Guild of Messengers banner

Category: Mysterium

  • Mysterium 2026

    Mysterium 2026

    The XXVII Mysterium was held in Portland, OR, on July 24–26, with the panels and presentations streamed to both Twitch and YouTube.

    Belford wrote a two-part summary in his blog, giving his perspective mainly on Cyan’s panel.

    Friday started with the Opening Announcements, with a few words and reminders from the convention chairs.

    ☛ In the A New Age of Myst Tabletop Gaming (link TBA) panel, Kefrith introduced four new homemade tabletop games themed around the Myst franchise. Three are custom re-themed versions of existing card and board games, while the fourth is a brand new design.

    ☛ In the Gehn’s Grab Bag (link TBA), attendees took game pieces, cards, instructions, and like Gehn made games with no written rules.

    ☛ Twice during the convention, Curator played the 2024 Mysterium Marker Missions (link TBA) on stream (which you can get via Mir-o-Bot).

    ☛ The rest of the day was dedicated to events that were not streamed. In the voluntary event Achenar’s Journey, people were randomly grouped and assigned a puzzle packet to solve. Annacat explored the music of the Myst series through dance and creative movement, teaching a simple short choreography. She also guided attendees through warmup and cooldown exercises each morning and evening. In the bring-your-own craft project Wharkin’ Hard ’n Hardly Wharkin’ event, attendees brought sketchbooks, knitting, crochet, drawing tablets, embroidery, quilling and such.

    Saturday started with the Creature Feature (link TBA) game: the cerpatee went extinct, Haven needs a new apex predator and it was up to the players to design one, either in teams or individually, using randomly selected Earth animals to create a creature that can fix Haven’s ecosystem.

    ☛ In the Restoration of The Great Shaft (link TBA) panel, Murry and Calum Traveler showcased the upcoming Descent location (thanks to the hard work of Calum, Tweek, Ametist, Ehren, TikiBear, Semjay and Maurus) and detailed some of the unique challenges in building it while keeping continuity with previous, often inconsistent depictions in DIRT, the novels, Myst V and Uru Live itself.

    Besides the familiar access from the Eder Tomahn, it will also be possible to enter from the Cleft area to the caldera, with a newly installed elevator platform. The location will have brand new music by Semjay and Maurus, mixed with the existing one. The tunnels have been extended compared to Myst V, to match the novels and to fix a geometric issue with the top of the Shaft, that would otherwise protrude above ground level.

    All the sections up (well, down) to the elevator platform are functional and roughly familiar if you played Myst V. There are plans for the sections beyond that, including the Bug Cave from the Intangibles assets; Semjay is working on this part.

    There is no planned released date, but Descent will be split in phases: phase 1 and 2 are the tunnels and the Shaft, phase 3 is the Bug Cave. Initially Descent will be released as a public instance, possibly with all puzzles already solved. For the future, they’re planning on a private instance that will be reached from Rainy Cleft, climbing up the volcano to the caldera.

    ☛ In the Myst Documentary (link TBA) panel, Philip Shane gave a few updates on the status and the many difficulties of the Myst Documentary. He was joined by collaborators Randy Woods (writer), David Van Taylor (consulting producer), Joshua Reinstein (editing, history cataloging), Ben Reichman (editing), John Clark, Hollister Starrett (music), Elana Bogdan (web design), and Khatie Postma (community manager). He showed various completed scenes: building Cyan’s office, outtakes from the Making of Riven footage, Rand and Robyn discussing puzzles for Myst, and the preparations for Obduction’s launch. Apparently there was a plan for a Coke–Myst Online co-branded ad.

    ☛ In the Cosplay Contest (link TBA), participant competed for the best interpretation of Achenar in Haven.

    ☛ In the Trial of Daddy Atrus (link TBA) panel, the Giant Bomb crew put Atrus on trial to decide if he’s guilty of being a bad father, and how much he’s to blame for their atrocities.

    ☛ In the Flimsiest Page (link TBA) panel, a parody of The Weakest Link, participants tried to impress everyone with their knowledge of Myst lore, often embarrassing themselves for getting it completly wrong.

    ☛ The rest of the day was dedicated to events that were not streamed. In the Guildmaster event, Taerun assigned the participants a variety of unique tasks to complete.

    Sunday started with the What Would Achenar Build? (link TBA) game, in which participants were split into groups, given a random pile of things, and given a task to build. Then each group presented their creation, to be judged based on creativity, best looking, and so on.

    ☛ In Cyan’ State of the Union panel (possibly the first in-person report not held in Spokane), Hannah Gamiel and Eric A. Anderson gave a few updates on Cyan’s activities in the last two years. The talk is also summarized on Cyan’s website.

    They started with a brief recap of the last two years: Riven’s many awards, the addition of Rime to Myst, the layoffs, the console ports of Firmament, Myst and Riven, the re-release of the novel trilogy ebook, updates for their classic games and Steam Deck verification, Steam bundles with Blue Prince, Outer Wilds and other games. Obduction was developed with early version of UE4, so further updates and ports are difficult; updating to a more recent release will take work and would lose support of certain features. Spyder is back, and posted recently on Cyan’s Discord, hinting about a link to an ARG teaser page.

    The main course was a presentation called “Paths Not (yet) Taken: Scraps from Cyan’s Development Past”, in which they showed concept art and prototype shots from various cancelled projects:

    • Latus (2004): one of the most known projects, it was an experiment in linear narrative, an episodic spy series with many interwoven storylines;
    • Obduction v.1 (2005): “Myst meets Halo”, Cyan at some point wanted to try making a shooter-style game with narrative twists. Over time the idea morphed into a game about a farmer trying to rescue his dog, who was abducted by aliens; then a scenario of a televised intergalactic game show where aliens would kidnap humans to compete for prizes. The Obduction that was released only kept a few ideas from the original concept;
    • DiSC v.1 (2006): the Cyan crew used to really be into disc golf, and actually started working on a disc golf game for the Wii, with powerups and wacky environments;
    • Lift/Lyft (2007): a game about flight and exploration, in a massive world with floating islands, alternating between third-person exploration on the ground and first-person flying combat;
    • Origami (2007): a much smaller, top-down action game about fighting paper monsters. Both Lift and Origami used Plasma 3.0, only used in Hex Isle;
    • Latus v.2 (2010): the second attempt was a timeline game in a 3D world, in which you could move along the timeline, seeing the ripple effects of small changes, opening new locations and new options as you progressed, exponentially expanding the possibile branches;
    • Goldfish (2011): “a love letter to the D’ni Cavern”, it was a game set in D’ni but not about Atrus. Some concepts and ideas were reworked for Obduction and Firmament;
    • DiSC v.2 (2016): similar to DiSC v.1, but in VR; they even had a prototype, but it didn’t go anywhere;
    • Goldfish v.2 (2023): a new take on the concept, quite ahead in design progress. This one is not in active development, but may still happen one day;
    • Eric has also been modeling the whole D’ni Cavern in Unreal, including Ae’gura and the City Proper. It’s a “backburner side project” that “might come in handy someday”;
    • Minnow: DarkPath (2025): a puzzle game under time pressure, set on a boring D’ni machine tunneling at high speed through the earth;
    • Minnow: WhoD’nit (2025): a murder mystery visual novel in the style of Phoenix Wright; Guildmaster Kadish makes an appearance;

    Then Eric and Hannah showcased Anglerfish (2024): a D’ni-era thriller with a darker tone, heavily under development towards the end of Riven production and teased as “Prefall” in early 2025, before the layoffs. The player is sent to fetch a Linking Book by a Guildmaster named Damreus, who’s also editing the Age as you’re exploring. They built a fully playable prototype, and showed a publisher pitch trailer (spoilers warning). It has more storyline and gameplay spoilers than you’d expect from a Steam game trailer. The game is not currently in production as they could not get it funded. Both the attendees and the stream chat were very clear they want to see it completed!
    The trailer was quickly featured on a number of online gaming websites (Criticalpixel, Games.gg, PCGamer, RetroArcade, RockPaperShotgun, VideoGameGeek, The Front List).

    Mudfish is the project Cyan is currently developing, a first-person adventure in the Myst setting, with “denser, more intricate game spaces”. The name is intentionally connected to Mudpie, Uru’s prototype.

    They’re not focusing on VR for the moment, as the team is too small to target all platforms. They’re planning boxed editions of Myst and Riven for PS5, Xbox, and Mac/PC. PS5 and Xbox boxes will have actual discs, while PCs will just get a Steam code. They’re also working on deluxe hardcover reprints of the Myst novel trilogy. As for The Book of Marrim, the manuscript turned out to be very incomplete, and the lore and story didn’t match the direction they’ve been following for the last twenty years. So BoM is a dead end at this point.

    Also, 2027 will be a year of anniversaries: Riven will be 30 years old; Cyan will be 40 years old, reportedly the oldest surviving independent game studio in the US. There are talks about a possible exhibition in Spokane, which led to the announcement of next year’s Mysterium location: Spokane, WA!

    ☛ The Closing Ceremonies (link TBA)wrapped up this year’s convention and ran the prize drawing.

    Thanks and kudos to the Mysterium Committee, who did a great job at organising and managing the event.

    Looking forward to next year!

  • Mysterium 2024

    Mysterium 2024

    The XXV Mysterium was held in Montréal, Canada on July 12–14, with the panels and presentations streamed to both Twitch and YouTube.

    Belford wrote a summary in his blog, giving his perspective on the various updates.

    Friday started with the Opening Announcements with a few words and reminders from the convention chairs.

    ☛ In the Cyan ‘State of the Union’ prerecorded panel Rand Miller, Hannah Gamiel and Eric A. Anderson gave a few updates on their games. While Riven‘s critical reception has been phenomenal, sales have not been correspondly positive. Riven costed “less than 2%” of a AAA game of comparable quality to make; it was a “monumental effort” and they really want to scale down their workload.

    Touching on the design process, they started with drastic redesign ideas, narrowing them them down to only those that directly supported the game experience. They also had to iron bugs and glitches quite close to launch.

    For the immediate future, they will be working on porting Firmament and Riven to more platforms, and improving Myst on the Quest 3. After that, Rand confirmed they have started on a new game in the D’niverse; it will be a new storyline and you will not have to be familiar with the Myst series to play it. They expect to have more to say next year.

    Also, Rand is retiring: with Riven released, he feels it’s the right time to cut back considerably; he will still be involved with advising on game design and such, but not as often and as much.

    ☛ In the Myst Reverse Engineer panel, Jeff Barbi showed how to hack the original Myst (thanks to Uli Kusterer’s HyperCard work), and a few interesting results of editing the HyperTalk source code. The original fireplace puzzle accepted two codes, from page 158 but also page 148. The HyperCard stack was password-locked against editing, but this feature can easily be bypassed with modern tools, and Jeff was able to recover the original password.

    ☛ In the Myst Online Update, a group of fan developers (AgeExplorer, Doobes, DPogue, Harley, Semjay and Yali) gave a few updates on what’s been going on in the Cavern. The writing team is trying a long-term story arc (“Diplomacy”) involving first contact with an unexpectedly inhabited Age. On the open source client front, DPogue has continued to improve the Korman Blender plugin, as well as the MacOS client, which however is not yet ready for testing on the live servers.

    As for upcoming Ages, Doobes and AgeExplorer are still working on the Descent: you can now take the elevator down the Shaft and mostly solve the puzzles there, and walk down the spiral staircase that runs the entire length of the Shaft. Doobes is also working on a major Chiso expansion. Tweek is working on a library Age, a garden homage to Myst, a rework of of Fahets, and a new Neighborhood. Semjay is working on completing one of Cyan’s cancelled Ages for Uru, Venalem, and also on the Explorer’s Emporium. Harley is working on expanding Naybree and on an Age called Rei’schu. Yali is working on a private city area and on UI updates for the client.

    ☛ The rest of the day was dedicated to events that were not streamed. In Uru Live, a devious marker mission ws released (video). For Puzzle Time, Rayne and m13 challenged the participants with a set of devious puzzles. For the Dance Event, Annacat explored the music of the Myst series through dance and creative movement, teaching a simple short choreography.

    Saturday started with a few events that were not streamed: the Mysterium Unconference, an unstreamed set of participant-driven discussion sessions; What Would Catherine Build? (Atrus was too busy this year!), where teams were asked to build something that met certain requirements, and delivered clever presentations for why they built like that.

    The subsequent three panels were all about Myst IV: Revelation:

    ☛ In the Designing Worlds panel, Patrick Fortier (Creative Director & Lead Game Designer), Mary DeMarle (Designer & Writer), Sebastien Yelle (Level Designer) and moderator Katie “Khatie” Postma (Community Manager) discussed bringing Myst IV’s world to life, the creative process, technical challenges and innovative design choices.

    ☛ In the Living Worlds panel, Meinert Hansen (Senior Art Director) and Guy Sprung (Actor for Achenar) shared their experience bringing the worlds and characters of Myst IV to life through visuals, sound, and motion.

    ☛ In the Retrospection panel, Mary DeMarle, Patrick Fortier, Meinert Hansen, Katie “Kha’tie” Postma, Guy Sprung and Sebastien Yellel shared behind-the-scenes insights, stories and the creative processes that brought the game to launch.

    ☛ The rest of the day was dedicated to events that were not streamed. In the Guildmaster event, Taerun assigned the participants a variety of unique tasks to complete.

    ☛ Sunday started with the Myst Documentary panel, where Philip Shane (filmmaker), Katie “Kha’tie” Postma and Joshua Reinstein gave the latest updates and showed some footage of the Riven launch event at Cyan HQ. The documentary is having trouble funding the full production. David Van Taylor was brought in to help with pitching, and Julie McElmurry is helping with production. The working title now is “A World I’d Want To Live In: Myst and the Video-Game Revolution“.

    ☛ The Closing Ceremonies wrapped up this year’s convention, running the prize drawing, and announced next year’s location: Atlanta, GA!

    ☛ After the Closing Ceremonies, attendees joined unofficial excursions to see some of Montréal’s many attractions, including the Biodôme and the Jardin Botanique.

    Thanks and kudos to the Mysterium Committee, who did a great job at organising and managing the event.

    Looking forward to next year!

  • Mysterium 2023

    Mysterium 2023

    The XXIV Mysterium was held in Spokane, WA on June 30–July 2, with the panels and presentations streamed to both Twitch and YouTube.

    Belford wrote a summary in his blog, commenting on Cyan’s announcements.

    Friday started at 11:00 KIT with the Opening Announcements with a few words and reminders from the convention chairs.

    At the 12:00 panel D’ni Linguistic Fellowship, Christopher “Kh’reestrefah” Gilson discussed word formation in the D’ni language, first showing how words in D’ni can be used to form other words, then looking at known D’ni words to discover patterns that point to historical rules that have not been explained before.

    At the 15:00 panel Uru World-building, Patrick “Doobes” Dulebohn gave a demonstration of Blender for Korman, the free plugin currently used to create Ages for MOULa and CC. He also briefly showed the use of ZLZ Age Importer, to get Cyan Ages converted to blends.

    At the 16:00 panel Art of Shoomlah, Claire “Shoom’lah” Hummel showed a retrospective of her Myst art over the years, and how the games have impacted her career as an art director and concept artist in the games industry (including hiding a Riven easter egg in Half-Life: Alyx). She runs a “real places that look like Myst” blog.

    At the 17:00 panel The Cavern Today Podcast, Dalken Starbyne, Esto Centura, Maurus and Sh’aeri held a live episode right at Mysterium, discussing the convention, D’ni, Cyan, and did a brief audience Q&A. The Cavern Today podcast has been bringing listeners news from the Myst fan community since 2005.

    At the 18:00 event Moving the Slider (not streamed), Rayne and m13 challenged the attendees at a group game, working together to solve puzzles, find clues, and trying to figure out what in the world the Thing is for.

    At the 19:00 panel Unwritten Character Creation Workshop, Faroguy, Eleri Hamilton, Vee Hamilton and Thomas “Curator” Steele announced the Modern D’ni expansion for Unwritten, and gave tips on how to plan a good character for the game.

    Later, Curator and Eleri hosted two parallel Unwritten sessions.

    Saturday started at 9:30 KIT with a few words from the convention staff, then the attendees headed over to Cyan HQ. At 11:00 Jeff Lanctot gave a brief welcome talk and order of events.

    At the 11:15 Cyan State of the Union, Hannah Gamiel and Eric Anderson discussed the recently released Myst (VR) and Firmament, and gave some updates about the Riven remake; notably, there will be some changes giving more lore details.

    Currently all resources are focused on Riven; future projects will likely be smaller, a bit more experimental, and possibly more related to the Myst universe. The presentation ended with a preview of the Riven remake, specifically the Boiler Island area!

    Starting at 12:15 the attendees were divided in three groups, alternating between lunch at the Squee Conservatory, a guided tour of the campus at DRC Headquarters, and an opportunity to meet some Cyan employees and guests at Gehn’s Temple.

    At 14:30 Mike “RIUM+” Ando showed off another one of his amazing creations: the Andotrope, a recreation of Gehn’s holographic imager from Riven. As RIUM+ put it, he “accidentally invented new technology while trying to make a videogame prop more screen-accurate”.

    At 15:10, at the Special Mystery Presentation, Phil Salvador from the the Video Game History Foundation announced they got permission to digitize a huge stack (about 100 hours of footage) of videotapes from Cyan’s vault, recorded in the Nineties, found by Philip Shane while he was collecting material for the Myst Documentary. They hope to finish digitizing the tapes and make them available by the end of this year.

    At 16:00 Rand Miller held a Keynote Q&A, discussing a few design choices for the Riven remake, and taking questions from the audience. Cyan is now focused on the remake. Richard Vander Wende has returned as creative leads, along with Rand Miller. The game logic is in place, but a lot is still needed for the visuals. They confirmed they will not use live-action video for the characters. No release date or platforms were announced, but they want to release it by the 30th anniversary (2027).

    The remake will expand a bit the lore, under the premise that they uncovered more archaelogical material from the New Mexico desert, and they will incorporate those discoveries into the new game. For the occasion, Rand showcased a metal plate with a relief of D’ni letters (possibly a gahrohev), originally used to cover the Fissure around the telescope.

    After Riven, they want to focus on smaller games, with more replay value, going back to the Myst universe.

    Wrapping up at 17:30, the crowd headed back to the hotel for the rest of the events.

    At 21:00 four parallel events started:

    Harley hosted the Gemedet Tournament, a game in which two players take turns placing pieces of their color in a three dimensional grid nine wide, nine long, and nine layers high. The objective is to complete an unbroken straight line of six pieces of the players color. Any direction the line of six can fit will count, including diagonals.

    Dan Binder hosted Name That Tune, a competition in which the attendees identified songs and tracks from the Myst games.

    Eleri and Curator hosted two more Unwritten sessions.

    After some announcements from the convention staff, Sunday started at 11:00 KIT with Cyan Games Completed Rapidly Live, a marathon of Myst games hosted by the Guild of Speedrunners, to show the differences and the development of its various iterations, in celebration of 30 years of Myst.

    At the 12:00 panel Uru Demake, Phil R showcased his ‘de-make’ of Uru, a recreation of some of the Ages in a very simple 2D pixel art engine called Bitsy; he discussed the process of translating puzzles from Uru into a minimalist style and redesigning some of the puzzles based on player feedback.

    After lunch, at the 15:00 panel Myst Documentary, filmmaker Philip Shane and team members Randy Woods, Joshua Reinstein, Katie Postma and Elana Bogdan gave an update about The Myst Documentary, highlighting how it will be structured and showing a few clips about the Miller family. Attendees were given an exclusive sneak peek.

    At 17:00 the Closing Ceremonies were held, wrapping up this year’s convention, running the prize drawing, showing the “Crafting With Watermelon” video, and announcing next year’s location: Montreal, Canada!

    Thanks and kudos to the Mysterium Committee, who did a great job at organising and managing the event.

    Looking forward to next year!

  • Mysterium 2022

    Mysterium 2022

    The XXIII Mysterium was held in Denver, CO on August 12–14, with the panels and presentations streamed to both Twitch and YouTube.

    Minasunda and Civer Gaming made summary videos; Belford wrote a two-part summary ([1], [2]) in his blog, commenting on Cyan’s announcements.

    Friday started at 10:00 KIT with the Opening Announcements and Cyan’s “State of the Union”, with Eric A. Anderson (Creative Director) and Hannah Gamiel (Development Director). They are super busy developing Firmament (they also showed a preview video), so they will combine Myst’s and Riven’s anniversaries next year. They will share something new every month, including challenge coins, Cyan logo shirts, re-releasing the ebook versions of the Myst novels, and digging through Riven’s archives. They are working with members of the community on “special, secret projects”. There are no plans for an official remake of Uru.

    At 11:30 the Walkabout Mini Golf: Myst panel with Don Carson, Henning Koczy, Lucas Martell, Edward McAndrew of Mighty Coconut studio discussed their approach to design for immersive gameplay with realistic physics, in combining their VR mini golf game with Myst’s iconic island.

    At 14:00 the The Last Clockwinder panel with John Austin and Anita Tung of Pontoco studio talked about their game, developed with Cyan Ventures (which has shifted role from publishing arm to development-support group).

    At 15:00 Kefrith’s Cryptic Contraption presentation revealed his surprise Myst-inspired creation, discussing the setbacks he got into in the creative process.

    At 16:00 the full recording of the concert held by the NULP Dance Group in Elonin was released as a YouTube Premiere.

    At 18:00 it was time for the trip to the Meow Wolf: Convergence Station interactive art series.

    Saturday started at 10:00 KIT with the Cyan Q&A, with Eric Anderson, Rand Miller, Ryan “greydragon” Warzecha discussing what is happening at Cyan, their artistic and technical approach to game design, and the rationale behind some decisions on Myst and Uru lore.

    At 11:15 the MOULa Fan Creations: Tech Development panel with Colin “Maccodemonkey” Cornaby, Adam “Hoikas” Johnson, Darryl “Paradox” Pogue, Paul “rarified” Richards presented the latest development news about MOULa, with an update on the process to make the client cross-platform. To get involved, you can contact the OpenUru team (testing) on Discord, or the H’uru team (developing) on GitHub and IRC.

    At 11:45 the MOULa Fan Creations: Ages panel with Ametist, Patrick “Doobes” Dulebohn, Harley “Calum Traveler”, Keith “Tweek” Lord discussed the challenges of creating and modifying environments for MOULa. The current tool for creating ages is Korman for Blender. You can find tutorials in the GoW wiki; Calum Traveler also made a series of videos.

    At 13:45 the Area Man Lives panel with Amy Green, Ryan Green, Mike Perrotto of Numinous Games, and Ryan “greydragon” Warzecha of Cyan, discussed their VR game produced with Cyan Ventures.

    At 14:45 the highlights of the concert held by the NULP Dance Group in Elonin was released as a YouTube Premiere.

    At 16:00 Erik Oberg’s Libraries of Myst presentation analyzed how libraries fit into Myst, both in the explicit sense of literal, in-game libraries and the broader presence of librarian principles and practices in the Myst universe, as well as how Myst fits into real-world libraries.

    At 19:45 the Achenar: Redemption in One Part panel with Guy Sprung, who played Achenar in Myst IV: Revelation, discussed the process behind playing a character who experiences both sides of being the villain and the savior.

    At 20:45 it was time for Cavern Feud, hosted by Dan Binder, in which teams competed against each other to see who best knows how the Myst community responds to various survey questions, like “what would Yeesha name her cat?” or  “which Myst animal would make the best pet?”

    Sunday started at 10:00 KIT with the Myst Documentary Sneak Peek and Q&A, with Elana Bogdan, Katie “Kha’tie” Postma, Joshua Reinstein, Philip Shane, giving insights into the creation of The Myst Documentary, which will cover Myst, Riven and Uru, the near-collapse of Cyan in 2005 and its climb back in the following years, and the new era that started with Obduction. Attendees had an exclusive sneak peak of the documentary, then they showcased the new online Community Vault of Myst Stories.

    At 12:00 the Closing Ceremonies were held, wrapping up this year’s convention, running the prize drawing, and announcing next year’s location: Spokane!

    Thanks and kudos to the Mysterium Committee, who did a great job at organising and managing the event.

    Looking forward to next year!

  • Mysterium 2021

    Mysterium 2021

    Like last year, the XXII Mysterium was held entirely online, on July 16–18, with the panels and presentations streamed to both Twitch and YouTube.

    Friday started at 18:00 KIT with Rand Miller playing through Myst and giving some insights in the design process. One highlight was the medallion on the planetarium door.

    At 19:00, it was time for the discussion rooms, this year held on the Mysterium Discord server, and for the marker missions in MOULa. You can still get them by PMing Mir-o-Bot (#32319) or MinBot (#9292763) the command “sendme 10800192” for the Red markers or “sendme 10801032” for the Blue ones. While you’re there, make sure to grab the Mysterium shirt in your Relto wardrobe, it won’t be available afterward!

    Saturday started at 8:30 KIT with a message from the Committee, giving some info on the organisation of this year’s convention.

    The first panel was at 9:00, with some members of the Myst IV: Revelation team: Meinert Hansen (Art Director/Sr. Concept Artist), Brian Wrench (Actor – Sirrus) and Geneviève Lord (Producer), discussing how Myst IV evolved in its looks, styles and immersive design.

    At 11:00 it was time for the Myst State of the Union panel, with Eric A. Anderson (Creative Director) and Hannah Gamiel (Development Director) presenting Cyan’s newly re-imagined version of Myst before its release for PC/VR and Mac.

    At 12:30 the Cyan Dev Team Q&A panel, with Abner Coimbre, Brandon Collins, Hannah Gamiel, Karl Johnson and Josh Van Veldhuizen discussing what it means to be a developer at Cyan and how they adapted to working from home.

    At 13:30 the Cyan Art Team Q&A panel, with Eric Anderson, Blake Bjerke, Jeremiah Castro, Autumn Palfenier and Derrick Robinson talking about how the look of a game is established and what inspiration they draw from in designing worlds.

    At 15:00 Vincent Weaver presented his Apple II Myst Demake, talking about the challenges involved with getting a fully playable version of Myst working on an 8-bit system from the 1970s, fitting on a reasonable number of floppy disks. To learn more (or try it yourself!), see Vince’s website.

    At 16:00 Chuck Carter (original Myst Artist) presented his reworking of the Selenitic Age for Unreal Engine 5, which will add some new twists (e.g. the maze ship is now destroyed). The redesign will have original music by Conductor/Composer Lucas Richman. You can follow Chuck on his website, Twitter and Instagram.

    At 17:00 it was time for the discussion rooms, with two focused chats beside open discussions: “Unwritten Character Workshop”, about creating a character for the Myst RPG, and “Dancing with Annacat”, to get some exercise after sitting and watching streams all day.

    Sunday started at 8:30 KIT with a message from the Committee, giving some info and announcing the location of Mysterium 2022, one that will give attendees the true Myst experience 😉

    The first panel was at 9:00, with Maxx Hirsch’s honors thesis “Finding Tomahna”, analyzing Myst as a product of American 1990s cultural movements and ideas, considering attitudes towards war, violence, new technology, reading, community, and diversity. You can read the full text here.

    At 1o:00 documentary filmmaker Phillip Shane gave an update and a sneak peek of the Myst Documentary, along with his collaborators Elana Bogdan, Will Cavendish, Rachel Kittner, Anais Michel, Katie Postma, Joshua Reinstein and Randy Woods. You can follow and support the development of the documentary on the official website.

    At 11:30 the Uru Worldbuilders Panel, with Eric Anderson, Mike Hines, Doug McBride, Steve Ogden and Bill Slease discussed about the original development of Uru, from DIRT and Mudpie up to the GameTap era.

    At 12:30 the MOULa Fan Development Panel, with Mark “Chogon” DeForest, Patrick “Doobes” Dulebohn, John “Marten” Johns, Adam “Hoikas” Johnson, Keith “Tweek” Lord, Darryl “dpogue/Paradox” Pogue and Paul “rarified” Richards discussed how fan developers and creators are keeping Uru alive and well, with client bugfixes, QoL improvements and new fan-made ages. To get involved, you can contact the OpenUru team (testing) on Discord, or the H’uru team (developing) on GitHub and IRC.

    At 14:00 the Unwritten Update panel with Veronica Hamilton gave some updates on the RPG and its role in Cyan Ventures, discussing the design and how it focuses on non-violent solutions. To learn more, visit the official website.

    At 15:00 it was time for Cyan Games Completed Rapidly, a round of speedrunning, with some unusual categories like Myst on the Apple II, and a few races.

    At 17:30 it was time for the discussion rooms, with no preset topics, and the Speedrun After Party, in which the speedrunners chatted with the attendees about the runs and racesfrom the panel.

    Thanks and kudos to the Mysterium Committee, who did a great job at organising and managing the event.

    Looking forward to next year!

  • 20th Mysterium, Day 3

    The third day of Mysterium has come, and alas it is the last. If you could not be present, remember that you can follow the convention live on Twitch and Discord.

    (more…)

  • 20th Mysterium, Day 2

    The second day of Mysterium has come and gone, and what a day it was. If you could not be present, remember that you can follow the convention live on Twitch and Discord.

    (more…)

  • 20th Mysterium, Day 1

    The wait is over, and the twentieth edition of the Myst/Uru community convention Mysterium has finally begun! If you could not be present, remember that you can follow the convention live on Twitch and Discord.

    (more…)