Riven was distributed initially on five compact discs, released on October 31, 1997, and later on a single DVD-ROM, along with a 14 minute long making-of video. The Myst style of gameplay in which the user clicked on objects in prerendered still frames and videos was maintained in this sequel; however, it was enhanced by many animated scenes.
Riven: The Sequel to Myst Trailer
Riven Commercial
Riven Android Trailer
Making of Riven B-roll
Riven Opening Scene Set Creation
Riven at Macworld Keynote 1998
The Net Cyan Interview 1998
There was an illustrated coffee table book made during the development of Riven. It details how Riven got its realistic look, which is a combination of two key factors: ray-tracing in rendering (which video games are only in recent years able to achieve in real-time), and hand-crafting each shot with intricate modeling, photo-realistic textures, specific lighting, and subtle effects.
It was originally released a few weeks after the release of Riven. While no longer officially published, it can still be found via Amazon or eBay.
Simple geometry and low texture resolutions made high contrast between light and shadow in the original Myst. Renders for each Age was displayed in a palette of only 256 colors, which, though expertly devised, limited the tonal range of finished images. The screens had 543x332 pixels, taking up approximately three quarters of the screen.
The screens in Riven has 608x392 pixels and 256 colors for each image, taking up almost the entire screen. Riven contains over 4,000 fully-rendered scenes and 1,000 QuickTime movies (over three hours of animation). Some of the scenes took over an hour to render on Cyan's SGI Indigo Workstations (they had 13 of them).
The models in Myst were quite simple. For example, there are whole forests of trees on Myst Island but no leaves. When Myst was originally constructed, each tree was modeled using just two cones -- one for the trunk, and one for the foliage. The ground cover for the entire island is a single texture image painted onto an extruded surface. In all, the island has one tenth of the geometric detail of a Riven island. It took about two years to make Myst.
At the time the game was made, the various islands which make up Riven was the largest wireframe models anyone had been working with. A single Riven island is represented by about 2.5 million triangles. Intricate detail can be found throughout Riven, from wind-shifted topsoil blanketing a mountainside, to the knotted woodgrain of a table top, to Riven shimmering water, which undulates, reflects and glints in the sun. Riven was in the making for over four years.
Behind-the-scenes photos during the production of Riven and released on the Cyan website at the time.
