Village Roadshow Entertainment Group put the word out on Wednesday for their latest acquisition of film and TV rights to best-selling video game, Myst. The game first took off in 1993 from the minds of sibling creators Rand and Robyn Miller through their company, Cyan. The brothers will partner with Village Roadshow to develop and produce alongside co-creator Ryan Miller, as well as Isaac Testerman and Yale Rice at Delve Media.
Apart from its 10,000 year-long canonical history, Myst primarily follows Atrus, a brilliant (if a bit naïve) grandson of Anna, a woman who triggers a world-shaping set of events when she discovers the D’ni civilization in a cavern deep below the New Mexico desert. The D’ni have a unique ability to write books that can link to other worlds. The discovery of their ability and the clash of cultures is the catalyst for novels and games.
Until 2002, Myst was the best-selling PC game of all time, and to date the franchise has sold over 15 million copies worldwide. Myst spawned several successful sequels including the critically acclaimed Riven in 1997. A series of Myst novels were also published. The books vividly explore the lives and backstories of the game’s characters.
Village Roadshow will take a full-scale approach to developing Myst across all divisions, relying on and expanding upon the game’s existing mythology to develop a multi-platform universe including film, scripted and unscripted television content. The key move comes following the appointment of CEO Steve Mosko, offsetting a new mandate backed by controlling shareholder, Vine Alternative Investments, to transform into a broad-spectrum content creator with an emphasis on TV, streaming and other emerging distribution platforms.
This move complements its business of developing and co-financing feature films including the upcoming release of Warner Bros.’s Todd Phillips-directed Joker on October 4, 2019.
The Myst game saga is credited as a one of the first examples of video games being described as art, and it is often sighted as having been a key influence on many contemporary creatives in diverse entertainment areas including video games, television, and motion pictures.