Myst is an adventure video game designed by Rand and Robyn Miller. It was developed by Cyan, Inc., published by Broderbund, and first released in 1993 for the Macintosh. In the game, the player travels via a special book to a mysterious island called Myst. The player interacts with objects and traverses the environment by clicking on pre-rendered imagery. Solving puzzles allows the player to travel to other worlds ("Ages"), which reveal the backstory of the game's characters and help the player make the choice of whom to aid.
Screenshot of the eponymous Myst Island. Solving a puzzle raises the ship in the foreground and allows the player to reach the Stoneship Age. The library in the background contains books that describe the different Ages the player can link to.
The same scene remade using Unreal Engine in the VR remake (2021)
An adventure game is a video game genre in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story, driven by exploration and/or puzzle-solving. The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media, such as literature and film, encompassing a wide variety of genres. Most adventure games are designed for a single player, since the emphasis on story and character makes multiplayer design difficult. Colossal Cave Adventure is identified by Rick Adams as the first such adventure game, first released in 1976, while other notable adventure game series include Zork, King's Quest, Monkey Island, Syberia, and Myst.
A computer terminal running Zork (1977), one of the first commercially successful text adventure games
The Whispered World (2009) is an example of a context-based point-and-click adventure game using high-definition graphics and animation.
The Stanley Parable (2013) is a first-person walking simulator set in an office building.
Myst used high-quality 3D rendered graphics to deliver images that were unparalleled at the time of its release.
