stuff, but I haven't see any source that says that's part of how they calculated units sold for the 6 million record. It seems unlikely they would say Riven "didn't sell as well as Myst" (at 4 million) and have a disappointing return if that was the case.

>>4829251
Myst came out when CD-ROM drives were new. When Riven came out most people already had CD-ROM drives. That's why it sold 2 million less.

back then Myst was like a needle in the haystack, it broke all the standards in the media, plus it was heavily oriented for pc, but most important, the history behind it was amazing and it made you think hard in some of the puzzles

>>4829242
I have no problem with Myst at all. I was in the minority among my friends in not enjoying it. I'm just saying that they gave it away back then like Nvidia gives out copies of borderlands today.

>>4829251
Most of my gamer friends had Myst but never played much of it, because a bunch of us got it for free while building up a computer that could play Quake and Half-Life.

Why would we buy Riven if he we didn't even finish Myst which we got for free? That's why Riven was disappointing to dispshit businessmen.

>>4829253
Are you seriously suggesting it has 2 million fewer sales solely because they didn't BUNDLE it as well as the first one?

And no one has given any figures about how many the bundles is even supposed to count toward the total. It could be like 5% for all we know which makes it ignorable as an explanation for great sales.

>>4829259
I just threw it in the stack of Encarta, groliers encyclopedia, and aol CDs I had.

>>4829261

Those figures probably don't exist. That doesn't mean it didn't happen. C'mon, dude. Nobody is trying to disparage Myst by pointing out that a large number of its sales came from hardware bundles. It's simply a fact.

>>4829261
I'm not saying Myst is a bad game, I'm saying that it had a massive marketing campaign that including shipping it with hardware. The publisher of Myst probably cut deals with hardware manufacturers.

It was a "killer app" for CD-ROM at a time when floppy disks were the norm and internet went through phone lines instead of cable lines. I personally knew a *lot* of people who had the game but never got far into it because we were all grade schoolers who were dumb and just wanted to play Half-Life and Counter-Strike and we all got Myst with our computer hardware. It looked really cool but none of us figured how to get far and we had more fun gibbing noobs anyway.

>>4829273
I sort of had the same experience but we were all playing Leisure Suit Larry thinking we were in to something really dirty instead.

>>4829275
I must be slightly younger than you 'cuz it was all about the Duke Nukem 3D titties at my school.

I don't keep up with games.
Is it true that they remade Myst in full 3d?

>>4829279
I hope not, the pre-rendered 90s CGI is the best part of it. If they rendered it in the latest Unreal engine it'd just be a boring walking simulator.

>>4829279

Yes. Twice, in fact. Cyan then released a fully 3D spiritual successor.

>>4829278
Duke 3D came out before I graduated HS, but I'm also old enough to remember playing Duke Nukem and Jazz Jackrabbit and all of the old games that Epic put out. Nothing beats the PC Speaker for those. I got a Creative bundle for Christmas one year and that's how I got my first copy of Myst.

>>4829279

Up until a few years ago, the only way to play Myst after Windows XP was the 3D versions. The Steam version of Myst was the first one that works on later versions of Windows.

my high school Economics teacher told me her favorite game was Myst but she wasn't a gamer. This was in 2004. I doubt she bought Myst, I doubt she ever bought any vidya at all. When I asked her about stuff like Unreal, Counter-Strike, Starcraft, Baldur's Gate... she didn't have a clue.

>>4829290
As I remember you had to have a VESA driver in autoexec.bat or config.sys. Can't remember which. Is that the reason?

Don't know about sales, but it's a really interesting game. I love the weird lonely atmosphere it conveys, and most of the puzzles are enjoyable, even to someone like me who sucks at puzzles in adventure games. Narratively I think it was really unique, I loved reading the journals of the dimension-travelling dude and then comparing his notes to the places you're currently exploring, wondering what happened to these islands etc. It's minimalist in its storytelling but works really well.
It's not a long game either, I totally recommend playing it through.

Now if only Riven didn't constantly crash on my PC, I could be playing it too...

>>4829335
>Now if only Riven didn't constantly crash on my PC, I could be playing it too...

Donate to these guys: http://www.starryexpanse.com/

>>4829270
"It's simply a fact" because people have repeated it without evidence enough times that everyone believes it's a bit of vidya trivia they learned, except it's actually made up. No one has ever cited anything other than "well I remember it being bundled when I was kid so it must have been a large % of the sales". And there's an additional bias due to Myst's overexposure. It got coverage and felt everywhere, so people assume without evidence the bundle % must be sky-high. Like without the bundles Myst couldn't have pollinated far enough or something.

>>4829359

Nobody is assuming or implying any of that. Why are you being so defensive? Myst is a great game. It would have been a commercial success with or without hardware bundles. Many people in this thread have said as much. We are not discussing Myst's quality. We are answering OP's question as to why its sales figures were so high.

>>4829359
Show me evidence that AOL discs were widely given out for free.

>>4829359
Did you know that some of the best games ever made didn't sell well, but some of the worst games have sold very well?

>>4827889
Yes. Reality and and how things were before you were born is black magic.

By being in the right place at the right time.

It was a killer app for a CD drive and soundcard and it proved the power of the PC as a multimedia platform.

The pre-rendered backdrops were very impressive for 1993 and the CD quality audio was something utterly new to gamers at the time - even in Japan, the Playstation was still full year away.

The following games in the series were never able to come within swinging distance of the original's success for the simple reason that they were no longer offering a new experience with new tech.

>>4829365
wat

>>4829752

If you can't provide evidence, it must not have happened. It's something people made up to make people hate AOL.

Myst and Riven's sales had nothing to do with bundled hardware specials.

You could buy Myst and Riven at places like Wal Mart for years after release. This is the exact same reason games like The Sims or some casual Agatha Cristie point and click game can maintain good sales. Until the advent of online stores like Amazon, the primary factor of media sales success after release is just the number of store shelves it sat on. The comic book industry in America has been permanently gutted since the 70s, when business issues caused stores to stop carrying comics except in specialty shops. Most comics have problems breaching 10k sales now when even newcomer comics used to breach 100k easily. All just because of lack of exposure through shelf space.

When someone says a game sold 6 million copies, and it's a game like Myst, what that probably really means is that Wal Mart, Target, Kmart, and other retailers bought 6 million copies and over the course of several years those copies made their way into the general public because they sat on store shelves. In 2015 I found a new copy of Jedi Academy at Kmart for $5, these stores are pretty willing to let produce sit for years if it's a PC game.

The same reason Avatar made $2 billion.

Myst sucks balls

>>4829365

Well uh, it was a free disc and the only way to get one was to be given one... so yeah

It sold on MUH GRAFIX. Despite this, it's comfy as fuck.

>>4827889
>literally the best graphics a video game could offer at the time
>puzzles that were not basic bitch and required you to actually regularly write things down and think of what you did
>while not particularly terrifying or scary multiple parts of the game had an unnerving quality that psychologically made people want to discuss it as it sparks sense of urgency and adventure

You couldn't have designed a better casual game in a million years OP. MYST was a masterpiece in every sense of the word.

>>4829824
You're not incorrect, if you go to staples they still have a small pc gaming section and at least 5 years ago there was a copy of MYST still there.

However MYST reached 4.3 million US sales in 7 years. For the time being that's incredibly impressive. There are still probably countless MYST boxes still on shelves now as you stated.

Myst is the new-age music of video games.

Prove me wrong.

>>4827889
When something is imitated over and over, the original is gonna seem cliché to people who don't know their fuckin' history.

Before there was escape-the-room shovelware, we had games like this made with love and care.

>>4827889
Myst was AMAZING to play with family and friends back in the day. We won't have days like that anymore, in that , you can see why even older generations pine for the days of huddling around the radio.

It just seems like the more the internet connects us, the more disconnected we become from each other. Myst was just a fantastic social experience.

>>4829763
>>4829365
But there are tons of articles and reputable sources talking about how AOL gave out discs for free, and you probably CAN get the numbers because it's an important and well-studied chapter in the history of the internet.

If it was that easy to get data on Myst sales and the effect of bundling, we wouldn't have a problem. But right now it's just a "fact" that people repeat because they heard it somewhere and it FEELS right, not because anyone heard it from Cyan or saw a breakdown somewhere.

>>4830664
I always played this with my dad and sometimes it would take us days to figure the puzzles, but damn it was worth it, once we finished it we would wait for the next game in the series