Anniversary CD-ROM Trailblazer 'Myst' Turns 30 Today

Not enough credit is given to the earlier titles from Cyan that lead up to Myst. The Manhole and Cosmic Osmo were built on early platforms of HyperCard, and HyperTalk if memory serves. Myst was the progression of the technology and the concept founded by these earlier games. They had so much exploration and imagination; just no puzzles. I believe Myst was also one of, if not the first, games to use QuickTime for video. Anyways, so many firsts with Myst and so many memories. I may not remember much of the original game anymore, but that music kinda sticks with you.

Myst was indeed a very big deal at the time. Interestingly it was a game that many parents of my friends played, even though none of them were "gamers" - it was seen as more like intellectual interactive entertainment rather than a "game for kids"...

I feel like including the above video titled "Myst Launch Trailer" is somewhat misleading. Thats a modern remake and couldn't be further from how the original looked in 1993. Here's the legit launch trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UYfMaDnsoY&ab_channel=Adventure%27sIndex

Though I feel even that trailer is misleading of what the actual game was like. It was mostly a slideshow where you clicked on elements to move to the next slide. Obviously different genres, but comparable because of the same launch year - for me at the time, Doom felt 10 generations ahead of this, because you could actually move around a 3d environment in real time. First time I'd ever seen that pulled off actually convincingly and at a good framerate.

Never really appealed to me, TBH. (To me, Myst seemed more like a novelty or tech demo than a full game)

A lot of early CD-ROM games suffered from "We've got all this space! Let's fill it with video!"-syndrome, with making the actual game being a secondary concern.

There was a remake of "SimCity" for instance, with advisors giving information with videos instead of just a text box, or re-releasing existing point-and-click adventure games as "Talkies" with voice-over added, at least the latter added something to the game.

So basically, like the release of most big technological improvements, it took a while for games to come out that made the most of it, and not just used it as a "Look, it's on CD-ROM!"-gimmick.

@MysticX I think one of the reasons why this happened is that RAM was expensive, slow, and low in size (CDs could hold 650 MB at a time when most computers had only a small percentage of that in RAM and Hard Drive space).

@Daggot Loved the Manhole, loved Cosmic Osmo even more. I still listen to the soundtrack of Cosmic Osmo to this day. That was back when you could pop a CD-ROM into a regular CD player and skip the first (data) track, and then the rest of the CD would be the WAV music.

@Nitwit13 I'd forgotten about the redbook audio!

@NatiaAdamo Floppy disks could hold 1.44 Mb of data each, so it was mostly a storage space issue (And who'd want to sit out a 50+ floppy install?), installing windows 3.11 off 9 floppies was a chore already.

Eventually games came out that were good and used FMV ("Command & Conquer" being a notable one), but the first few CD-ROM games were at the core very basic games that wouldn't have caused so much as a ripple without the "OMG! Look at all the videos!"-effect.