re misty's post, one of my favorite "neener neener" subjects is, "not only was myst not the first CD game, or the first CD first person adventure puzzle game, it wasn't even the first 'photorealistic' prerendered 3D first person adventure puzzle game, and neither was the 7th guest" because The Journeyman Project came first
this isn't fair, necessarily. Journeyman is definitely in the same vein as Myst, you would call it a mystlike if you didn't know better, but TJP is a very different game - it's not a point-and-click, for one thing, the world is divided into grid spaces that you navigate using arrow keys to move and rotate, like a first person shooter. it also has a very different list of pros and cons.
Pros (entirely subjective):
- Tons of animations
- More photorealistic graphics
- Far more detailed and intriguing environments
- More involved story
- Possibly the earliest example in gaming history of "audiolog"-based storytelling
- Some puzzles are a little bit less bullshit
- Only one good ending, and it's very clear how to achieve it.
- The most incredible sound design in the history of videogames (I'm not shitting you, play it JUST to hear the SFX and music, please, it's SO IDIOSYNCRATIC)
Cons (entirely subjective):
- It is possible to lose.
- It is even possible to die; in fact, one of the best "easter eggs" is seeing all the ways you can die, since every possible death has its own humorous illustration.
- The story could be perceived as trite (I personally like it, but Time Travel Lol)
- Timed puzzles
- One puzzle actually requires knowledge of geography (this killed me at age 8, although I later realized you could bruteforce it fairly easily)
- One puzzle is fucking Mastermind (RIP to all uninspired myst clones)
- Inventory management
- Sometimes you can't complete a puzzle without an item that you don't realize you need, and which can only be obtained by completing a different level and coming back
- More complex UI
There are some other problems, but they don't matter in comparison to the showstopper: while Journeyman Project first came out in (ostensibly) January 1993, almost a year before Myst, it's initial release was nuked, in the warez sense.
the game was developed entirely in Macromedia Director, and was unplayably slow on the resource-choked Macs of the time. reportedly, it was actually impossible to complete on some machines due to certain puzzles running out of time no matter how fast the player attempted them.
Presto Studios set to work writing a new engine from scratch, and eventually delivered The Journeyman Project Turbo! (the exclamation is diegetic) which resolved all these problems... and released a year later. Months after Myst. By the time a playable Journeyman existed, Myst hype would have absolutely obliterated it.
I'm not saying that TJP would be regarded the way Myst is, for a lot of reasons. A lot of the reasons people liked Myst, notionally, have to do with the gameplay loop being "wander around in a bunch of peaceful little Places and poke at Things. no stakes." you can't lose Myst, you can't get stuck, you can only not progress, and some people found that they didn't even care about progressing.
now, as a perpetually angry little boy, that didn't interest me very much. I mostly played violent videogames, because they fit my desires to see a problem and solve it with brute force in the most immediately obvious way possible. TJP is more like that. Besides the step-and-fetch-it inventory-based puzzles, the game is overwhelmingly linear and the solutions to everything are obvious. You're also locked in a life and death struggle with named characters who you meet face to face and defeat in single combat (delivering very satisfyingly brutal death sequences, in fact.)
So compared to Myst, Journeyman is Quake. That's what I wanted, but I think Myst's success proved that it's not what everyone wanted, and thus the timing probably didn't really make that much difference. Besides that, I've always been a proponent of the idea that it does not matter what came literally first when you are talking about cultural influences.
someone was probably doing what the Beatles were doing, way before they were doing it, but it doesn't matter what happened in some apartment in Britain if nobody else heard it, for the same reason that it doesn't matter that dads across the world probably thought up the Segway way before anyone actually built one. Doesn't matter! If someone has a yellowed sketch that looks exactly like a Segway, dated 1993, that's an interesting curiosity, but it doesn't change The Conversation any. When someone says "the first", there is an implied "that anyone cared about."
This isn't to diminish Misty's post at all, partly because the mass success of Myst was also the first mass success of any computer game. It got a ton of people into Gaming who had never cared about it before, so if you're talking about what was influential, well, The Manhole was probably just as significant when measured against the total pool of people playing computer games when it came out. Myst changed the game, as it were, so I think discussing what predated it is totally relevant. The reason Journeyman tickles me however is just because, if you look at it next to Myst, it looks like a fucking 2021 Prius next to a Studebaker. to my eyes it is SO far ahead, so more sophisticated.
I'm not saying it's objectively better, but I'm certain it contains a lot more content, in terms of audio, video, sound, music, depth. The worlds are larger, richer, more interactive. They have moving, talking characters. There's certainly more script, and they had to have had hundreds of additional storyboards. And then there's just the technical realities.
There are interviews with at least one of the Millers talking about how Myst was nearly impossible to create due to the unbelievable amount of power needed to even draw a wireframe of Myst Island, let alone render an actual finished frame. They were using "render farms" made up of literally every machine they could get a hold of, and over the course of development they bought or borrowed more just to try to get across the finish line. So in the face of all that... what the hell could Journeyman's development have looked like?
TJP's graphics look a whole generation newer. The polygon count in any given scene is vastly higher. They use bigger, more layered textures, environment maps, even raytracing (as in, effects you can't readily achieve without raytracing, like reflection and refraction.)
The first realtime-rendered remake of Myst came out 7 years after the original game, but really could have come out like three years sooner and looked fine. Journeyman never got a realtime remake, but if it had, I think the earliest it could have been done well would have been, like, 2010.
Journeyman looks like it should have come out at least two years later. What was it rendered on?? What machine could handle that?? Even if they used a render farm, how big was it, what machines, where did they get the funding?? I have never really heard answers to these questions. Visually speaking, I feel like people should have been so Wowed by TJP that it ought to have gotten accolades on par with Myst solely on its technical merits. Instead... I've almost never heard anyone talk about it.
In fact, the original release is so uninteresting to the general public that up until last year, I had never even seen it. I have found hundreds of copies of The Journeyman Project Turbo! at thrift stores, but never, ever come across a copy of the original, unplayable mess from 93. Googling it, I couldn't even find a picture of the box; nobody had a rip of the disc. But I got lucky last year and found one on eBay. It didn't have the box, but it did have the disc and manual, so I bought it, ripped it, and uploaded it to Internet Archive, and you can try it yourself (on a contemporary Mac.)
Like I said, I don't think that TJP could have been more "important" than Myst, but given that I played it first, it has always been fascinating to me that it wasn't more culturally significant. I'm honestly not sure why it doesn't have a larger cult following.
one of my favorite things about co host (unironic) is that if you don't tag a post you can lose it forever, and that's fine. i could swear i've written about this game in the past but i can't find it so i just wrote it again! maybe i had a different perspective this time! that's how casual human communication usually works, we tell stories repeatedly, and half the value of the telling is in the subtle alterations with each telling. it's not like i want to accumulate the most Numbers on the original post anyway, so who cares if I make a new one



