Release and Foreword

Apologies to people who were notified of a new upload from me expecting to see original work; it’s been a while since I’ve uploaded anything on my own profile, so it’s funny to dust it up with this weird restoration project. It’s good stuff though, I promise.

Anyway, if you want to see my latest endeavour in making original work, I’ve got a new game out: Neurokino Retrograde, made with Freya for Domino Club. I’ll talk about that in more detail in a different post.

For now, the foreword. You can find this in the project itself, but I’ve pasted it here because it kinda makes sense to.

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Barry Bonds enters the World of MYST (2004) is an interactive story made by Jon Bois, originally published on the comedy website progressiveboink.com (sidenote: a bunch of people from this website including Bois later end up joining SB Nation).

This is a remake of the piece published twenty years after the original piece’s release, seventeen years after Barry Bonds’ retirement, in the midst of the 2024 World Series.

It is a copy built to look as close to the original work as possible in presentation… but under the hood it’s quite different. The original piece was made in HTML 4, and as a result the original pages still accessible through the Wayback Machine are quite mangled due to some of the code being outdated/depreciated. This copy is made in HTML 5 and CSS 3.

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Barry Bonds enters the World of MYST is one of my favourite early works by Bois. Re-reading this after completing MYST (1998) for the first time was particularly nice, which prompted me to remake it for fun.

You could trace a direct line from this piece to 17776 (2017): they’re both pieces of interactive fiction, about sports, both imagine–or in this case, gives us a very small glimpse into–a future that is utopic.

Most of all, what comes across is the soft, kind quality, a sense of deep love for human beings (even famously arrogant ones like Barry Bonds) that permeates most of Bois’ work.

Something I’ve noticed while transcribing this piece is that the diary entries are dated from March to October (albeit scattered across many years). That’s exactly the months in-between a standard baseball season–including spring training–takes place, which makes complete sense considering this is a story where the concept of beating MYST is an overt metaphor for winning the World Series.

I’m sure people before me have noticed it, but I like this small detail a lot.

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While this is a faithful copy of the original, it’s not an exact one. I took the liberty of changing certain things. The main reason for my changes are accessibility and ease of use; I don’t believe they fundamentally denature the piece. I’ve also deliberately not changed things that an editor/publisher usually would when reprinting a book as this is a copy and not a reprint.

• Things I’ve kept from the original:
  • All the text is exactly the same: this means I’ve kept any typographic quirks and errors ranging from double spaces (I assume this was done because of the cursive font), to the year in the later diary entries suddenly changing from 2035 to 2025 (I assume this is a result of Bois changing the duration of Bonds’ time away from MYST from seventeen years to twenty-seven years and forgetting to adjust all of the dates accordingly, which I find quite charming).
  • The “library” menu is functionally the same. I debated with myself a lot over whether I wanted to make it a little bit more intuitive/easier to navigate or to keep the original one, which doesn’t give you any hints as to where to click–the pixel hunt aspect of it is very MYST–or in what order: ostensibly you can read the books in a non-linear way, although there is a clear order in which you should be reading them. Ultimately, I opted to keep it visually the same as the original.
  • I’ve restored the Monotype Corsiva typeface which doesn’t show up on the Wayback Machine archive anymore. Yay!
• Things I modified:
  • I’ve added alt text to all images. No reason not to. I’ve tried to be as concise as I could while also transcribing the humorous elements of some of the images in writing.
  • I’ve tightened the text columns for better readability. This is an arbitrary choice, although I imagine than on 2004 screens it probably would have looked quite similar and readable due to their aspect ratio being 4:3 or whatever. This is arguably an appropriate adaptation for wide screens. It’s also totally my personal indulgence.
  • I’ve made this website responsive/mobile-friendly. The library interface is honestly not ideal for smaller touchscreens, but hey, it mostly works.

Fun fact: I started working on this in 2022, had a completed working version that I never published anywhere, then I forgot about it until I came back to it in 2024 and redid all of it… Just in time for the twentieth anniversary of its original release. :)

Hope you enjoy discovering or re-discovering it! It’s really good!

Colophon

• Original piece made by Jon Bois, c. August 2004, published on progressiveboink.com. Remake by Cecile Richard, October 2024.
• The original pages from progressiveboink.com are available through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. -The structure of this site is based on John Doe’s page, a template that lets you make an entire website using a single HTML file.