Computer games were, at one time, unified. We didn’t even have the term “casual game” in 1993, let alone the idea that a first-person shooter (then an unnamed genre) could be considered a “hardcore title.” There were people who played computer games, and people who didn’t. People who got way into golf or Harpoon or hearts or text adventures — those were the “hardcore” players, in that they played their chosen field obsessively.
When Myst and the CD-ROM finally broached the mass market, this ecosystem was disrupted. Myst had, Robyn Miller makes clear, been designed to appeal to non-gamers. It sold to them. Enthusiast magazines like Computer Gaming World couldn’t set the taste for the industry anymore: there were millions buying games who didn’t read these magazines. An entirely new breed of player. In this situation, what could be more natural than concocting an us-and-them formula? In a very real way, it was already true.
The great narrative of Myst is that the “hardcore” game press and playerbase lambasted it when it launched. Disowned it. A slideshow, they called it. Abstruse, idiotic puzzles; pretty graphics and not much depth. “Critics and hardcore game players universally panned it as a slide-show that had little actual gameplay interaction”, claimed PC Gamer’s Michael Wolf in 2001.That same year, a columnist for Maximum PC recalled Myst as a “tedious code-breaking and switch-throwing mess”, and saw its then-new remake realMYST as “a pointed reminder of why the press dumped on the original so heavily when it came out.” | Računalniške igre so bile nekega dne enotne. Leta 1993 nismo imeli niti izraza "priložnostna igra", kaj šele, da bi prvoosebna strelska igra (takrat še neimenovan žanr) veljala za "nedopustno igro." Bili so ljudje, ki so igrali računalniške igre in ljudje, ki jih niso. Tisti, ki so se navduševali nad golfom, Harpoonom, srčki ali besedilnimi pustolovščinami — so bili "zagrizeni" igralci, saj so obsedeno igrali svoje izbrano področje. Ko sta Myst in CD-ROM končno dosegla množični trg, se je ta ekosistem porušil. Igra Myst, je bila po besedah Robyna Millerja, zasnovana tako, da je se je približala ne igralcem. In ti so jo pograbili. Revije za navdušence, kot je Computer Gaming World, niso več mogle določati okusa industrije: igre so kupovali milijoni ljudi, ki teh revij niso brali. Popolnoma nova vrsta igralcev. Kaj bi bilo v tej situaciji bolj naravno kot oblikovati odnos "mi in oni"? In to je bilo v resnici že dejansko stanje. Zgodba igre Myst je, da so jo ob njenem izidu "zagrizeni" novinarji in igralci obsojali. Odrekli so se ji. Klicali so jo diaprojekcija. Zapletene, idiotske uganke, lepa grafika in zelo malo globine. "Kritiki in zagrizeni igralci iger so jo vsesplošno obsojali kot predstavo z diapozitivi, ki je imela malo dejanske interakcije igralca pri igranjem", je leta 2001 trdil Michael Wolf iz revije PC Gamer. Istega leta se je kolumnist revije Maximum PC spominjal igre Myst kot "dolgočasno lomljenje kode in zmedeno pritiskanje na stikala" in videl njeno takratno novo predelava realMYST kot "jasen opomnik, zakaj je tisk izvirnik ob njegovem izidu tako močno kritiziral." |