On a crowded opening day, two major fantasies are at work in the vast, cacophonous halls of London's Olympia exhibition centre, where all the new, potential megahit computer games are displayed at the ECTS show.
The first is that the crowds of pale, mesmerised young men shuffling about from screen to screen could ever blast their way to glory if they were ever given the chance to be real-life versions of their on-screen macho characters.
The second is that a woman - in the ridiculous, balloonbreasted form of TombRaider's Lara Croft - would ever even consider scrambling over rocky ledges and demolishing attacking beasts in a pair of brown hot-pants.
Two slender, soft-spoken men who agree are wincing at the level of noise generated in the hall by thousands of onscreen sirens, gunblasts, shrieks of dying agony, and dropping bombs. They've been walking around the halls unrecognised, yet they are two thirds of what is probably the most famous trio of games developers in the world: the makers of the 3.5 million-selling Myst and now, its long-awaited sequel: Riven.
Robyn, the younger of the two Miller brothers who created Myst, is here along with Richard Vander Wende, who joined the pair's company Cyan - based in Spokane, in Washington state - after Myst to become a director of Riven.
In the US, where Myst was a runaway success, the three are on the cover of the current issue of Wired. Despite being Myst millionaires, the Miller brothers have remained charmingly down-to-earth, and Vander Wende - who already has heady credentials as former production designer on Disney's Aladdin and animator at George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic - is almost obliteratingly self-effacing. "We had always wanted to do a sequel," Robyn explains. "When we were about halfway through Myst, we started fleshing out what had come before and what had come after in the story."
The "what had come after" will be released around the first week of November, as a massive, five CD-Rom adventure called Riven. Cyan and its publisher and distributer Red Orb (Borderbund's games division) have been obsessively secretive about the new game and even now Riven's makers will only talk in general terms about the game's flow - but not about the specifics of puzzles, gameplay or storyline.
But they're happy to point out that a trip to the dictionary to look up the meaning of "riven" - to tear apart, to split with force or violence, to rend with distress or dispute - will reveal the theme of the game. Like Myst, it's a non-linear exploration of strange worlds in which the player must solve riddles and collect clues to reach the denouement. But this time, it is oh, so much bigger (4,000 images, twice the size of Myst) and oh, so much more beautifully rendered (500 times the computing power needed for creating Myst).
Myst set a standard in graphics that few have matched - full of rich textures and minute detail. But the Millers weren't typical gamers, happy to let appearance take a backseat to gameplay. As a matter of fact, they - and Richard - aren't gamers at all, which is perhaps why Myst was a popular success, not just a gaming success. That's why they're feeling overwhelmed by the noisy orgy of techno gaming going on around them, and are also slightly miffed. "We walk around and look at an environment like this, and. . . I mean, there's nothing attractive about this environment. I just want to leave," says Robyn. "Then, here's Riven sitting in the middle of all of it, and it's this quiet, contemplative game." He sighs. "We relate really from an aesthetic sense. We don't relate much to any of the stuff that's here." He adds that he doesn't necessarily feel that Riven is better, merely that it's of a different genre. That genre will have new visual standards set for it yet again when Riven is released.
Previews show some stunning graphics. Like Myst, Riven is full of watery worlds, but this time the water has shades from transparent turquoise to deep azure and is full of ripples and depth. Because such detail would ordinarily take up too much CDRom room, the Millers invented a new compression technique - and got the water they wanted.
Screen shots (on view at www.cyan.com) reveal precisely textured stone surfaces and exquisitely-lit interiors. The Riven demo at ECTS has all the Cyan trademarks: levers, odd mechanical bridges, lifts, strange submarine-like vehicles, old books, carefully-constructed gadgets. "We think of it like we were creating a world," says Robyn. "More like multiple environments," adds Richard. Richard came to the project not because the brothers felt they needed anybody else to help out, but because once they saw a portfolio of Richard's work, they knew they had to have him. Richard met the brothers at a computer conference in Los Angeles, where he recognised Robyn. Richard introduced himself, said he liked Myst, and mentioned that if they ever had any vacancies. . .
Now they feel like they are in limbo - the game is finished, but not yet released. They are impatient to see how people react.
With the conclusion of Riven, most of Cyan's employees have left. Both Miller brothers and Vander Wende feel it's time to move on, but haven't decided to what, or if it will be together. "We all have different ideas, I think, on what's next," says Richard.
"The one thing that will remain similar with whatever I do in the future," notes Robyn, "is I like making worlds."
Karlin Lillington is at: karlin@indigo.ie