Robyn and Rand Miller created the graphic adventure puzzle video game Myst. It was created by Cyan, Inc. and published by Broderbund in 1993 for the Macintosh personal computer platform. What most people did not know was that Disney almost made a theme park base on this video game.
“Myst Island,” was a Disney World theme park in the works. A small group of people would be relocated to an 11-acre island inspired by Myst. They’d spend hours there, investigating various locations and uncovering clues in a non-linear fashion.
What was the Most Popular Adventure Puzzle Game in the 1990s?
If you grew up in the 1990s, you might have remembered Myst. It was the best-selling adventure puzzle game that took players on a journey around a beautiful island full of strange secrets.
In the 1990s, Myst was responsible for increasing CD-ROM drive sales, and it remained the most popular PC game until The Sims surpassed it in 2002. (Source: Slash Film)
Disney’s Theme Park Based on Myst
The Walt Disney Imagineering department was rumored to have pondered turning Disney World’s Discovery Island into a Myst theme park for a long time. Robyn and Rand Miller, the brothers who created Myst, have officially revealed that they did collaborate with Disney on a Myst attraction.
Myst creator Rand Miller confirmed the long-running rumor during an interview with AV Club while promoting their new game Obduction.
That was absolutely true. At some point, there were some really cool plans to do some stuff with Disney. We were looking at it as the ultimate incarnation of our world. Basically, there was a place down in Florida. It’s one of the island areas that they had that wasn’t used very much. But it had some walkways among trees and an island area, and we went down and looked at it and walked around it, and it was incredibly Myst-like. It was perfect for Myst. So we were all excited. Their Imagineering team was excited about embracing that and building some stuff into it and tying it into the rest of the park, where you could explore and have this real-world experience. But, the way Disney works, and the way it had to fit in with their bigger scheme of things, and the way we didn’t understand pieces of it, I think it fell apart from their point of view. That was a very exciting time. It was cool to try to pull that off.
Rand Miller, Creator of Myst
Jim Hill first wrote the story over a decade ago, saying that Myst Island would have attempted to duplicate the look and feel of the award-winning computer games. Only a limited number of guests would have been allowed out onto the fog-shrouded island each day.
They’d have been dropped off by boat early in the morning and then picked up in the late afternoon. Their mission was to explore the ruins scattered around the 11-acre island to try to figure out what happened to the island’s previous occupants. This day-long adventure would have been unlike anything that Disney theme park guests had ever experienced before.
Just like the CD-ROM games that inspired it, Myst Island would have no linear storyline. Guests could only discover the various puzzles scattered around Myst Island by exploring all its weird little nooks and crannies. Depending on which path they took, which artifacts they uncovered as well the order in which the guest discovered them, different secrets of the island would have been revealed. Theoretically, no two guests could ever have the exact same adventure as they wandered the terrain
Jim Hill
(Source: Slash Film)