30 years later, Myst demake for Atari 2600 reminds us how far we’ve come

Nearly 30 years after its release on the Mac in 1993, Cyan's Myst is still as unstoppable as ever. As one of the most successful (yet sometimes divisive) computer games of all time, it sold 6 million boxed copies in the 1990s and later ended up on over a dozen platforms, with remakes counting for even more appearances, including a VR version. Now, thanks to an unofficial hobby project by Vince Weaver, Myst can add one more platform to the list: Atari 2600. Vince Weaver is an associate professor at the University of Maine in Computer Engineering. Since last year, he has been working on a partial "demake" of the famous point-and-click adventure game that runs on Atari's 8-bit game system, and he just returned to the project to make updates last week. For those not in the gaming community, the term "demake" might need some unpacking. A demake is essentially the opposite of a remake: instead of upgrading a game to fit modern standards, a demake takes a modern or classic game and adapts it for older, less powerful hardware. "Making demakes is a hobby of mine," Weaver told Ars in an email interview. "In the past, I've mostly done them for the Apple II platform, but about a year ago, I started making some for the Atari 2600. The demake sort of started out as me making a sort of small proof-of-concept version of things as a joke, but then when I get positive feedback, I get a bit carried away." The 2600—a game console released in 1977 with only 128 bytes of RAM and a maximum resolution of 160×192 pixels—may seem an unlikely home for the graphically-rich multimedia extravaganza that was Myst in 1993. It's a game once considered so large that it became a killer app for CD-ROM. But the disparity between platforms is exactly the point—because the translation process poses an interesting challenge. "The biggest challenge on doing a demake for something like Myst is the graphics," says Weaver. "Back in the '90s, Myst was famous for having stunningly nice rendered graphics. Translating that to old 8-bit machines is hard. It's even more difficult on the 2600 as you are constantly racing the beam and have some extreme limitations. For example, generally, you can only have two colors per line, and anything more than that takes a lot of tricky coding." Due to console limitations, Weaver doesn't plan to port the entire game over to the primitive 8-bit console, but he wants to get enough puzzles working to make it "real" game, as he writes on his website: "The full game requires at least 800 scenes, which would be roughly 200k, which would be both a pretty hefty cartridge as well as a lot of graphics to draw." The game, such as it currently is (v1.8 as of this writing), can be downloaded from Weaver's website and played either in an Atari 2600 emulator like Stella or on a real 2600 console using a flash cart. We tried it out in Stella and enjoyed wandering the iconic island, flipping marker switches. No puzzles are implemented yet, but Weaver plans to put some into the game soon. "The plan for the 2600 version is to have the speed run path through the game playable. You can beat the whole game without leaving Myst island. This will involve having two of the puzzles playable, the clock puzzle and the inside-the-fireplace puzzle," he says. The primitive graphical capabilities of the 2600 prove a sticking point for this port of Myst, with the low resolution making for blocky graphics that might be difficult to decipher if we had not already been familiar with the original game. Still, if you see the original and 2600 graphics side-by-side, Weaver's translations are impressive despite the blockiness. To create the 2600 graphics, Weaver says that he performs a unique conversion process, which he described in detail on his website:

I run the original game under SCUMMVM. I take a screenshot and load it into GIMP. I crop it, raise the brightness a bit, then size to 40×48. I then remap to the Atari 2600 palette (no dithering). I expand to 80×48 for editing. I then draw over by hand. The biggest challenge is picking what color to be the background color. It's often black or dark gray. When done I manually split things up into two images, background and overlay. I then have tools that convert these PNG files into data that can be loaded into the assembly language of the game.

Previously, Weaver ported Myst to another 1977-era machine with slightly better but still primitive graphics and memory capabilities: The Apple II. Unlike the 2600 version, this port is 100 percent fully playable and complete. "During the pandemic," Weaver says, "I made a full demake of Myst for the Apple II low-resolution mode (the Apple II demake is the full complete game, although in 40×48 15 color graphics, fitting on three 140k floppy disks." He's also experimented with a high-resolution Apple II Myst, although it's only a proof-of-concept for now.

So, what does Cyan Worlds, the owner of Myst, think about all this? Weaver says that the current crew at Cyan "are aware and say nice things about it." He also says that even Atrus himself—Rand Miller, one of the co-creators of Myst—has expressed appreciation for his work. We reached out to Miller for comment but did not receive a response by press time. As a computer science professor, Weaver's connection with these classic machines goes beyond nostalgia. He finds the coding process in 6502 assembly language—shared by the Atari and Apple II—relaxing and frequently shares his creations with his students. "You'd think that these days 6502 programming wouldn't be interesting to the students, but they do enjoy when I show things off to them." He's proud that he once got a chance to meet Chuck Peddle, designer of the 6502 processor and a University of Maine alumnus, before he died in 2019. So why put in all the effort to translate Myst to the Atari 2600? In Weaver's words, it comes down to the fun challenge of "taking a CD-ROM game and squeezing it onto a 16k ROM and still have it be recognizable and playable," and perhaps a dash of enjoying the satisfaction of conquering a task simply because it's there. And with Myst turning 30 this year, his work serves as a testament to the rich history and enduring appeal of the game, whether played on the cutting-edge platforms of their day or on a console that predates it by over a decade.