Concrete Donkey: Oh fark off writer, Myst was never even close to the 20th centuries best selling game. No one cares that you still obsess over that crap 30 years later

It was mediocre gaming that only looked good because of the hardware limits of the time

... it was probably the single best game in the point-and-click puzzle genre ever made, I'm not sure why you're going all hipster on it.  If you just admit you don't like puzzle games in general we're not going to run you out of town on a rail or anything, it's not a reflection on your inherent moral worthiness if you're more a shooter guy or RTS guy or something.  It's something of a niche genre that doesn't have a lot of breakout hits with mainstream success, we're used to this.

There were very few other puzzle games that were complex enough to actually be somewhat challenging while also actually legitimately presenting the player all the information they needed to solve the puzzles inside the game itself and without literally just telling the player to their face how the puzzle worked.  Myst was and still is the gold standard for finding that balance, even the better-selling sequel was a significantly worse game (Riven was a visual novel with the occasional puzzle dropped in your path to lock the narrative's progress.)

Like, I'm not sure why you're pretending like the graphics were the reason the game sold well here; yeah, they were a selling point (though the impressive part of the tech even at the time was more about how much they could get out of limited resources-- it wasn't 'oh, the game is pretty' so much as 'holy shiat I can run this 3d-rendered environment on this baked potato strapped to a pocket calculator', there's a reason the mobile ports happened so easily).  The core selling point was just that it was a better game than almost anything else in the genre.

... admittedly that's kind of a low bar, because point-and-click adventure type puzzlers had (and, frankly, still have) a reputation for faking difficulty by doing some, er, incredibly goddamned stupid nonsense.

Also the narrative framing device was pretty solid, which is always nice.  The story wasn't complex but it had genuine heart in it and an ambiguous enough end that you kinda felt for the poor bastard at the heart of it regardless of what you decided to do.

// I am also skeptical about what kind of accounting gymnastics were done to get "best selling game of the 20th century", though.  That seems... obviously inaccurate on its face, not because of the game's direct competitors but because of farking DOOM, which was even worse than farking Skyrim is now about never going the fark away, ever, for even five goddamned minutes.  At minimum they have to be talking dollars and not units moved, or treating the different re-publications of other games as different games or some shiat.

// DOOM is also the king of the "runs on a farking baked potato" aspect, Myst is famously not resource-intensive but it does have higher requirements than DOOM.