Zarf Updates

Bit of news on the historic preservation front. Cyan has posted the "Making of Myst" video from 1993, remastered in high-resolution from the original video files. Credit to Ted Sase for a fantastic job.

This 13-minute video was included on the original 1993 Myst CD-ROM. Because CD-ROMs were enormous, and they had all this free space left over...! The original Quicktime movie data was a whopping 73 megabytes. It looked kinda like this:

Okay, that's a Youtube rip, so it's probably worse than what I watched on my Mac Centris 610. But this was highly compressed video data. Also color grading hadn't been invented.

Comparison, today's version:

How is this possible? A couple of years ago, the Video Game History Foundation got permission to scan and digitize a pile of videotapes from Cyan's vault.

With that material available, Ted Sase was able to recover the original recordings and recreate the original video in 4K res. I'm pretty sure he redid all the titles, the transitions, the lot. In-game footage re-recorded from the game, of course. Ooh, is that a fixed aspect ratio? Nice.

There's a couple of brief shots that haven't improved. (See "Testing", 11:45.) I assume that footage was not found, so Sase couldn't do anything except color-correct the CD-ROM version. And of course the images filmed from CRTs have no more pixels than they did in 1993. (Although the monitor desync stripes have been cleaned up!)

But I'm just nitpicking to reassure the creator that his efforts have been appreciated. This is an amazing effort. My congratulations.