Bungie ViDoc: O Brave New World

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The Bungie ViDoc: O Brave New World is the last Halo-related ViDoc made by Bungie. It was released on YouTube on August 3, 2011. It runs for 55:08, and summarizes Bungie's history and future, as well as Halo's creation.

Transcript

The Bungie logo is presented.

• Luke Timmins: "In many ways, it's one of the best things that ever happened to Bungie, right?"

• "What I really like about this whole Bungie relationship with Activision is that I never saw it coming."

• Jerry Holkins: "The idea that Bungie would make Halo for a million years was inconceivable."

• Eric Osborne: "In a lot of ways, we're starting over."

• Geoff Keighley: "I can't wait to see where Bungie is going to take us next. I know it's going to be ambitious, I know it's going to be exciting. I just want find some details on it."

• Luke Timmins: Being an underdog, and having something to prove and remembering we're not the top dog any more is a great thing to happen to us.

• Curtis Creamer: "We're out on our own in the wilderness again and we have to fight to bring every customer along with us."

• Joseph Staten: "We've gone from a totally as sure as a thing can get with Halo, to tackling a challenge which is even bigger than Halo with no real guarantee of success."

• Martin O'Donnell: "There has to be some scare dangling over the edge of the cliff and hope that the world we are weaving will hold us."

• "I love being the underdog!"

• Jason Jones: "It does bring back the early days. We have this great idea and we don't really understand it. Its going to be fun to figure it out."

A group of pixels form together in a similar way to either Pong or Gnop which later transfigure into a timeline which moves between 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1995, 1997/1998, 2001, 2001, 2004, 2007, 2009 and 2010 simultaneously which showing brief snippets of games Bungie developed in those specific years.

Bungie 20th Anniversary

O Brave New World

• Alexander Seropian: "My senior in college was taking an artifical intelligence class, and Jason was in that class. He had a way cooler computer than I did, which really pissed me off. You know, so we just got to talking and tried partnering up."

• Martin O'Donnell: It was clear, right from the get-go that Alex was the business guy, Jason was the creative guy."

• Jason Jones: "I was working on a game and Alex was trying to start a company."

• Alexander Seropean: "So here we are in down town Chicago. This is the classiest part of town. The original Bungie was not here. For that, we've got to go south."

• "We occupied the second floor, so we got broken into a couple of times."

• "There was that crack house behind the building."

• Robert McLees: "I was employee number five. We were in one room... Well, a room and a half. Everybody did did everything."

• Jason Jones: "We ended up with Pathways."

• "Pathways into Darkness was our first successful game. It had made a profit."

Gameplay of Pathways is presented.

• Alexander Seropean: "Then came Marathon, which was a real big hit for us."

Marathon gameplay is is presented.

• Claude Errera: "Marathon was the first shooter which had verticality to it."

• Geoff Keighley: "It had that Sci-Fi sensibility. Mac gaming didn't really exist for me before Marathon."

• Lorraine McLees: "Marathon made me dizzy!"

• "I remember being amazed at this world that Bungie had created."

• Alexander Seropean: "We were bound by the comradery. It was our lives; 24/7. It was kind of like being in a band."

• Martin O'Donnell: "But the project that we were working on which was called Myth, which I though was really interesting."

• Alexander Seropean: One of the most significant things that we had done with Myth was we developed it for both the Mac and the PC at the same time."

• Geoff Keighley: "It was interesting how Bungie was able to nail both first-person shooters for the Mac and move to the other big genre which was Strategy games for the PC, and then nail that with Myth."

• Claude Errera: "Myth's the first time that Real-time strategy didn't have micro managing built into it."

Myth gameplay is presented.

• Mike Krahulik: "Myth was a revolution. It was an RTS which got rid of all of the bullshit."

• Lorraine McLees: "You use the terrain to your advantage. Which isn't something that a lot of games did at the time."

• Martin O'Donnell: "I definitely did not think Bungie would last. It didn't seem like they had a real plan for the future."

• Jason Jones: "We had the advantage twenty years ago of being really stupid. I mean young, but young is stupid. In that mind set, anything is possible. So you just get started and figure out what is hard on the way."

• Dave Dunn: "The first time I meat Jason, he said 'Why are you okay with building environments the way your making environments?', and I said 'Like I have a choice?' and he said 'Yeah, absolutely!'. I was 'Ah, so that is what our culture is about'."

• Alexander Seropean: I think it all starts with the idea that we were our own customer and that anyone else who going to play our games, we were in their shoes."

• Dave Dunn: "A big moment in Bungie, I think one that stands out to me, more than anything elses, is the Myth II installer bug."

• Jerry Holkins: "That installer bug that would remove your computer. You try to uninstall the game, it was just a scorched earth policy, like, 'Well, you don't like Myth? Fuck you!'"

• Mike Krahulik: "'We're taking your machine!'"

• Martin O'Donnell: "There was five hundred thousands units that were boxed, shrink wrapped and everything else."

• Dave Dunn: "Alex decided to do the right thing and recalled all of the copies."

• Martin O'Donnell: "It was just horrible. They had to reprint all the discs."

• Dave Dunn: "Everyone in the office was just stuffing new CDs into boxes of Myth II."

• Shi Kai Wang: "That caused the company a good chunk of money."

• Martin O'Donnell: "It was at least a million dollars stake."

• Dave Dunn: "A mistep like that is going to put you in some serious jeopardy."

So Our Game Is Called Halo...

The timeline appears at 2000, with an image of John-117 beside it. It is followed by many footages of Halo: Combat Evolved. The footage stops as the Halo logo appears.

• Marcus Lehto: "It started off with just three of us. We were at that time making what we thought was gonna turn out to be a Myth-type clone, with a sci-fi skin on it."

• Martin O'Donnell: "Thy were doing "Blam!", which was the codename for this other game they were working on."