They say a lot of things.
What is Ryven
In 1998, a Myst enthusiast named Justin Fisher built something quietly remarkable: a fully explorable, first-person web game inspired by the puzzle adventure Riven (Cyan, Inc.). Hosted on Geocities under the name Ryven — "The Imitation of Myst" — it let visitors navigate a 3D rendered world through clickable image maps, complete with ambient audio, a hidden crane puzzle with animations, and a companion journal for the actual Riven.
It lived at geocities.com/SoHo/Gallery/3210/. However,
it stopped working sometime in 2004, and Geocities as a whole was taken
down in 2009, leaving only traces of the world in the Wayback machine.
This Restoration
I ran into Justin in a Reddit thread where Myst fans were reminiscing about the ages that fans used to create and put online. (Navigating fan-built worlds like this one and figuring out how to make my own was a big part of my own Myst fandom during my formative years, leading to a life of doing computer stuff!) It turns out that Justin still had the original files, but the HTML was kind of messed up. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine had a somewhat working version archived. This project brings both together into a fully working archive.
Enter the Archive
Restoration progress
Done
- Used a script to crawl the Wayback Machine to pull down the most recent valid HTML copies of all pages.
- Synthesized Justin's original files with Wayback captures into a unified directory, preferring originals where both existed.
- Fixed up filenames, paths, etc to get all links and images to work properly.
- Made this "about" page :)
- Fixed the link from the tunnel to the best-archived version of the crane puzzle
- Got the crane puzzle working
- Removed Wayback Machine JS cruft
- Adjusted anchor elements to use "display: block" in order to ensure within-page scrolls go to the top rather than the middle of images.
- Created a "remastered" version with modernized single-page-app-style javascript and media embeds, QA'd it
- Share with the world
Still to do
- I think the project is done! If you find bugs or want help with getting a Myst age of your own online, email riv@purpleshiny.net
AI disclaimer
I used Claude Code for some of the "gruntwork" in this project--writing Powershell scripts to find-and-replace so that I didn't have to, for example. And it did a lot of the heavy lifting on the remaster. I empathize with many in the Myst community who feel trepidation about LLMs--I feel it too. At the same time, I also find certain utilitarian ways of working with them which (I believe) do not displace the important work that artists and other creative people do in the world. If any and all LLM usage bothers you, I'd prefer if you just move along instead of flaming me, as I've heard the arguments before (and debate them within myself frequently). Thanks!