Myst - the Movie!

I'm not an enormous "gamer" by any means, but there are a few games that I've found quite fun over the years.  Just about any sports game put out by Electronic Arts is pretty darn cool.  And there've been a few Star Trek games I've had fun with from time to time.

But the ultimate game series has got to be the Myst Worlds.  I played the first game of the series when it was released to the public.  A friend of mine told me about it, I bought it, and I was hooked.  A whole game on one CD?  And it's got QuickTime movies blended in?  And you can move yourself around with the mouse as though you're actually there?  And each frame was created by hand?  And it's got an original score of music?  That was 1996, and Myst literally blew the lid off of interactive gaming as it was so completely advanced for the time.  I mean, this was two whole years before Windows 98 (I remember attending a Microsoft "satellite release party" for Windows 98 in an old Chicago art theater, and Bill Gates said that the new Windows operating system would make the Internet a seamless part of the user interface, and I thought, "Why would you want to do that?  Don't you have to log in every time you access AOL anyway?")!

In addition to being near geniuses for creating Myst, the Miller brothers also wrote a series of books detailing the worlds they created in the game.  In the storyline of Myst and its sequels, a secret art form, involving writing books in such a methodical way that they become portals to new worlds spawned by each book, is passed down between the generations of a family.  Some family members have used the art for good, others have not.  Anyway, you can buy this series of books anywhere (I got one of them at a local library book sale for $1), and they are as important to the gaming community as Tolkien's work is to the rest of the world.

This post is actually to announce that two guys from Indiana have received permission from Rand Miller himself to make a movie for the silver screen of Myst.  They've already enlisted some big names in the industry.  This should be really cool.