A monumental follow-up, considered to be the highlight of the series.
Atrus needs your help to rescue his wife Catherine, who is trapped on the age of Riven, an age written by his mad father Gehn. A real-time 3D remake was released in 2024.
– Original game back of the box description
"Enter a deceptively beautiful world torn apart by age-old conflicts... where secrets lie hidden at every turn... and nothing is as it seems."
Miller established three leitmotifs for the game's three central characters, Atrus, Catherine, and Gehn. Gehn's theme is only heard in its complete form near the end of the game, but portions of the melody can be heard throughout Riven, highlighting his control of the Age. Miller tried to let the environment dictate the resulting sound in order to make the music as immersive as possible. He blended live instrumentation with synthesizers: "By mixing and matching conventional instrumentation, you can create an odd, interesting mood," Miller said. Ultimately, he wanted the music of Riven to reflect the game itself, which he described as having "a familiar-yet-strange feel to it."
Follows Atrus, his early youth with his grandmother Ti'ana, meeting his father Gehn, his study of the Art, and the events that lead up to where he meets his wife, Catherine in Riven and their journey to the island of Myst.
Set before the events of the first book, we learn about the origins of Atrus's family, his grandfather Aitrus with his parents Kahlis and Tasera. And Aitrus's meeting and marrying Ti'ana and raising their son Gehn.
Atrus, the last D'ni known to be alive, together with his wife Catherine and helpers finally manage to open the crumbled exit of the room in K'veer and gain access to all D'ni, setting out to find old linking books and survivors of The Fall.
Three novels were written between Myst and Riven to compliment their story. The events take place in this order:
Available as a digital collection, with "new copy and lore":
Amazon Kindle, Apple Books
Riven was initially released on five compact discs on October 31, 1997. And later, in 1998, a single DVD-ROM version came out. It was also released on a number of platforms including the Playstation and Sega Saturn.
While a Myst Masterpiece version was released with higher res renders, there was never one done for Riven. This was because a majority of original Riven data needed to do it was unfortunately lost.
The game was bundled throughout the years:
As early as 2009, there was a fan effort to remake Riven into a realtime 3D game, known as "The Starry Expanse Project". They used camera-matching efforts and texture comparisons to the original to recreate Riven, essentially from scratch.
In 2019 Cyan spoke with the team about officially remaking Riven, with permission to reference some of the work they had already did to help jump-start their efforts. The team stopped their development on The Starry Expanse Project and kept their meeting a secret until Cyan was ready to make an official announcement.
On the 25th anniversary of Riven, on October 31, 2022, Cyan announced that Riven was officially in development.
A year before the release of the remake, at Mysterium, the Myst fan convention, Rand Miller explained what the new version is about. He also brought out an artifact as an example of their level of thinking behind the new version, a metal plate with the Garo-hevtee, or "great words" in D'ni. And explained what the plate was used for: "After Atrus and Catherine fell into the fissure and realized the book would not be destroyed as planned, Gehn was left with a hole in the ground that was problematic. What we postulate is that he very quickly began to seal up the fissure."
"When we talk about Riven, it's because we're looking at documents and translating lore, getting more info about what happened. And the first generation of Riven was our best attempt to tell that story with what knowledge we had at the time. It just so happens that in intervening years we've gotten a lot more information. And a lot of it was right, and little bits were wrong, and a lot of it we can just dive a little deeper in."
"This is not a sequel, this is not something different, it is just new discoveries of Riven. You'll get there and it'll feel familiar and also be like, 'I don't know how to do this, this is something new'."
The full presentation with work-in-progress shots from the game along with a Q&A with Rand Miller and Richard Vander Wende.
A fan-made comparison of shots featured in the Riven remake trailer.
