I've seen the lost 'Myst' game—and we're all losers (for now)
During a demo, the creators revealed new secrets about 'Anglerfish' (now on ice) and 'Mudfish' (now in development).
This week, I wrote a feature for Wired magazine about a recently shelved Myst game codenamed Anglerfish and why it portends a funding crisis in the video game industry.
During my reporting, Cyan’s studio heads were kind enough to walk me through the first half-hour of a demo they built for publishers last year. While I found the game’s pitch trailer impressive, playing through the demo broke my heart all over again. Anglerfish looks like it would have been something special, with a fascinating narrative comparable to the franchise’s previous highs in Riven, The Book of Atrus, and The Book of Ti’ana.
Since most of my reporting was left on the cutting room floor, with Cyan’s permission I wanted to give fans of the Myst franchise a closer look at Anglerfish—as well as some exclusive new details about Mudfish, the new game Cyan is currently working on.
“I apologize for the cryptic letter, but it was written in haste,” the man says. This is Damreus, a guildsman in the Guild of Writers who has summoned me for reasons unknown. (I can’t help but wonder if this line of dialogue is a reference to my favorite line from Riven, Gehn’s “I apologize for the cage.”)
The co-studio heads of Cyan, Eric A. Anderson (creative director) and Hannah Gamiel (development director), are giving me a tour of the Anglerfish demo they built for game publishers as part of their funding pitch.
“There is something in the mansion I need your help to find,” Damreus says. “A book.”
We’re standing in Damreus’s library somewhere in the cavern of D’ni, but he’s talking about a mansion in another world; I see a scale model of it across the room. His facial expressions are lifelike, and his character model is detailed and naturalistic. “We worked with House of Moves to coordinate the performance capture,” Anderson says. “Noshir Dalal is the actor—he just knocked it out of the park.”
“It has proof of a horrific crime committed against my family,” Damreus says. “Without it, justice will never be done.”
Anderson and Gamiel confirm that Angelfish is set in “pre-fall D’ni,” meaning it takes place well before the previous games in the Myst series. “This is the oldest depiction of any of the events in Myst lore that have ever been committed to pixels,” Anderson says, referring to the collapse of the civilization that discovered the art of writing linking books. “This would have been hundreds of years prior to the story of Atrus and his family.”
When I place my hand on Damreus’s linking book, I see a first-person character model’s hand. Alongside the dialogue tree options presented during my conversation with Damreus, this is a new innovation for a Myst game. “Damreus addresses the player as Guildsman because you’re playing a member of the Guild of Surveyors,” Anderson says. “He needs your surveying abilities to track down this thing he’s after.”
After using the linking book, we arrive in the mansion, which Damreus says his grandfather built for the family when Damreus was just a young man. It’s a striking mix of recognizably D’ni architecture and contemporary style, perhaps a nod to the wealth of the pre-fall era. Music by Maclaine Diemer, who scored Cyan’s Firmament, sets the mood.
“This guy’s mansion sits atop an old mining site, which he wanted to display for people who visited his vacation age, so there’s this glass floor in the sitting room,” Anderson says. Most of the doors off the sitting room are locked, but a quick puzzle grants us access to a workshop filled with charts, handwritten notes, and machines. Later, when we walk out onto the mansion’s terrace, I can see a few structures and openings in the forested rock arch across the cove.
“Once you see the book, you will be tempted to open and read it, and I implore you, for your own safety and the safety of others—that book must remain closed,” Damreus warns. “Powerful figures appear within, and knowledge of their crimes will damn you as surely as it has damned me.”
After exploring the unlockable portions of the mansion, I eventually reach an impasse that prevents me from reaching the uppermost floor. “If you go back to [Damreus] and say you’re making progress but you can’t quite find it, he says, ‘No problem,’ and he takes out his pen and begins modifying the book,” Anderson says. “And if you know anything about the lore of Myst, you know ages can be modified. This guy’s a very good writer, but you realize that some of the changes he’s making are irresponsible. There are side effects.”
Anderson and Gamiel skip the demo forward to the point where Damreus has made his first changes to the vacation age’s descriptive book. (They never supplied a name for the vacation age.) When we reappear in the mansion, the weather has turned dark and stormy, the ocean is choppy and veiled in mist, and a massive rock has fallen into the mansion and destroyed parts of the structure—providing me with a way past a previously locked door.
“Maybe things are not what they seem, because this is supposed to be his vacation home, and boy, he certainly doesn’t seem to take good care of it,” Anderson says.
At this point, we’re only somewhere around 25% of the way through the demo, but Cyan needs to preserve most of its secrets in case they’re able to revisit the project some day.
“People are asking if we’re going release the demo to the public, and the answer is no for a variety of reasons,” Anderson says. “We didn’t tune it for puzzle density, so there’s not a ton here in terms of puzzles. And then another reason is that it reveals things that would spoil the core idea of the game. We’re keeping those things very close because we would love to rekindle the project one day. The core idea is what made us so passionate about it, and that core idea is still alive and well.”
After the demo, I asked Anderson and Gamiel a few questions that didn’t surface in the Wired story, so I’ve pasted them below.
How long was the demo?
Hannah Gamiel: It was about two hours.
Eric A. Anderson: Yeah, it’s more more than just a vertical slice. It was a full-on demo, and everything in the trailer was captured in-game by our trailer guy. It’s not smoke and mirrors. It’s entirely playable.
How many people worked on the demo during that four-month period?
Hannah Gamiel: It was the team that built Riven [2024] with the exception of Richard Vander Wende, who departed the company after Riven shipped. So the headcount was in the neighborhood of 30. It’s very flattering to see people be like “Whoa, you built that in four months?” But we built the Myst [2021] remake in one year. Our team can move fast. We weren’t crunching or sleeping at our desks.
Were there any characters in the game that fans would recognize from previous games or books? I know there’s been a lot of speculation about the man in the linking panel being Veovis, or even Atrus.
Eric A. Anderson: No, that speculation is incorrect. Atrus was not even a glimmer in anybody’s eye back then.
The traditional structure of a Cyan game is a hub world plus three or more spoke worlds. Was this intended to be smaller in scale?
Eric A. Anderson: We were trying to scope our worldbuilding to be more constrained than something like Firmament, which was sprawling and big. [Anglerfish] definitely had other destinations. The mansion you see in the demo and the snippets you see in the trailer, which are connected to the mansion—it was bigger than that. There are more things on the grounds, so to speak.
A good parallel would be a game like Blue Prince where you’ve got a big mansion, but you’ve also got the grounds surrounding the mansion. In this case, the mansion is built in this old mining age, so there’s mining equipment on the grounds. Whoever bought this age and repurposed it into a vacation age was clearly trying to show off to their rich D’ni friends and be like, “Look at how I transformed this age. Here’s a cocktail.”
Another good parallel would be Riven, which pretty much takes place in one age, and then you pop out to other ages for a few pieces.
A big question from your fans is, “Why not just fund this with another Kickstarter?”
Hannah Gamiel: A Kickstarter, based on our experience of having run and successfully completed Kickstarters, would not have covered the amount we needed to make this game come to life. The quality bar for our games continues to increase over time, so the cost does, too.
I love that people are asking for a Kickstarter. It’s very inspiring hearing people say “Take my money!” But it’s just not a valid option right now for this project. We’ll never say “never” to another Kickstarter, though.
Is Anglerfish truly dead now, or just on ice for the time being?
Eric A. Anderson: It’s definitely not canceled. It’s not like we chose to walk away from it. We simply couldn’t secure the financing we needed. But this iteration of Anglerfish is gone because the the team that made it is not at Cyan right now. Some still are, but a lot of key individuals that contributed to this are not currently here. If we were to revisit this in the future, which I would absolutely love to do, it will probably shift and morph and become something that looks a lot different.
Has the positive public reception and interest in the trailer affected that equation at all?
Hannah Gamiel: We listen to what people like, and what they don’t like. We’re practically always listening. It’s certainly a driving factor in what we do, and hearing the overwhelmingly positive response—how could we completely cancel it based on how positive that feedback was?
Eric A. Anderson: We’ve taken our share of lumps with previous releases. Riven came out and a vocal segment of our fan base certainly had criticisms, and we hear those criticisms. [With Anglerfish], we put the video up basically just because we didn’t want it rotting on a shelf. We’re proud of the work, and we really wanted the people who worked on it to be able to point the public at it and say, “I helped make that.” I was not expecting the reaction that it got. It was a shock.
Can you tell me anything about Mudfish, the new game you’re developing instead of Anglerfish?
Eric A. Anderson: Mudfish shares a lot in common with Anglerfish. Anglerfish was a focus on things that we knew we needed to work on. Character fidelity was up there because of the feedback we received on Riven [2024].
With Mudfish, the focus is on interactions. How does it feel to touch things in the game world—to interact with objects that you find around you? [We want to] up the interaction fidelity, and also scope down the game so we don’t have to build a giant world.
We can still create a really compelling Myst/D’ni experience in a smaller space. And we can elevate that experience by focusing on interactions. Imagine a game that doesn’t take place over a sprawling landscape, but maybe takes place in a library that has additional wings you can unlock. Or maybe little jaunts into attached ages. If you’re a writer in D’ni, and you have a collection of rare books, why not keep those books in a sealed-away wing that’s only accessible through a linking book?
But the focus is on interactivity fidelity, and we’re already building a tool set to handle that, and it’s already leaps and bounds ahead of our previous games, including Anglerfish. It’s a whole new tool set for us. We’re super excited about it.
So Mudfish is set in the Myst universe but not focused on Atrus’s family?
Eric A. Anderson: Yes, currently anyway. It is also planned to be pre-fall D’ni, and it’s meant to explore some of the themes of D’ni society that we touched on in Anglerfish. I’m tired of telling Atrus’s story. I want to tell other stories in the universe and there are so many opportunities to tell amazing stories in the pre-fall era.
It’s very early, so we’re mostly focused on systems building right now, and the narrative and character details are still very much in flux. We would love to share more about Mudfish at Mysterium next summer, but we’ll see how the year goes.
Note: At this year’s Mysterium, Cyan announced a flurry of updates alongside the Anglerfish trailer.
Deluxe physical editions of the “first three” (?!) Myst novels are coming soon. These will be “luxurious” and completely unrelated to the hardcover Book of Atrus that was sold at a previous Mysterium. (Cyan also confirmed in its State of Cyan address that The Book of Marrim is no longer in development, at least not the version that dates back to David Wingrove in the 1990s.)
Next year’s Mysterium will be held at company headquarters in Spokane, WA, and will celebrate the company’s 40th anniversary. Rand Miller will attend.
Boxed editions of Myst [2021] and Riven [2024] are coming soon.