Cyan’s Kickstarter: Obduction

Obduction Concept Art

Greetings, Myst fans!

Have you been longing for a new game from Cyan? Well, now is your chance to help make it happen! Cyan is currently about half-way through the fundraising time on their Kickstarter campaign to develop Obduction, a new realtime adventure game that will be built using the cutting-edge Unreal 4 graphics engine. They’re trying to raise at least $1.1 million, and still have about $350,000 to go as of this writing. If you haven’t pledged yet, get to it! If you already have, please spread the word! With Mysterium coming back to Spokane next year, we’d love it if Cyan had something new to show off when we visit their offices, and we’re sure you would too :).

Click here to check out the Kickstarter!

2014 Logo Contest Now Open!

We are pleased to announce that the Mysterium 2014 logo contest is now open for submissions! Next year marks the 15th anniversary of our little convention, and our Age theme will be Riven (since 15 is divisible by 5, and Spokane is high desert country, you see ;)). While it isn’t a requirement, we would absolutely love to see designs that both incorporate Riven and commemorate our anniversary.

Submissions must be received by November 30th, 2013. You can submit either a front design, a back design, or both. More information about the design requirements, as well as where to send you entries, can be found on the contest details page.

We look forward to seeing your artwork!

– Alahmnat

Remembering Past Mysteria: A Call for Memories

Next year, Mysterium will turn 15. It’s a huge milestone, and one that deserves to be celebrated (and we will definitely be celebrating it!). Along the way, we’ve been to a lot of really cool places, made many lasting friendships, and formed tons of memories. Unfortunately, right now a lot of those recorded memories have fallen down the Internet rabbit hole, and even the Wayback Machine has a broadly incomplete record of this event’s history.

With our 15th anniversary on the horizon, we are looking to rebuild some of these lost or incomplete records of our past. We’ve (finally!) put information about every previous Mysterium in the History section of our website, and now we’re asking everyone for help in making sure those pages have as much information on them as possible. If you’ve ever been to Mysterium before, there are several ways that you can help:

  1. If you would like to share a written account of your attendance, please email your write-ups to web@mysterium.net.
  2. If you have a gallery of photos online, please email a link to that gallery to web@mysterium.net.
  3. If you’ve uploaded photos to Google+, please be sure to tag our Google+ page so that they appear in our Photos section there.
  4. If you’re on Facebook, please be sure to tag your photos with our Facebook page.
  5. If you have photos on Flickr, please add them to that year’s Flickr group, all of which are linked on our Mysterium Flickr account.
  6. If you have photos that you would like to share without signing up for Flickr or another service, you can send them to us directly, and we will put them in our Flickr photostream. Check out this page for more information.

Mysterium 2014: Shorah from Spokane!

Shorah b’shemtee! This is Alahmnat, your 2014 committee chairman, reporting for duty.

I am thrilled to announce that planning for Mysterium 2014 is already underway! Next year we’re going back to where it all began: Spokane, Washington. We are still nailing down the last details on the hotel itself, but I can say for certain that we are looking forward to seeing you here in Cyan’s home town from August 1-3.

As with any year we’re in Spokane, there is the question of how (or even if) Cyan will be involved. Unfortunately we don’t have anything definite to announce at this time, but we are talking with them, and are hopeful that they can participate in at least some fashion.

I am very excited to be chairing next year’s Mysterium. I strongly believe that establishing a regular location on each coast will help make each year’s event better, by giving the planning teams some much-needed down time every other year, and enabling us to establish stronger relationships with local businesses, like hotels, that will make the hard work of location planning much simpler. The less time we have to spend reinventing the wheel each year, the more time we have to promote the event and do awesome things for you guys!

Over the next few weeks we hope to finalize a few more plans and get some important announcements up, so watch this space!

– Alahmnat, Mysterium 2014 Chair

Wrapping Mysterium 2013!

Shorah!

Mysterium 2013 is over and done, so now it’s time to wrap the event with some final words.

If you have photographs of Mysterium 2013 in publicly-viewable places, please email links to them to web@mysterium.net (or post them in comments). We’d love to post a showcase of people’s event pictures up on the blog and Flickr.

The recordings of the panels can be found on our YouTube channel. This is great for attendees who want to hear them again and non-attendees who want to know what happened. There will also be transcriptions of the panels within the next week.

Capella would like to take a moment like to thank the rest of her convention committee this year. Making a successful bid to host Mysterium in a new city is always a ton of effort and research. Odo’s a long-timer, and Capella has helped the committee before, but the rest of 2013’s committee was entirely new to the Mysterium planning game. Let’s thank estelendur, Kaelri, and Lutra for stepping up to the plate!

See you in the Drift – I mean, around the Cavern –

Capella