In 1993, Robyn Miller and his brother Rand released Myst, a first-person adventure that would take the computer gaming world by storm. Myst’s amazing graphics, complex puzzles and richly detailed world saw it become the best-selling PC game to date, an honor it would hold for a staggering ten years. I caught up with Robyn to discuss his early days in the gaming world, time spent working with his brother, Myst’s many impacts on their lives, and more.
"Blurry retouched Robyn: no age spots, no nose hairs, and no wrinkles." View full size.
So to kick this off, maybe you could please give us a rundown about your early background, how you got into computers and then into playing and eventually making computer games.
Robyn: Yeah, so it’s interesting now because I’ve been working with computers for so long that there really is a large history for me, and time has passed by quickly, it seems. I began seriously working with Macintoshes I guess about 1985 and 1986, and that’s when my brother Rand sent me a copy of HyperCard. HyperCard was something which came before the Internet – in some ways it was the Internet without the ability to connect to other users. It existed on your own computer and you could link from one page to the other via hyperlinks. It had a lot of the same or similar tools that the Internet has, but it just sat there on your own machine.
"This is Robyn, age nine, being treated like royalty as the Miller family arrives in Honolulu Hawaii. Less than a year later they will move away." View full size.
And so this arrived and I put it on to, well, not even my own computer because I didn’t have a computer at that point in time. I used my parents computer which sat in the basement at their house. I started playing with it and the first day I drew a picture of a manhole. I have no idea why I drew a manhole – I was living in Seattle at the time and I think I was just observing and examining the different kinds of manhole styles that were in the Seattle area. After I drew that manhole cover, I just was curious like “what’s under that manhole cover?” and what began to evolve was a world – a very primitive sort of world.
The Manhole, 1988.
So I made the manhole cover slide open and a beanstalk grew out of it, and in a fairly quick amount of time I created a series of cards... basically a slideshow that allowed the user to click on the manhole and go to the world at the top, where they could wander around. And you know, I didn’t really make any of this for anyone else to see. I made all of this just because I was curious how the tool worked, and it was just an experimentation as I was learning HyperCard.
I started to send the beginnings of this first project to Rand and he started to get very excited about it, which of course excited me, and I began to draw more and more of this world. Then I drew characters, and they were crudely animated. Then we came up with the idea to make this into a project, and it only took about a month and we turned it into a commercial product. We finished off the rough edges and so what I was initially made just by playing around and experimenting, we ended up creating a world where you could fully explore and get back to where you started. It was a complete world, I should say, rather than just a partial world. I would create on floppies – it was all on floppies back then – and I would send floppy after floppy after floppy down to my brother! He would clean up all of my work, because I was so new to HyperCard that everything I was doing was so messy. If you had looked at any of the scripting I had done, or even the way I had set up the cards, it was just such a mess! He would take all that and clean it up and turn it into something we could actually sell.
The Manhole, 1988.
After we had done that, he added some voices, and we took it to a HyperCard expo in San Francisco. We just thought, well, what the heck... let’s just do this, take it down there and show it off to a few people and see what happens. And it surprised us – we couldn’t believe it. There wasn’t much for HyperCard at that point and so people were really excited. In fact, articles were written which called it one of the hits of the expo, and I think that was because it was an entertainment product. No one knew what to do with something like HyperCard, and hey, if you think of it like the web, or at least when the web came out, broadly speaking, nobody knew what to do with it. It was very similar to that. We just turned around almost as soon as we got our hands on it and made one of the first entertainment products for it and people really responded to that in a positive manner. So, as a result of that, we had some offers from publishers.
The Manhole, 1988.
Could you maybe go into details of who they were and what they offered you?
Robyn: I can’t remember who all the publishers were, but the one we were happiest about was Activision. They came to us and they offered us a deal, and we were really flattered that any publishers were willing to offer us a deal for this thing because we never imagined that we’d be making video games. I certainly didn’t imagine that – I was going to the University of Washington getting a degree in anthropology, and this was the last thing I’d ever imagined I’d end up doing. Still, I loved doing it. I always loved doing art – art was something I’d had a passion in since my youth, so suddenly to have an entire project where I’d just drawn pictures and then have this idea that, wow, I could possibly do this for a living was pretty unbelievable to me.
I imagine it must have been quite dreamlike, especially with it being at the time such a new way to tell a story or such a new way to have somebody navigate through an imagined area. That must have been amazing for you?
Robyn: Right, and before this I had been doing a lot of freelance work on the Macintosh for people doing design and illustration and I was head over heels with the Mac and the operating system and the tools I used. And with this I saw an opportunity to use it all the time, so we made this black and white version of The Manhole, just 1-bit on the Mac, and if you look at it now, well, it looks pretty awful… I think most people would think that! (laughs) Still, it has its charms. I don’t remember who made the DOS version, but I do remember thinking it was garish and I think it’s been long enough that I can say that! (laughs) But anyway, we came out with Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel while we were with Activision, and it was really amazing because I was almost graduated from the University of Washington and was like, “OK, I’m just going to start making these videogames” and so Rand and I worked on Cosmic Osmo and it was phenomenal!
Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel, 1989
Nobody was really making games back then – I mean, obviously there were, but compared to today, it was a very small community of people making games. We were so privileged and fortunate to be able to be doing that back then, and I think of course that part of the difference is because of the Internet. Now if you make a game you can publish it yourself online, but if you made a game back then it had to be packaged and sold in boxes by a distributor who had a sales team and a PR force behind it. It was amazing that we had a distributor that had picked up our games, and that was a great thing for us. So we did The Manhole and what most people have forgotten or don’t realize is that we had another, larger version which had this whole soundtrack which we did while we were with Brøderbund.
Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel, 1989
After that we did a small version of Cosmic Osmo, but then we did a massive version of it too. It was like twice the size of the universe of Cosmic Osmo – it was gigantic, and I don’t know why we did it! (laughs) The first version was on floppies, and it was fairly small and compact. And then for CD-ROMs we expanded the universe more than twice the size, added a soundtrack with music throughout the universe and really just made a very large version of the project. Now when I go back and wander through this world, it’s kind of hard for me to believe that I drew every single one of these images… it’s crazy! (laughs) A little insanity – but we had a ton of fun working on it. Rand and I were sitting in a room working on it and would just throw ideas back and forth and as we worked through them, we’d create it. We’d be like, “well what about this room?” and we’d create it, and then we’d say, “well what about an electric eel on that side of the room?” and then I’d just draw it. He’d be working on programming, and it was just a great work environment – probably the ideal working environment.
What was it about working with your brother that made it so great?
Robyn: It’s funny… I still remember that as my favorite working environment. It was literally a dump of an apartment, (laughing) we had no money, we had no guarantee that the project was going to make money and in fact it didn’t make any money, but we had so much fun creating. The value in anything you do is in the making of it and the creating of it, and it was a wonderful, precious time together. The fact that we were brothers made that time so much more precious and valuable – and we do speak a common language because we’re brothers and we’d spent so many years together growing up, and we see things a certain way – in a very similar way – and approach problems in a similar way too. So that Cosmic Osmo project was the first time that started to play out and we really started to see eye to eye and work through problems in a similar way. That project, spending hours and hours in the same room, was probably the first time where our relationship was working so much to our benefit to create something good.
And for how long was it just you two working together? I know you had someone else help out with the music at some point, right?
Robyn: I did music for Cosmic Osmo, and we had somebody else, a good friend of ours named Shep Lovick, who wrote some of the music. Plus, we did some of the music production at a studio in Texas. We had some instrumentalists play some of the tracks, but for the most part, the creation of the world, the sound effects and the day-to-day design, world creation and character creation, that was Rand and I, for 95% of the project.
Spelunx and the Caves of Mr. Seudo, 1991
When did that change – when did you have to grow the team?
Robyn: Well, after Cosmic Osmo we did Spelunx, which was again just the two of us, and after that came Myst. And Myst was the project where we hired some other people, such as Chuck Carter, an incredibly talented artist, who was working in Spokane, Washington, where we were located at the time. We were lucky that he was there and that we got in contact with him. So for Myst, we had about four people. During the beginning of that game, I think there was a time where Rand and I were similarly in a room just designing the game, similarly batting ideas back and forth, creating all of the concepts and ideas for the game. Now, throughout the entire project we were not in the same room, but we continued to evolve the design for the game and stay in close communication throughout it.
Spelunx and the Caves of Mr. Seudo, 1991
Could you also please talk a bit about how you went from a point where you were this small team that made a few games, and then suddenly your fourth project was the best-selling PC game until The Sims. That’s such a massive achievement – I mean, here we are 25 years later and some guy is asking you about this thing you made in the early 90s. It was such an industry-changing thing, so how has that success sat with you? I think it’s interesting because you’re in this unique position where you’ve been able to follow, mostly thanks to the Internet, the persisting interest in your creation, see how it has touched lives, created fans and so on. You’re able to witness first-hand the effects of the fruits of your labour, as it were.
Robyn: Yeah, I mean, I think it has impacted me in many ways – some that are too complex for even me to know. But absolutely, and not just from seeing its impact in other games. I can’t tell you how many people have come up to me and said, “I got into my career because of your game” and every time that happens, I’m kind of astonished. In my whole life I never expected even one person to tell me that, and now I have heard it from so many people. Then there’s also – and this is what really freaks me out – when I hear, “oh, my fiancé and I played that and it had a huge impact on our relationship” – things like that. Or, “I played Myst with my father when I was at such and such an age, and it brought us closer together and was such a wonderful time”. So it’s these that I think are important and great things.
Myst, 1993
It’s a significance that goes beyond the commercial success, to where it’s touched someone in a personal way. A relationship between a husband and wife, or a special time between a father and child, to know that your project had that impact must feel absolutely amazing?
Robyn: Exactly – I see that it’s had such an impact, not only in people’s lives, but it’s also become a part of pop culture! It’s become this entity that’s larger than life, larger than this little game we made. You know, we were just making a series of games. We’d made The Manhole, and Cosmic Osmo, and we made Spelunx, and then we made Myst. Now, we knew Myst was better than those other games, we knew it was aimed at adults, but we never knew it was going to be this thing!
Myst, 1993
You weren’t designing a game for the Museum of Modern Art!
Robyn: Right! (laughs) We weren’t designing a game that was going to be there 20 years later and have people talking about it 20 years later. The same thing that happened to the other games was going to happen to Myst, you know? It was going to vanish after a while, maybe make its money back, hopefully, but the fact that Myst has had such a monumental impact is pretty phenomenal and remarkable. It still blows me away to this day. And I’ve not even mentioned the money it made, and the fact that it was such a hit game, and so many people played it. The sheer numbers of that… when that first happened, it just threw me for a loop. It didn’t even seem real. It was surreal, and I think I have a hard time grasping it even to this day! (laughs)
That wraps up the first of this two-parter interview – the conclusion is up next, in which we talk TV shows, The Immortal Augustus Gladstone, and much more. A big thank you to Robyn Miller for his participation. You can learn more about Robyn and his work at www.robynmiller.net, or follow him on Twitter.
Next:
Interesting People #3: Robyn Miller on filmmaking, character writing, videogames and more
Previous:
Interesting People #1: Chris Avellone on Pathfinder: Kingmaker
Very much interesting article.
The interview of Robyn Miller is great. It also shows the evolution of a game from b/w to color to 3D. That's cool!
I saw you joined in June this year and you have achieved a great success through awesome writing skill and interviews. This is the beauty of this platform, steemit. It always supports the original outstanding work.
I see you have done hard work to achieve this. Keep up the good work bro. :)
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We minnows can improve our position only by hardwork and supporting each other. :)
Thanks for the comment and the support. Will definitely watch your content.
Yes, I'm really impressed by Steemit so far, both as a great platform and for having an awesome community. Looking forward to a lot more here. Cheers, keep well!
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Interesting history!
Thanks! The second part is now live at https://steemit.com/gaming/@badastroza/interesting-people-3-robyn-miller-on-filmmaking-character-writing-videogames-and-more - hope you enjoy it too!
Wow this is such an amazing article I love the way that everything started it with a drawing of a manhole cover because if you've ever been to multiple cities you know that a lot of manhole covers can be very unique in their design
Thanks! Yes, such an easily ignored part of city life, but thankfully there are people who find inspiration in what may seem mundane to most. If you liked this, I recommend you watch Robyn's film The Immortal Augustus Gladstone for a deeper look into his artistic mind. Trailers and full version are on YouTube.
I kick myself for never playing Myst, but I was a King's Quest junkie.
Oh man, King's Quest 2 was my first ever Sierra game. Set me off on quite a journey...
i hope useful
https://steemit.com/steemit/@musliadialasyi/when-is-the-best-time-to-post-on-the-steemit-and-seen-a-lot-of-people-kapan-waktu-yang-tepat-untuk-posting-di-steemit-dan
Interesting - thanks for this. I'm trying different times to see what makes the most sense. I imagine there will come a time soon when it won't matter too much as the community will be widespread enough that there will be plenty of readers at all hours of the day.
Might be a way away, but I'm glad we're along for the ride...
Your comic drawing s are great, and the interview of Robyn Miller is pretty good too. Black and white to color to 3d, good art appreciation!!
Thanks for the feedback - check out the follow-up for more from Robyn (link is at the bottom of the post). Hope you enjoy.
Wow this took me back! So cool to get an insight into what that time was actually like, since I was too young to really appreciate what was happening. Now that I look back and also see young people who never knew a pre-internet world or what it was like not to be able to Google things on your phone or how raw and fascinating new games like Myst seemed and remain today, I appreciate stories like this that help give some perspective of how far we've come. I know someone you might get a kick out of who works in a similar field of story telling and technology. See what you think: https://www.ted.com/talks/shilo_shiv_suleman_using_tech_to_enable_dreaming
Oddly, I find my first impressions of Steemit to be a bit like my first explorations of Myst! Both can be explored endlessly and the reasons for being here are as varied as the people we meet. Really nice article @badastroza look forward to reading more!
Wow, thanks for the lengthy and detailed feedback. Really appreciate you taking the time. I'll check the link out for sure. Maybe get an "Interesting People" interview out of it! ;) Thanks also for the Resteem!
Glad you liked the interview. I'm trying to get a lot more like this out - I really like the idea of these being permanently written to the Steemit blockchain so that this information is here for people to enjoy however many years in the future that they may find it.
So many classic games that were special to so many people around the world... plenty interviews still to be done.
If you would like to contact Shilo I can try to arrange for you.... she is an artist so if you are patient it is doable, but you know.... herding cats. But she is lovely and could make for a great interview. Plus who knows? Maybe we could convince her to join Steemit ;) Her project is called The Fearless Collective btw
Do you have a direct line to her?
We can chat on steemit.chat at some point if you're on there. I've got the same username and am in the general chat a few times a day.
Very intresting
Thanks... Lots more to come!
Excellent post, thanks for sharing such important content with us.
Thanks very much - glad you liked it. Plenty more to come (and make sure to check out the conclusion to this interview if you enjoyed this post - what you have on this page is only the first of two parts!).
this is very interesting
Thanks very much - plenty more to come in the second part of this interview, which I hope to have up over the weekend.
nice topic. interested.
Thanks - hope you enjoy the next part as well.
Intresting bro that u hiding ur wrinkles with the blurriness.....
Good
Haha! You should see him in The Immortal Augustus Gladstone (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2366150/) - he looks like an entirely different person.
(More on that in the interview I'm posting tomorrow)
Go ahead....
But i prefer u hair like iron man...tony stark...robert downey jr.
Carry on dude
Thanks for the comment - will do. Got a number of other interviews lined up and hoping to put out about two a week, other commitments allowing!
Very interesting post!
Glad you think so - that's my goal!
beautiful post
Appreciate that, princekayani - thank you. Looking forward to contributing a lot more.
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Some nice A E S T H E T I C S in those games. What a legacy..
Totally agree. Made such an impact for so many people.
Myst was the first PC game I bought and played and I loved it. Great interview. Upvoted and followed.
Awesome - thank you! Hope you enjoy the next part as well.
Wo very interesting this article congratulate you
Thanks a lot!
This post received a 4.9% upvote from @randowhale thanks to @badastroza! For more information, click here!
Anyone reading this who has also tried randowhale? Keen to hear thoughts.
What a wonderful post, it brings back happy memories. So many hours spent on it just looking around and immersing myself into the game.
Awesome - glad the interview brought those back for you. I'm busy prepping the second part right now, and should have i up in the next few hours.
interesting, Development of video games
good continuation
Thanks! I plan to post plenty more interviews from game designers and developers, so stick around if you're interested in that sort of thing!
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thank you
wow...very interesting article
Thanks for the feedback - interesting is what I am going for! Hope you enjoy the next part too.
Looking forward to it
Cool - in case you missed it, here it is:
https://steemit.com/gaming/@badastroza/interesting-people-3-robyn-miller-on-filmmaking-character-writing-videogames-and-more
@badastroza
Okay qed, you summoned the info robot of @qed:
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31.522% of steemers signed up later than badastroza (2017.06.12 at 21:28:27).
Hope that helps, take care!
Wow - where does this data come from? I only joined a few weeks ago, so that's a huge increase in signups just within the last month.
Yes, it's going up dramatically right now.
The data is straight from the Blockchain API. Next I'll make the bot also show you part of the followers and following you share with the person you query.
This is really cool. Thanks - keen to see what else you can get the bot to do.
I'm open for suggestions :)
If people like and use the feature, I'll have to get a Raspberry Pi or something, though, because I can't leave my laptop at home (streaming web data) just for that, hahaha
excellent history i wait the next !
Thanks! It's now live for your reading pleasure at https://steemit.com/gaming/@badastroza/interesting-people-3-robyn-miller-on-filmmaking-character-writing-videogames-and-more
Very interesting article!
Thanks - hope you check out the second part as well. Plenty more great insights from Mr Miller there. :)
Congratulations @badastroza!
Your post was mentioned in my hit parade in the following category:
Cool - thanks for the mention :)
Great one................... really inspiring...! Would definitely expect few more from you..... Good job
Thanks - have you seen the follow-up to conclude the interview? I really enjoyed talking to Robyn about his games and the move to filmmaking, which is discussed in much more details in the second part at https://steemit.com/gaming/@badastroza/interesting-people-3-robyn-miller-on-filmmaking-character-writing-videogames-and-more
Hope you enjoy it!
Thanks for sharing @badastroza
Appreciate that - thanks for reading.
Very Interesting article.
Hope i can make article like this someday, because i'm a newbie in steemit.
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Nice, upvoted and followed :)
Awesome, thank you!
This post has received a 4.29 % upvote from @booster thanks to: @badastroza.
This post gets a 11.36 % upvote thanks to @badastroza - Hail Eris !
Very much interesting article.
The interview of Robyn Miller is great. It also shows the evolution of a game from b/w to color to 3D. That's cool!
I saw you joined in June this year and you have achieved a great success through awesome writing skill and interviews. This is the beauty of this platform, steemit. It always supports the original outstanding work.
I see you have done hard work to achieve this. Keep up the good work bro. :)
I also joined in June but not good as you. I have followed you. Please follow me back if you like my work @nitesh9.
We minnows can improve our position only by hardwork and supporting each other. :)
Copied comment.
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Thanks, glad you liked it.