Myst Kickstarter offers $1,000 tier that’s actually worth it

Cyan Worlds is launching an ambitious Kickstarter to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the legendary puzzle game Myst, and the highest tiers of the $247,500 campaign may actually be worth the asking price.

The first tier is $1, which doesn’t give any backing rewards, and the next is $49 for digital copies of all seven of the Myst games, updated to work on modern PCs:

• Myst (1993)
• Riven: The Sequel to Myst (1997)
• RealMyst: Interactive 3D Edition (2000)
• Myst 3: Exile (2001)
• Uru: Ages Beyond Myst (2003)
• Myst 4: Revelation (2004)
• Myst 5: End of Ages (2005)

“Behind the scenes, we’ve been working to procure the legal rights to make all of the Myst games available,” Cyan stated on the Kickstarter’s page. “As an indie developer, resources are limited for development, and acquiring these rights isn’t always an option. But we’ve finally managed to talk with all the right people in all the right places to garner funds to make it happen! With the needed agreements secured, we’re delighted to present the Myst 25th Anniversary Collection, featuring all seven titles in the Myst series!”

The package will include existing re-releases for some of the titles in question, such as 2004’s Uru: Complete Chronicles and 2014’s RealMyst: Masterpiece Edition. The downside is that most of the seven games do not, at the time of writing, work on Macs. Cyan may or may not be able to address that limitation in the future.

“For various reasons, maintaining some of those Mac titles now means rebuilding them from scratch — an option that, as a small indie studio, takes time or resources we just don’t have,” Cyan Worlds explained. “And for games that were produced by other studios, even that option may not be possible. Although most games in this Anniversary Collection are not compatible with MacOS, Cyan will continue to work to update or rebuild some of the Mac titles, and explore other options to try to make more of the games playable again on the Mac in the future.”

All seven games themselves will eventually be available digitally for anyone to purchase; Cyan Worlds has worked with GOG.com to make them compatible with Windows 10. But it’s the physical rewards for the various tiers that will never be produced again. The highlight is a physical version of “The Linking Book,” with a window that shows artwork from the game. If you pledge $169 or more, however, that window will be replaced by an 800x480 LCD screen and a built-in speaker that will play scenes from the games.

Pledge $250 or more and you’ll also get a functional replica of Gehn’s pen and inkwell, which looks pretty interesting in the released artwork.

Cyan Worlds

That’s all well and good, but the $1,000 “Collector” tier includes something even more special: one of 25 original, hand-drawn pieces of art from the development of Riven, many of which have never been seen publicly.

“Only 25 of these one-of-a-kind design sketches are being made available to celebrate the 25th anniversary,” Cyan Worlds said on the Kickstarter page. Each one is different, and backers will be able to choose which image they’d like in order of the pledges received. The first person to have backed this tier — 15 have already done so at the time of this writing — will get the first choice of the art.

This is a heck of a way to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the original Myst and the games that followed, and the Kickstarter campaign already seems to have the momentum it needs to see it through to the end.