Bungie ViDoc: O Brave New World

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To cap off Bungie's 20th Anniversary festivities, the team has assembled a near hour long documentary covering the studio's past, present, and future. Featuring insight from the team -- including their ever illusive Creative Director, Jason Jones -- and interviews from key industry veterans and luminaries, "O Brave New World" is both a celebration of Bungie's legacy and a love letter to the community of gamers who have embraced Bungie's games for two incredible decades.

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The Bungie ViDoc: O Brave New World is the last Halo-related and longest 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. Though mostly new footage, it also contains parts from other ViDocs, as well as videos recorded during the early days of Bungie.

Transcript

The Bungie logo is presented.

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

• Adam Sessler: "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 something 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 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 while 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 had, which really pissed me off. So... 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 Seropian is seen in a car, which is driving down the streets of Chicago.

• Alexander Seropian: "So here we are in down town Chicago. This is the classy 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 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 Seropian: "Then came Marathon, which was a real big hit for us."

Marathon gameplay 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 Seropian: "We were bound by this 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 Seropian: 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 RTS 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 was going to 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, like, anything is possible. So you just get started and figure out what is hard on the way."

• Dave Dunn: "The first time I meet Jason, he said 'Why are you okay with building environments the way you're building environments?', and I said 'Why would I not be okay? Like I have some choice?' and he said 'Yeah, absolutely!'. That sorta gave me a hint that is to 'Ah okay, so that is what our culture is about'."

• Alexander Seropian: 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...'"

• Mike Krahulik: "'Well, you don't like Myth?'

• Jerry Holkins: "'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-dollar mistake."

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

So Our Game Is Called Halo...

Halo: Combat Evolved

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

• Marcus R. 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: "They were doing "Blam!", which was the codename for this other game they were working on."

• Jason Jones: "We had a huge map for a continuous RPG and before that we had an RTS."

• Shi Kai Wang: "We had no idea what the game was going to be, I had no idea. I was just there to do concepts."

• Marcus Lehto: "It was pretty generic Sci-Fi. You had your typical military forces, tanks, jeeps, that kind of things and some armored guys."

• Jason Jones: "We did a lot of thinking about what it meant to be an action game. And could an action game be a Real-time strategy game? And the answer was no."

• Shi Kai Wang: *We want a Sci-Fi character, a guy in a suit who can go from Earth to space and we don't have to worry about him changing clothes. And we just needed him to look like a Space marine."

• Marcus Lehto: "Oh god, what do we call him? Something like the super soldier."

• Shi Kai Wang: "And then, you know, we started moving the camera closer and closer to the character."

• Marcus Lehto: "What if we put ourselves in this character, what if we became that character?"

• Eric Osborne: "Those are the moments where things start to come together. It's Marcus saying 'No, no, we're going first-person because this is more fun'."

• Shi Kai Wang: "I don't think we could have captured as much of the audience had we stayed in Third-person."

• Eric Osborne: "Those are the ideas and decisions which really change the course of the game and the company."

• Martin O'Donnell: "Suddenly we had this opportunity to tell a little piece of a story. I remember Joe coming to me and saying 'Ancient, epic, alien'. So he just gave me those three words and I though okay, well I'll just try combining something that does that. I came up with the pounding drums, Cellos, monks, alien voice and showed it to the guys on Monday morning and then they got on a plane to go to New York and show it at Mac World the next day.."

• Alexander Seropian: "Which really went over, big."

Footage of the Pre-Xbox Halo from the Mac World is present.

• Geoff Keighley: "They were making games for the Mac which you know was still a small and stall-based at the time. But you know, Bungie was into pretty ambitious games and to fund games of that calibre is not easy to do."

• Ed Fries: "One day, my phone rings; telling me that Bungie is in financial trouble and that their talking to some people about potentially being acquired."

• Alexander Seropian: "It was going to be really important for Microsoft to have games for the Xbox. That is what would make or break it. So you know, we call up at Fries and said 'Maybe we should talk'."

• Ed Fries: "That was a great call to get, it was definitely a time were I was open to that kind of a conversation and had money to spend and desperately needed content for this new platform that was going to be showing up in less than two years."

• Marcus R. Lehto: "We knew that there were some financial struggles at that time. There was some strange dudes in black suits walking around the office, weeks prior to that and so we knew something was going on."

• Chris Barrett: "I had been there for something like a couple of months and then I get called into Alex's office and he's like 'So, we might be moving to Seattle' and I was like 'Oh god, you know I just signed a lease!'.

• Ed Fries: "This was a group that while I respected their talent because I had seen their previous games. I mean, I probably would have been interested in them just for the team. But that fact that they had this Halo thing that they were trying to figure out was a plus."

• Jordan Weisman: "Ed came into me one day and said that 'I want you to go talk to Jason and Alex and tell them its all going to be okay once we buy them."

• Joseph Staten: "Greed, fair and simple. Cashed it in, sold our souls, came out here. I mean if you're going to sell your souls, Seattle's a pretty nice place to do it."

• Adam Sessler: "Back in the 90s, Microsoft had an evil empire like quality to them, and the idea that they were going to Microsoft was 'Oh no! They're selling out!'."

• Shi Kai Wang: "That turning point of us going from PC games to Console was gigantic and it was a giant gamble."

• Geoff Keighley: "Bungie, I think presented a great opportunity for them, but I think it was incredibly risk worthy too."

• Harold Ryan: "One of the main polls for the team to move into Microsoft was to be a part of creating the Xbox and a game that really used it."

• Chris Butcher: "Jason said it best, I think; he said that 'Microsoft has built the biggest cannon in the world and they're pointing it right at Sony and that we can be a bullet in that canon, and we can make a really big impact on the course of the game history'."

• Alexander Seropian: "We got very excited about the opportunity to define and a platform and to define a franchise would be important to the platform."

• Shi Kai Wang: "Everybody in the office was pissed off because we like being independent and, you know kind of like a 'Fuck the man!' sort of thing and now we got to the console and now we're like 'Hey there, man'! and we're like shaking his hands, *laughs*. Instead of raising our fists up."

• Chris Butcher: "It was exciting, as well as terrifying."

• Ed Fries: "I had this nice spot in this building picked out for them in this building and thought they would love it and they hated it. You know, it was a typical Microsoft office which the Microsoft people think are great. The Bungie guys looked at me and said 'This looks awful! This is the exact opposite of what we want. You know, we want a big open space' and just mow down all of these walls of this section."

• "People just couldn't fathom being at Microsoft."

• Jordan Weisman: "I remember Ed complaining that even he didn't have a key to get into the Bungie area."

• Geoff Keighley: "The challenge that I think Halo faces is that it was trying to do a first-person shooter on a console platform."

• Ed Fries: "One of the biggest challenges was making a shooter that felt right and worked right on a controller.