Software · 1993 – 2002
Cyan's serene CD-ROM puzzle adventure was the best-selling PC game in the world for the better part of a decade, holding the title from 1993 until The Sims finally overtook it in 2001–02.
Myst, developed by Cyan and published by Broderbund in 1993, became the defining PC game of the CD-ROM era and one of the most commercially successful titles the platform has ever produced. It sold roughly six million copies and held the title of best-selling PC game of all time for the better part of a decade, a reign that only ended when Will Wright's The Sims — released in 2000 — surpassed it around 2001–02, having itself passed 6.3 million copies worldwide. The game's success was inseparable from the technology it arrived alongside. Myst was built for CD-ROM, and its pre-rendered still images, ambient soundscape, and slow, contemplative exploration of a deserted island were precisely the sort of experience that the new format made possible and floppy disks did not. In the mid-1990s, as computer manufacturers pushed CD-ROM drives into homes and consumers wondered what they were actually for, Myst supplied the answer — and it was frequently bundled with drives and multimedia PCs, seeding it into an enormous number of households. This gave Myst an audience quite unlike that of most games. It reached people who did not consider themselves players at all: adults who had bought a computer for work or family use, and who found in Myst something closer to an interactive novel or a beautiful, meditative puzzle box than to the twitch action they associated with the medium. That broad, non-traditional appeal is precisely what propelled it to sales figures no conventional game of the period could match. Its commercial dominance also made it divisive. Myst's success was held up by some as proof that games could be contemplative, adult, and artful, and by others as a lamentable triumph of pretty slideshows over genuine interactivity — a debate that raged through the mid-1990s. Whatever the verdict, the numbers are unambiguous: for eight years, the best-selling PC game in the world was a quiet puzzle game about walking around an empty island, and it eventually sold around six million copies across PCs, consoles, handhelds, and later mobile devices.