Fig. 1 - The IBM 286. (Ain't she a beauty?)

In 1984, when I was twelve and my dad bought us an IBM 286 (Zowie!), I was a little peeved that he refused to get us an accompanying game to play on it.  Clearly bored to death, I got curious about some BASIC and BASICA programming language tutorials that were strewn about near that big, pale, beige pile of plastic and glass.  With them, I got the whirring beast to do some neat color tricks and to generate an oddly fulfilling cascade of repeating text.  But that kind of kid/computer interaction couldn’t really compete with Zork’s interactive text-based knife fight with a thief….

So, I went back to reading for fun—even majored in Lit.

The next time I was truly dazzled by a video game was a decade later in 1994.  The 286 (which I’d taken with me to college—yes, the computer really did last ten years) didn’t have a CD-ROM drive.  It couldn’t handle Mosaic or Netscape Navigator.  My copy of Wordstar (word processing software) didn’t even have italics!  (Guffaw.)  Seriously, my computer might as well have been constructed with squirrel bones and wood.

It was at this low moment in my digital life that fate intervened.  Somehow, somewhere, I was exposed to a screenshot and a vague description of Robyn and Rand Miller’s revolutionary interactive adventure game Myst.  That tiny whiff of Myst was all I needed to pack the 286 into a closet and make a bee-line for my first Mac PowerPC tower with its handy-dandy CDROM drive.  Soon to follow was my copy of Myst.

When that yonic fissure cracked open on my screen and I saw the stars of the heavens in that opening QuickTime movie—holy effin’ Hannah.  I just about crap myself.

A silhouette of a man slowly tumbles into a fissure in time and space.  As he falls away, the worn, hardbound book he’d been holding falls toward you.  The calm, wise voice of Atrus reads from the last entry in his journal:

I realized the moment I fell into the fissure that the book would not be destroyed as I had planned.  It continued falling into that starry expanse, of which I had only a fleeting glimpse. I have tried to speculate where it might have landed, but I must admit that such conjecture is futile.  Still, questions about whose hands might one day hold my Myst book are unsettling to me.  I know my apprehensions might never be allayed, and so I close, realizing that perhaps the ending has not yet been written.

See the opening of Myst here:

The euphoria of seeing advanced graphics coupled with immersive sound in an interactive virtual storytelling environment had me clicking around the richly rendered Myst island for long, entranced hours.  The sound of wind and ocean water!  Oh and the gears, all the gears turning and locking into place!  The story’s delivery medium—a simple slide show of high-resolution (for its time) graphics mixing with well-placed QuickTime movies and sound effects—took interactive graphical adventure gaming, along with the art of storytelling, into a new, mind-blowing dimension.