Los Angeles, CA — April 15, 2020 — Village Roadshow Entertainment Group (VREG) set Ashley Edward Miller to write the pilot and showrun the television adaptation of the best-selling video game MYST. The company will rely on and expand upon the game’s existing mythology to develop a multi-platform universe including film, scripted and unscripted television content.
First released in 1993, MYST is a first-person graphic adventure video game, created by brothers Rand and Robyn Miller and the company they founded Cyan. Village Roadshow will develop and produce alongside the original co-creator Rand Miller and his youngest brother Ryan Miller, as well as Isaac Testerman and Yale Rice at Delve Media.
The vast MYST canon has over 10,000 years of history, but its primary saga follows Atrus, a brilliant (if a bit naïve) grandson of Anna, a woman who triggers a world-shaping set of events when she discovers the D’ni civilization in a cavern deep below the New Mexico desert. The D’ni have a unique ability to write books that can link to other worlds. The discovery of their ability and the clash of cultures is the catalyst for the MYST novels and games. Until 2002, MYST was the best-selling PC game of all time, and to date the franchise has sold over 15 million copies worldwide. MYST spawned several successful sequels including the critically acclaimed RIVEN in 1997. A series of MYST novels were also published. The books vividly explore the lives and backstories of the game’s characters.
The MYST game is credited as a one of the first examples of video games being described as art, and it is often sighted as having been a key influence on many contemporary creatives in diverse entertainment areas including video games, television, and motion pictures.
Miller’s credits include writing Marvel’s THOR and Fox’s X-MEN: FIRST CLASS. He has written and produced for critical genre successes like “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles,” “Fringe,” “Black Sails,” and “Lore.”
About Village Roadshow Entertainment Group
Village Roadshow Entertainment Group is a leading global entertainment company building premier, content-rich businesses in the entertainment industry. VREG employs innovative strategies to produce, acquire and deliver intellectual properties with timeless appeal, while maximizing group-wide strategic and operational efficiencies. VREG is the holding company of Village Roadshow Pictures and Village Roadshow Television.Under its leadership by Vine Alternative Investments, Village Roadshow Entertainment Group diversified its portfolio to include financing and producing projects across multiple formats including film, television and digital.
About Cyan
Cyan is a legendary indie game studio headquartered in Spokane, Washington, best known for award-winning games Myst and Riven. Cyan celebrated the 25th anniversary of Myst last year with a special collector’s edition of the complete series. The company continues to explore innovative new areas of rich storytelling in both interactive and traditional mediums.
About Delve
Founded in 2009 by Isaac Testerman, Delve Media began as a digital agency for clients such as Facebook, Instagram, Samsung, and GoPro. The company then expanded into unscripted television, creating shows and content for Discovery, SyFy, and Outside TV. MYST is the first of several projects being developed by its new scripted division, which launched in 2018 under longtime collaborators Isaac Testerman and Yale Rice. Delve is repped by Buchwald.