Riven X for Mac OS X cancelled; announcing Mobile Riven

Update: This was my April Fools entry for 2008. Riven X is still under development for Mac OS X only.

The recent introduction of the iPhone SDK got me thinking about the future of Riven X. And I came to the conclusion there was no future for a slideshow on modern desktops. However, plenty of people will want some games on their iPhones, and Riven certainly would be great with that touch UI. So I’m officially announcing I’m stopping development of Riven X for Mac OS X and will be working exclusively for the iPhone. Expect daily builds in a month or so.

I hope you’re as excited as I am about this. When you solve that puzzle at 4 PM riding the bus home or being jammed in traffic, you won’t have to wait anymore! Just slide that unlock slider, punch the Riven icon and off you go on an adventure.

23 thoughts on “Riven X for Mac OS X cancelled; announcing Mobile Riven

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  3. Doug Moon

    Okay, I realize that today being, well, today, you’re probably joking, but It still is a neat idea. :) Granted, maybe the Mobile OS X/Cocoa Touch/whatever the platform is called as a whole may not be up to the input precision required for something like a direct port of Riven, leaving alone the potential difficulty (and approval issues with getting an unauthorized port of a commercial game approved, etc.), games in the “explore a world” genre (Myst, the flash games whose names escape me that were based around getting out of a room, etc.) could work really quite well on that platform, interface-wise, as well as the fact that they are exactly the sorts of games that I could see myself wanting available to pass the time. Too bad Myst is a dead franchise and the commercial software market has moved out of this genre entirely it seems.

  4. Pingback: Riven X for Mac OS X cancelled; announcing Mobile Riven | Gearfire.com

  5. Joseph Martineau

    Please tell me you’re kidding. Also, does your employment at Apple (congrats on that, btw), mean you will no longer support Riven X/Mobile Riven (if it exists)?

  6. Jean-François Roy Post author

    [quote comment="1997"]Please tell me you’re kidding. Also, does your employment at Apple (congrats on that, btw), mean you will no longer support Riven X/Mobile Riven (if it exists)?[/quote]
    Yes, it was a very savory joke. Riven X development is continuing as planned.

  7. cameron

    wtf i was all say and my riven x keeps crashing arfter 3 minutes

    and a cannot update to 0.6d for some reason but it says that it tis there to be downloaded and i wanna save my game

    cheers

  8. cameron

    ye thnks i was just saying mine crashes alot and i tryed 0.6d and the slide action was 2 slow and it becomes boring so it is better in 0.5 in my view and the switch in the mouth of that fish to go up does not work tell me if you don’t know what i mean but im just saying

    cheers

  9. Jean-François Roy Post author

    [quote comment="2005"]ye thnks i was just saying mine crashes alot and i tryed 0.6d and the slide action was 2 slow and it becomes boring so it is better in 0.5 in my view and the switch in the mouth of that fish to go up does not work tell me if you don’t know what i mean but im just saying

    cheers[/quote]
    Development builds have no guarantees on performance whatsoever, and indeed at the moment the development builds have work in progress transition code that may not be suitable to play.

    The particular puzzle you mention is not implemented yet and will not function before the 0.8 release timeframe.

  10. cameron

    no i you know were you pull up the switch and then the mouth opens and it is a elevator the one to make it go up is broken
    its not a puzzle

    when will 0.7 0.8 be out? do you know

    good job so far
    did you get my crash report i get the rainbow wheel of death then it closes
    cheers

  11. cameron

    hope that works but thats the one that does not work

    just telling

    cool app, don’t know how it works tho do a youtube thing how it works

  12. Jean-François Roy Post author

    [quote comment="2008"]no i you know were you pull up the switch and then the mouth opens and it is a elevator the one to make it go up is broken
    its not a puzzle

    when will 0.7 0.8 be out? do you know

    good job so far
    did you get my crash report i get the rainbow wheel of death then it closes
    cheers[/quote]

    I consider that elevator a puzzle :p I do not have any dates associated on each release, since the project is pretty much done on my free time. Usually, so far, each release has taken about 2 months to complete. 0.6 is almost ready to go out, as a matter of fact.

    I did get your crash report and responded to it. Thanks for filing it.

  13. Alastair

    you’ve gotta get permission to port Riven to iPhone/iTouch. What happened to the rights to that game when Cyan went belly up?

  14. Jean-François Roy Post author

    [quote comment="2013"]you’ve gotta get permission to port Riven to iPhone/iTouch. What happened to the rights to that game when Cyan went belly up?[/quote]
    Cyan Worlds is still operating AFAIK, but the rights probably belong in part or in totality to Ubisoft. I should point out Mobile Riven was an April’s Fools and development on Riven X continues as scheduled.

    Discussions about copyright and shipping Riven X have not begun, simply because Riven X is not done yet. I should point out Riven X is not a remake of Riven, but only a new engine. You still need to own or purchase a copy of Riven in order to play.

  15. Albert Arroyo

    Question: I ran RivenX However it does not allow me to open previously saved games from Riven (ran on PPC G4 9.2.2, from Tiger). I got Myst DVD Masterpiece to work on Sheep shaver with no disk and can load the saved games but not on Riven X. Any recommendations?

  16. kaelb

    I remembered this post from a while ago. I’m commenting because the original Myst really IS available now on iPhone. Just thought that was funny.

  17. Jean-François Roy Post author

    The Riven X engine could be modified to run on the iPhone, but it would still be an incredible challenge. Riven is a *massive* game, and I’m not sure even with draconian compression that it’d be possible to get it down to a reasonable size.

    Still, it’s something I’ll definitely be looking at once Riven X is complete.

  18. kaelb

    Well Myst on the app store right now takes up around 767 megabytes on the iPhone, and uses 1.5 gigabytes to install before it is reduced to that size. Riven is probably not feasible.

  19. Seth Lipko

    Yeah, i got Myst on my iPod asap when I saw it on the app store and would do the same with Riven if it were possible. I have 18 GB of space waiting to be used up by more Myst games. I know it would be hard work, but… It would still rock.

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