Pyst

Pyst Island is full of litter, most of the buildings are ruined, and graffiti reveals secret doors and solutions to puzzles that challenged players in Myst. Pyst utilizes three-dimensional graphics, animated drawings, and pre-recorded video and audio.

Gameplay is a simplified version of the playing style used for Myst. The game consists of a series of pre-rendered, interactive visuals of Pyst Island locations. With Bergman's "seal of disapproval", the concept is that the familiar Myst locations have been vandalized by millions of virtual players who have been trapped on the island, having "giv[en] up on trying to finish the damn thing", and as a result have trashed the space, while a shady entrepreneur has built a "Dorian Grey money-making scheme". Unlike in Myst there are no real puzzles to solve. The player simply explores a setting, and then moves to adjoining locations at will.

The basic concept of Pyst was to show what Myst Island (from the best-selling game) would look like after four million people (that game's players) had visited and "explored". Pyst developer and comedian Peter Bergman wanted to give Myst players the ability to "experience the island in a whole new light". Palladium President Ed Bernstein wanted the game to be a "transformative work that moved way beyond Myst", in order to avoid copyright issues with Myst publisher Broderbund, on the grounds of the new game being a parody work. A spokesman from Broderbund said the company was unfazed by the project, commenting: "We've seen imitators and they usually just give us a good chuckle".

Bergman discovered that the sense of comic timing he had for his live shows couldn't be replicated in the digital realm, and he had to adapt accordingly. Firesign Theatre website Firezine said that the game was illustrative of Bergman's ability to "survey America's culture and obsessions like a maniacal monitor reflecting the absurdness of it all, while casting his iconoclastic eye to read the entrails of the present coarse and our delirious future".

The game received mixed reviews. While noted for its novelty as one of the first parody video games, Pyst was seen as not living up to its full potential as a parody of ripe and timely subject matter and was criticized for lacking in gaming content, being more of an interactive story than a game.

Electric Playground praised the game for having a "cheeky attitude and an irreverence" not found in the source material. Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture wrote that Pyst challenges the central conceit of Myst, whereby the "untouched landscape" navigated by a "lone trailblazer" is reimagined as a popular, commercialised tourist attraction. PC Primer thought it was "side-splitting" and "light-hearted". MacGamer gave it the distinction of being the first parody video game, and deemed it a "mildly amusing, short-lived parody with no gaming component".

The game is considered by many to be the earliest parody video game and the first parody of the Myst series, but a free "homage" game entitled Mylk was created by Bart Gold using Macromedia Director and released earlier. Mylk's PC version was by Wayne Twitchell. The plot of this game involves a "dairy cow fall[ing] through a crevice to a ranch". Stories in Between: Narratives and Mediums @ Play listed Pyst, Mysty, Missed, and Mylk as four parody games based on the Myst series.

The Mysterious World of Missed, or Missed, was developed by Jason Bloomberg. 100 Videogames noted the success of Myst is "best demonstrated by the amount of parodies constructed of it". Danielle Rosen of Built To Play thought the game was a predecessor to exploration video games like Gone Home and Dear Esther.