Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with Text Stuff from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Either everyone, and welcome to Text Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Lauren volk Plump, and today
Speaker 1: we're taking uh an interesting subject, one that is near
Speaker 1: and dear to both our hearts. Yes, we are going
Speaker 1: to tackle in a two parter the company Bunging, makers,
Speaker 1: famously of Halo, among many other things. Also, I have
Speaker 1: an announcement to make. This is unfortunately my final episode
Speaker 1: of or or episodes of Text Stuff. After this, I'm
Speaker 1: going to move on. I'm staying with How Stuff Works
Speaker 1: in order to pursue a bunch of other opportunities within
Speaker 1: the company. You'll still be able to hear me on
Speaker 1: our other show, Forward Thinking, So don't worry. Jonathan and
Speaker 1: I are not in any kind of ancient grudge match
Speaker 1: which only one of us will survive. Probably Joe is
Speaker 1: a great mediator, and Joe is the other co host
Speaker 1: on Forward Thinking, and he is the one who is
Speaker 1: able to keep us in line. No, this is something
Speaker 1: that is very exciting for you, Lauren, because here here's
Speaker 1: the thing, folks behind You're gonna get a peek behind
Speaker 1: the curtain. We did this for episode six, We're gonna
Speaker 1: give you another peak right now, which is that working
Speaker 1: at how Stuff Works is amazing, but it's a lot
Speaker 1: of work, right Oh yeah, And I mean there's a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff going on within the company and so
Speaker 1: so yes, but but we we really wanted to do
Speaker 1: this episode on Bungee as my kind of send off
Speaker 1: because we are both so fond of the series and
Speaker 1: it's interesting bookends because I think the very first episode
Speaker 1: you and I recorded together was about survival horror video
Speaker 1: games Silent Hill, Right, yeah, we specifically did. So that's right.
Speaker 1: We're we're coming and going on or I'm coming and
Speaker 1: going on a on a video game kick. And uh
Speaker 1: and for those of you who are wondering about the
Speaker 1: fate of tech stuff that will continue and I'll talk
Speaker 1: more about at the end of the next episode. Let's
Speaker 1: let's move on to talking about Bungee, this company that
Speaker 1: created a game that both of us have grown to love,
Speaker 1: and I became the world's best sniper bullet magnet in
Speaker 1: that game. So so let's where those bullets went spawned death.
Speaker 1: But the story of Bungee actually begins way back in
Speaker 1: nineteen one. That's when a fellow named Alex Serropian, who
Speaker 1: was attending the University of Chicago as major in computer
Speaker 1: science and mathematics, was interested in creating a company of
Speaker 1: his very own. He was kind of always sort of
Speaker 1: a business minded in that respect. Now, back in nineteen nine,
Speaker 1: so the year before this this story really begins, he
Speaker 1: had created a clone of a popular early computer game, Pong,
Speaker 1: and he created it for for the Apple Macintosh platform. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which I know for those of us who are more
Speaker 1: recent uh computer owners, probably don't realize the Mac platform
Speaker 1: for a very long time was catering to a much
Speaker 1: smaller audience. Oh yes, and almost no games were available, Yeah,
Speaker 1: very few and far between. So he created a Pong clone,
Speaker 1: which he creatively titled Good Knop Pong Backwards. Um. He
Speaker 1: distributed the game for free, so this was not some
Speaker 1: money making scheme. He was really kind of doing this
Speaker 1: as an exercise in his interest in in gaming in
Speaker 1: general and in Apple in particular, because he had always
Speaker 1: personally been I think an Apple and Mac user and
Speaker 1: was sort of lamenting the fact that more stuff wasn't
Speaker 1: available for for computer users like him. Yep, So he
Speaker 1: ended up deciding, you know what I think this is
Speaker 1: what I want to do. I think I want to
Speaker 1: go into developing and publishing games, And so he got
Speaker 1: back to work to think the first official Bungee title,
Speaker 1: you could say, Ganap is sort of a Bungee title
Speaker 1: they often lump it in, but in a way that
Speaker 1: was sort of the predecessor that led to right, it
Speaker 1: was a precursor. Um. The first game that they would
Speaker 1: actually publish was Operation Desert Storm, which was a tank
Speaker 1: shoot or like a like a top down tank shot.
Speaker 1: It makes me think of the old hundred, which had
Speaker 1: a combat with an exclamation point that involved top down
Speaker 1: tank battles where it was a two player game and
Speaker 1: you would maneuver through a maze sort of similar to that,
Speaker 1: a little bit more more sophisticated. The graphics were certainly
Speaker 1: more sophisticated than the old at twenty s um and it.
Speaker 1: I remember specifically that it had copyright protection in the
Speaker 1: form of a manual where you would you start the
Speaker 1: game and the game would ask you questions that you
Speaker 1: had to answer by flipping through the manual and finding
Speaker 1: the right answer on the right page, like like what
Speaker 1: what word is on or whatever? Yeah, those were the
Speaker 1: day as man when your copyright protection was involved a
Speaker 1: hard copy of the documentation that came with the game,
Speaker 1: because back then most of us didn't have access to
Speaker 1: things like scanners, so it was a viable means of
Speaker 1: copy protection and not so much these days. Uh. You
Speaker 1: would control this this tank, and you maneuver through these
Speaker 1: maze like areas, fight other tanks mortars, complete specific tasks
Speaker 1: whatever that happened to be for that level, and you
Speaker 1: could pick up a little power ups. Um. You had
Speaker 1: you know, health as well as fuel that you had
Speaker 1: to keep an eye on or else you would lose
Speaker 1: that that game, you lose a life. Um. And it
Speaker 1: was pretty primitive. But then Sarropean was a soul designer
Speaker 1: working on a game. This was back in the day
Speaker 1: when people still occasionally did that. We were getting into
Speaker 1: by the nineties, into the era of games where you
Speaker 1: would have larger teams working on a title, increasingly large teams. Yes,
Speaker 1: but but but it wasn't unheard of at the time
Speaker 1: for for especially a relatively simple game like this with
Speaker 1: a relatively small release, to have a single dev Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so this was I think he pretty much got in
Speaker 1: at at the very tail end of that era. Like
Speaker 1: if it had been much later, it would have not
Speaker 1: been a very viable business. Oh shure. I mean also
Speaker 1: within the next few years, UM blockbusters like Doom would
Speaker 1: come out for for PC and kind of blow the
Speaker 1: entire market wide open. But but that that is that
Speaker 1: is up and coming. So in two he would get
Speaker 1: together with a former classmate, Jason Jones, who had been
Speaker 1: working already I think I think unto himself on a
Speaker 1: game that he called Minotaur. Yeah, the full title is
Speaker 1: Minotaur the Labyrinth of Crete. Yes. By the time it published, right,
Speaker 1: they got together to to finish up the game and
Speaker 1: published it under Bunchie. Yeah. So this at this point,
Speaker 1: Sarropean and Jones had met in an artificial intelligence class
Speaker 1: and so they both had this interest in games. And
Speaker 1: when Jones found out about Serapians plans and Seropian found
Speaker 1: out about Jones's work on this game, they thought, well,
Speaker 1: this partnership would make sense. We'd have a lot more
Speaker 1: chance of success working together. And the game itself was
Speaker 1: a multiplayer game, which was pretty innovative at the time.
Speaker 1: It was again for the Mac, and it would uh
Speaker 1: allow up to seven people to play on a local
Speaker 1: area network or land and UH although I did read
Speaker 1: one thing where it said a player and up to
Speaker 1: seven others, So whether it was seven or eight, I
Speaker 1: don't know. I I wasn't playing Mac games at this time,
Speaker 1: so I have no personal expertise with this particular title.
Speaker 1: I always assume things going even numbers and multiples of specifically,
Speaker 1: so eight is probably more likely. Uh, but that's based
Speaker 1: on consoles, not Yeah, that's true. That's true. Uh, the
Speaker 1: same here though, because seven just seems like a weird number,
Speaker 1: but it was appropriate for Bengie, I guess. So, I
Speaker 1: guess so that it does feature pretty heavily any Sorry,
Speaker 1: they have the entire seventh column thing at any rate. So,
Speaker 1: so the game is a dungeon crawler style, right, So
Speaker 1: you have a little character and you're moving through a
Speaker 1: dungeon maze. The whole purpose of the game, at least
Speaker 1: the multiplayer version, is to kill all the other players. Um.
Speaker 1: In fact, they came up with the the slogan kill
Speaker 1: your enemies, kill your friends, enemies, kill your friends, and
Speaker 1: that that slogan would show up in other future Bungee titles,
Speaker 1: usually on game types like like a death match or something,
Speaker 1: and that would be the little descriptor uh. So this
Speaker 1: was a pretty simple game, although the networking made it
Speaker 1: again pretty innovative, interesting title. It only sold around a
Speaker 1: thousand copies, so not a huge success by any stretch
Speaker 1: of the imagination, but it convinced both Jones and Seropian
Speaker 1: that this was a good idea to have this company, Bungee,
Speaker 1: and to work together to create games. So Jones is
Speaker 1: often credited as co found or of Bungee. So even
Speaker 1: though European was really determined to create this company before
Speaker 1: Jones got involved, it wasn't until Jones had had started
Speaker 1: collaborating that it really became a thing. So uh. Their
Speaker 1: original headquarters was an apartment on the South side of Chicago.
Speaker 1: Just an apartment, just apparently there was, according to a
Speaker 1: documentary on Bungee's twentieth anniversary, a crack house behind set apartment. Um.
Speaker 1: They actually had a lot to say about that. If
Speaker 1: you haven't seen the twentieth anniversary documentary, it's a fun video.
Speaker 1: It's an hour long. It's up on YouTube so you
Speaker 1: can watch it. And those guys have a really great
Speaker 1: sense of humor, and so it's really fun to kind
Speaker 1: of get some of the behind the scenes. Um, there
Speaker 1: are a lot of a lot of bleeps and bloops
Speaker 1: that are they're they're they're colorful group. But yeah, they
Speaker 1: had like a room and a half according to one
Speaker 1: of the developers, that's about how much space they had.
Speaker 1: And uh and before too long, Jones and Seropian would
Speaker 1: end up high tiring on more people to kind of
Speaker 1: join the group and start working together to make more
Speaker 1: complex games Likerees Entry Pathways into Darkness. Yeah, yeah, this
Speaker 1: one was interesting. It's a first person shooter game, but
Speaker 1: it also incorporates action adventure type gameplay and role playing
Speaker 1: game type gameplay altogether, so it wasn't as cut and
Speaker 1: dry as a first person shooter like Wolfenstein three D
Speaker 1: or Doom Right. It had other elements. There were some
Speaker 1: puzzle solving elements, You had some stats that could increase
Speaker 1: over time as you played, and it was pretty cool
Speaker 1: that Jones himself had gotten the idea of really developing
Speaker 1: a more complex version of the first person shooter when
Speaker 1: he looked at Wolfenstein three D, which was not in
Speaker 1: three out for the Macintosh platform. Eventually, of course, it
Speaker 1: would be released for like everything, um, but it wouldn't
Speaker 1: hit mac until the next year. So so when he
Speaker 1: when he saw that, he was like, there's an opportunity
Speaker 1: for this kind of game wise in't it on a map?
Speaker 1: Let's make it? And what was fantastic? I mean I
Speaker 1: played Wolfenstein back in probably so I could totally see
Speaker 1: where he got the like, like looking at the gameplay
Speaker 1: of Pathways, I see where the inspiration came in. But
Speaker 1: also this would be when you'd start to see Bungee
Speaker 1: coming up with some really incredible storylines that get really
Speaker 1: complex and some some tropes that you can still see
Speaker 1: in their games today, which is so fascinating. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean it's it's a shooter, and most of us when
Speaker 1: we play a shooter, we're used to a pretty bare
Speaker 1: bones storyline. Oh sure, well, I mean especially I think
Speaker 1: in these days with stuff like like Doom and Wolfenstein
Speaker 1: three d Um that was very run and gun, and
Speaker 1: I mean, and the objective was killed bad guys, where
Speaker 1: the bad guys everyone you meet right and then get
Speaker 1: to the exit at the end of the level. It's
Speaker 1: usually really a linear kind of level. I mean, you
Speaker 1: might have twist and turns, but really there's only one
Speaker 1: way to get from point A to point B and
Speaker 1: kill everything that happens to be in between point A
Speaker 1: and point B. That's about it. But this was a
Speaker 1: game where they wanted to add in a really rich mythology.
Speaker 1: They created this science fiction alien world type thing. There
Speaker 1: was an alien race called the jar oh which that's
Speaker 1: important because they'll come back um and uh. The whole
Speaker 1: thing takes place in a pyramid in the Yucatan Peninsula,
Speaker 1: and you actually have to go into the pyramid and
Speaker 1: go underneath. There's in the mythology a big evil alien
Speaker 1: monster that that rests Cathulhu like underneath the pyramid, and
Speaker 1: you come up with this brilliant plan based upon these
Speaker 1: these kindly aliens called the jar oh Um to destroy
Speaker 1: said monstrous entity, or at least slow it down. Yeah,
Speaker 1: by by detonating a nuclear weapon the pyramid. You know,
Speaker 1: it's a measured response. Yeah, well sure, I mean also,
Speaker 1: I guess you know, especially in the early nine days,
Speaker 1: if you're the president and you get a phone call
Speaker 1: from aliens and then a completely reasonable response is to go, yes,
Speaker 1: I will blow up this ancient artifact. Yes this is
Speaker 1: This would clearly be the administration before the one that
Speaker 1: we saw an Independence Day, where they try to take
Speaker 1: a much more measured approach um, you know, this was
Speaker 1: this was one of those things that as I read
Speaker 1: about it, it it really tickled me. I mean, I could
Speaker 1: definitely see where the seeds were planted for future Bungee titles,
Speaker 1: but it just made me think of, uh uh, the
Speaker 1: I could just imagine the exchange where the aliens say, yeah,
Speaker 1: do you have any huge weapons that you can use, Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: we've got these these nuclear bombs, Like all right, you
Speaker 1: should totally go into the pyramid and use one of those.
Speaker 1: And the President says, oh, and that will kill it
Speaker 1: and oh no, that won't kill it. It'll just slow
Speaker 1: it down long enough for us to get there and
Speaker 1: handle it from there. At any rate. You play as
Speaker 1: a special Forces agent who is part of a team,
Speaker 1: and at the very beginning of the game, you're separated
Speaker 1: from your team and you lose all your equipment. So
Speaker 1: it's basic kind of first person shooter where you start
Speaker 1: off with some of the lower power pieces of equipment,
Speaker 1: basically nothing, and you have to kind of run through
Speaker 1: the pyramid picking up equipment and solving puzzles and killing
Speaker 1: stuff or you know, at least avoiding being killed as
Speaker 1: right as possible, and you have a time limit, so
Speaker 1: that's interesting too. You had to be able to set
Speaker 1: off the bomb and escape, either by getting out of
Speaker 1: the pyramid and calling for pick up or if you
Speaker 1: did not have a radio beacon, because that was one
Speaker 1: of the things you had to find running far enough
Speaker 1: to get outside the blast radius of a nuclear bomb. Um.
Speaker 1: And if you did those things, you got the successful
Speaker 1: ending of the game. So the game could end in
Speaker 1: various ways depending upon your choices, which was pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I also found it really interesting. One of the
Speaker 1: game elements was that you could find this this yellow
Speaker 1: crystal that would let you converse with dead people. Um,
Speaker 1: and that that's that's where all the story elements came,
Speaker 1: right right, Yeah, I mean, which I'm sorry to saying
Speaker 1: that sentence out loud always makes me giggle just a
Speaker 1: little bit. Um. But of course you have to have
Speaker 1: the yellow crystal to talk to dead people. This isn't
Speaker 1: a crazy game, um, but but yeah, yeah, it was
Speaker 1: a lot of backstory about what was going on and
Speaker 1: would give you a lot of clues for what you
Speaker 1: where you should go, and what you should do next.
Speaker 1: And and that is a story element is so rampant
Speaker 1: throughout not only most of Bungee's video games, but a
Speaker 1: lot of other video games in the industry after this.
Speaker 1: So I just think that it's kind of terrific to
Speaker 1: have seen this in exactly. Yeah, this idea of of
Speaker 1: incorporating your story elements into the game itself where the
Speaker 1: player has to come into contact with it an Yeah,
Speaker 1: whether now in this case it is this yellow crystal
Speaker 1: that lets you talk to dead people, but in other
Speaker 1: games it will be like terminals, right, so going to
Speaker 1: get over that, um yeah, yeah, right, right, terminals or
Speaker 1: cassette tapes or whatever it is, right, so, uh, and
Speaker 1: you would run into all these other like adventure were
Speaker 1: types who had died in pursuit of this pyramid. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and a few right because there had been like a
Speaker 1: Nazi expedition there in some Cuban treasure hunters, I think.
Speaker 1: So it's all these like like different eras of people
Speaker 1: who had one at one time or another, had attempted
Speaker 1: to infiltrate the pyramid and had not been terribly successful,
Speaker 1: but you get to hear about it because you have
Speaker 1: the yellow crystal. They failed successfully, That's true. So the
Speaker 1: game ended up being a big success for Bungee. Keep
Speaker 1: in mind, a big success on the Mac platform was
Speaker 1: smaller than what you would find for the PC platform.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, and we'll talk a little bit about that
Speaker 1: in another couple of years down our timeline. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: it meant that the company was able to actually start
Speaker 1: really ramping up and going into their next project, which
Speaker 1: was one of the If it hadn't been for the
Speaker 1: Halo series, I think this would be the big one
Speaker 1: that people would remember. And a lot of Mac gamers
Speaker 1: are very fond of this articular series. Oh sure. I
Speaker 1: think the only reason that it's not more wildly widely
Speaker 1: remembered is just the sheer disparity of Mac two PC
Speaker 1: PC users, especially in in the mid nineties here. But yes,
Speaker 1: Marathon is the name of this game, and it was
Speaker 1: set in the same universe as Pathways. Actually yeah, it
Speaker 1: was not a sequel to Pathways. Uh. Pathways took place
Speaker 1: in what was then modern day uh Earth, which today
Speaker 1: would be like well those mid nineties Earth temporary Earth.
Speaker 1: It's a period piece now, but at the time it
Speaker 1: was supposed to be taking places during the modern day.
Speaker 1: Marathon was set in the future and uh It was
Speaker 1: originally called Marathon zero as a working title, and it
Speaker 1: was shown at the San Francisco Macworld Expo, just a demo,
Speaker 1: like a you know, kind of a sizzle real type
Speaker 1: thing in January. Yeah, and it featured a sort of
Speaker 1: a faster gameplay than Pathways. Also had some new features
Speaker 1: that have become standard in first person shooting games, like
Speaker 1: dual yielding weapons. That was one of the things they
Speaker 1: showed off, which not very many first person shooters had
Speaker 1: really done up to that point. Um, and also alternate
Speaker 1: modes of fire for your guns, so if you had
Speaker 1: a gun that had burst mode versus single fire or
Speaker 1: you know, grenade launcher or whatever and had that kind
Speaker 1: of gameplay as well. Now, according to Jones, it was
Speaker 1: kind of met with a tepid response. So the development
Speaker 1: team said, who oh, we have a problem here, a
Speaker 1: potential problem. I mean, if the if people think that
Speaker 1: this is just yet another first person shooter clone, like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: you guys are trying to do the same thing that
Speaker 1: Wolfenstein and Doom are doing, then we've got a problem. So, uh,
Speaker 1: they decided to go back to the drawing board and
Speaker 1: really revisit Marathon and and pour some new energy into it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they hired one Ryan Martel to to create a new
Speaker 1: rendering engine for them. Yeah, and he also created a
Speaker 1: map editor tool, which again becomes kind of a hallmark
Speaker 1: of Bungee products, where they create rules that allow players
Speaker 1: to do their own sort of editing and make their
Speaker 1: own kind of maps. Um. You'll you'll find that again
Speaker 1: and again in various Bungee titles, not all of them,
Speaker 1: but enough of them where you see that they really
Speaker 1: understood that player communities could be really creative and become
Speaker 1: evangelists for your product. So if you support that, they
Speaker 1: tell everybody else, Hey, this game is awesome and I
Speaker 1: made this awesome map. But for you to be able
Speaker 1: to play my awesome map, you need to go out
Speaker 1: and the game right. Um. Although this feature would not
Speaker 1: be released to the players as of Marathon, I think
Speaker 1: it wouldn't be until Marathon three that that would happen.
Speaker 1: But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Um. They would
Speaker 1: also hire um Greg Kirkpatrick to help them develop the
Speaker 1: pathology of this game world Yeah, which again very complex.
Speaker 1: Like Pathways, was a much more complicated world than what
Speaker 1: you would typically see in a first person shooter. They
Speaker 1: were further enriching this mythology that had been created during
Speaker 1: the Pathways experience. Later in Bungee also brought on a
Speaker 1: programming named Alan Roy or a Lane Roy, who began
Speaker 1: to build in multiplayer functions to the game, which originally
Speaker 1: was not going to be one of the game features,
Speaker 1: but then they thought, oh, we could support some you know,
Speaker 1: local area network play and uh. And again that ended
Speaker 1: up being a huge deal to Marathon success. Uh and
Speaker 1: again something that Bungee would be very interested in continuing
Speaker 1: in further titles. Yeah. So, just a few months later
Speaker 1: in July, they debuted this another demo of the game,
Speaker 1: which they had officially decided to call Marathon, at the
Speaker 1: Boston Macworld Expo, and and it received a pretty huge response. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Bungee ended up even decided to take pre orders on
Speaker 1: the game. Originally promising, oh, this this thing is ready
Speaker 1: to go into boxes in two weeks. We'll have this
Speaker 1: shipping out in two weeks. It actually would not ship
Speaker 1: until December, so from July to December they realized there
Speaker 1: was still a lot more work to be done on
Speaker 1: the game. Jones says that the reason that this game
Speaker 1: was so late was partially because the team had become
Speaker 1: obsessed with playing it in multiplayer, and so instead of
Speaker 1: actually working on the game, and they tended to just
Speaker 1: fragging each other. Yeah, I could see that happening. I've
Speaker 1: been I've I have joined groups where we were having
Speaker 1: lots of plans for the day and it all ended
Speaker 1: up being, you know, just a massive land party. Um.
Speaker 1: Then it was right around this time in the early nineties,
Speaker 1: so yeah, it was someone on the team who said,
Speaker 1: you know, the single player campaign probably doesn't have the
Speaker 1: full attention that it needs for it to be a
Speaker 1: satisfying experience for a player, so perhaps some of us
Speaker 1: should stop, you know, killing each other and develop it
Speaker 1: some more. And so they they did that. They started
Speaker 1: going into full on crunch time working on the game.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, because I mean but by the time they
Speaker 1: realized all of this, they really would have had to
Speaker 1: have shipped it like two weeks previous to get it
Speaker 1: out by Christmas, which is always the game developers called, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't want to miss that holiday season because that's
Speaker 1: going to be your most lucrative time. So they finally
Speaker 1: concluded the development on December fourteenth and started shipping it
Speaker 1: to customers. Now, they had more than twenty five thousand
Speaker 1: pre orders by that time, so they're shipping partners. Because
Speaker 1: Bungee was such a small company at the time, they
Speaker 1: were working with other small companies they're shipping partners who
Speaker 1: were actually the ones putting the products together and and
Speaker 1: producing the disks and shipping them out. They couldn't meet
Speaker 1: that capacity in a really short time. So even yeah,
Speaker 1: they're developers were out there like stuffing boxes and shrink wrapping,
Speaker 1: it would not be the last time. Rather that Bungee
Speaker 1: employees would have to start getting their hands dirty actually
Speaker 1: boxing orders and getting out the door. So when they
Speaker 1: showed up to the San Francisco Macworld Expo in after
Speaker 1: the game had already gone gold and started shipping, they
Speaker 1: brought copies of the game with them and they sold
Speaker 1: out of all of them. So it had gone from
Speaker 1: a lackluster response a year previous to a sellout game. Uh,
Speaker 1: and it was, you know, kind of a pretty cool game.
Speaker 1: Had six chapters and twenty seven levels within the game.
Speaker 1: Also something that you would see in later Bungee games,
Speaker 1: this kind of multi chapter, multi level approach um and
Speaker 1: hew a lot of basic missions like you'd have to
Speaker 1: first person shooter, so shooting enemies would be a big one.
Speaker 1: Rescuing people who are about to be shot by enemies
Speaker 1: will be another one. Uh, dis army explosives. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: that the enemies couldn't blow up the people who they
Speaker 1: had previously been shooting at. You get a theme here. Uh.
Speaker 1: Definitely had a science fiction theme again because it was
Speaker 1: in that Pathways universe. You play as a security officer
Speaker 1: who is assigned to a space station that is called
Speaker 1: marath On. It also introduced some some themes that would
Speaker 1: be showing up in later Bungee games, like artificial intelligence. Uh.
Speaker 1: The station had an AI called durn Doll that had
Speaker 1: gone sort of, um well, not necessarily bonkers, but it
Speaker 1: becomes self aware and self determining, and it's definitely preventing
Speaker 1: you from preaching your goals. It's an antagonist. Sometimes you
Speaker 1: work against each other, sometimes you work with each other.
Speaker 1: This is also something you see in a lot of
Speaker 1: Bungee games where you have to make these weird allegiances
Speaker 1: that later on you turn on each other for some reason.
Speaker 1: But the idea of an AI that gains self awareness
Speaker 1: or becomes a problem will pop up in later Bungee titles,
Speaker 1: even after Bungee was done working on those titles. UM,
Speaker 1: so that was kind of cool, and you would end
Speaker 1: up playing the same character, this nameless security officer for
Speaker 1: two more game titles in the Marathon series. Um, you
Speaker 1: never were given a name. Very mysterious kind of character.
Speaker 1: Another thing that's similar to the Halo series, which we'll
Speaker 1: talk about in our second episode. But at any rate,
Speaker 1: the storyline very complex, uh, and involved not just the
Speaker 1: rampant Ai during Doll that was kind of taking totalitarian
Speaker 1: control of the space station, but also an alien invasion force.
Speaker 1: And so you're you're dealing with lots of stuff all
Speaker 1: at once. And at the end of the game, during
Speaker 1: Doll is able to transfer its intelligence from the space
Speaker 1: station to the alien spacecraft that had been the one
Speaker 1: that was invading, and then you know goes and says
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go see what what the universe has to
Speaker 1: hold CIA and zooms off and that was the end
Speaker 1: of the game. Now, the big success here wasn't just
Speaker 1: the first play person game, which a lot of people love,
Speaker 1: but also the multiplayer. People really love the multiplayer Eli. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you could you could land up to eight people at least,
Speaker 1: so yeah, I think yeah, And so it was one
Speaker 1: of those things where, uh, people really latched onto that,
Speaker 1: and it became a huge success for Bungee, which prompted
Speaker 1: them to make some sequels. Now, this was something that
Speaker 1: that Jason Jones originally was not really into. He wasn't
Speaker 1: big on let's make sequels for our gains. He liked
Speaker 1: the idea of developing new, uh new I P each time.
Speaker 1: But when the demand was there and the opportunity was
Speaker 1: there to expand upon the story and mythology they created, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, it's kind of hard to say, well, let's
Speaker 1: not do that. This is what people want, and sure, sure,
Speaker 1: And also I mean I think that I think that
Speaker 1: it wound up. I think what is so special about Bungee, actually,
Speaker 1: I feel allow me to pontificate just a wee bit,
Speaker 1: is that they they don't do exactly the same thing twice.
Speaker 1: They're never working with it exactly the same story, um,
Speaker 1: you know, or it's a different segment of the story,
Speaker 1: or they're approaching it from a different angle. And and
Speaker 1: the game elements that they introduced are interesting enough that
Speaker 1: you feel comfortable, but you have a huge drive to
Speaker 1: to keep playing around in this universe. And I feel
Speaker 1: like they enjoy playing around in their own universes still
Speaker 1: so um so so yeah, so two sequels. Marathon Too
Speaker 1: was called Durndall and and it came out so just
Speaker 1: a year later. Yeah. It was one of those things
Speaker 1: where they just immediately started developing as soon as as
Speaker 1: soon as it was clear that Marathon was going to
Speaker 1: be a big hit. Uh. And this one ends up
Speaker 1: taking place in the game world seventeen years after the
Speaker 1: ending of the first game, and you wake up and
Speaker 1: you're on that alienship. You're still that security officer. You're
Speaker 1: on the alienship. Turns out During Doll really had need
Speaker 1: of you, so he took you, apparently against your will.
Speaker 1: I have not played the Marathon games, so if I
Speaker 1: get any of this incredibly wrong, feel free to write
Speaker 1: in and explain to me how I have misrepresented the plot.
Speaker 1: But basically, during Doll has this plan to use you
Speaker 1: and some of the other people who were aboard the
Speaker 1: Marathon space station as frontline soldiers in a war against
Speaker 1: the Aliens that had been such a big problem in
Speaker 1: the first game. And so uh, it's again another first
Speaker 1: person shooter where you're you're continually learning more through various
Speaker 1: computer terminals, just like in the first game, and you're
Speaker 1: trying to complete various missions, very similar gameplay to the
Speaker 1: first one. They did add in some special stuff for
Speaker 1: this sequel that had not been in the first game,
Speaker 1: including liquid effects. So yeah, these are things where where
Speaker 1: you as the player could jump into various pools of
Speaker 1: stuff and it would have a different effect. Would it
Speaker 1: would slow down your movement or or or give you
Speaker 1: weapons effects? Right, yeah, like for example, some weapons like
Speaker 1: a fire based weapon wouldn't fire and water also if
Speaker 1: the if the pool were deep enough, you would actually
Speaker 1: sink into it, so that you know, you'd start to
Speaker 1: drown if you didn't, if you didn't uh surface fast enough, uh,
Speaker 1: which in the first Marathon game all the surfaces were
Speaker 1: solid surfaces. And really you know, this this kind of
Speaker 1: liquid sort of thing that was fairly new for the
Speaker 1: time of maryor Thon and Marathon too. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: liquid effects are not easy to pull off, especially not
Speaker 1: easy to pull off convincingly, especially not in this era
Speaker 1: of rendering exactly. So you know, running into a lava
Speaker 1: pit usually you would just have a game where if
Speaker 1: you touched something, you died, as opposed to you get
Speaker 1: engulfed in something and you start taking damage and you
Speaker 1: have an opportunity to get out before you die. Um.
Speaker 1: But yeah, that was one of those interesting little elements
Speaker 1: they added in multiplayer got some new features, including some
Speaker 1: game types that became really popular in later games across
Speaker 1: the genre of first person shooters. Yeah, like a like
Speaker 1: a kill the dude who's holding the ball kind of game?
Speaker 1: Yeah in uh in Halo that would be a skull. Uh.
Speaker 1: There are other games where you know, there's some object
Speaker 1: that represents I am the player that everybody needs to
Speaker 1: kill now as essentially that. They also had like a
Speaker 1: King of the Hill style game, which is essentially the
Speaker 1: same style game you'll find in first person shooters Across
Speaker 1: the board now, which is a zone on a map
Speaker 1: is designated as the hill, and you have to take
Speaker 1: it and hold it for as long as you possibly can,
Speaker 1: and whoever holds it for a given number of seconds
Speaker 1: within around wins. It's a really great excuse to shoot
Speaker 1: a lot. I actually really like that game type because
Speaker 1: it's very forgiving for people who are not good at
Speaker 1: first procedutors like me. It involves very little strategies. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's most like this is where you need to be
Speaker 1: right now, and that's all. That's all that's important. And
Speaker 1: most of the time, if you just lag behind a
Speaker 1: little bit, the grenades clear out everybody else and then
Speaker 1: you come in. And I've noticed generally that you know,
Speaker 1: if if you're if you're struggling, you know, really winning
Speaker 1: the game, you can at the very least frustrate the
Speaker 1: heck out of your friend. That's right. You can play
Speaker 1: the part of spoiler if you can't, if you can't
Speaker 1: actually be a good winner. Uh yeah, I love this
Speaker 1: game type uh. This sequel was then followed up Bungee.
Speaker 1: You know, Bungee was such a small team comparatively speaking,
Speaker 1: that they couldn't work on multiple projects simultaneously at this point,
Speaker 1: so they really would focus on one title and get
Speaker 1: it out the door, and then they would start the
Speaker 1: next title. So they had just done Marathon, and then
Speaker 1: they did Marathon too. So the next project they decided
Speaker 1: to do was Marathon three Infinity, and that would come
Speaker 1: out just another single year in after Marathon to Darn
Speaker 1: Doll and so that this would be the final game
Speaker 1: in the Marathon series. It's although it's not quite the
Speaker 1: last that we'd hear some of these elements, that's true.
Speaker 1: It's also the trippiest game that they that they created
Speaker 1: the Marathon series because it wasn't straightforward at all full
Speaker 1: according to according to Kirkpatrick, it was purposefully not straightforward, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1: It was meant to challenge the player to bring his
Speaker 1: or her own interpretation to the game to decide what
Speaker 1: actually is going on. So, within the context of the game,
Speaker 1: it appears that you are able to travel to different
Speaker 1: alternate timelines with the goal of stopping a catastrophe from happening.
Speaker 1: The catastrophe happens at the beginning of the game, and
Speaker 1: then you have the this ability to potentially uh bypass
Speaker 1: that to stop it from happening going through either alternate
Speaker 1: timelines or perhaps you're just exploring your own consciousness, yeah,
Speaker 1: or just alternate realities in general, not just timelines. It's
Speaker 1: never really fully explained. You would again get bits and
Speaker 1: pieces of information from computer terminals. So you could play
Speaker 1: this game straight through as a standard first person shooter,
Speaker 1: not interested in all in the story, and still have
Speaker 1: a satisfactory experience just based on the gameplay. Sure, but
Speaker 1: if you jump around to these different timelines and realities
Speaker 1: or whatever it is you can, you can find all
Speaker 1: kinds of different enemies and get all kinds of different
Speaker 1: story elements, and it's a more, you know, a richer experience,
Speaker 1: I would say. So, just like in UH, for those
Speaker 1: of you who have played the Halo games, you know
Speaker 1: you can you can zoom through those games and not
Speaker 1: pay attention to the cut scenes or anything. But if
Speaker 1: you do really pay attention to the details, you start
Speaker 1: to try to pick up all of the backstory elements.
Speaker 1: Crazy complicated. So yeah, at any rate, um, you would
Speaker 1: face different enemies and different timelines. Sometimes you would face
Speaker 1: uh and sometimes an enemy in one timeline would be
Speaker 1: an ally in another timeline. So it would be one
Speaker 1: of those things where you might be used to blowing
Speaker 1: these alien guys away repeatedly, and then you go to
Speaker 1: an alternate timeline suddenly you're working with the aliens and
Speaker 1: you're shooting humans, and um, you would have to just
Speaker 1: adjust to whatever the timeline demanded of you. And it
Speaker 1: shipped also with these map making tools we had talked
Speaker 1: about and asset editors. They were called Forge and anival, right,
Speaker 1: and anyone who is familiar with the with the Ladder
Speaker 1: Halo series will very much recognize those elements. So this
Speaker 1: this gave you the chance to make your own multiplayer
Speaker 1: maps and and tweak weapons and and all kinds of
Speaker 1: other stuff like that. Yeah, so if you wanted to
Speaker 1: have a game where everyone had super overpowered weapons that
Speaker 1: are one shot kills. Uh and and are you know,
Speaker 1: invisible and running around a really complex map, you could,
Speaker 1: in theory do that. Yeah. Yeah, you can set your
Speaker 1: own physics and and physical structures within within these maps.
Speaker 1: And I it kills me that this was. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: did release a couple of very tiny titles. They're not
Speaker 1: even really included in Bungee's full history if you look
Speaker 1: on their website. But one of them was called Abuse. Uh.
Speaker 1: This was These were games that they kind of worked
Speaker 1: with other people to help publish them. Abuse was a
Speaker 1: game where you played as a prisoner trying to escape
Speaker 1: a penitentiary while fellow prisoners are all being turned into monsters,
Speaker 1: thus making prison even worse than it normally would be.
Speaker 1: And then the other one was called Weekend Warrior. And
Speaker 1: I've never seen this game. It was developed by Pangea
Speaker 1: Software and then completed and published by Bungee. And the
Speaker 1: description I read said it was a game show world
Speaker 1: where you win prizes by sl puzzles, disarming traps, and
Speaker 1: beating the crap out of competing contestants. So it made
Speaker 1: me think of a slightly more sophisticated version of Smash TV.
Speaker 1: I think that was the name of it. It was
Speaker 1: an arcade game that. Yeah, absolutely, big money, big prices.
Speaker 1: I love it. It just makes me think of that. Um.
Speaker 1: So the company was growing quite large at this point. Yeah,
Speaker 1: although I I did want to put in all these games,
Speaker 1: I believe we're We're for were for Macintosh, right, Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: they were just developing for the Max. Some of the
Speaker 1: games like Marathon To eventually got ported overtop. Right, they
Speaker 1: would get popular enough that they would make ports. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but they weren't. They weren't being developed for any other
Speaker 1: platform other than the Macintosh. Uh. You know, if it
Speaker 1: had enough of an interest, they would attempt to port
Speaker 1: it to Windows based PCs, but it was that was
Speaker 1: not their intended audience. So in in nine seven they
Speaker 1: officially grow right. Yeah, They would found a satellite studio
Speaker 1: out in California called Bungee West, which would begin to
Speaker 1: work on a game called Tony, which was a a
Speaker 1: third person shooter adventure kind of game that that was
Speaker 1: highly inspired by a lot of of of anime, like
Speaker 1: a like Ast in the Shell. Yeah, if you ever
Speaker 1: look at this game, you can tell where they pulled
Speaker 1: their inspiration from. Uh. That was a troubled developmental process
Speaker 1: for that game. Well well yeah, yeah right, we'll cover
Speaker 1: it later, but suffice it to say that I think
Speaker 1: that Bungee and Bungee West didn't generally agree all the time. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there were some issues, um between the two teams, and
Speaker 1: even within just the Bungee West team itself, also within
Speaker 1: Bungee itself. These are these were a lot of creative
Speaker 1: young UH individuals who more often than not really worked
Speaker 1: well together as a team. But sometimes you know, if
Speaker 1: the if the elements weren't just right, things could take
Speaker 1: longer than they needed to, And especially as the company
Speaker 1: was going through these growth spurts, it's easy to get
Speaker 1: a little bit off track. Um. Also, they would release
Speaker 1: myth The Fallen Lords, one of their one of the
Speaker 1: games that that that strategy players on the Mac absolutely loved. UH.
Speaker 1: It was a fantasy real time tactics game. Some people
Speaker 1: call it like a real time strategy game, but it
Speaker 1: didn't have the micromanaging that you would have in a
Speaker 1: typical RTS game, like you didn't have to build a
Speaker 1: um barracks that would produce units. In fact, it was
Speaker 1: it was a really unforgiving game in the sense that
Speaker 1: when the level started, you would have a certain number
Speaker 1: of units at your disposal and that's it. They could
Speaker 1: not replenish themselves. If you lost them, they were gone.
Speaker 1: Casualties were a huge deal. And not only that, but
Speaker 1: if you weren't careful with the way you played your characters,
Speaker 1: your own guys could end up destroying half your units
Speaker 1: in friendly fire, Like don't put your archers behind mine
Speaker 1: your knights, is what I'm saying. So it was a
Speaker 1: dark fantasy world. Also had a lot of gore to it,
Speaker 1: although when I say gore, you're talking about these tiny
Speaker 1: little cartoonish figures and blood pixels and it would just
Speaker 1: be that blood would splatter the whole board. But it
Speaker 1: but it wasn't. It wasn't realistic in the sense like
Speaker 1: they were all very cartoon sure, sure, although at the time,
Speaker 1: certainly I think a lot of people were very up
Speaker 1: in arms about even cartoonish video game up in arms
Speaker 1: being a slightly unfortunate UM but in development, in fact
Speaker 1: that the game had been called the Giant Bloody War Game. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think, yeah, that was that was pretty telling. Originally,
Speaker 1: this was going to be a little, you know, kind
Speaker 1: of side title that they were going to publish while
Speaker 1: they also tried to create a new first person shooting game.
Speaker 1: But then Quake came out, and when Jason Jones saw Quake,
Speaker 1: he felt that any game Bungee would make at the
Speaker 1: time would be compared unfavorably to Quake. So instead they
Speaker 1: decided to elevate Myth to being their primary focus rather
Speaker 1: than the secondary title, and they really went in on that,
Speaker 1: uh and it turned out to be a good a
Speaker 1: good project because once it came out, people really responded
Speaker 1: positively to it. Some critics said that there were some
Speaker 1: elements to the game that made it a little more
Speaker 1: difficult than it necessarily had to be. Like, your your
Speaker 1: field of view was very limited. You couldn't zoom out
Speaker 1: very far, so you had a little radar that would
Speaker 1: kind of show you where enemy units were in comparison
Speaker 1: to your units, but you couldn't really see them, and
Speaker 1: it made it hard to plan out your strategy because
Speaker 1: you know, you might have someone flanking you and you
Speaker 1: can't you just can't physically see that far off the map. UM,
Speaker 1: And so there was that there were some other issues
Speaker 1: with the user interface. So Bungee ended up releasing a
Speaker 1: patch and upgraded the game to Myth one point one,
Speaker 1: and that patch ended up adding in more more streamlined
Speaker 1: user interface, zoomable field of view, that kind of thing,
Speaker 1: and that made it um address a lot of the
Speaker 1: criticisms that they got early on. It was popular enough
Speaker 1: that by they would release a sequel called Myth two
Speaker 1: Soul Blighter. Yeah. Uh, this game is famous for something.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it almost shipped with like the worst bug
Speaker 1: in the history of all video games ever. Yeah, in
Speaker 1: which by by trying to uninstall the game, you could
Speaker 1: delete your entire hard drive. Yeah. You could literally destroy
Speaker 1: your hard drive like, well, not literally, I guess you
Speaker 1: could data your heart. Yeah, I mean you would. You
Speaker 1: would wipe it absolutely clean. And this was discovered un
Speaker 1: format it and an unfortunate marketer. Yeah, I heard that.
Speaker 1: I heard that it was a lady um Overseas actually,
Speaker 1: who who had been doing a test on it and
Speaker 1: and uninstalled as many people do, by by just going
Speaker 1: to the going to the root files and by by yeah,
Speaker 1: and then oops, her her computer was no more. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there were some great commentary about this particular uh, this
Speaker 1: particular bug by folks like the Penny Arcade guys who
Speaker 1: were like, you don't like our game, screw you, We're
Speaker 1: taking all of your data. But it was non intentional
Speaker 1: no um, And they did catch it before it shipped.
Speaker 1: It had unfortunately already been printed and boxed. So this
Speaker 1: was another time at which Bungee employees like the developers
Speaker 1: had to go out into warehouses and unshrink crap games
Speaker 1: and switch out the disks. Yeah, they physically had to
Speaker 1: remove bad disks and put in good disks and then
Speaker 1: package it all back up again. Uh. The estimates I've
Speaker 1: heard for this mistake were like, what was the cost arrange?
Speaker 1: Right around a million dollars a k A about what
Speaker 1: the game made, which was a really severe blow to Bungee.
Speaker 1: Bungee was was kind of operating like right in the
Speaker 1: margin this whole time, like they were they were seeing success,
Speaker 1: but they were also trying to ramp up and yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and so making basically nothing on a game because of
Speaker 1: this mistake was it was huge, huge, and so that
Speaker 1: would end up affecting their decisions in the very near future. Um,
Speaker 1: you may have also heard about myth three, but that
Speaker 1: game did not come out from Bungee because of something
Speaker 1: that happened in the year two thousand. But here's the problem.
Speaker 1: My notes stopped for part one, so I can't even
Speaker 1: talk about two thousand yet. We're gonna have to wait
Speaker 1: for a whole new episode and find out what happened.
Speaker 1: Contractually speaking, we're not allowed to say anything else, right,
Speaker 1: So for those of you who have no awareness of
Speaker 1: what happened in the past, tune in next time so
Speaker 1: that you can find out that the exciting conclusion to
Speaker 1: the Bungee story. In the meantime, if you guys have
Speaker 1: any suggestion for future episode ideas for tech Stuff, please
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