Greetings all
We have an update about Mass Mysteria for you, but first we wanted to make sure everyone knows about Firmament!
If you haven’t already heard, Firmament is an all new game from Cyan.
Firmament is currently on Kickstarter, and it needs your help! We all have 8 more days to get the campaign to its goal. It has a ways to go, but we can do it if we push it on social media. Be sure to tell your friends, and consider upping you pledge by a few dollars if you can.
Greetings all!
As you can see from the title of the post, we have a very exciting special guest to announce today:
That’s right, Jack Wall will be a special guest at Mysterium this year.
Jack Wall is an ASCAP award-winning and BAFTA nominated composer best known for his rich, cinematic scores found within popular video game franchises such as Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, 3, & 4, and Mass Effect 1 & 2. Most recently Wall scored the supernatural drama television series Shadowhunters: The Mortal Instruments airing on Disney’s Freeform TV as well as the latest record-breaking entry in the blockbuster Call of Duty series, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4. He has also written additional music score for numerous other TV series including the fantasy drama series Reign on the CW and Emerald City on NBC as well as scoring the hi-octane action film Hard Target 2 available on Netflix.
However, Myst fans will know him as the composer of the beautiful soundtracks from Myst III and IV.
Between Jack and Russel we’re starting to build up quite a powerhouse of audio guests, so expect at least one panel centered around game audio. And who knows? We may get them to join in on Mysterium Showtunes!
Mysterium has been around for a long time, and many of you have been coming for just as long. We want to showcase the people that make Mysterium great, and that means we need your pictures and stories! We want you to submit or post a photo of you at your first Mysterium convention. For bonus points, feel free to include a story about how Mysterium/the Myst community has impacted your life (or even career). We’ll collect all of these and display them in some fashion this summer. Here are the details:
We look forward to seeing your pictures and hearing your stories!
Quick reminder that Registration and Hotel Reservations are currently open.
Also, remember to join the discussion on your local Mass Mysteria meetup!
Until next time,
-Taniith
Mysterium 2019 Con Chair
Greetings all!
We are excited to announce that registration and hotel reservations are now open! First, though, we want to show you the winning logo submissions for this year’s t-shirts.
Above we have our lovely front logo, made by Xemylixa. Below we have our awesome back logo, by calumTraveler.
We love both of these logos, and we think they’ll look beautiful on the shirts. You can get more information about the shirts on our T-Shirt page.
This year, Mysterium will take place at the Ruby River Hotel in downtown Spokane. This hotel is in walking distance of the downtown core and Riverfront Park, and overlooks the Spokane River. We’ve secured a rate of $119/night for one-bed rooms, and $129/night for two-bed rooms (plus tax).
To book your room, and for more information about the hotel and surrounding area, please see our Location page.
In addition to hotel reservations, Mysterium registration is now open! From now until June 1st, you can purchase a weekend registration for $35, or a premium registration (weekend + shirt + coloring book) for $60. That’s a $5 discount off of the individual items! After June 1st, the price will increase and shirts/books will not be available.
We are also introducing a space for personal pronouns on our badges this year. We’ve heard attendees ask for it over the past few years; in the interest of creating the most welcoming and enjoyable environment we can, we decided it was time to introduce the option. Adding pronouns to your badge will be 100% optional, but all staff badges will include them.
You can get all the details and purchase your registration at the Registration page.
We made the decision to raise registration prices by $10 this year, and we want to be fully transparent about why. As described in our FAQ, registration prices go towards the cost of renting the hotel space, equipment rentals, swag, and convention expenses. Unfortunately, the cost of hotel space, especially in popular cities, has been increasing quickly in recent years. In addition, this year we have invited quite a few special guests, and part of the registration increase will go towards offsetting their travel costs. Please get in touch with us if you have any questions about registration.
Remember to submit any event/panel/activity ideas using our submissions form! Also, be sure to join in the Mass Mysteria city planning discussions on our discord – details here.
We expect to have a very exciting special guest announcement in a few weeks.
Until then,
-Taniith
Mysterium 2019 Con Chair
Greetings All!
It’s been a while since our last blog post. Time for some news!
Event submissions are now open! As a fan-run convention, we rely on you to help us fill the schedule with a fun assortment of events. We try to have everything from fan project presentations, to group activities/games, to last year’s showtunes night. So if you have an idea, please submit it!
This year we are introducing a new category called “Microtalks”. Do you have something you’d like to show the community, but you don’t want to stand up there for 30-60 minutes? Try doing a microtalk. These can be as short as 5 seconds, or as long as 10 minutes. Bring props and visual aids if you want, or just stand up and talk. It’s up to you.
Event submissions are due by May 20th, 2019.
We also want to throw in a quick reminder that Coloring Book and Enamel Pin submissions are still open for another 2 weeks. We’ve had some great submissions so far, but we’re certainly looking for more!
We’re sorry for the radio silence on Mass Mysteria. Today we’re happy to announce the opening of city-specific discussion channels on our Discord server. We know not everyone uses Discord, but after much discussion we decided it was the simplest way to get discussion spaces set up. We hope you’ll join us on Discord!
Once you join the server and agree to the rules, head over to the “#mass-mysteria” channel for general discussion, or to the “#bot-commands” channel to opt-in to your city’s channel. Check out our Mass Mysteria info page for more details about the events!
We are very excited to announce our next special guest for Mysterium 2019: Russell Brower!
Russell Brower
Russell Brower is a three-time Emmy Award winner, Composer, Musical Director and Conductor. For over a decade, Brower was the Senior Director of Audio and Lead Composer at Blizzard Entertainment, developer and publisher of the World of Warcraft, Diablo III, StarCraft II, Overwatch and Hearthstone franchises. Previously, Brower served as a Principal Media Designer and Music Director at Walt Disney Imagineering, creators of Disney’s theme parks worldwide.
As an independent composer and sound artist, he has worked on such projects as Animaniacs, Batman: The Animated Series and many other series, specials and films. He serves on the Boards of Directors of the Society of Composers & Lyricists and the Game Audio Network Guild and is a member of NATAS and NARAS, and is a Film Scoring instructor for the UCLA Extension Program. “Invincible”, from his score for World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, made its first appearance in the Classic FM Hall of Fame Top 300 in April 2014 at no 52.
Myst fans will know him best from the Myst 25th Anniversary Kickstarter, for which he composed several Myst-inspired musical pieces available to backers.
We’re very excited to welcome Russell to Mysterium!
That’s all the news we have for today. We expect to open registration and hotel reservations in mid-February, so keep an eye out for that. We’ll also be announcing even more special guests.
Until then,
-Taniith
Mysterium 2019 Chair
Shorah All!
As promised in our last post, we’re opening the next round of art submissions today. We also have some exciting news about special guests for Mysterium 2019. Let’s get to it:
First, a reminder that shirt logo submissions must be received by January 4th, 2019. That’s just under 3 weeks from now!
We have two additional art categories opening up today. First is pins!
We created a trio of exclusive enamel pins for Mysterium 2018 (two of which are shown above). We’re planning to create a new set of exclusive pins for 2019, and this time we’re opening it up to anyone who wants to create a design! Simple pin art isn’t that hard to do, and they look really great once they are manufactured. You can check out the details for pin art submissions here.
Second, we’ll be making a coloring book for Mysterium this year!
Adam Winsor – MandalaMantis.com
Coloring books geared toward adults have become popular in recent years. They’re a fun way to do something creative, and many people find them to be relaxing. This idea was tossed around the room at Mysterium 2018, and we decided it was time to make it happen. You can find the details for coloring page submissions here.
Unlike logos, the submission deadline for pin and coloring page submissions is February 15th, 2019.
Given that this will be the 20th annual Mysterium, and that it’s in Spokane, we felt like we needed to do something extra special. So, we’ve been calling in favors and reaching out to as many special guests as we can find from across the Myst series. We’ll be announcing them periodically over the next few months, but today we’re very excited to showcase our first guest – Chuck Carter:
Photo by Jeff Hitchcock
Or as we on the committee like to think of him:
Photo by Ellen Rockett
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”.
We last saw Chuck at Mysterium 2016 (video here), where he told us all about his then-new indie studio Eagre Games, and a game he was working on called ZED.
ZED is the story of an aging artist, lost in regret and the haze of dementia. Inside the dreamscape of this creative mind come undone, players reassemble the artist’s fragmented memories into a final, lasting legacy: a loving final gift to his unborn granddaughter.
Making its debut on PC (with optional VR support for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive), ZED is a surreal trip, with an unexpected narrative that unfolds across fanciful, fractured lands. Spanning regret, reconciliation and redemption, it’s a bittersweet story that’s both deeply personal, and undeniably universal.
Then, a month ago, Eagre announced that ZED would be published through a partnership with Cyan Ventures, a new publishing arm from Cyan. We were already planning to invite Chuck back, but it was a no-brainer with news like that!
We’re working with Cyan and Eagre to hopefully have a VR rig set up in the convention room so that people can try out ZED in full VR.
You can find out more about ZED on over on its Steam page. Be sure to add it to your Steam wishlist while you’re there!
We’re all very excited to have Chuck back this year, and we think you’ll enjoy having him at Mysterium, too. Stay tuned for more special guest announcements in early 2019!
We’re wrapping up negotiations with our Spokane-area hotel, and plan to open up registration in early 2019. We expect event and panel submissions to open in mid-January. We will also have some more news for Mass Mysteria in the coming weeks.
As always, feel free to contact us if you have any questions or comments!
-Taniith
Mysterium 2019 Chair
