Hello everyone! We hope you’re all having a promising start to the new year. Let’s kick things off with some announcements.
Hotel Booking
Hotel room booking is now available at our selected venue, the Westin Alexandria Old Town. Rooms are available for $100/night with included wireless internet and discounted parking. For more information about the hotel and the booking link, please head to our Location page.
Mysterium 2022 Location Bids
Mysterium is made possible by local efforts every year. Want us to visit your favorite city? Send us a location bid! Bids for Mysterium 2022 will be accepted through April 1st, 2021. For more information, including sample bids from previous years, visit our Location Bidding page.
Rollover Registration Update
Rollover registration emails were sent in early December. If you have questions, or did not receive one, please feel free to contact us through our Contact page.
Thank you all for joining us as we start 2021. We look forward to bringing you more exciting announcements over the coming months.
– The Mysterium 2021 Triumvirate: Capella, Dan, and Drew
Greetings everyone! We are excited to share some updates for Mysterium 2021!
Registration Now Open
Registration for Mysterium 2021 is now available on our Registration page. Standard registration can be purchased for $30, while premium registration, which includes a t-shirt and any swag, can be purchased for $45 through April 30th. A link for hotel reservations will be posted on the Location page soon.
Before you jump in, we have a few additional notes about registration this year:
2020 Registration Rollover
If you purchased a Mysterium 2020 registration and elected to roll it over to 2021, please do not purchase an additional registration. We will contact all registrants who requested a rollover in the coming weeks to confirm and follow-up with a blog update. If you don’t remember whether you requested a rollover, please wait to see if you receive communication before re-registering.
Statement on COVID-19
The safety and well-being of our attendees is of utmost importance to the Mysterium Committee. As the state of the coronavirus is continually evolving, it is difficult to determine exactly how events or gatherings may look in July. That said, we reserve the right to require attendees to provide proof of vaccination against COVID-19 or a negative test prior to issuance of a badge and admission to the event space. Any such proof will be used solely for verification and will not be stored by either The Mysterium Convention or Falling Man Group.
As the situation solidifies in the coming months, we will be sure to provide updates as they are ready to be shared. Any associated policies will be listed on our Policies page, including any potentially relevant changes to our refund policy, if and when they are written.
T-Shirt Order Update
All T-shirts ordered this year have been shipped! Many thanks to Odo for single-handedly taking on such an immense operation. If you have not yet received your shirt or an email with shipping information, please contact us and include your order number.
Submissions
As a reminder, we are currently accepting event, Activity Book, writing, and art submissions from the community. For more information, please see our Submissions page.
Thank you all for your continued support; we hope you are all staying well and look forward to an opportunity to see everyone again soon. For our fans in the United States, have a safe Thanksgiving holiday.
–The Mysterium 2021 Triumvirate: Capella, Drew, and Dan
We’ve gone through your 2020 survey feedback and are now kicking off Mysterium 2021! We have a few announcements to share.
Survey Highlights
Thank you to everyone who filled out the Mysterium 2020 survey. It gives us valuable insight and ideas for future conventions. There were a few recurring themes we noticed from the results:
You’d like some additional new panels such as a discussion of the books. While we can’t promise anything since it’ll be dependent on special guests’ availability, we are looking into possible topics. If you have contact with a potential Myst-related special guest, please let us know via our Contact Us page.
Speedrunning and Unwritten were quite well received. Thank you to everyone who made those events happen!
Several people were unaware of streams and recordings from prior years. While this year was entirely online, we stream every year as best we can, excepting when panelists request us not to. We stream live on Twitch, and we post everything to our YouTube channel after the convention. A link to the YouTube playlist for a given year can also be found on the History page on our site.
We received several comments about Starry Expanse. While Mysterium provides a platform for announcements from fan projects, we are not directly involved in them ourselves and cannot guarantee regular presentations or updates. We encourage fan-driven projects to submit an event proposal should they have updates they’d like to share.
You may have noticed a new channel, #feedback, on our Discord server. This is for providing suggestions and feedback, either for the server or the convention itself.
T-Shirts
We know many of you are eager to receive the t-shirts you pre-ordered. Unfortunately the pandemic has made it difficult to collaborate on packing and shipping, but we are well underway. Shirts are being sent in batches, and we are around 75% complete. Please note that if you are outside the US, international shipping has been slow lately so it may take extra time for your shirt to reach you.
Mysterium 2021
As previously announced, Mysterium 2021 will be held July 16-18 in Alexandria, VA, just outside Washington, DC. We’ll continue providing information over the next few months, but to start things off, we’re opening submissions:
Have an activity you’d like to run during Mysterium? Event submissions will be open until May 31.
We’ll be printing an activity book similar to the digital one we offered during Mysterium 2020. Page submissions will be open until April 25. Note: All pages from the 2020 digital book will be printed for 2021, so if you submitted a page this year, you do not need to resubmit it unless you wish to update or correct it.
As always, we will have a writing and artwork table to showcase your creations. Please get these in by July 1.
More details, including information on how to submit your ideas and works, can be found on our Submissions page. This year’s t-shirt design will be the same as 2020. Pin designs were also previously selected earlier this year.
That’s it for now. We’ll be opening registration and hotel bookings in the next few months. In the meantime, happy Halloween and enjoy the Fall!
–The Mysterium 2021 Triumvirate: Capella, Drew, and Dan
We have less than a week before Mysterium begins, and we have a few reminders and a big announcement.
Reminders
If you haven’t yet, be sure to register for Mysterium. You will not be able to access the social discussion groups on Zoom unless you do. We also recommend downloading Zoom and running a test call if you plan to join the discussions.
Jack Wall, composer of the Myst III and IV soundtracks and one of our many special guests, let us in on an exciting piece of news yesterday. Jack, in collaboration with Tim Larkin and Cyan, has re-released the soundtracks from Myst III, Myst IV, Uru, and Myst V through his record label.
They are available for purchase digitally from iTunes, Amazon, and Google, and can be streamed on various services worldwide. Search for them under the following names:
Myst III: Exile (Original Game Soundtrack)
Myst IV: Revelation (Original Game Soundtrack)
Uru: Ages Beyond Myst (Original Game Soundtrack)
Myst V: End of Ages (Original Game Soundtrack)
A fan asked about re-releasing the albums at Mysterium last year, which helped to get that ball rolling.
We’ll have more Mysterium news for you in a day or two. Until then, happy listening!
We have just under four weeks to go until Mysterium, so it’s time we tell you about another of our special guests – Stephan Martiniere!
Stephan Martiniere
Myst fans may remember him as the Visual Art Director for the URU/Myst Online games and Myst V, but Stephan has an extensive list of credits across all types of media. From games to movies to book covers to theme parks, he’s done it all. We are enormously excited to welcome him to Mysterium this year, and we think you will all enjoy hearing from him.
You can learn more about Stephan, and all of our guests, on our Special Guests page – and if those aren’t exciting enough for you, stay tuned because we have plenty more to come.
Myst Doc Kickstarter
If you’ve attended Mysterium in recent years, you will remember seeing Philip Shane recording us all and talking about the upcoming Myst Documentary. Well, come tomorrow you will be able to back the Myst Doc on Kickstarter! Head over to the Kickstarter page to sign up for a notification when the campaign goes live.
While you wait, you can also check out an exclusive interview with Philip, Rand, and Robyn over on VentureBeat, here.
What Would Atrus Build
A long-standing favorite of Mysterium attendees, What Would Atrus Build asks participants to “finish” a project that Atrus left in pieces on his desk. We haven’t held this event for several years, but we think this year’s online format lends itself to a slightly modified version: We give you the prompt, and you present your creation in a pre-recorded video.
Make it as simple or complicated as you want. Don’t have the right junk or construction skills to actually build your idea? No problem! We welcome sketches, 3D models, or any other way you can think of to express your creativity.
You can learn all about our WWAB contest on the submissions page.
Call For Discussion Topics
Mysterium is known not just for its great panels and events, but also for its welcoming and casual social atmosphere. You’re just as likely to overhear new friends discussing the finer points of D’ni lore, as you are to hear them talking about unrelated TV shows or computer programming. Someone once described Mysterium as “the fun parts of large cons, but all weekend”. How do we translate that to the online format, though?
Our solution: Social rooms on Zoom. Everyone who is pre-registered (for free!) will receive an email in a few weeks with information about when and how to join these social rooms. Before that, though, we need some topics! We’re looking for a wide range here, so don’t limit yourself to just Myst-specific topics. We’re already planning a time for a ‘crafting circle’ hangout, and another for ‘mental health and coping skills’.
You can use this form to submit your social topic ideas. Feel free to submit as many as you want! Topics should be submitted by July 26th.
Reminders
Remember that Open Mic Night submissions are due in about a week (July 20), and there’s still time to grab a t-shirt and help a couple great causes. Also, if you originally registered for our on-site 2020 convention and have not received an email about refunds and roll-overs, please get in touch with us.
