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 meet 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."


 * 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 their 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 a action 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 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 were things start to come together. 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 if we had decided 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 'Anchient, 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, Chellos, 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 Seropean: "Which really went over, big."


 * 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 aquired"


 * Alexander Seropean: It was going to be really important for Microsoft to have games for the Xbox. That is what would make or break it.