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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.
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.
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.