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How Myst Almost Couldn't Run on CD-ROM | War Stories | Ars Technica

Myst co-creator Rand Miller recounts how the HyperCard-built game struggled to run on 1x CD-ROM drives. He and his brother Robyn compressed image and audio data heavily to get acceptable performance. Part of Ars Technica's War Stories series.

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Why HN readers recommended it

HN commenters point to it as the first-person story of how Myst grew out of HyperCard and fit on CD-ROM, especially in threads about HyperCard and retro game constraints.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel
Ars Technica
Topic
game development history
Format
interview
Level
general
HN recommenders in dataset
4
HN mentions in dataset
6
Recommendation years in dataset
2020–2024

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

  • Related, the video How Myst Almost Couldn't Run on CD-ROM[1] is actually more fascinating and entertaining in my opinion. [1] [VIDEO]

    nodesocket on Hacker News · 2020-03
    In How Prince of Persia Defeated Apple II's Memory Limitations [video]

  • The game Myst was originally written in HC, and a game engine (Mohawk) had to be written for Windows to provide similar functionality in order to port it. There's a documentary about it: [VIDEO] Definitely one of the rare indie game success stories. They really …

    anonsivalley652 on Hacker News · 2020-02
    In HyperCard: What Could Have Been (2002)

  • If you want to hear more about this from the man himself, Rand Miller has a great video with Ars Technica: [VIDEO] And extended edition: [LINK]

    clusmore on Hacker News · 2023-01
    In When Douglas Adams wrote about Hypercard

Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.

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