Seemingly out of nowhere, gamers around the world were feeling the call of duty. But as the year ended, it wasn't the shooter everyone was buzzing about. Halo 3 was, indeed, a massive success, praised by critics and fans alike. Now that Microsoft owned the Halo developer, the Apple deal went away, and suddenly Halo was an Xbox exclusive. How was Microsoft going to compete with that? Simple: they bought Bungie. Bungie had already given a demonstration of Halo on the Mac. Just like Apple, Microsoft wanted to prove the raw horsepower of their platform. While this was happening, the Seattle giant was creating its own video game console, which would eventually be the Xbox. None of this was lost on Microsoft, of course. At a time when Windows was the premier OS for gaming, Jobs wanted to break in. So in the late '90s, when Steve Jobs returned to Apple and was trying to turn its declining image around, he reached out to Bungie to get them making excellent, ground-breaking, and technologically-advanced games exclusive to the Mac. The Marathon games had in fact been among the best Mac games available, and that wasn't lost on the Mac creators in Cupertino. One of their franchises had been Marathon, a futuristic first-person shooter series. They were right.īefore Myth, Bungie had always developed exclusively for the Mac. If they could make a game with that green armor in it, they'd have a hit on their hands. The aesthetics of Halo seems to have been Bungie's guiding light at the time: they didn't know what the game was, but they knew it looked good. While this iteration, too, would be abandoned, the look of the hero was more or less locked in. Specifically, the third-person shooter realm, complete with creatures on which the hero could ride. Even the relatively grounded human design, with recognizable cars and infantry, looked instantly memorable.īut game development is a long and constantly-shifting process, so for whatever reason, Bungie chose to abandon the tactics genre and shift the fledgling Halo idea into the shooter realm instead. It would feature futuristic marines fighting bizarre aliens, involving both infantry and vehicles. But instead of moving straight into Myth III, Bungie instead chose to start a whole new franchise: one based on science-fiction instead of fantasy. So if real-time tactics worked well for them, it only made sense to do it again.
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