In April of 2018 Cyan Worlds announced that they were launching a Kickstarter for the 25th Anniversary of Myst. As a long time fan of the franchise I was extremely excited that my absolute favorite game of all time was being re-released along with all of it’s sequels. As a part of the campaign, backers would receive a replica of the Myst Linking Book which would house a video Linking Panel, physical copies of each game, and a replica of Gehn’s Inkwell.
It was a dream come true! The book, the games, the possibility of never before seen content! I made my selection as a backer and watched as Cyan absolutely crushed their goal. Now all I had to do was wait for delivery which was sometime in November… I could not wait to get my hands on that book!
Kickstarter backers had began to tag photos with #Myst25 out on the ‘internet’ in order to unlock Community Goals.
Stuff we’ve been collecting for the better part of 20 years started to surface. It has been glorious. There are two pins pictured above that you can get here. They. Are. Beautiful. Now available in copper.
With all the sharing I was reminded of Myst enthusiast, and all around cool dude, Rium+’s project of a replica book that actually plays the games and is by far the best replica I have ever seen. It’s so good, in fact, that Cyan scanned his book and used it in the realMYST Masterpiece Edition. If you haven’t seen it, there’s more about that here. I was inspired! Thus began my quest.
My idea was to take some of the Flyby’s and put them on a Raspberry Pi for playback. If I wanted to load the games I could figure that part out later. I was looking at this project through the lens of a prop collector. A prop collector with limited funds…
Because I am very patient man, I immediately went out and purchased a few copies of Harpers New Monthly Magazine. Not the famed Volume 54, but copies I wouldn’t mind destroying while I figured out what it was I really wanted to accomplish.
I purchased a few things to help clean up the books. Cellugel to help preserve the leather on the spine and Absorene to help clean the dirt and dust built up over the years. Applying the Cellugel to the aged cracked leather was like applying lotion to dry feet… The Absorene was hard to manipulate at first as it has a Play-doh like consistency in that you really have to work it in your hand before you want to use it on the book. It helped to clean up the ends of the pages where dust had been collecting up from being shelved for 100+ years.
The Pi Situation:
I decided to go with a Raspberry Pi, a compatible Touch Screen, a 32GB memory card, and a portable battery pack to power the Pi. I would cut out enough space in the book for the hardware, preserving some of the pages towards the front, and cut out a window where you could access the touch screen to activate the video.
I would have to gut this book to see how these components would fit. I’ve cut into books in the past, but the pages in this book are thinner, and delicate. I didn’t want to do any damage to the exterior. I spent a lot of time looking at this set up and considering if this was the route I wanted to take as I wasn’t truly happy with the hardware. So, it looks alright, I guess?. You get what you pay for. The battery pack is pretty big. The Pi and HDMI elbow connected to the LCD is clever. I was happy with the results so far but I wasn’t blown away. The viewing angle is not good at all, you had to be looking straight at the screen to see the image. I decided to put any cutting on hold until I decided what to do.
The Brochure
At my last job, one of my many tasks was delivering mail for the office. Part of that task would require that I go out to our old office, check for leaks, mice, and any mail that may find its way there by mistake. Sometimes packages, almost always junk mail, would mysteriously appear on the old reception desk. One day a package from Salesforce appeared addressed to no one, for a company that was acquired by the company we had acquired, at least 10 years gone. On any other day I would have simply tossed the package out. For some reason, who knows why, I would open this one. It felt different. I’m glad I did…
It was a video brochure about a new Salesforce product. For those who are unfamiliar with what a video brochure is, I’ve got a sample here.
It had a 5″ high resolution full color LCD with an absolutely stunning viewing angle. It plays audio, and does all of this when you open it. I would, of course, be showing you the original had I taken any video of it whatsoever. Why? I was so excited by my discovery that I rushed to gut and strip out each and every component to build this:
Here’s the run down. Using a piece of foam board I carved channels to run the cables through. I ‘peeled’ out the foam from the board leaving behind the card layer so that I could cut fit in the speaker, reed switch, USB cable and battery. Although, the back looks like a mess, it worked out really well.
At the time I put this all together the Kickstarter Myst book had no estimated time of arrival. I found some videos on YouTube of the Flybys but I decided instead to obtain the in-game media. Using disc images of each game I used an app called ‘Riveal‘ to extract the video files from Revelation, Riven and Exile. With the Myst I was easily able pull off the .mov files and convert them Quicktime. Using the USB connection built onto this ‘board’ I was able to connect it to my desktop and drop the video files into the “video” folder. The content for the Kickstarter book is now available directly from Cyan. Unfortunately, they do not include the Revelation FlyBys. I’ve uploaded them here.
The inside. 
Less the hardware. 
With hardware.
The Semi-Finished Product
Now, it’s not finished quite yet! I have yet to apply the paint to the cover, and to decide if I want to modify the spine to add the same text. After all, this was always intended to be a prototype.
Just some heads up – the paper in these books is cheap, low-grade newspaper-style paper with randomly cross-linked short fibres. As you’ve no doubt found already, the last 140-ish years have made the paper brittle and a little crumbly, and there’s a lot of variability from book-to-book depending on how they were stored over the past century. It’s very hard to cut it with a clean edge using a knife, but the best technique I found was to slice the paper roughly first, then do it a second time much slower with a fresh knife blade.