I never even heard of RealMyst somehow... just watched a youtube video of it and kind of wish I bought that game instead, lol.
Still, there is a lot to be said for the nostalgia factor in a game like this, and the original Myst was what I played.

I agree that 2D still has its place and upgrading to 3D is not always the best artistic choice, but RealMyst was not one of those cases.
Myst was already a 3D game. It was built as a fully rendered 3D environment and turned into snapshots because of technology limitations back then.
I tend to think of Myst as a 3D game with a really bad frame rate. :)
You turn in 3 dimensional space, looking up, down, left, right....all RealMyst did was take you off the rails just a little bit. You could turn around and look at things freely without the constant distraction of clicking the edges of the screen to turn.
I respect your opinion. In my own I found RealMyst to be a beautiful and faithful recreation that really set the world free of its former constraints without losing any of the atmosphere or content in the process.

Well said Factoid, well said... I still remember loading up the realmyst test demo and being awed by how much the stoneship world came to life. I remember climbing to the top of the hill and staring out on the horizon watching the purple lightning for a good 30 minutes. I agree that realmyst is a beautiful recreation of the original.

The only problem with realMyst is that they never got around to doing realRiven.
And that it's not more widely available. I really hope GOG.com releases it sometime...

Ah, so this isn't the version that had the new age.. I thought that was introduced in Masterpiece Edition, for some reason. It's a shame, I was looking forwards to finally seeing that. Oh well, I may still get this if the copy someone gave me a couple years ago doesn't work.
I agree it would be nice to try RealMYST, as I never did get my hands on it (too expensive at the time) when it came out. I would, however, be genuinedly interested in seeing a RealRiven, but I'm not sure how they'd do it. Didn't they have to redo the cinematic scenes with Atrus and the brothers in RealMyst? I really liked the way the characters looked in Riven, and that version of Cathrine will always be my favourite.
Stiil.. as long as this is getting people to play and (re)discover Myst, I'm happy it was released on GOG.

I kinda want to dig up my copy of realMyst and check it out again now. As far as I can recall the video sequences weren't any different. I think by that point one of the Rand brothers had left to form his own studio, so unless he came back just for the recordings I don't think they could have.
The way the videos were done they could easily be integrated into a 3D environment. Most of them are on a flat surface, so rendering a video is no problem. The biggest challenge would have been seeing Atrus in D'ni at the end...where you can walk around at all angles. I imagine they probably just used a 2D sprite for that, though.