On February 1, 2022, a gamer woke up from the first morning of the year and was surprised to find that Sony had acquired Bungie, the former developer of Microsoft's IP Halo, for $3.6 billion.
Some have described the acquisition as Sony's "stealth" or "NTR" Microsoft, because the Halo series, created by Bungie, is the most successful first-person shooter on Microsoft's console Xbox.
As of February 2021, Halo has sold more than 81 million copies of the entire series, and the IP works have expanded to novels, comics, movies and other non-FPS games, and the game has successfully shaped the character of the sergeant major, written a shocking epic plot, and ushered in the era of FPS gamepads, before which the general view in the game industry was that gamepads were not suitable for playing FPS games.
Halo also appeared many times in the once-popular American drama "The Big Bang Theory": in the play you can see leonard and Penny playing Halo together with Xbox controllers, the Xbox console on the TV side and the non-commissioned officer helmet in the distance (can you find it?). ）。
American drama "The Big Bang Theory"
The success of Halo has allowed more and more FPS games to begin to appear on the console platform, and microsoft has successfully made countless mistakes and still be able to gain a foothold in the console wars.
A lot of things are like this, you just have to do the right one thing, the other little thing is no problem to do a hundred wrong, and the acquisition of Bungie is the most correct decision in the early days of Microsoft Xbox.
Whether it is from the contribution to the game industry or the value created for the company, Halo and even Bungie, who created Halo, are objects worthy of being remembered by the game industry.
However, Bungie, who has done a great job for Microsoft, is now a part of Sony.
As a result, countless white scholars made up an emotional drama:
This brain supplement is not unfounded. In December 2021, Phil Spencer, head of Microsoft's gaming division, was asked in an interview about Bungie and said: "Microsoft today can keep Bungie.
Combined with the news of Sony's acquisition of Bungie today, it can be speculated that Spencer was already aware of this matter at that time.
Why did Microsoft fail to keep Bungie at that time, and what did it do wrong? Obviously Microsoft first, made the first game console, made a game with good sales reputation, two good things put together Why is Bungie leaving? Why didn't this emotional contract continue?
This article will comb Bungie from the surprise of the founding, to the sweetness of joining Microsoft, and then to the determination to leave Microsoft, it can be clearly seen that for artists with pursuits, money is not the most important.
Uncarved jade
Fast forward to 1991, when Alexander Seropian of the University of Chicago founded Bungie in Chicago.
Cerropiam initially worked on apple computer platforms, the first game was Operation: Desert Storm, released on Apple's Macintosh, named after the Gulf War operation codenamed Desert Storm, which began in 1990 and sold only about 2,500 copies in total.
By the way, this game looks like this:
In 1992, Jason Jones joined Bungie to develop their second game, Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete.
The game was also average, selling only 2500 copies.
Minotaurs: Labyrinth of Crete is average, but the game's development engine earns Bungie a licensing fee to support future development and, most importantly, jason Jones.
A lot of articles on Bungie will focus on founder Alexander Seropione, but I think the real core of Bungie is the current CCO (Chief Creative Officer) Jason Jones, who dominated the success of Halo and Bungie's style of doing things, and influenced the pattern of console wars, which will unfold step by step.
Level Editor and "Don't Make a Sequel"
In 1993, Bungie launched their first FPS game, Pathways into Darkness, Apple's first true FPS game to feature texture mapping and their first commercial success.
After its release, Road to Darkness received critical acclaim from the gaming world, winning Inside Mac Games' "Adventure Game of the Year" and Macworld's "Best Role-Playing Game", and was included in MacUser Magazine's Annual Top 100 Games List.
During the development of the game, Jason Jones made two crucial decisions: the first was to develop the level editor, and the second was not to make a sequel.
In many large games, the level editor is an essential element of large games, especially open-world games. The level editor created by Jason Jones (below) is designed to allow ordinary people without development abilities to quickly get started, adding walls, doors, guns, monsters, and other objects to levels.
Most of the 40 million-square-foot game levels were designed by Colin Brent, a friend of Jason Jones's, which greatly eased Jason Jones' workload, shortened the development cycle, and brought brent's artistic talents to life.
The Level Editor has become an essential core for big games such as Zelda Legends of the Wild, and Jason Jones was able to realize its importance in 1992.
The second point is that Jason Jones said in an interview with Inside Mac Games that The Road to Darkness was originally produced as a 3D version of Minotaurs: Labyrinth of Crete, but he later found that the style and setting of the original game were not suitable for the new game, so he decided to start a new one.
Jason Jones said of the reasons for not developing a sequel to The Dark Road: "One of the reasons [for not developing a sequel] is that I don't like sequels. A lot of times game companies come out with sequels to a game because they make a lot of money on the first game and they want to keep releasing similar games until every player gets tired of it. ”
"Sometimes these sequels are fun, and people who like the first generation like sequels, but sometimes they don't."
Bungie won't release Path to Darkness 2. There's been a lot of cool changes to rendering technology since its original release, and it's no longer appropriate for the Path to Darkness 2 worldview. ”
Here I would like to combine Jason Jones's point of view to make an explanation: the worldview and art of many games are determined by technical limitations. Taking "The Road to Darkness" as an example, Jason Jones mentioned that the ceiling and floor of the game are black, because the technology at that time could only be made like this, so the game's worldview and art can only be "The Road to Darkness".
But with new rendering techniques to make the picture more beautiful, the original worldview and art will become a constraint, which is the core reason why Jason Jones "does not like sequels".
There are many examples of this in the gaming industry: Devil May Cry was originally developed as a sequel to Resident Evil, but became a separate series due to the unique gameplay; "Eldon's Ring of Law" was originally developed as a sequel to Dark Souls, but Hidetaka Miyazaki said that he did not want the dark souls to be set up to bind George W. Bush. R· R. Martin's creation did not use the DARK SOUL IP.
If the IP restricts the creator's play, many gamers do not want to make a sequel, and the artist's most satisfactory work will always be only the "next one".
Many of Bungie's articles that analyze Bungie's departure from Microsoft are attributed to "not giving enough money" and ignore the nature of artists to create. In fact, talented producers such as Hideo Kojima have little interest in developing sequels, but the system of large companies seeking stability and making money does not give them much creative freedom, and there are too many examples of unhappiness in the end.
However, Jason, who "did not like sequels", made the first sequel, which is the "Marathon" series.
Dawn before Halo
Beginning in 1994, Bungie released three works from the Marathon series, Marathon 2, and Marathon Infinity, for three consecutive years, which are considered precursors to Halo due to the same space style and weapon setting.
The plot of the new game breaks away from the dark ceiling and ground art style of "Road to Darkness" and moves to outer space in 2794. Players will take on the role of a security guard trying to stop an alien invasion on a colonial ship called Marathon.
Compared to The Road to Darkness, Marathon's style has put Much less constraint on Bungie, which may be one of the reasons for the release of its sequel.
Moreover, the progress of each generation of Marathon is obvious: The 2nd generation has better graphics, increased swimming action, the game also logs in to Win95 for the first time across platforms; Marathon Infinity levels have more scenes, larger plots and more complex plots, and add player-oriented level editor Fork and physics editor Anvil.
After Marathon 2, perhaps after the Windows platform, Bungie no longer stuck to the Mac exclusivity strategy: it developed Myth: Fallen God and subsidiary Bungie West developed Oni, both cross-platform games.
Many pc veterans will be impressed that this 2001 mainland genuine game "ONi" is The work of Bungie, and the excellent gun + fighting combat system has won a good reputation.
However, Bungie did not have a good time during this time, and Myth 2 had a bug that would delete the player's computer files, so Bungie spent $800,000 to replace the player's disc.
The BUG incident seriously injured Bungie, which made Bungie sell 19.9% of the shares and exclusive distribution rights to four games to Take-Two, which also led to Bungie's decision to sell himself.
Why sell to Microsoft? In fact, looking back at history is also traceable.
As mentioned at the beginning, the two founders originally wanted to stick to the Mac platform to make games, but with the success of Marathon 2 after the launch of Win95, Bungie's mind began to come alive.
See the Win95 logo in the lower right corner? For fruit fans, this is the beginning of Bungie's depravity!
But even so, Bungie stuck to a cross-platform strategy and decided to continue playing for the Mac, including the latest game, Halo.
Peter Tamte, then Bungie's executive vice president, persuaded his former boss, Steve Jobs, to introduce Bungie's Halo at Apple's 1999 Macworld conference, causing a stir among Mac users.
The game was publicly advertised and in the spotlight, and it looked like everything was fine, right?
Unfortunately, far water can't quench the thirst of the near, because of the huge loss caused by the "Myth 2" BUG incident, and "Halo" is still in its infancy, Bungie is almost out of the pot financially.
Rumors were that Bungie initially wanted to commit to Apple and had negotiated the price, but Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of global product marketing, got a negative answer when he asked Jobs if he wanted to buy Bungie.
A week later, Jobs regretted it and decided to buy it. But it was too late, and Philip Schiller called Bungie again to find that Bungie had reached an agreement with Microsoft on the details of the acquisition.
The story that follows is what we finally see: after multiple negotiations, Take-Two acquired the rights to the Mythical series and Oni, while Microsoft acquired the rights to Halo and Bungie's other games.
The later story is what everyone saw, Bill Gates and the well-known actor Dwayne Johnson teamed up to unveil the original Xbox console, and then at the E3 game show on June 19, 2000, shortly after the public preview of the original Halo, Microsoft announced that Bungie had been acquired by them, and Halo became the exclusive debut game for Xbox.
At that time, Halo looked like this, and it was still a third-person game:
The whole acquisition has been twisted and turned, comparable to a soap opera, the female protagonist is bitterly in love with the male second, during which she is touched by the male protagonist's gentle and considerate, and the male second wakes up and chases after it is too late...
Jobs was furious when he heard the news, but the facts could not be changed, and Bungie, who had aspired to only play games on Apple's Mac, began to make games for Xbox.
Later, I will not say more about what happened, and I understand everything.
Many people regard Bungie as the "three surnames of the family slave" of the game industry, but in fact, Bungie's acquisition this time is very helpless, the founder did not continue their Mac belief mainly blamed Jobs's erratic personality.
However, if it were not for the death order of "Halo" being bet on the "Xbox", I am afraid that the FPS boom of console players would have to arrive a few years later.
Next, we have our protagonist "Halo" appear.
Halo is born
After Bungie was acquired, it moved from Chicago to Microsoft's headquarters in Raymond, Washington, and overhauled the entire game over the following year: the game changed from the original third-person to first-person, rewriting the story, improving graphics quality, and optimizing for xbox gamepads.
According to Marcus Lehto, designer of Halo demo, in order for players to really feel like they're shooting, the game had to be first-person — it felt too fragmented in the third person.
At the same time, Jason Jones insisted that the game build more connections with players, and adopting first-person was the best way to achieve that.
Eventually Halo became the familiar first-person shooter, like the one below.
Notice the ring in the center of the picture above? This is the "aiming frame" pioneered by Halo, as long as the enemy is inside the frame, it is automatically aimed at the enemy to shoot.
The following author uses a clearer and easier to understand picture to show: the enemy on the right side of the following figure is only at the edge of the aiming frame, but the system will determine that the player is aiming at the enemy, and the bullets fired will also hit the enemy; the bloody bullet hole in the center of the picture is also left by the system automatically shooting the enemy at the edge of the aiming frame, and when the enemy dies, the bullet begins to fire in a straight line, leaving a bullet hole in the center position that is not stained with blood.
A closer look looks like this:
At that time, due to the lack of controller accuracy, FPS games on the console were rare. Halo's sight frame is a big killer for a low-precision grip and one of the key factors in its ability to become a console shooter milestone.
In addition, Jaime Griesemer wrote code to discern the player's intention to assist the player in moving and aiming, rather than basing it on the player's actual actions, which made the player feel silky and natural when using the controller.
However, Halo's frame, while good, is not something that can be used directly, as this frame is combined with the game's shield and other systems to form Halo's fast-paced first-person shooter combat.
Taking only the aiming frame without considering mechanisms such as shields will only make the game unbalanced.
James Grismo's accomplishments don't stop there, he formulated Halo's "30 Seconds of Fun," a philosophy taught to him by Jason Jones that had previously become Bungie's credo.
30-second fun means that each battle in Halo is limited to 30 seconds, and each battle player uses different weapons, different vehicles, against different enemies and different enemy combinations, sometimes against enemies who are fighting each other. Without any repetitive 30 seconds, the mission is constantly changing.
Halo has made a lot of innovations, but at the same time, there are many items and gameplay that have been ruthlessly abandoned, such as open world maps, campaigns, and online multiplayer modes, which makes Jason Jones, who does not like to do sequels, also start to consider a sequel.
But from now on, Halo 2 has planted the fuse for Bungie's break with Microsoft.
On-time release or better quality?
Purely in terms of sales, Halo 2's 8 million copies sold better than Halo's 6 million copies.
But the quality of the game can not only be measured by sales, otherwise it is impossible to explain the sales of "Ancient Wolf 4" and "Renwang 2". The same goes for Halo 2.
One of the obvious problems with Halo 2 was the management chaos, marcus Leto recalls: The lack of communication between the groups in the early days of development was where many of the conflicts that followed. Jason Jones did not propose a clear goal and did not manage it effectively. The development of the single-player campaign is chaotic, there are too many people in charge, and they all have different ideas.
In fact, this is not surprising, it can even be said to be an inevitability, as the revolutionary ranks grow, it is difficult for the members to remain pure.
Max Hoberman, who developed Xbox Live's multiplayer feature for Halo 2, said: "I insist that we should support players who want to play over split screen and LAN, and when the rest of the Halo 2 team mockively referred to the small multiplayer mode as a 'party game,' we came up with pretty good results in just 6 months with a very small team size and few resources. In contrast, the development of the 'Warzone' model has barely started, while the development of the single-player campaign is beginning to be in crisis. ”
This problem is currently a common problem of large companies, but it is not convenient to elaborate, in short, the progress of "Halo 2" has been greatly delayed under the ridicule of all parties.
This is a fundamental problem, Halo 2 is difficult to release on time without guaranteeing the quality of the game.
Ed Fries, a former head of Microsoft's game studios, recalls: The unprecedented success of Halo made Xbox more dependent on it, so the sequel had to be released on time.
At a meeting where Microsoft executives were discussing whether to force Bungie to release Halo 2 on time or give them an extra year to polish the game better, everyone voted for "on-time release." But at Fryes's insistence, executives gave the artists some time.
Of course, this is the version of the story given by Frye, in the author's analysis, it is likely that the executives gave Fres a time point to check the progress of the project, and if it did not meet expectations, it was forced to be released on time, and Fryes used his position as a guarantee...
But now it doesn't make much sense to discuss this, in short, the third chapter of Halo 2 has been completely cut, which is why many players feel that the ending is hasty.
The creators of the Halo series recallEd Halo 2, they said it was like putting 10 pounds of in a 5-pound bag.
In fact, the experience of "Halo 2" is not uncommon in the game circle, and a certain TGA annual game is also when the overall structure of the game is completed, and a director suddenly wants to join his Madonna thought to make a drastic transformation of the game, resulting in a lack of plot preparation and an imbalance in the rhythm of the game.
The painful experience of Halo 2 also made Bungie consider leaving Microsoft, and they negotiated with Microsoft, and Bungie's independent condition was to make Halo 3 and two other games for Microsoft.
One of these works is Halo: Hell Parachutes, because the bonus is linked to the project, so many employees are reluctant to participate in this project, but because Microsoft has liberalized a lot of creative freedom, allowing the protagonist to no longer be a non-commissioned officer, allowing open non-linear tasks, many designers who have come all the way from the original Halo think that this work is his favorite project.
I don't agree with some of the ideas that Bungie's departure from Microsoft is a team's skyrocketing price: they just want to play the game.
But if this can't be achieved, then you can give a little more money and you can bear it.
Later, instead of staying at the stable Microsoft to make a "Halo" sequel to earn money, Bungie chose to start a new "Destiny" series.
Sony's acquisition of Bungie is not surprising to me, and it is not realistic for Bungie, who is "not free and better to die", to let it return to the Microsoft that brought pain to itself.
Of course, there is a saying that "breakup meets character", compared to the contradiction between activision and infinity Ward founders, the breakup of Microsoft and Bungie has been a good gathering. And Phil Spencer's recent move has shown some sincerity to the studio, and Microsoft may indeed be able to keep Bungie now.
It's just that there are no ifs in life.
epilogue
When I introduced the cultural differences between the East and the West, I mentioned that European and American cultures will pay more attention to exploration, creativity and freedom, which is difficult for many people who grew up under the Eastern Confucian culture to understand.
Entering a big company like Bungie, with a good salary and superior benefits, is definitely a symbol of success in our Eastern culture.
But they just want to leave, want to play without restriction, and face all kinds of risks.
Bungie is the free bird, let it fly.
This article refers to the fandom.com's Bungie Encyclopedia, Steve Haske's The Complete, Untold History of Halo, and Fork Packet's "Bungie's Path to Freedom: From Retreating the Halo" to Rewriting the "Destiny".