For those of us who love HALO, the name, “Bungie Studios”, is one that we treat with great reverence. HALO fans – who make up a significant portion of this site’s readership – regard Bungie as the producers of the three greatest FPS games ever made. (Plus HALO 3: ODST, and HALO: Reach, which are not very far behind in terms of quality and playability.)
As such, there is a mythos around Bungie, which has long shielded it from criticism as a game studio. But it turns out that, behind the scenes, things have been going wrong at Bungie for a VERY long time – dating back to its halcyon days, twenty years ago.
And, as it happens, this helps explain why so much of what Bungie has done over the past decade, has been… underwhelming, to say the least.
To understand all this, we have to start with that mythos I mentioned. In the mind of the average HALO fan, Bungie did all the right things to make those games, before Microsoft stepped in and messed everything up. By the end of HALO 3, Bungie had released what amounted to quite possibly the single greatest FPS action shooter of all time. Master Chief and Cortana were stranded somewhere INNNNN SPAAAAAAAAAACE!!!!!!!!, the Flood had been destroyed and eliminated completely as a threat, and the raging war with the Covenant was over. Humanity was, at long last, safe.
And then Microsoft took a bunch of ex-Bungie people, plugged them into something called “343 Industries”, headed by a bald Scot named Frankie O’Connor, and saddled them with a number of Mr. Softies, who proceeded to run the world’s greatest gaming franchise straight into the frakkin’ ground.
Such is the thought process of the average HALO fan. HALO 4 was a confused mess that had an incredibly emotional finale, but a completely confusing backstory that undid so much of the lore established in the prior games. HALO 5: Guardians was even worse, completely destroying that lore and totally failing to deliver on any of the promises it made in the trailers. HALO Infinite was a tentative return to form, but it dropped with way too much technical debt, and required YEARS of upgrades and releases to make the thing truly outstanding.
Against the muddled mishegoss that was Microsoft’s stewardship of HALO as a franchise, Bungie’s reign seemed a blessing by comparison. And it was.
But, as this rather excellent video from Akshon points out, the seeds of Bungie’s downfall were planted long ago – at the very height of its success:
What, exactly, do we mean by its “downfall”?
To understand that, we must now catch up with current events.
It turns out, there is now a major plagiarism scandal plaguing Bungie, which fought long and hard to become independent of its corporate overlords – not once, but twice. Yet, today, it is now essentially a subdivision of yet another giant corporate game developer. And in spite of all its struggles, it is still burning through cash at a rapid rate, trying to recapture the magic that once defined it as one of the top game developers out there.
That magic, though, is GONE – along with the people who made it happen. The modern Bungie is a shell of its former self. The legendary names that we HALO nerds grew to know so well – Martin O’Donnell, Michael Salvatori, Marcus Lehto, Jason Jones, and many others – no longer work at Bungie, having either been sacked, or left of their own free will. The result has been a series of lacklustre games that miss the fire, innovation, and unique spark that made the HALO trilogy so amazing.
Destiny was, to be quite blunt, unplayable. I tried it out once, for a few hours, and simply could not figure out how to get into it, at all, because I could not figure out what the game actually was. Apparently, subsequent DLC releases improved its quality substantially, and made it a much better game, but I gave up on it completely and have never touched it in the past decade. I have no idea whether Destiny 2 is any good, and honestly, I cannot be arsed to find out.
And now we get the news about Marathon – which harks back to one of the very first Bungie titles, and which was in many ways a true spiritual successor to HALO: Combat Evolved. The DNA of the original Marathon is all over HALO: CE, in fact – from the Marathon logo adorning the UNSC Pillar of Autumn, to the song, “Siege of Madrigal”, to various name references, to the concept of “rampancy”, and so on and so forth.
The problem is… the new Marathon game looks and feels NOTHING like the original:
And that is only the beginning of the problems with this game. The biggest of them is that its art style is apparently a complete rip-off of another artist’s work, in an age where plagiarism is becoming increasingly common and difficult to catch:
Looking at the gameplay footage for Marathon (2025), all I can say is, it looks like a really ugly spin on Destiny. I see very little of the original HALO DNA in it, and I have no real interest in playing something that looks THAT ugly. Even though I finally managed to get myself a new Xbox SeX (yes, really, it actually happened), and a new TV capable of actually doing the graphics justice, I cannot bring myself to disgrace that setup with something that looks as ugly as all that.
In summary, all things pass away, and Bungie too has passed. The things that once made it great, are gone now. HALO continues to suffer and wither under chronic mismanagement by Microsoft, which itself appears to be completely out of ideas – their best brainwave at present, is to re-release the original game, using the Unreal engine, instead of pouring real resources into undoing the TREMENDOUS damage done to the storyline and franchise over the past 10 years.
Destiny is over. Destiny 2 does not appear to have been particularly successful. Marathon (2025) looks like it is DOA, judging by the harsh reactions to it from top gamers who have seen and played the Alpha build.
So, let us raise our glasses, gentlemen, to the studio that once redefined what you could do with FPS games, and which gave us HALO, and all the wonderful memories that came with it. But let us leave it at that, along with any expectations or high hopes we might have, of anything good coming from corrupt and cash-hungry game studios in the future.
1 Comment
I played Marathon on my dad’s work Mac back in the day (he HATED Doom and did not allow it in the house, but all my friends had it) and loved it. My dad had a conniption back in 1994 because the game took up 12 MB of our 80 MB hard drive. I have images on my phone that are bigger than both.
I use its logo as my Twitter icon and the quote in my profile is from Durandal, who’s still the most complex and entertaining “rogue computer” in video game history. The SPNKR rockets are my favorite Marathon callback in Halo (Marathon’s rocket launcher was the SPNKR-x17) along with “wow, a Mark V!” (the player was eventually revealed in the third game to be the tenth Mjolnir Mark IV cyborg that Martian revolutionaries smuggled aboard the Marathon). You can play all three original games for free using the AlephOne source port. https://alephone.lhowon.org/
Destiny was actually quite fun if you played with a group. Once I exhausted everything I could do myself, I went on Reddit looking to find folks to do the Vault of Glass with. I got hooked up with a Texas teacher and his crew, and they let me into their clan immediately when I recognized that it was a Marathon reference (G4SB, short for G4 Sunbathing, the only Marathon 1 level where you have to watch your oxygen.) I had some of the best gaming experiences of my life with those guys, and I still miss them. We did everything – raids, strikes, campaign levels, multiplayer – and always had fun doing it.
I found the art style of this new Marathon game jarring right off the bat. All the blockiness and neon reminded me of some very early 3D games, which was not a great look. I was probably going to skip it regardless because it’s clear from Bungie’s actions that they’ve been hijacked by activists and are not the same company, as you noted.