The 1993 point-and-click puzzle game Myst, produced by game design studio Cyan, captured the hearts of a generation. The fan base demonstrated their love for game's design and style with sales that all contributed to make the game the highest-grossing PC game until The Sims finally beat it in 2002. But as Cyan works on producing their next game, Firmament, these same fans are preparing to meet for the 20th annual Myst convention, called Mysterium.

Myst changed the landscape of computer games, highlighting the value of puzzles and mysteries over flashy action and combat mechanics. It's often credited with bringing CD-ROM games into the mainstream and was responsible for its share of CD-ROM sales. The game follows a nameless, bodiless character, dropped into an unknown world and presented by a steampunk version of a video voicemail with a task: find the missing pages of some broken books. Players travel to five different worlds in the original game, each with an entirely different aesthetic and mechanic for returning home. With little environmental guidance, players must solve a series of puzzles to find the missing pages and return them to the main world.

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Some combination of the often punishingly difficult puzzles and the abandoned, steampunk world of the original game quickly forged a band of superfans, whose devotion to the game allowed for the creation of a series of sequels. As technology improved, the single viewpoint games were eventually reconfigured to allow for a free roam of the richly crafted environment. The production company Cyan even flirted briefly with the world of MMORPGs, though the isolated nature of the game never translated well into this shared virtual world.

Despite this draw of the solitary adventurer in an abandoned world, Myst found itself with a fan base eager to collaborate, to share their love for the game and the worlds it created. Since 2000, fans have been gathering during the first full weekend of August to celebrate the series at the Mysterium convention. Aided by the creation of a book series and a tabletop RPG, expanding and canonizing aspects of the lore of Myst (along with the cultures and language), convention attendees worked to dive deeper into Cyan's worlds.

Patterned after larger conventions, each Mysterium features a number of panels on topics ranging from the composition of the music for the games to the crafting of intricate wooden versions of the material cultures depicted in the games. Cyan, the game studio responsible for Myst and its sequels, often talks with the crowd, and in some cases offers tours of its Spokane, WA headquarters.

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Myst pool with trees

But the real draw of Mysterium is its puzzles. This is a convention for self-described puzzle addicts, after all, who have chosen to stan a series of games with mechanics based entirely on puzzles. Any given convention, attendees may have the option to participate in everything from home-brewed escape rooms to city-wide scavenger hunts, and puzzles of all sorts are the norm. Attendees have the option of joining in on a session of Unwritten, the tabletop roleplaying game set in the worlds of Myst, for an immersive puzzle-solving fix, and can watch speedruns of many games within the series.

As with more well-known conventions, Mysterium also features cosplay, with many attendees bringing different characters from the series to life. This includes some characters originally portrayed by the game designers themselves and who once appeared as full-motion video capture, as well as the polygon-ed creations of the multiplayer online game Uru. Though most characters wouldn't look too out of place in 2020, the cosplay does feel more at home around the tables of folks crafting inventions out of boxes of junk and passing notes in constructed languages.

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While the convention remains relatively small, drawing crowds of a couple hundred at its largest, it has proven resilient. Like many 2020 conventions and activities, this year's Mysterium was impacted by COVID19 and has moved to the virtual world. While the shared space of the convention hotel won't be available, participants will still be able to attend panels via Mysterium's dedicated Twitch channel. And, to imitate the general convention feel, the group also runs a Discord server, allowing for synchronous chatter and breakout groups even during the panels.

Regardless of whether it's happening in physical or virtual space, Mysterium offers fans of the Myst series a place to embody the famously bodiless protagonist of the game and live out their own adventure. Without treading the same ground as the puzzles and mysteries already written into the canon, the convention invites attendees, at least for a couple of days, into the worlds of Myst.

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