Sunday, September 11, 2016

"Is it true that you and Disney were working together at one point to make a sort of real-world version of Myst Island?"

From an interview with Myst creator Rand Miller:
AVC: In a way, the rise of escape rooms has gone a long way toward creating Myst-like spaces in the real world. Have you done one?

RM: No. The guys here at the office have. We’ve got one that’s not far from our office, and they’ve gone in and done it. I would love to. I’d like to make one—I guess that’s part of my makeup. Here at our office, we’ve got a chunk of land in the woods close by, and I keep thinking, “Oh my gosh, of course we need a cool escape-the-room associated with Myst that we could do some sweet stuff with.” I start thinking of all the crazy, cool stuff, like, “We’ll do projection mapping and we’ll bring in automated stuff. We’ll have smart controls, and it’ll be awesome.” I don’t know when that’ll happen, but yes, that whole concept excites me. I’m into this stuff. [Laughs.] The only thing better than VR at this point, as far as immersing yourself in something that feels like real-world experience, I guess, is the real world. So, it would be really cool if you could do it well. I guess that’s the tricky part.

AVC: Is it true that you and Disney were working together at one point to make a sort of real-world version of Myst Island?

RM: 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.