![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.gameinformer.com\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/body_default\/public\/2024\/04\/01\/f6e2dd41\/riven_01.jpg\")
<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\nIf Myst was The Hobbit<\/i> of point-and-click adventure games, Riven was The Lord of the Rings<\/i>. Built by a small studio called Cyan in Spokane, Washington, it had photorealistic graphics on par with its era\u2019s Hollywood movies and the narrative intricacy of a novel.<\/p>\n
But for many people, it was more than just a technical marvel. It was a life-changing experience.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can directly trace my path to the gaming industry back to Riven,\u201d says Sam Winkler, narrative director at Gearbox Software and co-writer on Borderlands 3.<\/p>\n
\u201cI often credit Myst and Riven as the main inspiration of my creativity today,\u201d says David Howe, lead editor of Netflix\u2019s Castlevania series.<\/p>\n
An engineering lead on Diablo IV, Jeff Stewart, says Riven was \u201cthe single most inspirational game\u201d he ever played.<\/p>\n
But in 1998, a few months after Riven came out on October 31, 1997 \u2013 before it sold 4.5 million copies and became the runner-up to Myst as the best-selling PC game of all time until 2002 \u2013 the game\u2019s three creative leads parted ways.<\/p>\n
Rand Miller, the developer who played franchise protagonist Atrus on-screen, stayed at Cyan and became CEO of the oldest surviving independent game studio in America. His brother Robyn Miller, the artist and composer behind many of Myst and Riven\u2019s sights and sounds, left the company to pursue other interests. Richard Vander Wende, the production designer of Disney\u2019s Aladdin<\/i> who pushed the Millers\u2019 sequel to new heights in iconic imagery and character-driven realism, went back to the film industry.<\/p>\n
Two decades passed before Rand Miller asked a question.<\/p>\n
What if we went back to Riven?<\/i><\/p>\n
And then, What if we made it bigger and better?<\/i><\/p>\n Rebuilding A World<\/p>\n Twenty-six years after the original Riven was released, I arrive in Spokane at the peak of autumn, when the forest surrounding Cyan\u2019s headquarters is bright with red and gold leaves. I immediately recognize the front door from Richard Kadrey\u2019s 1997 coffee table book, From Myst to Riven<\/i> \u2013 an otherworldly arch that looks like it was torn away from the rest of the Arts-and-Crafts-style building by an earthquake.<\/p>\n \u201cThe bricklayers loved that,\u201d the voice of Atrus tells me. \u201cThey said it was the most fun thing they\u2019d ever done.\u201d<\/p>\n In person, Rand Miller doesn\u2019t remind me of the bespectacled scholar (and questionable father) he\u2019s played in six consecutive Myst games. Now 64 years old, with long locks of gray hair and a penchant for Birkenstocks, Miller exudes the easygoing and paternal warmth of a surfing instructor. He speaks with the slightest hint of a southwestern drawl, no doubt from his years living in New Mexico and Texas.<\/p>\n Miller shows me around the House That Myst Built. I see mannequins dressed in costumes from the original Riven, a display case full of awards, and a massive knife prop built by Adam Savage before Mythbusters<\/i> made him famous. In the back of the building, overlooking an algae-filled pond and a grove of ponderosa pines, we reach a conference room with a cyan-blue ceiling.<\/p>\n \u201cWhy remake Riven after all these years,\u201d I ask.<\/p>\n Miller takes a deep breath. \u201cRiven was sacred to us, so we waited until the technology finally caught up to the point where we could make something that looked even better than the original, but in 3D,\u201d he says. \u201c[And] my first thought was, we need to make it look precisely the same.\u201d<\/p>\n But then Miller reached out to Vander Wende, the original game\u2019s co-director, with a tantalizing question: \u201cIf you could change<\/i> anything about Riven, pie-in-the-sky, what would you change?\u201d<\/p>\n Vander Wende arrives at Cyan a little later in the morning, fresh off a plane from Hawaii. He\u2019s in his 60s now, too, and tall like Miller but more soft-spoken. He also sounds like every bit of the perfectionist he was in the \u201990s.<\/p>\n \u201cI can\u2019t do something half-assed unless somebody puts a gun to my head,\u201d Vander Wende says. Turning to Miller, he continues: \u201cI was really dubious when you approached me about coming back to Cyan. Why would I want to remake something I already did? I never even played the original game after it came out. Doing an imitation of it held no interest for me.\u201d<\/p>\n As a result, the new Riven isn\u2019t a carbon copy of the original. There are new puzzles, new locations, and new pieces of lore alongside structural changes to make the world more narratively consistent. And this time, it\u2019ll be fully traversable in real-time 3D instead of an interconnected series of 4,000 still images and quick time events.<\/p>\n \u201cWe looked at the backstory that gave rise to the world of Riven and the characters that inhabited it,\u201d Vander Wende says. \u201cWe found discrepancies and corrected those and embellished things that needed to be filled in.\u201d<\/p>\n I raise my eyebrows. Miller notices. \u201cThis is a dangerous question, but when you heard we were remaking Riven, what kinds of things did you hope we\u2019d do?\u201d he asks me.<\/p>\n I think about it for a few seconds. I tell him all the parts of the world I wanted to explore more, as well as the two additional worlds we only glimpsed in the original game. I wince, worrying I\u2019ve just described an impossibly grand vision for the new Riven.<\/p>\n But Miller smiles. \u201cSo far? Check, check, check, check.\u201d<\/p>\n Rewriting A Memory<\/p>\n \u201cWas there always a stairwell over here?\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019m exploring Book Assembly Island, also known as Crater Island or Boiler Island. I can hear the turquoise water lapping against the shore of its volcanic caldera and the wind pouring over the cliffs above me. The sky is the same blue I remember from my childhood, but now I can walk anywhere and look in any direction.<\/p>\n Seven or eight \u201cCyantists,\u201d including Miller and Vander Wende, are sitting behind me, watching me play their new version of Riven.<\/p>\n Hannah Gamiel, Cyan\u2019s development director and one of the two people who will lead it when Miller retires, informs me that there was not, in fact, always a stairwell over here. I descend into a dark cave, where an entirely new location presents a new series of puzzles, as well as new insights into the world.<\/p>\n Within seconds, I\u2019m lost. \u201cAlways follow the pipes,\u201d Gamiel says, sitting to my right. \u201cOur games should have been called Follow the Pipes 1 and Follow the Pipes 2.\u201d<\/p>\n Gamiel first played Riven when she was 4 years old, sitting in her mother\u2019s lap. \u201cI was the designated disc-swapper,\u201d she says. The original game was split across five separate CD-ROM discs, one for each island. Gamiel\u2019s mother, Robin, would later meet and marry Rand Miller.<\/p>\n Gamiel started working at Cyan in 2013, first in the QA department and then as a programmer. \u201cThose were super lean years,\u201d she says of the time before Obduction, the company\u2019s Kickstarter comeback in 2016.<\/p>\n Later, elsewhere on the same island, I break into a regal laboratory built by Gehn \u2013 Atrus\u2019s father, a world-conqueror with a god complex who\u2019s been trapped on Riven for decades \u2013 only to discover that the interior has completely changed compared to the original game.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the first things I did when I came back was write a rough outline of Gehn\u2019s 30 years on Riven, which we had never done before,\u201d Vander Wende says. \u201cOnce I did that, it was easier to make decisions [about what to change or add].\u201d<\/p>\n After a white-knuckle ride on Gehn\u2019s magnetic levitation tram, I reach the other island Cyan made available during my demo, where Gehn spied on the Rivenese people from a Gothic underwater stronghold. On the surface of the island, one of the structures I remember is missing completely, and there are new puzzles to solve, but Miller assures me the other islands hold even bigger \u2013 and wilder \u2013 surprises.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat do you think,\u201d Miller asks me. \u201cYou\u2019re the first person to see any of this outside the company.\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019m stunned. \u201cIn some ways, it feels identical to my memory of Riven,\u201d I say. \u201cBut in other ways, it\u2019s like I\u2019m playing it for the first time because there are new places and new things I don\u2019t understand.\u201d<\/p>\n Vander Wende frowns. \u201cAll I can see are the mistakes,\u201d he says but laughs along with everyone else.<\/p>\n Technical Difficulties<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a puzzle,\u201d Miller says.<\/p>\n A few hours later, we aren\u2019t in Riven anymore. We\u2019re in the Cyan parking lot, and I can\u2019t figure out how to open the passenger door on Miller\u2019s Tesla Model Y. Vander Wende can\u2019t figure it out either, and I think Miller, who is probably one of the most famous puzzle designers in America alongside Will Shortz and that guy who buried a treasure chest in the Rocky Mountains, is sadistically enjoying our confusion.<\/p>\n Once we solve the puzzle (I couldn\u2019t tell you how for the life of me now), Miller drives us through the Douglas fir forests north of Spokane to a restaurant for lunch, where I get to know Cyan\u2019s creative director, Eric A. Anderson, the other person who will lead the company alongside Gamiel after Miller retires.<\/p>\n \u201cI stumbled on Cyan when I was in art school collecting issues of Cinefex<\/i> magazine,\u201d Anderson tells me. Now in his 40s, he still has the barely bottled energy of a Cyan fan whose dreams have come true. \u201cThere was a help-wanted ad in the back that said something like, \u2018We\u2019re making Myst II, and we need 3D artists.\u2019\u201d Anderson emailed Cyan asking if it hired college interns, but fate wouldn\u2019t bring him to Spokane until the year 2000 when Miller was spearheading the ambitious, aforementioned MMORPG.<\/p>\n Decades later, in the early days of the Riven remake, Anderson and Gamiel thought they might be able to reuse some of the original game\u2019s 3D models, even though most of them had been lost to the tech-death of SGI workstations, the same now-defunct computers that Industrial Light & Magic used to make Jurassic Park<\/i>. But when they finally managed to locate and open a single file from the \u201990s, it was too low-resolution, forcing them to recreate every inch of the islands from scratch in Unreal Engine 4.<\/p>\n Cyan also met with a grassroots team of Riven fans called the Starry Expanse, which had been painstakingly translating the game\u2019s old models into its own version of a 3D Riven for more than 13 years. \u201cWe referenced some of their assets for measurements, but they were replicating the old Riven,\u201d Anderson says. \u201cOnce Richard [Vander Wende] came back, we knew things were going to change, so it was easier to just build everything ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n One of the biggest technical challenges for Anderson and Gamiel has been bringing Riven\u2019s characters back to life. The original game featured live-action video performances by several actors, including Rand Miller as Atrus, Sheila Goold and Regina Altay as his wife Catherine, and Royal Shakespeare Company alumnus John Keston as his father Gehn.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s literally impossible to graft a 2D video from 1997 into a real-time, high-resolution 3D environment. Cyan\u2019s previous remake, 2021\u2019s award-winning VR and PC version of Myst, featured computer-generated characters in lieu of the original live-action performances. \u201cIt was\u2026 an experiment,\u201d Miller laughs, but for the new Riven, Cyan hired a full-time animation lead, Autumn Palfenier, to raise the uncanny valley.<\/p>\n \u201cFor Gehn, we tried analyzing the [old] video and tracking certain features, but the resolution was so low, and it\u2019s not even a full shot, so it just wasn\u2019t doable,\u201d Anderson says. Instead, they\u2019ve been filming performances in Cyan\u2019s basement using motion-capture technology.<\/p>\n \u201cI can say on the record that this is a union production with SAG-AFTRA,\u201d Gamiel says, referring to the same labor guild that represents Hollywood actors. \u201cWe wanted to get some incredible talent into this game.\u201d<\/p>\n She won\u2019t tell me who\u2019s playing who but does confirm that Miller will return as Atrus and that the studio managed to salvage an old audio recording of John Keston, who died from COVID-19 complications in February 2022 at the age of 97. \u201cWe had an actor study John\u2019s performance and then do it in sync with the original audio, so we got Gehn\u2019s full body,\u201d Anderson says. They show me a work-in-progress close-up of Gehn\u2019s face, which exceeds my expectations.<\/p>\n For Gamiel, working with professional actors has been the most rewarding part of the project. \u201cWhen I watched some of these performances, I was shook. They brought us to tears. People are going to be impressed.\u201d<\/p>\n The Ending Has Not Yet Been Written<\/p>\n Back at Cyan\u2019s headquarters, I try to get one more surprise on the record before leaving Spo\u2011 kane behind.<\/p>\n \u201cCan you confirm a release year for Riven?\u201d I ask.<\/p>\n Miller, Gamiel, and Anderson look at each other and make several faces. \u201cIt\u2019s coming out sooner than people might think,\u201d Gamiel says. They also can\u2019t confirm or deny (yet) that there are any plans for a VR version, only that it\u2019ll be available for PCs.<\/p>\n \u201cAfter Riven, will we revisit the D\u2019ni universe in a future Cyan game?\u201d I ask, referring to the fictional civilization responsible for Myst and Riven\u2019s \u201clinking book\u201d technology, of which Gehn and Atrus are practicing descendants.<\/p>\n \u201c100%,\u201d Anderson and Gamiel say in unison. \u201cStar Wars figured out how to tell more than just the story of the Skywalker family, and we\u2019re trying to do the same thing,\u201d Anderson says. \u201cThere are more stories to tell in the D\u2019ni universe that aren\u2019t directly about Atrus\u2019s family. There are other characters out there that [our fans] are familiar with, and it would be a shame if we didn\u2019t leverage those to our benefit.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s time for me to go, but I keep thinking about something Vander Wende said the day before. \u201cWhen Riven came out, most of my friends and family didn\u2019t play because it was too difficult. I just didn\u2019t know whether what we made really meant anything to anyone,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Days later, back at home in North Carolina, my 7-year-old daughter walks up to my desk while I\u2019m writing this story. She notices an image of the original Riven on my second screen \u2013 a dramatic vista of a massive golden dome surrounded by vertical sea stacks.<\/p>\n \u201cWhere is that<\/i> place?\u201d she asks, her eyes wide.<\/p>\n I almost tell her it\u2019s from a video game. I think about playing Myst with my dad and playing Riven with my brother. I think about how happy my mom was when I told her I was flying out to Spokane. I think about Vander Wende, Miller, Gamiel, and Anderson and what it means for art to make an impact on people.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ll take you there soon,\u201d I say.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.gameinformer.com\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/body_default\/public\/2024\/04\/01\/906cad39\/riven_02.jpg\")
<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\nRebuilding A World<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.gameinformer.com\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/body_default\/public\/2024\/04\/01\/2a948ac1\/riven_03.jpg\")
<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\nRewriting A Memory<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.gameinformer.com\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/body_default\/public\/2024\/04\/01\/2d2b488c\/riven_04.jpg\")
<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.gameinformer.com\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/body_default\/public\/2024\/04\/01\/4b93fedf\/riven_05.jpg\")
<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\nTechnical Difficulties<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.gameinformer.com\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/body_default\/public\/2024\/04\/01\/117d488c\/riven_06.jpg\")
<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\nThe Ending Has Not Yet Been Written<\/h2>\n
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<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n