The Bungie Story Part One

of or or episodes of Text Stuff. After this, I'm going to move on. I'm staying with How Stuff Works in order to pursue a bunch of other opportunities within the company. You'll still be able to hear me on our other show, Forward Thinking, So don't worry. Jonathan and I are not in any kind of ancient grudge match which only one of us will survive. Probably Joe is a great mediator, and Joe is the other co host on Forward Thinking, and he is the one who is

able to keep us in line. No, this is something that is very exciting for you, Lauren, because here here's the thing, folks behind You're gonna get a peek behind

the curtain. We did this for episode six, We're gonna give you another peak right now, which is that working at how Stuff Works is amazing, but it's a lot of work, right Oh yeah, And I mean there's a lot of stuff going on within the company and so so yes, but but we we really wanted to do this episode on Bungee as my kind of send off because we are both so fond of the series and it's interesting bookends because I think the very first episode

you and I recorded together was about survival horror video games Silent Hill, Right, yeah, we specifically did. So that's right. We're we're coming and going on or I'm coming and going on a on a video game kick. And uh and for those of you who are wondering about the fate of tech stuff that will continue and I'll talk

more about at the end of the next episode. Let's let's move on to talking about Bungee, this company that created a game that both of us have grown to love, and I became the world's best sniper bullet magnet in that game. So so let's where those bullets went spawned death. But the story of Bungee actually begins way back in

nineteen one. That's when a fellow named Alex Serropian, who was attending the University of Chicago as major in computer science and mathematics, was interested in creating a company of his very own. He was kind of always sort of a business minded in that respect. Now, back in nineteen nine, so the year before this this story really begins, he had created a clone of a popular early computer game, Pong,

and he created it for for the Apple Macintosh platform. Yeah, which I know for those of us who are more recent uh computer owners, probably don't realize the Mac platform for a very long time was catering to a much smaller audience. Oh yes, and almost no games were available, Yeah, very few and far between. So he created a Pong clone, which he creatively titled Good Knop Pong Backwards. Um. He distributed the game for free, so this was not some

money making scheme. He was really kind of doing this as an exercise in his interest in in gaming in general and in Apple in particular, because he had always personally been I think an Apple and Mac user and was sort of lamenting the fact that more stuff wasn't available for for computer users like him. Yep, So he ended up deciding, you know what I think this is

what I want to do. I think I want to go into developing and publishing games, And so he got back to work to think the first official Bungee title, you could say, Ganap is sort of a Bungee title they often lump it in, but in a way that was sort of the predecessor that led to right, it was a precursor. Um. The first game that they would actually publish was Operation Desert Storm, which was a tank shoot or like a like a top down tank shot.

It makes me think of the old hundred, which had a combat with an exclamation point that involved top down tank battles where it was a two player game and you would maneuver through a maze sort of similar to that, a little bit more more sophisticated. The graphics were certainly more sophisticated than the old at twenty s um and it.

I remember specifically that it had copyright protection in the form of a manual where you would you start the game and the game would ask you questions that you had to answer by flipping through the manual and finding the right answer on the right page, like like what

what word is on or whatever? Yeah, those were the day as man when your copyright protection was involved a hard copy of the documentation that came with the game, because back then most of us didn't have access to things like scanners, so it was a viable means of copy protection and not so much these days. Uh. You would control this this tank, and you maneuver through these maze like areas, fight other tanks mortars, complete specific tasks whatever that happened to be for that level, and you

could pick up a little power ups. Um. You had you know, health as well as fuel that you had to keep an eye on or else you would lose that that game, you lose a life. Um. And it was pretty primitive. But then Sarropean was a soul designer working on a game. This was back in the day when people still occasionally did that. We were getting into by the nineties, into the era of games where you

would have larger teams working on a title, increasingly large teams. Yes, but but but it wasn't unheard of at the time for for especially a relatively simple game like this with a relatively small release, to have a single dev Yeah. Yeah, so this was I think he pretty much got in at at the very tail end of that era. Like if it had been much later, it would have not

been a very viable business. Oh shure. I mean also within the next few years, UM blockbusters like Doom would come out for for PC and kind of blow the entire market wide open. But but that that is that is up and coming. So in two he would get together with a former classmate, Jason Jones, who had been working already I think I think unto himself on a game that he called Minotaur. Yeah, the full title is

Minotaur the Labyrinth of Crete. Yes. By the time it published, right, they got together to to finish up the game and published it under Bunchie. Yeah. So this at this point, Sarropean and Jones had met in an artificial intelligence class and so they both had this interest in games. And when Jones found out about Serapians plans and Seropian found out about Jones's work on this game, they thought, well, this partnership would make sense. We'd have a lot more

chance of success working together. And the game itself was a multiplayer game, which was pretty innovative at the time. It was again for the Mac, and it would uh allow up to seven people to play on a local area network or land and UH although I did read one thing where it said a player and up to seven others, So whether it was seven or eight, I don't know. I I wasn't playing Mac games at this time, so I have no personal expertise with this particular title.

I always assume things going even numbers and multiples of specifically, so eight is probably more likely. Uh, but that's based on consoles, not Yeah, that's true. That's true. Uh, the same here though, because seven just seems like a weird number, but it was appropriate for Bengie, I guess. So, I guess so that it does feature pretty heavily any Sorry,

they have the entire seventh column thing at any rate. So, so the game is a dungeon crawler style, right, So you have a little character and you're moving through a dungeon maze. The whole purpose of the game, at least

the multiplayer version, is to kill all the other players. Um. In fact, they came up with the the slogan kill your enemies, kill your friends, enemies, kill your friends, and that that slogan would show up in other future Bungee titles, usually on game types like like a death match or something, and that would be the little descriptor uh. So this was a pretty simple game, although the networking made it

again pretty innovative, interesting title. It only sold around a thousand copies, so not a huge success by any stretch of the imagination, but it convinced both Jones and Seropian that this was a good idea to have this company, Bungee, and to work together to create games. So Jones is often credited as co found or of Bungee. So even though European was really determined to create this company before Jones got involved, it wasn't until Jones had had started

collaborating that it really became a thing. So uh. Their original headquarters was an apartment on the South side of Chicago. Just an apartment, just apparently there was, according to a documentary on Bungee's twentieth anniversary, a crack house behind set apartment. Um. They actually had a lot to say about that. If you haven't seen the twentieth anniversary documentary, it's a fun video. It's an hour long. It's up on YouTube so you

can watch it. And those guys have a really great sense of humor, and so it's really fun to kind of get some of the behind the scenes. Um, there are a lot of a lot of bleeps and bloops that are they're they're they're colorful group. But yeah, they had like a room and a half according to one of the developers, that's about how much space they had.

And uh and before too long, Jones and Seropian would end up high tiring on more people to kind of join the group and start working together to make more complex games Likerees Entry Pathways into Darkness. Yeah, yeah, this one was interesting. It's a first person shooter game, but it also incorporates action adventure type gameplay and role playing game type gameplay altogether, so it wasn't as cut and dry as a first person shooter like Wolfenstein three D

or Doom Right. It had other elements. There were some puzzle solving elements, You had some stats that could increase over time as you played, and it was pretty cool that Jones himself had gotten the idea of really developing a more complex version of the first person shooter when he looked at Wolfenstein three D, which was not in three out for the Macintosh platform. Eventually, of course, it would be released for like everything, um, but it wouldn't

hit mac until the next year. So so when he when he saw that, he was like, there's an opportunity for this kind of game wise in't it on a map? Let's make it? And what was fantastic? I mean I played Wolfenstein back in probably so I could totally see where he got the like, like looking at the gameplay

of Pathways, I see where the inspiration came in. But also this would be when you'd start to see Bungee coming up with some really incredible storylines that get really complex and some some tropes that you can still see in their games today, which is so fascinating. Yeah, I mean it's it's a shooter, and most of us when we play a shooter, we're used to a pretty bare

bones storyline. Oh sure, well, I mean especially I think in these days with stuff like like Doom and Wolfenstein three d Um that was very run and gun, and I mean, and the objective was killed bad guys, where the bad guys everyone you meet right and then get to the exit at the end of the level. It's usually really a linear kind of level. I mean, you might have twist and turns, but really there's only one way to get from point A to point B and kill everything that happens to be in between point A

and point B. That's about it. But this was a game where they wanted to add in a really rich mythology. They created this science fiction alien world type thing. There was an alien race called the jar oh which that's important because they'll come back um and uh. The whole thing takes place in a pyramid in the Yucatan Peninsula, and you actually have to go into the pyramid and

go underneath. There's in the mythology a big evil alien monster that that rests Cathulhu like underneath the pyramid, and you come up with this brilliant plan based upon these these kindly aliens called the jar oh Um to destroy said monstrous entity, or at least slow it down. Yeah, by by detonating a nuclear weapon the pyramid. You know,

it's a measured response. Yeah, well sure, I mean also, I guess you know, especially in the early nine days, if you're the president and you get a phone call from aliens and then a completely reasonable response is to go, yes, I will blow up this ancient artifact. Yes this is This would clearly be the administration before the one that we saw an Independence Day, where they try to take a much more measured approach um, you know, this was this was one of those things that as I read

about it, it it really tickled me. I mean, I could definitely see where the seeds were planted for future Bungee titles, but it just made me think of, uh uh, the I could just imagine the exchange where the aliens say, yeah, do you have any huge weapons that you can use, Like, yeah, we've got these these nuclear bombs, Like all right, you should totally go into the pyramid and use one of those. And the President says, oh, and that will kill it

and oh no, that won't kill it. It'll just slow it down long enough for us to get there and handle it from there. At any rate. You play as a special Forces agent who is part of a team, and at the very beginning of the game, you're separated

from your team and you lose all your equipment. So it's basic kind of first person shooter where you start off with some of the lower power pieces of equipment, basically nothing, and you have to kind of run through the pyramid picking up equipment and solving puzzles and killing stuff or you know, at least avoiding being killed as right as possible, and you have a time limit, so

that's interesting too. You had to be able to set off the bomb and escape, either by getting out of the pyramid and calling for pick up or if you did not have a radio beacon, because that was one of the things you had to find running far enough to get outside the blast radius of a nuclear bomb. Um. And if you did those things, you got the successful ending of the game. So the game could end in various ways depending upon your choices, which was pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah,

And I also found it really interesting. One of the game elements was that you could find this this yellow crystal that would let you converse with dead people. Um, and that that's that's where all the story elements came, right right, Yeah, I mean, which I'm sorry to saying that sentence out loud always makes me giggle just a little bit. Um. But of course you have to have

the yellow crystal to talk to dead people. This isn't a crazy game, um, but but yeah, yeah, it was a lot of backstory about what was going on and would give you a lot of clues for what you where you should go, and what you should do next. And and that is a story element is so rampant throughout not only most of Bungee's video games, but a lot of other video games in the industry after this. So I just think that it's kind of terrific to

have seen this in exactly. Yeah, this idea of of incorporating your story elements into the game itself where the player has to come into contact with it an Yeah, whether now in this case it is this yellow crystal that lets you talk to dead people, but in other games it will be like terminals, right, so going to get over that, um yeah, yeah, right, right, terminals or cassette tapes or whatever it is, right, so, uh, and you would run into all these other like adventure were

types who had died in pursuit of this pyramid. Yeah, and a few right because there had been like a Nazi expedition there in some Cuban treasure hunters, I think. So it's all these like like different eras of people who had one at one time or another, had attempted to infiltrate the pyramid and had not been terribly successful, but you get to hear about it because you have the yellow crystal. They failed successfully, That's true. So the

game ended up being a big success for Bungee. Keep in mind, a big success on the Mac platform was smaller than what you would find for the PC platform. Oh yeah, and we'll talk a little bit about that in another couple of years down our timeline. Yeah, but it meant that the company was able to actually start really ramping up and going into their next project, which was one of the If it hadn't been for the Halo series, I think this would be the big one

that people would remember. And a lot of Mac gamers are very fond of this articular series. Oh sure. I think the only reason that it's not more wildly widely remembered is just the sheer disparity of Mac two PC PC users, especially in in the mid nineties here. But yes, Marathon is the name of this game, and it was set in the same universe as Pathways. Actually yeah, it

was not a sequel to Pathways. Uh. Pathways took place in what was then modern day uh Earth, which today would be like well those mid nineties Earth temporary Earth. It's a period piece now, but at the time it was supposed to be taking places during the modern day. Marathon was set in the future and uh It was originally called Marathon zero as a working title, and it was shown at the San Francisco Macworld Expo, just a demo, like a you know, kind of a sizzle real type

thing in January. Yeah, and it featured a sort of a faster gameplay than Pathways. Also had some new features that have become standard in first person shooting games, like dual yielding weapons. That was one of the things they showed off, which not very many first person shooters had really done up to that point. Um, and also alternate modes of fire for your guns, so if you had a gun that had burst mode versus single fire or you know, grenade launcher or whatever and had that kind

of gameplay as well. Now, according to Jones, it was kind of met with a tepid response. So the development team said, who oh, we have a problem here, a potential problem. I mean, if the if people think that this is just yet another first person shooter clone, like, oh, well, you guys are trying to do the same thing that Wolfenstein and Doom are doing, then we've got a problem. So, uh, they decided to go back to the drawing board and

really revisit Marathon and and pour some new energy into it. Yeah, they hired one Ryan Martel to to create a new rendering engine for them. Yeah, and he also created a map editor tool, which again becomes kind of a hallmark of Bungee products, where they create rules that allow players to do their own sort of editing and make their

own kind of maps. Um. You'll you'll find that again and again in various Bungee titles, not all of them, but enough of them where you see that they really understood that player communities could be really creative and become evangelists for your product. So if you support that, they tell everybody else, Hey, this game is awesome and I made this awesome map. But for you to be able to play my awesome map, you need to go out

and the game right. Um. Although this feature would not be released to the players as of Marathon, I think it wouldn't be until Marathon three that that would happen. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Um. They would also hire um Greg Kirkpatrick to help them develop the pathology of this game world Yeah, which again very complex. Like Pathways, was a much more complicated world than what

you would typically see in a first person shooter. They were further enriching this mythology that had been created during the Pathways experience. Later in Bungee also brought on a programming named Alan Roy or a Lane Roy, who began to build in multiplayer functions to the game, which originally was not going to be one of the game features, but then they thought, oh, we could support some you know, local area network play and uh. And again that ended

up being a huge deal to Marathon success. Uh and again something that Bungee would be very interested in continuing in further titles. Yeah. So, just a few months later in July, they debuted this another demo of the game, which they had officially decided to call Marathon, at the Boston Macworld Expo, and and it received a pretty huge response. Yeah. Bungee ended up even decided to take pre orders on the game. Originally promising, oh, this this thing is ready

to go into boxes in two weeks. We'll have this shipping out in two weeks. It actually would not ship until December, so from July to December they realized there was still a lot more work to be done on the game. Jones says that the reason that this game was so late was partially because the team had become obsessed with playing it in multiplayer, and so instead of actually working on the game, and they tended to just

fragging each other. Yeah, I could see that happening. I've been I've I have joined groups where we were having lots of plans for the day and it all ended

up being, you know, just a massive land party. Um. Then it was right around this time in the early nineties, so yeah, it was someone on the team who said, you know, the single player campaign probably doesn't have the full attention that it needs for it to be a satisfying experience for a player, so perhaps some of us should stop, you know, killing each other and develop it some more. And so they they did that. They started going into full on crunch time working on the game.

Oh yeah, because I mean but by the time they realized all of this, they really would have had to have shipped it like two weeks previous to get it out by Christmas, which is always the game developers called, right, yeah, you don't want to miss that holiday season because that's going to be your most lucrative time. So they finally concluded the development on December fourteenth and started shipping it to customers. Now, they had more than twenty five thousand

pre orders by that time, so they're shipping partners. Because Bungee was such a small company at the time, they were working with other small companies they're shipping partners who were actually the ones putting the products together and and producing the disks and shipping them out. They couldn't meet that capacity in a really short time. So even yeah, they're developers were out there like stuffing boxes and shrink wrapping,

it would not be the last time. Rather that Bungee employees would have to start getting their hands dirty actually boxing orders and getting out the door. So when they showed up to the San Francisco Macworld Expo in after the game had already gone gold and started shipping, they brought copies of the game with them and they sold out of all of them. So it had gone from a lackluster response a year previous to a sellout game. Uh, and it was, you know, kind of a pretty cool game.

Had six chapters and twenty seven levels within the game. Also something that you would see in later Bungee games, this kind of multi chapter, multi level approach um and hew a lot of basic missions like you'd have to first person shooter, so shooting enemies would be a big one. Rescuing people who are about to be shot by enemies will be another one. Uh, dis army explosives. Yeah, so that the enemies couldn't blow up the people who they

had previously been shooting at. You get a theme here. Uh. Definitely had a science fiction theme again because it was in that Pathways universe. You play as a security officer who is assigned to a space station that is called marath On. It also introduced some some themes that would

be showing up in later Bungee games, like artificial intelligence. Uh. The station had an AI called durn Doll that had gone sort of, um well, not necessarily bonkers, but it becomes self aware and self determining, and it's definitely preventing you from preaching your goals. It's an antagonist. Sometimes you work against each other, sometimes you work with each other.

This is also something you see in a lot of Bungee games where you have to make these weird allegiances that later on you turn on each other for some reason. But the idea of an AI that gains self awareness or becomes a problem will pop up in later Bungee titles, even after Bungee was done working on those titles. UM, so that was kind of cool, and you would end up playing the same character, this nameless security officer for two more game titles in the Marathon series. Um, you

never were given a name. Very mysterious kind of character. Another thing that's similar to the Halo series, which we'll talk about in our second episode. But at any rate, the storyline very complex, uh, and involved not just the rampant Ai during Doll that was kind of taking totalitarian control of the space station, but also an alien invasion force. And so you're you're dealing with lots of stuff all

at once. And at the end of the game, during Doll is able to transfer its intelligence from the space station to the alien spacecraft that had been the one that was invading, and then you know goes and says I'm gonna go see what what the universe has to hold CIA and zooms off and that was the end of the game. Now, the big success here wasn't just the first play person game, which a lot of people love,

but also the multiplayer. People really love the multiplayer Eli. Yeah, you could you could land up to eight people at least, so yeah, I think yeah, And so it was one of those things where, uh, people really latched onto that, and it became a huge success for Bungee, which prompted them to make some sequels. Now, this was something that that Jason Jones originally was not really into. He wasn't big on let's make sequels for our gains. He liked the idea of developing new, uh new I P each time.

But when the demand was there and the opportunity was there to expand upon the story and mythology they created, uh, you know, it's kind of hard to say, well, let's not do that. This is what people want, and sure, sure, And also I mean I think that I think that it wound up. I think what is so special about Bungee, actually, I feel allow me to pontificate just a wee bit, is that they they don't do exactly the same thing twice.

They're never working with it exactly the same story, um, you know, or it's a different segment of the story, or they're approaching it from a different angle. And and the game elements that they introduced are interesting enough that you feel comfortable, but you have a huge drive to to keep playing around in this universe. And I feel like they enjoy playing around in their own universes still so um so so yeah, so two sequels. Marathon Too was called Durndall and and it came out so just

a year later. Yeah. It was one of those things where they just immediately started developing as soon as as soon as it was clear that Marathon was going to be a big hit. Uh. And this one ends up taking place in the game world seventeen years after the ending of the first game, and you wake up and you're on that alienship. You're still that security officer. You're on the alienship. Turns out During Doll really had need of you, so he took you, apparently against your will.

I have not played the Marathon games, so if I get any of this incredibly wrong, feel free to write in and explain to me how I have misrepresented the plot. But basically, during Doll has this plan to use you and some of the other people who were aboard the Marathon space station as frontline soldiers in a war against the Aliens that had been such a big problem in

the first game. And so uh, it's again another first person shooter where you're you're continually learning more through various computer terminals, just like in the first game, and you're trying to complete various missions, very similar gameplay to the first one. They did add in some special stuff for this sequel that had not been in the first game, including liquid effects. So yeah, these are things where where you as the player could jump into various pools of

stuff and it would have a different effect. Would it would slow down your movement or or or give you weapons effects? Right, yeah, like for example, some weapons like a fire based weapon wouldn't fire and water also if the if the pool were deep enough, you would actually sink into it, so that you know, you'd start to drown if you didn't, if you didn't uh surface fast enough, uh, which in the first Marathon game all the surfaces were

solid surfaces. And really you know, this this kind of liquid sort of thing that was fairly new for the time of maryor Thon and Marathon too. Um. You know, liquid effects are not easy to pull off, especially not easy to pull off convincingly, especially not in this era of rendering exactly. So you know, running into a lava pit usually you would just have a game where if you touched something, you died, as opposed to you get engulfed in something and you start taking damage and you

have an opportunity to get out before you die. Um. But yeah, that was one of those interesting little elements they added in multiplayer got some new features, including some game types that became really popular in later games across the genre of first person shooters. Yeah, like a like a kill the dude who's holding the ball kind of game?

Yeah in uh in Halo that would be a skull. Uh. There are other games where you know, there's some object that represents I am the player that everybody needs to

kill now as essentially that. They also had like a King of the Hill style game, which is essentially the same style game you'll find in first person shooters Across the board now, which is a zone on a map is designated as the hill, and you have to take it and hold it for as long as you possibly can, and whoever holds it for a given number of seconds within around wins. It's a really great excuse to shoot

a lot. I actually really like that game type because it's very forgiving for people who are not good at first procedutors like me. It involves very little strategies. Yeah, it's most like this is where you need to be right now, and that's all. That's all that's important. And most of the time, if you just lag behind a little bit, the grenades clear out everybody else and then

you come in. And I've noticed generally that you know, if if you're if you're struggling, you know, really winning the game, you can at the very least frustrate the heck out of your friend. That's right. You can play the part of spoiler if you can't, if you can't actually be a good winner. Uh yeah, I love this game type uh. This sequel was then followed up Bungee.

You know, Bungee was such a small team comparatively speaking, that they couldn't work on multiple projects simultaneously at this point, so they really would focus on one title and get it out the door, and then they would start the next title. So they had just done Marathon, and then they did Marathon too. So the next project they decided to do was Marathon three Infinity, and that would come out just another single year in after Marathon to Darn Doll and so that this would be the final game

in the Marathon series. It's although it's not quite the last that we'd hear some of these elements, that's true. It's also the trippiest game that they that they created the Marathon series because it wasn't straightforward at all full according to according to Kirkpatrick, it was purposefully not straightforward, right, Yeah. It was meant to challenge the player to bring his or her own interpretation to the game to decide what

actually is going on. So, within the context of the game, it appears that you are able to travel to different alternate timelines with the goal of stopping a catastrophe from happening. The catastrophe happens at the beginning of the game, and then you have the this ability to potentially uh bypass that to stop it from happening going through either alternate timelines or perhaps you're just exploring your own consciousness, yeah, or just alternate realities in general, not just timelines. It's

never really fully explained. You would again get bits and pieces of information from computer terminals. So you could play this game straight through as a standard first person shooter, not interested in all in the story, and still have

a satisfactory experience just based on the gameplay. Sure, but if you jump around to these different timelines and realities or whatever it is you can, you can find all kinds of different enemies and get all kinds of different story elements, and it's a more, you know, a richer experience, I would say. So, just like in UH, for those of you who have played the Halo games, you know you can you can zoom through those games and not

pay attention to the cut scenes or anything. But if you do really pay attention to the details, you start to try to pick up all of the backstory elements. Crazy complicated. So yeah, at any rate, um, you would face different enemies and different timelines. Sometimes you would face uh and sometimes an enemy in one timeline would be

an ally in another timeline. So it would be one of those things where you might be used to blowing these alien guys away repeatedly, and then you go to an alternate timeline suddenly you're working with the aliens and you're shooting humans, and um, you would have to just adjust to whatever the timeline demanded of you. And it shipped also with these map making tools we had talked

about and asset editors. They were called Forge and anival, right, and anyone who is familiar with the with the Ladder Halo series will very much recognize those elements. So this this gave you the chance to make your own multiplayer maps and and tweak weapons and and all kinds of other stuff like that. Yeah, so if you wanted to have a game where everyone had super overpowered weapons that are one shot kills. Uh and and are you know, invisible and running around a really complex map, you could,

in theory do that. Yeah. Yeah, you can set your own physics and and physical structures within within these maps. And I it kills me that this was. Yeah, they did release a couple of very tiny titles. They're not even really included in Bungee's full history if you look on their website. But one of them was called Abuse. Uh. This was These were games that they kind of worked

with other people to help publish them. Abuse was a game where you played as a prisoner trying to escape a penitentiary while fellow prisoners are all being turned into monsters, thus making prison even worse than it normally would be. And then the other one was called Weekend Warrior. And I've never seen this game. It was developed by Pangea

Software and then completed and published by Bungee. And the description I read said it was a game show world where you win prizes by sl puzzles, disarming traps, and beating the crap out of competing contestants. So it made me think of a slightly more sophisticated version of Smash TV. I think that was the name of it. It was an arcade game that. Yeah, absolutely, big money, big prices. I love it. It just makes me think of that. Um.

So the company was growing quite large at this point. Yeah, although I I did want to put in all these games, I believe we're We're for were for Macintosh, right, Yes, yeah, they were just developing for the Max. Some of the games like Marathon To eventually got ported overtop. Right, they would get popular enough that they would make ports. Yeah, but they weren't. They weren't being developed for any other

platform other than the Macintosh. Uh. You know, if it had enough of an interest, they would attempt to port it to Windows based PCs, but it was that was not their intended audience. So in in nine seven they officially grow right. Yeah, They would found a satellite studio out in California called Bungee West, which would begin to work on a game called Tony, which was a a third person shooter adventure kind of game that that was highly inspired by a lot of of of anime, like

a like Ast in the Shell. Yeah, if you ever look at this game, you can tell where they pulled their inspiration from. Uh. That was a troubled developmental process for that game. Well well yeah, yeah right, we'll cover it later, but suffice it to say that I think that Bungee and Bungee West didn't generally agree all the time. Yeah. Yeah, there were some issues, um between the two teams, and even within just the Bungee West team itself, also within

Bungee itself. These are these were a lot of creative young UH individuals who more often than not really worked well together as a team. But sometimes you know, if the if the elements weren't just right, things could take longer than they needed to, And especially as the company was going through these growth spurts, it's easy to get a little bit off track. Um. Also, they would release myth The Fallen Lords, one of their one of the

games that that that strategy players on the Mac absolutely loved. UH. It was a fantasy real time tactics game. Some people call it like a real time strategy game, but it didn't have the micromanaging that you would have in a typical RTS game, like you didn't have to build a um barracks that would produce units. In fact, it was it was a really unforgiving game in the sense that when the level started, you would have a certain number of units at your disposal and that's it. They could

not replenish themselves. If you lost them, they were gone. Casualties were a huge deal. And not only that, but if you weren't careful with the way you played your characters, your own guys could end up destroying half your units in friendly fire, Like don't put your archers behind mine your knights, is what I'm saying. So it was a

dark fantasy world. Also had a lot of gore to it, although when I say gore, you're talking about these tiny little cartoonish figures and blood pixels and it would just be that blood would splatter the whole board. But it but it wasn't. It wasn't realistic in the sense like they were all very cartoon sure, sure, although at the time, certainly I think a lot of people were very up in arms about even cartoonish video game up in arms being a slightly unfortunate UM but in development, in fact

that the game had been called the Giant Bloody War Game. Yeah, I think, yeah, that was that was pretty telling. Originally, this was going to be a little, you know, kind of side title that they were going to publish while they also tried to create a new first person shooting game. But then Quake came out, and when Jason Jones saw Quake, he felt that any game Bungee would make at the

time would be compared unfavorably to Quake. So instead they decided to elevate Myth to being their primary focus rather than the secondary title, and they really went in on that, uh and it turned out to be a good a good project because once it came out, people really responded positively to it. Some critics said that there were some elements to the game that made it a little more difficult than it necessarily had to be. Like, your your

field of view was very limited. You couldn't zoom out very far, so you had a little radar that would kind of show you where enemy units were in comparison to your units, but you couldn't really see them, and it made it hard to plan out your strategy because you know, you might have someone flanking you and you can't you just can't physically see that far off the map. UM, And so there was that there were some other issues

with the user interface. So Bungee ended up releasing a patch and upgraded the game to Myth one point one, and that patch ended up adding in more more streamlined user interface, zoomable field of view, that kind of thing, and that made it um address a lot of the criticisms that they got early on. It was popular enough that by they would release a sequel called Myth two Soul Blighter. Yeah. Uh, this game is famous for something. Oh yeah, it almost shipped with like the worst bug

in the history of all video games ever. Yeah, in which by by trying to uninstall the game, you could delete your entire hard drive. Yeah. You could literally destroy your hard drive like, well, not literally, I guess you could data your heart. Yeah, I mean you would. You would wipe it absolutely clean. And this was discovered un format it and an unfortunate marketer. Yeah, I heard that.

I heard that it was a lady um Overseas actually, who who had been doing a test on it and and uninstalled as many people do, by by just going to the going to the root files and by by yeah, and then oops, her her computer was no more. Yeah, there were some great commentary about this particular uh, this particular bug by folks like the Penny Arcade guys who were like, you don't like our game, screw you, We're

taking all of your data. But it was non intentional no um, And they did catch it before it shipped. It had unfortunately already been printed and boxed. So this was another time at which Bungee employees like the developers had to go out into warehouses and unshrink crap games and switch out the disks. Yeah, they physically had to remove bad disks and put in good disks and then package it all back up again. Uh. The estimates I've heard for this mistake were like, what was the cost arrange?

Right around a million dollars a k A about what the game made, which was a really severe blow to Bungee. Bungee was was kind of operating like right in the margin this whole time, like they were they were seeing success, but they were also trying to ramp up and yeah, yeah, and so making basically nothing on a game because of this mistake was it was huge, huge, and so that

would end up affecting their decisions in the very near future. Um, you may have also heard about myth three, but that game did not come out from Bungee because of something that happened in the year two thousand. But here's the problem. My notes stopped for part one, so I can't even talk about two thousand yet. We're gonna have to wait for a whole new episode and find out what happened.

Contractually speaking, we're not allowed to say anything else, right, So for those of you who have no awareness of what happened in the past, tune in next time so that you can find out that the exciting conclusion to the Bungee story. In the meantime, if you guys have any suggestion for future episode ideas for tech Stuff, please

let us know. Send an email to text stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop a line at Twitter at Facebook at tumbler tech Stuff hs W is the handle, and we'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because it has stuff works dot Com