PYST: Сатиралық ойын және «Мист» аралының пародиязы

1997 video game

Pyst (stylised as PYST) is an adventure computer game released in October 1996. with Bergman, Stallone, Inc. as co publisher. Mindscape began distributing the game on August 20, 1997. The parody features full motion video of actor John Goodman as "King Mattruss", the ruler of "Pyst Island". Versions of the game were produced for both the Windows PC and Apple Macintosh operating systems. Parroty Interactive was a division of Palladium Interactive, whose other brands included Ultimate Family Tree and Palladium Kids. Parroty intended to create National Lampoon esque "humorous CD ROMs, web sites and other forms of interactive comedy". This title served as Parroty's debut game in the interactive parody space, which would be followed by games such as their Star Wars parody Star Warped.

The basic concept of Pyst was to show what Myst Island (from the best selling game) would look like after four million people (that game's players) had visited and "explored". A spokesman from Broderbund said the company was unfazed by the project, commenting "We've seen imitators and they usually just give us a good chuckle". Firesign Theatre website Firezine said that the game was illustrative of Bergman's ability to "survey America's culture and obsessions like a maniacal monitor reflecting the absurdness of it all, while casting his iconoclastic eye to read the entrails of the present coarse and our delirious future". John Goodman plays "King Mattruss", the ruler of "Pyst Island". The 2004 book Game Work: Language, Power, and Computer Game Culture noted that this was an example of the then recent trend of famous actors starring in digital movies within games. Goodman and Bergman had worked together in radio, while Goodman also had appeared on the Proctor and Bergman Comedy Service series prior to Pyst. The game was "highly successful"; in 1997 Palladium's vice president of marketing Rob Halligan said Pyst was "tremendously successful last Christmas and continues to sell well". the game being the first product by Palladium to include dial up access to AT&T WorldNet Service. Hal Josephson, executive producer for Pyst, said there were very few business models at the time for how to make money online. In 1998, after Parroty's acquisition by The Learning Company, Palladium founder and chief executive officer Ed Bernstein said "it was a fun business, but not terribly lucrative".

Pyst Island is full of litter, most of the buildings are ruined, and graffiti reveals secret doors and solutions to puzzles that challenged players in Myst. Pyst utilizes three dimensional graphics, animated drawings, and pre recorded video and audio. Gameplay is a simplified version of the playing style used for Myst. The game consists of a series of pre rendered, interactive visuals of Pyst Island locations. With Bergman's "seal of disapproval", the concept is that the familiar Myst locations have been vandalized by millions of virtual players who have been trapped on the island, having "giv[en] up on trying to finish the damn thing", and as a result have trashed the space, while a shady entrepreneur has built a "Dorian Grey money making scheme". The game does not feature the Myst style point and click interface. Instead, the players are shown an image on a postcard with four arrow keys, on the edges, that players click to change the image on the postcard. The player moves through the scenes clicking the lateral arrow keys; clicking the upper and lower arrow keys two postcards are shown for every scene, all featuring a special Pyst currency in a stamp, stylised as "5F".

The game received mixed reviews. While noted for its novelty as one of the first parody video games, Pyst was seen as not living up to its full potential as a parody of ripe and timely subject matter and was criticised for lacking in gaming content, being more of an interactive story than a game. Electric Playground praised the game for having a "cheeky attitude and an irreverence" not found in the source material. Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture wrote that Pyst challenges the central conceit of Myst, whereby the "untouched landscape" navigated by a "lone trailblazer" is reimagined as a popular, commercialised tourist attraction. PC Primer thought it was "side splitting" and "light hearted". MacGamer gave it the distinction of being the first parody video game, and deemed it a "mildly amusing, short lived parody with no gaming component". Electric Games unfavourably compared it to an older, and in its opinion better, parody entitled Mylk due to the latter being free and having gameplay. Computer World thought that the game offered salvation to the multitude of players who remained perpetually stuck on Myst Island. The Sunday Mirror thought Goodman was "at the core of the game". The Daily Mirror thought it was a good alternative to those stumped by Myst, describing it as "not really a game but a lot of fun". Salon said the game "cheerfully capitalizes on that frustration" of playing the mysterious and elusive Myst, and added that the "emergence of full scale parodies" like this was a sign of the video game industry's "arid decadence". Electronic Design called the game a "wacky parody" that reimagines the well known island as something out of an industrial nightmare. In the Eyes of the Setting Sun deemed it "satirical", while BusinessWeek thought all of Parroty Interactive's work was "hilarious". Billboard found it to be funnier than Myst and "all too short". Plotting New Media Frontiers thought that the existence of parody games demonstrated that "generic conventions are well established and part of the culture associated with computer game playing", citing Pyst as a prime example. Computer Shopper said the title was "no holds barred" and "pulls no punches" in its odd sense of humour, and deemed it a favourable alternative to those who were annoyed by Mysts "inscrutable puzzles". Emil Pagliarulo of The Adrenaline Vault saw Pyst as an example of how Parroty Interactive made games that were "completely original simply by capitalizing on unoriginality". PC Gamer said that Pysts two main problems were that it was not funny as a parody of Myst, and that it was not so much a game than a "series of rendered slides in sequence". Giant Bomb writer Alex Navarro thought he had not enjoyed the game's humour in his youth as he had not played Myst; he retrospectively claimed that the game was "not a very good parody". K. R. Parkinson of Adventure Gamers wrote that the game "ultimately comes up lacking in its attempt to lampoon its best selling target of derision". BrutalMoose felt the game was a good idea wrapped up in a bad execution. A reviewer from Game Revolution gave it a scathing review, deeming it "pathetic". Entertainment Weekly described it as a "pretension busting romp through a ripe for puncturing cult classic", comparing it to Mad magazine's 201 Min. of a Space Idiocy parody of A Space Odyssey. PC Multimedia & Entertainment initially thought the game was a "stupid idea", but upon playing it found it to be a "very funny multimedia presentation". The Daily Pennsylvanian concluded their review by saying that while Myst sucked the player in, Pyst "just plain sucked". Andy Oldfield of The Independent thought the game was merely a "series of puns and visual gags", not a proper parody. HardcoreGaming101 felt the game only had 30 minutes of gameplay.

The game is considered by many to be the earliest parody video game and the first parody of the Myst series. However, a free "homage" game entitled Mylk was created by Bart Gold using Macromedia Director and released earlier. Mylks PC version was by Wayne Twitchell. The plot of this game involves a "dairy cow fall[ing] through a crevice to a ranch". The Mysterious World of Missed, or Missed, was developed by Jason Bloomberg. Daniel Rosen of Built To Play thought the game was a predecessor to exploration video games like Gone Home and Dear Esther. A demo of the planned sequel to Pyst, Driven (an allusion to the Myst sequel Riven), was included on CD ROMs of later Parroty Interactive games, including the "Pyst Special Edition" re release of the game.