I still remember when we stopped shipping the Carmen product line on floppies. This let artists and developers see and adjust their work to meet whatever data rate target we were using at the time - this evolved as the installed base of CD-ROM players moved from 1X to 2X and so on. When Broderbund started work on the Living Books series (animated interactive books for children), the authoring was done in Director, then run through a special tool (thanks to Estaban Ahn) that measured what data rate would be required by the assets you were using. The data rate issue was always a problem. Our first CD-ROM product was The Whole Earth Catalog. Remember that back then burners ran at 1X speed. I spent considerable time researching the two burner options, Sony or Philips and eventually chose the Sony product because you could daisy-chain multiple burners together via an optical data cable which would let you burn multiple discs at the same time. At the time a burner cost about $25K and blank CDs were about $50 each. I worked at Broderbund during that time period, and was responsible for 'special projects' which included building out our CD-ROM lab. We hope you enjoy this edition of "War Stories." There are several additional videos in the series heading toward completion, so stay tuned for more! Promoted Comments If we wanted to explore brave new computer-generated worlds, these were the tools we had to work with. The optimizations employed by the Millers to scrape together spare kilobytes here and there seem nuts by the standards of today, where games typically mass in the dozens of gigabytes and arrive installed on our computers and consoles via fast broadband connections rather than physical media.īut, hey, it was the 90s. What good is having 600MB of space to play with when your IO speed to and from the drive maxes out at 150KB per second?įortunately, there were tricks that could be employed-including paying careful attention to the physical location of Myst's data files on the CD-ROM itself. ![]() ![]() Myst's visuals lived at the cutting edge of what interactive CD-ROM technology could deliver at the beginning of the multimedia age, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, fitting the breadth of the Millers' vision onto CD-ROM didn't happen without some challenges.įurther Reading Video: How Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun punished the computers of the dayI won't spoil the video any further, except to say that the problems faced by the Millers in making Myst share some similarities with the problems faced a few years later by Westwood with Command and Conquer and its sequels-CDs were huge, but the CD-ROM drives available in the early '90s were slow. Doom was a hard and fast shotgun blast to the face, visceral and intense, aiming to capture the feeling of hunting (and being hunted by) demons in close sci-fi corridors Myst was a love letter to mystery and exploration at its purest.Ī few months back, Ars caught up with Myst developer Rand Miller (who co-created the game with his brother Robyn Miller) at the Cyan offices in Washington state to ask about the process of bringing the haunting island world to life. ![]() It's fascinating that Myst happened the same year that Doom launched, too-both games attempted to simulate reality, but with vastly different approaches. Further Reading Growing up gaming: The five space sims that defined my youth Myst came to market in 1993, which was a banner year in PC gaming-1993 also brought us X-Wing, Doom, Syndicate, and Day of the Tentacle, among others.
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