If so, good for him - I couldn't find one anywhere. "I suspect he just found one already to size and charged me as if they made it. "His English skills were so poor I suggested we talk in Chinese and I used Google Translate, so I guess you could add that to my skills," he says. The games are set in fictional realms known as Ages, which can be accessed by linking books, and you play as The Stranger, a visitor to the Ages. He says he designed the touchscreen controller himself.Īnd as for the touchscreen itself? At one point in his search, he found himself talking to a vendor in China to arrange for a custom design. Ando ended up ordering a mixture of store-bought parts, and custom PCB layouts, soldering the whole thing together and switching out components between a bunch of boards to get the most efficient versions. The parts that made up the computer came from specialist vendors that ordinarily sell to aerospace and other niche enterprise customers. "To give you an idea of how uncommon it is to shrink an X86 computer down this small," he says, "the smallest X86 computer made by Apple, the Mac Mini, is 17 cm - this book is only 12 cm, plus I had to squeeze in my own power source and screen." Most mobile devices run on ARM, but Ando wanted to run the original releases of each game, so porting wouldn't do. To build the tiny computer that powers the Linking Book, Ando needed to find a X86 board that could fit inside. "Research was the main skill involved," says Ando, "I spent hundreds of hours, literally, trying to find suitable components to meet all my requirements." The games have been widely ported and the game - once so huge that you needed special hardware to run it - is now available for download on iOS (among other places). The game spawned four sequels, along with novels, music, and an MMO that is still online and being powered by donations from the fan base. It was the first breakout hit in PC gaming and from its release in 1993 it held the title of best-selling PC game until 2002 when The Sims surpassed it. Myst was a ground-breaking point-and-click adventure game created by Cyan Worlds, made of hundreds of beautifully rendered scenes whose combined size made the game so big that it needed a CD-ROM to play, back when many computers didn't have them. He made a lovingly authentic replica of the Linking Book that helps the main character - you - navigate the world. But maker Mike Ando took a little piece of that world and drew it into ours. The classic PC game Myst was known for drawing people in to its massive, surreal world.
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