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Bungie Software Bought By Microsoft
Cannonball writes: "An article posted by Alta Vista Tech announces the sale of Bungie to Microsoft for an undisclosed sum. Halo will become an X-Box title." There's been rumors about this for the last few days, but here's the confirmation. Bungie makes such fine titles as the Myth series - which I really enjoyed.
As the typical die-hard Mac user, who went crazy back in the day for all those original Marathon leaks, then the infamous Demo release (which was hacked to extend game play to 20 minutes...the floors of "Mars Needs Women!" littered with your co-workers bodies), I was naturally hit in the gut with this news. "How DARE you Bungie! You sold out! I'm going to stick my Bungie CD's in the microwave and mail the remains, postage due, back to you!" Please. Think back...back to when you first got that Marathon Demo...appearing in the little hallway on the UESC Marathon...that creepy music, the dark, claustrophibic hallways, the mindless Bugs whapping their sticks at you. It was the tingly, creepy game experience of a lifetime, that many have not felt since, even with Marathon 2 and certainly not Infinity. Marathon is now open-sourced, and Myth (one of the only other Bungie games I ever played) is in the hands of Take-Two. T-T also has the rights to develop two games with the HALO engine (Marathon IV, anyone?). I say good riddance, Bungie. Have fun with XBox, enjoy your new rainy climes. Me, I'm gonna keep playing network M2 (still the best), and don my "They're everwhere!!" T-shirt.
On bungie's Microsoft Acquisition FAQ, the claim to have the freedom to choose what platforms they develop titles for, except:
And now that people have figured out how to get CDR's to boot, i'm sure it won't be long before linux is running on them.
Thats the beauty of open hardware. And nothing is being assimilated.
Unreal and many other beautiful games use DX7, but doesn't mean they have been assimilated :)
Marathon, on the other hand, was fully 3D.
Almost. I was an avid Marathon map maker when it first came out, and while I'll give you that Marathon was lighyears ahead of DOOM at the time (those debates w/ the PC folk were great back then), Marathon had it's quirks, they were just hidden a lot better.
The biggest problem was that you couldn't have a room with two opening in a wall showing on top of each other. Meaning, you couldn't have a doorway on the ground level, and then a doorway directly above it on the second level. You could program it just fine into your map, but once you turned to look at it *BARF* the machine would crash. It took me a while just to figure out that this was the problem, as it would crash as soon as it got one frame of that on screen. There were other minor quirks, but you get the idea.
Still, Marathon had to be one of the best games ever when it was introduced.
Marathon wasn't 3D; you could not create a true bridge (much less an object unconnected to any other wall), most people call it 2.5D, in that height was simulated with Z-coords from the polys. I'd even call it 2.5+D; you had the ability to overlap polys in the same X-Y space unlike Doom, thus allowing one to create 'floors' at various heights. You could even have these polys overlap at the same Z space, to allow effects where you could have players think they are in the same spot but were actually in separate parts of the map (they won't see each other, however, save by radar positioning. One of the network maps that came with the first Marathon was 5-D space that used this aspect well.)
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Actually, There were no plans to update the Myth series after Chimera, on any platform. Who knows, Take 2 interactive, now owners of Oni and Myth could find another development studio to continue on the series past what Jason Jones and Alex Seropian felt was the end of the series, but such a sequel would seem unlikely as the cross platform tools Bungie made are probably in house software.
... it isn't the end of the world (or Bungie for that matter). Read this interview for clarification. Then you'll know that
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What will happen:
The Bungie guys will be absorbed into the rest of Microsoft and eventually they'll get tired of not being able to make their own decisions. They'll end up leaving and going their own separate ways, and the world will be a little worse for the whole process.
Take2 may try to find another developer but without the Bungie guys doing it, it won't be the same and will fail.
Old story--MS buys a company, makes more people rich, but destroys something good in the process.
Sad.
Vote Quimby.
Marathon was an improvement on DOOM, but it was still just 2.5D. It used ceilings, floors, smoke, and mirrors to imitate full 3D, but it wasn't. Quake was the first successful FPS with a real 3D world.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
What I am worried about is not mac versions.. MS has done some mac software. What I am more worried about is that people like Loki won't be allowed to port bungie's games to ,linux any more...
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
I read this article and the one at News.com carefully, and while it suggests that Halo may only be X-box only, I really can't see that happening. MS is trying to aim the Xbox at people that can't afford a full home computer, and thus compete with the game consoles like Dreamcast which come with limited internet access. The way I'm reading it, but obviously may not be right, is that Halo will be release first for the Xbox to allow it to be one of the first games you can get for it (possiblibly even shipping it), but at some point after the Xbox release, you'll see the PC and Mac (and Linux, maybe) releases. Especially with Halo's huge kudos at E3, *NOT* releasing this for PC platforms would be stupid. However, the article does use the word "proprietary" in here, so it may be that Halo is completely gone for the PC, which would really suck.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
In typical topical fashion, Penny Arcade has a comic about this today...
So, is this for real? Penny Arcade says it just in the rumour stage right now...
BlackNova Traders
Quake is definitely the first true 3d game, in that you could have bridges, floating blocks, etc. I've tried enough map making in HL to know that floating blocks are quite possible which I misjudge the height of an object :D
I would still say though that there's a bit more to go to get 3D complete; Quake, HL, Unreal all are based on a free x-y movement with limited Z movement because of gravity. For 90% of the games out there, sure, this makes sense, but what if I really wanted to make a Matrix- like game, walking sideways on a wall? Or create a map based of Escher's designs? That Z dimension is still optimized away, to make the games faster, sure, but now that CPU and video boards of today can definitely meet the challenge, someone should add the completely free x-y-z type of movement for enclosed map games (In games like Homeworld, the free x-y-z is already there, but it's not in enclosed areas which make line of sight calculations harder.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Really. Look at Looking Glass. Look at the reasons Bungie has given, specifically their sense of where things are heading for _any_ independent developer- Bungie are not small time and if they were seeing that much trouble, the industry is DEAD and just hasn't fallen over yet. THINK.
In the US, Bungie is singular. In almost every other country in the world, Bungie are plural. If you want to flame someone for grammar, at least get it right.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
Presumably, if they have the rights to those games, they'll need the tools to maintain them.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
I actually know the answer to that question. M$ is in the process of buying a hot strategy game company. This is another aspect of the M$ philosophy -- buy 3rd party developers to choke off support for other platforms.
The company I know about is already Windows-only and uses DirectPlay, so their impact on Mac/Linux is minor. But Bungie is a big huge loss to the cross-platform game world.
By the way, in the unlikely event that the M$ breakup goest through, which half would get DirectX & friends?
Microsoft buys Bungie, both claim acquiree remains "autonomous". Many Slashdot commenters ask "how long will that last".
VA Linux buys Slashdot, both claim acquiree remains "autonomous". Many Slashdot commenters say "it'll last forever".
What's the difference?
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Compaq dropping MAILWorks?
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
X: I think of unix. I think of startx. I think of Xfree86. I think that it should be running X. BUT NO!!!! Microsoft is using what would be good name for a Linux game console. What does Microsoft have to do with X? Is this box going to run an Xserver on top of DOS? I don't think so. Use Xwindows not Xbox. Maybe it is like SQL. When I say SQL people think Microsoft SQL server. They are associated with the name. What a great marketing machine they are. Now, When a kid thinks X he'll think Microsoft first, and then have to be explained exactly what X really is.
The saddest part about all this is how Bungie thinks they can really stay the same, while owned by Microsoft... it's just like when a popular indie artist with a loyal cadre of fans signs with a major label. "Don't worry," they say, "We'll still do everything the way we always have, our Corporate Owners promised not to tell us how to do things. We'll stay true..." Of course, we all know what happens after that.
It doesn't wash. We're not hearing the whole story.
So, since the 'carrot' is utterly, transparently inadequate as an explanation for what's going on (Halo, the Steve Jobs feature presentation of Macworld, being seized and turned into an X-Box only title), what might there be as far as the 'stick'?
We don't have to look very far. Bungie is well known for being paranoid about distribution. Its early struggles with distributors were agonising- IIRC there's a funny rant on the subject at Bungie.com. This company, more than almost any other, was _painfully_ aware of its delicate lifeline with the distributors.
All Microsoft would have had to do was threaten to have Bungie blacklisted with ALL the distributors and Bungie would have to agree to any terms. "Don't carry Bungie or we'll pull Office". No distributor would risk offending Microsoft, no distributor would carry Bungie, Bungie would be dead- it's that simple. This is the most likely 'stick'- making it easy to understand these shocking and very obvious results.
Yes this is illegal as fuck, and exactly the behaviour MS has just been found guilty of in court. Your point?
The fact that Microsoft is running amok and trying to do as much damage as it can as fast as it can is hardly surprising. It's just a little startling how _obvious_ they're willing to be with it, knowing they can move faster than the courts.
The most interesting point is this: Bungie is pretty much a top-tier developer. If they can be _seized_ in this manner and assigned to X-Box only, no developer is safe, and no market really exists- it's just a play-market. The question people should be asking themselves at this point is: who will be next? Will Id be seized and "Doom" be made an X-Box only title?
Another Reason that microsoft may be buying out game developers, is:
1) make sure they aren't easily able to port there games to other platforms aka Linux,so anything made by the company can only be played on Microsoft specific hardware/Software i.e Xbox or Win2000/ME. (Therefore possibly less reason for people to swap OS).
2) A lot of the companies have very talaented people in, so they could be trying to get them to work closely with the Directx team(ahem..undisclosed ahem... API's) to get a advantage over other game devolpers,or to help devlop new functionality to the API.
I personnaly think they will try to sign more game developers soon to try and help give the Xbox, a better chance of not flopping.
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As cunning as a fox, which has just been appointed professor of cunning at Oxford University. http://www.kinlan.co
Bungie is a funny company. Their early stuff was unremarkable (pre-Marathon), as is true of most companies. Then Marathon came along, which for all intents and purposes was a DOOM clone. Mac people *hate* this, because Marathon hit the Mac before DOOM was ported, though it was released after DOOM was out for the PC. And they're quick to point out certain features, like the ability to look up and look down). But it's still very much like DOOM, and even Jason Jones has said that they were heavily influenced by that game.
Myth was good. Bungie needed to go off in another direction and this was it. Myth II was more of the same, but it was marred by a severe installation bug that could trash your hard drive.
Since then, Oni has been a big disappointment. It was announced, the release was impending, then it disappeared for a year (very little was seen of it between E3 1999 and E3 2000). Now it's a PlayStation 2 game more than a PC game, and it looks, um, really bad. The frame rate at E3 was embarrassingly poor, and the game is looking very dated.
Halo is a funny game. The "no gameplay" trailers have gotten fanboys drooling, but the reasons why are elusive. Halo isn't particularly high poly--a barren landscape with no landmarks--and there doesn't seem to be a whole lot to shout about, except a distinctive art style (reflective black soliders running under a pink sky). The E3 trailer had all sorts of jumping between scenes that made it obvious that it wasn't actual gameplay. And still there's talk about how it's the ultimate next gen game. Puzzling.
So Bungie started by cloning the best company around, and they ended up creating the highly innovative and playable Myth, but now they've gone off and become yet another all-hype game company that can't help but disappoint. Could Messiah and Daikatana have done anything but disappoint after all that time? And Myth is on the same road.
I'm stunned. I've just been over to Halo.bungie.org and the amount of invective on the forum is amazing. If Bungie was worried about what effect this announcement would have on their loyal fans, they must be feeling pretty sick at the moment.
Two long time Bungie fan sites seem to be closed or on the verge of closing - The Mill and Marathon Story. For those not in the know, these were the two linchpin sites for Myth and Marathon fans. While the announcement on The Mill is a little overheated (read the source for the real reason) its understandable given that a lot of long time fans feel as though they have just lost a close friend.
I also worry about the possibilities of a Linux port. To my knowledge, not one MS branded game has been ported to Linux, and I believe it is now highly unlikely that a Linux version of Halo or any future game from Bungie will appear, mainly because while Bungie has a say on what versions are produced, MS holds the exclusive distribution rights. MS knows that games are one of it's strongest cards, and that many Linux users keep a Windows partition to play the games available. Hey, with Descent 3, Terminus, Quake 3 Arena, Railroad Tycoon and Sim City 3000 and Halo on Linux, I would kiss my Windows partition goodbye.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
(grumble... grumble) why can't ms just go away and act like they don't exist(grumble)
NOw.. what about a ppc version of halo? I bet they scrap it. Perhaps not, seeing as how it's done..but....
SO much for hoping for a port anywhere else.
No innovation? What about MS-BOB?
Oh yeah - it went over like a fart in church. Never mind.
Seriously - one of the advantages of having a boatload of cash is that you can go out and buy all the things you need to keep some innovation alive. But Microsoft hasn't done much original stuff since the first version of Excel (which, ironically, shipped on the Mac first).
An awful lot of the products and tools they've hung their hats on over the years have been bought, in fact. A much abbreviated list of some of their significant purchases goes like this:
MS-DOS (purchased, an X86 clone of CP/M)
PowerPoint (they bought Nashoba Systems, the company behind that, Nutshell, and FileMaker)
Visio (just bought last fall)
FrontPage (they bought Vermeer)
Hotmail
WebTV
And in gaming, they bought Access Software (the Links people), and they have the publishing deal that got Age of Empires produced.
Is there anything wrong with that, though? I really don't think so. If a company wants to play in a particular marketplace they can either roll their own, or buy someone who has it ready-made. Cisco has executed that strategy brilliantly, but they get lauded for it because (a) they aren't seen as pure evil, and (b) they have integrated companies pretty seamlessly.
So purchasing Bungie isn't necessarily bad. If Bungie gets to keep doing what they're doing (so long as it makes money), than there's nothing wrong with the transaction. Microsoft gets guaranteed good content for the X-box when it ships (Bungie is a pretty darn solid gaming company), other platforms continue to get their fair share of software, and everybody makes money. I won't not buy a new Bungie game because it's now Microsoft, but I won't buy it if it sucks, regardless of the publisher. And if they stop producing Mac and Linux games, then they're leaving money on the table. I'm sure the Mac side is profitable, and very possibly the Linux side too.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
The PS2 has more raw power
Proove it :) My DC plays modern games at 60fps and can do everything your "super console" can do.
The DreamCast is old
Nope. Just maturing. Don't compare apples to oranges. I'm not buying a PS2 because of i already have DVD player and i can play every title for the PS2 that i want with my DC. The potential of the DC is only coming of age through experience and knowledge. OTH, the PS2 is coming of age by bashing its own overly hyped ego.
What does this have to do with the X-box
Nothing. The X-BOX is an X-BOX. It is a PC in disguise. It will be fast, it will be modern, it will have all the bells and whistles of a "PC" but it can't compete with my DreamCast. The XBOX nor PS2 is not a Console boys and girls.
The DreamCast isn't selling
What crackpipe have you been smoking out of? 6,000,000 units is selling.
For anyone who can make up there own mind
That is something to cherish. If you can make up your own mind, your own opinions and are a true gamer then i bet you will own an N64, a DC and a PSX and will probably upgrade as you go. You like the consoles because of the gaming experience. Its too bad that 75% of the people visiting this website have forgot what it was like to play games. They're to stuckup the ass with uptimes and polygons a second when they forget what the real experience is.
So my point being. Its good to see the console market thriving, good to see all these "badboys" coming it. But people. Gaming is the console, and Sega is the leader. You go to an arcade and chances are people are lined up at Sega releases, and chances are that will land on your DC. Now what the hell do you see at the arcade running under a PS2? X-BOX? PSX?
Hence they've been buying developers ( & keeping them independent), then releasing games under the "Microsoft" label: in the lame attempt to fool the world that they can do hip & edgy stuff as well as patches for Office.
I could be wrong, but I think Terminal Reality Inc was the first game company to be bought out by Microsoft, way back in 95....
Cheers,
Justin.
"My cat's breath smells like cat food." - The Tao of Ralph Wiggum.
HALO isn't being *ported* to the Macintosh. The reason Bungie stands out among game developers is that they develop cross-platform from the ground up. That's why it's such a seamless experience from both sides, and why neither platform looks any better than the other. Quake III was the same way; not ported, but developed; that fact alone wins over Mac users for not having to wait an extra month (or, in Blizzard's case, year) for the latest and greatest. Westlake (the major porting company) does brilliant work with things like UT, but it still has to wait for the PC code to be done. It will be truly sad when a Bungie game is filled with Direct3d, DirectPlay, Direct*, and Mark Adams et. al. have to clean that stuff out.
Too bad. They were the premiere developer of Mac gaming titles. At least they got the source code for old games like Marathon out before they were bought..
[ReidNews]
so which Microsoft will own this? It's a worry whichever way it falls but I'm just thinking that if Windows gets Bungie then they could conceiveably cut development to other platforms (like the mac & linux) and focus on offering windows only apps?
... which leads me to another point, how on earth are Microsoft's holdings in other companies be divided? Would companies and shares aquired by Microsoft be spilt evenly? or will one half get more of another?
Bungie have also been quoted as saying that they will remain autonomous within MS, and may continue to develop titles for non-MS platform (e.g. Mac), although it remains to see how long that lasts. I suspect that Mac titles may be allowed to continue for a little while, but PlayStation 2 titles will be knocked right on the head in favour of X-Box.
not kill off Bungie's identity. This article:_ page_912_1.html
http://www.dailyradar.com/features/game_feature
over at DailyRadar.com shows a little light at the end of the tunnel for PC/Mac gamers who liked the independent and creative Bungie.
It's only when we've lost everything, that we are free to do anything...
--Alain
Er- going out and _seizing_ top tier game developers who are cooperating with your competition (Halo has headlined Macworld and been featured in Steve Jobs keynotes) and making them turn their game X-Box only is, shall we say, a _bit_ over the line? This is precisely the sort of thing MS has been doing that got it _convicted_ of antitrust and sentenced to be broken up, right down to the likelihood that MS strongarmed Bungie into it.
Oh, they probably offered the usual choice. "Either you take this money and become part of Microsoft or we will make sure no title you ever produce will ever work on Windows again. Accidents happen you know, and it would be so tragic if your sequence of API calls happen to make DirectX go Boom.".
Why does microsoft continue to buy companies, someone should explain the benifits of hiring and paying companies, rather than absorbing and destroying them.
Surely Microsoft already has it's own gaming department, why buy a dynamic succesfull inventive company just to integrate it with the bogged down, corporate coders of microsoft.
And another thing, if the programmers of Bungie have been bought out and given near garanteed job security, why the hell would they bother to make any more good games. The chance of the company failing or succeeding on the next project is what makes the smaller companies make such good games.
Want an example, what about the massive EA-sports, what the hell original games have they created recently??? Just the same old "New Improved Fifa", all they seem to do is update the player names for the latest tournament.
Rant over
I have been really looking forward to HALO. Bungie seemed like a group who seriously took their fans opinions to heart. If they decide to release HALO only for the XBox, I'll feel seriously betrayed. Bungie has had a very die hard following of Mac and PC users ever since HALO has been announced and if Bungie suffers for ditching those people in order to get more `say' on how the XBox is created, then so be it.
Oh well, there are other games coming out. I'm sure someone can fill Bungies shoes in the PC/Mac arena.
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin