While I'm tied up playing Riven and assembling my Riven site, I offer you my Myst list. This is my personally-culled set of Myst-related bookmarks. It's far from exhaustive, but most of these sites have link collections of their own which fill the gaps left here.

Riven note: From the time Cyan announced that their sequel to Myst was to be called Riven, I've been in a self-imposed media blackout regarding that subject. (For those of you who've somehow missed the hype, Riven was officially released on October 31, 1997.) I wanted to immerse myself in Riven with the same clueless wonderment I enjoyed while playing Myst. I succeeded for the most part, stumbling across only a couple of vague hints -- nothing that wasn't revealed anyway in the opening sequence of the game.

If you agree that advance information about the game would ruin some worthwhile surprises and just generally spoil the experience, don't read Cyan's "Spyder" progress reports. (Actually, you can read Reports One through Three, which are just cute and humorous. But everything from Report Four onward could contain serious spoilers -- this according to a programmer at Cyan who, aware of my blackout, advised me to avoid them.) You'll also want to stay away from a couple of other links I've commented below.

THE OFFICIAL WORD

Cyan

Obviously, this is the most important Myst-related site, Cyan being the folks who created Myst and its sequel, Riven. I include several sub-links here because there are a few pages on their site which will get you quickly to what you want. (Otherwise, you might wade through half a dozen pages before finding your quarry. They're all lovely pages, mind you . . . but, being so graphics-rich, they load a bit slowly.)

• Cyan Home Page: To skip the pretty but merely decorative Welcome splash screen, go straight here for a list of departments.
• C.L.O.C. (Chronological List Of Changes): This is the first place I go on revisiting the Cyan site. The top of the list shows the date of the latest change and gives you a direct link to that area.
• SiteMap: Hit this for a fully-linked overview of the site. It's one big imagemap graphic, but it's got everything.
• Cyan Chat: Converse with fellow Myst fans and Cyan staff. Requires a Java-capable browser.
• Myst Related Links: Forget not the Official List.

Brøderbund

Brøderbund's Myst and Riven pages are the only other official source of information. The Riven pictures are captioned, so if you're avoiding spoilers, keep away.

VOX POPULI

The Myst Hint Guide

If you're playing Myst and are stuck on a puzzle, do not buy a Myst solution book and do not use a "walkthrough." Well, that is, don't do those things if you value the experience of solving a puzzle for yourself -- and the puzzles in Myst are intensely satisfying to solve, even if you get a little hint. And that's exactly what the Myst Hint Guide gives you. This site has, I don't know, hundreds or thousands of pages, each with an individual clue. Begin at a general starting point and click your way through the questions until you've got just enough information to get you going again. Even if you've solved Myst already, this is a great site. No graphics, mind you -- just a whole lot of hints, one by one, in plain text. (If you're unbearably frustrated, this site will give you complete solutions if you really want them. But it doesn't give them to you up front, so you can always go back and try to play through the game on your own.)

Mystique, the Myst Fan Club of Japan

It's the Las Vegas of Myst web sites. It's big, it's flashy (and I mean that literally -- don't go here if the <BLINK> tag makes you twitch), it's packed with animations and JavaScript marquees; it's . . . uh . . . it's tacky, honestly. But it does have a lot of stuff, including the funny-and-cheezy MYLK parody and a bunch of rare and hard-to-find images.

The Myst Trivia Challenge

Test your Myst trivia knowledge. This was originally a contest with prizes; the contest is over and the prizes have been awarded (I got one!), but you can still take the quiz. It's surprisingly complete in its scope.

MEET THE PRESS

Guerrillas in the Myst -- Wired 2.08 (August '94)

This interview with Rand and Robyn Miller is pretty much the seminal Myst article.

The MYST Interview -- Urban Desires 1.7 (November/December 1995)

Subtitled "The Web's First Solvable Article," this discussion with Rand and Robyn is broken up into puzzle pieces. Fortunately for brain-weary web surfers, the authors provide a Traditional Table of Contents that lays it all out for you. Albeit segmented, this is a fun interview -- the Millers get a little wacky.

The Parable of Myst II -- Fast Company Issue 2 (April/May 1996)

Engaging, incisive article about Cyan's phenomenal success and accompanying growing pains. Cyan's web site does not tell you about this one. This site doesn't contain any spoilers about the Myst sequel -- not even its name.

THE ANALYTICAL MIND

Lost in a Book

Great title, eh? This a self-contained hypertext essay on Victor Nell's Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure as it applies to hypertext itself. The author asserts that "hypertext/media can far surpass the novel in many regards, and specifically, in its ability to entrance the reader." In the notes, Myst is discussed as an example of entrancing hypermedia. Neat stuff. (I don't know who the author is, since there is no obvious attribution and the essay is rather large. I may yet fully explore this site -- I will probably need to keep a journal to find my way around -- and discover who wrote it.)