Village Roadshow Entertainment Group has acquired the film and television rights to the classic adventure puzzle video game Myst. The production company will mine the game's deep mythology of the Myst franchise to develop a multi-platform universe across film and television (both scripted and unscripted).
Village Roadshow will develop and produce the projects alongside Myst co-creators and brothers Rand and Robyn Miller, as well as Delve Media's Isaac Testerman and Yale Rice. Village Roadshow will take on a "full-scale approach" to developing Myst content, utilizing its entire creative team to adapt the properties across film and TV.
Myst was first released in 1993 by Cyan Productions, the video game development company co-founded by the Miller brothers in 1987. The first game sold over six million copies, making it the top-selling PC release for years until The Sims unseated it in 2002. Over the years, the franchise has grown to include nearly 10 individual titles which have cumulatively sold more than 15 million copies. There have also been a number of novels based on the game published by Hyperion.
The franchise features a deep canon spanning thousands of years of mythology and history, though the primary saga follows Atrus, the grandson of a woman named Anna who sets off a momentous series of events when she discovers a mysterious civilization, the D'ni, in a cavern deep beneath the New Mexico desert. The D'ni possess a unique ability to pen books that connect distant worlds, which serves as the catalyst for the Mystgames and novels.
