How a Fan Recreation Helped Jump Start Cyan's Riven Remake (2024)

On Halloween in 1997, Cyan, Inc. released Riven: The Sequel to Myst to the delight of gamers and puzzle lovers everywhere. 25 years later, the development company announced it would be revisiting the iconic islands to bring players a smooth, 3D, and entirely modern remake of the classic game. While Cyan generally holds its cards pretty close to its chest, news of the Riven remake wasn't wholly unexpected since fans had been working on their own for nearly 15 years. In fact, Cyan's efforts to revamp Riven grew out of this fan-based initiative.

Myst's surprising success helped define not only the style and direction that the development company Cyan would lean on for the foreseeable future; it also helped spur on the adoption of the CD-ROM format, literally changing the landscape of gaming. Riven could have been just any other sequel, capitalizing on the success of Myst but content to be a simple lackluster carbon copy. Instead, Riven is one of the most beloved entries in the Myst series and one of the most highly-rated puzzle games still today. Perhaps that's why fans became so eager to see a modern remake of Riven that they attempted to make one themselves.

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What Is The Starry Expanse?

The Starry Expanse project started 13 years ago as a grassroots effort by fans of the game to finally give Riven the remake it deserved. The original Myst has received seemingly continuous updates since its release, with an updated Masterpiece Edition and a 3D version called realMyst released in 2000, a Unity-fueled remake realMyst: Masterpiece Edition in 2014, and even a VR version in 2020. The Starry Expanse Project, which adopted the nickname of realRiven, wanted to bring the same love to Riven, translating the computer-generated stills into a fully-realized and immersive 3D environment.

Since 2010, the team has been presenting on its progress at Mysterium, the annual convention for the Myst fandom. They operated with full transparency, which included reaching out to Cyan directly to ensure that their work was done with approval from the development company. However, in early 2020, the project seemed to go uncharacteristically silent. The community pieced together, from tweets and scuttlebutt, that the project was under NDA after being absorbed by Cyan itself, and some fans even worried that this meant the project was dead.

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The Starry Expanse Led to Cyan's Riven Remake

On Halloween 2022, 25 years to the day since Riven's initial release, Cyan put the rumors to rest by announcing a Riven remake from Cyan but built out of the start that The Starry Expanse had already made. After teasing the announcement in true Myst style with some cryptic images and numbers posted to its social media accounts, Cyan made the news official.

While a Riven remake is certainly exciting news, what makes this project special is its start in the fan community. The Starry Expanse project made this possible by demonstrating to Cyan that the fanbase (and customer base) wanted a modern, 3D Riven. More pragmatically, the team also literally did the initial groundwork. Cyan explicitly credits The Starry Expanse project with core pieces that the Cyan team was able to reference to jump-start development. The hours that the group spent camera-matching the original game would not be in vain. The exact influence that The Starry Expanse had on the new in-house Riven remake remains unclear, but based on its own press release, the team seems excited about passing the torch.

Some in the community are still worried about Cyan taking the reins from The Starry Expanse, mourning the loss of what had once been a community project. With so much work left to do to complete the Riven remake, nothing's yet set in stone. However, this episode in the history of the worlds of Myst shows that fans can influence the games that they love -- and the hope with Riven is that such influence will be positive.