Myst 3: Exile, Revisited

Recently I came across an article in a Catholic publication that talked about the increased sense of wonder and attention to detail that the author developed from playing the video games in the Myst series.  
In traversing the lands in Myst, searching for clues to unlock the mysteries, "nothing is meaningless," says the author.  "All points to a pattern beyond itself."   I now know that life is like that: complex and full of meaning, and it rewards efforts to find what is below the surface.

I played Myst 3: Exile when it first came out, before Seth died.  In playing I would lose track of time navigating its scenery and machinery; and more often than I like to think, two hours would go by before I came up for air. I was new to video games.  (Even now, except for a very few small forays, Seth's games are the only ones I have played.)  But it was so beautiful, so haunting, that images from it still appear in dreams and in my vision at other odd times.  I was very disappointed--though also slightly relieved--when I had to get a new operating system, and it would not support Myst.  The beauty and draw of it, and the duties that called to me were irreconcilably at odds.

When I found the article referenced above, it gave me a rationale for looking to see if  it could still be had, and played on Windows 10.  The answers were Yes, and Yes.  And it could be had for under $10.  So I bought it, from GOG Galaxy.  

Now, as an old lady, and a non-gamer, I am sure I don't know anything that my readers don't know, but since I found it, I thought other people who might have wanted to reconnect with this intricate and compelling game would be happy to know that even the likes of me can find and install it.   

One more thing.  The first age, J'nanin, was designed by Seth.  (He also designed the last age, Narayan.)  When I was playing Exile the first time, I expressed my frustration to Seth that though I could walk all over the island, I couldn't figure out how to open anything.  He said, "It might help to make a map of the island."  That was all the clue he would give me, but it was enough.

Floweringnose Day 2021

We have all this artwork that Seth has done.  He was so good at what he did that it is possible to just indulge in baths of Seth art soup and fill yourself with it, slurping up all kinds of  pictures:

elegant drawings for Myst 3 Exile--  

comical, clever art with his signature perspective genius, coupled with great visual storytelling in the two part Doom Patrol series,

his own designs for weird spacecraft,

a museum full of art lovers,

the weirdest of all his weird drawings: a scene both horrific and comical, where Our Hero has no chance whatever to escape (even the sun has it in for him) but he remains serene as he contemplates it all,

an absolutely fabulous fight scene, involving four people, where the action is completely clear, in which there are no right angles

 

a calm scene of fishing from a rock in Japanese waters,

or many others.  

In his pictures there are many different life perspectives, different styles, different moods, different 

speeds, different attitudes.  He was able to immerse himself in any of them, and enjoy them.  It was all Life, and that was what it was all about: Life.  

His artwork is so compelling that now we may be tempted to say that it is enough.  And of course, it has to be.  The man is gone.  But I'd like to offer a link to a conversation he had with interviewer Mike Jozic in 2004.  It gives a little flavor of what it was like to be with him:

Mike Jozic interview from 2004

 

 

FLOWERINGNOSE DAY 2020

Here are some of Seth's drawings for Myst3: Exile.  Little sketches for places on the main island, or world.  Very Art Nouveau elegant.  I don't remember exactly if these got used or not; it's been a few years since I have played the game, and now the technology has changed and I can't get it to run.

And below are some drawings that I found in a little spiral notebook: stuff that makes you laugh.

Ah well.  Let us continue to do our own work and thank God for Seth whose life and work continues to inspire.

Creating new universes

"I need to produce great ideas, and I believe that if I were asked to design a new universe, I would be mad enough to undertake it."  --Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720--1778)

We just came back from an exhibition at the San Diego Museum of Art on the work of Piranesi, who produced hundreds of exceedingly detailed engravings of architecture, ruins, cityscapes, sarcophagi, as well as maps, drawings of furniture, details of architectural flourishes, and his own architectural fantasies.  Some of the most intriguing drawings are the title pages of his books, in which the title is engraved on a fallen stone, which is surrounded with  other fallen stones, as well as bones, skulls, plants, people digging, whatever his wildly creative fancy could come up with.  Looking at picture after picture, I kept seeing Willworld, and other of the slightly skewed and often crumbling worlds designed by Seth Fisher.  If the centuries could somehow have been compacted, how Seth and Giovanni would have enjoyed each other's company.  Together I suspect they both would have taken on the project of designing a new universe.  

Their styles are different, but the delight in ornate details that you wouldn't necessarily find in your neighborhood is of a piece.  These two artists were brothers under the skin.
I suspect that Giovanni chuckled to himself, just as Seth did, as he drew in his street scenes the odd touches that make you look at his drawing and wonder, "Could that really be there, or did he make it up?"

Another little bit of kinship:

Not just the fact that both drawings have an arm stretching out to the right, but there is an otherworldy loneliness to them both, a sense of not quite belonging here.  People live in both high and precarious sites, but how do they get there?  Seth's drawing is a design for Myst 3 that was ultimately chucked, so it is less fully realized than the Piranesi one, but in both cases, the artist was trying for a mixture of recognizability and strangeness.  
It's where they lived.  

More from the archives of Myst 3 sketches

These two sketches from the tower at J'Nanin show Seth's understanding of architecture and of Art Nouveau architecture in particular. Art Nouveau was not just a matter of curving forms instead of right angles; it features stylized plant forms, balance, and proportion. The harmony between white space and busyness is a one of its hallmarks. Too much blank space and you have something that looks like a grain silo; too much busyness and you have Los Vegas for the eyes.

Good proportion makes your eyes happy: they want to just feast on the vision.

Both the sketches are views of the tower that is shown here in its final form. Like an architect Seth imagined and drew out even most of the hardware. My husband and I have done some home remodeling, and I know that there are some elements that I for one can ignore forever. And then I find that I have to make a decision about something I had never noticed before: "Do you want those hinges to be brass or stainless steel? --gloss or matte finish? --three screws or two?" But here they are--imagined in nearly all their detail in Seth's sketches.
I suppose that is what concept artists are paid to do. And it suited Seth's vision to imagine the detail work.

Myst 3 drawings

A kindly and observant Mystophile wrote to me this week to send me links to a couple of other places on the web where Seth's drawings had been posted--drawings that I had not put up myself. Here is one link he sent. And here is another (both put up without mention of Seth's name). With the aim of keeping this blog interesting, I had not posted ALL the drawings that I have. But it seems that people who love Myst really want to see everything. And I am glad to put something up here every month or so. So let me find a few drawings from Seth's notebook that I had not previously posted.

Here are some sketches of plants and animals for J'Nanin. The flowers I recognize. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the animals made it into the game.

Seth's drawing of the crab is quite a bit nicer than this scan. He didn't often use shading in his drawings, but he did on this, and his is far more subtle than what you see here: much lighter and rounder, even with as much softening as I could do on Microsoft Picture Manager and Picasa.
I don't remember seeing these half-buried bones in J'Nanin anywhere. But of course, at the time, I wasn't looking.

Myst 3: drawing for Narayan

I posted the above sketch on April 23 of this year, under the heading "Unused Sketches". A couple of weeks ago an alert (but anonymous) Mystophile noticed it, and sent me this color picture from Myst 3 below, of the game's final world Narayan, saying that what I had thought was an unused sketch was almost certainly instead a drawing for that world. As you can see...

As I told my reader, I played the game all the way through, but didn't remember this image at all.

a couple more Myst 3 sketches

Two sketches. The lower one is for something that definitely became part of the machinery in the game. Machinery didn't exactly come naturally for Seth, but he was pretty good at it. Most of his toys as a young child were the kind where you put things together, Legos and the like. And I have a little story. When Seth was 9 years old, I was divorced from his father and I met Bob, who I later married. On my first date with Bob, he invited both Seth and me for dinner at his condo. Seth finished dinner first, and disappeared into the bathroom. Later Bob told me that what Seth had been doing in there was taking apart Bob's shaver. He wanted to know how things worked.

So gears held no particular mystery for him. The gears in his drawing would probably in fact make an elevator go up and down, though I doubt that anyone playing the game would take the time to make sure they were right.

The other drawing is for something that I don't recognize. It must not have made the final cut, but it seems so particular that you would think I would know at least where it is supposed to be. My guess is that it is an early design for the lower room in the tusk on J'Nanin. The final one turned out quite different from this.

Myst 3 design: Narayan

These look like preliminary drawings for the last age, Narayan, which Seth also designed. He did the page of masks (maybe more), but then I don't think he ended up using them at all. As I said, it's been quite a few years since I played this game, and at the time I wasn't comparing the actual game with his drawings.

But it's clear, from both his sketches and from the photo of the room, that this was always intended as a room composed of twisted and sinuous ropes or branches of material, very organic in a surrealistic way. The final room is not nearly so complex as Seth's drawings. In designing a game--as well as designing architecture--it is not enough to make places that are beautiful and interesting; in this case the spaces also have to accomodate the puzzles and the story that takes place in the room. Everything must fit together.

Myst 3 unused sketches

This rather fabulous set of treehouses must have been one of the early permutations of the tower on J'Nanin. The final one is nothing like this, except that they are all rather ornate in that Art Nouveau style.

One thing Seth knew how to do was to brainstorm. The summer after his sophomore year in college he spent as an unpaid assistant at an advertising agency. He loved the work (and the agency got the most creative artist they had probably ever had, for nothing). He told me that what he learned there was that you couldn't have just one Great Idea; you had to have ten Great Ideas, and then they would choose from those. That lesson stayed with him. He knew how to keep pushing, to keep looking for different ideas. He also knew how to be willing to toss a great idea if it didn't work in this project.

More Myst 3 sketches!

I was going through boxes looking for some more notebooks of comic book work, (which I didn't find) and I found a whole notebook of sketches that Seth did for Myst 3, all carefully stored in those clear sheet protectors. So I'll post Myst 3 work for another few days.

It looks as if this sketch was pretty close to the final for the game, although the gears that Seth painstakingly drew do not appear in the color image. I don't remember if you can see them when you play the game (I played it seven or eight years ago.); maybe you can.

Tomorrow I'll post some sketches that did not make it into the finals. Seth probably saved them because he liked them and thought that maybe he would find another use for the structures and avenues he designed. And indeed it is possible that some of his Myst 3 creative ideas went through a slight metamorphosis and came out into Nimbus.

Myst 3 drawings: last time

While he was working on this, Seth asked me if I would like to design the flooring for the inside of the bottom story of the tower. It had to have three-way symmetry. I did what I thought was a pretty good design with some nice Celtic knotwork, but he was disappointed, and said that the knotwork was too obviously from a specific era and place. This setting was supposed to be outside our world. Above are a couple of Seth's own floor designs. In fact, the final floor design in the game turns out to be more muted than any of these, and does not call attention to itself in any way. (Then it was my turn to be disappointed. If they rejected my design, at least they could have come up with something beautiful and interesting. But I guess that was not the point.)

Below are some details he drew for the first era, none of which made the final cut.

Myst 3 tower plus sketch

This must have been getting closer to the final, because this tower is almost what was used in the game. Just the extra stuff on both sides was scrapped in favor of a more clean look which you can see in the view of the tower below. Seth fans will appreciate the doodle that he added on his drawing, of the slightly worried man with the carrot head, as well as the tower visitor with the motorcycle boots and polka-dot jacket.

Myst 3: some more preliminary towers

Here are two more towers that didn't make the cut. He is getting more finished with these; the drawings are polished and signed (though he rarely signed his comic book work). There are a lot of the same elements in the two I am showing here, and you can see that the tusks that dominate the landscape are visible in his drawings. When he finally decided that the tower itself should be built into a giant tusk, then the bells must have started ringing in his brain.

At the bottom is another view of the completed landscape.

Myst 3: a couple more early towers

As promised, here are two more tower sketches that didn't make it into the finals. The upper one must have been one of the very early ones, because it is nothing like the one that was finally agreed on. The second one is very close, but isn't made from a giant tusk.
Here, of course, is the final result of Seth's design, plus the marvelous engineering of the finish and 3-D guys.

More Myst 3 design drawings

The tower that is the central focus of the island in the first age of Myst 3 went through a number of permutations before it achieved its final look. The top image is one of the earliest of Seth's ideas for it.
I will post a few more of his tower designs soon, but I have a little something else to say before I do.

When Seth was a senior in college, he was given the opportunity to have a solo art show in a gallery space there. I flew out to Colorado to help him put it up, and to celebrate his first exhibition with him. We mounted about 20 of his drawings and hung them around the room. Among them was the drawing that is here at the bottom. I always thought it was a memorable image: quirky, mysterious, amusing, and a little bit melancholy. (The dark ink at the lower edge, by the way, is because my scanner is not quite big enough for the art board of the drawing. Seth's original is clean.)
So when I was going through these Myst 3 tower drawings, I was startled and tickled to see that Seth had also kept that image in his mind, and thought he might be able to give it a second life as part of Myst 3. He was a professional, however, and knew that no matter how much you may like a particular image, the work as a whole must take precedence. So the little brace screwed into the cliff face went into the "extras" file.

Myst 3 Exile design drawings

The originals of these drawings must be owned by Presto, Inc (though now that that entity doesn't exist, I don't know who has them), but Seth made photocopies of many of his Myst 3 design drawings, and it is a couple of those I am posting today. I would say that the year he worked at Presto (2000) was exceedingly productive for him, and gave him some tools that he continued to use in all his art. He was given the challenge of designing witty puzzles within buildings and landscapes that were beautiful to look at and interesting to walk through.
He had the great joy, which he expressed over and over, of working with other designers who were the best in the business. It was always a pleasure for him to knock heads with other artists he respected. With them he didn't have to hold back: he could throw out his wildest and most challenging ideas, and know that they would be met by minds that understood and could critique them intelligently.
Being a free lance artist is a solitary business. When he was drawing comic books, he sometimes drew 12 hours a day or more. He didn't seem to feel lonely (though it was hard on his wife); he was interrelating with his characters and his drawings. And when he stopped drawing to take a little r & r, he was entirely present to whomever he was with. Nevertheless, a community helps to build up a person, keep him whole; and Seth's community was fragmented, except for that one year with Presto. The friends he made there were friends forever.