Greetings All

Can you believe it’s almost June? In just over two months we’ll all be gathering in Spokane! With that in mind, we have a few updates and another big announcement:

Registration/Swag Deadline

Early Bird registration ends this Saturday, June 1st. After that, the registration price will go up, and we can’t guarantee you’ll get swag with your badge.

Also, if you want to order and extra coloring book or t-shirt, be sure to do so ASAP. After Saturday we’ll be closing pre-orders on those and placing our manufacturing orders.

You can register or buy shirts/books at our registration page, here.

Hotel Update

Ruby River, our convention hotel, is basically booked solid at this point. There may be one or two rooms currently available on our reservation link, but that’s it. We’re actively working with the hotel to secure a block of overflow rooms at one of their nearby properties. We’ll email all registered attendees, and post here/on social media, once we have more information.

In the meantime, some people on our Discord server have expressed an interest in sharing rooms to split the cost. You can post to the #room-and-ride-share channel there if you’re interested.

Announcing – Tim Larkin

We’re very excited to announce that our next special guest is Tim Larkin!

Tim began his relationship with Cyan as a sound designer for Riven, and later as the Audio Director and composer for URU and Myst V. He currently works as a sound designer and composer at Valve. You can find out more about Tim, and all of Mysterium’s special guests, on our new Special Guests page!

If you’ve been following our special guest announcements, you may be starting to notice a theme. Stay tuned, because we’re not quite done with these announcements yet!

Until then,
-Taniith
Mysterium 2019 Chair

Greetings all!

As you can see from the title of the post, we have a very exciting special guest to announce today:

Jack Wall

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 Memories

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:

• Post with the hashtag #Mysterium20 to Twitter (tag @mysteriumcon) or to our Facebook Group
  • Alternately, you can email your submission to tanshin@mysterium.net
• Include a photo of you at your first Mysterium. You can also include a photo of you today if you wish.
• Include your preferred name, if it’s not your Facebook/Twitter handle
• Optionally, include a short story/blurb to go with it
  • Did you meet your partner because of Mysterium? Or did it have some other major impact on your life?
• We will collect all posts with the #Mysterium20 hashtag, and the contents may be shown later on the website or in the con-room

We look forward to seeing your pictures and hearing your stories!

Reminders

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!

It’s been a while since our last blog post. Time for some news!

Event Submissions

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.

Other Submissions

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!

Mass Mysteria Update

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!

Special Guest: Russell Brower

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!

Next Time on 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