Riven Easter Eggs Revealed

Again, with the little tool by Bo Lindbergh, you will be able to see two movies that aren't in the game itself, but lies on the first cd, the cd with Book Assembly Island on it. It is obvious that it belongs there, but why it was removed from the game beats me...

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I was actually such a lucky bastard that around the late summer of 1997, I looked over the shoulders of a friend of mine, when he played the beta version of Riven. He had received this beta version momentarily because he was in charge of writing a review of Riven, and there we saw this book press - so I can tell you where it was meant to be:

© Copyright Cyan. All rights reserved.

I seem to remember it was somewhere around here you could click to see it.
In fact, it was very interesting to see this beta version, complete with debugger and an interface where you could see the outlines of the hotspots you use while navigating - yum, yum!

Anyway, I received an email from Seth Martin , where he told me where in Riven you actually could see the book press, so the press did make it after all! Thank you Seth! Do the following:
Face the boiler controls, and click in the upper left hand corner, on the pump:

© Copyright Cyan. All rights reserved.

Then you should see an angeled picture of the nice view to the left of the boiler. Look down towards the left side and you will see the upper part of the book press! Cyan did have a deadline after all, eh? ;)

© Copyright Cyan. All rights reserved.

Then Gregg Collins wrote to me and told me that you could also see the book press by walking a bit back on the catwalk and turn towards the boiler room:

© Copyright Cyan. All rights reserved.

It is pretty hard to see, but it's there. If you look up, you'll also be able to see it, just even more blurred:

© Copyright Cyan. All rights reserved.

(Ain't that little hand nice, by the way? Very convenient when showing this. And it comes with the game. Heh.)

One of our fellow Riven-fans, called "PDBECS" (e-mail name) asked me why this book press was in the game. Of course one could guess that it was there for us to see that Ghen was making the paper for his books on the island, but I passed the question on to Richard A. Watson at Cyan , and he replied:

"The book press was removed from the game when the testers kept expecting it to be some kind of mechanism to open the hatch above. Since so few of them "got it" (that it was a paper press), we decided to remove it, (though there are a couple of views you can still see it, if you try hard enough)."

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Secret things in Riven: The book press that never made the game (or did it?)

Secret things in Riven:
The book press that never made the game (or did it?)