20 years ago today Riven: the Sequel to Myst was released! To celebrate its anniversary, I've just finished work on another major upgrade to the Riven Journals. Check them out at https://www.riumplus.com/riven-journals/

What's new: - The background music now plays on more modern browsers (including on most smartphones) - There’s a new compatibility shim to display the mouse hover text, which replaces window.status which has been deprecated for quite some time - All Perl code has been modified to work with newer versions of the language, which means the cookie handling parts work properly again. This means all .cgi pages work, there’s no more script errors, and Journal 5 is actually completeable now - All PHP code has been modified to now work with version 7 of the language - Personally checked that the Easter Eggs are actually accessible, since no one’s found them yet (they’re pretty hard to find!) - A couple backend logic errors have been corrected (which were present in the original Riven Journals… I have no idea how I missed them for so long) - The Prefetching code has been updated with more hints, which should make browsing around the Riven Journals super fast with very quick page load times

.....And just to add a little extra icing on the cake for the anniversary, it’s my pleasure to unveil some previously-unreleased, never-before-seen Riven concept art of the schoolroom Wahrk counting number game. Enjoy. :)

Time for me to fess up to one of the sneakiest pranks I've ever pulled off.

During Mysterium 2014 (a fan convention devoted to the Myst series of games), there was a table of "official" rare memorabilia & artefacts on display. This letter magically appeared amongst the other items, claiming to be meeting notes for MYST II: The Fifth Age (the working title for Riven: The Sequel to Myst back in 1994). It's hard to tell from the photo, but it's printed on an actual sheet of their original embossed parchment letterhead Cyan used to use back then, and the date in the top right was exactly 20 years prior to when it was unveiled. Don’t bother asking how I managed to pull that off - my response will only be “black magic”. ;)

Its contents is the real work of art - it's filled with references to actual things that didn't make the final cut (some of which aren't common knowledge), joking about things that happened many years later (or that have been forever stuck on the back-burner), and a couple downright absurd suggestions just to see what I could get away with. Turns out, I could get away with all of it - more than one person thought the whole letter was legit. In fact, when they were cleaning up after Mysterium was over, someone from Cyan thought it was real & filed it in their vault amongst all their other original artefacts! But I figured it's been long enough, I thought I should come clean with my sneaky shenanigans & share what I created. ;P

Torri Higginson, aka Dr Elizabeth Weir from Stargate Atlantis, in a DeLorean.

Maybe a ZPM is just an Atlantean Mr Fusion.

Valentine's Day 2014

As I do these every year... Here’s my 2014 silly Valentine’s Day image. I quite like this one... Not as dark as the Hitler one last year but just as geeky as the Yoda Best Valentine from 2012.

"A real Myst book" by Mike Ando aka RIUM+

This is my "working" replica Myst book. It's made out of a copy of the same book Cyan originally used as a texture reference. Inside the book is a full desktop computer, completely self-contained without any external wires or wireless computer. The embedded screen isn't just showing a still photo or a video: it's running a full copy of realMyst PC edition. On-board is a copy of all the Myst games. It's fast enough it plays all of them smoothly (even End of Ages at ~30fps). You play the games just by touching the touch-screen. Also included are a blank white page & a blank blue page. These are from other copies of the same book Cyan used, so they're as official as you can get. With the book's red internal lining, this makes a full set of the three colours used in Myst. For more details & a video of it in action, check out www.riumplus.com/mystbook