Linking Book

This is one of those "I'm finally a good enough artist to get this picture out of my head" images.
I'll probably add more to it later, but for now I'm calling it done.

The game Myst changed my life.
Sounds corny, I know, but it did.
I first ran across the game in second grade, when it had just come out.
It flat-out blew my mind.
The D'ni 's strange mix of magic and science (It was years before I knew the word steampunk, but I was hooked on it then and there), the way solutions were always hidden in plain sight, the satisfation of cracking that stupid "power line switches" puzzle after three days of frustration, and graphics that were so far ahead of their time they still don't look too shabby even by today's standards.
(Think about that for a second. This was a time when the cutting edge of home video games was the Super Nintendo's pseudo-3d backgrounds, and they made a 3d, open-world game. Yeah.)

But what kept me coming back was the Ages and the story they told, of a man who could create books that could take you to another world, and his sons who abused that power. The very idea of describing a world so completely that it became real (or perhaps opened the door to a place that already existed) was something I had never even contemplated before- and the idea that it could have a life beyond you... Even as a second grader, I knew that it wasn't really possible to create a "real" linking book... but it could be fun to try.

I played all of the series, and each game left me more inspired than the last: the unstable worlds of Riven, the elegant and interlaced worlds of Exile, the haunting prison and sanctuary worlds of Revelation, the quietly crumbling worlds of End of Ages- and I await the day that a new Age is written. Each one of the games in the series is a lesson in world building, and how worlds can rise and fall on the flap of a butterfly's wings.

To this day I think of every world I create in my concepts as a world linked to by a linking book. The world of the Greening Wars, the world of the rekindled dragons, the world of the "Divided Souls Saga" I created with my brother... all lit in part with the spark that Myst ignited in my imagination.