Myst for Nintendo DS: Port History, Credits and Reviews

Myst on the Nintendo DS is a handheld port of the 1993 adventure, made by Hoplite Research and released in Europe in December 2007 and North America in May 2008, with a Storm City Games edition recorded later for North America. The original game is background here; the entry is about the DS card.

Where the game came from

Rand and Robyn Miller made Myst under their studio Cyan, after earlier children’s titles such as The Manhole and Cosmic Osmo. According to Wikipedia, Activision turned down an adult-oriented pitch around 1990, and the Japanese company Sunsoft then asked the brothers for an adult game. Cyan proposed Myst for $265,000 and started work in 1991, building on Macintosh computers with HyperCard.

Broderbund published it for Mac OS on 24 September 1993, with a Windows version in March 1994. By 2000 it had sold more than 6.3 million copies, and it was the best-selling PC game of the 1990s until The Sims passed it in 2002.

Ports ran through the following decades: 3DO in 1995, Sega Saturn, Atari Jaguar CD and PlayStation in 1995 and 1996, a PlayStation Portable edition in 2006 and iOS in 2009. The Nintendo DS version sits in the middle of that run.

What the DS edition changed

RPGFan’s Patrick Gann reviewed the port on 15 July 2008. The 1993 original ran at 640 by 480 in 8-bit colour, and the DS screen is 320 by 240, which the port handled with heavy compression. Gann describes blocky pixels, shading errors and random colour inversions in stills, and says the embedded videos fared worse. Music carried over well, while voice clips sounded fuzzy through the system speakers.

Controls were the sorest point. The original lets the player hover over a spot to see what a click will do; the port drops that step, so any touch triggers an action at once and the buttons and d-pad do nothing. Gann proposed hovering by stylus or d-pad and a double tap to select, and the developers did not adopt either idea.

Content stayed largely intact. The Rime Age chapter from the later remakes is included, and the one new feature is a magnifying glass that enlarges book text on the lower screen so it is readable on the upper one. Gann called it the only worthwhile addition.

Release and credits

HonestGamers lists Hoplite Research as developer, Midway as European publisher with a 7 December 2007 date, and Empire Interactive as North American publisher on 13 May 2008. Wikipedia’s Myst article gives the same dates and adds Storm City Games as publisher of an updated North American release. VideoGameGeek puts that Storm City Games edition at 9 February 2010. Wikipedia’s separate list of DS games credits Cyan Worlds as developer, whereas the Myst article credits Hoplite Research, so the developer field depends on where you look.

Reception

Wikipedia reports a Metacritic score of 43 out of 100 and a GameRankings figure of 45 percent. RPGFan gave 45 out of 100, with sub-scores of 30 for gameplay and 15 for control, and advised against the port because nearly any other version is preferable. HonestGamers’ Marc Golding reviewed it on 15 August 2008 and gave 1.5 out of 5, writing that it looks far worse than it did in 1993.

Can you still play it?

Yes, as a physical card. A DS cartridge runs on the DS, DS Lite and DSi and in DS mode on the Nintendo 3DS family, and ordinary DS cards are not region-locked. The Wii U and the Switch cannot read it. Nintendo discontinued the 3DS family on 16 September 2020, but used hardware remains the way to play, and no digital edition of this port is documented in the sources used here.