The Myst™ series of games peaked, I think, with the creation of Myst Online: Uru Live® (now free to play), an early MMORPG and contemporary with then startup Second Life™. Since peaking Myst is heard from less and less with almost no news coverage now. The core fans still love it and post 20 to 50 comments in the forum each day.

Myst: Uru Live – By ddb174

In-game play will see a few concurrent players but there are times with maybe 50 concurrent players. That may change soon. For years fans have wanted to build ages (game play areas like SL’s private regions) and add them to the main Uru Live play. At this year’s Mysterium, an annual fan get together, Cyan Worlds, Inc., the creators of Myst, announced they plan to add some fan ages to the main online version of the game and possibly some content from other episodes of the Myst series.

This means that a pipeline for fans to deliver new content will finally after years be completed. This is supposed to happen in the next 12 months and the possibility of some content making it in this calendar year is suggested.

Some those of those working on adding fan content and making new game servers have blogs and forums where new activity is reported and discussed. See these sites:

Tweek

OOC Blog – http://invertedpixel.tumblr.com/
OOC Twitter – https://twitter.com/keithlord
Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/artofkeithlord

IC Blog – http://dniexplorer.com/
IC Twitter – https://twitter.com/dniexplorer

ChloeRhodes

This covers all the OOC stuff as far as my ages and DIRT and MOULa development stuff will go:
OOC DIRT Blog – http://thedeepcity.com
OOC Dev Twitter – http://twitter.com/DIRTUruLive
DIRT – Uru Live Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/DIRTUruLive
OOC Blog – http://gpnmilano.tumblr.com

And IC stuff
IC Blog – http://chloerhodesic.tumblr.com
IC Twitter – https://twitter.com/ChloeRhodes_Dni

There are over a dozen sites reporting happenings in the Myst community. The central site for news is the Guild of Messengers (GoMe). Guilds were an in-game/story thing from the online days of Myst that turned into both In-Character (IC) and Out of Character (OOC) fan groups. The GoMe is one such group that aggregates the community news and publishes it on a blog.

We will probably see some resurgence of interest in Uru Live. Whenever there is new content it seems to pull old time fans back. Once the new content is explored and the puzzles solved those fans are off to explore other worlds. It is hard to know how much interest will be shown or how long it will last. Nor is the rate of flow of fan content into the game knowable.

It is also hard to know how fan run shards, fan owned and operated servers running copies of the games with custom modifications, will fair. Will the current fan shards be like those in the ‘Until’ era? (A time when copies of the Uru Live were run semi-legally by fan groups.) It was a time with lots of drama. We can’t know what it will be like this time. But, the next year has the possibility of being an interesting year for the Myst fans.