May Contain Nuts

First, I would like to note that I’ve been very impressed by not only the positive response to Cyan’s recent release of Myst for iPhone, but also by the apparently high interest in the title. I suspect that there is a certain nostalgia factor involved in its popularity – especially amongst the Mac crowd, which has lately been unable to play the game on modern Mac hardware, or even in the latest OS X release on older hardware – but I don’t think nostalgia alone is enough to push a $5.99, 700MB application into the Top 10 Paid Apps list in multiple territories (and even the Top 5 in some).

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about the game’s popularity is its price point. The App Store has gotten quite a lot of press about its “race to the bottom”-style pricing wars, where just because you can charge more than $0.99 doesn’t mean you necessarily should. In fact, of the Top 10 Paid Apps currently in the US App Store, only Myst is priced higher than $0.99, and the average price of the other Top 25 Paid Apps is only $1.70. At $5.99, Myst is practically a premium application by App Store standards, and is managing to out-sell heavyweights like EA (with Trivial Pursuit, Tetris, and Tiger Woods PGA Tour) and PopCap (with Bejeweled 2), who have their games priced between $2.99 (Bejeweled 2) and $9.99 (Tiger Woods PGA Tour, because someone has to pay the licensing royalties to both Tiger and the PGA Tour, I guess). Given the fact that more expensive apps generally seem to be a turn-off for many buyers, coupled with the fact that at 700MB, Myst is easily the largest app in the App Store several times over, I’m honestly impressed at how well the game is selling.

What doesn’t surprise me quite as much, honestly, are the reviews. Overall, the game has a 4.5 star rating, with 86% of its ratings giving it 5 stars. I’m not exactly surprised by this fact given how well-done the port is, and given that there’s probably more than a few repeat buyers giving it these glowing reviews (though the repeat buyer thing doesn’t necessarily mean it’s guaranteed a good review… the DS port seems to be getting a pretty cold shoulder from veteran fans for what I understand are perfectly valid reasons). What does surprise me a bit is that the game is still so popular and well-received even though it’s 16 years old now, is rather clearly dated in terms of its technology, and has a rather vocal crowd of hard-core gamers who love to rip on it (amusingly, there are notably few complaints about its slideshow nature in the App Store reviews, and most entertainingly, someone commented on the absurdly long length of the intro… whether they were referring to Cyan’s classic logo or the actual game intro I’m not sure, though I suspect it was leveled at the logo, which is a lot longer than most of the “throw it up and get it over with” logo splashes of game developers these days).

Ultimately, it’s a testament to Myst’s staying power that 16 years later it’s still such a popular game. I think it sets a new bar for quality games in the App Store, and could well re-establish the traditional adventure game genre on a new platform, though I hope developers have learned from earlier efforts to duplicate Myst’s formula with spectacular failure and avoid making a lot of downright disastrously bad adventure/puzzle games.

Personally, I picked Myst up over the weekend just after it was announced as available on the Lyst (perhaps the first time in several years that I’ve gotten breaking Myst news from the Lyst, which was itself a nice bit of nostalgia ), and played through it on Sunday and Monday. Overall, I’m very impressed with how well the game runs on my 1st-gen iPod Touch (the slowest Touch product in Apple’s lineup). It eats practically no battery (I think playing a long podcast is more battery-intensive, which is just weird, but also awesome), and with one exception that a reboot seems to have fixed, is rock-solid.

There are a couple of differences between the PC and iPhone versions which bear mentioning just for the sake of being nit-picky. First, the Linking Books are all still images, with the obvious exception of the initial fly-over of Myst Island (because that’s frankly impossible to remove); the animated fly-throughs from Myst Masterpiece Edition are the only moving overview you get of the Age. I suspect this was done for space-saving reasons, and ultimately it doesn’t detract from the experience. If anything, it’s made up for in spades by actually being able to “touch” a Linking Book for the first time. Suffice it to say, I geeked out over this more than was probably necessary.

Second, some of the sound effects seem to have been changed or removed, and the “loose” nature of some of the controls have been tightened rather substantially. This is most notable in Mechanical Age, where the Fortress Rotation Simulator doesn’t make a thrumming buzzy noise when “booting up”, the elevator rotator doesn’t have any inertia to it (making it impossible to over-shoot the elevator’s position, which was sometimes annoying but fairly realistic) and sounds a lot less substantial (I think the wrong click sfx was used there), and the fortress rotation puzzle also lacks its inertia. It may also be because of the touch-based interface, but the pressed state of many buttons seem to be missing; again, Mechanical Age is a good example, where the elevator buttons don’t dim when they’re pressed. Most jarring was the change made to the Generator Room’s sfx on Myst Island… gone is the reverberating series of “ka-chunk”s as the lights turned on, replaced now with a pretty bland pair of “click”s. Again, these don’t really detract from the experience, especially if you’ve never played the game before, but from the perspective of an old-timer, they were noticeable changes.

Finally, the wipe transitions seem to have all been replaced with fades. This is fine for moving from place to place within the game, but it does remove some of the pseudo-animated feel that the doors used to have in the original, where wipes were used in the place of video to “swing” doors open. The transition speed also seems to be used for the “animation” of large button presses, like the pump switches in Stoneship. I like having the transition speed set medium-high, which is fine for walking about, but it seems too slow for the pump switches.

One thing that is markedly improved over the Windows release, at least, is that the game performs just like it did on the Mac, even back in 1993. The Windows release was plagued by a couple of pretty glaring quality issues, most notably the fact that it couldn’t play two sounds at the same time. If you were standing by the Planetarium on Myst and turned the marker switch on, the windy ambient sound would cut out so that the switch sfx could play, and then the wind sfx would return. It also suffered from a problem with Quicktime’s behavior under Windows, where the cursor would flicker and display as black-and-white rather than color whenever it was placed over a video. These two problems persisted even into the Masterpiece Edition of the game, which has always bugged me given how well the rest of the game is presented.

Changing gears to actual presentation, I’m absolutely blown away by the visual quality of the images, even 16 years away from the game’s original release. To be sure, the construction seems a tad crude in places by modern standards (especially the massive color-only bitmaps used for ground texture), but the image fidelity itself is fabulous. With the iPhone’s 160ppi display and the original 24-bit rendered images, everything looks super bright and crisp… much better than trying to play it on a 24″ monitor set to 640×480. I would suggest setting your display brightness to at least 50% before playing, though, or the darks are a bit over-dark (display brightness has always been a concern in the Myst series, so this isn’t exactly a new development ).

The audio sounds great in most places, though some of it just suffers from poor source quality… the voice work is a bit fuzzy, I suspect largely because it was done by a couple of guys in their basement with what was very probably not top-of-the-line recording equipment 16 years ago. It’s probably as good as it’s going to get, and while it’s not crystal clear, it’s still pretty darn good (and it’s nice to have Atrus pronouncing “futile” correctly, even if the audio quality does suffer ).

If there’s one audio cue I do wish would be remastered from scratch, it’s the chime on the Selenitic clock tower. Gods bless Chris Brandkamp’s pitch-shifted Craftsman 7/8″ wrench, and kudos to him for his sound design ingenuity (between that and the toilet bubbles I still giggle every time I watch the Making Of video), but it just doesn’t have the bass of a real clocktower chime, and it gets lost under the louder and more trebble-heavy tick-tocking and grinding noises in the cue.

The auto-zoom is a nice feature, though it does rather clearly illustrate that the images being used in the game are only as large as the display itself. Most of the auto-zoomed content looks fuzzy because of the scaling… I’m pretty sure there isn’t much Cyan can do about this because the original images aren’t really big enough to make high-quality zooms, but I’ve caught myself waiting for an image to “resolve” the way Safari does when you zoom into a webpage, before realizing that the image is as clear as it’s going to get.

One thing that is a tad jarring is the fact that the game seems to flash to black rather frequently when transitioning from a still image to a video and back again. I don’t know if this is just a side effect of playing on a 1st-gen iPod Touch, or if it affects all platforms, but it is a little distracting and breaks the immersion a little. The loading throbber that appears for about a half-second before a larger video (like one of the brothers’ ramblings) plays is also a little distracting and seems largely unnecessary, but neither of these things are really deal-breakers.

Since it’s been the subject of a fair amount of conversation in the various places the game is being talked about, I thought I’d also discuss the game’s size from my limited-knowledge perspective. A couple of people have noted that the game’s size is absurd considering that the original game fit onto a 650MB CD, and was able to be installed on hard drives that were smaller than the iPhone port itself is with plenty of space to spare. These people are forgetting that the original game only installed the executable for the game’s engine; the media used by the game was streamed off of the CD, not copied to the hard drive. They are also forgetting that the original game used 8-bit images with additional Quicktime compression layered on top of them, while the iPhone release uses the original 24-bit renders, which are probably either JPG (if they were shooting for space-saving) or 24-bit PNG (if they were shooting for losslessness), and probably don’t have additional compression applied to them because it’s ultimately not as important as it used to be to save every possible byte. I’ve also noticed someone in the Wired review complaining that the game was smaller on the PC despite having larger images. Ignoring the 8-bit vs. 24-bit difference, there is no conceivable way that the original images were twice as large as those used on the iPhone. The game ran at 640×480 (versus the iPhone’s resolution of 480×320), but the images were nowhere near as large as the screen. Assuming RAWA’s example images in his dissertation on dithering are the correct size, the original game’s images were 544×333, or about 20% larger than the iPhone resolution. I am uncertain whether the images used in the iPhone release are the same size as the originals, or if they are scaled/cropped to fit the iPhone’s screen (the aspect ratios are different, though only slightly, so some cropping has occurred), but it would very likely not go as far toward explaining the increase in the size of the game as some of the other factors discussed above and below.

The video content was also super-compressed (and often looked terrible overlaid on the dithered 8-bit images) and poor quality, while the iPhone release’s video content is virtually indistinguishable from the still images. I’m wondering if the videos weren’t just re-mastered to all play as full-screen video content rather than embedded on a still background to avoid the overlay issue entirely (this would explain the full-frame flashing I experience, as well as why the Linking Book animations were removed), which would make them substantially larger in file size, despite improvements in compression technologies in the intervening years. More than anything else, I think this would have had the largest impact on the game’s size (and would explain how it went from just over 500MB in an interview with Rand several weeks before the game’s release to over 700MB… such an increase seems unlikely to be caused by a boost of audio or still image content alone).

Finally, the audio and music is all 100% intact and very high quality. The musical cues were truncated in the Masterpiece Edition release (again, ironic that the Masterpiece Edition would suffer from so many technical failings), likely to help keep the game on a single CD. The iPhone release made no such compromises, and it’s likely that a number of megabytes of content are taken up just by using the complete cuts of the music.

Ultimately, this is a no-holds-barred, damn-the-torpedoes release of the original Myst, which I have to say is well overdue. It’s a fantastic port, even factoring in the minor issues I’ve mentioned, and it plays very well, even on my low-end hardware; it probably plays better than it did on our $2000 PC back in 1994. It’s also great that I can play the game without having to migrate to my aging laptop or reboot my iMac into Windows, and I can take it with me to keep me occupied outside the apartment.

Several folks have said that despite the ludicrous size requirements, they would love to see Riven make the jump to the iPhone as well. While I won’t argue that it would be great to have Riven on the iPhone (even if it meant it was the only thing on some people’s iPhone… I can easily see it topping 5 gigs in size), I think that it’s such a massive undertaking that Cyan would be better suited to put it off until later. If any of their existing back catalogue gets ported, I’d love to see Manhole, Cosmic Osmo, and Spelunx make the jump before Riven (if only so I can actually play them).

Interestingly, something RAWA once said about Spelunx has me thinking that it would make for a great game to port to the iPhone under OS 3.0. In discussing Spelunx for those who had never seen or heard of it, RAWA mentioned this:

The cave system is also modular, so it is possible that if new rooms are discovered in the future, they can be added to your cave.

Given Apple’s impending support for in-app purchases and Spelunx’s modular design, it seems like a natural fit for a kid-friendly, extensible, educational game for the App Store.

Beyond re-releasing their back catalogue, I think Cyan could conceivably get into the market of making smaller iPhone-only games, given the high percentage of each sale that goes back to the developer, the low cost to market, and the potentially high return on investment due to the massive install base.

To be pie-in-the-sky, since the super hard work of moving Myst to a Cocoa-based application has already been done (while noting that going from an iPhone to a Mac app isn’t just a toggle in XCode), I’d also love to see Myst re-released for Mac OS X, and I’d definitely love to see Riven re-released on the Mac as well (definitely more than I’d like to see it released on the iPhone), since neither will currently run on the platform that launched the series. Given that Riven is the only game in the catalogue still limited to 8-bit dithered images and highly-compressed, 16-bit, outdated-codec videos, a Masterpiece Edition re-release with 24-bit images and high-quality video would be very, very much appreciated, regardless of the platform it ends up on (though Apple will need to improve their installation process if Riven hits the App Store at several gigabytes in size).

Ultimately, though, it’d be nice to see Cyan break new ground rather than continually re-tread the past… the question, I guess, is whether they can get any money to do so. I hope they can.