It may be difficult to believe in this age of Halo and Halo and yet more Halo, but Bungie Software used to be in the business of making some very, very good games. That these games have only achieved a cult following rather than the recognition they deserve is mostly down to two things: Bungie’s acquisition by Microsoft in 2000 in order to use Halo as a flagship title for the then in-development Xbox, and that Bungie started out as a Mac developer at a time when the iPod was a tiny, tiny glint in Steve Jobs’ eye. The latter meant that three of their best games were released on a format that no-one was really paying any attention to – as with today, the Macs of the early nineties were for artists and writers, not gamers – while the former brought them massive public attention at the cost of everyone conveniently forgetting that they’d ever existed as a separate entity to Microsoft. I’m going to spend the next two of these columns trying to turn back the clock by explaining just why Bungie’s old games are so fondly remembered by those who played them.
