I absolutely love that, after all these years, Myst is still capturing our attention. I am not a huge gamer, but of all the games I have played, Myst still remains my favorite.
I think it's the first game that really transcended what games were at the time. Prior to PCs, games were mostly just hand-eye coordination checks. Myst was the first game I played that really engaged the brain and problem solving.
You never played interactive fiction games prior to Myst? There was plenty of thinking and problem solving in those games. It was certainly a huge graphical leap forward over the previous point-and-click adventure game, but I didn't feel it was particularly a qualitative jump in puzzle content.
I was wondering about the text based games myself while reading GP. Zork was nothing but a puzzle game that definitely did not require hand-eye coordination or any other skill set other than solving puzzles. That's what Myst was as well, only with pretty pictures
Sure, I played the heck out of games like that on my Commodore 64, but it still doesn't match, for me at least, the depth of the puzzles and problem solving in Myst.