Myst III: Exile Digital Press Kit

A community effort to document Myst merchandise

This is a press kit for Myst III, intended to be given to journalists in order to help them write articles about Myst III. This kit contains 4 notable pieces of media:

A Press Kit CD (English version)
A "Making Of" CD
An 8-page pamphlet
A copy of Myst III on four CDs

The "Press Kit - English" CD

The files on the press kit CD are in a folder labeled "E3 DPK 2001". However, due to the dates on the disk and it's contents, it's clear that this particular artifact wasn't handed out at E3 2001, which took place in May 17–19, 2001. Evidence includes:

The manufacture dates etched into the disks themselves are for 13 July 2001 (for the press kit disk) and 6 July 2001 (for all of the other disks)
The 'date modified' timestamps on many of the files range from 31 December 1999 to 11 May 2001, and the folders are dated 15 May 2001, which would be far too close to E3 to press these files to disk in time.
The file "Myst III Walkthrough.doc" is a walkthrough for the demo, which isn't actually present in this kit.

Therefore, I believe that this disk contains the files that were handed out at E3 2001. However, it's not likely that this particular configuration of disks was used at E3 2001 itself. My theory is that these press kits were mailed out in preparation of the EU release (7 September 2001) or the Xbox/Playstation 2 ports (22 September 2002).

This disk also contains a copy of the desktop themes from the "Making Of" CD, also with small differences, which is discussed later.

There is a wide range of content on this disk. The root folder mostly contains files such as the manual and some quick reference material to aid members of the press in writing articles, and a folder called"Logos" contains print-ready logos for Presto, Ubisoft, and several variants of Myst III's logo (along with a document outlining some guidelines for utilizing the logo).

"Myst Product Line Overview" contains two formats of the same file: a timeline of the current Myst media that existed at the time, with very small summaries of the first two Myst games as well as the three novels.

"Creator Biographies" contains biographies of two Ubisoft employees and four Presto employees, and"Headshots and Team Photo" has a collection of photos of Presto employees.

"Game Trailer" contains copies of the same three trailers as the "Making Of" CD. Notably, though two of these trailers are in lower resolution, the "Game Trailer" here is actually a higher resolution than the "Making Of" CD's version.

"Live Action Blue Screen Shoot" contains 17 pictures taken during the production of the live action cutscenes, including photos of Maria Galante as Katran and Brad Dourif as Saavedro. These photos have last-modified dates ranging from 31 Dec 1999 to 22 Aug 2000.

Finally, there are two folders dedicated to screenshots. "Web Ready Screenshots" is a collection of small screenshots intended for display on web pages, as evidenced by their small filesizes and dimensions (none of these images are larger than 671 x 768 or 388 KiB).

However, the "High Res Screenshots + Covers" folder contains a variety of high-resolution files that haven't been previously released to the public, in a high variety of file formats. The original formats are retained in this mirror, but you can find this folder's contents converted to jpg here. Here are some notable examples:

(2200 x 3000, 2.91 MiB)

(3600 x 3600, 9.36 MiB)

(3600 x 3600, 8.18 MiB)

(2048 x 1107, 2.09 MiB)

Two of these files contain multiple layers in order to perform small corrections: this is how JannaninLagoon_roto.psd looks with it's original sky, and this is the box art without it's color corrections.

Interestingly, several of these files have the same four-letter tags as their counterparts inside Exile's data files, such as ENCH.PCT, which is an unfinished version of Exile's ENCH-30 node, with different lighting and lacking the gondola's cable assembly. In most cases, these renders have slightly different lighting or geometry than the in-game versions:

LIDRCamNode24_Back.PCT is actually the exact same resolution as Exile's LIDR-24 node, but this press kit's render has a low-polygon stump on the right hand side, and several leaves are missing from the nest on the left.
LIFOPort_Print.psd has drastically different lighting and different foliage as Exile's LIFO-39, and is also rendered from a slightly different position. Opening this file in Adobe Photoshop reveals that an additional layer has been added with numerous touch-ups, adding shadows and removing seams in many places. Here is how it looks with the touchup layer removed.
LISV_SqueePrint.tif isn't actually a shot that can be found in-game, and LISV is not a tag used in Exile at all (the squee section in Edanna is tagged LISW)
ENCHCamNode74_Right.PCT corresponds predictably to ENCH-74: the geometry is identical, but all of the lighting is slightly different.

Furthermore, the file BirdPrintCGW.psd actually contains multiple layers, possibly giving us a glimpse into Exile's render process. Seperate layers exist for the sky/ocean, the tree, and the bird. A touchup layer also exists to hide some seams.

Therefore, I believe these renders may have been made during production, before geometry and lighting were finalized.

A complete copy of this disk's files can be explored here:

Press Kit - English

Press Kit - English (Disk image)

The "Making Of" CD

This CD's contents are identical to the "Making Of" CD that came with the Myst III Collector's Edition, although it has different art printed on the disk. The manufacturer and manufacture date of both CDs are the same. This disk also contains Myst III desktop themes for Windows, which I discuss further in the final section. But the most significant content on this disk are the movie files: this disk includes three trailers (gametrailer.mov, theatrical.mov, and tvtrailer.mov) and a "Making Of" video.

Here you can explore all the files on this disk:

The Making Of

The Making Of (Disk image)

The pamphlet

The pamphlet is an 8-page plastic booklet measuring 26cm x 14cm. The page numbers inside the pamphlet consider the cover to be page 1, and so the content begins on page 2.

A composite scan of the entire pamphlet can be found here:

(3330 x 15307, 41.4 MiB)

The game disks

The disks included are PC only CD-Roms, as opposed to the more common PC/Mac compatible releases (which exist in both 4-CD and 4-DVD configurations.) This set bears many similarities to other post-launch 4-CD releases of Myst III, including the UK Collector's Edition (manufactured on 24 July 2001) and the Myst Trilogy box set (manufactured on 25 July 2001), both of which were manufactured by the same company as this set. Other similarities to these retail sets include:

These disks install Version 1.2 (164) of Myst III without requiring any patching or creating a seperate patch entry in the Windows installed program list.
The autorun.inf on disk 1 is misconfigured, referring to an icon file that doesn't exist, so the CD's thumbnail cannot render (the other 3 game disks don't have this problem.)
Although the art is different on this press kit than it is on the retail disks, the color scheme is the same on both, likely so they could both be manufactured without extensive retooling.

However, since this is a PC-only release rather than a PC/Mac release, the files on these disks are different from the files on PC/Mac dual-compatible retail releases.

The desktop themes

This kit includes themes intended to be used with Microsoft Plus, a software package for Windows 95 through XP that expanded theme support (among other things). Although Microsoft Plus is now deprecated, the actual wallpapers/cursors/icons/sounds are still useable on modern machines; they simply need to be manually assigned.

Here is a copy of all of the theme files, which are normally inaccessible without having Microsoft Plus installed:

Exile theme files for Microsoft Plus

The installer also replaces the Windows 95/98/ME startup/shutdown screens, shown here in both their raw format and in the stretched format that Windows displays them:

(320 x 400, 0.09 MiB)

(640 x 400, 0.11 MiB)

(320 x 400, 0.08 MiB)

(640 x 400, 0.1 MiB)

(320 x 400, 0.08 MiB)

(640 x 400, 0.1 MiB)

There are also three extra wallpapers included, in four different resolutions each. The third extra wallpaper (called "desktop 4") is the only difference between the "Press Kit" themes and the "Making Of" themes: the "Press Kit" CD included these four files in 8-bit CMYK rather than 8-bit RGB. This has been corrected on the "Making Of" CD, giving them a modified timestamp of 2 Feb 2001 rather than 15 Jan 2001, and smaller filesizes.

Here are copies of all five wallpapers (the 2 theme wallpapers and the 3 extra wallpapers) in their highest included resolution: