Into The Myst -- It's A Safe World, A Story, A Work Of Art - And 1. 2 Million People Bought It

IN THE BEGINNING, BEFORE ALL the CD-ROM awards and the online fan clubs and the million-dollar book contract and the full-page Gap ad, and yes, even before the multimedia gurus were heralding the computer adventure game Myst as a new era in entertainment, a new art form, heck, practically a new life form, before all that, Myst was merely an idea.

The idea was in the minds of two brothers who live in Spokane, Rand and Robyn Miller. The brothers wanted to create a computer game. Not just a computer game, but an imaginary island. Not just an island, more like, well, a whole WORLD, a beautiful and mysterious and moody world where you could explore, become lost and eventually figure things out without having to mow down space aliens or worry about getting yourself blown up.

The infant universe of CD-ROM entertainment was at that time dark and bleak, inhabited mostly by shoot-'em-up no-brainers and digitized pornography. So the Millers said to themselves: Myst is a cool idea. Let us make it. But the brothers lacked money. And they lacked the sophisticated computer equipment needed to create such a game. And they lacked business savvy. In fact, the California company that published the Millers' previous two children's' games had recently gone bankrupt, withheld software, stopped sending checks. The older brother and his wife, expectant with a third daughter, were forced to go on welfare. And so it came to pass, four years ago, that the Miller brothers were poor and without product. Yet they had faith in each other, in their families, in God, and also, they had an idea.

Along came three Japanese investors from the Sun Corporation: Mr. Kiharu Yoshida, Mr. Masato Kawai and Mr. Shizuya Furukawa. They had heard of the Miller brothers and their idea, and so went to meet them in a fluorescent conference room of a Spokane hotel. The brothers were clad in jeans, cotton shirts and the type of shoes that allow sweat to evaporate freely. The Japanese businessmen thought the brothers' casual wear somewhat impolite, but the Millers explained it was their uniform, and the investors could see Spokane was no Tokyo. They could also tell that the brothers, as Mr. Furukawa puts it, "were very pure and they always wanted to make a best game. They don't care, you know, about business. That's why we trusted them."

What tipped off the investors that the Millers were motivated by ideas more than money was that when the time came to negotiate contracts and license agreements, the brothers pulled out hand-drawn maps. Blueprints of weird contraptions. Pine trees. Some sort of strange ship. A planetarium. The investors looked at the sketches, watched the brothers' exuberant faces. The older brother recalls, "We were this nothing little company that doesn't even have an office, and we're telling them we're going to build a world." The businessmen could not fathom the Millers' presentations, but they understood the brothers' excitement. It was, Mr. Kawai says, "as if boys told us their dreams."

"It will be a best game?" Mr. Furukawa asked.

"Yes! Yes! It will be good!" the Millers promised.

And so the three investors trusted the brothers and advanced them $330,000. Two years and several hundred thousand dollars later, the Millers created Myst.

YOU SLIDE THE MYST disc into your computer's CD-ROM slot. Your screen fills with stars in a night sky. The silhouette of a man tumbles, slow motion, through a fissure in the dark heavens. The man is clutching a book and says he is worried about the tome falling into the wrong hands. The book spins through space, filling your screen. It has a marbled gray cover with worn black corners. You click on the book. It opens. You hear wind blowing across desert, or maybe ocean. You click on a page. You hear water lapping against rocks and seagulls screeching in the distance. Click. You are drawn through the page, into the book, into your computer, onto an island with a weathered dock, a planetarium, a tower with stone steps, trap doors leading to secret elevators under stairways behind sliding bookcases activated by gilded paintings in an octagonal library with carved moldings.

Myst is a sensual world of rough cement walls, parquet floors, chirping frogs. It is a safe world because nobody dies. It is a scary world because nobody seems to be alive. It is a work of art because it is creative and beautiful. It is a story, sort of a novel, because there is a beginning, an end and complications to unravel in the middle. Yet ultimately, exploring Myst is a lonely experience because there aren't other people. Why not? Where are they? What happened? Somehow you know that's what you have to figure out. The key, both brothers will tell you, is to do what you would do if you were actually there. What you might not realize, until it's too late, is this journey will take about 40 hours. Click.

Actually, you are not alone. It only seems that way. Myst is the most popular disc ever produced in the short history of CD-ROMs. Since its release in October 1993, it has sold 1.2 million copies at about $50 a pop. It has earned the accolades "masterpiece" and "revolutionary" from traditional game-players, the ones who log megahours at their keyboards and get an adrenaline rush from joy-sticks. It is almost a cult. Every week, an average 2,000 people visit the Myst hints guide, a World Wide Web site created by Doug Ingram at the University of Washington. In New York, 27-year-old Ivan Cockrum was so entranced by Myst that he set up a fan club on CompuServe, then an online magazine about Myst and finally, inspired by the Miller brothers' example, quit his job, changed his life and is now working on his own CD-ROM. He dreams of someday taking a vacation in Channelwood, one of the ages you can travel to in Myst.

Myst has also won space on the hard drives of people who never had the time or inclination for Pac-Man, Streetfighter II or Doom (the rest of us). "It doesn't have to resort to the sort of fast-food entertainment, that sex and violence adrenalin-junkie response," says Ann Marcus, an editor at Infotainment World, an electronic entertainment magazine. "There's almost a zenlike quality to the game. It teaches a quiet, problem-solving deliberateness, like completeness. Was it Rousseau who said that man is basically good? Myst is confirmation when you give people quality, they'll rise to the occasion to support it."

AFTER MYST WAS RELEASED, when the Net was abuzz with praise and the game was clearly a hit, the Japanese investors asked the Millers why didn't they move to L.A. or New York or Silicon Valley or Hollywood, capitals of the digital and entertainment industries. "They told us: Spokane is the best city to make best game," Mr. Furukawa recalled. Besides, Rand and Robyn like being near their parents and around a lot of trees.

Millionaires on paper, the Miller brothers plow most profits back into their company, Cyan, drawing salaries they describe as larger than teachers' but smaller than doctors'. They contribute some of their earnings to support Christian missionaries abroad and some of their time delivering brown-bag lunches to the poor. Rand and his wife Debbie live in the same doublewide mobile home as before, though they recently got a minivan (used) to haul around their three daughters. Their new pastel couch set, purchased from one of the local strip malls, is about as far from the bright lights and hot minds of Hollywood and Silicon Valley as it gets.

It's about a 45-minute drive to Rand's house from the old bricks and fast food places of downtown Spokane. Head north on Division Street, past more taco joints, schlocky tire stores, 1950s-era doughnut shops, burnt-out neon signs, sports emporiums, close-out leather manufacturers, strip malls, bowling lanes, fruit stands, and a taxidermist who appears to specialize in zebras. The road gives way to Douglas fir and furrowed fields. When you smell the county compost center, turn right and go seven miles up a narrow winding road.

Spokane, where the Millers have lived for five years, is where it all happened, Debbie says. Where their youngest daughter was born into welfare and where, three years later, Myst would catapult the two brothers, both fundamentalist Christian college drop-outs, into cyber fame and financial fortune. They have moved their growing company from the doublewide to a converted garage to a strip-mall office. Now they're building a 10,000 square-foot headquarters with lots of glass and arched bridges over streams. Cyan has grown to a dozen employees. Only one has finished college.

Casually hanging over each other's office cubicles in jeans and untucked shirts, 36-year-old Rand and 29-year-old Robyn look like the sort you'd run into on Saturday morning in REI. Kind of like laid-back boomers in a Gap ad. Which, in fact, they are. They are also sons of preacher Ron and his wife Barbara, who live just down the road.

Pastors' kids tend to go off the deep end, Rand and Robyn would be the first to tell you. Probably because of too many rules, Rand hypothesizes, but that was never the case in Ron and Barbara's house. The four Miller boys were raised to ask questions, explore, challenge assumptions. They were allowed to watch television. They loved to read. Three of them dropped out of college, but none ever rebelled against the family.

As father Ron's calling took him from bible church to bible church in Pennsylvania, Texas, New Mexico, Hawaii, Haiti and Seattle, he took the kids on adventures. The Grand Canyon. Old silver mines. They crashed their bikes through the woods, came upon pioneer cemeteries, created wild stories about what they saw. They drew maps of secret hideouts on islands. In Texas, during summer vacation bible camp, they took over the church and helped their dad build worlds out of refrigerator boxes. Rocket ships with blinking lights, jungle caves, scenes described in C.S. Lewis' children story, "The Lion, Witch and Wardrobe."

Dinner around the maple kitchen table was lively. The boys argued with their parents and each other about school, politics, God. They went back and forth on the issue of creation. Did God actually make the earth in seven days? Rand tends to think it wasn't a literal seven days. "I don't think he's trying to fake somebody out by building 15 billion years of history into the rocks." Robyn says he can't be sure, doesn't have enough information. They both say it can't be that important an issue to God or the creator would have spelled it out.

Rand discovered computers as a teenager in New Mexico, when the family lived behind the university computer lab. He played Lunar Lander, a primitive computer game that relied on x's for graphics, and soon designed his own game about a swarm of killer bees. His mom was so proud she sent it off to a contest, where it won second place.

By the late 1980s, Rand had dropped of college to program computers for a Texas bank. On his brain's back burners, he was cooking up a children's computer game - something fun, something non-violent he'd want his own daughters to play. Meanwhile, Robyn, the artistic one, was biding time in Seattle, waiting to establish state residency so tuition would be cheaper at the University of Washington. Rand called Robyn and suggested he learn Hypercard, a way of programming Macintosh computers, so he could help illustrate the kids' game. Immediately, Robyn started drawing a manhole cover. This led to Manhole, their first children's game, then Cosmic Osmo, then Spelunx, and then Myst.

THE WEEK I VISITED Rand and Robyn Miller in rural Spokane, it was raining. The rain dripped off hundreds of ponderosa pines onto the roof of a backyard cedar shed, offices for Cyan, the Millers' company. Inside, a dozen employees labored over the sequel to Myst. For long stretches, all you'd hear was the tap of computer keys, the click of Macintosh mice, the whir of hard drives, the drip of rain.

In the quiet, details stood out. The little red flag on the black mailbox in front. A postage meter with a geometric shape. Iridescent plexiglass awards. Chartreuse moss clinging to tree bark. It seemed fitting that Cyan's atmosphere should inspire appreciation of detail because, for the Miller brothers, God is in the details.

Downstairs, Robyn swoops in and out of a computer model of a scene under construction in the Myst sequel. First, gray-scale images. Then polygons, more polygons, a geometric land form. Zoom in. Grid becomes a bump map where black spots indent, white patches whoosh out. Rocks emerge from algae-covered water. The level of detail is astonishing. There are splashes of sunshine as well as cool shadows, reflections and refraction, warm stagnant pools, the suggestion of breeze. Each shred of algae is its own shade of green, its own texture. The rendering is so realistic it elicits both a feeling of deja vu and a desire to explore. No one, of course, has ever been there; no one can ever go there. This place is in a computer. It is a world the Miller brothers and their colleagues have just created.

Is this playing God?

Robyn, the artist, mouse in hand: "Definitely, we are made in the image of the creator. We like to create." Doesn't everybody? he asks. The impulse to paint a picture, to write a novel, to design a computer game, he says, is all a part of the same God-given urge to do something original. This is not unique to the makers of Myst.

Rand, the computer programmer: "It makes you realize what kind of petty gods we are. Incredibly small."

Take trees. In the Myst sequel, each leaf on every tree will be different. The Myst team used cameras to photograph real-life trees, scanned each image into the computer, tweaked an insect bite on this leaf, a ruffled edge on that one, digitally pasted them, leaf by leaf, onto branches. Painstaking. But this, after all, is only a facade, a computer game. Rand points at the hundreds of trees just outside the window. Look at those! he says. Each trunk different. Each individual pine needle. God designed millions of trees, he says, and it's not just a two-dimensional rendering on your computer screen. "THE THING WORKS!" he shouts. "That BLOWS me away! Man, the creator MADE all this stuff! It's just INSPIRING!" It was still raining. Outside, water seeped into the ground, roots sucked up nutrients, needles drank in light, produced chlorophyll, cotyledons, pine cones, food for squirrels who spread seed to make more trees.

"Things like Myst just don't happen," Rand says. "Nothing that is beautiful just happened. It was planned." Leaves on trees. A computer game. Proof that God exists.

To Miller, the computer programmer, God is the ultimate designer. God designed people to have free will. This is a feat, he says, when you consider that programmers can't even program computers to choose random numbers. God didn't want robots, Miller says. What he wanted was to give people choices, to spell out examples of what pleases him and hope they chose to do what is good.

Does Myst please God?

In the original Myst, the Miller brothers wanted to weave a moral tale into the story in the manner of a C.S. Lewis novel. Nothing heavy-handed, no huge statement, just a couple of choices to make players sit back and think. Most of that got quashed due to technical difficulties. Robyn likens the original Myst to early silent movies, experiments of technology that didn't tell profound stories, but nonetheless opened the door for cinematic innovation.

Which brings us to the Myst sequel. The thought of getting more sophisticated and tying subtle lessons into the plot intrigues and pleases the Miller brothers. They want the next game to be more complex, more beautiful. They expect it will be out sometime in 1996, maybe in the fall. Until then, the brothers are keeping the Myst sequel mostly mystery, and won't say much more except that they hope the next world they create will be good.

Paula Bock is a writer for Pacific Magazine. Harley Soltes is Pacific's photographer.