Fans of Myst can visit the mysterious island with friends almost 30 years after release of the original game to play a round of mini golf together.
The course inspired by Cyan’s landmark puzzle game is slated for release later this year as paid downloadable content in Walkabout Mini Golf. It’ll come with all the same features as other DLC releases, including cross-platform multiplayer from Quest to Steam and a guest pass that allows just one player with the purchased course to bring along their friends for a round. For developer Mighty Coconut, the partnership adds considerable momentum to its efforts to license properties for adaptation into theme park-like multiplayer mini golf courses following the previous announcement of a course inspired by 1980s Jim Henson film Labyrinth.
Myst, of course, was born in 1993 as a puzzle game set on a beautiful island players advanced through one click at a time. The title has been rebuilt multiple times, first as a real-time 3D environment and most recently for VR. Mighty Coconut’s head Lucas Martell sat down with us in our studio and shared some details about the upcoming release and the status of development at Walkabout.
“Our goal is not to recreate Myst itself and we need a different sort of set of things for physics and everything. So it’s going to be fairly accurate to the original, but we are going to have to be recreating a little bit of it and also there’s a few changes that we’re going to have to make to the island just to make it work as a mini golf course,” Martell explained. “So I think that that’s something that fans will get and understand, and we’re trying to be respectful and reverent of what was created, but at the same time, it is the mini golf theme park version. So there are some times where we need to move some rocks around and we need to open up a couple of spots to let people have the fun, but it’s still gonna be very, very recognizable as the island from the game.”
He confirmed the course will start on the dock — the same entry point for Myst since its start.
“We reached out to the folks at Cyan and it just happened to turn out that they had all been playing Walkabout anyways, so they knew about us, we obviously knew about them, and as soon as we started talking about it, it was clear that just like they have such a great mindset around it,” Martell told UploadVR. “It was great because they’re like, ‘oh no, we want you guys to have the freedom, make a few of those tweaks, it doesn’t have to be exactly the same thing.’ And we’ve all said that we don’t want it to try to step on the toes of what Myst did. We want this to be an homage and just a love letter to the game.”
Check out a 5-minute cut of our interview in the video embedded above. We didn’t include it in the Myst-focused video, but Martell confirmed to us that active work continues on an iOS and Android port of Walkabout Mini Golf that will feature cross-platform multiplayer with other versions. Mighty Coconut have more than half a dozen courses in development and are beginning to work on ideas that won’t release until 2023.
