Mysterium 2021 Special Guests

Eric is a longtime veteran of Cyan, contributing heavily to Uru (Myst Online) and Myst V. More recently, he served as both Art Director and Technical Art Director for Obduction. Currently he serves in the role of Creative Director, showrunning game projects and helping steer the ship.

Blake is a Senior Technical Environment Artist. He rejoined Cyan last year, and is now continuing where he left off with Myst VR and Firmament. He is responsible for both creative art tasks, as well as speeding up art team efficiency by creating art pipelines, tools, and scripts.

Chuck, along with Robyn Miller, created the artwork that brought the worlds of Myst to life. After Myst, he worked on a number of other games, including a number of titles at Westwood Studios. He has created artwork for TV shows like Babylon 5, Crusade, and Mortal Kombat Krusades, as well as for motion rides like “Star Trek: The Experience” and Disney’s “Mission to Mars”. In 2019, Chuck released ZED under the Eagre Games banner, in partnership with Cyan Ventures. He is currently working on a remake of the Selenitic Age in Unreal Engine 5.

Jeremiah is a veteran artist at Cyan whose career began in 2007 as a QA tester. Jeremiah’s first Art/Development duties came from working on realMyst for the iPad (2012), and has contributed to all of Cyan’s games since.

Abner is a senior engineer with prior experience at Thekla Inc. (Braid and The Witness) as well as NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Abner draws from his expertise in systems programming to automate and simplify the team’s workflow wherever possible. He also lends a hand in debugging and porting our games.

Brandon has been with Cyan for about 5 years. He started in QA working on Obduction then moved into a Software Engineering role, working on Obduction, Myst, and Firmament.

Mark started in the Cyan Garage on a snowy day in January of 1995 making him employee number 11. He has worked on almost every Cyan project in some capacity and has worn many different hats including CTO. Some of Mark’s favorite Cyan projects include Manhole Masterpiece which was his first assignment, Riven his first AAA title project and Myst Online because the fans the keep it and him going!

A Myst fan since 1993, Patrick has been creating content for Uru since 2007. He continues to work on a wide array of related projects, some voice work for Machinima series The Lost Art, as well as helping others learn how to use Blender and Korman to create their own Ages.

Hannah is a biz-dev person, production lead, and programmer in pursuit of making 2D and VR games that matter. She is currently the Development Director at Cyan and wholly responsible for Eric Anderson’s migraines.

Eleri is a curator for Cyan’s lore archival project, and works on Unwritten. She is a leader at Inkworks Productions (now partnered with Cyan Ventures).

Veronica is the primary developer for Unwritten and part of the leadership at Inkworks Productions. You can see her run a monthly game of Unwritten at http://twitch.tv/unwrittenrpg.

A native Montreal illustrator, Meinert has a variety of credits in film, television and games. He has worked in animation, visual effects and production design. His concept art work in films include Arrival, Mirror Mirror, Upside Down, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, Leatherheads, The Spiderwick Chronicles, and 300. In games, he was the senior concept artist for Batman: Arkham Origins, and also worked as an art director and senior concept artist on Myst IV: Revelation. As a visual effects concept artist and matte painter, his credits include Silent Hill, Across the Universe and Stranger Than Fiction. His television credits include The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne, Inside the Space Station and Alien Planet. As an animation director, Meinert’s credits include Bad Dog, Bob Morane, and his own cartoon short for Hanna-Barbera, The Adventures of Captain Buzz Cheeply. He currently teaches Photoshop Illustration at Dawson College, and builds retro-future props from found objects.

You can find more about Meinert and his art at his website and his ArtStation page.

Mike Hines is a game developer and artist currently living in Burien, Washington. His first job in the game industry was with Headspin, Inc. where he was part of the team working on the engine that became the foundation for realMyst and Uru. He worked primarily as an environment and technical artist on both projects and was the world lead for Teledahn. Since working at Cyan he has worked for many more game companies including Epic Games China and Harebrained Schemes, and is now working as an Art Lead on VR projects at Oculus.

Marten first became enchanted with Myst during his final year of college, and he joined the internet community of fans on Uru Obsession back in 2003. A former Guildmaster of the Guild of Messengers, he is currently volunteering with the OpenUru project to funnel community improvements into the official MOULa client. He lives near Portland, Oregon.

Adam is a core developer of the open source Uru client and Korman Age creation plugin for Blender. He has been a Myst fan since childhood and in the cavern since 2005.

Karl is the principal engineer at Cyan. He has worked on most of the Cyan titles from Uru to the new Myst. During that time, he worked as a tester, producer, and engineer.

With a programming background complemented by a McGill MBA (IT & International Business), Geneviève has been IT Consultant, Manager and Director for 11 years, while living in 5 countries (Canada, Belgium, Sweden, Trinidad & Spain). She then became Game Producer and Senior Game Director at Ubisoft and A2M (now Behaviour Interactive) in Montréal, where she worked on Myst IV. Since 2007 she has been the Montreal Industry Liaison and Branch Director for the Burlington Champlain College.

Geneviève’s special interests are coaching, the optimization of managerial methods, and all applications of new media. When not working she can be found with her nose in a good book (history, fantasy, science fiction, literature and European comics) or playing games (RPG, MMOS, strategy and casual). Geneviève is committed to helping people harness the positive effects of new technologies, as well as helping games reach their full potential as a new media.

Keith started tinkering with Uru in 2004 with simple file modifications and later moved onto Age building where he released a couple of Ages. He has spent the following years working to improve his content and eating waffles.

Doug worked at Cyan from 1999 through 2007. According to the Imager code to access the Rime Age in realMyst, he was about 27 years old at the time. (And OG was 35). On Uru, Doug managed the team that designed (initially in about 20 pounds of clay) the D’ni City, scripted the puzzle logic in Kadish Tolesa, and like everyone else, spent way too much time debugging the Teledahn buckets. Doug left beautiful Spokane to the wetter Washington side in Seattle to join the Xbox team at Microsoft, and for the last 4 years has been leading a Design team at Nintendo.

Rand Miller is a trailblazer in the video game industry – meaning he has gray hair. He co-founded Cyan 30+ years ago and has developed everything from MMO’s to mobile apps, including the blockbusters Myst and Riven. His passion is discovery, and when he’s not exploring the real world with his wife, he concocts ideas of strange places that can only be explored virtually. Even though Myst is now officially a museum-piece, he optimistically feels that the best years lie ahead.

After co-founding Cyan with his brother Rand in the late 80s, the two released the games The Manhole, Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel, and Spelunx. Shortly thereafter, he composed the soundtrack for and co-designed a game you might have heard of, known as Myst, which held the record for bestselling game of all time for 7 years. After the successful follow-up, Riven, he left Cyan to experiment in everything from acting, writing and directing films, composing music, and running a small film production company with his wife. Years later, he worked with Cyan once again, appearing in and composing the soundtrack for Obduction. Most recently, he re-released the soundtrack to Myst on a special edition vinyl sold through Fangamer.

You can see more of Robyn’s work on his website.

By day, Steve works for Sid Meier’s Firaxis Games. By night, he draws, animates, writes, and occasionally sleeps. When not doing any of that, he can be found in the wilds of Maryland’s horse country, running, biking, hiking or kayaking with his family. While at Cyan (1998-2003) he was Art Director on realMyst and Assistant Art Director on URU. He primarily worked on The Cleft, Relto, Gahreesen and the Bevin neighborhood of the D’ni City.

Autumn is an animator who has worked on everything from small indie projects, and VR experiences, to AAA games. She is using her experience to bring emotive, nuanced character performances to life at Cyan. She enjoys playing guitar, tinkering with electronics, and exploring the beautiful scenery of the Pacific Northwest.

Darryl is a long-time Myst fan and has been working on fan tools for Uru since 2005. His main development focus is porting Uru to macOS and Linux.

Kha’tie has been a Myst fan since 1995, when she and her then new husband Rick (aka “Timeposter”) played with a small group of friends on a borrowed computer. She soon discovered the incredible Myst fan community online, first in Cyan Chat, then on the Lyst, and later in Myst Community, where she learned a ton about community and how to best manage them.

After volunteering as a Community Manager for a few years, she got a job at Ubisoft as Community Manager for Myst Worlds in 2003 during the development of Uru (and the secret development of Myst IV). After Myst V and the Uru sequels launched, she moved to other studios including Cartoon Network, Gazillion, Disruptor Beam, and Stoic, and worked on titles including Stargate, Star Trek, Marvel, and Game of Thrones. After the Myst 25th Kickstarter, she worked with Cyan as a community, social media, and marketing management consultant. She is currently Social Media Manager for the Myst Documentary.

Paul first encountered Myst while in graduate school and was fascinated by the idea of a computer game as a work of art in visual and audio domains. He currently acts as a coordinator for fan content and coding changes flowing into MOULa with OpenUru and the Minkata test shards. Occasionally he finds time to revisit the cavern and enjoy all of the additions and improvements the fans can imagine for Uru. He lives in Colorado.

Derrick has been working at Cyan for over 10 years and has done practically everything there is to do in the art department. He feels that it’s a great honor and privilege to be Cyan’s Art Director and work with some of the finest pixel pushers in the business.

Philip Shane is a documentary filmmaker with more than 30 years of experience. He was co-director and editor of Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey (Winner of the Special Jury Prize at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival), and most recently was editor of Dancing in Jaffa, which had its World Premiere at the 2013 TriBeCaFilm Festival, and for which he and fellow editor Bob Eisenhardt won the Best Editing Award at Israel’s prestigious DocAviv Film Festival. He produced and edited Einstein (2008, History Channel).

At ABC News for nearly a decade, Shane edited many distinguished programs including Ted Kopple’s Iraq War documentary, Tip of the Spear, which won the 2004 DuPont Columbia Award for Broadcast Journalism, and Martin Luther King: Searching For The Promised Land (1999) which won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Historical Program. A short film he made with Peter Jennings and Senior Producer Richard Gerdau, Witness to History, preserved Jennings’ personal memories of 9/11 and has been placed in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Museum of American History.

In addition to Dancing in Jaffa and Being Elmo, Shane has edited many films about performing artists. With Paul McCartney, his daughter Mary, and director Alistair Donald, he made the film Wingspan (2001), about the McCartney family’s life after The Beatles. His previous project, The Beatles Revolution (2000) told the story of the band through the memories of musicians, artists, politicians, writers, and other celebrities. Other artists he’s worked with include Carly Simon, Bruce Springsteen, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Bill is a published author in trade and theological journals on the intersection of video games and learning sciences and has spoken by invitation on those topics to a wide range of audiences including graduate students at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center and Calvin College’s freshmen colloquium. He’s the author of a series of comedic Arthurian novels under the pen-name Liam Perrin. And he teaches game design, artificial intelligence, game engine architecture, and game systems courses as a faculty member at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University.

He holds a B.S. with university honors in electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, a Master’s of Divinity from Phoenix Seminary, and studied briefly at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh before the game industry made him an offer he couldn’t refuse (It didn’t take much). He worked as a Senior Research Programmer at the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging at Carnegie Mellon, as Technical Development Director and Lead Gameplay Engineer on the ill-fated Stargate Worlds MMO, and as a senior engineer on an equally (but less traumatically) ill-fated Facebook fantasy politics simulator.

He also worked as an innovation engineer in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers college at Arizona State University on the Center for Games and Impact’s Quest2Teach project which received the ASU President’s Award for Innovation by integrating an immersive teaching simulator with a custom economy-enriched social network to train secondary ed. teachers.

Josh started working at Cyan back in 2008 in QA. He is married with two children, and has lived in the Pacific Northwest most of his life, and now serves as the Quality Assurance Manager at Cyan.

Before he left behind the greasepaint, lights, and microphone pop filter to devote himself full time as a psychologist to his psychotherapy practice, Brian acted in film, television, theatre, improv, and video games. He has done voice work for cartoons, instructional videos, radio and television commercials, and, yes, video games. His only fan mail (Real letters! Not just e-mail!) has been for Myst IV: Revelation. The only time he knew the exact moment in the audition when he booked a role was for Myst IV: Revelation. The only YouTube presence he has is for Myst IV: Revelation (never read the comments…) He is pleased though mystified (yes, he had to) to be asked to share his experiences on this beautiful project with you all!

Brian can currently be found at http://brianwrench.com/.