Mighty Coconut and Cyan will create Walkabout Mini Golf: Myst in VR

Cyan has partnered with Mighty Coconut to make a virtual reality course set on Myst Island, dubbed Walkabout Mini Golf: Myst.

Austin, Texas-based Mighty Coconut is developing the new 36-hole VR course as an extension of its existing Walkabout Mini Golf VR title. The Myst course will debut in the fourth quarter of 2022. Walkabout Mini Golf: Myst will be a downloadable content (DLC) course for the popular VR game.

The course will be available on Meta Quest, Steam, and forthcoming VR platforms and will feature immersive gameplay with realistic physics, and iconic settings, objects, and the spirit of puzzles from the Myst saga.

Lucas Martell, executive producer and head of Mighty Coconut, said in an interview with GamesBeat that his team is consulting with Cyan on the development to get the look and feel of Myst Island correct.

“We’re able to do some much larger things that you could do in a real-life course,” said Martell.

It helps that Cyan has already turned Myst into a 3D adventure in VR. Myst VR debuted in December 2020 on the Oculus Quest 2 headset. But Martell said that his team has to remake the island in the art style for Walkabout Mini Golf, so they will use the art work from Myst more like an inspiration for their own title.

The original Myst is a graphic adventure puzzle video game initially released for the Macintosh personal computer platform in 1993, now approaching its 30th anniversary.

“All of us at at Mighty Coconut grew up playing Myst, and some of us have rediscovered it within the past couple of years,” Martell said. “It seems sort of sacrilegious to put a mini-golf course on Myst Island. Yet at the same time, when we’re thinking of where do we want to hang out together and play around in mini golf together, Myst Island sounds like the perfect thing.”

Five people can currently play in a room together in multiplayer. In designing the Myst multiplayer, Cyan and Mighty Coconut will be able to work together.

“We’re going to have to dial in a couple of things, but in general we’re trying to stay as true as possible,” said Martell. “It’s a love letter.”

Martell said that one thing Myst enables is to add more puzzle-solving to the mini-golf experience than other licenses do. That will come into play when you’re looking for lost balls.

Hannah Gamiel, development director at Cyan in Mead, Washington, said in an interview that the Cyan team had been fans of the Walkabout Mini Golf game before negotiations began. Meta introduced Cyan and Mighty Coconut.

“We were really stoked to hear from Mighty Coconut,” said Gamiel. “We’ve had meetings in Walkabout Mini Golf, so it’s very exciting.”

And both founders (Rand and Robyn Miller) have played the VR game.

“It’s also kind of perfect. Because people want to hang out on Myst Island,” she said. “They want to spend time with friends and family. And people have been doing that over the years anyway, just playing the game. This just seems like a perfect companion anyway for it. So anyway, I’m very excited.”

Mighty Coconut is the entertainment studio behind the best-rated multiplayer game on the Meta Quest: Walkabout Mini Golf, which in March announced a partnership with the Jim Henson Company to develop Walkabout Mini Golf: Labyrinth.

The base game of Walkabout Mini Golf includes eight courses, which each include 36 holes (18 easy mode and 18 hard mode). Mighty Coconut is subsequently releasing individual add-on courses as downloadable content (DLC)—three have been released to date, with more in the works.

Martell said the Myst course will be vivid, challenging, puzzle-filled, and beautiful for players where they can escape, explore, and play solo or rendezvous with up to four other players for 18 easy mode and 18 hard mode holes—complete with iconic Myst objects, settings, and puzzles.

You will also be able to find 18 lost balls, participate in a “fox hunt” scavenger expedition, and collect a virtual, commemorative putter. The Walkabout Mini Golf title has hundreds of thousands of players in more than 40 countries.

Mighty Coconut was started in 2014 by Martell, who made the animated short film The Oceanmaker. Myst was the best-selling game of the 20th century. Don Carson, the lead art director at Mighty coconut, is a former Disney Imagineer.

“So all the courses have a bit of this theme park idea in terms of how they’re designed,” Martell said. “It just happens to be a theme park built around a mini-golf course.