Wasps in the Myst

Excavate the crawl space behind the second floor landing of my childhood home on Long Island and you may yet find a musty copy of the official Journal of Myst. Treat it gingerly, for it is a totem of my youth — a portal to a bygone era. In that way it mirrors the game it came with.

Over the winter that straddled ’93 and ’94, approximately 200 million American dads visited their local Wiz and picked up a copy of Myst, the point-and-click adventure title. They proceeded to play it in family dens and refurbished basements across the country. Myst became the CD-ROM’s first blockbuster, and the bestselling PC game for almost a decade. It is the computer game your own dad played (unless you yourself are Dad).

You may have seen him slumped over the communal Gateway, methodically clicking a gummy mouse as he adjusted his bifocals. You might have heard him muttering a string of numbers to himself while cracking open a third Diet Coke.

Myst and its attendant rituals were a source of endless fascination in my home. My dad usually played it at a witching hour only partially accessible to me, in the desperately elastic minutes before bedtime. I’d catch the haunting notes of the game’s music box intro, followed by that familiar whoosh. I’d glimpse ocean, gears, and bookshelves. The next morning I’d flip through his Official Journal and survey the fresh entries, scribbled in his indiscernible type, accompanying some impossible diagram.

Because my dad is not precious about his stuff and likes it when people are interested in his doings, and probably determined that a seven-year-old could wreak little havoc on a save file in which death is impossible and progress requires logical thought, he gave me free reign to Myst at my pleasure.

I went everywhere; I examined everything. I was never able to leave whatever stage he happened to be on, as I considered the game’s puzzles fundamentally unsolvable. But I flipped switches and redirected pipes. I lingered on the composition of each frame. I listened to the game’s eccentric sound effects.

Mostly I referred to my dad’s copious notes, trying to decipher what he had already deciphered, laboring diligently to spot something he might have missed. My mission was the mission of any kid who craves refrigerator glory — acknowledgement, praise — but as a Wasp, my need felt more acute. That’s because congratulations are the standard units of affection in any Wasp household. Embarrassed by love, Wasps prefer to confine its expression to those moments of objective achievement or surmounting. It’s easier for a Wasp to say “great game!” than “I care about you”; this is what draws us to racquet sports.

At seven, I wasn’t a budding athlete. But I was smart, or felt smart, and I knew my dad was smart, and I spent a lot of energy on the matter of bridging our smarts, of signaling to him that in my squash-incapable body was a more than capable mind, a fully-formed personhood worthy of his attention. Academics offered a roundabout path to that goal — and of course there was the time-honored tactic of constantly telling him my opinions.

But Myst was a novel and irresistible vehicle for dad seduction. It was, crucially, something he already enjoyed; it was one of his few recreations that I could even fathom, unlike reading the Financial Times or smoking a cigar on a lawn chair in the driveway. And it provided a whole world to engage with: an aesthetic vocabulary that only he and I had access to. It was the perfect bonding agent for father and son.

Myst itself, meanwhile, is a game about fathers and sons — or one father, Atrus, and his two large adult sons, Sirrus and Achenar. The game begins, memorably, with your sudden appearance on the titular island. You discover a message from Atrus meant for his wife Catherine, in which he summarizes the story’s prompt: his library of dozens of books “linking” to various worlds has been destroyed by one of their two boys. He is attending to the matter presently. Catherine, stay put.

You are not Catherine, and perhaps you feel mildly uncomfortable at the thought of insinuating yourself into a private family matter. Nevertheless, you’re trapped here until you do something about it. This becomes abundantly clear when you realize that you are totally alone on the island.

So you check out the library and verify its charred contents. You meet Sirrus and Achenar, who are each trapped in a color coded volume and who are not unruly teenagers, like you supposed, but grown men with facial hair. They call out at you through thick static, imploring you to recover and replace the torn pages of their books so they can escape their tiny prisons. (These sequences — no matter what your age in 1994 — are starkly terrifying.)

It bears noting that while Myst is mostly remembered for trailblazing graphics and an almost lyrical evocation of loneliness, its premise is conventionally domestic: powerful fathers, errant sons.

As you hunt down the brothers’ lost pages, you learn more through found letters and journals. Atrus is a polymath who can write entire worlds into existence through an ancient tool known as the Art. Half godhead, half cartoonishly potent novelist, he is a meticulous observer of his creations — freely travelling among them and befriending their indigenous societies. He brings Sirrus and Achenar along on these excursions and educates them in the Art, but things predictably Go Sideways when the sons develop a taste for omnipotence. They scheme to kill their father and usurp his position as universal patriarch, but end up betraying each other before Atrus catches on and imprisons them.

If this all sounds positively Greek, that’s because it is. Classical tropes abound in Myst. The name Atrus even echoes Atreus, father to sons Agamemnon and Menelaus and head of the cursed house that bore his name, and which was doomed by the gods to suffer repeated instances of family murder.

Sirrus and Achenar themselves, from what you can gather, live like wayward Wasp youths: pursuing decadent pleasures in the shadow of daddy’s success, bouncing between vacation homes, harassing the help. They come to represent distinct subtypes. Achenar’s messy chambers are littered with instruments of torture and war, whereas Sirrus keeps his four poster beds neat and his syringes hidden. Achenar raves at you like a lunatic while Sirrus drips with deference. As villains, they’re convincingly sketched, but as agents in the family drama, they exist only in relation to Atrus; where he is deliberate, compassionate and rational they are impetuous, heartless and deranged. Restoring either of their books results in your swapping places with that brother and losing the game. The only possible salvation, of course, is through Atrus.

Sirrus and Achenar are failsons, destined to compare unfavorably to their maker. They suggest the inherent risks of structuring the family around the family business, and the dark side of dad-worship: if you can’t beat ’em, despair.

Brilliant but remote father figures occupy a literary category all their own, and consciously or not, Myst was among the first video games to broach that venerable topic. Although at the time I grasped none of these cultural nuances, the impulse to alternately reach for and rebel against the Dad Unit was one I would grapple with for years.

Catherine’s total absence from Myst is briefly alluded to in the game’s “good” ending, when Atrus mentions that his wife is trapped on a different world, thus laying the runway for Myst’s beloved sequel Riven. (“Your princess is in another castle.”) But as I played the game’s 20th anniversary re-release, I wondered just where the hell she was — and how many moms and daughters might have wondered the same thing. To its credit, Riven does introduce these female characters. But it also doubles down on Myst’s formula: its antagonist is Atrus’s father.

After untold hours of inept sleuthing, my seven-year-old self finally did solve a puzzle. It happened basically by accident. I recorded it carefully in my dad’s journal and then ran to go find him. When he confirmed that it worked, he praised me up and down.

It made my week.

I write sporadic, minimally researched essays on topics in gaming that interest me. Follow for more, and in the immortal words of Jeb!, please clap.