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ciathyzareposts · 4 years

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Myst (or, The Drawbacks to Success)

Robyn Miller, one half of the pair of brothers who created the adventure game known as Myst with their small studio Cyan, tells a story about its development that’s irresistible to a writer like me. When the game was nearly finished, he says, its publisher Brøderbund insisted that it be put through “focus-group testing” at their offices. Robyn and his brother Rand reluctantly agreed, and soon the first group of guinea pigs shuffled into Brøderbund’s conference room. Much to its creators’ dismay, they hated the game. But then, just as the Miller brothers were wondering whether they had wasted the past two years of their lives making it, the second group came in. Their reaction was the exact opposite: they loved the game.

So would it be forevermore. Myst would prove to be one of the most polarizing games in history, loved and hated in equal measure. Even today, everyone seems to have a strong opinion about it, whether they’ve actually played it or not.

Myst‘s admirers are numerous enough to have made it the best-selling single adventure game in history, as well as the best-selling 1990s computer game of any type in terms of physical units shifted at retail: over 6 million boxed copies sold between its release in 1993 and the dawn of the new millennium. In the years immediately after its release, it was trumpeted at every level of the mainstream press as the herald of a new, dawning age of maturity and aesthetic sophistication in games. Then, by the end of the decade, it was lamented as a symbol of what games might have become, if only the the culture of gaming had chosen it rather than the near-simultaneously-released Doom as its model for the future. Whatever the merits of that argument, the hardcore Myst lovers remained numerous enough in later years to support five sequels, a series of novels, a tabletop role-playing game, and multiple remakes and remasters of the work which began it all. Their passion was such that, when Cyan gave up on an attempt to turn Myst into a massively-multiplayer game, the fans stepped in to set up their own servers and keep it alive themselves.

And yet, for all the love it’s inspired, the game’s detractors are if anything even more committed than its proponents. For a huge swath of gamers, Myst has become the poster child for a certain species of boring, minimally interactive snooze-fest created by people who have no business making games — and, runs the spoken or unspoken corollary, played by people who have no business playing them. Much of this vitriol comes from the crowd who hate any game that isn’t violent and visceral on principle; the overlap between players of games like Doom and those like Myst is inevitably limited. (The surprising thing is that an overlap exists at all…)

But the more interesting and perhaps telling brand of hatred comes from self-acknowledged fans of the adventure-game genre. These folks were usually raised on the Sierra and LucasArts traditions of third-person adventures — games that were filled with other characters to interact with, objects to pick up and carry around and use to solve puzzles, and complicated plot arcs unfolding chapter by chapter. They have a decided aversion to the first-person, minimalist, deserted, austere Myst, sometimes going so far as to say that it isn’t really an adventure game at all. But, however they categorize it, they’re happy to credit it with all but killing the adventure genre dead by the end of the 1990s. Myst, so this narrative goes, prompted dozens of studios to abandon storytelling and characters in favor of yet more sterile, hermetically sealed worlds just like its. And when the people understandably rejected this airless vision, that was that for the adventure game writ large. Some of the hatred directed toward Myst by stalwart adventure fans — not only fans of third-person graphic adventures, but, going even further back, fans of text adventures — reaches an almost poetic fever pitch. A personal favorite of mine is the description deployed by Michael Bywater, who in previous lives was himself an author of textual interactive fiction. Myst, he says, is just “a post-hippie HyperCard stack with a rather good music loop.”

After listening to the cultural dialog — or shouting match! — which has so long surrounded Myst, one’s first encounter with the actual artifact that spurred it all can be more than a little anticlimactic. Seen strictly as a computer game, Myst is… okay. Maybe even pretty good. It strikes this critic at least as far from the best or worst game of its year, much less of its decade, still less of all gaming history. Its imagery is well-composited and occasionally striking, its sound and music design equally apt. The sense of desolate, immersive beauty it all conveys can be strangely affecting, and it’s married to puzzle-design instincts that are reasonable and fair. Myst‘s reputation in some quarters as impossible, illogical, or essentially unplayable is unearned; apart from some pixel hunts and perhaps the one extended maze, there’s little to really complain about on that front. On the contrary: there’s a definite logic to its mechanical puzzles, and figuring out how its machinery works through trial and error and careful note-taking, then putting your deductions into practice, is genuinely rewarding, assuming you enjoy that sort of thing.

At same time, though, there’s just not a whole lot of there there. Certainly there’s no deeper meaning to be found; Myst never tries to be about more than exploring a striking environment and solving intricate puzzles. “When we started, we wanted to make a [thematic] statement, but the project was so big and took so much effort that we didn’t have the energy or time to put much into that part of it,” admits Robyn Miller. “So, we decided to just make a neat world, a neat adventure, and say important things another time.” And indeed, a “neat world” and “neat adventure” are fine ways of describing Myst.

Depending on your preconceptions going in, actually playing Myst for the first time is like going to meet your savior or the antichrist, only to find a pleasant middle-aged fellow who offers to pour you a cup of tea. It’s at this point that the questions begin. Why does such an inoffensive game offend so many people? Why did such a quietly non-controversial game become such a magnet for controversy? And the biggest question of all: why did such a simple little game, made by four people using only off-the-shelf consumer software, become one of the most (in)famous money spinners in the history of the computer-games industry?

We may not be able to answers all of these whys to our complete satisfaction; much of the story of Myst surely comes down to sheer happenstance, to the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings somewhere on the other side of the world. But we can at least do a reasonably good job with the whats and hows of Myst. So, let’s consider now what brought Myst about and how it became the unlikely success it did. After that, we can return once again to its proponents and its detractors, and try to split the difference between Myst as gaming’s savior and Myst as gaming’s antichrist.

Rand Miller

Robyn Miller

If nothing else, the origin story of Myst is enough to make one believe in karma. As I wrote in an earlier article, the Miller brothers and their company Cyan came out of the creative explosion which followed Apple’s 1987 release of HyperCard, a unique Macintosh authoring system which let countless people just like them experiment for the first time with interactive multimedia and hypertext. Cyan’s first finished project was The Manhole. Published in November of 1988 by Mediagenic, it was a goal-less software toy aimed at children, a virtual fairy-tale world to explore. Six months later, Mediagenic added music and sound effects and released it on CD-ROM, marking the first entertainment product ever to appear on that medium. The next couple of years brought two more interactive explorations for children from Cyan, published on floppy disk and CD-ROM.

Even as these were being published, however, the wheels were gradually coming off of Mediagenic, thanks to a massive patent-infringement lawsuit they lost to the Dutch electronics giant Philips and a whole string of other poor decisions and unfortunate events. In February of 1991, a young bright spark named Bobby Kotick seized Mediagenic in a hostile takeover, reverting the company to its older name of Activision. By this point, the Miller brothers were getting tired of making whimsical children’s toys; they were itching to make a real game, with a goal and puzzles. But when they asked Activision’s new management for permission to do so, they were ordered to “keep doing what you’ve been doing.” Shortly thereafter, Kotick announced that he was taking Activision into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. After he did so, Activision simply stopped paying Cyan the royalties on which they depended. The Miller brothers were lost at sea, with no income stream and no relationships with any other publishers.

But at the last minute, they were thrown an unexpected lifeline. Lo and behold, the Japanese publisher SunSoft came along offering to pay Cyan $265,000 to make a CD-ROM-based adult adventure game in the same general style as their children’s creations — i.e., exactly what the Miller brother had recently asked Activision for permission to do. SunSoft was convinced that there would be major potential for such a game on the upcoming generation of CD-ROM-based videogame consoles and multimedia set-top boxes for the living room — so convinced, in fact, that they were willing to fund the development of the game on the Macintosh and take on the job of porting it to these non-computer platforms themselves, all whilst signing over the rights to the computer version(s) to Cyan for free. The Miller brothers, reduced by this point to a diet of “rice and beans and government cheese,” as Robyn puts it, knew deliverance when they saw it. They couldn’t sign the contract fast enough. Meanwhile Activision had just lost out on the chance to release what would turn out to be one of the games of the decade.

But of course the folks at Cyan were as blissfully unaware of that future as those at Activision. They simply breathed sighs of relief and started making their game. In time, Cyan signed a contract with Brøderbund to release the computer versions of their game, starting with the Macintosh original.

Myst certainly didn’t begin as any conscious attempt to re-imagine the adventure-game form. Those who later insisted on seeing it in almost ideological terms, as a sort of artistic manifesto, were often shocked when they first met the Miller brothers in person. This pair of plain-spoken, baseball-cap-wearing country boys were anything but ideologues, much less stereotypical artistes. Instead they seemed a perfect match for the environs in which they worked: an unassuming two-story garage in Spokane, Washington, far from any centers of culture or technology. Their game’s unique personality actually stemmed from two random happenstances rather than any messianic fervor.

One of these was — to put it bluntly — their sheer ignorance. Working on the minority platform that was the Macintosh, specializing up to this point in idiosyncratic children’s software, the Miller brothers were oddly disengaged from the computer-games industry whose story I’ve been telling in so many other articles here. By their own account, they had literally never even seen any of the contemporary adventure games from companies like LucasArts and Sierra before making Myst. In fact, Robyn Miller says today that he had only played one computer game in his life to that point: Infocom’s ten-year-old Zork II. Rand Miller, being the older brother, the first mover behind their endeavors, and the more technically adept of the pair, was perhaps a bit more plugged-in, but only a bit.

The other circumstance which shaped Myst was the technology employed to create it. This statement is true of any game, but it becomes even more salient here because the technology in question was so different from that employed by other adventure creators. Myst is indeed simply a HyperCard stack — the “hippie-dippy” is in the eye of the beholder — gluing together pictures generated by the 3D modeler StrataVision. During the second half of its development, a third everyday Macintosh software package made its mark: Apple’s QuickTime video system, which allowed Myst‘s creators to insert snippets of themselves playing the roles of the people who previously visited the semi-ruined worlds you spend the game exploring. All of these tools are presentation-level tools, not conventional game-building ones. Seen in this light, it’s little surprise that so much of Myst is surface. At bottom, it’s a giant hypertext done in pictures, with very little in the way of systems of any sort behind it, much less any pretense of world simulation. You wander through its nodes, in some of which you can click on something, which causes some arbitrary event to happen. The one place where the production does interest itself in a state which exists behind its visuals is in the handful of mechanical devices found scattered over each of its landscapes, whose repair and/or manipulation form the basis of the puzzles that turn Myst into a game rather than an unusually immersive slideshow.

In making Myst, each brother fell into the role he was used to from Cyan’s children’s projects. The brothers together came up with the story and world design, then Robyn went off to do the art while Rand did the technical plumbing in HyperCard, and also composed and tracked the music. One Chuck Carter helped Robyn on the art side, while Chris Brandkamp produced the intriguing, evocative environmental soundscape by all sorts of improvised means: banging a wrench against the wall or blowing bubbles in a toilet bowl, then manipulating the samples to yield something appropriately other-worldly. And that was the entire team. It was a shoestring operation, amateurish in the best sense. The only thing that distinguished the boys at Cyan from a hundred thousand other hobbyists playing with the latest creative tools on their own Macs was the fact that Cyan had a contract to do so — and a commensurate quantity of real, raw talent, of course.

Ironically given that Myst was treated as such a cutting-edge product at the time of its release, in terms of design it’s something of a throwback — a fact that does become less surprising when one considers that its creators’ experience with adventure games stopped in the early 1980s. A raging debate had once taken place in adventure circles over whether the ideal protagonist should be a blank slate, imprintable by the player herself, or a fully-fleshed-out role for the player to inhabit. The verdict had largely come down on the side of the latter as games’ plots had grown more ambitious, but the whole discussion had passed the Miller brothers by.

So, with Myst we were back to the old “nameless, faceless adventurer” paragon which Sierra and LucasArts had long since abandoned. Myst actively encourages you to think of it as yourself there in its world. The story begins when you open a mysterious book here on our world, whereupon you get sucked into an alternate dimension and find yourself standing on the dock of a deserted island. You soon learn that you’re following a trail first blazed by a father and his two sons, all of whom had the ability to hop about between dimensions — or “worlds,” as the game calls them — and alter them to their will. Unfortunately, the father is now said to be dead, while the two brothers have each been trapped in a separate interdimensional limbo, each blaming the other for their father’s death. (These themes of sibling rivalry have caused much comment over the years, especially in light of the fact that each brother in the game is played by one of the real Miller brothers. But said real brothers have always insisted that there are no deeper meanings to be gleaned here…)

You can access four more worlds from the central island just as soon as you solve the requisite puzzles. In each of them, you must find a page of a magical book. Putting the pages together, along with a fifth page found on the central island, allows you to free the brother of your choice. This last-minute branch to an otherwise unmalleable story is a technique we see in a fair number of other adventure games wishing to make a claim to the status of genuinely interactive fictions. (In practice, of course, players of those games and Myst alike simply save before the final choice and check out both endings.)

For all its emphasis on visuals, Myst is designed much like a vintage text adventure in many ways. Even setting aside its explicit maze, its network of discrete, mostly empty locations resembles the map from an old-school text adventure, where navigation is half the challenge. Similarly, its complex environmental puzzles, where something done in one location may have an effect on the other side of the map, smacks of one of Infocom’s more cerebral, austere games, such as Zork III or Spellbreaker.

This is not to say that Myst is a conscious throwback; the nature of the puzzles, like so much else about the game, is as much determined by the Miller brothers’ ignorance of contemporary trends in adventure design as by the technical constraints under which they labored. Among the latter was the impossibility of even letting the player pick things up and carry them around to use elsewhere. Utterly unfazed, Rand Miller coined an aphorism: “Turn your problems into features.” Thus Myst‘s many vaguely steam-punky mechanical puzzles, all switches to throw and ponderous wheels to set in motion, are dictated as much by its designers’ inability to implement a player inventory as by their acknowledged love for Jules Verne.

And yet, whatever the technological determinism that spawned it, this style of puzzle design truly was a breath of fresh air for gamers who had grown tired of the “use this object on that hotspot” puzzles of Sierra and LucasArts. To their eternal credit, the Miller brothers took this aspect of the design very seriously, giving their puzzles far more thought than Sierra at least tended to do. They went into Myst with no experience designing puzzles, and their insecurity about this aspect of their craft was perhaps their ironic saving grace. Before they even had a computer game to show people, they spent hours walking outsiders through their scenario Dungeons & Dragons-style, telling them what they saw and listening to how they tried to progress. And once they did have a working world on the computer, they spent more hours sitting behind players, watching what they did. Robyn Miller, asked in an interview shortly after the game’s release whether there was anything he “hated,” summed up thusly their commitment to consistent, logical puzzle design and world-building (in Myst, the two are largely one and the same):

Seriously, we hate stuff without integrity. Supposed “art” that lacks attention to detail. That bothers me a lot. Done by people who are forced into doing it or who are doing it for formula reasons and monetary reasons. It’s great to see something that has integrity. It makes you feel good. The opposite of that is something I dislike.

We tried to create something — a fantastic world — in a very realistic way. Creating a fantasy world in an unrealistic way is the worst type of fantasy. In Jurassic Park, the idea of dinosaurs coming to life in the twentieth century is great. But it works in that movie because they also made it believable. That’s how the idea and the execution of that idea mix to create a truly great experience.

Taken as a whole, Myst is a master class in designing around constraints. Plenty of games have been ruined by designers whose reach exceeded their core technology’s grasp. We can see this phenomenon as far back as the time of Scott Adams: his earliest text adventures were compact marvels, but quickly spiraled into insoluble incoherence when he started pushing beyond what his simplistic parsers and world models could realistically present. Myst, then, is an artwork of the possible. Managing inventory, with the need for a separate inventory screen and all the complexities of coding this portable object interacting on that other thing in the world, would have stretched HyperCard past the breaking point. So, it’s gone. Interactive conversations would have been similarly prohibitive with the technology at the Millers’ fingertips. So, they devised a clever dodge, showing the few characters that exist only as recordings, or through one-way screens where you can see them, but they can’t see (or hear) you; that way, a single QuickTime video clip is enough to do the trick. In paring things back so dramatically, the Millers wound up with an adventure game unlike any that had been seen before. Their problems really did become their game’s features.

For the most part, anyway. The one place where the brothers’ inexperience shows to most negative effect is in Myst‘s approach to narrative. It is, one might even say, a textbook example of how not to do an interactive story: you get the entire backstory as one massive infodump, in the form of a whole shelf full of journals to be read in a literal in-game library, almost as soon as you start the game, then essentially nothing more until the big climax. This approach can make the puzzles — which, as I’ve already noted, are quite good in the abstract — feel peculiarly unrewarding despite themselves, in a “why on earth am I even doing this?” sort of way. Far better to dole the backstory out bit by bit, as a reward for each puzzle you solve.

Additionally, the networks of nodes and pre-rendered static views that constitute the worlds of Myst can be needlessly frustrating to navigate, thanks to the way that the views prioritize aesthetics over consistency; rotating your view in place sometimes turns you 90 degrees, sometimes 180 degrees, sometimes somewhere in between, according to what the designers believed would provide the most striking image. Orienting yourself and moving about the landscape can thus be a confusing process. One might complain as well that it’s a slow one, what with all the empty nodes which you must move through to get pretty much anywhere — often just to see if something you’ve done on one side of the map has had any effect on something on its other side. Again, a comparison with the twisty little passages of an old-school text adventure, filled with mostly empty rooms, does strike me as thoroughly apt.

On the other hand, a certain glaciality of pacing seems part and parcel of what Myst fundamentally is. This is not a game for the impatient. It’s rather targeted at two broad types of player: the aesthete, who will be content just to wander the landscape taking in the views, perhaps turning to a walkthrough to be able to see all of the worlds; and the dedicated puzzle solver, willing to pull out paper and pencil and really dig into the task of understanding how all this strange machinery hangs together. Both groups have expressed their love for Myst over the years, albeit in terms which could almost convince you they’re talking about two entirely separate games.

So much for Myst the artifact. What of Myst the cultural phenomenon?

The origins of the latter can be traced to the Miller brothers’ wise decision to take their game to Brøderbund. Brøderbund tended to publish fewer products per year than their peers at Electronic Arts, Sierra, or the lost and unlamented Mediagenic, but they were masterful curators, with a talent for spotting software which ordinary Americans might want to buy and then packaging and marketing it perfectly to reach them. (Their insistence on focus testing, so confusing to the Millers, is proof of their competence; it’s hard to imagine any other publisher of the time even thinking of such a thing.) Brøderbund published a string of products over the course of a decade or more which became more than just hits; they became cultural icons of their time, getting significant attention in the mainstream press in addition to the computer magazines: The Print Shop, Carmen Sandiego, Lode Runner, Prince of Persia, SimCity. And now Myst was about to become the capstone to a rather extraordinary decade, their most successful and iconic release of all.

Brøderbund first published the game on the Macintosh in September of 1993, where it was greeted with rave reviews. Not a lot of games originated on the Mac at all, so a new and compelling one was always a big event. Mac users tended to conceive of themselves as the sophisticates of the computer world, wearing their minority status as a badge of pride. Myst hit the mark beautifully here; it was the Mac-iest of Mac games. MacWorld magazine’s review is a rather hilarious example of a homer call. “It’s been polished until it shines,” wrote the magazine. Then, in the next paragraph: “We did encounter a couple of glitches and frozen screens.” Oh, well.

Helped along by press like this, Myst came out of the gates strong. By one report, it sold 200,000 copies on the Macintosh alone in its first six months. If correct or even close to correct, those numbers are extraordinary; they’re the numbers of a hit even on the gaming Mecca that was the Wintel world, much less on the Mac, with its vastly smaller user base.

Still, Brøderbund knew that Myst‘s real opportunity lay with those selfsame plebeian Wintel machines which most Mac users, the Miller brothers included, disdained. Just as soon as Cyan delivered the Mac version, Brøderbund set up an internal team — larger than the Cyan team which had made the game in the first place — to do the port as quickly as possible. Importantly, Myst was ported not to bare MS-DOS, where almost all “hardcore” games still resided, but to Windows, where the new demographics which Brøderbund hoped to attract spent all of their time. Luckily, the game’s slideshow visuals were possible even under Windows’s sluggish graphics libraries, and Apple had recently ported their QuickTime video system to Microsoft’s platform. The Windows version of Myst shipped in March of 1994.

And now Brøderbund’s marketing got going in earnest, pushing the game as the one showcase product which every purchaser of a new multimedia PC simply had to have. At the time, most CD-ROM based games also shipped in a less impressive floppy-disk-based version, with the latter often still outselling the former. But Brøderbund and Cyan made the brave choice not to attempt a floppy-disk version at all. The gamble paid off beautifully, furthering the carefully cultivated aspirational quality which already clung to Myst, now billed as the game which simply couldn’t be done on floppy disk. Brøderbund’s lush advertisements had a refined, adult air about them which made them stand out from the dragons, spaceships, and scantily-clad babes that constituted the usual motifs of game advertising. As the crowning touch, Brøderbund devised a slick tagline: Myst was “the surrealistic adventure that will become your world.” The Miller brothers scoffed at this piece of marketing-speak — until they saw how Myst was flying off the shelves in the wake of it.

So, through a combination of lucky timing and precision marketing, Myst blew up huge. I say this not to diminish its merits as a puzzle-solving adventure game, which are substantial, but simply because I don’t believe those merits were terribly relevant to the vast majority of people who purchased it. A parallel can be drawn with Infocom’s game of Zork, which similarly surfed a techno-cultural wave a decade before Myst. It was on the scene just as home computers were first being promoted in the American media as the logical, more permanent successors to the videogame-console fad. For a time, Zork, with its ability to parse pseudo-natural-English sentences, was seen by computer salespeople as the best overall demonstration of what a computer could do; they therefore showed it to their customers as a matter of course. And so, when countless new computer systems went home with their new owners, there was also a copy of Zork in the bag. The result was Infocom’s best-selling game of all time, to the tune of almost 400,000 copies sold.

Myst now played the same role in a new home-computer boom. The difference was that, while the first boom had fizzled rather quickly when people realized of what limited practical utility those early machines actually were, this second boom would be a far more sustained affair. In fact, it would become the most sustained boom in the history of the consumer PC, stretching from approximately 1993 right through the balance of the decade, with every year breaking the sales records set by the previous one. The implications for Myst, which arrived just as the boom was beginning, were titanic. Even long after it ceased to be particularly cutting-edge, it continued to be regarded as an essential accessory for every PC, to be tossed into the bags carried home from computer stores by people who would never buy another game.

Myst had already established its status by the time the hype over the World Wide Web and Windows 95 really lit a fire under computer sales in 1995. It passed the 1 million copy mark in the spring of that year. By the same point, a quickie “strategy guide” published by Prima, ideal for the many players who just wanted to take in its sights without worrying about its puzzles, had passed an extraordinary 300,000 copies sold — thus making its co-authors, who’d spent all of three weeks working on it, the two luckiest walkthrough authors in history. Defying all of the games industry’s usual logic, which dictated that titles sold in big numbers for only a few months before fizzling out, Myst‘s sales just kept accelerating from there. It sold 850,000 copies in 1996 in the United States alone, then another 870,000 copies in 1997. Only in 1998 did it finally begin to flag, posting domestic sales of just 540,000 copies. Fortunately, the European market for multimedia PCs, which lagged a few years behind the American one, was now also burning bright, opening up whole new frontiers for Myst. Its total retail sales topped 6 million by 2000, at least 2 million of them outside of North America. Still more copies — it’s impossible to say how many — had shipped as pack-in bonuses with multimedia upgrade kits and the like. Meanwhile, under the terms of SunSoft’s original agreement with Cyan, it was also ported by the former to the Sega Saturn, Atari Jaguar, 3DO, and CD-I living-room consoles. Myst was so successful that another publisher came out with an elaborate parody of it as a full-fledged computer game in its own right, under the indelible title of Pyst. Considering that it featured the popular sitcom star John Goodman, Pyst must have cost far more to make than the shoestring production it mocked.

As we look at the staggering scale of Myst‘s success, we can’t avoid returning to that vexing question of why it all should have come to be. Yes, Brøderbund’s marketing campaign was brilliant, but there must be more to it than that. Certainly we’re far from the first to wonder about it all. As early as December of 1994, Newsweek magazine noted that “in the gimmick-dominated world of computer games, Myst should be the equivalent of an art film, destined to gather critical acclaim and then dust on the shelves.” So why was it selling better than guaranteed crowd-pleasers with names like Star Wars on their boxes?

It’s not that it’s that difficult to pinpoint some of the other reasons why Myst should have been reasonably successful. It was a good-looking game that took full advantage of CD-ROM, at a time when many computer users — non-gamers almost as much as gamers — were eager for such things to demonstrate the power of their new multimedia wundermachines. And its distribution medium undoubtedly helped its sales in another way: in this time before CD burners became commonplace, it was immune to the piracy that many publishers claimed was costing them at least half their sales of floppy-disk-based games.

Likewise, a possible explanation for Myst‘s longevity after it was no longer so cutting-edge might be the specific technological and aesthetic choices made by the Miller brothers. Many other products of the first gush of the CD-ROM revolution came to look painfully, irredeemably tacky just a couple of years after they had dazzled, thanks to their reliance on grainy video clips of terrible actors chewing up green-screened scenery. While Myst did make some use of this type of “full-motion video,” it was much more restrained in this respect than many of its competitors. As a result, it aged much better. By the end of the 1990s, its graphics resolution and color count might have been a bit lower than those of the latest games, and it might not have been quite as stunning at first glance as it once had been, but it remained an elegant, visually-appealing experience on the whole.

Yet even these proximate causes don’t come close to providing a full explanation of why this art film in game form sold like a blockbuster. There are plenty of other games of equal or even greater overall merit to which they apply equally well, but none of them sold in excess of 6 million copies. Perhaps all we can do in the end is chalk it up to the inexplicable vagaries of chance. Computer sellers and buyers, it seems, needed a go-to game to show what was possible when CD-ROM was combined with decent graphics and sound cards. Myst was lucky enough to become that game. Although its puzzles were complex, simply taking in its scenery was disarmingly simple, making it perfect for the role. The perfect product at the perfect time, perfectly marketed.

In a sense, Myst the phenomenon didn’t do that other Myst — Myst the actual artifact, the game we can still play today — any favors at all. The latter seems destined always to be judged in relation to the former, and destined always to be found lacking. Demanding that what is in reality a well-designed, aesthetically pleasing game live up to the earth-shaking standards implied by Myst‘s sales numbers is unfair on the face of it; it wasn’t the fault of the Miller brothers, humble craftsman with the right attitude toward their work, that said work wound up selling 6 million copies. Nevertheless, we feel compelled to judge it, at least to some extent, with the knowledge of its commercial and cultural significance firmly in mind. And in this context especially, some of its detractors’ claims do have a ring of truth.

Arguably the truthiest of all of them is the oft-repeated old saw that no other game was bought by so many people and yet really, seriously played by so few of its purchasers. While such a hyperbolic claim is impossible to truly verify, there is a considerable amount of circumstantial evidence pointing in exactly that direction. The exceptional sales of the strategy guide are perhaps a wash; they can be as easily ascribed to serious players wanting to really dig into the game as they can to casual purchasers just wanting to see all the pretty pictures on the CD-ROM. Other factors, however, are harder to dismiss. The fact is, Myst is hard by casual-game standards — so hard that Brøderbund included a blank pad of paper in the box for the purpose of keeping notes. If we believe that all or most of its buyers made serious use of that notepad, we have to ask where these millions of people interested in such a cerebral, austere, logical experience were before it materialized, and where they went thereafter. Even the Miller brothers themselves — hardly an unbiased jury — admit that by their best estimates no more than 50 percent of the people who bought Myst ever got beyond the starting island. Personally, I tend to suspect that the number is much lower than that.

Perhaps the most telling evidence for Myst as the game which everyone had but hardly anyone played is found in a comparison with one of its contemporaries: id Software’s Doom, the other decade-dominating blockbuster of 1993 (a game about which I’ll be writing much more in a future article). Doom indisputably was played, and played extensively. While it wasn’t quite the first running-around-and-shooting-things-from-a-first-person-perspective game, it did became so popular that games of its type were codified as a new genre unto themselves. The first-person shooters which followed Doom in the 1990s were among the most popular games of their era. Many of their titles are known to gamers today who weren’t yet born when they debuted: titles like Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, Half-Life, Unreal. Myst prompted just as many copycats, but these were markedly less popular and are markedly less remembered today: Journeyman Project, Zork Nemesis, Rama, Obsidian. Only Cyan’s own eventual sequel to Myst can be found among the decade’s bestsellers, and even it’s a definite case of diminishing commercial returns, despite being a rather brilliant game in its own right. In short, any game which sold as well as Myst, and which was seriously played by a proportionate number of people, ought to have left a bigger imprint on ludic culture than this one did.

But none of this should affect your decision about whether to play Myst today, assuming you haven’t yet gotten around to it. Stripped of all its weighty historical context, it’s a fine little adventure game if not an earth-shattering one, intriguing for anyone with the puzzle-solving gene, infuriating for anyone without it. You know what I mean… sort of a niche experience. One that just happened to sell 6 million copies.

(Sources: the books Myst: Prima’s Official Strategy Guide by Rick Barba and Rusel DeMaria, Myst & Riven: The World of the D’ni by Mark J.P. Wolf, and The Secret History of Mac Gaming by Richard Moss; Computer Gaming World of December 1993; MacWorld of March 1994; CD-ROM Today of Winter 1993. Online sources include “Two Histories of Myst” by John-Gabriel Adkins, Ars Technica‘s interview with Rand Miller, Ryan Miller’s postmortem of Myst at the 2013 Game Developers Conference, GameSpot‘s old piece on Myst as one of the “15 Most Influential Games of All Time,” and Greg Lindsay’s Salon column on Myst as a “dead end.” Michael Bywater’s colorful comments about Myst come from Peter Verdi’s now-defunct Magnetic Scrolls fan site, a dump of which Stefan Meier dug up for me from his hard drive several years ago. Thanks again, Stefan!

The “Masterpiece Edition” of Myst is available for purchase from GOG.com.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/myst-or-the-drawbacks-to-success/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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interestinginfotips-blog · 5 years

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What it Means to Have a Sanguine Husband or Wife

Strengths of a Sanguine Husband

1. Loud

2. Emotionally warm––Sompa Sanguine if he is married to Mansa Melancholy is likely to enjoy an emotionally surcharged relationship because they both possess the richest emotions of the four basic temperaments.

3. Friendly––Sompa is an enthusiastic, feeling-oriented person who can easily be moved to tears by the sad mood of his friends or to joy and excitement by the happiness of others.

4. Happy

5. Outgoing––Sompa is the fun-loving, super-extrovert with personality, charisma and charm to burn. If he attends a party he is the life of it.

6. Talkative

7. Enthusiastic

8. Stimulating

9. Communication & Fellowship • He is expressive in public––in storytelling, conversations, exaggerations and actions. He is likely to get a lot of public attention. • Rarely says vicious things about others.1

Weaknesses of a Sanguine Husband

1. Lacks discipline

2. Prone to exaggerate

3. Disorganized

4. Hot-tempered

5. Prone to unfaithfulness [because of his instability]

6. Weak-willed

7. Finances • He is indisciplined with money and spends money anyhow. • He is unconstrained and usually overspends. • He can be poor, even with good opportunities.

8. Emotions

He is too emotional [he cries one moment, and the next moment it is over]. • He is angered easily but also forgives very quickly. • He can be moody.

9. Spirituality • He is disorganized spiritually. • He can be very carnal and fleshly.

10. Commitment • He loses interest easily. • He can be unfaithful and weak-willed, especially if his wife is uninteresting.

11. Home • He is untidy––throws things about. • He is dirty.

12. Relationships • He may enter and leave a relationship easily.2

Strengths of a Sanguine Wife

1. Sena Sanguine is adorable and popular––she was probably a cheerleader in school.

2. She is the easiest personality to spot in a crowd––she talks a great deal, usually laughs loudly, and has many gestures, like waving her arms in the air.

3. She is always in the middle of the action, mixing and mingling with people, and entertaining them with grand stories that may bear little or no resemblance to the truth.

4. Other personalities watching her wonder if she ever gets tired.

5. She is good at networking––she is relationship-wise and knows virtually everyone.

6. She’s everyone’s best friend and sincerely loves them all. However, she has an extra special place for friends who adore and idolize her. She thrives on compliments.

7. She doesn’t get worried when she is not worshipped. When her feelings are hurt she doesn’t hold a grudge.

8. She is quick to apologize when she realizes she’s done wrong.

9. She’s spontaneous and excitable and can decide on fun on the spur of the moment.

10. She’s a talkative––she is usually a good speaker or great teacher because she can talk for hours on a topic she has little or not much information about.

11. She’s the life of the party––she likes to throw parties and to attend them. At the party all action revolves around her. She usually arrives late at the party, because she either loses the directions to the party or forgets about it.

12. Her primary goal in life is to have fun. When things get too serious, she tries to lighten up her environment.

13. She always expects the best from people and from life.

14. Motivator––can motivate others to action and is fabulous at dreaming up wild schemes for someone else to implement. She can convince normally sane people to do things they wouldn’t normally do.

15. She is usually fond of bright colours.

16. Creative––she is a very creative dresser and likes new hairstyles and colours. Her crea tivity may extend to baking, decorating, and entertaining. She is good at inventing homes, crafts and projects for kids.

17. Accepting––she lives by the principle “live and let live”. She doesn’t spend her time thinking about what is wrong with people she meets. She rather focuses on what is right about people and about life.

18. She accepts the fact that everyone has faults and everyone makes mistakes. She has no desire to judge others and this attitude makes her popular.

19. She has a seemingly childlike faith and trust in human beings––she always believes the best about others.

20. She rarely spreads vicious rumours although she likes to talk. She easily entrusts her life to God and is therefore seldom plagued by worry and fear as the other temperaments. She lives one day at a time.3

Weaknesses of a Sanguine Wife

1. Too Talkative––often wonders why everyone else is quiet all the time. Because she doesn’t pay adequate attention to details she may say the wrong things and embarrass those close to her.

2. She tends to exaggerate for effect and therefore is seen as not telling the truth.

3. Permissive––she may allow her children to behave anyhow and may not take danger signs in marriage and life in general seriously.

4. She tends to avoid confrontation––since her goal in life is to have fun, she puts off dealing with problems.

5. Forgetful––they do not remember appointments and schedules.

6. Unreliable––she often gets excited about a role but is not around when it is being implemented.

7. She lacks attention to detail––she makes commitments without thinking about what it will take to follow through. She leaves a trail of broken promises.

8. Fussy––she fusses and complains when she has to work a little. She doesn’t like to work.

9. Messy Housekeeper––she never seems to know where anything is because she is disorganized. She has a hard time finding her curlers, make-up bag, keys, etc. She rarely has anything clean and tidy. She doesn’t enjoy cleaning the house and usually has an untidy bedroom.

10. Overwhelming––some people can’t stand sanguines. They find them too overwhelming.

11. Seems phony––other temperaments may misunderstand her motives. She can appear phony even when she has good intentions.4

Notes

1. Joyce Meyer, Help Me I’m Married! ( Fenton, Missouri: Warner Books, 2000), 224 226; Marita, Noon and Chuck Littauer, Love Extravagantly (Minneaposils, Minnesota: Bethany House, 2001), 144.

2. Tim LaHaye, I Love You But Why Are We So Different? (Eugene, Oregon: Harvest House, 1991), 37, 40.

3. Ibid., 25, 27.

4. Ibid., 37, 40.

by Dag Heward-Mills

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oddcontent · 6 years

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The sisters and the Boys

This is relatively old. About a year old? It’s unfinished and my thoughts have since been updated since, but i’ll still put this up because our blog is lonely :P

Maybe I’ll do a revised post later, but for now here are some relationship headcanons as well as personality details on my twins, Yin and Yang!

Yin - Green Heart, Kindness

Yin is the more introverted one of the two sisters. Yin grew up reading with the Nancy Drew books and children’s mystery books and loves the idea of solving crime and catching bad guys. Yin is often quiet among company, often found reading on her phone or at the side of Yang, the more outgoing sister than with anyone else. Her more snarky, silly personality is let out by the encouragement of Yang and friends. Yin is fierce with her love and protective of her loved ones, when befriended Yin will be friendly and polite but keep you at a distance until finally she’ll love you before she likes you if you’re willing to stick around. She’ll run to your side in a time of crisis to help you, save you and maybe give cuff to the head or punch to the shoulder for the trouble but she’s with you all the way. Yin enjoys giving commentary to movies and overjoyed when encouraged instead of shushed by present company, orange juice, disney movies and visual novels.

Yang - Red Heart, Determination

Unlike Yin, Yang was much more readily into befriending others. Yang is charming and affectionate, often wrapping her arms around shoulders of friends, linking arms to drag her sister away on an adventure, or just to obnoxiously give you a poke on the nose with a ‘boop’. She’s a bit of a flirt, and is quick to fall into love and often out of it. Craves commitment but also fearful of it which often leads to a string of break ups. High school was a terror. (Yin had a lot of assholes to punch) Is fierce when wronged, but a bit more bark and little bite when in a confrontation. Is just as silly and goofy as her sister and enjoys raunchy pick up lines. No, not to be used. To laugh at. (“If you're feeling down, I can feel you up. “ “That’s worse than the last one, sis. And stop sending me shitposts, we’re literally sitting right next to each other!” “Haaahaha!”) Yin LOVES rpg games. She likes the heavy emphasis on storytelling. (If this was real life and she played Undertale, you bet your ass she’d throw herself into the fandom faster than Frisk fell Underground)

Both sisters enjoy horror movies. To be accurate, Yang is eager to watch, Yin more hesitant but curious. By the end of the night, Yang is clutching onto her sister with a death grip and both sisters are screeching at the screen. Yang to warn the humans of the coming danger, and Yin out of anger for the stupidity of the protagonists. Yang loves Korean dramas. Loves them. Yin is forced to watch alongside her and provides commentary. Both girls play otome games, but Yin is a completionist and wants to get all the endings and Yang squeals and rants about her favorite characters. Anime is argued and debated about constantly between the twins.

Note: Yin and Yang aren’t actually their real names. They just started calling each other that because both are better at things the other aren’t and they decided that they would balance each other out better if they could keep themselves in check. Especially when insecurities and anxiety rises.

Undertale

Sans

I see an easy friendship to develop, Sans could watch movies with Yin and he won’t tell her to be quiet when she gets fired up and throws popcorn at the screen, they both make fun of actors and predict what happens next. Yin would be exasperated with Sans’ joke but she’ll smile, and maybe snort if it’s a very clever one, which would mean Sans would have to make MORE so she could do it again. Yin asks questions. A lot. She asks about the underground, Sans’ various jobs, the sock in the living room, the trash tornado and...probably figure out Sans’ scientific background from his various physics books. Sans is secretive and Yin is curious enough and smart enough to realize that and try to poke or ask questions which would probably cause Sans to withdraw. Yin wouldn’t pry out of any malicious intent, simply a desire to know but this would put a strain on their friendship and anything more if Yin were to push. Luckily, Yin wouldn’t want to make Sans’ uncomfortable to pursue it and respects his privacy. But if say someone blabbed a bit, like Papyrus or Alphys...it doesn’t hurt to peep a question or two, right?

Yang enjoys corny jokes, bad jokes, simply for the sake that they’re obviously bad, so she’d enjoy Sans’ company. Yang might be a bit much for Sans who isn’t a physically affectionate dude in general, but Yang is just as content to communicate with Sans over the phone as she is in person. It’d do the bone boy good to have someone spoil him though, Yang would happily do so. Yang could probably fall for Sans...it’s staying that’s the problem. She won’t cheat, or have wandering eyes, Yang’s a good girl but she doesn’t have much experience with long term relationships past the ‘honeymoon phase’ and she’s a bit of a romantic and likes little gestures while Sans is more of a casual sort of guy. If they end up in a romantic relationship it’ll have to depend on them both if it stays that way.

Papyrus

Papyrus finds Yin’s detective habits fascinating! It’s sort of like puzzles. You have to solve things! Yin finds Papyrus’ enthusiasm endearing and, like with Yang, lets herself be dragged along on whatever adventure Papyrus would take her on. She’d easily be spurred along by his energy and would be right along with him, cooking spaghetti together or driving around in his race car and looking out for ‘CRIMINALS AND HOOLIGANS!’. But, she’ll probably tire out a lot faster than Papyrus would so he’ll have to carry her around on his back while Papyrus tells her stories about his achievements, Sans, the Royal guard, Fluffy Bunny, anything that comes to mind. Yin has never dated anyone or even fooled around but gets the biggest crush on Papyrus during their friendship. But who wouldn’t really? She wouldn’t know what to do about it and she wouldn’t act on it so they’ll just continue on with their shenanigans until Papyrus finally turns to her and goes “YIN! HUMAN, I FIND I ENJOY YOUR COMPANY VERY MUCH! SO MUCH THAT WE’VE BECOME GREAT FRIENDS! BEST FRIENDS AND I! WOULD VERY MUCH...LIKE TO BE MORE. I WOULD BE HONORED IF YOU WENT ON A DATE WITH ME!”

How could Yin possibly say no?

Besties!!! Such enthusiasm! And Papyrus likes platonic cuddling, Yang can hug him whenever she wants! Yang’s already in love. Well, until Papyrus turns her down. “I’M VERY FLATTERED YANG, BUT I JUST DON’T FEEL LIKE THAT FOR YOU! PLUS I KNOW YOU LIKE KISSING AND I DON’T HAVE LIPS!” Yang isn’t that heartbroken, she wasn’t actually in love but she did consider dating him. She accepts and they’re the best of buds. ...Until she develops feelings for real. And then the insecurity hits. What was she thinking before? She can’t date Pap! Pap needs someone who can keep at his own pace (not literally, most people can’t keep up with Papyrus at his pace) someone who doesn’t go through relationships like they do with soap. Yang moves pretty fast and Papyrus is...so good. Oh boy. If Pap and Yang date, Papyrus is gonna have to have a talk with Yang. Despite how Yang feels about herself, she would never rush Papyrus through their relationship and in fact would be a good relationship starter, should they ever break up. Papyrus gives Yang encouragement and positive reinforcement. A good noodle, Papyrus is.

Underfell

Red

Haha well shit. A flirty, bold skeleton with anxiety and self esteem issues? It’s like Yang if Yang was a dude. And a skeleton. Not that Red completely reminds Yin of her sister because that’d be weird but there’s some...pings going off in her head. If Red tried putting the moves on Yin, Yin’s super awkward and blustery about it. Give her time, she’ll get to know Red as they hang out together. Red isn’t much of an outgoer and neither is she, they can spend indoors together hanging out on the couch and watching horror movies. Yin screams and gets angry and Red can laugh at her. Yin miiiight get a bit...curious and take up Red’s semi-serious flirtations. though if Red ends up chickening out, Yin would end up a little hurt that Red might’ve just been messing with her but brush it off because she was ONLY curious obviously and it’s easier like this because they can just stay friends like normal, right? ...Yeah, these two nerds need to talk things out.

Yang and Red would probably hit it off at like a bar at first. If Yang starred in the choose your own tale with Red, she’d get the Sinner’s ending. ...Well, maybe after a round of beanboozled. They have a bit of a whirlwind romance that could end a blast or disaster. They’re similar in some ways that might mean they’ll mesh really well and in some ways might mean they’ll spark out as fast as they came together (hehe). Yang doesn’t mind if Red gets jealous or possessive, she’d be thrilled, it means she’s wanted. But Yang being affectionate might mean Red would take offense to her being close with...probably everyone. Not Yin though. Red gets kinda drool-y seeing them together. Which would make Yang take offense a bit because why is Red alright with a threesome when it’s them (Red you gross) but Yang can’t just hug people like normal. Eventually she might find it stifling and their insecurities would throw each other off. These two ALSO would need to talk things out.

Edge

Haha double shit. Yin is...not impressed. Who is this big, edgy, shouty asshole? Yin would probably end up picking a fight with Edge. Yin tries to be polite but this guy. Wowie. The twins can be fierce but Yin’s the protector, the fighter. She wouldn’t stand for his rude, I-AM-ABOVE-YOU-LITERALLY-AND-FIGURATIVELY attitude. And Edge finds this puny, squishy little human trying to mess with him laughable, because??? Puny, squishy human. Things might escalate and wherever they are, they’ll probably be told to leave because they’re disturbing the peace. After...they just keep bumping into each other. (“YOU!!!” “Ugh, no.”) If Yin REALLY wants to fight Edge, somehow she convinces him to spar with her. Yeah, you heard that right. If they can’t talk it out, they’ll fight it out and then they’ll be square, at least Yin figures. Yin’s punched her fair share of jerks she can handle this guy. ...Yeah no, she gets her ass handed to her. But, Edge is…-whispers- impressed. Just a little. But you didn’t hear that from him, no sir. She put up a good fight and Yin asks where Edge learned how to fight which leads to Edge bragging about being the CAPTAIN OF THE ROYAL GUARD, and talking about his accomplishments and exploits and so on and so forth. (“Huh. Fine then, big guy, color me impressed.”)

Yang also, is not the least bit impressed. ...Okay, maybe she thought Edge was sort of handsome even with the scars, until he opened his mouth. Still, whatever remarks he might make her way, Yang turns it right around and flirts back, because what better way to piss someone off than to brush off angry remarks with a casual air. But somehow this leads to shenanigans and Edge calls Yang a admirer of his and figures, if she’s so incensed to get close to him, he is ‘GRACIOUS ENOUGH TO TAKE YOU UNDER MY WING THEN!” ...Yeah, what? Yang figures she can make the best of it and hey this would probably make a good story to tell later, right? Edge is still a bit of a jerk but Yang isn’t so down on herself that she’s going to let someone get away bullying her without a fight. (“What makes you so Great and Terrible, anyway?” “WELL IF YOU INSIST ON KNOWING, MY MINION…!”)

Underswap

Blueberry

What more is there to say, Yin thinks the little dude is cute. But more in a kid brother kind of way than dating way. Yin would happily follow Blueberry on the greatest adventure, she’s content to be a sidekick.

Stretch

Swapfell

Raspberry

Rus

#Whisper

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someguyranting1 · 6 years

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Why Do So Many People Love SAO? The Art of Mass Appeal

Hey! It’s okay! You are allowed to like Sword Art Online. I feel like I needed to explain that before somebody gets the wrong idea and thinks this is just me saying, “I don’t understand how somebody likes an anime that I don’t like!”

I just want to put this on the record: You’re not a bad person for liking SAO. You don’t have shit taste, and you’re not stupid. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to like this show, and, for this review, we’re going to be exploring what those reasons are because any show that can reach over a million people has to be doing something right.

No, this isn’t going to boil down to an insulting and reductive conclusion, like, “Thirsty weebs need wish fulfillment,” although I do think that is part of it for some people. This is a serious, analytical look at the series. The mechanics of mass appeal have always fascinated me, and SAO’s lacking qualities in other departments make it easier to isolate those mechanics than it would be looking at something like FMA.

You really can’t understate the impact that SAO has had on popular culture. It takes a lot of brand recognition for an American product to get a shot on network television, let alone a Japanese one. Much as critics like to downplay popularity as a measure of quality, success like that doesn’t just come down to random luck.

That said, luck is a major factor. SAO is often lauded for its great premise, but that’s only half the story. The most obvious factor in SAO’s whirlwind success is that it hit on the right premise, at the right time. When SAO came out in 2012, eSports and Free-to-Play games were becoming huge in the public eye. League of Legends had overtaken WoW as the most-played PC game of the year, and WoW’s death grip on the MMO market had loosened enough so that the landscape of online worlds was becoming more expansive and varied than it had ever been before. It was the perfect time to release any story about hardcore gaming, hardcore MMO gaming in particular, and with the Hunger Games phenomenon just starting to “catch fire” thanks to the first movie’s release, the market was hot for death game stories in particular. Add to that the exploding popularity of the then-new Game of Thrones and Walking Dead, and any series with a similar sense of lethality was bound to do well. Just look at how many articles at the time compare Attack on Titan and SAO to those two shows.

On top of that, anime was about to blow up in a big way in the West. Crunchyroll came to my attention in Fall of 2011, when they acquired the rights to Fate/Zero. I was hooked enough on the series from watching it on their ad-supported site to bite the bullet on a subscription just to get one episode ahead, and I don’t think I’m the only one. From 2011 to 2012, Crunchyroll began offering a serious value proposition by doubling their seasonal anime library, and becoming the go-to place for basically everything coming out of Japan by the Summer of 2012. It might not have been Fate/Zero specifically, but between huge series like HunterxHunter and quality niche stuff like Space Brothers and Kids on the Slope, the streaming service finally had enough content to pull in and sustain a hundred thousand subscribers by September of 2012, and two hundred thousand by March of 2013. Crunchyroll had become the service of choice for the then-niche community. SAO hit right in the middle of the surge in anime’s Western popularity, right at the point when Crunchyroll had enough content to be worth a subscription, but before it became totally unreasonable to watch everything on the service.

As one of the biggest fish in a rapidly-expanding pond, SAO both benefited from and helped spur on the service’s growth. Since it was one of the most popular shows on the service, Crunchyroll naturally put it at the forefront of their marketing push, which only increased its brand caché among anime fans and casuals alike. At this point, SAO was huge in Japan, and within the niche of Western anime fandom. It had proved its market viability enough to become a flagship title for the recently revived and redesigned Toonami block on Cartoon Network in Spring of 2013, and it was both relevant and popular enough to be added to Netflix in 2014, right in time to hype up the second season.

Anime had become a massive wave, washing over popular culture. Like 2013’s Attack on Titan, SAO had the good fortune to start riding that wave while it was still small, and go all the way to the top. The two series’ similar tone, and similar lethality, meant that fans of one were likely the fans of the other, and the cross-pollination only helped them both.

However, if good timing and an enticing premise were all it took for a show to embed itself in the popular culture, we’d be staring down Season 3 of The Unlimited Hyoubu Kyousuke right now. As much as it pains me to admit it, SAO does do some things very right when it comes to its execution that primed it for its whirlwind success. One of the biggest factors in this regard is the look of the show. A1 Pictures has faced a lot of criticisms from anime YouTubers and critics in general for the uniform look of its productions, and indeed, it can get pretty tiring to see the same faces, in nearly identical art styles, over and over again. However, that’s not going to be a problem for the casual anime fan, whose only seen a few dozen series. Their shows might look pretty similar, but they all look polished and professional, assuming they’re given enough time in production. They might not look or feel as nice as something from Ufotable, Kyoto Animation, or Bones, but they can get most of the way there in less time with a smaller budget, and that’s impressive. People like things that feel polished and professional.

If you haven’t seen a million shows like it before, SAO looks really clean and cohesive. It looks like what you expect a good anime to look like. The lineart is sharp and crisp, the characters blend with the environments well (at least, when the characters aren’t moving), and you can freeze on almost any frame and use it as a pretty decent wallpaper, which is all that many casual anime fans look for in a show’s visuals.

A1’s visual style is also very versatile. Its characters look cool, but they’re still very expressive. The girls can be moe cute, the heroes can look badass and youthful, and the adults can look old and hardened, and they all exist within the same world. Despite its “same-face syndrome” problem when put next to other A1 anime, SAO’s main cast has impressively diverse and easily recognizable character designs.

On the subject of design, while I do think that SAO would be a crappy game in real life, I will credit it for looking very visually appealing. The environments are super varied and interesting, from the flower dungeon, to the ice peak where they fight the dragon, to the trippy cave system where they find the Gleam Eyes. As VR spectacles go, this world would be a hell of a draw. The show’s visuals can really pop with vibrant colors, without looking too silly, and those can be muted down for more serious scenes without it looking incongruous with the rest of the show. SAO manages to sell moe, horror, action, and even Looney Tunes-esque cartoon comedy at times, and it all feels like roughly part of the same series.

That highlights one of the show’s other big strengths: plot variety. Because of the longtime scale of its storyline and the way that its setting creates a sort of blank slate for adventure, it can dabble in lots of different plot concepts, and even genres. One episode might be a short tragedy about Kirito watching all of his friends die, while the next is a cute story about saving a little girl’s pet and beating up some cackling Team Rocket villains, and that can be followed with a two-parter murder mystery, and after that, why not, let’s go on a side quest for crafting materials that blossoms into a short unrequited love story.

None of these individual stories have to be particularly great, hell, they don’t even have to make much logical sense because each one is so different from the last that it’s kind of fun to watch just for the surprise of finding out what they’re going to do next. Even if you really hate one storyline, you can rest assured that something new is on the horizon within an episode or two, and there’s a good chance that at least one of the many things the show tries will work for you.

Because Kirito’s character arc is about learning to open up to other people, all of those different plots feel like they’re moving the central plot forward, or at least a little, even if they’re really just filler. That results in a show that feels like it’s moving forward at a good pace. Emphasis on “feels” because if you look at the actual storytelling and logical structure of events, it’s an absolute mess. Just look at the final fight between Kirito and Kayaba Akihiko, it just comes out of nowhere on Floor 75 and it doesn’t work at all. However, if you’re just sitting down for entertainment, how a show feels to watch is paramount, and what sense it makes doesn’t matter so much.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying that it’s dumb to enjoy a show on that level. There’s value in sitting down, turning your brain off, and simply being entertained for the sake of relaxation. Analyzing anime can feel like work. For some, it is work. In SAO, it feels like at least one really important thing happens every single episode, and there’s usually a really cool-feeling action scene every two or three episodes to keep the excitement up. As a result, the show has momentum. Once you start watching, it’s very easy to keep watching without getting bored or confused. The show is consumable, like popcorn or other A1 Pictures shows like Gate.

The show suffers, a lot, when it loses this forward momentum, which I think is a big part of why even fans of the series acknowledge that the Fairy Dance arc kinda sucks. Kirito has a clear goal there, with an obvious solution in trying to rescue Asuna, which means that any diversion from that goal, like going off to fight a random guy in PvP, feels like a true waste of time. Furthermore, Kirito’s character is entirely static during that storyline. He doesn’t grow or change at all. Neither does Asuna, nor anyone aside from Suguha, and even then, only kind of. Therefore, even when the story is moving forward, it feels kind of flat.

Gun Gale fixes this problem in a kind of artificial way of giving Kirito sudden onset PTSD to get over, but it does help the story feel more substantial, and fans reacted positively to that. When it does work, even if it doesn’t actually have any idea where it’s going, SAO’s story moves forward with a bold sense of confidence and purpose.

Speaking of boldness, SAO also excels at setting a strong tone for whatever is happening in its story at any given time, particularly early on. Not necessarily the most appropriate tone, but a tone that is powerful and striking nonetheless. The monsters feel scary and intimidating, the comedy feels fun and lighthearted, the romance feels heartwarming and intimate, and deaths feel tragic and poignant. If you’re not invested in the story and characters, a lot of this can feel cloying and emotionally manipulative, but until something happens to take you out of that (like Yui’s death did for me), watching SAO is an emotional rollercoaster.

A big part of that is Tomohiko Ito’s direction. He is really good at placing the camera and cutting in a way that draws out the maximum possible emotion from any given scene. He needs to work with great source material, like Erased or Gin no Saji to really shine, but even working with Reki Kawahara’s leavings, he does a good job. The use of reflections in windows while Kirito listens to Sachi’s last message to him is legitimately incredible filmmaking.

The emotional impact of the series is further enhanced by the work of Yuki Kajiura, Tomohiko Ito’s most favorite composer, who also crafted the amazing soundtrack of Erased, as well as Tsubasa, Madoka Magica, Fate/Zero, Kara no Kyoukai, and some of the Xenosaga video games. Yuki Kajiura is one the most singularly talented composers working in the anime industry today, and it’s hard to understate just how much of an impact I think she’s had on the perceived quality of SAO. Her compositions for the show give it an air of cinematic quality, but they also feel distinctly, and very appropriately, video game-y. In particular, I’d argue that she is the primary reason that people say SAO has good action scenes. Her compositions make fights that are actually pretty stilted and janky, outside of a few sakuga cuts, feel incredibly bombastic and slick. When SAO’s music kicks up, it gets your pulse pounding, and it’s hard to resist getting caught up in it or even humming along to that memorable hook. Watch these fights without the music, and they kinda suck.

Kajiura’s abilities don’t just improve the action scenes, though. Her work is an integral part of that emotional roller coaster effect, heightening the emotion of each scene and connecting the emotional beats so that the shifts in tone feel less jarring than they might otherwise feel. She makes the scary scenes feel scary, the sad scenes feel much, much sadder, and the romantic scenes feel powerful and moving. That brings us to the big reason that I think people love SAO.

Most of the things I’ve talked about so far aren’t totally unique to SAO, and though they are important factors in getting people interested and keeping them invested in what’s going on, they’re not enough on their own to make people care so much that they’ll tell me to kill myself when I badmouth it. To evoke that kind of emotional response, a show really needs to get its audience to say, “Fuck yeah!”

The thing that makes a lot of people say that, myself included when I first watched SAO, is the fact that Kirito and Asuna get together in Episode 10, after several episodes of buildup where other characters notice they have a thing for each other, and it’s just really cute. That’s just not a thing that happens in anime. Even in shows with a clear OTP relationship, nine times out of ten the romance will be drawn out to its breaking point, and the characters will only hook up right at the end of the story, which isn’t just a lazy way to create an emotional arc, it’s tedious to watch.

The “will they, won’t they” is a story we’ve seen a million times, while the equally interesting story about what happens after, the trials and tribulations of actually dating and being in love, is almost never touched upon. You can justify that in a romance anime where the story is about characters sorting out their feelings and finally getting together (Toradora does that and it’s just about perfect), but even there, after a while you start to crave shows that buck that trend, like Ore Monogatari, My Little Monster, and Golden Time.

Also, with shows that have other things driving the plot, there’s really no excuse. There are few things that could really improve on Fullmetal Alchemist, but Winry and Ed hooking up earlier in the story would probably be one of them. Look at how many people loved Mikasa’s confession to Eren at the end of Attack on Titan Season 2. That was beautiful!

It’s a very pleasant surprise to see two main characters of a show like SAO commit to a monogamous relationship this early in the plot, and I think that most people who love the series do so because, in this respect, it doesn’t waste their time. This plot turn changes a lot of story dynamics, too, since Kirito and Asuna can be explicitly motivated by their love for one another, and that love can be made much deeper than the obvious mutual crushes that drive shows less willing to pull that trigger. For a story so driven by its emotional content, that one change makes SAO feel very different from just about everything else a casual fan is likely to have seen, and from what you would probably expect going into the show.

Now if you’re like me, and you think a lot about story structure and plot logic, that effect of that change doesn’t really last. Reki Kawahara is totally unwilling to abandon his harem anime nonsense, so every arc sees Kirito introduced to a new hot girl who wants to jump his bones. In terms of narrative structure, that really undercuts the importance of his commitment to Asuna.

However, if you’re just watching the show to enjoy a show, then it feels very substantial, to the point that fans get very mad at me when I call this harem anime a harem anime, in the same way that all of the deaths early on make the show feel very lethal and dangerous, so long as you don’t realize that all of the key characters have plot armor. If you do buy into it, the scenes of Kirito and Asuna being a couple and enjoying each other’s company are extremely emotionally satisfying. By the same token, if Yui doesn’t bug you the same way she bugs me, her relationship with Kirito and Asuna is adorable. Hell, Asuna and Kirito’s romance is the only part of the movie that I think really works. To get more cynical for a moment, for the segment of the audience that does use this show as pure escapist wish fulfillment, the fact that Kirito can have an emotionally fulfilling relationship with his wife, while still being chased by hotties all because he’s so dang good at video games that he’s basically invincible, those aspects only improve the show for you.

However, I don’t think that most people who love SAO love it for those reasons. I think they love it because it managed to get them deeply invested in its main characters through one very bold plot turn, and once you care about those characters, seeing Kirito be an unstoppable badass stops being eye-rolling, and starts being cool and fun. I think they love SAO because the world that it creates seems like a very appealing place on the surface to spend time in, and you can imagine yourself being one of the NPCs going off and doing something that’s not vital to Kirito’s plotline, like that guy who’s fishing, for some reason. I think they love SAO because it came at the right time in their lives, right when they were getting into anime. If you’ve seen hundreds of anime, then yeah, parts of it are going to feel played out, but if you’ve seen just a handful, SAO is going to feel fresh, and new, and exciting.

Considering that it’s at the forefront of the anime fandom, even today, I think it will be among many people’s first anime for many years to come, and I think that ties into why so many of us so passionately hate this show as well. Because when we discovered it, it had all of this promise and potential, but at one point or another, be it a poorly-executed death or a very, very poorly-executed rape scene, it let us down profoundly, and we were left unable to enjoy this thing that, at one point, seemed like it could be so great, that was, at one point, so enjoyable for us. That disappointment is a lot more cutting than the overt and unsurprising terribleness of something like The Asterisk War or Akashic Record.

But not everyone was disappointed in it in the same way. While I do think it’s fundamentally poorly made, SAO does some things right that are going to be more important for some people than the things it does wrong are for me.

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moviecatchup · 7 years

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It’s like ‘Jaws,’ but in space: Alien

Alien 1979 Dir: Ridley Scott Rating: 4 / 5 mouths within mouths within mouths

“Many producers have professional ‘readers’ that read and summarize scripts for them. The reader in this case summarized it as ‘It’s like Jaws (1975), but in space.’”

— IMDb trivia, Alien

Another day, another classic movie catchup! I was more intentional about missing Alien, I think — I had heard that it was scary, and given my previously stated fear of horror movies and general disinterest in sci-fi, I never made any effort to see it.

Our viewing came about in a bit of a backwards fashion — D and I wanted to go to the movies last week, and Alien: Covenant had just come out. We debated staying in and watching the original first so I could get some context, but in the end the desire to get out of the house for a date night outweighed the need for chronological franchise viewing. There were some definite plusses and minuses to that decision — plusses included a delicious cheeseburger at our local Alamo Drafthouse and being reassured that these movies actually aren’t that scary; minuses included feeling like I already had seen this cinematic universe when we got around to watching Alien a couple days later — while we were watching the movie that was intended to introduce us to the universe for the first time, I wasn’t able to see it through uninitiated eyes.

For anyone who is in the late-to-the-movie-party boat with me, Alien follows the adventures of the cargo spaceship Nostromo and its crew as it cruises through space, initially back to Earth with ore for whatever we need ore for in 2122. There are seven crew members, awakened from a two-year hypersleep at the opening of the film because their AI captain MUTHUR (pronounced ‘Mother,’ how clever) has detected a communication, and it is their contractual duty to discover the potentially intelligent communicator. They land on an unknown planet, send a team out to find the exact source of the blip, and things go steadily, though not quickly, downhill from there. The pacing of this movie is delightful — there is time for both the crew and the audience to think, weigh the options, and let the enormity of their situation settle in. There is gore, though not as much as you’d expect, and there are certainly scary moments, but you’re mostly just watching the crew grapple with their changing reality.

Like many of the movies I’m watching and writing about for this little project, my reaction to Alien suffered a bit from its now-prominent and -permanent place in the American zeitgeist. Though I had never seen the movie, I had picked up what the alien looked like somewhere along the way, and the plot and visuals were not shocking or especially remarkable, by today’s standards. I hadn’t seen a lot of space movies until the past couple of years, but I’ve been catching up, and the narrative of “ship exploring space, full of astronauts with strong personalities, brings an alien on board, alien kills everyone except that one person / various other calamities ensue until there’s just that one person” is a whole thing. This just didn’t hit me with the same force as I’m sure it hit audiences in 1979 — too spoiled by hyper-realistic CGI graphics and jaded by movies telling and retelling stories.

Le sigh.

All that being said, there’s a reason we tell and retell these stories — they’re really good stories! And they get at a lot of essentially human themes: our desire to explore and discover, our essential reflex to stay alive against all odds, our fascination with and fear of the unknown, and what that emotional combination can force us to do. Also, there really isn’t such a thing as an original story — there wasn’t when Shakespeare was writing and there isn’t now — so getting picky about recurring plot lines is a little high and mighty of me. It’s about how you tell the story, and I think that Ridley Scott and co. told this one very well.

Case in point (IMDb is today’s theme, if you couldn’t tell): “The Xenomorph has 4 minutes of screen time, and doesn’t make its first appearance until about an hour into the film.” How flipping good is that? The Thing, the entity around which the action of the entire movie occurs, is a minor character at BEST. The tension builds and pulses race through storytelling and cinematography, not through neverending “we are developing the plot now” conversations interspersed with jump scares or spooooky things in the corner of your eye. Ridley manages to make the initial introduction of the characters both engaging and a little foreboding — after everyone is roused from hypersleep and is sitting around eating and catching up, you get a sense of camaraderie and a sense of bad things to come all at once. We get to the jump scares eventually, of course, but by the time they happen, it’s a release of built-up tension, rather than an out-of-nowhere reminder to pay attention to the movie.

Apropos of not much, my mother calls Sigourney Weaver a “take-no-prisoners actress.” I lean more towards “badass,” but I think the sentiment is the same either way.

Favorite IMDB trivia pieces (besides the ones cited above):

“The dead facehugger that Ash autopsies was made using fresh shellfish, four oysters, and a sheep kidney to recreate the internal organs” — I thought I saw a damn oyster in there!

“The original title was ‘Star-Beast’…” that would have been far, far shittier.

(This is a long one, but hang with me a second) During early development, Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett ran into a writing impasse while trying to work out how the alien would get aboard the ship. Shussett came up with the idea “the alien f*cks one of them,” which was eventually developed into the facehugger concept. This method of reproduction via implantation was deliberately intended to invoke images of male rape and impregnation, so both writers were adamant that the facehugger victim be a man: firstly because they wanted to avoid the horror cliché of women being depicted as the easy first target; secondly because they felt that making a female the casualty of a symbolic rape felt inappropriate; and thirdly, to make the male viewers feel more uncomfortable with this reversal of genre conventions. — way to turn some of the tired old horror tropes on their gender head a bit!

The literal translations of some of this film’s foreign language titles include Alien: The Eighth Passenger (Argentina, Mexico, Spain, Canada, Denmark, Israel and France) and Alien: The Uncanny Creature from a Strange World (West Germany). — I really, really dig The Eighth Passenger as an alternate title for this movie.

Iconic? I mean, absolutely — I don’t think I need to qualify or explain that

Re-watchable? I’m not sure I would reach for this again for a while — to me, it’s more of a genre-defining experience than a go-to movie night movie. I’m glad I watched it, I feel like I have a better context for a lot of other space movies, but I don’t think I enjoyed the experience of it enough to choose it over something I haven’t seen, or something I’ve seen a million times and love. We are, however, working our way through the Alien universe / franchise — we watched Prometheus a couple days ago, which was also super entertaining, and it has spurred a couple long conversations about the timeline and placement of the overall universe. According to Ridley Scott via trusty IMDb, Alien (and all sequels), Prometheus, Predator (and all sequels) AND Blade Runner are all in the same universe, so there’s a lot to discuss.

Favorite moment? Sigourney Weaver singing “You Are My Lucky Star” as she prepared to finally blow the damn thing into space — it was eerie and unexpected in a way that I got right behind. And the chestbursting scene actually made me laugh out loud — we all knew it was coming, and it was a great moment, but seeing that little thing pop out and scamper away just made me giggle.

Hated? The lone black character being underpaid AND lazy AND yelled at to just shut up and listen (to the white man with authority explaining basic facts condescendingly), and then switching to total compliance when he was threatened with no income at all. That whole scene was just icky with racist tropes. Also, the underwear scene towards the end was so unnecessary — you just couldn’t let a female character get through a movie without showing some leg ( / buttcrack?!), no matter how badass she was, eh? For shame, the year 1979. And 2017, but that’s a different matter.

Bechdel test? Yes! From the IMDb trivia, it sounds like they cut a couple of scenes between Ripley and Lambert that would have been challenging — one with them discussing if either of them had had sex with Ash (the robot, for lack of a better word), and another in which Lambert slaps Ripley after Ripley refuses to let the contaminated group complete with facehugger back on the ship (women are so catty and always slapping each other! right?!) — but those scenes were cut and we’re left with a movie with a strong female protagonist, and scenes with her and the other female character talking about something other than men or romance. Lambert was annoyingly cry-y and panicky, but you can’t have everything in this life.

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