Trivia / Riven

• Academic Athlete: John Keston, who plays Gehn, is in fact a world-record-holding athlete, as well as a Shakespearian scholar.
  ''John Keston was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company and a voice teacher at Minnesota's Bemidji State University. After starting running at 55, he dominated his age groups for more than a decade and set many age records. He once set three world records - 10,000 metres, 3000 metres and the mile - in a single meeting. In 2001, in his mid-70s, he was inducted into the USA Track & Field Masters Hall of Fame. He is a US citizen but was born in the UK.''
• Approval of God: The Starry Expanse Project, several fans took it upon themselves to give Riven the realMyst treatment, which Cyan gives their full support to.
  • As of Mysterium 2019, the project team is officially working with Cyan on the project.
• Ascended Glitch: Some of the glitches in the game involve various moving segments of machines and paths being in the wrong position on certain screens, a number of them involving the submarine train in the village. One of these misplaced images of the sub was eventually used in the easter egg path.
• The Cast Show Off: In addition to his impressive athletic and dramatic accomplishments, John Keston is also a talented singer, and one of the easter eggs is him, in full Gehn costume, belting out some opera.
• Dummied Out: In beta versions of the game, there was an operable book press near the boiler on Book Assembly Island. The screen containing it still exists in the game, but was made inaccessible because playtesters mistook it for a puzzle. It can still be seen in the background of some other screens. Gehn's lab on the same island has five drawers, of which only the top one opens, revealing a collection of different eggs. An unused screen (without opening/closing animations) reveals that the drawer below this one contains butterflies.
• Creator Backlash: Robyn Miller stated in a Reddit AMA that he thought parts of the game were too hard, specifically the "waffle iron" puzzle. He said that he "wanted to create worlds and interactive stories that could be enjoyed by people who had never played a game in their life. Riven failed to deliver in that regard." Nevertheless, when Robyn appeared at the 2020 Mysterium convention, he was pleasantly surprised to learn that some fans consider Riven to be the greatest game ever made.
• Indo-European Alien Language: The Rivenese language that the Moeity and Cho speak is actually Tok Pisin, a dialect known to a certain area of Papua New Guinea. Direct translations for the dialogue have not been released, though.
• The Other Darrin: Catherine is played by two different actresses in Riven and Exile. Actress Sheila Goold's lines were also dubbed over by Rengin Altay who would end up playing adult Yeesha, Atrus and Catherine's daughter, in Uru: Ages Beyond Myst and Myst V: End of Ages.
• What Could Have Been: The game was almost called "Equiquay". Also, there was an early meeting where the Millers briefly considered making Catherine the bad guy.
• Working Title: Myst: The Fifth Age.