History of Bungie
From Bungiepedia
This page has been taken from Bungie.net's The History of Bungie
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[edit] 1991: Gnop!
Bungie began as a company one crisp morning in May of 1991, but that wasn't exactly the beginning. Before it emerged, fully formed as the multinational corporate behemoth that published Operation: Desert Storm (on which they later based a war), "Bungie" released a Pong clone (nearly 20 years after the original, mind you) called Gnop! That's Pong spelled backwards, and it was that type of brilliant marketing strategy that would catapult Bungie into the gaming stratosphere. But surprisingly, there was a long way to go between Gnop! and Halo 2.
But Chicago in 1991, when Alexander Seropian set up the company to publish his self-penned Operation: Desert Storm, was a very different world. The country was seeing epic deficits, unemployment was at record levels, Janet Jackson was topping headlines and we had just been involved in a short but messy war in Iraq . Unrepeatable events, for sure.
Back then, the PC was clearly the dominant computing platform, but that didn't stop Seropian and his Artificial Intelligence class compadre Jason Jones from embracing the Macintosh, for reasons of familiarity and ease of use rather than any fundamental business thinking. That and the fact that Jason Jones had a mostly complete build of Minotaur ready when Seropian convinced him to join forces.
"Yeah, I grew up on the Apple II and then the Mac," says Jason, "I wrote all this C code for PCs though, before I even went to school. This was the heyday of PCs, with Wing Commander and stuff. The PC market was really cutthroat, but the Mac market was all friendly and lame. So it was easier to compete."
Jason remembers things weren't all sweetness and light, "I didn't really know [Alex] in the class. I think he actually thought I was a dick because I had a fancy computer. He was looking for another thing to publish after Operation: Desert Storm, so we published Minotaur – and it was after that we set up a partnership. What I liked about him was that he never wasted any money."
To be continued...
There was no money to waste in the early days, when the whole operation (if you can call two guys in a basement an operation) was something like a garage band – and early players of Minotaur (Bungie's second or third release, depending on how you count 'em) might have been shocked to see Jason and Alex sitting cross-legged in Alex's apartment, hand-assembling the Minotaur boxes. And although Operation: Desert Storm had been a minor hit (2500 copies sold!), it was Minotaur that would raise profiles, eyebrows and expectations.
[edit] 1992: Minotaur
Released in 1992, Jones' Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete was a sharply detailed, playable dungeon-crawler, and similar in some ways to many a PC RPG and adventure game. But where it veered wildly from the rest of the pack was in its required use of networking – in this case, using AppleTalk or (gasp!) a Modem! Naturally this limited the audience somewhat (it too sold almost exactly 2500 copies), but Minotaur quickly developed a very hardcore following, and a demographic with an epically disproportionate amount of facial hair.
[edit] 1993: Pathways into Darkness
But by 1993, 2D wasn't enough for these guys. They needed at least one more D to fully realize their ambition. "What if we remade Minotaur, but set it inside a tube?" Jason Jones probably didn't say, but that is indeed what Pathways into Darkness was. Minotaur in a tube. Of course, the tube was texture-mapped, fully utilized the then-epic Mac RISC chipset and featured creepy, convincing active-panning stereo sound. It sounded like you were in a tube. And it looked better than anything else on the machine at that time.
Coded on a Mac IIFX, Jason worked alone on the code, while his friend Colin Brent designed the graphics. To put that in perspective, there are currently about 65 full time people working at Bungie and a ton of contractors to boot.
The plot, which they'd actually started to consider at that time, featured Mayan pyramids, a sleeping god and alien infestation – big concepts that would help define later efforts. They began to realize that telling a story was almost as important as collecting fruit and rescuing princesses.
These two fine-fettled fellows would hawk their wares, Cockney-style at every trade show and gathering they could find. Demonstrating how cool it looked was a lot easier than simply putting it out there, and people started to get it. Pathways started making inroads.
Awards, plaudits, trophies (including MacWorld's Game Hall of Fame, the MacUser 100, and Inside Mac Games' Adventure Game of the Year) and that greatest of all rewards – cash - started to trickle into Bungie central. The money started to change them almost immediately. Seropian started blowing funds on things like rent, a T-Shirt and witnesses remember he'd order supersized fries like it was just nothing. Jones, stoic and stalwart though he was, began to warp under the pressure of the filthy lucre. He too started buying T-Shirts, medium sodas and even tipped waitresses. Alex took to cruising around in his almost brand-new Dodge Neon. Rollin' through Chi-town in tha mad hooptie. It was time for a reality check.
The guys, giddy with wealth, managed to pull themselves together just long enough to invest in an actual upstairs office, and a compact and bijou staff. The new office, a converted mission situated in front of a swanky crack house, featured such amenities as no AC, and a server named after the crack house. Bungie was now a company, instead of just a creepy one-bedroom apartment with two guys in it.
Logistical problems abounded however, not least of were the countless building code violations that made this new space a deathtrap "Yeah, we used to trip the breaker switches all the time. Everything would go out and we'd have to power things up one at a time just so the switch didn't trip again," says Jones.
Jones also recalls the time that AT&T arrived to fix the company's malfunctioning T1 line. "Nobody knew where it was actually located, so we just wandered around looking – we ended up finding this locked door to the basement. The AT&T guy was ready to give up, but we needed our internet connection pretty desperately. So I broke the door down."
It got worse. "I guess the building used to be some kind of weird religious school, and the basement was filled with these tiny desks, you know – the ones with the seat built-in and there was a near-empty swimming pool with about six inches of sludge at the bottom. The T1 line was actually hooked up in an abandoned boiler room covered in about forty years of corrosion." If it sounds like a level from Resident Evil, then you're successfully picturing the scene. But swimming pool of death aside, Bungie was a real company, with real employees and a real creepy basement. But amazingly, very early work on what was to become Halo actually started there.
[edit] 1994: Marathon
The experience with Pathways into Darkness had taught Bungie two important lessons: One is that without a story a game is a lesser thing and secondly, that it's a lot easier to tell a story with convincing graphics. Roll these two elements together and you've got what's arguably the greatest Macintosh game ever: Marathon .
Although begun as a sequel to Pathways, Marathon was reworked dramatically, both aesthetically and creatively. Set on a starship hurtling through the void in a distant future, you play a lone security guard on the UESC Marathon, fighting off a boarding party of alien slavers. Marathon would introduce elements that would become recurring themes in the Bungie experience – networked play, full 3D movement, state of the art graphics, and advanced, disembodied AI characters that aided the player…
Marathon was released in late 1994, and picked up a number of awards in 1995. It was an unqualified success. Not only did it go toe to toe graphically with PC games like Doom and Descent, it bettered them at every turn with network play, compelling story and sheer energetic originality. The game even supported voice communication using the Mac microphone. It changed Bungie from boutique developer to leading Mac publisher almost overnight.
Jason Jones remembers its flaws, recalling wistfully, "All the characters are bitmaps, you could only draw trapezoids. When you looked up and down in Marathon – it's actually just distorting the geometry. It's an optical illusion."
So they hit the ground running in 1995. With barely a pause for breath, Bungie started work on Marathon 2: Durandal. The eponymous AI Durandal kidnaps our nameless hero and whisks him off to a distant world to battle an alien race. The game was more than just a sequel, it was a big expansion of the technology, the story and the gameplay. It included game modes like Tag, King of the Hill, and Kill the Man With the Ball, and allowed the single-player scenario to be played cooperatively. Sound familiar?
Marathon 2, released in November 1995, was also the first Bungie game to be ported to PC (Windows 95, in September 1996), marking Bungie's transition from Mac specialist to multiplatform publisher. It coincided with tremendous growth – the company's revenues shot up an astonishing 500%. This was now a company with a marketing staff, programmers, artists, desks, Post-It notes – the whole deal!
1996 was also the first multiple release year: Bungie published the Crack Dot Com-developed shooter Abuse. They also released the aptly-named Marathon : Infinity for the Mac. Developed in conjunction with ex-team member Greg Kirkpatrick's (he actually wrote the Marathon storyline) Double Aught Studios, it featured built-in editing tools, so players were able to create, save and swap their own levels and scenarios. It was the last new Marathon game, and the beginning of a new era.
[edit] 1996: Myth
The Chicago mob moved onto a brand-new franchise. Made up mostly of the Marathon team, the group switched gears dramatically, but smoothly. Lots of players were expecting another first-person shooter. What they got was a Real Time Strategy game so innovative; they invented a new genre for it: Real Time Tactical. As obscure genre subcategories go, it's no Panic-Action-Horror, but it's nice when your game defies description for a good reason.
Myth: The Fallen Lords was the game of course, and its mix of (still) impressive realtime 3D graphics, online battles, fast, intuitive gameplay and smartly defined characters rocketed it to success. To date, Myth has sold over 350,000 units and continues to enjoy an almost rabid following. It was released to massive critical acclaim on Mac and PC simultaneously – another Bungie first.
And Bungie's pioneering networking technology continued apace, with the standard-setting Bungie.net online gameplay service. Its success spawned an equally impressive sequel – Myth II: Soulblighter, and as anyone who's had their soul blighted by its improved online play and graphics can tell you, it's roundly considered a pinnacle of online gaming.
Bungie "Vivisectionist" Rob McLees, describes a necessary move from the crappy Halsted Street office to the slightly less crappy and much bigger Ontario Street (still in Chicago ) office, saying, "The move to the Ontario street office was like Battlestar Galactica. We did have movers, but we also moved a lot of stuff in our own vehicles – I wish I still had my Bel Air for that. It was like moving out of your dorm with all your college buddies into a slightly less junky dorm with fewer rats, but with more leaks."
Jaime Griesemer's first days at Bungie were pretty typical of early Bungie career paths. "My break into game design came when the Myth news website I ran in college got me a job as an in-house beta-tester at Bungie. Within three days I had determined that designing levels was a lot more fun than testing them, so I started working on multiplayer maps for Myth II under the auspices of 'testing the tools'. Nobody really bought that excuse, but the maps turned out ok and I was doing things nobody else had time to do, so they let me keep doing it."
Bungie kept doing it too, 1996 was the year Bungie hired musician Marty O'Donnell – a man known as much for his cat-like virility as his famous Flintstones Kids ad jingle. Marty also wrote several Mr. Clean jingles before noticing that the sound of monks chanting was more romantic.
Marty himself describes his first job for Bungie, "Late '96 I was working on audio for my first game project, Riven, and I dropped an email to Bungie to let them know I was available if they needed me. Tuncer Deniz answered my inquiry and had me come over and meet the guys. I started working on sound design for Myth: The Fallen Lords soon after that. Originally that game wasn't going to have narration or music, but I changed their minds."
Marty also claims to have invented the Microwave oven, tweeters and frivolous litigation, but counts Myth among his greatest creations.
[edit] 1997: ONI
In 1997, Bungie released the Marathon Action Pack – a complete collection of all three Marathon titles, bundled with user-created mods and levels, and the definitive Marathon experience. But 97 also saw the need for expansion, in the shape of Bungie West – based near San Jose , California . Ostensibly set up to allow the creation of simultaneous in-house projects, Bungie Studios West started work on a top-secret, multi-format action game called Oni.
In 1999, back in California , work was continuing on Oni – now announced as a multiplatform third-person action title for Mac, PC and (gasp!) PlayStation2. This was to be Bungie's first console* project and easily its most mainstream title to date.
Featuring a fast-paced blend of action, combat and stealth, it set the scene for many modern console action titles – from Metal Gear Solid 2 to BloodRayne. Comparisons with Tomb Raider were pointless, since heroine Konoko's antics made Lara Croft seem like she was moving in slow motion. Oni was fast. Konoko also had the unique distinction of a female protagonist who was fully clothed. Even Ms. Pac-Man can't say that.
Lorraine McLees, Bungie artist, remembers the slight tug of war between the Chicago and Bungie West, "Their vision of her was more overtly -blam!- than ours. We specifically didn't want her to be just another Lara Croft, so we'd go back and forth with the California office. They'd send [Konoko] designs back with a bare midriff and the bottom of her breasts exposed, and we'd go back and re-clothe her. The funny thing is that the more we tried to de--blam!-ize her, the more sexy she became."
Bungie also found itself in a new partnership: In 1999, Take 2 Interactive bought a 19.9% share in Bungie, a strategic partnership that gave the company a large influx of cash, as well as the vast distribution muscle of Take 2 (they released a little game we like to call Grand Theft Auto). That meant that Bungie was now exposed, overnight, as a leading console developer. But this was small potatoes compared to the unveiling of the Bungie project scheduled to follow Oni.
Technically, Bungie's real first console project was a Bandai/Apple Pippin port of Marathon, although the Pippin was so doomed it wasn't even funny.
[edit] 2001: Halo
At the Macworld show in 1999, Bungie demoed, to huge applause, footage of a sci-fi shooter set on a mysterious alien ring construct. It simply looked spectacular. The list of features seemed improbable – network play, vehicle combat and huge outdoor environments. But Halo was to have them all, and more. But there was plenty of drama to come before it would see the light of day.
Halo, like most of Bungie's games, began a long time before it was unveiled, and in a remarkably different form. The first vision of Halo was basically Myth in a sci-fi universe. There even exist builds of the game, where you control marauding marines in a real time tactical 3D environment, complete with vehicles that would come to be known as Ghosts and Warthogs. It actually looked kind of fun.
Meanwhile, the Take 2 partnership was to be short-lived. In 2000, Microsoft, recognizing the brilliance of the Halo project, decided to acquire the game, the company and the employees, and bring Halo exclusively to Xbox – Microsoft's first video game console. The news sent ripples of excitement, anticipation and disappointment throughout the industry. This meant no PlayStation2 version for sure, and it put the PC and Mac versions in doubt, at least as far as the press were concerned.
"We never got it running on PS2 anyway," quoth an anonymous staffer.
Jason Jones tries to recall the events leading up to the Microsoft deal: "I don't remember the details exactly, it was all a blur. We'd been talking to people for years and years – before we even published Marathon , Activision made a serious offer. But the chance to work on Xbox – the chance to work with a company that took the games seriously. Before that we worried that we'd get bought by someone who just wanted Mac ports or didn't have a clue."
Ironically, it was at this time that Alex Seropian finally started to feel some guilt for something he'd done back in 1990. He'd stolen (a lot of) floppies from his internship at Microsoft to replicate the first batch of Operation: Desert Storm. True story. His guilt was assuaged by a check the size of Texas .
Take 2 kept the rights to Oni (releasing it successfully in January of 2001) and Myth, and Bungie made its most dramatic move yet. Almost every staff member chose to move with the company they'd grown to love, and finally left the windy crime of Chicago for the predictable drizzle of Redmond , Washington .
It was important to leave Chicago with a bang, and eyes glazed and brain addled with nostalgia, Jason and Alexander actually went back to the old basement apartment and offered the current tenant $1000 to let them hold the leaving party there. Seriously. The bemused but sensible tenant agreed readily. What happened at that party is difficult to discern, but nobody on staff will talk about it. Amazing the effects shame has on the memory.
Marty O'Donnell's memory however is affected not by shame, but rather the corrosive tang of bitterness and the ravages of time, as he remembers, "Back then it was like a big smelly frat house located in a former catholic girls school. Now it's like an even bigger smellier frat house located in a former accounting firm's office space."
Work continued on Halo apace, and in some ways, the switch to the Xbox version was a blessing. A single, powerful, stable platform and a chance to exploit the vagaries of a new system. Programmers love that stuff. Probably. Jason certainly saw some good in it, saying, "It's really fun to know that everyone who's playing your game is going to be having the same experience. You know they're going to be sitting in a comfortable place with the controller you expect them to have."
But the schedule had to be accelerated. Halo had to launch at the same time as the Xbox. It was fast becoming the system's killer app. The Bungie guys had gone from worrying about the heat being turned off at 6pm, to having Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates demanding to know when the game would be ready.
On November 15th, 2001, Bungie changed forever. Halo was finally released. It was a smash hit. And it was viral.
The way the press reported on the game was hypnotic. At first they were taken by the graphics. Halo looked amazing. Later articles shifted towards the gameplay – it was the first time since GoldenEye that a first-person shooter had really worked on a console – and the use of twin analog sticks on the Xbox controller was almost perfect. And then people really discovered the multiplayer game – and made console LAN parties a real phenomenon.
As sales of Halo and the Xbox itself started to soar, Bungie, much to the relief of many, confirmed that Halo PC and Mac were still in the works, but it would be nearly two years before either version saw the light of day. In the meantime, the expected clamor for Halo 2 info started to reach a crescendo
[edit] 2002: Halo 2
A sequel was such a no-brainer, that no official green light was even given. It was more a case of, "When will it be ready?" The answer was always going to be "When it's done." Work began after a decent pause.
Jay Weinland recalls the short break. "I went to the Hotel Coronado in San Diego and blew all my overtime pay trying to reestablish all my husband credentials after a brutal crunch." All-nighters aren't unusual in game development cycles, and Jay's tale is pretty typical.
Sadly for the sound guys, "rest" is a relative term. "We gave very little thought to localization, to be honest," says Jay, "so we had to come right back and start another crunch – this time doing foreign language versions of the game."
Clearly the trick here is to marry IN the company, as in the case of Lorraine and Robert, or more controversially, the Cananimators, Nathan and John, whose love of poutine, protein and routine brought them together.
Bungie is used to sequels – after all, its biggest franchises, Marathon and Myth each had a sequel. The trick is always to make it worthwhile, both for the player and the developer. If you've got nothing new to say, don't say anything at all.
With that in mind, an expanded and refreshed Bungie team started stabbing furiously at their keyboard terminals, in a comic pastiche of what Hollywood thinks programmers do. After they tired of that, they began a long process of design, writing and thinking.
Expectations were both confining and liberating. Halo Xbox players would probably be pretty happy with a Live enabled rehash of the first game. That's not what they expect necessarily, but that would be fine for some. Bungie of course never gave that a second thought. Halo 1.5 rumors birthed, lived and died without any merit. Halo 2 was going to be something else entirely.
As a tease of sorts, and to highlight plot as much as technology, Bungie released a teaser trailer of Master Chief diving Earthward from a spaceship at a press event in 2002. The first glimpse the public would get of Halo 2 gameplay would be at E3 in 2003. At the purpose-built Halo 2 Theater.
The Halo 2 Theater was an edifice that took up a significant chunk of Microsoft's E3 real estate. Inside the darkened, sound-proofed auditorium, the night before E3, Bungie employees worked feverishly to make sure the demo was complete, bug-free, glitch-proof and perfect. It had behaved perfectly thus far – and this was the final test. Right in the middle of the demo, it crashed. Not a freeze, not a stutter, but a big familiar blue screen, the most embarrassing type of crash possible. Code was checked, checksums rechecked – everything seemed perfect, but the game still crashed! It was a disaster!
Until that is, somebody noticed that the demo Xbox being used (a green debug kit) was sitting on top a giant hot subwoofer. Whether through a combination of its giant magnetic field, or perhaps the stifling heat of the LA Convention center – the box had simply given up. A replacement was grabbed from a pile of dozens, and the day was saved. Huzzah!
Bungie's decision to show and play through a real level from the game, was met with glee from the assembled throng, and lines to watch the real time, playable demo were around the block (if a giant booth can be considered a block).
The usual E3 doubts – "It's running off a huge PC." Or "That's not real time, he's pretending to play it." – eventually dissipated as word spread of the cool new features – such as twin weapons, destructible environments and vehicle boarding. Bungie of course, was keeping far more hidden than it was revealing. Comepetition was HOT at that E3 though. Valve unexpectedly unveiled Half Life 2, id showed off more impressive Doom 3 footage and EA's Battlefield 1942 continued to impress. But Halo 2 just had something extra. It was easy to identify too. While Half Life and Doom demos showed off cool gameplay and impressive graphics – the demos shown didn't reveal or further any plot as such. Watching the Halo 2 trailer felt like the first time you watched the Star Wars Episode 1 trailer. With the important caveat that Bungie didn't go mental between the first game and the sequel.
In October last year, an erroneous release from Microsoft supremo Steve Ballmer caught a few Bungie employees off-guard. Mr. Ballmer's statement to the press (on a completely unrelated matter) contained the following shocker, " we're working on the next version of Xbox right now and we're working on Halo 2 and Halo 3, the two newest versions of the game." Halo 3? What the...! Anyway, turns out it was a mistake, nobody had to go quickly program anything, and work continued on Halo 2.
And it sapped at our strength. We slaved all night and all day for three years, filling ourselves with delicious salty snack treats, and crying salty tears of rage and delight as the game progressed. But could it ever succeed?
[edit] 2004: The Move
So, sometime in November 2004, let's call it the 11th, because that's what we go up to - we released Halo 2 for Xbox. Little did we suspect that our boutique art project would be noticed by the general public. But it was. Embarrassed, we hid ourselves under a bushel. There are no egos here, only mighty talents that span every discipline from art to science with complete mastery. Did I say hid under a bushel? I meant to say that we cruised around Seattle and the surrounding area in a limousine bus full of champagne, waving to crowds of people lined up for a “midnight madness” event that took the nation by storm.
We signed anything and everything that was thrust under our trembling Sharpies, from noobs to boobs. We didn’t care. There was a lot of identity theft that night, but what of it? We can always create new, better identities.
Halo 2 sold well. It sold astoundingly well. To date, that means roughly 8 million copies worldwide. Did we let that success go to our heads? Certainly not. Our new found prowess as absolute masters of creation allows us fine control over our egos. After being slapped back to reason by various moms, girlfriends and wives, we came back to work the next day and started typing our programming codes for a new multiplayer map pack.
If you’ve ever played, for example, Turf, on Halo 2, then remember that every single pixel in that level was created in the post Halo 2 launch crunch haze. The fact that some of those maps reached a higher graphical bar than the ones the game shipped with originally, is testament to the kind of dedication Bungie staff can muster when a cat-o-nine tails is wielded with the correct degree of vigor.
Halo 2 went on to win a bunch of awards, and cemented the franchise as just that – a franchise. A series of novels by Eric Nylund and William Dietz were smash hits. A Halo Graphic Novel with art from Moebius and Simon Bisley and Phil Hale and a legion of others, was Marvel’s best selling graphic novel. Action figures, clothing and all that stuff followed – not because we were abusing the IP, but because our players wanted it. There was really little likelihood that we could get away with not making Halo 3. Especially after our cliffhanger ending. Folks were getting riled up
Now, all things being equal, folks would simply have played Halo 2 until Halo 3 came out. But Microsoft had a slightly different plan. They moved the party. To the Xbox 360. Which was fine by us. We all had HDTVs by this point, and we wanted something to play on them. And we had a story to finish. So work began on Halo 3.
Now, you can’t make a next-gen game with last-gen staffing levels. For Xbox 360, you need a lot of content. A lot of graphics, a lot of code, a lot of audio and a lot of people to make it. Bungie GREW. Faster than it ever had before. The old office space was simply not going to be big enough. So we moved. To the Kirkland 434 building.
The original street number of the building was something bland, so we asked the good burgers of Kirkland for 343. They wouldn’t play ball, since somebody else had that street number, but they did offer us 434, which we liked the sound of. The new office wasn’t just a number though, It was to be our dwelling place and the repository of all our genius. It was to be home.
We started to work furiously on the new game, making progress at an unholy rate. Enough progress in fact, to be able to branch off a public beta version of the multiplayer game. And that would be the first chance the public ever got to get their hands on Halo 3.
To be continued...
