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Bungie: Doomed to Fail or Destined to Succeed?

Bungie: Doomed to Fail or Destined to Succeed?

I had the privilege of representing Cheat Code Central at Bungie this week during a preview event for Destiny: The Taken King .  While our full coverage of that expansion is coming later, I’d like to take a few minutes to talk about Bungie itself.  If you’ve been paying attention to Destiny , you’ll know that it’s a bit of a divisive game.  One reason some fans criticize Destiny is that not only does it diverge significantly from Halo in terms of gameplay, but that Bungie moved from making Halo exclusively for the Xbox to using the PlayStation 4 as the lead platform for Destiny .

And it’s true that a lot of people know Bungie as the Halo company, but my Bungie memories go back a lot further.  I played a bit of Marathon , a pioneering first-person shooter that was Bungie’s first big hit, in college.  We used to link several Macs together to play Marathon deathmatch, since that was before the days of widespread Internet.  Yes, Marathon was a Mac game, and Bungie developed largely for Macintosh until it was acquired by Microsoft and Halo became an Xbox exclusive.

Now, if you know system enthusiasts, you can imagine how Macintosh gamers reacted to having a fan-favorite developer move exclusively to the console world.  Along with Blizzard, Bungie was one of the few developers that had been particularly devoted to Macintosh in the late ’90s. People were very upset and thought of Bungie’s move as a betrayal… yet the Halo series being on the Xbox and Xbox 360 is what allowed Bungie to have the tremendous success it enjoys today.

In fact, our tour of the Bungie offices showed how the company celebrates both the accomplishments of the past and the dedication to flexibility and change that allows it to make the games it dreams of creating.  Posters, props, and other decorations honor everything from Marathon and Halo to the strategy series Myth and the one action adventure game, Oni , developed by the now-defunct Bungie West.  A large display of Bungie history in the main hallway is divided into the Mac years, the Microsoft years, and now the company’s place developing Destiny for Activision. That past doesn’t hold Bungie back, however, as seen by the signs of modern development like the “Spandex Palace” motion capture room.

Bungie: Doomed to Fail or Destined to Succeed?

Bungie is a rare developer, known since the early ’90s for developing high-quality games that inspire a great deal of passion in their fans. Halo in particular holds an impressive spot in gaming history, and we’ll have to wait and see if Destiny can make a similar mark on gaming as it evolves. A big reason why Bungie has stuck around for so long is its willingness to be flexible and adopt to changing business and technological trends.

Not all these changes are popular with Bungie’s fans, and that’s totally understandable. We gamers tend to value loyalty in companies, and it sucks to have a developer that you love move to a platform that you don’t prefer or make a different kind of game than the kind that you loved. What some people call betrayal, however, can also be excellent business sense that takes a company further than it could go before. Being willing to make those choices in order to pursue its dreams has been a big part of Bungie’s history, and it might even be why the company is still surviving and thriving when so many others have failed.

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