There are few hotter companies than Bungie right now, the developer who waked away from a lifetime of making Halo games with Microsoft, to start their own new shooter MMO, Destiny, with Activision. Halo is the company’s lifeblood, but now they’re finally starting to spread their wings outside of Master Chief with this fall’s Destiny release, and I thought it would be a good time to start examining some interesting facts about Bungie.
1. Activision is investing $500M over the course of ten years in Bungie’s new Destiny franchise. The lucrative deal took Bungie away from Microsoft exclusivity and Halo in order to create the new shooter MMO. The game has undergone a recent alpha test, with a beta beginning in July. The game will be released in final form in September. The $500M is said to likely span future content expansions including DLC and fully-fledged sequels, but only time will tell if that number will be added to, given the massive size and scope of the game.
2. There was once a Halo movie in development, aiming to be a big budget video game film blockbuster the likes of which the world has never seen. Peter Jackson was at the helm of the film, but it ultimately collapsed due to budget concerns. Neil Blomkamp worked on the film as well, and many of the elements of the film were transformed into his own, non-Halo film, District 9. Little has survived from the Halo film, but every so often a full-sized Warthog prop will crop up here and there.
3. Microsoft is partnering with Steven Spielberg, who will produce a live action Halo TV series that will run on Xbox, and possibly traditional TV as well. The show will hopefully do what the failed movie couldn’t, bringing Halo to life onscreen. It was inspired by the success of the Halo 4 promotional webseries, Forward Unto Dawn, which cast a young set of cadets under attack and aided by Master Chief. The webseries showed that Halo could work well even on a relatively limited budget, and helped pave the way for the TV show.
4. Halo was a much different game early in development. When it was first conceived, it was a third person shooter rather than a first person shooter, and even before that, was meant to be a real time strategy game (which we eventually saw with Halo Wars). Most interestingly, the game was originally developed as a Mac exclusive title, before it switched teams and became the most iconic series Microsoft has, while Apple remains a gaming powerhouse in mobile titles only. There’s actually a video of Steve Jobs presenting Halo for the very first time that is worth a watch.
5. Bungie has a very clear obsession with the number seven. It can be seen in many of their games (there are seven Halo titles, 7 terminals in Halo 3, Spartan “117” as Master Chief’s identifier). Bungie throws “Bungie Day” on the seventh day of the seventh month each year, July 7th. A few more 7s for the road might be 7 operational Halo rings, 7 members of a fire team, the Halo array spins at 7 km/s, sli space in the 7th dimension, and so on and so forth. Though some say that if you want to see a number conspiracy, that number will start popping up everywhere.
6. Some quick Halo facts:
– A Halo ring is 6,214 miles in diameter and 198 miles wide.
– Master Chief’s famed MJOLNIR armor weighs 995 pounds.
– Master Chief is suspected to be well into his 40s
– When working on Halo 3, Bungie recorded that they ate 20,000 pounds of pizza, drank 24,000 gallons of soda and a half ton of bananas. No word on how many pounds they gained with that diet.
7. Halo 2 underwent quite a few changes before release as well, though perhaps not as many as the original. In 2003, Bungie had to ditch a planned E3 demo of the game and remake the entire thing in just 18 months. Originally, the game had many Warthog variants (Snow Warthog, Swap Warthog, etc, which were all scrapped), the game was supposed to contain the Mongoose that appeared in Halo 3, and the game was never supposed to end on a cliffhanger the way it did.
8. Bungie’s contract with Activision to develop Bungie was recently ordered to be unsealed during the case which pitted Activision against the creators of Call of Duty. In it, details were revealed like the fact that four games are planned, Bungie will receive between 20-35% of the revenue from the game, and they are shooting for a more marketable “T for Teen” rating, something they were recently awarded even after all Halo games have been rated “M for Mature” by the ESRB. Bungie owns the Destiny IP, but all future Destiny games will be published through Activision. Some portions of this contract may have changed over time, but many seem to be taking shape as the game developes.
9. Going into the random side of things, Bungie’s Halo was the first video game to be honored by Madame Tussauds, the famed wax museum. In 2007, Master Chief was given his own life-size statue at the museum, beating out other video game icons like Lara Croft and Mario. The statue is over seven feet tall and weighs 275 pounds. Slim, given the armor is wax, not metal. To date, no other video game characters have received wax statues from Madame Tussauds.
10. The ranking order of the most popular Halo games of all time are as follows.
1. Halo 3 – 11.91M sold globally
2. Halo: Reach – 9.57M
3. Halo 4 – 9.05M
4. Halo 2 – 8.49M
5. Halo: Combat Evolved – 6.43M
6. Halo: ODST – 6.24M
7. Halo Wars 0 – 2.43M
Halo 5 is due out in 2015, and is being developed by 343 Industries who took over the franchise after Bungie left Microsoft. They also developed Halo 4.
[Photo via Bungie]
