Special Guests

Once again we’re bringing some special guests who have worked on various Cyan and Cyan Ventures games! We’ll be announcing more guests in the weeks leading up to the convention, so check this page for updates!

In Person

Amy creates narrative video games that focus on personal and innovative stories. Her titles with Numinous Games include BAFTA award winning That Dragon, Cancer and Cannes Nominated AREA MAN LIVES, a virtual reality mystery that allows the player to speak out loud to the characters within the game. She is also working on a fitness game for Talofa games entering early Beta soon. Amy has given a TED talk that has over a million views, she has been a featured speaker at The World Cyber Games, Madrid Games Week, Pop Tech, Games for Change, SXSW, Notre Dame and the University of Chicago.

Ryan is a digital interactive artist, programmer, and video game designer currently focused on narrative VR, serious, and accessible games. The first decade of his career was spent as a UI/UX designer, programmer, and software architect for Davita Healthcare, a Fortune 500 company. Ryan currently serves as a Creative Director and Head of Narrative for Numinous Games, a studio he co-founded in 2012.

Numinous Games first title, That Dragon, Cancer, was created as a poetic memorial to Ryan and his wife Amy’s third son Joel, and Joel’s fight against terminal brain cancer. That Dragon, Cancer went on to receive broad critical praise, winning a BAFTA award in 2017 for innovation as well as a 2016 Peabody / Facebook Futures of Media award.

Story Writer, 3D artist, Age Writer, and Content Tester for MOULa. Harley has grown up with the all of Myst Games through their life, and is happy to contribute to URU Live however they can- be it testing upcoming content, or creating it for the community at large.

Harley has been an active member of the Myst community under one name or another since the Until Uru days of 2004.

Mike (@sirmrcl3an) is a software developer & producer with over 22 years combined experience in healthcare and videogames. Mike is an aspiring voice actor and content creator on Twitch (twitch.tv/SirMrCl3an). He has built and managed teams of over 30 developers, QA analysts and configuration managers. His heart is in the creation of accessible video games through world building and game design.

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.

Online

ametist built her first age for Uru in 2008 and up until 2012 there were several more. She used them to inspire her students, and also used Uru as a teaching tool. From 2012 to 2019 she built apps and games for AppStore and Steam, but is now back with building for Uru and taking part in the Uru community again. She now has two ages in MOUla, one she built on her own, and one built together with Dulcamara. ‘Without the fantastic support from the Uru community, neither of them would be there’ she says.

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.

John is a game developer, engineer, and game designer living in Seattle, WA. He is a co-founder of Pontoco, and one of the project leads on The Last Clockwinder.

Elana is a game designer and front-end engineer with over six years of experience. When she isn’t working for mission-driven tech startups, she enjoys undertaking more creative projects, like consulting as a designer for a high-tech escape room or developing a local multiplayer game for an arcade in Brooklyn. Most recently, she joined the team at Left Turn Studios, an indie game studio with several unannounced titles, dedicated to building a culture of equality and inclusion.

After meeting filmmaker Philip Shane at Mysterium in 2019 (and chatting over many cups of coffee in Brooklyn), she began collaborating on The Myst Documentary. A lifelong devotee of the Myst series, she has put great love and care into crafting the official homepage for the documentary, the press site, and the upcoming “Vault of Stories,” an immersive, audiovisual archive to preserve the collective memories of the Myst community.

To learn more, you can find her personal portfolio at https://elana.games/. (She also roleplays monthly as Tomeh in Strange Seeds, the official campaign of the Unwritten Myst RPG.)

Don (@DJCarson) is the senior art director at Mighty Coconut. He is a concept illustrator and designer working in the theme park and computer game industries. He has worked as a Senior Show Designer for Walt Disney Imagineering, art directing projects like Splash Mountain, Mickey’s Toontown and Blizzard Beach. His focus is bringing design principles unique to environmental storytelling to projects all over the world. Don has applied designs to computer games, the theater and other media. Don has a long career in theme park design, and he strives to show the potential of using the principles of environmental storytelling to influence an audience’s experience, whether they are exploring a physical or virtual world.

Colin (@colincornaby) is a Mac and iOS developer living in Portland, OR. Growing up playing Myst on the family Mac LC, he’s been a lifelong Myst fan. He’s a contributor to the H’Uru Plasma client, with a focus on bringing Uru to the Mac.

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.

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

Henning (@statelycoach) is the Level Designer for Walkabout Mini Golf at Mighty Coconut. He has worked as an animator and character rigger on various projects in award-winning gaming, film, commercials, and museum interactive displays. A collection of his work, drawings, and his own games can be found at www.anomalina.com.

Keith discovered Myst in 1996 and not long after found his way online and joined the community on RivenGuild and CyanChat. Since then he has been an active member of the community Working on multiple projects and community sites over the years.

In recent years he has dialed his involvement back a bit but is still very Active within the Uru Development community putting his artistic talents and understanding of D’ni lore to build new Ages For Uru and help support others in their Age building endeavors.

After spending 10 years honing his content and Finally getting the hang of newer development tools his First Age is soon to turn up on the MOULa shard. This release of content has Lead the way for more Ages and areas developed by being primed for release for people to Explore in future updates coming in the new Seasons.

Lucas (@LucasMartell) is creator of Walkabout Mini Golf and head of Mighty Coconut, an independent entertainment studio based in Austin, TX that’s partnered with Cyan to create a course set on Myst island. He’s also the co-creator of Spies in Disguise, the Fox/Blue Sky animated feature starring Will Smith and Tom Holland. The original short film Pigeon: Impossible as well as The Oceanmaker have been seen more than 30-million times online and screened at over 350 festivals in 63 different countries.

Edward Felix is a 3D Designer based in Melbourne, Australia, working for Mighty Coconut on their hugely popular VR title Walkabout Mini Golf. Formally trained in Engineering, he previously worked as an animatronic and event space designer. His work has ranged from self-contained character systems for stage, to large mechanical pieces for music videos. When not working, he tends to his collection of banana plants and programs murder mystery text adventure games.

Rand 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.

Darryl is a web and software developer from Vancouver, BC and has been involved in Uru development for the past 18 years. His first experiences with development were through the COBBS forum, starting with C#, Python, and eventually C++ to work on tools like PRPExplorer, PyPRP, Korman, and libHSPlasma.

For the past 10 years, he’s been focused on technical improvements to bring Uru‘s open-source Plasma engine to macOS and Linux, and has spent several years working on a cross-platform OpenGL rendering pipeline.

Outside of Uru, he’s a volunteer maintainer of the Apache Cordova project, an amateur radio operator, and enjoys hiking in the local mountains.

Joshua is an editor for narrative and documentary films with over 8 years of experience. After majoring in Film Production at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, he began his career interning at WHYY and PBS as a video editor and producer’s assistant.

For the past few years, Joshua has been working closely with director Philip Shane on The Myst Documentary, a project he contributes to as both editor and researcher. As a huge fan of Myst and indie gaming, he is honored to help tell the story of this groundbreaking series and everyone who worked on it throughout the years. Joshua’s work for The Myst Doc is available to view on social media, including Instagram and TikTok.

Outside of Myst, Joshua has worked for various other media organizations including radio station 88.5 WXPN, PhillyCAM and the Alzheimer’s Association, as a photographer, production assistant and social media manager. He continues his interest in the creative arts through directing short films, writing poetry and short stories, and performing as a musician.

Guy is a veteran Montreal actor, director and writer. He has acted on stage and screen in English, French and German. Besides playing Achenar in Myst IV, among other video game shows, he more recently played the Vizier in the Prince of Persia remake. He has been Artistic Director of five different theatres in England and Canada, directing the likes of Academy Award winning actor William Hurt in William Shakespeare’s Richard The Third at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. He also directed Academy Award winning actress Kim Hunter in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman at the Stratford Ontario Festival. His production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream ran for eleven years in Russian at the Pushkin Theatre, Moscow.

Anita is an artist, runner, and home to microbial life in Oakland, CA. She’s worked in art and design across many types of games and tech, and most recently art directed The Last Clockwinder.

Ryan started with Cyan in the summer of 2003, working directly with the community on Uru before moving into a production/management role on Myst V and Cosmic Osmo’s Hex Isle. He was the Producer on Obduction, and Head of Developer Relations for Cyan Ventures on Unwritten, ZED, and AREA MAN LIVES. Recently Ryan was promoted to Associate Designer on Firmament and beyond.