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Comment by kylek | Hacker News Reader

>>>I can't believe how far they've fallen. Take a look at the brilliance of the first Marathon to the clusterfuck that is Halo - I have such vivid memories of the pacing, art style, music that is Marathon.

Sorry. Flashbacks. Visit http://marathon.bungie.org/story/ for an unbelievable rabbit hole

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Ah, good, there is someone else around who remembers Bungie before they were acquired by Microsoft!

I recall being so disappointed when Halo turned from a Mac-first game to an XBox exclusive...

I hope a more-independent Bungie can recapture some of their magic from those early days.

I too remember. I still play Myth II at lan parties, and I'm just as terrible at it now as I was when I was a MoG. The day when Microsoft bought Bungie was a dark one indeed.

Myth!!!!! I spent so much time posting as "Gothmog" on myth.bungie.org. to me, it is still the quintessential game.

What do you think of Microsoft's purchase of Ninja Theory? Do you think they've changed?

I doubt it. I'm sure Bungie had reasons for wanting to leave Activision, but Destiny was the project they pitched to Activision, not the other way around, and a lot of the problems I still have with Destiny after all the work they've sunk into it are still inherent in the concept.* I think as the size of teams keeps getting bigger, you keep getting forced to chase the lowest common denominator in the market -- it's a shooter, it's RPG, it's multiplayer, it's open world. A Bungie that was looking to recapture the early days would have to lay off almost everybody and start doing indie games, and I don't see that route earning back the money it must have cost to buy out Activision.

* The shooting is still as good as it was in the Halo days, but the need to constantly grind for gear to progress really kills the way you would acquire new weapons in Halo and learn how to use them in concert. There's so many more weapons in Destiny, but it doesn't feel like you have the same sort of choices you had in Halo.

Re: choices offered in Halo vs Destiny, I’d offer Destiny has all of the complexity you seek, only it doesn’t present itself in a way that’s very obvious. I’ve only recently started playing (PS Plus free download) and initially arrived at the same conclusion, but as I started acquiring exotics, and tinkering around with different character subclasses, the depth of the game design started to reveal itself. There’s a real lack of clarity in getting you into the games feedback loops, but once you hit them, it can get really addictive.

This, coupled with the really engaging and welcoming community, are a few of the elements that have me excited about this announcement. Bungie is still responsible for getting involved in the initial mess of Destiny’s initial launch, but hopefully they have learned from their prior experiences.

> A Bungie that was looking to recapture the early days would have to lay off almost everybody and start doing indie games

I don't understand the logic here. Surely they could create smaller, self-contained units to work on projects like this? Even stick them in separate buildings for that "small company" feel.

Why would any game company be Mac first? Mac is a small slice of the pie of computers. Mac gamers would be a crumb. It's not exactly a surprise they would target a platform that has actual market share.

The same reason any other company develops Mac-exclusive software.

I'm not suggesting they be Mac-first today. I'm saying that's where they got their start (when it was a much, much smaller slice!), and the first real demo of Halo was at MacWorld Expo 1999. It was running on a Mac then.

But then Microsoft bought them, and they had to port the whole thing to XBox, and when it eventually came out for Mac years later, it was a port of a port.

Imagine if Halo had been a Mac-exclusive when it launched. True, it wouldn't have had the full force of Microsoft's marketing machine behind it, but it still could have made a world of difference for Mac gaming, for those of us who did care about such.

And then they were bought, and Mac gaming lost its chance to become remotely relevant for another decade or more.

If Halo had remained a Mac game, then like Marathon before it, the game would have passed silently in the night unnoticed by most of the gaming world, to be read about years later. And bungie would have gone bankrupt.

Getting bought by Microsoft was the best thing that could have happened to bungie at the time.

Pretty much. My understanding is that they sold to Microsoft precisely because it was that or fold up shop.

But the Mac itself still seemed under threat at that time. Having such a cool-looking game that was going to be Mac-first, if not Mac-only was a PR/morale booster. And its then being absorbed by MS, who was very much The Enemy in those days, was an equally large bummer.

And not just the game: Bungie was really a darling of the Mac community. They had created and published a string of awesome games over the course of the 90s, all Mac-first. Pathways, three Marathons, Myth I and II, Oni... "Losing" them was a blow.

Looking through these threads I’m horrified that there is nary a mention of Bungie’s Myth and Myth 2.

Award winning, real time tactical multi and single player game with a map maker and a mod system. So diffeeent from their other titles.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_(series)

Fond memories of the “recon” WW2 mod that transformed the game of 1 on 1 managing an army of dwarves and warlocks to team vs team each individual controlling 1 army man.

(Edit) If you want to play it, the game is still supported (with a release in Nov 2018!) here http://projectmagma.net

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