iPhone Myst was released this weekend. Six dollars. Search "myst" in the App Store to buy.
It's kind of enormous -- over 700 megabytes. (The install process needs another 700 megs of temporary space, so if your phone is super-full, you'll need to clear out 1.5 gig of free space.) Downloading it from Apple took about half an hour on my cable-modem net connection; transferring it to the phone took another fifteen minutes. (That was with the dock connector. I didn't have the nerve to try installing it over wifi.)
I've only played with it briefly. The port seems solid; tap to touch or move, edge-tap or swipe to turn. The only problem I've seen is that background music and repeating animations sometimes fail to continue through taps or scene changes.
I'm not sure that all the puzzles will play exactly the same. The original Myst introduced several subtle variations of the "click to do it" interface, as you played through the game. The cruder touch-screen system may not lead players to think outside the box in that way. Indeed, the info screen says outright:
Some objects (certain large valves or levers or switches) only respond to dragging - moving the object with your finger. Try touching an object first - if it doesn't seem to respond, maybe you can pull it or rotate it by dragging.
I am still waiting for an adventure game which is truly native to the iPhone interface... somebody surprise me?
So what next for Cyan? They haven't mentioned any product being in active development except for this one. My butt-estimate is that the iPhone app will pull in enough money to justify itself, but not enough to let Cyan expand beyond its current (very small) staff level. Even the best iPhone app success stories have been on the level of "Yay I am a successful indie developer", not "Yay now I can hire ten people and start a development studio."
The last word on open-sourcing Uru was mid-April:
The plans for opening the sources for UruLive is still intact. Unfortunately the schedule for it has been effected. Besides myself being busy with Myst, the ex-Cyan programmers that were going to help also had greater demands from their 'real' jobs.
So, I am trying to get the initial team together again and find out what has yet to be done and how much time and effort it will take to achieve that. I'll let you know as soon as I do. -- Mark DeForest, April 16
So, once again, who knows.