Yesterday evening I was wandering through a forest considering finding somewhere to spend the night while trying to keep the zombies at bay, when I suddenly started thinking about how computer games had changed over the past two decades.
Massive games like Minecraft, The Forest and The Long Dark are the latest in the ever ascendant Open World genre that began gaining popularity with the release of Myst almost exactly 20 years ago.
When The Stranger stumbled onto Myst’s eponymous island, the idea of a game where the player was simply left to do what they wanted seemed crazy. Like so many things though the very thing that made it unusual became its selling point
As Macworld said when awarding it the best game of 1994 Myst removed the “most annoying parts of adventure games — vocabularies that you don’t understand, people you can’t talk to, wrong moves that get you killed and make you start over. You try to unravel the enigma of the island by exploring the island, but there’s no time pressure to distract you, no arbitrary punishments put in your way”.
It was a light-bulb moment of epic proportions confirmed by the game’s record breaking sales, which were not surpassed until Sims (which tellingly also has major open world elements).
Games producers have often combined Myst’s instruction-free, open world structure with other genres such as the shoot-em-up (Grand Theft Auto), the role playing game (The Elder Scrolls) and the strategy game (The Sims). Meanwhile titles like the hugely popular Minecraft and the in-development Long Dark prove that the genre is alive and well, in the meantime there is a dark forest full of zombies to explore.