Myst (Mega LD)

Myst (Mega LD)

System(s): Sega Mega LD
Publisher: Pioneer LDC
Developer: Brian A. Rice, Inc.^[1]
Licensor: Sunsoft
Developer(s) of original games: Cyan
Planned release date(s): 1995-06^[2]
Genre: Interactive Movie^[3]
Number of players: 1
Status of prototype(s): Prototype dumped

For the released Saturn and PlayStation Portable versions, see Myst.

Myst (ミスト) is an unreleased Sega Mega LD full-motion video graphic adventure game developed by Brian A. Rice, Inc. and scheduled to be published by Pioneer LDC in 1995. A port of the titular 1993 Cyan game Myst, development was virtually completed in 1995 (with the game even receiving an official Japanese publishing code, PEASJ1035) when a video playback bug was discovered which rendered the game unplayable.^[1] Combined with poor sales of the Pioneer LaserActive, Myst ultimately never materialized.

In modern years, two prototype discs have been discovered and preserved by private collectors.

History

“	The game was 99% complete, the graphics looked beautiful for the day... some scenes that had animations in it that used the Sega graphics to overlay the video look "so, so"... many animations and all transitions were rendered to the videodisk with a half dozen Macintoshes we had running for a couple of months. For example, a wipe left, or a dissolve forward, would take up 6 frames on the videodisk and we would play the 6 frames to do an animated transition... unfortunately, there was a hardware bug that caused the transition occasionally to not stop after the 6th frame and keep on playing through other scenes. So, this prevented the game from ever being released.	„
— Brian A. Rice, Inc. founder Brian A. Rice^[1]

Development

A hardware bug in the Pioneer LaserActive leads to inconsistent behavior of screen transitions after a certain amount of playback time. While most developers for the platform seem to have avoided this issue, the Mega LD port of Myst required extensive use of the hardware's ability to stop video at a certain frame.^[1] Unfortunately, this bug would not be discovered until the project was virtually complete; all known prototype discs exhibit this issue, rendering them unplayable.

Versions

Localized names

Also known as
Language	Localised Name	English Translation
English (US)	Myst	Myst
Japanese	ミスト	Myst

Magazine articles

Main article: Myst (Mega LD)/Magazine articles.

Promotional material

A promotional preview, published in LA Express Vol. 12.
A promotional preview, published in LA Express Vol. 12 (translated into English.)
A promotional feature, published in LA Express Vol. 13.