About The Story
Summary
The Myst Journals is a short story I wrote based on the Cyan game
Myst. In actuallity, the story itself is an entire
walkthrough of the
game from start to finish. Needless to say, hints and solutions will be
revealed. If you don't
want any hints on how to play, then don't read this. If you do want
hints, or otherwise just want to read along, go ahead.
If you are looking for just a walkthrough I'd
recommend going to another site. The main purpose of this site is to
tell a story, not to give out all the clues at once.
About the Hero
The hero in this story is as non-descript as possible. The name, origin,
gender, and age of the hero is never revealed in an attempt at putting
the reader in the shoes of the hero himself (or herself?) I
have created a slight background to the hero for the purposes of
character development.
What you are literally reading, is the journals of the hero written down
after the completed journey through Myst Island and the accompanying
Ages. The path to the finish isn't exactly straight, as the hero
sometimes makes mistakes and draws the wrong conclusions from the
evidence at hand.
Dunny to D'ni
While the name of the Age D'ni has never really been spelled out in the
game, those of you that browsed through the directories on the CD-ROM
will notice it is spelled Dunny. Accoring to a contact at Cyan, the
change was made because the word Dunny happens to be a slang word in another
country. (And I won't say what it means, either.)
The Original Ending
For those of you who have read The Myst Journals before version
1.0, you will notice that I changed the ending. In all honesty I think
it was for the better.
When the original ending was written, it wasn't fully clear what the
limitations on the linking books were. I'm not going to spoil bits and
pieces from The Book of Atrus but let's just say that linking
back to Earth would be a difficult thing to do.
So, I decided to get the creative
juices flowing and try a different ending. I'm not going to spoil the
ending here, but I will say that I think this new ending will help the Hero to
appreciate the beauty of Atrus' work, and prepare him/her more for the
adventures to come.
Besides, after I experimented with the new ending, I realised that the
original one was a bit sappy, and reminded me too much of The Wizard of
Oz.
Technical Details - The Text
The original text was written, edited, and spell checked with MS Works on
an IBM PC. The files were then saved in text format and
transferred to this Unix system. The linefeeds were added with the
fold command. The HTML codes were manually added using the
pico editor.
For viewing this document your Web browser should support tables. All
the table code at this site is strictly HTML 3.0 (no Netscape or
Internet Explorer extensions).
Technical Details - The Graphics
The background is a backdrop I found on the Netscape web site. It's
called grey_marble2 I beleive.
The banner image is a GIF image created with Microsoft Painbrush. The
GIF conversion was done with Microsoft Imager and the transparancy was
done with GifTrans.
The fonts used in the banner are Eurostyle Extended, Heritage, and
Serpentine.
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