I must admit, this news about #Uranus and #Neptune has me shook:
"A fresh analysis of Voyager 2's images show both ice giants are in fact a similar shade of greenish blue, which is the 'most accurate representation yet' of the planets' colors, the new study finds."
while most people remember Myst, fewer remember cyan's earlier first-person hypercard adventures like The Manhole, Spelunx and Cosmic Osmo.
spelunx has a unique and wonderful art style - robyn's 1-bit black/white paintings are crisp, imaginative, and delightful. but what surprises me the most is that colour sprites are mixed in at specific places. i do not know of other games that feature both colour and b+w support simultaneously during gameplay. (fwiw, if your macintosh was 1-bit, it would show 1-bit art in its place)
this is the launch edition of the game, ca. 1991. two years later, after the success of Myst, #cyan would re-release Spelunx with repainted 256 colour art. robyn himself isn't a fan of the repainted art, and i can understand why. the originals are incredible examples of what macpaint and hypercard are capable of together.
i especially like that the game includes a Hypercard 2.1 diskette, because there were no guarantees that macintosh owners would have a copy of their own.
attached is the receipt I found in the game. it appears the Colbert family of Fayetteville, Georgia bought this for their kids a few days after christmas '92 - one can imagine santa brought the family a new mac for christmas a few days earlier :)
if you're interested in cyan's untold history, i highly recommend @MossRC's wonderful interview with robyn miller on the b+w adventure series:
Cyan theme - Frames. The old Cuen House and Butcher Shop (1883), and the first telephone exchange in Florence, Arizona (1902). Leased by one of Arizona’s most notable early politicians and judges, Earnest Macfarland, or “Mac”, set up an attorney’s office with partner Tom Fulbright in 1930. After years of disuse and the town of Florence reacquiring the building, it is now home to a small business.
New blog post! I'm always seeing "first CD-ROM game" citations that are totally inconsistent, or which cite games like Myst, so I decided to put together a timeline of all the candidates - and ended up calling into question the point of "firsts" lists in the first place.