In this field report from Mead, Washington, Cyan co-founder Rand Miller takes VGHF library director Phil Salvador on an exclusive tour of the “Cyan Vault.” Together, they uncover rare game artifacts, prototypes, and cool behind-the-scenes treasures while diving into Cyan’s rich history. Listen in to discover how thoughtful, meticulous preservation can not only tell a story but also breathe new life into a classic like Riven.
See more from Rand Miller:
Twitter/X: @randemtweets
Website: cyan.com
Video Game History Foundation:
Podcast Twitter: @gamehistoryhour
Email: podcast@gamehistory.org
Twitter/X: @GameHistoryOrg
Website: gamehistory.org
Support us on Patreon: /gamehistoryorg
Transcript
Transcription provided by Jeremy Seith
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
cyan headquarters, Riven remake, video game history, Myst series, Cyan Vault, production materials, promotional items, game development, historical artifacts, design documents, fan memorabilia, game editions, laser disc, smoke effects, employee photos
Phil Salvador 00:08
Welcome to the Video Game History Hour where we talk with people from and about video game history. I’m Phil Salvador, library director at the Video Game History Foundation and for this week’s episode, we decided to try something a little different. This is our first ever field episode. Instead of bringing someone onto the show to talk with us, we went out to visit them. We were out doing some video game history archeology this summer, and we wanted to bring you, the listener, along for the ride with us. Take a listen.
Phil Salvador 00:40
We are out in Mead, Washington. It’s a little town in the eastern half of Washington State, about half an hour north of Spokane. And we’re at the headquarters of Cyan, developers of classic, influential adventure games, you know and love. The Myst series, Cosmic Osmo, the Manhole, Abduction, Bug Chucker. All the classics, all the classics here at Cyan. And joining us today is the co founder of Cyan, Rand Miller. Rand, thanks for inviting us up here.
Rand Miller 01:07
Hey, we’re glad you could come. Nobody ever comes to Mead, Washington. So–
Phil Salvador 01:12
It was a quick Uber ride away from the hotel we were at. So first off, before we get into the meat of this thing, I want to pass it over to you, because what’s going on at Cyan? We’re obviously here for a reason. It’s kind of a big week for y’all right now?
Rand Miller 01:24
Yeah, you’ll hear the noises in the background. There’s a lot of people here. We’re releasing the rerelease of Riven, our new, reimagined, rebuilt, redone-from-scratch Riven is finally mostly done. For those of you who do software development, you’ll know exactly what I mean. Yeah, so, people are coming in to kind of celebrate, so it’s a big weekend.
Phil Salvador 01:24
Yeah, and the reason we’re here specifically, I mean, obviously it would just be fun to come up to Cyan, but we, the Video Game History Foundation, kind of sort of worked on the Riven– we contributed to the Riven remake, I guess is something we would say, right?
Rand Miller 01:59
Absolutely. Yeah.
Phil Salvador 02:00
So just a little background for folks if you missed this announcement last year. We’ve been working with Cyan to help preserve some of the stuff in their archives of material. Specifically, we’ve been doing all the video tapes they have, so it’s all the raw filming footage of the game, interviews, all this incredible material Cyan has held on to. And we were doing this for historical reasons. We were doing in support of an upcoming documentary called The Myst Documentary, directed by Philip Shane. But it turns out, y’all had another use for some of this material as well.
Rand Miller 02:28
It came in handy. Over the 25 or so years that we’ve been just kind of sitting there.
Hannah Gamiel 02:34
I’ve been told to bring this to you. She says she couldn’t find the one you may have been referencing.
Rand Miller 02:34
Yeah, she didn’t.
Phil Salvador 02:41
That was Hannah Gamiel. What’s your title at Cyan now?
Hannah Gamiel 02:44
So sorry. I’m the development director at Cyan. <laughter>
Phil Salvador 02:49
Hannah was just walking in and handing something that looked like a puzzle box to Rand.
Rand Miller 02:51
It’s actually a little piece of history itself. It’s, yeah, we can get into that. But it’s yeah, it’s cool little artifact for testing Riven that we used.
Phil Salvador 03:00
Interesting.
Rand Miller 03:01
I mean, honestly, it’s every little bit of– piece of something we can get to help with this development. So, you get the stuff you guys found in vaults was great, because we had lost so much stuff over the 25 years. We had to dig stuff in the vault. The vault was missing things and also in formats that we didn’t know. And so even textures or reference things for how big things were or small they were, it was just invaluable to see some of that stuff, even on videotape. So we could, you know, take that, the tape measure and go, How is that related to the– to that person, to that thing.
Phil Salvador 03:40
It’s also pretty unique that you have, you’ve referred to the vault. There is a room at this building at Cyan’s headquarters called the Cyan vault, where you’ve kept a lot of this stuff, like production materials or props from live action filming and promotional items, all this. I know that we’ll see some of the stuff we get on it, and I won’t spoil any of it, but it’s kind of unique, because this building, I think, is one of the reasons we even have the space to do that. And this building’s got kind of a history behind it, right?
Rand Miller 04:02
Yeah, yeah. This is the building that Myst built. We finished Myst, and in case you guys don’t know, it was rather popular, much to our surprise, and it created a lot of, I think, what is currently referred to as resources for us. And so we built a building that we could work in, and so most of Riven was actually done in this building and over the intervening years, it’s been kind of something that kept us alive as an indie company. We don’t have to pay rent in a big city. It’s just a building in Mead, Washington, and we get to kind of be here. So as we get bigger and smaller, we still have our place to work, and we have a vault.
Phil Salvador 04:51
Amazing. Well, let’s go check it out. I was really excited, like, All right, let’s go check out the vault. But you’ve been there many times. It’s your closet.
Rand Miller 04:58
Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Phil Salvador 04:59
But this is my first time going in the vault.
Rand Miller 05:00
We’re not going to the lower D’ni floors.
Phil Salvador 05:03
That’s right, that’s right.
Rand Miller 05:04
No, this is just the upper vault.
Phil Salvador 05:06
This is the public facing stuff. This is not– that’s not where you keep, like, the books are down there.
Rand Miller 05:10
Exactly. There’s wink winks, a lot of winks and nods going on right now. All right,
Phil Salvador 05:14
Alright, well I realize this is not a visual medium, so I’ll try to narrate as we go. But we are walking over to the Cyan vault now. We’re walking through their offices where I assume, well, there’s a lot of books here. I guess there’s not workstations here.
Rand Miller 05:26
Don’t touch the linking panel on those books. <laughter> We have a big server room in here. That’s the old sound room. We did all the sounds for Riven in there. Tim Larkin.
Phil Salvador 05:35
Amazing. Amazingly that server room, one of the videos we had from the vault is from the construction of the building. So we have, like, videos showing off the construction of the server room.
Rand Miller 05:43
Yes! Right, right.
Phil Salvador 05:44
If you’re curious about the server room, listeners, that will be something you can look into.
Rand Miller 05:48
Alright, the vault is always locked. So I did manage to remember to get my keys.
Phil Salvador 05:54
Thank you for the foley sound effect there.
Phil Salvador 05:56
Yes, my grand master key will open the vault.
Phil Salvador 06:02
And here we go. Here’s the vault.
Rand Miller 06:03
It’s nice and quiet in here.
Phil Salvador 06:05
Goodness gracious. So to describe this room, as you walk in, I’d say it’s, like, maybe, like, 15 by 15 feet is kind of the size of this thing. And there’s just boxes as far as the eye can see, and it’s– there’s physical games, there’s just boxes of paperwork, there’s development material, there’s lots of swag. Tons of stuff in here. So I think the format of this is, I’m just gonna kind of say, Hey, what’s that? We’re just gonna kind of poke around at some things.
Rand Miller 06:27
Yeah, you definitely should. Some things I’ll be like, Ah doesn’t matter. Some things I’ll be like, Oh yeah, that’s really cool.
Phil Salvador 06:34
So the first thing I noticed when we walked in, I’m looking at these big metal shelves, and they have, and this obviously is not like the most, like, historical stuff, but there’s a lot of swag here. There’s Myst shirts from over the years. I see a hat for Red Orb, which was one of Brøderbund’s adventure game publishing arms. They’re just– I’m not sure where to prompt from that, apart from, geez, that’s a lot of t-shirts. <laughter> But you’ve had a lot of– it seems like there’s, like, jackets, like, I don’t know. It’s amazing that you have all this kind of merch made for each of the individual games that you worked on.
Rand Miller 07:03
The idea behind all of that being in here is, every time we get merch or make merch, or somebody else makes merch to market, Myst or Riven or any of the other projects, we’re like, Okay, let’s put a few of those in the vault. So we end up with lots of stuff in the vault. I don’t know what we’re gonna do with it. But, like, here’s, like, Myst t-shirts. This is the original design.
Phil Salvador 07:24
Oh, wow.
Rand Miller 07:25
When we at first did a Myst t-shirt, that’s the one we did.
Phil Salvador 07:28
Sort of a sepia image of Myst Island with the word Myst on it.
Rand Miller 07:31
Yes, exactly. Cosmic Osmo t-shirts. You know.
Phil Salvador 07:35
Is that a vintage, like, of the time Cosmic Osmo t-shirt?
Rand Miller 07:37
It’s a good question. It might be.
Phil Salvador 07:39
Wow.
Rand Miller 07:40
Yeah, you’re– Yeah, you just don’t know what you’re gonna find in here. Some old Myst t-shirts–
Phil Salvador 07:43
I also– I noticed–
Phil Salvador 07:45
Oh, what’s this?
Rand Miller 07:46
Phil Salvador 07:46
What do we have here?
Rand Miller 07:47
No, no, no, that’s– Oh! Here, here, here. This!
Phil Salvador 07:50
Oh, my goodness.
Marie Chapman 07:51
Wow.
Rand Miller 07:51
This is the very first piece of clothing we ever made here at the company. My brother Robin and I.
Phil Salvador 07:57
Wow. It’s a black sweatshirt that just says Cyan in, like, Times New Roman or Georgia font.
Rand Miller 08:02
And our little blue dot–
Phil Salvador 08:05
Very early.
Rand Miller 08:06
–that seems to accompany things throughout history. So yeah, that one is kind of special.
Phil Salvador 08:11
I also noticed there’s just some other swag. I see what appears to be a wine bottle with the Myst label on it that’s filled with pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
Rand Miller 08:19
So yes, those were– I forget who did those. If it was somebody who was selling Myst back in the day, could have been Brøderbund. It could have been Sunsoft, related to those, or one of the other spin offs decided to market it with a puzzle. Everything– We’re fans too. So everything that gets made, we’re like, You got to send us a few of those, and we can stick them in the vault. And so we have– how many do we have there? Seven puzzles, or something like that? Seven or eight puzzles in wine bottles.
Phil Salvador 08:49
Yeah, I mean, this is the largest collection of Myst memorabilia. Like, I’ve seen people’s fan collections. But this is far beyond anything that–
Rand Miller 08:54
Oh yeah, yeah. And then, okay, so mixed in with the crazy, you know, swag, is also, like, pieces of history, like, for example, this is the actual handle from Riven that Catherine pulls at the end when she gets in the elevator to pull down.
Marie Chapman 09:14
Oh my god.
Phil Salvador 09:14
Oh wow.
Phil Salvador 09:14
Yeah, picture, it’s like a kind of a big rusty triangle with a screw on the end, is the shape of it.
Rand Miller 09:18
Exactly. Almost like you could, you know, play it. “I need more cowbell” kind of stuff now with it.
Phil Salvador 09:22
So this was– when you were doing production, you went down to Pacific Video Resources in San Francisco for the filming of Riven so these were, like, the props that were on the set with the blue screen.
Rand Miller 09:29
Yes, and anything that people had to interact with had to be a physical item, because it was too hard to align the digital things with people’s fingers that we were recording with the live action.
Phil Salvador 09:41
So it was like, tables could just be blue screen, but if you had, like, a door, you had to, like, actually make a door,
Rand Miller 09:45
Yes. Which we did, and have also. Although it doesn’t fit in the vault, but it’s around here somewhere.
Phil Salvador 09:49
Yeah, it’s kind of a big door.
Rand Miller 09:51
Atrus’ boots from something.
Phil Salvador 09:54
Oh goodness.
Rand Miller 09:54
We have a satchel from something. We have the actual burned books from the original Myst.
Phil Salvador 10:00
Oh so this was when, like, when you went to the shelves in the library and you pull out a book– you actually burned a book to do this.
Rand Miller 10:06
We burned several books just to get the texture and the feel.
Phil Salvador 10:09
For the readers, I’m trying to– it seems to be titled Maintaining a Healthy Heart. <laughter>
Rand Miller 10:15
Shh, don’t tell anybody.
Phil Salvador 10:17
Don’t let anyone know it’s a burned book. Gonna have fans, mass-burning that book to reproduce it.
Rand Miller 10:21
Yes. I’m old enough now where I probably shouldn’t have burned this when I need to read it. Maintain my healthy heart. <laughter> Oh, look at this. Do you know what that is?
Phil Salvador 10:30
Oh, I don’t. So looking at it, it seems to be, like, a transparent piece of something plastic with the Cyan logo on it.
Rand Miller 10:35
Yeah, it is a–
Marie Chapman 10:37
Pocket protector.
Rand Miller 10:37
–pocket protector.
Phil Salvador 10:38
Oh, my goodness.
Rand Miller 10:39
A Cyan pocket protector. It’s old.
Phil Salvador 10:41
I don’t know of any other video game companies with their own branded pocket protectors. That’s remark– because, so I try to put this in perspective, like, as someone who collects some of this stuff, I one time saw a Sim City 2000 pen on eBay, and I was like, That’s amazing. And then I realized, well, that was just a piece of swag they ordered. So like, what– you know, it’s a pocket protector company. You just get that. But that’s, 30 years later, is kind of exciting and weird.
Rand Miller 11:03
And the cool thing is that, you know, with the current crop of people who are working here, most of them don’t even know what a pocket protector is, so it’s kind of fun. <laughter> And they were like, Oh. They also probably don’t know what a pen and pencil is, either.
Phil Salvador 11:15
They played Myst. People listening who played Myst know what a pen and pencil is. Also, across from these shelves, there’s also a bunch of books, and these appear to be a combination of, like, the novelizations of Myst, all the strategy guides, some in different languages. I see a Japanese strategy guide for Riven here.
Rand Miller 11:30
Yep, our pack rat mentality says, Hey, let’s get versions of every single different language that we printed the books in. And I think we’ve got most of them, but I have no way of knowing, but yeah, there’s as much as we could possibly collect is here. Audio books are here with tapes. There’s– I don’t even know what, you know, what the– some of them like, are different covers, because it was in, say, Europe, maybe. The EU or Great Britain, and they wanted their own cover. And so, of course, we were like, Yeah, sure, send a few.
Phil Salvador 12:08
I remember seeing, I don’t know if you have it here, at one time I saw at a bookstore, was a strategy guy from Myst that had been relabeled Myst: The Prequel to Riven. That may be in here. I’m not entirely sure
Rand Miller 12:17
That I would like to get my hands on. Tt may be in here, and I just don’t know, but–
Phil Salvador 12:21
There it is. Myst – the official strategy guide for the prequel to Riven.
Rand Miller 12:25
There it is. You’re right. We do have it. <laughter> The only strategy guide recommended by Brøderbund.
Phil Salvador 12:32
Beautiful.
Rand Miller 12:32
Wow, wow. Good catch. Man, you dug that one out of the middle of nowhere on here.
Phil Salvador 12:39
I’m a librarian. I know books, that’s my thing.
Rand Miller 12:41
Good. Yeah, okay, so that’s all books, books, books, oh my gosh.
Phil Salvador 12:46
So moving on from the books, though. This is– now this caught my eye immediately. As we see here, it’s a shelf, just, like, an Ikea shelf of binders of things, and there’s–
Rand Miller 12:53
Oh my goodness. Yes. This could be, oh my gosh, all kinds of financial– at some point when we were doing Uru, there was business plans, all kinds of boring stuff. Frankly, it’s all stuff I don’t even care about. You know, it’s all like, not necessarily game related, more business related. So.
Phil Salvador 13:14
And I’m sure a lot of this was, you know, some of this could have been– I think this is still– When we work with developers, some of this might be confidential, where it’s, like, HR paperwork, like, we’ve had some things where it’s, like, we’re not going to share people’s, like, performance reviews. Like, that’s absurd. But my eye was caught going through– There’s a couple things. There’s, like, the Cyan employee handbook, something, or royalty payments between Brøderbund and Cyan. I have no idea how that worked for Brøderbund, so that’s fascinating. I immediately went to something here. It’s a printed out document labeled A Myst Adventure – M3 design document dated 1999 from Presto Studios, and this appears to be a design document for Myst III. Explaining– Interesting. So, I’m actually really curious. I know Presto Studios did Myst III, it wasn’t a Cyan joint, but how much were you involved in, sort of the approval of this? Or, because having a design document at least implies that there was some involvement.
Rand Miller 14:01
Yeah, yeah, they sent early stuff to try and convince us, you know, Hey, you should let us do this. And it was really complete, and they did a lot of work on it. We, I think, most importantly, wanted to make sure that, you know, canon and all the little D’ni details were kept up with along the way, but they did an amazing job on their own. So, you know, there was a few back and forths. We fixed a few things. It was part of this proposal. And then, you know, eventually they convinced us.
Phil Salvador 14:37
Yeah, there are some things in here that are fascinating in terms of stuff that didn’t make the cut. I see here a page for a concept called upside down age, where it’s an age set in a Dyson sphere, and it’s, like, the, like things are suspended from the ceiling that you walk around in. Just concepts that didn’t make it. We love documents. Crystal world. Crystal world one and two are separate concepts in this document. Just all sorts of fascinating, you know, just sketching out what would a Myst game by someone else be like? Fascinating stuff.
Rand Miller 15:02
Exactly. Yeah, good stuff.
Phil Salvador 15:05
I see things enabled, like, survey consumer interview from 1996.
Rand Miller 15:09
I guarantee you, that’s not something we did. But yeah. <laughter>
Phil Salvador 15:12
I think it says Brøderbund on it.
Rand Miller 15:13
Yeah, there you go.
Phil Salvador 15:16
Stoneship Incorporated, Cyan Incorporated, various names from the companies gone under from various years. Just all sorts of fascinating– And this is for, I think a lot of people listening, they might be like, Oh, where’s the games? But for us, this is kind of the gold. It’s, like, this kind of gives you insight into how the company worked. That’s the really exciting stuff. Moving along, we have, oh, geez. Okay, this is a couple boxes that are filled with Jaz disks and tape backups. So okay, so we have a way of doing these now, but just looking at it still makes my blood run cold.
Rand Miller 15:46
Yeah, yeah, mine too.
Phil Salvador 15:48
Some of it’s fascinating, like, here’s one labeled Myst upgrade test. I don’t know what that is. That could be Masterpiece Edition possibly?
Rand Miller 15:54
Don’t have a clue.
Phil Salvador 15:55
There’s a CD labeled “work/valve” from the making of Riven. I mean, these are kind of things where, like, you held on to this, but I assume at this point, like, it’s not even clear what’s on some of these, right?
Rand Miller 16:04
No, no, I think probably most of this is Riven-related, because we kept pretty meticulous backups. The problem with it was, then it was related to particular platforms and particular operating systems that kind of are hard to get your hands on these days.
Phil Salvador 16:21
It’s true. We started specializing in this stuff. We finally got a Jaz disk set up. We got a donation from a developer. It was a Jaz disk labeled “miscellaneous”, and we had to know, and it was just MP3s. It was really disappointing. My mind thinking about unusual formats, was drawn to this. This one’s kind of neat. It’s a magneto-optical disc, which I think a lot of people haven’t seen for Myst II sound effects, and it was produced by O’Donnell/Salvatori, who, I think folks might know Marty O’Donnell and Michael Salvatore as the folks who did the soundtrack for Halo as well, but they were contracting on Riven, doing some of the sound work.
Rand Miller 16:53
Yeah, they, along with Tim Larkin, did all the sounds for Riven.
Phil Salvador 16:57
Well that’s it. That’s a magneto-optical disc from their work.
Rand Miller 16:59
Yeah, we did lots of MODra, MODiscs, as we called them, affectionately. <laughter> Magneto-optical is too long.
Phil Salvador 17:06
The first time I’ve heard MODisc, I’ve never heard that abbreviation before.
Marie Chapman 17:09
Bring it back.
Rand Miller 17:09
I don’t know if anybody used it. We just– We would pass those back and forth like crazy as we were going.
Phil Salvador 17:17
So I’m looking over here. There’s more paperwork, which of course, I’m very curious about, but I’m also– there’s what appears to be a painting of, like, a young woman making out with an alien.
Rand Miller 17:28
It’s various fan art over the years that we have gotten from various people.
Phil Salvador 17:32
Oh, is that– would that have been something for Abduction? Would that have been–
Rand Miller 17:36
And we kind of switch it up as we go. This is from Abduction, yeah.
Phil Salvador 17:39
Okay, yeah. That’s one of the aliens from Abduction, okay.
Rand Miller 17:41
Abduction, cool stuff from– I mean, interesting related is stuff like this.
Phil Salvador 17:49
This is, it is a rock with the Riven logo engraved on it. Was that, like, it’s a paperweight thing, or?
Rand Miller 17:55
At the end of Riven, the OG Riven, we went down to the river, picked up rocks, cut them in half, and had sterling silver daggers that every employee got in a rock.
Phil Salvador 18:13
Wow, so that’s sans dagger, but that’s one of the rocks.
Rand Miller 18:17
That’s probably was a test cut of the water engraving for the word Riven on there.
Phil Salvador 18:22
Fascinating. I also spotted back there what appeared to be the original line art for the, one of the Myst comics, where it’s the very hunky Atrus in the Myst comic,
Rand Miller 18:31
Oh yeah, oh yeah.
Phil Salvador 18:33
It’s a beautifully done, very kind of, like, ’90s Rob Liefeld, like, comic art style with serious kind of looking, like, he’s got no hair at all, and he’s, like, just piercing white irises. It’s very odd. But–
Rand Miller 18:43
Atrus, I think Atrus looks exactly like that.
Phil Salvador 18:46
They really capture– they got the cheek bones and yeah, just chiseled–
Rand Miller 18:49
Captured my, I mean, I, you know, I don’t want to brag too much. <laughter>
Phil Salvador 18:57
But looking around here, though. So again, there’s more paperwork, and this is stuff that, again, to me, is exciting, where it’s, like, employee files, obviously we can’t do a whole lot with but, like, old entertainment research, TV, film, IMAX. I assume that was a case where, as you’re kind of studying what’s happening in that space, you’re doing research on this stuff.
Rand Miller 19:13
Oh, yeah, yeah. Or we had inquiries from, you know, after Myst, there was a lot of success and we get– everyone would knock on the door, like, Hey, we want to do blah with Myst. And so they’d bring research, and we would file it and it, I mean, in case people aren’t getting the picture here, this is very eclectic. Like, there’s a wall of white boxes, but also, like oh, wait, there’s books and Cosmic Osmo and Spelunx stuff.
Phil Salvador 19:39
Yeah there’s a giant– This is a leather bound book with the– It’s an engraving–
Rand Miller 19:44
Fan made, fan made.
Phil Salvador 19:45
Okay, of the Cyan Worlds logo. And this is like a notebook, oh my goodness, with, like, this ornate reconstruction of the front of your headquarters.
Rand Miller 19:53
Yeah, yeah. Really cool.
Phil Salvador 19:55
It’s a really– Yeah, there’s, I think– how many are we looking– like eight by five, just stacked of box. And there’s a filing cabinet–
Rand Miller 20:01
You forgot about these. Hard drives.
Phil Salvador 20:03
–additionally filled with tape cassettes and hard drive backups. Oh, my goodness. So this is the kind of stuff we’re good at, but it also just makes my blood work. Wow, actually, oh, this is– So what we’re pulling out here,Rand just reached into a filing cabinet. And this is a document that is labeled– the name of it is “jungle island Myst II” dated from March ’95 and it is an ink, like, cartographic drawing on graph paper of the layout of Jungle Island from Riven. Was this how you designed them back then? I remember, in the making of video that we just restored for y’all and put on a YouTube for the making of Riven, you mentioned, like, making, kind of, like, a map, or plotting at where the puzzles will be, and how it was designed and that’s what those are.
Rand Miller 20:41
Yeah, that’s exactly right. That’s how we did– that’s how we work. It felt like it was very architectural, you know, map-like. So that’s, you know, everything was done that way.
Phil Salvador 20:54
This is, that’s a– “rebel underground” is this label for this
Rand Miller 20:57
The path going one way, yeah. Now, whether or not these were final? Probably not. These were early on, but yeah, all top down, crazy, top down, maps and images.
Phil Salvador 21:07
Fascinating. And yeah, so just to give people a concept, so, like, that’s in a filing cabinet, and next to it is a box labeled “Stoneship Rubber Gut” and I have no idea what that means.
Rand Miller 21:18
So after Myst’s success, the accountant said, Oh, you need to form some other companies, for I don’t know why. To this day. I’m like, We do? And they’re like, Yes, we need– And so we were like, Well, let’s call one Stoneship and one Rubber Gut.
Phil Salvador 21:35
There’s also Miller LLC.
Rand Miller 21:36
That was just, like, the property or the building had to be a different way. Stoneship was, for obvious reasons. Rubber Gut, that’s reaching into the past. You guys know what Rubber Gut is?
Phil Salvador 21:47
Not familiar with Rubber Gut.
Rand Miller 21:47
Okay, in Cosmic Osmo–
Phil Salvador 21:49
Oh, I should know this.
Rand Miller 21:50
–there is an arcade game where you put the quarters in, and it plays a couple different games depending on, you know, what you do. And one of them is Rubber Gut.
Phil Salvador 22:02
And that was just pulling company names out. Rubber Gut, there we go.
Rand Miller 22:04
Rubber Gut, kind of rolls off your tongue.
Phil Salvador 22:07
I don’t want to spend forever on paperwork, I just get excited about this stuff. But I also see something here labeled “Cyan products press kits”, which for us as historians who collect things, this is some of the best material, because it shows how these games were meant to be marketed.
Rand Miller 22:21
That’s what’s in here. But let’s see, oh yeah, digital press kits. It looks like.
Phil Salvador 22:26
Oh, fascinating. So that’s a CD labeled “Riven, the Sequel to Myst screenshots”. We have one of those. We were going through at the foundation. We have one of the ones that was sent to GamePro.
Rand Miller 22:34
Oh, awesome!
Phil Salvador 22:35
And every image– you were talking about old formats, every image in there was in, like, some proprietary Silicon Graphics workstation format that nobody can comprehend.
Rand Miller 22:44
Exactly.
Phil Salvador 22:45
Cyan logo treatment. Oh, I see a bunch of loose floppy disks as well. So this would have been like designing what became the Cyan logo, or?
Rand Miller 22:53
Or we sent that to the press so that if they were gonna print the logo, they had just reference for that.
Phil Salvador 22:58
These are floppy disks that are all– the labels are crossed out and they’re– just have like, “logo” or “Riven logo” written on them. That one just says “Riven”. I’m gonna slide these back into the–
Rand Miller 23:09
Yeah, ’cause, Oh, those will be lost. Like, if you don’t put them back in the meticulously filed areas. <laughter> Myst demo discs, sneak preview.
Phil Salvador 23:17
That must have been for Masterpiece Edition, that’s from 1998.
Rand Miller 23:20
Yeah, it must have been, boy. Don’t even know– these are press kits.
Phil Salvador 23:26
Oh, this is a folder where it says– I’m not sure if– I can’t read that at the top, it says, “My worst fear has been realized. The damage is more extensive than I previously imagined. I must act while there’s still time.” And it’s a folder, and there’s press kits for Riven in here with, like, contact info for Brøderbund. And there’s also film slides with screenshots of the game. We’ll hold it up to the light here just so I can see it. And that is a book on a table in that screenshot in Gehn’s Age. And so that’s how screenshots were sent to the press back then, right? Was–
Rand Miller 23:55
It was on the verge of internet and digital. But you know, if you really wanted to make sure you sent atoms and not bits, yeah.
Phil Salvador 24:05
And there’s, oh, wow, there’s–
Rand Miller 24:06
Look at that. Negatives.
Phil Salvador 24:07
Ooh, what? So this folder was labeled the– it’s the Spokesman-Review, which is the local paper. Is that correct?
Rand Miller 24:12
Yeah.
Phil Salvador 24:12
Okay. And there’s just, it’s a folder full of negatives. From what? It’s not clear.
Rand Miller 24:17
I have no idea what that is.
Phil Salvador 24:18
That’s a very good– I’m trying to look at these right now, and it’s very hard to tell. There’s people in– You know what this? So there’s a picture of what appears to be someone from Cyan with a Tommy Pickles mascot costume from Rugrats. I think these were pictures taken at a trade show, maybe like when Riven was being shown off at E3 or something like that.
Rand Miller 24:37
Could be.
Phil Salvador 24:38
There’s a lot of people in the lanyards and mascot costumes. So that’s what I assume that is.
Rand Miller 24:41
Interesting.
Phil Salvador 24:42
Some old business cards–
Rand Miller 24:44
We have employee photos in there, some business cards.
Phil Salvador 24:48
Team photos, that’s– when we talk to developers, and they’re thinking, you know, I don’t have historical things. We say, do you have team photos? That’s one of those things that people don’t think about.
Rand Miller 24:55
We took individual photos of everyone.
Phil Salvador 24:57
Oh, there’s a very pensive photo of Richard Vander Wende looking like Michael Stipe in the music video from Losing My Religion. <laughter>
Rand Miller 25:07
Very good description.
Phil Salvador 25:11
It’s a good photo. I have to be evocative in an audio format to explain what we’re seeing.
Rand Miller 25:15
No, nailed it, yeah.
Phil Salvador 25:16
But this is really incredible.
Rand Miller 25:17
There’s Richard again.
Phil Salvador 25:23
I can only think of maybe one or two companies that kept this– own, like, extensive records of their own– So this would have been for, like, press? For saying, like, We’re Cyan and here’s the people who work at our company, or what was the purpose of this?
Rand Miller 25:33
I– these are– you know, we were proud of the people who were here, and we’ve always been really– it’s– we’re kind of employee centric, so we probably took them when we were done and just so we’d have them and we– I– yeah, I have no idea what all we did with them.
Phil Salvador 25:51
Oh, you know what? Let’s put– we didn’t put this back. I’ll do this real quick. One other thing I want to mention, I want to get off the boxes real quick because there’s so much more to look at. But how did this fit? There we go.
Rand Miller 26:02
Very meticulous.
Phil Salvador 26:04
I just wanted to randomly– there’s a bunch of boxes that just say Cyan Worlds with various dates on it. I’m just kind of curious what’s in these, and hoping we won’t discover anything, you know, treacherous.
Rand Miller 26:13
It’s probably accounting.
Phil Salvador 26:15
You know, it is. As soon as I open it up, I see names of various accountants and bank stats. So that’s meticulous.
Rand Miller 26:24
I’ve never opened one of those drawers. <laughter>
Phil Salvador 26:28
That’s the kind of case where, even for us, like, unless someone really, really wanted to go deep, like, long after everyone here is dead, it’s like, that’s kind of not a priority.
Rand Miller 26:35
Yeah. Evidently, this one was opened a lot. <laughter>
Phil Salvador 26:39
The handle of this box is held on by masking tape. So that’s a–
Rand Miller 26:44
I have no idea why.
Phil Salvador 26:47
So looking over here, first off, more things, before we even get to the wall of games, which is very exciting. I see some stuff down here, like I see a box labeled “Uru prime demo test discs”, and I– Well, it says there’s downloads, Japanese version, path of the shell. Okay. So this must’ve been– was just, like, different editions of Uru that were test copies.
Rand Miller 27:04
I don’t even know. That’s what it says on there. But, yeah.
Phil Salvador 27:08
Wow, so it’s a full– this is actually very meticulous. It’s a folder that’s labeled, like, “Uru 21”, “Uru 26” and it’s just all these different, I assume– I’ll pull– oh, it’s installation media. It’s like the CDs that would go– Wow. Okay, I don’t know if any of this is, like, the final game versus being just like a backup copy, but it’s very meticulously filed and color coded.
Rand Miller 27:29
Yeah, they were– it was probably part of the backup or keeping locks. I mean, somebody saved all the versions just so we’d have them in case we needed to go back. So that’s probably what that is.
Phil Salvador 27:42
It’s amazing.
Rand Miller 27:43
Yeah, I don’t know that was other people’s jobs. <laughter>
Phil Salvador 27:46
I also see some VHS tapes here. These might have been the ones we worked on. I don’t know. It’s– they’re just labeled, like, “Riven” or ones labeled–
Rand Miller 27:54
Were those just on the floor?
Phil Salvador 27:55
These were just on the floor. I think we might have not caught these in our screen. It’s possible, yeah.
Phil Salvador 28:00
Those may have fallen through the net. <laughter>
Phil Salvador 28:01
But I see they’re produced by North by Northwest, which was the company that filmed a lot of the behind the scenes footage from Riven. So that could be interesting. That could be more behind the scenes video we don’t know about.
Rand Miller 28:10
Feel free to put them on a shelf. <laughter>
Phil Salvador 28:12
Oh yeah, there we go.
Rand Miller 28:14
Now they’ll be preserved forever.
Phil Salvador 28:16
I’m seeing tons of– stacks of what seems to be emails from around 2001. Oh, wow. That’s from– That is internal emails from the development of Uru. Just says “mud dev list of content creation”, email backups, incredible.
Rand Miller 28:31
Well I have– That stack, who knows what’s in this.
Phil Salvador 28:35
That’s kind of amazing stuff. So what else do we have here? I know you said you were kind of fishing around and trying to find some interesting things to pull out. This seems like a kind of an eclectic mix of stuff.
Rand Miller 28:43
This is a very eclectic mix of all kinds of things. Yeah.
Phil Salvador 28:48
I see, like, on this pile right now, the two things I picked up, there’s an Unreal E3 Award nominee prize by Nvidia, and an Abduction frisbee, are two things that are kind of standing out.
Rand Miller 28:59
Obviously, those go with each other, yes. I mean, filed together alphabetically by size. Let’s see, back– Well, we’ve got all kinds of large portfolios with newspaper articles, magazine articles.
Phil Salvador 29:13
Oh wow. So those are looking at those. It’s like large art portfolios, is kind of what we’re looking at.
Rand Miller 29:17
Yeah, and then up top is various magazines. Numerous magazines that, you know, things have been in. Myst articles or Riven.
Phil Salvador 29:26
Issues of Wired magazine that would have mentioned Cyan.
Rand Miller 29:28
Yes, or or had us on the cover. There was two that had us on the cover.
Phil Salvador 29:32
There’s the one famous, I think it’s September of– it was,like, May. I forget what year that was, but it’s one– It’s all three of you. It’s you, Robin and Richard in all matching denim.
Rand Miller 29:41
Right, the Riven version, yes. Pretty cool.
Phil Salvador 29:47
Beautiful.
Rand Miller 29:47
Right. And then back here–
Phil Salvador 29:51
oh, okay, I think I know what this is.
Rand Miller 29:54
What is this? These are tapes that, at some point, were at my house and they’re newer and older mixes of stuff. Hi8, MiniDVs.
Phil Salvador 30:05
Yeah, it’s a bunch of camcorder tapes.
Rand Miller 30:06
It’s all company stuff, though. I have no idea what might be on this. Some of them have labels. Some of them
Phil Salvador 30:12
Yeah, I see, like, this one is, oh, this is this one’s label “Cyan picnic ’94/smoke effects” and I don’t know what that could possibly mean.
Rand Miller 30:19
That would be Riven smoke effects.
Phil Salvador 30:20
Oh, interesting. Okay.
Rand Miller 30:21
Yeah, we actually got a smoke machine. There’s steam that’s coming out of various pipes on Riven in the original. And we got a smoke machine and filmed it against a black background, and we– that’s how we did the smoke
Phil Salvador 30:32
Oh, fascinating.
Rand Miller 30:33
That– I don’t know. What does that say?
Phil Salvador 30:35
That says “video master from 2001”, “Real Myst trailer”, “avatar” and something called “big movie”. But it looks like this is, like, yeah, promotional stuff.
Rand Miller 30:43
These are ones that we’ve seen before. This is “Myst green screen”. Sirrus and Achenar. My dad is Atrus. There’s been no clips of these.
Phil Salvador 30:51
So that was like, when you’re in the front of the blue screen, going, “bring me the blue pages” That’s that video.
Rand Miller 30:56
That’s, that’s it, yep. Oh my goodness. You haven’t seen– you haven’t gotten those tapes at all.
Phil Salvador 31:00
We haven’t gotten those yet. We just got a Hi8 setup. So this– we could do these for you.
Rand Miller 31:05
Okay, let’s do it. Here’s Rand and Robin interview.
Phil Salvador 31:08
That’s right. This would have been, like–
Rand Miller 31:09
“B-roll of stratum modeling”. This is what we made the making of–
Phil Salvador 31:13
Oh yeah. Like the grainy, like, CD, like, the QuickTime video that came on the CD. This is the original footage for the Making of Myst. Wow. We’ll happily–
Rand Miller 31:20
Live action behind the scenes. Atrus and–
Phil Salvador 31:24
That’s PVR. Oh yeah, actually, you know, when we were going through the tapes, this is some, you know, kind of inside baseball stuff. But we have a bunch of videos of behind the scenes of Riven, and they were labeled like, “transfer from Hi8 tape” and this would have been the original tape. So then we can get these done too.
Rand Miller 31:39
Could’ve been. And this might have been stuff I filmed from Hi8 too. I don’t know who made that. “Making of Myst tape one”.
Phil Salvador 31:46
Oh my goodness.
Rand Miller 31:47
“Robin and Rand”, “RAWA”, this is all the employees. Music, HyperCard, etcetera.
Phil Salvador 31:51
“B-roll hyper card”. That’s actually really fascinating. Wow. We will happily do these for you.
Rand Miller 31:57
We will pass them on to you.
Phil Salvador 31:59
I think you have a trip to UPS in my future before I’m out of here this weekend.
Rand Miller 32:05
“Scribe”, “Catherine”, “Gehn”, “behind the scenes”, more stuff, yeah.
Phil Salvador 32:09
Amazing.
Rand Miller 32:09
And I don’t know what’s on the miniDVs. Looks like–
Phil Salvador 32:13
Other very tiny labeling from someone who had very tiny handwriting.
Rand Miller 32:16
Uru stuff, “Cyan trailer”. Oh, this is– oh my goodness, 2003 we had Kenyan musicians and dancers came and Tim recorded them making really interesting music, and used it in Uru and a lot of Uru stuff, on tape.
Phil Salvador 32:37
Oh my goodness. Fantastic. That’ll flesh out the Uru folder in our collection. That one is super exciting.
Rand Miller 32:46
I’ll put those aside, then.
Phil Salvador 32:47
Oh, absolutely, that way– we’ll feast on that one for sure. So just going through a couple more things before we then go to the big game pile. This thing you mentioned earlier–
Phil Salvador 32:58
Oh yeah. The thing that Hannah brought in.
Phil Salvador 32:59
–behind the scenes beta testing thing. So what are we– this is like a three printed little tray with shapes.
Marie Chapman 33:03
The island.
Phil Salvador 33:03
And that’s the shape of–
Rand Miller 33:04
Okay. It is. A little bit of a spoiler alert. But in Riven we, much to our surprise, realized that there was one island that had no puzzle at all on it. There was no friction at all. You just walked on it and learned things. And we also realized that that one in particular should have some friction. So we combined a few things and made a new puzzle there that we refer to as the slider puzzle. But we needed to test it to see if it would work. And this was an early 3d print that we made just to let people try it. This one is not great. I can– I’ll bring the other one and we can– I’ll let you see how it works. So we actually put magnets in it, and people would slide it exactly in the game so they could test it.
Phil Salvador 33:51
Oh. Did you often make physical versions of puzzles when, like, doing testing or design?
Rand Miller 33:55
Occasionally. Not usually, 3D printed. But RAWA was notorious for cutting out paper pieces, you know, moving things around the way they needed to be.
Phil Salvador 34:06
For folks at home that’s Richard A. Watson, who was a designer and artist on many of the Cyan games. That’s how I solve the gauntlet puzzle in Abduction. I just cut things out and turn around a piece of paper.
Rand Miller 34:15
That’s how he made the gauntlet puzzle in Abduction.
Phil Salvador 34:17
That makes me feel a lot better. It makes a lot of sense. One other, just random thing here, before we move on, I see what appears to be a card file, box filled with photos.
Rand Miller 34:28
Oh, yeah.
Phil Salvador 34:29
Oh, I think I know what’s the deal with these. So this is, yeah, it’s a box filled with photographs labeled, like, “old doors”, “metal”. What were these used for, Rand?
Rand Miller 34:37
Textures. This is- that’s our texture library before there was bits that were easily accessible. So Richard and Robin and Josh, I think, went down to New Mexico because so much of what Riven had, so many of the textures were related to there. And they just explored and took close-ups of textures that then we would– they developed, the artists could have those, you scan it in and map those textures to buildings or trees or doors or, yeah, whatever you needed. Yeah.
Phil Salvador 35:08
Development style. There’s so many things back here, but just to pull one out, I’m just curious if you even know what this is. It appears to be a LaserDisc labeled “Myst November 29 1995”. Do we have any idea what– That is a late– you know what this is?
Phil Salvador 35:24
I think this is– there was going to be a LaserDisc port of Myst. I think it was going to be for the LaserActive or the LaserDisc. This is a Pioneer-branded LaserDisc, labeled “Myst b3 test disc”.
Rand Miller 35:24
No clue.
Rand Miller 35:37
Yeah. It could be.
Phil Salvador 35:38
So would this have been the LaserDisc? Okay. Fascinating. Fascinating.
Rand Miller 35:44
Definitely what it could be.
Phil Salvador 35:45
I’m going to be very careful because– There are people who know how to digitize– Oh, the crinkling you heard was plastic wrap. The disc is okay. The disc is not buckled.
Rand Miller 35:53
It crumbled onto the floor, gone forever.
Phil Salvador 35:56
Lost media.
Rand Miller 35:57
No, it’s back in its sleeve. Safely in its sleeve.
Phil Salvador 35:59
It survives. Back into a pile of, I can’t even tell. It’s things wrapped in paper
Rand Miller 36:02
Here, put this old FileMaker-now-Cyan-logo floppy disk back on top of it. <laughter>
Phil Salvador 36:08
So much of that. We could go to that stuff for the next couple hours, but I want to– But here’s– this is the stuff I love. But again, back here, I’ve been teasing this. This is the game wall. And this is just every edition of every game. It’s every variant of Riven. It’s all the additions of Myst and realMyst, some really eclectic stuff. I see in the back there, there’s the Riven calendar app. Big box.
Rand Miller 36:30
Yes! Were you aware of that?
Phil Salvador 36:32
I was aware of that. I just, I’m confused by it still.
Rand Miller 36:34
Yeah, it was a– you would get that app for your computer, and it would run a calendar with– featuring Riven images on it, which is intriguing but–
Phil Salvador 36:45
I guess, that you know, at the time, like, yeah, there’s a brand of software. I see tons of copies of things. Like, I see a lot of Cosmic Osmo’s Hex Isle on the back there.
Rand Miller 36:53
Yep, yeah, not one of our bigger hits.
Phil Salvador 36:57
So actually, this reminds me of a funny story. I’m aware that, up until recently, y’all had a lot of copies of The Manhole CD-ROM Masterpiece Edition. I see a couple of those down there still. But I think you had, like, crates full of those that, yeah.
Rand Miller 37:10
Yes. Yeah, it’s an ongoing joke, because I keep telling everybody they can’t throw them away. And they keep saying, well, we’re gonna throw them away. I’m like, No you can’t throw them away. And then at some point, I think they just disappeared.
Phil Salvador 37:22
I know they were– they’ve been handed out to fans at events. I have one at home, yeah. Our producer for this episode, Marie also has a Manhole–
Marie Chapman 37:31
That just appeared in my luggage. <laughter>
Rand Miller 37:35
As they find good homes, I’m okay with it.
Phil Salvador 37:37
But then a bunch of other unusual variants. Like, I see here you have a stack of Myst for Sega Saturn and Jaguar CD in the back there.
Rand Miller 37:45
The cool part of that was for every one of these versions of the game, we got sent a console.
Phil Salvador 37:50
Oh, incredible.
Rand Miller 37:51
And they’re up in drawers, up in the conference room to this day. If you open the drawers under the whiteboard, it’s like, What is this? A Jaguar, a Sega Saturn.
Phil Salvador 38:01
Incredible.
Rand Miller 38:01
I mean, they’re all in there.
Phil Salvador 38:02
Yeah, I see around here you have what appears to be, I would say, is, like 20 <bleep> dev kits.
Rand Miller 38:07
We do, which I don’t think we can mention those. But–
Phil Salvador 38:10
Okay, well, for our editor, bleep out what we just talked about, but leave in this conversation about bleeping it out to leave people in wonder about what happens.
Rand Miller 38:18
We can ask if we can mention those. We did a ton of testing on it. And so we have dev kits, and you can’t really get rid of them, so they’re in the vault. We are keeping them <bleep>. Meticulously keeping them, just like the contract said.
Phil Salvador 38:33
I will bleep out the name of the company as well.
Rand Miller 38:38
If Tony says. He may say it’s fine. Yeah, I’ll let you guys dig in there.
Phil Salvador 38:41
But what else do we have? I think there’s, like, all the little different editions of like Saturn versions of games. The one thing that caught my mind, two things here. First off, there’s a version of The Manhole labeled “The Fire Hydrant”. A single disk version of The Manhole. I wasn’t even aware of this variant.
Rand Miller 38:56
Oh yeah. This is the– So the story is, and, yeah, those are the real deal from the very first thing that we released
Phil Salvador 39:03
They’re not even labeled Cyan. They are Prolog Software.
Rand Miller 39:06
I had a consulting company, yeah, named Prolog, and so we sold them under that. This is what we took to the Hyper Fest, or whatever it was called, in San Francisco. That was the beginning of our foray into building worlds, my brother and I. And so the interesting thing was that not many people had hard drives, so we thought, Well, we’ll make a small version of The Manhole on a single floppy disk, and we’ll call it The Fire Hydrant, and we’ll probably sell a lot more of those. Well, no, people want things for their new equipment. And the five-disk Manhole sold. We sold every one of them, and so we have a few of The Fire Hydrants left.
Phil Salvador 39:51
It’s just its floppy disks in a clamshell case. Fascinating.
Rand Miller 39:54
Yep.
Phil Salvador 39:54
I also see something here I’ve never heard of before. What is this? It’s a Cyan-branded product called Peacock, the HyperCard Import Export solution. Was this a dev tool you made?
Rand Miller 40:07
Yeah, we made it for ourselves, and it was so useful we’re like, We should just sell this. So–
Phil Salvador 40:13
The motto in the back says “you’ve just picked up one powerful peacock.”
Rand Miller 40:16
Oh, we were so clever. It was– HyperCard was really useful for a lot of things. As many people know, we used it for, you know, Manhole and Cosmic Osmo and Spelunx and even Myst right? And Riven actually, as well. But it kept data in it, and getting data in and out of it, you had to kind of script to do that. And we decided, you know, there should be a tool for getting the data in and out. So we wrote one.
Phil Salvador 40:46
And you would release things like that too. I think there was a thing you made. It was called, like, you know, Strange Tales from HyperCard or something like that. So that’s– it’s not unusual for Cyan to have done that.
Rand Miller 40:54
Yeah, that was for– was that for Macworld, or MacUser magazine, they wanted to get an article and released a floppy with these fun little toys that we had come up with in HyperCard. Yeah.
Phil Salvador 41:05
So a lot of games. I don’t know if anything else stands out, but I know we’re getting a little short on time for you because you’ve got shenanigans to go off and do.
Rand Miller 41:11
I do have shenanigans. That’s right.
Phil Salvador 41:12
But there’s also over here, there’s another shelf full of stuff and props and just a look at some of these things as well. It looks like it’s a combination of things. Some of them, they’re, like, branded journals, branded mouse pads, multiple copies of theRiven calendar. What is this? So, this is a, oh, this is, it is a brand– It’s a Jenga set that comes in a Riven, the Sequel to Myst, like, canvas bag. Was it like trade show memorabilia, or what would have been the–
Rand Miller 41:39
Yes. You know, I don’t even know. Brøderbund made this stuff and they sent it to people. We don’t know who they sent it to. All we made sure was that they sent us a few. So I have no idea who ended up with these.
Phil Salvador 41:49
Okay. Well, this is my holy grail that I’ve– when I was thinking about weird things in here this is the one that stands out to me. This is a bottle of water that just has the Riven logo on it. This is Riven water and it is, I want to say, over the years, the box, not box, the bottle, has collapsed in on itself significantly.
Rand Miller 42:05
As if you carried it to the bottom of the sea and the pressure had squished it. Yeah.
Phil Salvador 42:14
I am almost certain it is the only surviving Riven bottle of water.
Rand Miller 42:17
I– you know, we had a few at some point, but obviously those have been– somebody drank them. Yeah.
Phil Salvador 42:24
They are no longer with us. Other things we have here, I just see just so many interesting bits of memorabilia, like it would appear to be like an astrolabe. Not even sure what this goes with.
Rand Miller 42:33
Yeah, yeah. Gyroscope kind of crazy thing. I don’t either. Does it have any– Is it Myst or Riven related?
Phil Salvador 42:40
No labeling on it at all. Nothing seems to be related to that.
Rand Miller 42:43
I don’t know.
Phil Salvador 42:43
There’s also this very heavy– Oh, I think I might know what this is. Can I even get this off?
Rand Miller 42:51
Oh, you can.
Phil Salvador 42:51
This seems very dangerous. So this is extremely–
Rand Miller 42:54
Oh, it’s taped on the backside.
Phil Salvador 42:55
Oh, it’s taped, okay.
Rand Miller 42:56
Simply for the very reason.
Phil Salvador 42:57
So it is a very heavy, I assume this is a giant knife. This is a giant knife with Gehn’s insignia on it.
Rand Miller 43:05
His crest, yeah. The Riven dagger, or one kind of Riven dagger.
Phil Salvador 43:09
So I know we have in some of the behind the scenes footage from the wrap party for Riven, we have footage of Richard Vander Wende cutting a Riven cake with a giant Riven dagger. Could this be that dagger?
Rand Miller 43:19
Yes. That could be, and that’s– maybe it’s there’s cake still on it is why it won’t come out of that sheath so easily.
Phil Salvador 43:24
<laughter> Encrusted. Alright, that’s the most dangerous thing I think I’ve handled a while. What else?
Rand Miller 43:29
Oh, pick up the thing on the end. That’s more dangerous. Yeah, there you go. Yeah.
Phil Salvador 43:34
Oh, this is actually dangerous. This is one of the props from filming, right? This is the dagger that the rebels use.
Rand Miller 43:39
It’s either the original or it’s a replica.
Phil Salvador 43:42
Oh, this is actually sharp. I need to be careful.
Rand Miller 43:44
At some point we had replicas made of these things, and they did a really good job, but it is sharp. when you said the other thing was the most dangerous.
Phil Salvador 43:52
Yeah, that is actually–
Rand Miller 43:52
Like, no, yeah, this is the most dangerous.
Phil Salvador 43:55
Just a couple other random things we’re going through here. I see some CDs labeled “Myst impressions”. Do you have any memory?
Rand Miller 44:01
Myst Impressions, let me see.
Phil Salvador 44:02
There’s, like, eight or so these. Might be like an audio ambiance CD. I’m trying to wiggle one out of here, Myst– screensavers. That is a box of Myst screensavers down there next to a second Riven bottle of water. There we go.
Rand Miller 44:16
There’s another one. Yay.
Phil Salvador 44:17
And that is an ale from the promotion of Bungie’s game Myth. It is Burly Dwarf Ale. That’s just interesting. That’s not even, you know, Cyan-related, but that’s just a, like, trade show memorabilia is really fascinating. So many things, water bottles, I mean, like, reusable ones, mouse pads, things from Fangamer. Actually, this is something I’ve seen, a lot of I’m curious about. I’ve seen around here at Cyan HQ, a bunch of things labeled the D’ni games. And it’s like a little Myst themed Olympics. What was that?
Rand Miller 44:48
It was something the Mysterium fans came up with, just a game, a little competition that they did, you know, Olympic kind of nod.
Phil Salvador 44:57
And that’s the Myst fan convention. Yeah. God, there’s just fascinating things in here. There are so many, like, there’s, you know, like the prototype that when he did Kickstarter and put out Myst books. These ones are labeled, like, “final color approved”, “no screens with production samples”, “store signs”. Y’all got everything. And, of course, there’s the Atrus action figure still sealed.
Marie Chapman 45:15
I do own one of those.
Rand Miller 45:17
Oh, nice. I don’t even own one
Marie Chapman 45:19
With book.
Rand Miller 45:22
Yeah, I figure this is kind of– I consider the vault my stuff. So I do own an Atrus action figure.
Marie Chapman 45:30
I recommend reading the copy on the back out loud. It’s very good.
Phil Salvador 45:33
Plus it’ll be a great note to end this on. “From the award-winning game from Cyan Productions and Ubisoft comes Atrus and Saavedro. Get the game and learn what secrets are within the book Atrus prizes so highly. Each discovery you make and each puzzle you solve leads you one step closer to reversing a wrong that has gone unchecked for ages.
Rand Miller 45:51
Oh, how can you resist?
Phil Salvador 45:53
I want to go and buy one of these right now. Listen– First of all, Rand, thanks again for giving us a tour of this. This is– we could spend, like, the next five hours here. We won’t, because we’ve got a party to get to, got some celebrating to do. I know you’re obviously a person in demand. Thank you so much for coming by. This is great.
Rand Miller 46:11
Great. I love going through this stuff. It brings up wonderful memories, and it’s nice to revisit all these things before they’re lost forever, or until you guys actually mark them down and save them forever.
Phil Salvador 46:24
Like I said, well, I’ll bring some stuff back, send it back with digital copies. We’ll get as much done as we can. For folks listening, by the time you hear this, the Riven remake will be out. It is on PC, Mac, QuestVR, also VR and PC. I think that’s the list of platforms right?
Rand Miller 46:39
For now.
Phil Salvador 46:40
For now! Okay, well, yeah–
Phil Salvador 46:42
Mac. Did you say Mac?
Phil Salvador 46:43
I said Mac, yeah, but Marie said LaserDisc.
Marie Chapman 46:45
Not too late.
Phil Salvador 46:46
I think that’s a good point. We can get the LaserDisc–
Rand Miller 46:48
That’s coming later.
Phil Salvador 46:50
Rand, thanks so much for joining us.
Rand Miller 46:51
Thank you, Phil.
Frank Cifaldi 46:53
Thank you so, so much for listening to the Video Game History Hour. Brought to you by the Video Game History Foundation. If you have questions or comments for the show, you can email us at podcast@gamehistory.org. The Video Game History Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non profit, and all of your contributions are tax-deductible. You can support us right now by going to gamehistory.org/donate, or by joining our patreon at patreon.com/gamehistoryorg, one word. this episode of the Video Game History Hour was produced by Robin Kunimune and edited by Michael Carrell. Thanks so much for listening, and we’ll see you next time.
–Transcript edited by Jeremy Seith.