Important Bungie Events

In a deal naming almost no specifics, Bungie Studios, a wholly owned unit of Microsoft's Microsoft Games Division, becomes the privately held Bungie LLC, with minority Microsoft shareholding and a long-term Halo publishing deal.

http://www.bungie.net/News/content.aspx?type=news&cid=12835

Bungie spent slightly more than seven years and fifteen weeks owned wholly by Microsoft, releasing four games during that period: Oni, Halo 1, Halo 2, and Halo 3. Halo 1 and Oni underwent significant development before the purchase.

A day to remember the pilot of dropship Echo 419, Carol "Foe Hammer" Rawley.

Nearly three years to the day after shipping the first game and twenty-nine months after announcing the title, Bungie ships Halo 2 and delivers the Xbox its first-- and only-- profitable quarter to date, shattering single-day sales records in the entertainment industry. The game is one of the last truly groundbreaking titles for the console, which will be replaced by the Xbox 360 in a year's time, and gets a stranglehold on the Xbox Live leaderboard, achieving the top spot in terms of the number of players on the service every single week since its release until the present day.

Sixteen months after announcing the game for the Mac and Windows platform, Bungie ships Halo as a launch title for the first edition of Microsoft's Xbox console, in the interim having been purchased by Microsoft. According to many reports, however, the game had been in development possibly since the shipping of Myth 2, putting the total development time at slightly less than three years.

If one disregards Oni, which was done in part by Bungie West and in part by the Oni team members brought to Redmond after the buyout, then the gap between Bungie's last release (Myth 2) and the release of Halo 1 is three years. The announcement bifurcates that period.

Reportedly intrigued by the possibility of shaping how Microsoft develops their new Xbox console system, Bungie is sold Microsoft and becomes part of Microsoft Game Studios.

Rumors spread that Bungie's principled stand on making a recall of Myth 2 due to the uninstaller bug hurt the company financially enough to bring the eventual release of Halo into question without further funding. Bungie at this time had already sold 19.9% of the company to Take Two Interactive, the infamous publishers of the Grand Theft Auto series. As compensation for their shares in Bungie, Take Two receives the rights to the Oni and Myth franchises. Oni languishes indefinitely, while Myth 3 is farmed out to Mumbo Jumbo, a studio that is closed almost as soon as their game is released, a game which almost uniformly failed to live up to the high standards of the franchise's fans.

Other rumors spread that a possible acquisition of Bungie by Apple Computer was discussed, although it is not exactly when. Peter Tamte is supposed to have had discussions with Apple prior to the acquisition, but the substance of those discussions is unknown. Given Apple's attempts in 1999 to place greater emphasis on Mac gaming, in conjunction with the push to migrate to the OpenGL standard from QuickDraw 3d, this would seem like a logical move. Perhaps due to their bad experience with the ill-fated Pippin console, or for other reasons, an Apple deal never materializes.

The status of releases of Halo on other platforms is thrown into question until after the release of the game on the Xbox platform. Eventually, Gearbox ports it to the PC and Westlake Interactive ports their PC port to the Macintosh. Friction develops between Gearbox and those at Microsoft working on the port over editing features, with the result that eventually Gearbox independently releases and supports Halo Custom Edition, designed to play user-created content made with the Halo Editing Kit.

A little more than a year after shipping the original game, Myth 2 is released, again for both Mac and Windows platforms, with a completely new scenario developed in-house and a revamped game engine.

Bungie had attempted to do everything right: improve the engine of their award-winning game, do development cross-platform from the beginning, and do a simultaneous release of a killer strategy game on hybrid media in time for Christmas.

Bungie didn't manage to get the game out the door before Christmas, but en route to store shelves, a show-stopping bug was discovered, not in the game, but in the Windows installer of the game. If Myth 2 was installed at the top level of a gamer's C drive, uninstalling the game would inadvertently wipe out the entire hard drive.

Bungie took the high road, recalling all the Myth 2 CDs. The game eventually shipped as version 1.1, with the corrected Windows installer. Despite not affecting the Mac version of the game in the least, because Myth 2 was shipped on hybrid discs, Mac users were affected by the recall as well.

Less than 12 months after announcing the title, and slightly less than two years after their own last full game release (Marathon 2, for which they created the engine and the scenario in-house) Bungie ships Myth, a completely new game with a new engine, a new story, in a completely different genre. To boot, it marks the company's first cross-platform release, shipping simultaneously for Macs and PCs.

Myth won several awards, not only from Mac game publications but from PC gaming magazines as well.

Following Bungie's acquisition by Microsoft the rights to the Myth franchise were sold to Take Two Interactive; but custodianship of the metaserver needed for effective online multiplayer fell to community members; two major such sites still operate: PlayMyth.net and Mariusnet.com.

Again less than 12 months passes between releases. Admittedly, Bungie only published Marathon Infinity. Double Aught created the scenario, which used the Marathon 2 engine largely unchanged.

Double Aught was headed by Greg Kirkpatrick and Randy Reddig. The group later planned to build a portal-based engine for a game to be called Duality, which was never completed or released.

Kirkpatrick had previously worked at Bungie and founded Double Aught.

Bungie announces the development of Marathon's sequel, forgoing plans for an expansion pack and opting to create an entirely new game with an enhanced graphics engine.

At the second MacWorld show that year, this time in Boston, Bungie demonstrates the greatly revamped Marathon game, with a graphics engine rewritten since earlier in the year and an entirely new plotline.

Bungie supposedly tells showgoers that the game will ship "in two weeks" according to the Marathon Scrapbook, saying they were waiting only on the boxes.

In fact, the game was not quite done. Every single solo map ended up getting re-done, and Marathon would not end up shipping until near the end of the year, leading to the now-famous Bungie policy of not announcing release dates, a policy that would stand until the company was purchased by Microsoft and the release date for Halo was locked in place to be a launch title for the Xbox in November of 2001.

The no-release-date policy constantly caused conflict with Bungie fans who preordered from mail-order houses, required by law to provide release dates when taking preorders, a topic Matt Soell addressed in a Bungie Soapbox piece in October of 1996, which can still be seen on the Bungie.net site today.