Classic Postmortem: The Making Of Myst

[Music] okay hi everybody um I'm thrilled to be here I uh actually I'm kind of honored to be here because I'm totally honored to be here I never in a million years would have expected uh that 20 years ago when we made Mist um anybody would be interested in it 20 years later so this is pretty incredible um so um I get started uh thank you all for coming it makes me feel old postmortem I this what a name I want to go back to um a little earlier than Miss um in 1984 uh when 1984 was uh just a little bit after the Mac was

was created so it was four years later and Rand and I were in different places Rand was in Texas my brother and uh I wa I should say that Rand Miller my my brother and I'm Robin Miller and we were the guys who made Mist just in case anybody was [Applause] [Laughter] here uh wow I just like had this feeling inside me of just utter confidence wow um I want to bring you home with me now um in 1988 Rand was in Texas I was in Washington state and he called me said I've got this idea for this interactive story book um I like wasn't interested really in this but he was really into computers I kind of wasn't I didn't have a computer in fact he wanted to send me this thing called hypercar

which he did and um I went into my parents' basement they had a computer in their basement and I started working on I I started drawing a manhole cover that was like part the first part of the story I don't know why I drew a manhole cover and I continued drawing a linear story I drew the manhole cover open and um I just like continued drawing sequentially this story book um but I got to this Vine growing out of the manhole and I I didn't know what I wanted to do at that point I didn't know if I wanted to go up the vine or down into the manhole and from there it just the medium itself became nonlinear and it's as if the medium was calling out to be nonlinear it was not it was not something that uh we really invented at that point point in time or

really were were trying to do it was just um it just happened on its own um so that was the manhole in 1988 um and then we continued making these these games that were all that had all the same qualities one after the other and you saw that last those screens before they were black and white um totally totally simple they were a lot of kids games and they missed pointing click first person point of view um and the player as the main character you didn't have an avatar or anything like that you just sort of were in the world and you were the person in that world wandering around uh you also had this quality of everything being explorable in the manhole not so much but then um later on we kind of realized as we would watch people play that people would see

door and they would they would definitely want to go through that door but if people saw something like a forest in the distance well they wanted to go to that Forest if people saw um no matter what it was a drawer a anything they wanted to be able to explore the entire world there wouldn't there they didn't want any boundaries to that world and so we attempted as much as possible to create No Boundaries now nowadays almost every game is are they're just Mammoth they pretty much have no boundaries back then it was a little different um we got to a point around 1990 where we um we had this idea that hey let's make one of these worlds for grown-ups for an older audience and uh we wanted to add something a little bit more like a story a nonlinear story um and and we wanted to make the player

like a protagonist we wanted believable characters and we wanted the player as the protagonist to make some sort of ethical Choice uh between right and wrong we thought that would really uh create you know create an interesting story of some sort there would be an emotional provocation so we created the gray summons we created the idea of the gray summons and we proposed it to Activision and uh Activision told us to stick to children's games which really um was uh disheartening um we were not doing very well at that point in time um and so uh I mean we were really not doing very well we were eating and I'm not exaggerating we were eating rice and beans and government cheese and that's like that was our diet we're probably very healthy

uh a lot more healthy than I am today um but this was I mean we this was the end of potentially the end of our career in gaming um and I think though I as a matter of fact I know we had learned so much we had gleaned so much from what we had done up to that point because everything we had done in in those earlier products we took and we folded into uh what became missed which I'll talk about in just a little bit um it was almost at that exact point or a little afterwards that Suns sunsoft of Japan came to us and said hey we've got this great idea we would like you to make a game for an older audience uh just like you know you've been doing except not for kids okay because we don't we don't want you to do that anymore we want you to make something but for you know like

everybody else and so it was it was it blew our minds and we we were on board totally we just had no idea you know what to do in terms of that it was 1991 I'm just like give you a sense of what time this was okay this guy was around this was like the one of the most popular movies of the year um these were cell phones and we couldn't afford them and this was the internet and we couldn't afford it um so we didn't know at all um what to do in terms of our game but we knew what we we kind of knew what we wanted it to be at that point was a a nonlinear story again believable characters we wanted Advanced Graphics much more advanced Graphics than we had been doing we didn't know what that meant at all um in fact we we thought we would

probably be handdrawing the graphics so M for a while at that point was going to be all handdrawn um and it was it was intimidating to like think okay we're going to make this game it's going to be really Advanced Graphics but we're going to have to draw it all in in you know how would that mean and some sort of puzzles we didn't what would the puzzles be um and then again some sort of ethical choice that was really intim intimidating what what would this ethical Choice be mystery we knew okay yeah it's going to be a mystery um just to go through some Inspirations that that were behind Mist d and d uh growing up our brother not Rand not me but our other brother played a lot of DN D and so we were kind of surrounded

by that a bit um he would get all of his friends together at least once a week and they would sit and play it and so ran and I were able to observe when there's a really good dungeon master um you get this thing where it's like you know a great story can happen it's creative it's fun uh it's it's it can be a blast and um maybe not so much with a bad dungeon master but you know it's it can be a really cool and adventuresome and and exploratory you know cool thing in fact Rand um created his own dungeon at one point in time he he wanted to do that and what he threw out was rolling to create your characters and rolling you know rolling for your dexterity rolling for your strength rolling for these uh these other aspects of your character and he said you guys are going to play

this and you're just going to be yourselves use your own intelligence and just observe within this universe and um in fact he never used dice at all he just told people what they saw within that Universe if you look there's one drawing over here um and it's Ran's dungeon uh drawing from Ran's dungeon when we were creating Mist we got to the very last age we were designing uh it was a mechanical age and if you notice a simil similarity it's we used this as a part of the design we we kind of like what are we going to do for this last age oh let's get out that old dungeon you designed Ram zorc we um we had played zor Rand had played both the zorks uh there was there was all kinds of other video games before missed obviously but um we hadn't we hadn't had a lot of experience with those other video games we had played

those zorc games and um I I had played like half of zor 2 it was incredibly cool um Rand had played both of them and and they were definitely an inspiration for us um because they were these nonlinear worlds so and I'm just going to quickly go through you know Star Wars of course um the world there uh from a very early time it was the myth behind that Universe uh was deeply inspirational portals to other Universe universes um um we we took almost directly from The Chronicles of Narnia and then um Jules Vern the idea of an island we took from Mysterious Island and then just old books you know we we kind of stole that idea you know

we we stole a lot of things in a way I don't know if all creativity is is kind of stealing in a sense okay pre-production I I don't know where we got the idea for two brothers it had to be subconscious on some sense on some level um but we went with two brothers oh this is interesting when sunsof came to us they said look what we're going with are the is Game Machines that's what we want guys you take everything else we don't want it we don't want all the PC stuff that's not valuable what we think is valuable as Game Machines so it's like great we got we got all the PC stuff and they went with Game Machines but Game Machines had at that time had no hard drive buffer and very small memory buffer so we had to design around that for mist um that was an interesting design restriction so how do we design around

that we had to load different pieces of mist um we had a compartmentalize Mist which we did by making creating ages um this works really well for design um probably a lot of game makers have discovered this along the way a lot of designers have discovered this along the way as well just to fit pieces of a thing in your mind to know there's one central place if you think of wandering around Disneyland you know you always know there's that central location and then you go out to all these different areas and you and you always feel like yeah okay I can always no no matter what if I get lost I can always go back to that central location uh in fact we had on an earlier product uh that we had done done the same exact thing we'd had this ship went around to all these

planets you can always very easily get back to that Central ship um so we were kind of used to that idea um but I'm not I don't know if we would have done that on missed had there not been that memory restriction with something that we did and it worked out really well puzzles um I I actually hadn't put this part into my presentation until last night I I was in an interview and somebody asked as me oh how'd you come up with puzzles completely forgot about it um I we had a idea when we created miss that most people don't like Puzzles um Gamers love puzzles but we weren't creating Mist for gamers we were creating the game for essentially non- Gamers um and non- Gamers don't really they don't like Puzzles um so a good puzzle shouldn't feel like a puzzle it

should feel very familiar and not arbitrary it should have a sense that it's just a part of the world um and that it's just something you're just figuring out because it's you know it's like a thrown breaker in your house you know what happens when the electricity goes out well you go and and you know you you you switch the breaker back on or and so we kind of did that as much as possible in Mist we now we created some bad PU and Mist but we also made some good ones uh and so to a certain extent I think Mist worked because of that um in fact we made some really bad puzzles in this there one or two that just are that suck um but there's some that that are that are pretty good um so you solve a good puzzle you're able to solve a good puzzle with just observation and and basic common sense um so here's an arbitrary puzzle that we did Miss

not good um this one is not arbitrary at all and if you remember if you played Mist um it was just the windmill that that that pumps water up from the the sea and and you've got this container full of water and then there's the water pressure that powers everything on the island it's really just it's maybe it doesn't feel like a puzzle at all you just feels like you're trying to power stuff on the island and then you've got this puzzle puzle where you're just trying to you've got a chest at the bottom of this Lighthouse and it's stuck down there it's got something in it you've got a you've got to bring the water up inside the lighthouse it's a definitely a surreal environment but the puzzle itself doesn't necessarily feels so arbitrary okay while we were designing this was so great for us we had no fans we had no demographic no sales projections no outside expectations of any

sort so it's like we just had a ton of fun we we didn't have to second guess any of our choices we just got to like explore the world as we were designing and which was fantastic it was really really I think it was a rare experience I don't know how often people get to really do that um we literally were just the we were creating this world for ourselves and um I think that was one of the reasons Mist did well is because we made it for ourselves um and that all really took place during the design a lot of it took place during the design you know just having fun with it we got to have a lot of fun with it um so much so and this is an example of that in just even the name I don't know it was like a 30 second phone call

just like hey what should we name it how about Miss okay good you know whereas like Riven I don't know the Riven it took months to name Riven so because there was multiple people involved multiple companies involved it's just the difference this is once we had had totally designed it we came up with a proposal these are pages from The Proposal um kind of interesting brought back to sunsof they said great you love it let's go with it that's the original budget from Mist we we came up with the amount we thought it would it would cost we doubled it added some more um then we got together we we had hired a couple people and we play tested it in a D and D fashion and we did that because we wanted to find any big problems with the game so it's like okay you're standing on the dock this is off to your right is in front of you and we found issues with

the game at that point it really worked incredibly well um so I recommend recommend that was it was excellent for us worked well uh production I there's some things in this production that aren't really production I I don't know there kind of little uh of both production and pre-production but we had a lot of questions about how do we resolve certain things um in production like our our our Advanced Graphics our our protagonist who makes this so-called ethical Choice our believable characters and this nonlinear plot um our Advanced Graphics um like I said we were going to handdraw the whole thing and I did spend some time in in toward the beginning just like in Photoshop I was drawing things and I got really scared um thinking oh my god what have we gotten ourselves into I there's way I can't draw this stuff this is like

this is going to look this is going to look crappy and so um and then I got out strata vision and I started drawing um um basically gray skill you know uh Extrusion Maps if you don't know what an extrusion map is it isn't important it was this kind of thing that kind of looked like this and um color maps and I made something that looked like Mist Island and we I was able to create an island that's all that's important once I created an island a single Island um then we knew okay we can we can make a 3D world and it was like uh from that that point on we were home free and and we knew the world was going to look very very different uh and cinematic and we were thrilled and then we went to you know creating these worlds now right

there that screen you see is 920 x 108 I've I've stretched it I've made it very big the actual size of mist was that was more like that size that was the the gameplay size so it was a very tiny resolution and we were able to do that the shots took between 2 to 14 hours to render each shot so the more complex shots and we had to like do things like hide everything on the and accept exactly what you were looking at um the protagonist of coer is whoever's playing the game and then you got this whole um ethical decision thing it was just for us it was as simple as choosing one of the brothers who was one was good and one was evil and at that point we hadn't added this other choice um the believ as far as believable characters we had some real problems there because there was this issue of one-way

communication when you're playing this the other characters any characters you meet they communicate to you they communicate to you and you don't get to communicate to them um bless you and you're in a nonlinear world at any point in time while this person is talking to you you can just walk away it totally breaks the spell of believe believability as far as as well we had no method of displaying video at that point in time when we began the game when we began production QuickTime did not exist so there were some ways to display something like video they just weren't really that they didn't do it very well so we thought we need to design around these limits and it's in terms of a one-way communication you know with this whatever characters you come across them

speaking um in this sort of monologue style we tried to featured as much as possible with a oneway device of some sort um in terms of um a nonlinear world again we tried to feature that problem and we we'd say that all the time Rand and I would always say uh don't fix it as much as feature it um but we tried to feature that nonlinear world with some sort of location based device you know and both of those issues we featured um with the books that they were in so you had to go there and you had to be in that location and they were in these little books quick time came along halfway through development um which was oh my God when it came when it was came along we were so thrilled we needed

it so when when with them in these books they were it was almost like a barrier existed naturally between you and and these characters it was okay for you to walk away from them because there was almost a screen or plate of glass between you and them and they were spading in and out all the time and if you had come cross them in the real world it would be okay to walk away from them that's kind of it it felt more believable in that respect so we wanted to make something that felt as believable as possible it feels really not very believable when a character's standing there talking to you and you turn around and walk away or when a character is standing there talking to you and you can't say anything back to them in this in this sort of scenario they didn't expect you to talk to them because they couldn't have heard you anyway

um plot okay our plot was set up in um basically like the islands were set up very simple style of plot if I were to outline it this is basically what it would have looked like in the beginning when we had first designed the game um it was something that anybody or at least us designing the game could have fit in our heads that we could that we did fit in our minds very easily so it made us it made us happy um this I'm just going to compare it against the the flowchart for the for Riven uh plot there was it was so complex we never could keep it straight um and um I

think um as the developers of ribbon it it made it made it frustrating to work on for one thing it ALS wasn't um contained and you couldn't just sit there and imagine the Story from beginning to end as you had experienced it like what is this contained plot so whereas Mist you could think oh okay this was the story this was bum bum bum a plus b b you know this is and it was so was a it was I it was again looking back in hindsight I think that was another reason why why Mist was successful climactic ending this was something that came later after our initial design um Tada that's my effect it's not an audio

presentation um atus we realized as a certain point in time that we needed this other sort of character at the ending because people just choosing between the two brothers was not enough they needed something more toward the ending and so we realized that this father would make that choice more complex and um and so we added atress and so it add it just changed the the ending to something that looked a little bit more like this and in terms of this whole ethical decision aspect of the game and an emotional provocation you know I think um it had that I'm not sure if we really succeeded so much as much as we wanted to you know I I know there's there's uh

games today that that um that really emotionally provoke we attempted it um and um and we did our best to emotionally provoke uh people and I think in instead it was it was a fun game but but it was an effort uh technical limitations uh this is kind of interesting a single speed CD ROM it was slow a single speed CD ROM is really really slow and so we were dealing with slow enough speeds that we had to carefully lay out the island or the islands on by hand onto the disc so you know Mist Island and this is kind of an exaggeration I mean it's totally an exaggeration but uh Mist Island would go here for example Stone ship age and then so

on um but even more than that you know we would say you're you've got the all the shots and animations along this path they would all go together in one place or likewise the shots in in this location so if we hadn't have done that you know the speed of the of the CD ROM just it wouldn't have we wouldn't have been able to pull from the drive fast enough for anybody to play this game okay distribution I think this is kind of interesting um just for us just as a memory um we did show it to a couple of people but we were working with broer blend at the time and you know we had all the these images of the first island and this was what we showed um to broer bun when we first sat down with them uh when we finally sat down with them and they were

like they loved it and that's who we went with for mist um and they said to us and I think it was soon after that they said to us look uh why don't you try music with this and we were not real keen on that idea um there there weren't a lot of video games out with music at that point I don't I don't remember exactly what video games had music in them what we liked was diagetic music and that was something we had been doing in our previous games so you know for example you walk into a radio station you go in there you pull some tapes into you you program the radio station and then you go to another place where there's a radio and you hear the music that you've been that you've programmed um so we felt like if you had soundtrack it would seem false it would just pull you out of the

environment um cuz you know music doesn't play in the real world and so why would it play in this place that we're trying to make it be so believable and so real um and so we said okay well we're going to we're going to write some music we're going to put it in mist and we're going to show you how wrong you are and so we did that we wrote some music and we put it in mist and instead like it really worked well and so so it's like great okay well now we need to write a soundtrack and so we did that and um in terms of post production oh okay this was this is good um we did pretty extensive game testing um where we would put two people in front of the game and we put we always did it with two people because two people um would talk to one another whenever we would sit one person in front of the game they would just like play play play you know find a mistake or whatever but we would sit two people

so they could talk to one another and then we could hear whatever they didn't like or did like and um which like you know we' sit back there and when I say we would sit back there behind them or stand back there behind them it was Rand and I standing behind them uh writing notes extensive notes and whatever you know whatever they would talk about whatever they didn't like or you know and um and then we were able to um change things on the fly so like if they're here and they clicked here to go to the Planetarium it's like okay great we didn't make that work because this is the button to go to the Planetarium we could just step in immediately and we could fix that um and so this was like vitally vitally important um because we made we wanted the game to be except accessible by

everyone and if they clicked on something and it didn't work well that was something that was our problem it was like you know that was something we had done wrong and so we spent a lot of time doing this kind of testing um we wanted the interface of the game to be totally totally invisible and um and playable by not by necessarily by Gamers we didn't NE we didn't make the game for gamers we wanted it to be playable by non- Gamers um and so we had we played it with a lot of non- Gamers and so that that I I can't stress how how much that helped us it also showed us that there were problems with the story um and setting up the game we we um like we didn't have what I guess would we call an inciting incident like we put this note we put this note in the beginning of the game

um it hadn't had it previous to this so we added it and it introduced people to this new thing we added a door right by the dock and a message from our main character now who this person atus an atress now gives the player a message and sends them on their Quest so people you know before this was added people didn't know what to do it was something like this play testing this kind of play testing where Rand and I were directly involved for long long periods of time uh really gave us a lot of uh Vital Information here's our new flowart with the flo for chamber okay um last thing I'm going to quickly touch on here is we did this focus group testing um and this is something broer Bund uh did and we just thought what focus group testing uh I just think it's kind of

funny and interesting and they brought this one group in and we were like what oh no they hated the game the first group hated the game and um man it was really discouraging and they brought group two in and man this group just they loved it and I think that was the first time Rand and I got this sense that wow this might sell like a 100,000 copies you know maybe we'll like make our money back or we maybe we can do another game after this we were so happy there was a guy there Bruce Fredericks I don't know I don't know what he's doing now um he showed slogans and so he showed a bunch of slogans to these guys at the focus group test testing he showed one of the slogans he

showed and I oh God I hated that no so such a sale oh and you know over the years I've just like my God come your world so okay well that's it I you know I I don't have [Applause] thank you thanks um so questions so I was curious so you mentioned uh a figure of $265,000 and you were saying that you asked for an amount and then you doubled it or they gave you double what you asked for or something what was the

first number you asked for and then got okay great question um we came up with an amount we doubled it then added some more and that end figure was $265,000 what did it actually cost oh yeah well we we we need we actually spent more than that but you know if only had it had occurred to us that hey you can go back to the people who are paying it and ask for more oh you know it never occurred to us so we are like really thinly stretched during the the development of the thing and and yeah I you know I don't the the the answer to your question is I don't remember what it actually cost but you um were you so it looks like you

used hypercard to make this did you have to totally hack it like crazy or was it like out of the box hypercard yeah um the question was did we have to hack hypercard like crazy because we used hypercard to create this game um we didn't have to hack it like crazy but we did um have a couple of X commands and one of the X commands we used was to have the main X command we used was to do color in hypercard but mostly no it was pretty um straightforward I mean um it I mean we were able to I I would kind of say that if hypercard hadn't have had existed I I don't know if we how we would have ever made missed because or any of our previous products Mi it was so it allowed us to do things so quickly even like the play testing I mentioned where we could just stay there and watch people if they clicked on something we could just boom pop in change something instantaneously

hypercard was amazing kind of funny when I was putting together this little presentation I was using Apple keynote it reminded me so much of using hypercard not quite the same thing but um but yeah hypercard was an amazing tool you know I wish that I wish something like that still existed uh except that you could like put things up on online with but it was just an amazing tool for us um could you please briefly discuss the design process behind the BPH of what the bathos spere really hard oh oh oh oh oh oh okay yeah that was our worst puzzle yes it was [Laughter] [Applause]

you know okay the design process on that originally you you walked through it so the all the drawings we have are like Pathways and then um like little Pagoda things that you get to and then you you so it was like this huge almost Labyrinthian maze um and it looked really cool in our heads um but then when we got to production we realized oh my how will we possibly create it in fact we we started Chuck Carter was the one who who who made all that and we he started actually making it and then we realized oh this is going to be this massively huge thing how are we going to do this and it's going to it's going to be cumbersome to play uh because you're going to be walking forever and and um but the but you know you you actually find your way through it with sounds it we failed on that one totally that's the answer uh so that's one of those

arbitrary things we made that that's the worst puzzle on the game yeah so oh um over I just wanted to say I I played MIss in the fourth grade in the computer lab and it literally has changed my life it's probably why I'm actually here instead of I don't know being a lawyer or something stupid um so thank you for that um my question did you go into the production um knowing Strat division or did you have to learn it sort of as you went um before in some of our previous products um there was something we did called Spiel lunks and we had in little pieces little bits here and there I had used it we got to know it really well and missed so and it was simple it was very simple program as well very easy to learn take one from the back seat Mike's way back here oh yeah yeah you got two

sets back there hi Robin I'm Ryan from Untold entertainment I'm I build adventure games thanks so much for making Mist it was an inspiration for sure thank you um speaking of inspiration it was really fascinating to me that you listed is there a weird echo on this thing or what it was interesting that you listed D and D as an inspiration but you never mentioned the uh the third person graphic adventure games with a lot of inventory manipulation were those not even on your radar like did you guys ever play them third person Sierra stuff Lucas art stuff not really on the radar we just we didn't play them um yeah I I had never played any of them now maybe Rand had played some of those or you know some of those or but I had I hadn't played any of those yeah I think the only game I had ever played previous to miss was probably zorc too um and and then I just you know and and that wasn't really my

interest games I I didn't like I didn't like games I didn't play games now I play a lot more games that's wild so yeah um how about way in the back over there hi uh first thank you very much beautiful game um I it sounded like you had some really creative approaches to game testing and we just kind of scratched the surface with you and I specifically that was really interesting when you you said you you know watched um not just watch to see what people would click on but how kind of uh you would react to that and I wondered if there you had more to say about that like what your expectations were going in and kind of how those shaped your design process for the puzzles um yeah I mean not just that you know we really wanted this to be a game that you know U um of we didn't have a target audience and

we just really wanted to be a game that a very wide group of people could play and enjoy and and um the interface in terms of the interface the interface was extremely important to us that it kind of feel like it not have an interface so we just tested that again and again and again so um that was you know we that testing was extremely extremely important to us to make sure you know the game feels like there is an an interface and and we wanted it to feel cinematic in a sense with no computerized elements computerized and um and so we designed around that you know there's you know whenever Rand and I during design were tempted to to give it this cinematic feel as much

as possible because we know there's an audience out there we knew at the time there was an audience out there that is kind of so and and then the testing I don't know I don't know what I'm saying I don't know if that answers your question okay um I was just curious you mentioned when you started when your brother contacted you with the idea you were living in Washington and he was in Texas so I was just curious how you guys managed the project and what was the division of labor like in general between you and your brother okay yeah well you know that went on for like um we lived separately until one of our kids games um and uh then during M by the time Mist came along we were in the same place and so and that was in and then that was in Spokane Washington and so it was really easy at that point and was it like were you both doing everything both doing art both doing

story or did you kind of yeah uh well we were both designing uh so we were in during the design process we were totally doing we were together you know in the same room working on all of that together um and then I would go off and do the art uh working with like I said Chuck Carter on mist and then Rand did all the programming uh yeah scripting and Etc thank you all right hi um I love the games and I decided to pick up the Miss novels a couple years ago just like two years ago and I really enjoyed them and I enjoyed all the story that they filled in but I guess I was kind of surprised by the scale of death and destruction in them it's kind of different from the games and I was wondering if you could comment on like what what made you want to develop the backstory was it the fans or was it you know was it yeah we wanted to at the point we were um we wanted we knew we were going to make another game and I don't remember at

what point that was um probably after people's uh we thought oh okay well we know we're GNA we knew there was more to the story and then we thought well we we wanted to tie those two things together M and this next game we were going to make and we came up with this idea of tying the two together with this book this novel um um and we kind of like the idea okay it's a book this this is a world about books um so that made sense to us um I don't know does that answer your your question did it take for you guys to actually create a game and you said that you were running low on funds so how did you manage that and what did your publisher say when you talk with them about your planning that didn't work out so uh it took two

years and what was the second part uh the what did your publisher say did you meet your schedules regardless of the money running out well we we you know we we worked hard to meet our schedules sometimes we met them sometimes we didn't meet our milestones and um but we we always got close enough you know um and then we had two Publishers because we we had sunsoft um and then we also would have a rot Bond um and so we were kind of we were at different places with both of them and so um you know I think we I think we kept up pretty well it took two years though totally to create the game from start to finish thanks yeah I I have no idea what time it is and and if I'm anywhere near okay good okay um so thanks again for Miss also it was also inspirational to me as I was growing up so when I played it took me about 5 days about an age day I had friends that finished it

in like one sitting one day um when you were developing it did you have any kind of time in mind like oh you you were kind of aiming for you know six seven 10 12 hours of gameplay or was it just get through it how you get through it you know I don't think so at all no I mean we like I said earlier we were creating this world for ourselves there wasn't a lot of games or none that we had experience experience that set a precedent for hours of gameplay so if there had I'm sure we would have felt like okay well we need to give people this many hours of gameplay but so we were just creating this world that we thought would be really cool and interesting and fun and it was a fun place for us to experience as we were creating it we were living in that world that's all we had ever done was live in the worlds we were creating and and enjoy them as we created them and then go on to the next world and um we never we never for just even for a

little bit thought about like oh it's going to take this many hours um to experience this now we watched people play it then in our testing and so we could see oh this takes a while this is good this is they're enjoying it people are hooked for this amount of time people en enjoy the place um and they don't get bored that was the main thing you know and um so yeah but we never intended from the beginning for it to take a certain amount of hours thank you all the way in the back what are you and your brother doing now um The Immortal Augustus Gladstone it's a about a guy who um it's a fictional film about a guy who believes he's a vampire he believes he's Immortal um it's kind of filmed in a documentary style and um so This Crew

follows him around he lives in a vacant um hotel and he's out to find a relative it's not it's not necessarily A comedy uh believe it or not um but uh yeah so we are going to be it's probably this summer I think you know that will be coming out so look for it thank you thanks for asking uh hi uh Phil fish you you followed me back on Twitter a couple days ago and uh that made my weak uh I just wanted to say I grew up obsessing on your games uh for years and years and years I beat Riven without looking up any information anywhere it took me a full year uh the first video games I ever made were misted clones in black and white hypercard and then I spent years and years and years writing my own age books and really getting into into World building uh you know that's that's kind of what I do for a living now uh and my question is will you please sign

my copy of the book of atus yeah [Music] okay such a pleasure yeah very nice meeting you very nice meeting me it's I've been so obsessed with your world my entire life all right this is the one talk I see at GDC this year it's yours you want it too yeah to me all right there you go great to meet you I love your game by the way I love it oh yeah oh yeah it's beautiful all right um oh way in the back hello uh I just have a quick question about the protagonist the person playing the game I was always curious if you had in your mind a backstory for how this person acquired the book absolutely not no um

we were really we really strongly felt like that the protagonist in the game or you was just whoever was playing the game and so um that was that was really important to us now you know it's funny because I know other stories have evolved like it's the people have said the stranger or something but it was um and I don't even know what that means now but it's um but yeah we always felt like you know it needs to be just whoever's playing the game with their they need to really feel like they're in this place themselves and um that it's them in this world rather than playing a the part of some some other person um in in in in Mist that was

really important to us cool thank you yes you okay uh hi um I'm uh I just have two comments that I'd like to make one is that uh uh the whole metaphor of you know writing books and then going to the worlds that you write is such a uh incredible uh story idea that I I just it holds up so well I just wish more people would take that idea and do something with it because it's such a cool idea um and second is uh you and I have never met but we have spoken on the phone I actually my name is Jack wall and I wrote the music for the sequels misser and four right and I it gives me great pleasure to uh give you a huge debt of gratitude that I owe you right now thank you sir nice to meet you what about you no okay in the back hi

yeah I recently dug out my old copy of mist and uh went through the journal that I had with all the the notes of solving the puzzles and it was amazing to go through those uh memories again and so I'm curious whose idea was it to include that in the package the journal I don't remember whose idea it was to include it in the package so I'll just say BR buns um but I know one of the things we felt strongly about and was the idea to not have instruction an instruction manual um and I don't know if newer versions of the game have an instructable I know one of the the original Mists uh didn't because we really felt like you know people shouldn't have much instruction when they start playing it and they didn't and we we felt like they didn't need it so but but I don't know is the answer

well it was fantastic and thank you you've said that your drive for making the game was that you wanted to make worlds that you would want to uh you liked for yourself um and you've also said that um that you didn't care how long the game was and you almost forgot about puzzles when preparing this talk so I guess my question is why was it so essential if there be puzzles filling the game oh it's it's not essential at all um but they slow people down and then they get to experience the world a little bit more slowly but yeah I mean um for me I just love being in the world um I do like the story puzzles I think tend to strengthen they can tend to strengthen that story a little bit more if there could be a game and I'm sure there could be a game with no Puzzles and where you could have story uh somehow I I'm sure that could work you know I know there can be a game with no um puzzles and no story and it could

work you know Minecraft does that amazingly well so um yeah guess I guess we're I think we're over um has time right now I'm afraid this room is on a very rapid turnaround we're going to have to cut it here right cool thanks so much for [Applause] coming