Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Bungie - The Best of Times, the Worst of Times.

Bungie is, without a doubt, one of the most prolific design studios in the world today. They’ve been in the business for almost eighteen years now, and while most people know them for Halo they had some pretty impressive games long before the Halo series dropped and lowered the expectations of most gamers concerning game quality and length.

I’m not saying that Halo was bad – I’m saying it was overrated, and largely used to bring first person shooter gaming to a new platform. And it did so admirably. While Goldeneye on N-64 certainly brought a lot of new gamers into the fold the PC was still the uncontested home of the FPS until Halo dropped and changed all the rules with reliable, consistently usable controls and well designed, well balanced multiplayer. But play Halo on the PC and compare it to its contemporaries and it’s pretty unimpressive.

What it really did was shift the life cycle of first person shooters forevermore. It’s hard to think of a major studio which released an FPS on a console and then ported it to PC before Halo, but now PC exclusive FPSes are becoming rarer and rarer. Most of the major FPS releases of 2009 have either been console exclusives or multiplatform games that, for better or worse, bring the worst aspects of console gaming to bear.

And the Halo series has also lowered expectations across the board. Sequels are no longer expected to revolutionize game play or, at the very least, tell a solid functional story. No, they’re intended to form cliffhangers so that trilogies can be completed, so that units can be sold and consoles can be solidified as gaming platforms.

I’d like for you, dear reader, to try an experiment. Find a copy of Halo and play it. Regardless of which platform you play it on, just play a single level and think long and hard about how the game is constructed, how the game flows and how story is told in it. Now, fire up a copy of Halo 3 and give it a good play. Or just watch a video of it – if you just played Halo 1, you just played Halo 3. The core gamecplay across the trilogy is beyond consistent – its cut and paste.

They’ve barely introduced new mechanics between games. Mildly interesting concepts broached in Halo 2 (space combat and a protracted battle on earth) are abandoned or clumsily repeated in Halo 3. Then look at the story itself – it’s one long segment of the same war from first game to last – one big battle.

In the end Bungie has essentially made the same game three times with a few tweaks and no new story concepts. They’ve made full price expansion packs for their last big release, with an incredibly long design cycle in between. But I still have immense faith in Bungie as a developer, and not just because Halo is a meticulously designed and wonderfully realized game that repeats itself over and over. Its because long before Halo, when Bungie was still part of the 1990s, they were likely the most impressive designer in the world.

Let’s step way way back in our time machines to 1994, when Marathon, the spiritual predecessor to Halo, was released. If you play Marathon you’ll notice that it seems an awful lot like a low-fi version of Halo, something Bungie is ready to admit. They’ve added the Marathon armor as an easter egg in Halo 3, and there’s even a storytelling nod to Marathon where Bungie gives us snippits of story hidden in text-heavy consoles.

Marathon was, for its time, impressive for its physics system and the quality of the story it told, and little else. In the Doom era there wasn’t a whole lot to first person shooters – controls and physics couldn’t be fine tuned enough to let people shoot with any degree of precision and realistically you really only needed a handful of guns to make game play fun. And Marathon, even today, executes on those few guns and the technology of the time wonderfully.

But what makes Marathon as a series stand head and shoulders above Doom, why it earns an essay where Doom would have a news brief, is what it did with storytelling. Marathon, and moreover its sequels, were textually self-aware. They told their story within the context of a videogame. And they always pushed the envelope with these stories in terms of what it meant to be a protagonist in a videogame and what it meant to inhabit the world of a video game.

Marathon Infinity was the pinnacle of this – a non-linear story with a truly post-modern bent and no clear, easily followed plot. If you’re a big enough nerd to cruise message boards you’ll notice that people are still discussing just what Marathon Infinity was all about today. It was a game that did its best to challenge players not just with its punishingly difficult game play (the boss battle in Marathon 2 remains one of the best constructed and toughest challenges I’ve ever faced in a game, as well as one of the most rewarding I’ve ever dealt with) but with a story that demanded their interpretation and participation.

Bungie made the first post-modern game. And, moreover, they made it right. They made it with enduring themes and resonant, intelligent characters who it changed with the story to make a point. Marathon could be seen as a considerably less surreal and less sexual New York Trilogy for video games. It takes what it means to be a video game and tell a story in a video game and turns it on its ear.

This dedication to storytelling is something that carries over to Myth, Bungie’s amazing entry into real-time strategy. Not to oversell the game, but the first Myth made me into a hardcore gamer. It made me reconsider the real-time strategy genre and I find that games today struggle to attain the quality of game play and tactical depth which Myth seemed to effortlessly produce. But I’ll write more on that later – right now I’d like to talk about Myth’s story.

Myth used a series of journal entries between missions in order to string together the events of the game – and it did a fantastic job of it. Other games have tried to use a similar technique; Sacrifice’s past-tense missives strive towards the same end of establishing a long, hard fought struggle in a protagonist’s memory. But Myth did it earlier and better – the tone of the journal entries was spot on: that of resolute hope in the face of overwhelming odds, the knowledge that each entry might be the writer’s last.

With these entries Bungie made me identify with a faceless, nameless protagonist more than I ever identified with the Master Chief. Myth’s between-mission missives were masterfully written and executed, and, much like the computers of Marathon, flawlessly drew players into the world. Unlike the cut-scenes, which seemed like fun asides, the journal entries, along with the missions, worked perfectly together to draw me into Myth’s world. Myth told a story with a skill that few games today can match, and it did so with tools that are arcane by present standards.

But Myth also tried to revolutionize the real-time strategy genre. In the shadow of Starcraft and Warcraft 2, real-time strategy giants dedicated to the rush-boom-turtle model, Myth took a more tactical point of view, giving players a limited set of resources and asking them to use those resources as well as the map and the game engine in order to defeat other players using tactics and unit control. Whereas in Warcraft 2, the ability to manage a small number of units with superior skill isn’t going to win many battles, in Myth the best players were the ones who understood the manner in which units interacted with each other and the physics engine of the game. They were the players who could take a tiny army of weak, seemingly defenseless units and tear apart your massive force with a few well placed attacks and some careful use of terrain.

And watching players fling dwarven grenades across the map with their Fetch’s lightning is just as impressive today as it was in 1997. Myth’s robust physics system, carefully designed units and incredibly streamlined and balanced game play is something that contemporary RTS developers are just starting to strive towards. Even with the atrocity that was Myth III, the Myth series remains one of the most impressive achievements in strategy history. With an amazing physics engine even by contemporary standards and a masterfully executed story, it should’ve set the bar for modern RTSes. Instead it has become a relic which until recently was mostly ignored. And now that its lessons are finally being used in games like DoW 2 and Endwar people are seeing a renaissance in the strategy genre, and wonderful, frightening and bewildering renaissance that should’ve come a decade ago.

And no discussion of Bungie’s history would be complete without mentioning Pathways Into Darkness, the best game no one ever played. Pathways of Darkness was a blend of survival horror and first person shooter, intended to be completely immersive and abusively difficult. It featured a dramatic ticking clock, unconventional puzzles and strict limiting of resources while facing opponents, each of whom could and would easily kill your protagonist unless you took proper care. It featured bosses who simply could not be beaten, a unique storytelling hook and scads of Nazi gold.

And it’s nearly impossible to find a copy nowadays, so I’ve never played it. I’d love to talk more about it, but all I could discuss firsthand would be the community which has attempted to re-create its experience and the people who still passionately follow and discuss the game fifteen years after its release. If these people are

What Bungie did in Pathways of Darkness is something survival-horror developers have been struggling to do ever since. They made a game with extremely limited resources, a ticking clock and a constant sense of danger which tested both the player’s ability to play as well as plan. Sure, the story told wasn’t as impressive as their other titles, but the revolutions they made in game design were. And, like most of Bungie’s titles, it has since fallen beside the proverbial road.

The only game I don’t want to discuss at length is Oni. While it tried its hardest to be revolutionary and challenging, Oni sort of failed on every level, coming off as stodgy, repetitive and underdesigned. While Bungie had only the best intentions with Oni they failed to execute on any of them. In the end, it nearly spelled disaster for their studio, and it can be seen as a great contributor to their sale to Microsoft. It was the dawn of their “thirty seconds of fun” philosophy, and it heralded the slow decline of their games into Halo-dom.

But the point of this essay is that Bungie was once not only a great developer, but a forward thinking and highly intelligent developer. They wanted to change both what it meant to play a game and what it meant to tell a story in the confines of a game, and they did a badass job of each task.

Each of the games I mentioned in this essay can impart many lessons on contemporary developers. Myth blended a series of unconventional gameplay elements into a brilliant whole, Marathon utilized a traditional model in a brilliant way and Pathways of Darkness broke every rule that the first person genre had had up to that point and has established since.

And these games also established Bungie as a developer. Even after Halo’s lackluster series of releases, where the Haunted Apiary outstripped Halo 2 and 3 in every dimension, I’m still excited for Halo: ODST. And it’s largely because of their storied past, and because this is going to be their last Halo game.

Bungie has proven that they can do great things, even if Halo has nearly destroyed the credibility they established in their youth. And perhaps now that the Halo series is shifting its attention to more human story telling once again we’ll see a resurgence in the quality of game Bungie once offered.

Essentially what I wanted to say with this overlong essay is that, Halo aside, Bungie is a wonderful developer and their place in history is well established. It would just be nice to see them make a comeback, and the best way they could do that is by looking back at their old games and seeing what made them great.