Myst Online: Uru Live Again – Q&A with Rand MillerTags: in Ten Ton Hammer Network Anonymous Interviews Myst Online: URU Live
Posted March 1st, 2010 by mattlow

http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/81562

With the recent resurrection of Myst Online: Uru Live Again, Ten Ton Hammer puzzled out the tough quests to get to the bottom of the story. To that end, we tracked down Rand Miller, co-founder and CEO of Cyan Worlds, and the man responsible for millions of gamers’ heads exploding from trying to figure out puzzles over the years.

Ten Ton Hammer: For our readers who aren’t familiar with the title, can you tell us a little bit about Myst Online: Uru Live Again (MO:ULagain)?

Rand Miller: For anybody who knows Myst, they know that it’s about exploring another world. It’s not about feeling the pressure to twitch and shoot or jump and run, but about understanding what went on in the world and exploring it. So, the idea of Myst Online, when we approached that a lot of years ago, was to take that idea of Myst and have that same appeal with worlds that you visit, but attach it to everything that a broadband experience can offer. In other words, the world content could continue to evolve, change, and be added to and you can explore this with your friends. It was definitely the transition for Myst to a state-of-the-art experience.

Ten Ton Hammer: So now you’ve opened up a free server. What made you decide on doing that?

Rand: We poured a lot of money and effort into Myst Online back in the day. We started work on it shortly after Riven, so it’s been a lot of years in the making. As good as Myst was in the right place at the right time, Myst Online was in the wrong place at the wrong time. So, we’ve had a lot of fits and starts, and a lot of publishers who bailed on us and got a little ahead of their game and needed a little more money and blah…blah…blah. Anyway, it had a few chances to be published, but never really has made it. The idea is that we have some pretty incredible technology and content that is languishing in the vaults at the office, and we’re excited that we have a large enough fan base who would enjoy playing it. Let’s open it back up, so the bits won’t rot. Let people play it, let people enjoy it, and at least we keep it alive to a certain extent. From there, move it to more of an open source, where the fans could create content along with us creating content and see if it becomes something more and takes on a life of its own.

Ten Ton Hammer: You’ve mentioned that you’ve been fighting for an online version of Myst for a long time now. First, it was delayed and ended up not being shipped with Uru in 2003. Then, in 2004, it got scrapped and resurrected again by GameTap as a distributor in 2006, and then cancelled in 2007. Do you think that the player base has changed at all since then? Is it more likely to receive a better reception now?

Rand: I’m not sure that it’ll receive a better reception. I think the best chance we had was the initial launch. We had a lot of people signed up for the beta, and we have a box on the shelf that played as a single player game. With a simple click, you could turn it into a massively multiplayer game, which was a really cool idea, but the publisher didn’t want to get into the online market at that point, which was unfortunate in being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I think what we have at this point is that we have a very loyal fan base, who have enjoyed the depth of what we’ve put into this product. It’s a small base; it’s not a World of Warcraft, which, obviously, nothing is. It’s large enough that maybe there’s enough people to keep it going, from a small publisher’s point of view, almost a grassroots’ point of view. The idea is that maybe there’s room for something like that. Maybe we’re on the small end of the long tail, but in these days and times, maybe you can do something like that and pull it off. If we don’t try it, then it will fail.

Ten Ton Hammer: Now that Myst Online is going to open source, how has the community been responding to it? Do you have any kind of predictions on where they may take the game?

Rand: We were blown away. When we released it, we didn’t do it with a lot of fanfare or press releases. This was a labor of love. We turned the switch on and put a little note on our website. At that point, things went nuts. We had no idea that there would be that kind of response we got from the fans. We suddenly had thousands and thousands of people trying to download the game from our website. We crashed, promptly, then started to beef up the servers, which went through several rounds over the next few days of enhancing the servers and apologizing to the fans. The response has been overwhelming. One of the most gratifying things is that older fans who never got to play Myst Online because of the numerous fits and starts or didn’t want to subscribe to other places. There’s a lot of people on the forums who say, “Oh cool. I never got a chance. I always want to see what Myst Online was, what was there. Now, I finally get a chance.” That is rather satisfying to us. Also, a change for us is that we’ve actually stuck a donation button on the bottom of the download page where you register and say if you want to give five or ten bucks. The fans have responded so generously. These times are kind of tough, and it’s been really encouraging. It’s not going to pay all the bills, but it will allow us to justify beefing up the servers a bit too.

Ten Ton Hammer: Just to explain to our readers, there are no microtransactions or anything. It’s a completely free server; free to download, and free to play. The only way they can contribute and help out is by using that donation button. Is that correct?

Rand: That is correct. We’ve love to find some way so that we can pay the bills. We’re not looking to make money on this thing; we’re looking to just get it back alive. At some point, if we get enough people, we’d love to provide new content. All of the content we got, and there is a ton of content, is free for people to go in and explore. There’s the donate button; a lot of people who have donated and a lot of people haven’t, but we don’t want people to feel obligated. It’s just a chance to get these worlds with massive amounts of content out there and keep them from dying.

Ten Ton Hammer: Has the game changed at all since it was discontinued in 2008? Have you added anything new to it?

Rand: We’ve basically resurrected it at its most recent form. Over the years, we’ve added content. It started out, back in the day, with a few places open. As time went on, we opened up new ages and new sections of the underground city. As GameTap took it over, we added more content. There were some additional ages where you could play some competitive games and some larger, vast other ages. What we did was, when we shut it down at GameTap, we kind of preserved that. When we re-opened it, we opened it with all the content. Everything is there, all the clothing rewards. If you play Myst Online, you get your own real estate; you have your own little island, and there are ways, as you play, to change what it looks like. We’ve included all of those rewards and trophies that allow you to change your own little piece of virtual real estate. Going forward, we’ll see what we can add in, but as of right now, it’s a lot of stuff. People who haven’t seen it before will be overwhelmed.

Ten Ton Hammer: Are you planning on bringing more updates to Myst Online, now that it is live again, or are you going to leave it to people with the open source?

Rand: I think it’ll be a combination. The economy has hit us hard like a lot of people. Bringing this back, we’ve explained on the website, that we can’t babysit it. We can’t watch it that closely; we won’t be able to fix bugs necessarily. The fact that it is free allows us to lower people’s expectations to a certain extent. At this point, it’s pretty clean and bug free. What we’d like to do is to keep it running, and see if we get a little time here or there where we can start to ramp it up, getting one of our programmers or art guys to build a couple of things. At the same time, build up the open source and release bits and pieces of it, so that we get the fans doing that on a parallel basis. Our content increases in parallel with what the fans are doing, a little bit from them and a little bit from us, so the world continues to grow.

Ten Ton Hammer: Is there anything else you wish to tell us about Myst Online: Uru Live Again?

Rand: The weirdest thing is that we bring it back, and people are going to think that there’s some angle where they get in there and that they’re going to have to pay something. It’s a great time, frankly, if they’ve ever been curious to go check it out. I know Myst, depending upon what side of the fence you’re on, is that it’s a really cool legacy game or you hated it and it destroyed adventure gaming. The fact is that Myst Online is an amazing amount of technology that, frankly, defined a different way to look at MMOGs. If all you’ve seen is the leveling games, it’s worth your while, for free, to go in and check it out and see what you think. We’d love for some new people to check it out and they might be surprised.