Posted by Andrew Plotkin

https://blog.zarfhome.com/2025/08/mysterium-report

Mysterium was in Atlanta this year. I didn't attend but I followed (some of) the streams. You can catch up on their Twitch channel; videos will be moved to Youtube once they're edited.

This was not, sadly, a news-heavy year. This is because the news from Cyan was layoffs in March and June. I know the company leads (Hannah Gamiel, Eric A. Anderson, Mark "Chogon" DeForest) are still there and keeping the lights on, but I don't know how many other folks are still there with them. Not a lot.

Thus, Cyan did not host a "state of the company" videocast this year. Nor did they, or anybody else in the know, make any announcements.

The only vibe we got was during the Q&A session for Philip Shane's ongoing documentary. (More on that in a bit.) Someone asked "Will Cyan's current in-production game become part of the documentary?" Shane didn't spill anything but there were some expressive winces from the team.

My read of the room: nobody's confident Cyan's next game will get made at all. But nobody's giving up on the idea either.

Fan presentations:

Guillaume Lethuillier talked about his Myst Graph project. See my blog post from a few months ago. The new info (to me) is about the Mohawk game engine, which Broderbund created to port Myst to Windows. (HyperCard was of course not an option on Windows.) Mohawk then became a cross-platform engine used by Riven (1997) and Myst Masterpiece Edition (1999), as well as some non-Cyan games. So any graph analysis of Riven would have to use a Mohawk parser -- perhaps based on the implementation that now exists in ScummVM.

Andrew D. Miller gave a conlang talk comparing the D'ni language with Klingon. (Miller has translated Sherlock Holmes into Klingon.)

He talked about how both languages are rooted in the fictional cultures that were part of their stories. Klingons were originally a Cold War mirror of the (optimistic post-WW2) Federation, mashed up with projected barbarian aggression. ("Everybody knew" the Eastern Bloc was crude and uncivilized.) Then the Soviet tropes fell away in the 90s and the barbarian stuff took over. In contrast, D'ni was pictured as an ancient, stable-or-ossified culture; their magical language comes from ideas of Adamic/Enochian "true knowledge". So Klingon sounds like (stereotypical) Russian, whereas D'ni is reminiscent of Hebrew.

(But this is superficial. The people who invented the conlangs didn't follow the structural features of Russian or Hebrew.)

Miller noted that Klingon and D'ni both use the Fantasy Apostrophe, but they use them differently.

He also answered one question I've always had: why does Klingon orthography use capital letters in that weird way? (E.g. "tlhIngan pIqaD".) Because Klingon was originally created for film actors to speak on camera! The capital letters indicate non-English sounds that the actors need to pay attention to.

Sharp question from the audience: Is it realistic that D'ni pronounciation is so regular? They have a ten-thousand-year-old literate civilization. In the real world, when a language gets written down, the orthography is frozen but the way people talk continues to drift. (English "knight" was not a confusing spelling for Chaucer.)

Miller's guess (this is not canonical) is that the D'ni reverence for their magical Age-writing language could have spilled over into extreme conservatism about their daily language. Maybe they had a strict "received pronounciation" which was enforced by their Guild of Linguists.

The Myst documentary

So, Philip Shane's documentary. He started it in 2016, filming the launch of Obduction. It's been in progress ever since. There's been years he said "I'll show the finished film at next year's Mysterium!" but the funding situation has proven rougher than he anticipated. The current status is "I'll make significant progress by the next Mysterium."

Please observe the delightful camcorder-on-the-Island effect on the front page of the Myst documentary web site. The camera's zoom button works. Web design by Elana Bogdan (who has been a NarraScope speaker, by the way).

Shane is working with Joshua Reinstein (producer, researcher, editor), who got involved around 2020. Ben Reichman is also involved; he's been going over the very large pile of Cyan historical video (1.5 terabytes!) recovered by the Videogame History Foundation. All sorts of goodies are turning up, including extended sequences filmed during the creation of the original Myst. Rand goofing around in the recording booth; Rand and Robyn sweating over legal pads full of puzzle design docs.

He showed some prototype gameplay footage for Myst Online concepts that got cut: paddling a canoe, swimming underwater, using a flashlight. He mentioned the idea of using voice-chat as a game mechanic -- yelling at the Ahnonay quabs to scare them. That's from this design doc:

This is a puzzle graph, but not a game-state chart in the familiar sense. Rather, it's a mind state chart: it shows the route(s) of player exploration and understanding. The legend for graph nodes lists link, puzzle, observe, discover, action, take note, deduce, reward, time-critical, gate, additional info. It looks like they made these charts for all the puzzle Ages of Uru. Maybe Myst 5 as well, given the timeline.

There was a doodle of a D'ni toilet: a toilet seat over an open Linking Book. Do not accidentally link to the Poop Age.

Shane showed some clips filmed at recent Mysteriums, including 2019 and 2023. (Mysterium is now a mask-required event, so it's easy to tell which year is which!) I spotted myself in the 2019 crowd:

(This marks my first return to the (doco) silver screen since Going Cardboard (2012), where you can find me in long-shot footage of a game convention. I'm pretty sure I was also caught in PAX B-roll for Indie Game: The Movie but I didn't wind up on screen.)

From documentary Q&A (quotes not exact): How much done? "I'd like to say it's 50%, but I'm going to say closer to 33.3%. There's a lot of editing to do." How long? "Feature-length." (Aiming for 90-120 minutes, because you always want to put in one more clip.) Music? Too early to say, but Shane has worked with Joel Goodman in the past. What camera does he use? Several, but his favorite is the Sony FX6.

As for the question of what will go in the documentary, and where it will end: "There's nothing I know that's absolutely in or out, except for Myst and Riven [which are in]." Shane points out that if you're making a film about living people, their lives don't stop. "At what point do you put the pencil down?"

I suppose "the ending has not yet been written" has never been more literally true.

Myst Online

Some sad news -- not from Mysterium; it got mentioned a couple of days later on the Cyan Discord. Apparently one of the core members of the fan Age-writing group has left the community.

I don't know what happened there. I wasn't around for whatever went down, and I have not asked anyone for private details. The person in question dropped out around the end of January. In May, their projects were marked as "suspended" on the Age list wiki page. (In-character announcement here.)

As I understand it, the person is not coming back, and the original model files for their Ages -- released and in-progress -- are lost. That includes the Descent remake, as well as Chiso Preniv, the library which is the hub for all fan Ages. Chiso is pretty load-bearing, so the remaining volunteers have worked to reverse-engineer its model and thus keep it open for future updates.

This loss has also taken down the Guild of Messengers site, a very long-standing Myst Online fan forum.

There will be a short announcement about the situation at the next All Guilds Meeting: Kirel neighborhood, Saturday the 9th, 13:00 KI time. (See below.)

I don't have a lot to say here except that volunteer-run communities can be fragile. We knew that. Plan for continuity.

Next year

Portland Oregon! I have absolutely no idea whether I'll go.

Update, August 9th

I attended the All Guilds Meeting in Myst Online. There were two announcements relevant to the above.

First, Korov'ev discussed the loss of the Guild of Messengers web site, which is now down and not expected to come back. The site included game-world announcements (e.g. Age releases), in-game chat logs (like the meeting I attended!), tutorials for running a fan server, and a calendar link.

Most of the content can be retrieved, either from Wayback (archived through July 2023) or from Korov'ev's own collection of chat logs. The calendar link is a Google calendar and is still available.

Plans for replacing the GoMe site are not settled. Floated ideas (for various pieces of its function) include an offshoot of the Guild of Writers wiki, a new wiki, a custom site hosted by another community member, or the r/Myst subreddit.

https://rel.to/, a community link hub, is also affected. This site is still up but nobody has access, so it is frozen now. I imagine it will fall over at some unknown future time.

At the end of the meeting, Calum Traveler (harleyTraveler263 on Discord) got up to give a prepared statement about the person whose disappearance triggered all this. My summary (not official) is:

• The person is in "significant legal trouble"
• We know very little except what is already public record
• It's serious and will not be resolved any time soon
• No matter how it resolves, the person does not intend to return to the Myst community

I am not using the person's legal name or handle in this post. It's easy enough to find from the links I've given, and a small amount of web searching will turn up public-record legal info. However, this post is not a primary source and I do not intend it to be a Google hit for the person's name.

https://blog.zarfhome.com/2025/08/mysterium-report