Even if you’re not or never were a video gamer, chances are that in the mid-90’s you sat down with Myst for a frustrating few hours before you either gave up or bought a strategy guide. The game was a huge hit, and now Roserock Films and Gran Via Productions are going to make a movie about it, according to Variety.
The heavily puzzle-based game gives you control of The Stranger and places you first on the Island of Myst, where you discover two brothers each imprisoned in magic books and each claiming that the other murdered their father. Of course that’s not the case, as the father is trapped in his own book imprisoning him in the world of D’ni. All three members of the family plead with you to help them complete their book, sending you into different worlds referred to as “Ages”, where you’ll find missing pages to each book which when completed will free their prisoner.
The game comes with three endings, two bad, one good, so it leaves a little mystery about what route the movie will take. Will it be a happy ending with the main character freeing the father so he can complete the book of Myst? Or will one of the brothers be freed, imprisoning our hero in their book forever or until someone else stumbles into the world?
Myst certainly will give the producers a vast and lush world to play around in as the landscapes in the game are beautifully rendered (for 1993) despite its staticness. The series continued with Riven years later and then in three novels which explained the story even deeper, which should give the crew behind the film quite a lot to go on. Producer Adrian Vanderbosch says that they’ll be basing the movie primarily around the novels to “offer audiences the essence of Myst without being limited to the famous island of the first game.”
Myst is still in the very early stages of preproduction so there’s no projected start or release date set. Check back as more details unfold.
