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Holiday Treat #1: An Important Documentary, Restored

Added 2023-11-28 14:37:02 +0000 UTC

The following is part of our 25-day Holiday Countdown Calendar! Every day from December 1st through the 25th, we're posting a cool game history treat, and $5 and up Patrons get access one day early! This is technically our December 1st post, but since today is Giving Tuesday, we're giving you this one a little earlier than usual.

This is all part of our annual Winter Fundraiser donation drive, where we ask those who are able to generously give what they can so that we can continue thriving. If you're able to make an additional one-time charitable contribution, this really is the best time to do so, as your donations will be DOUBLED thanks to a generous group of sponsors! Head on over to gamehistory.org/donate to learn more and give today.

Today, we have a classic game documentary for you — at a quality it has never seen before!

For the last year, we’ve been working with Cyan, the creators of the Myst series, to digitize hundreds of video tapes from their collections. We’ve already found some amazing footage, including the original live-action recordings for Riven: The Sequel to Myst.

We also found the original master copy of The Making of Riven, a 13-minute documentary that was included with the game. The video that shipped with Riven was heavily compressed, and the version we found on a Digital Beta tape is an incredible bump up in quality. Look at this before-and-after!

We’ll be sharing more videos from the Cyan collection when we launch our digital library in 2024. But for now, please enjoy this newly remastered version of The Making of Riven! Our huge thanks to Cyan for opening up their vault for this exciting project, and thanks to our friends at Moving Image Preservation of Puget Sound for their expert digitization.