Variety reports that Legendary Entertainment, the production company behind such films as Godzilla and Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, has struck a deal to develop the 1993 adventure game Myst into a TV series. Although its largely static 3D graphics and slideshow-style navigation may seem quaint now, Myst was a phenomenon in its day. Sparked by widespread adoption of CD-ROM technology, Myst became the best-selling computer game of all time, a record that stood until The Sims surpassed it in 2002.
If you’re not familiar with Myst, you might be wondering why such a big hit hasn’t been optioned for a movie or TV project before now. If you are familiar with Myst, you might be wondering how the hell Legendary will make a TV show out of it. Because the thing about Myst is there aren’t any people around. You do catch glimpses of other characters, mostly through flickering videobook portals to strange realms, but you spend most of your time silently exploring beautiful, abandoned islands and solving the puzzles therein. So unless we’re going to watch a mute hero fiddle with the controls on a rocket ship’s pipe organ for an hour, the creators of this show will have to take a few liberties with the source material. The nature of those liberties remains to be determined, but Variety says that Myst creators Rand and Robyn Miller will be “creatively involved” in the show, potentially with a video game tie-in.