The Last Candle

Over the weekend I concluded a play-through of Cyan Worlds’s realMyst, the 3D remake of the once-hugely popular and confidently two-dimensional Myst, and concluded that not only was the 3D unnecessary, the modernized viewpoint was poorly utilized and reduced the overall experience compared to the original 2D version.

The reasons why the 3D iteration is the lesser brother are pretty clear and might be composed into a separate post in the future, but for now, I’m going to share a stupid comparison and a bit of snark that bubbled to the surface of my memory over the weekend.

To start, allow me to establish the players in this tragi-comedy: realMyst, of course, but also Unreal Tournament, a hot-dogging sci-fi first-person shooter.

For those who haven’t played one or both of these games, Myst is a classic point-and-click adventure-puzzle game with a terrific setting and a satisfyingly unspoken story, featuring a lone adventurer, The Stranger, trying to uncover the reason and secrets behind a surreal island. Unreal Tournament (or UT) is like Myst but with multiple adventurers, wielding crazy goo-blasting firearms, exploding each other into bloody pieces or regenerating from a bloody husk to rise and wreak havoc once again.

Here’s what realMyst looked like back in 2000, which is exactly how it looks today:

If released today, IGN.Com would give that game a 4.5 out of 10. Back in 2000, though, it was the hot stuff. realMyst easily looked better than anything else out on the market at the time, and it basically came out unannounced.

Don’t want to take my word for it? I don’t blame you, but you might accept the opinion of one Cliff Bleszinski, lead designer of the modern and hyper-popular Unreal Tournament and Gears of War franchises, in a Shacknews comment (then known as the Shugashack) on October 13th, 2000:

That demo [of realMyst] has some impressive engine mojo.

/me goes to whip the programmers

Cliff

Mr. Bleszinski and the rest of his team at Epic Games, the then-PC-only (and now-console) developer, released the first game in the Unreal Tournament series in 1999. Here’s an example of UT ‘99, the in-house product Epic designers had to go home to after gaping at realMyst:

For my money realMyst certainly bests Unreal in the looks department, although at the time it was far outclassed on the dance floor by Unreal on both a critical and technical level[^1].

The stage is set — back to the present day. Today marks roughly nine years since the commendable release of realMyst and ten years since UT’s meteoric impact on the first-person gaming scene. Nine years is a dozen generations of PC hardware, each new generation allowing for significant increases in all of a game’s aspects. How have the respective franchises progressed after nearly a decade of PC progress?

Here’s a screenshot I captured of Unreal Tournament 3, which was released just last year:

Now that’s an adventure game. Well, maybe more action-adventure. Without the adventure part.

But if Epic Games can come that far in ten years, what about Cyan Worlds? What wondrous worlds and graphics engines has the legendary adventure game studio spawned since the famous release of realMyst?

Here’s Cyan Worlds’s latest release, nine years after realMyst’s debut and CliffyB’s laudations, and after about twenty new generations of CPUs and pixel-pushing video card chipsets:

Zing.

To conclude, I should cover myself by saying I really enjoy both the Myst and Unreal Tournament series’ — probably the former more than the latter, honestly. Comparing these two instances is, I admit, much of a stretch, particularly since Cyan World has released fully-3D games after 2000 that had much better visuals than realMyst, like the 2003-released Uru:

But comparing screenshots from iMyst and Unreal Tournament 3 does make one wayward point: first-person shooters have gone completely nuts, and adventure games have a long way to go back towards innovation.

[^1]: UT ‘99 ran at good framerates on a variety of hardware configurations; realMyst ran poorly on cutting-edge machines. This comparison is even more damning when considering the significantly fewer systems realMyst computed (graphics, audio, input) compared to Unreal’s workload (all of Myst’s, with significant advances in each, and with the addition of artificial intelligence and networking).

Until about two hours ago, this entry’s title was going to be “The Fall of the Michigan Theater.” While that old title was fair hyperbole, this entry’s title is not. Clearly something has changed for the better. Let me happily explain.

The Michigan Theater is one of few favorite Ann Arbor institutions (others: the downtown library, the Arbor Brewing Company), but at the end of May the theater’s programming took two missteps that for my own potential entertainment appeared to be disastrous stumbles.

The first misstep was to begin showing Pixar’s beautiful new film Up in ugly “Disney 3D,” four times a day. Future “3D” movies are sure to follow.

The theater just received a new 4K projector for the 3D films, thanks to local donations. While I haven’t seen the film yet, or any Disney 3D film for that matter, I wonder why they don’t use the new hardware to show digital film without the perceptively less clean and bright colors produced by the 3D projection and added the irritation wearing cheap polarizers. Perhaps the answer is because 3D is modern, “cool” and cutting-edge, even though the technology provides inferior clarity and more distractions and despite this technology. The new projector will hopefully be a boon to the theater’s coffers, but it’s a strange, possibly damaging move for the art-house theater.

Stumble number two was more like diving off face-first into a ravine, plunging down into a garden of spiked rocks: the severe reduction of the Summer Classic Film Series. I’ve looked forward to each series every year, pledging to see the full run of shows, although I’ve never found the time — or inclination, more honestly — to catch every week’s screening. Still, I’ve only missed two or three shows out of the batch of more than a dozen since I began keeping track in 2007; sometimes I would catch both the Sunday and Tuesday screenings, if the film is really something special, as I did when I caught both shows of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin with an essential live organ accompaniment. The Series has become a regular, three-month-long escape and is the closest thing I have to a summer vacation.

So imagine my disappointment when the theater’s web site and snail-mail delivered schedule advertised only three shows for the Summer Classic Film Series. The site schedule appeared first, and I thought it was a mistake; but when the paper schedule arrived, it was the second source — two vectors pointing towards the same conclusion. This was a catastrophe. Summer was going to end after a single month of shows.

But today, with the week’s email newsletter of shows, came salvation.

Rumors and speculation of the demise of the Summer Classic Film Series’ past glory were greatly exaggerated and misinformed, because a schedule of the full, fifteen-film series has gone live on the theater’s site, and it is a hell of a run. The three films advertised prematurely — The Seven Year Itch, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington — are still in the lineup as the first three films, but after those classics (and terrific films they are), the series goes to eleven.

Bullitt. The annual Marx Brothers show, The Cocoanuts. Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, which is the first classic French New Wave the theater has shown since at least 2006. The Searchers, the annual western. The Godfather, for crying out loud, which isn’t even the biggest film of the lot: Citizen Kane is. Holy wow. But wait — there’s more!

Needless to say, after viewing that schedule the irritation of Up and Disney 3D rolled off and out of my consciousness like water off a duck’s back. You kids can take your cheap polarized glasses: I’ll take my summer classics.