A new Kickstarter launched today for a documentary film on Myst, the landmark 1993 adventure game that helped popularize the CD-ROM format and changed the way people thought about videogames. The film tells the story of brothers Rand and Robyn Miller, who created Myst together in a double-wide trailer home in rural Washington state.
Myst was a smash hit, capturing the attention of Apple's Steve Jobs as well as mainstream media. Brooklyn-based filmmaker Philip Shane met the Miller brothers in 2016 and pitched them the idea of a documentary, and the project has evolved to take in not only the development of Myst, but also some of the contemporaneous tech that made the game possible: Quicktime, Hypercard (a linking format which led to the popularization of hypertext in web development in the 1990s), the Macintosh, and Strata Pro 3D graphics software.
Shane has shot some 100 hours' worth of preliminary footage at Cyan's studios in Washington, and plans on using funds from the Kickstarter to support full production on what looks to be a fascinating slice of games and personal computing history.