Star Wars Land is still far from completion—and it’s still unclear if the Marvel heroes will ever get their own Disney plot—but there was a time when Disney was looking outside of the company for theme park inspiration. It’s been rumored for over a decade that the Mouse had plans to create a Myst attraction in Orlando’s Disney World, which ultimately never came to fruition. Now, the co-creator of Myst, Rand Miller has revealed that he and his brother and fellow Myst co-creator Robyn Miller actually worked with Disney on the proposed attraction.
Via /film, Rand Miller told A.V. Club that “at some point, there were some really cool plans to do some stuff with Disney. We were looking at it as the ultimate incarnation of our world. Basically, there was a place down in Florida—it’s one of the island areas that they had that wasn’t used very much. But it had some walkways among trees, and an island area, and we went down and looked at it and…It was perfect for Myst.”
The island that Miller is referring to is Disney’s Discovery Island, which was subsequently abandoned and closed. According to Miller, the original vision was to recreate the Myst experience on Discovery Island, before those plans ultimately fell by the wayside.
“Their imagineering team was excited about embracing that and building some stuff into it and tying it into the rest of the park, where you could explore and have this real-world experience…But, the way Disney works, and the way it had to fit in with their bigger scheme of things, and the way we didn’t understand pieces of it, I think it fell apart from their point of view. That was a very exciting time. It was cool to try to pull that off.”
According to Jim Hill Media’s report in 2004, the proposed Myst attraction would have only catered to a limited number of guests per day. The guests would arrive by boat in the morning and they would spend several hours sorting through the clues and experiences in a non-linear way. It’s possible that the size of Discovery Island and the smaller number of guests that it could accommodate played a role in the project’s cancellation. But it’s an amazing idea that we would have loved to see become a reality.
Would a Myst theme park still be an exciting attraction for Disney? Point and click on the comment section below to register your response!
Image: Brøderbund
