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14 INLANDER OCTOBER 3, 2013
Tony Fryman, president of Cyan, says he’s excited about the company’s soon-to-be-disclosed Kickstarter project.
Sarah wurtz photo
“writing the next age,” continued... significant videogames. They didn’t expect it to be a game that would, two decades later, inspire a lengthy retrospective over its legacy like last week’s Grantland piece. “It was our little surreal adventure,” Rand says, echoing the game’s tagline. With profits soaring, they constructed headquarters that looked like something out of Myst. A jagged brick edifice that appeared torn out of the building’s face arched over the entrance, while waterfalls poured down rocks out back. Inside, artists worked beside a small library, under the stars of an artificial planetarium. Cyan had enough money for a nearly a limitless canvas for the sequel, Riven. “A painting is finished if you run out of money and run out of time,” Rand says. “[But] Riven, in a lot of ways, had kind of this unlimited budget. It was being funded by Myst.” The freedom was exhilarating; the pressure, exhausting. Riven was released four years later to critical praise. It was hyped in an epic-length Wired story, marveling over how a success like Myst could come from a isolated place like Spokane. Riven was longer. It was a lot harder. And it was the company’s last clear success. As Robyn, the artist, left the company to create more linear stories, Rand’s ambitions turned to “building something that would never end.” He was intrigued by massive multiplayer games like EverQuest, where thousands of players could play simultaneously. But instead of EverQuest’s addictive grind of killing monsters to get bigger weapons to kill bigger monsters, he wanted a different draw.
“What we were looking to do is to play on a different emotion: The human desire to explore. The reason you went to Carlsbad Caverns was to explore, to see what’s in the next cavern,” Rand says. “What I was looking for was drama and storytelling, like Lost instead of Family Feud.” While another studio created direct Myst sequels, it spent the next six years designing a multiplayer Riven follow-up, Uru. It set up an assembly-line workflow to constantly churn out new content. It constructed a sprawling complex across the parking lot from its headquarters to house a sizeable staff. They mapped out elaborate stories, created characters, planned ingame events. “The world would just get bigger and bigger, and you could explore with other people,” Rand says. It was a huge risk. A few massive multiplayer games have been towering successes; others have bankrupted entire studios. But Cyan never got the chance. In 2004, just as the game was about to be released, Uru’s publisher Ubisoft shuttered its entire online division. It was a huge blow to nearly six years of development. Most of Uru’s content trickled out in the form of single-player games and expansion packs, but Uru was never truly released in its intended form. “I think that you have to look at things that fall apart as things you can learn from,” Rand says. “You have to make sure that failures are just stumbles, and not complete collapses.” For a time, Cyan teetered on that edge. A year later, the company released one last game, Myst: End of Ages, then prepared to stop all active software development. “I remember