Disney Almost Created A 'Myst' Theme Park

Myst creator Rand Miller confirmed the long-running rumor during an interview with AV Club while promoting their new game Obduction:

That was absolutely true. 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 walked around it, and it was incredibly Myst-like. It was perfect for Myst. So we were all excited. 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.

Our friend Jim Hill first wrote about the story over twelve years ago:

"Myst Island" would have attempted to duplicate the look and feel of the award winning computer games. Only a limited number of guests would have been allowed out onto the fog shrouded island each day. They'd have been dropped off by boat early in the morning and then picked up in the late afternoon. Their mission was to explore the ruins scattered around the 11 acre island to try to figure out what happened to the island's previous occupants. This day-long adventure would have been unlike anything that Disney theme park guests had ever experienced before. Just like the CD ROM games that inspired it, "Myst Island" would have no linear storyline. Guests could only discover the various puzzles scattered around Myst Island by exploring all its weird little nooks and crannies. Depending on which path they took, which artifacts they uncovered as well the order in which the guest discovered them, different secrets of the island would have been revealed. Theoretically, no two guests could ever have the exact same adventure as they wandered the terrain.

The reason behind the idea was that park guests were becoming disgruntled with the hour long wait times for three-minute long rides. Theme park exit surveys suggested that park visitors might be interested in a longer experience. The idea was to test out the model on a small scale with this Myst project, to see if tourists would pay more for a different type of Disney theme park.

Disney planned to transform Bay Lake's Discovery Island into a Myst theme park. Over the years of development, "several proposed storylines were sketched out, and potential rehab plans for Discovery Island were drawn up." No one seems to know exactly why the project never happened. Hill suggests that a construction site on the small island would have been a logistical nightmare. Also, the interactive effects that would have been needed to be created would have been very costly then.