The Myst Journals is a short story I wrote based on the Cyan game Myst. In actuallity, the story itself is an entire walkthrough of the game from start to finish. Needless to say, hints and solutions will be revealed. If you don't want any hints on how to play, then don't read this. If you do want hints, or otherwise just want to read along, go ahead.
If you are looking for just a walkthrough I'd recommend going to another site. The main purpose of this site is to tell a story, not to give out all the clues at once.
The hero in this story is as non-descript as possible. The name, origin, gender, and age of the hero is never revealed in an attempt at putting the reader in the shoes of the hero himself (or herself?) I have created a slight background to the hero for the purposes of character development.
What you are literally reading, is the journals of the hero written down after the completed journey through Myst Island and the accompanying Ages. The path to the finish isn't exactly straight, as the hero sometimes makes mistakes and draws the wrong conclusions from the evidence at hand.
While the name of the Age D'ni has never really been spelled out in the game, those of you that browsed through the directories on the CD-ROM will notice it is spelled Dunny. Accoring to a contact at Cyan, the change was made because the word Dunny happens to be a slang word in another country. (And I won't say what it means, either.)
For those of you who have read The Myst Journals before version 1.0, you will notice that I changed the ending. In all honesty I think it was for the better.
When the original ending was written, it wasn't fully clear what the limitations on the linking books were. I'm not going to spoil bits and pieces from The Book of Atrus but let's just say that linking back to Earth would be a difficult thing to do.
So, I decided to get the creative juices flowing and try a different ending. I'm not going to spoil the ending here, but I will say that I think this new ending will help the Hero to appreciate the beauty of Atrus' work, and prepare him/her more for the adventures to come.
Besides, after I experimented with the new ending, I realised that the original one was a bit sappy, and reminded me too much of The Wizard of Oz.
The original text was written, edited, and spell checked with MS Works on an IBM PC. The files were then saved in text format and transferred to this Unix system. The linefeeds were added with the fold command. The HTML codes were manually added using the pico editor.
For viewing this document your Web browser should support tables. All the table code at this site is strictly HTML 3.0 (no Netscape or Internet Explorer extensions).
The background is a backdrop I found on the Netscape web site. It's called grey_marble2 I beleive.
The banner image is a GIF image created with Microsoft Painbrush. The GIF conversion was done with Microsoft Imager and the transparancy was done with GifTrans.
The fonts used in the banner are Eurostyle Extended, Heritage, and Serpentine.