Disney Once Planned a Park Based on Myst

If you’ve lived a cultured and varied gaming life, you’ll be familiar with the exploration game Myst. Originally released back in the 90s, Myst was quite the cult classic, and offered some of the most frustrating and unique puzzles I’ve ever seen in any game. Interestingly, the game also caught the attention of Disney, who were once in talks with Myst’s creators to build a theme park based on the weird world of Myst in Florida!

In an interview with Rand Millar spoke with AV Club, where he revealed that the Myst rumour was indeed true, and that Walt Disney World Resort had approached him about creating Myst Island.

AVC: Is it true that you and Disney were working together at one point to make a sort of real-world version of Myst Island?

RM: That was absolutely true. At some point, there were some really cool plans to do some stuff with Disney. We were looking at it as the ultimate incarnation of our world. Basically, there was a place down in Florida—it’s one of the island areas that they had that wasn’t used very much. But it had some walkways among trees, and an island area, and we went down and looked at it and walked around it, and it was incredibly Myst-like. It was perfect for Myst. So we were all excited. Their imagineering team was excited about embracing that and building some stuff into it and tying it into the rest of the park, where you could explore and have this real-world experience. But, the way Disney works, and the way it had to fit in with their bigger scheme of things, and the way we didn’t understand pieces of it, I think it fell apart from their point of view. That was a very exciting time. It was cool to try to pull that off.

It was an interesting idea, but for those who weren’t into complex and fairly obscure point and click 3D adventure games in the mid 90’s, the island would have just been some freaky island thing that didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but it’s still a shame it didn’t happen, as it would have been full of classic gaming charm and well worth a visit for fans of the series.