![]() They handled all the marketing and whatnot. Broderbund was doing Riven, they were going to publish Riven. This lever is another practical that’s laying around the office… And we get to keep the door which is sweet. ![]() So we had to build a whole door so that Gehn at one point can open it from both the inside and outside. RM: The door over there…Anything when you do blue screen work needs to be a practical. So it was kind of fun having all the extra fun stuff. We sent them sketches, we’d send them sketches that were not as detailed as this, and then it comes back, we’re like “Oh this is so cool they sewed shells and beads into this and all this detail into this thing.” That was really an eye-opener because all we’d done was Myst. So Tony, who’s our president now, called around because he was the producer for the thing, and found the Seattle Opera and who made clothing and costumes for the Seattle Opera. But we don’t know how to get costumes designed. The cool thing about this is we designed these…We had money for Riven, obviously, which was sweet. RM: These are two of the costumes from Riven. And we were working with some architects who suggested “Maybe we can get some clay and work some stuff out.” So for a few days several of us on the team who were going to build the city mocked it up, and this is the result. We were having a hard time wrapping our brains about it. This is all stuff we originally threw out, and my brother Robyn pulled it out of the trash cans and said “Yeah, we should keep this.” It’s nice to have it here.ĮRIC ANDERSON, Art Director: Uru, during the early days, we were having a hard time trying to figure out what the heck the city itself looked like. The original espresso machine or whatever it’s called. It’s kind of…you get to see the way brains are working. This is stuff they…Oh my goodness the Riven stuff, you can see a lot of the evolution. RM: This is concept art by either Robyn or Richard Vander Wende on Riven. He says it in an interview, “I don’t play many games but I built this cool crazy dagger thing for those guys.” And we didn’t know! It’s hanging here and we’re like “What?! That thing’s special now! We thought it was just a cool-looking dagger!” Concept art Come to find out that it was basically Jamie and Adam, the MythBuster guys, who he called, back when they were still a prop company. Let’s just do it in CG.”īut that was still…Sweet prop! We’ll hang that up! But then what we find out is that…Eric Anderson, our art director, he sends around this video. So Tony gets in touch with some prop guys in the Bay Area and has that sent up, and by the time we got that the CG guys had already been like “We did a mock-up, I think we can do it all in CG. So the art department’s like “Okay, someone make the Riven dagger and we’ll just build out all this dirt everywhere. ![]() Just a small miniature version.” And this big Riven dagger falls down like and dust should fly up. That thing…at the end of Riven there’s this sequence where the whole world is destroyed, everything collapses, and we’ve got all these workstations and all this incredibly expensive hardware and software, but we’re thinking, “Well, destroyed worlds are so many particles. The place is in a little bit better repair, and we’re just doing what we can. And they were thinking “Ah, we’ll have milked it by then.” But it was great for us because ten or fifteen years later the mobile market was coming up, and we were like “Oh man, if we could just convert some of these we could at least get bootstrap money to fund a little here, build up a couple people.” It’s worked, which is nice. I don’t even remember how long it was, but it was probably ten years or fifteen years. With Broderbund we said “Well, how about a long time but not in perpetuity. The publisher’s always right in perpetuity. Any indie that can pull that off is smart. We still had people doing stuff because I think we were, at that point…One of the smartest things we ever did was get the rights to the software to revert back to us, to get the IP to revert back to us. I mean, we didn’t even run the sprinklers for a couple years and stuff just collected.
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