NEWS

Bungie Employs Undead

It was pretty entertaining discovering the names of Bungie employees on the headstones in Silvermines. I thought it was a nice touch. Little did I know then that there was more tru7h behind that little gag than I realized.
Bungie had to funnel a major amount of resources into Myth. The road was very rocky for two reasons. First, they wanted to make it a state of the art game. Second, they wanted it to make it a quality game in all aspects.
To do this Jason Jones, the project leader, had to drive his crew unmercifully for long over a year. And that drive took it's toll on both the Myth development team and Jason Jones as well. As one unnamed Bungie employee put it, "We were making a game about Hell and we were living in hell at the same time."
This same employee, whom I shall call Naipores Rednaxela or Deep Trow to protect his identity, told me many other alarming things when I talked to him. Things hidden inside of Myth. Evil things.
It all started one night while I was fooling around with Myth, looking for secret commands and whatnot. One of the things I do is try mashing down various keys while I start a game to see if anything happens. That fateful night I was randomly pressing keys while I started Crow's Bridge and something very different happened indeed.
The game started normally enough, but quickly went into the realm of the surreal when one group of Thrall protecting the bridge suddenly attacked even though I was well away from their position. I had my Warriors stand their ground because I wanted to see what would happen. Before I knew it, seven Thrall had killed seven Warriors.
Needlessly to say, I was very alarmed. I quickly got my Archers and Dwarf formed up and began pummeling the Thrall. One by one I picked them off. But one of them kept coming. That's when I noticed two sickening things: The Thrall had a huge life-bar, different from all the rest, and he was smiling. That's right, smiling!
While I was taking time for a reality check, that one Thrall mowed down the rest of my force.
As he was hacking my last remaining Warrior to death I zoomed in as close as I could to look at that evil grin. As I looked at that Thrall's face I felt a sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach as I realized the face was that of Jason Jones!
I immediately contacted my source inside Bungie to get the scoop on this weirdness. Deep Trow would only say it was a glitch and nothing else. But I sensed an uneasiness in him - an evasiveness. I knew I was on the scent of something big.
The next day I flew to Chicago. There, I hounded Deep Trow until he would talk to me. I am sorry to say I had to threaten him with revealing the little 'jaunt' he had at the 1998 MacWorld San Francisco convention with three elderly Bungie groupies, a pirated copy of Quake2, and large print paperback edition Herman Melville's Moby Dick. 'Call me Ishmael,' indeed!
"It all started with the plot, of course," Deep Trow nervously told me, "It was like we were channeling it or something." He paced erratically and looked over his shoulder constantly while he told me the tale. Once he did both at the same time and he tripped over a footstool, just like Dick Van Dyke.
The story was gruesome and frightening. Apparently Bungie had tapped into something dark and disturbed. "Oh sure, it started as a joke," Deep Trow told me, lying on the floor, "Buy a black candle here, stick pins in a Voodoo doll representing our channel contacts there, the next thing I knew I had Soffish on a tiny altar and I was ready to sacrifice it because I was worried about us making the alpha date." He shivered in the morning sun while I brushed wood chips off his back.
And the explanation for what I saw in the game? It was the real thing he assured me. "All that 3D modeling stuff was a cover story. Hell, it was hard enough coding everything. We would have never finished if we had to model all those sprites. After the game was released we covered our tracks with some 'sample' 3D examples to keep people happy."
I asked why I could see Jason so clearly. He nearly dismissed the question. "Oh that, you must have disabled the resolution interlock. After we imaged all the Bungie employees we realized that people might catch on so we deliberately put a lock on the resolution." Then he laughed the laugh of a man who is walking on the edge. "Ha! Why do you think the install is 350Mb? It's filled with high resolution images. The maps only take 5K!"
I knew I had pressed him too hard and in his exhausted state he had slipped into fantasy. I left him at a Dairy Queen trying to decide between Vanilla and French Vanilla. I flew back home.
Once I was on the flight I resolved that this was some sort of gag and that my contact was overworked. But I could not dismiss the haunted look he had in his eyes as I left him.
Later, as I stared out the window, I watched a flock of birds in a precise formation. As the plane approached them they resolved into the wispy bodies of Soulless. Before I could cry out, they were gone, hidden by the clouds. I knew then: my days were numbered.
I have barricaded myself in my home with an old cavalry cutlass I once used in a high school play. For the last seven days I have heard the guttural barks of the Ghôls as they ransack the garbage, looking for things to throw. During the nights I hear the slow shuffling of a Wight as he looks for a swimming pool to hide in. Yesterday, there was thunder and lightning, but no rain. I knew it meant the Trow and the Fetch had arrived. If I peek outside, I know there will be tiny red dots on the horizon.
I stay on BungieNet all the time so I can practice tactics against the Dark. This way I'll be ready when they come. The other players think I'm insane when I ask for just one Warrior. Ha! If they only knew!
I have nothing more to write. - poena.dare

P.S. I've just discovered a way to kill Balor in the Last Battle even if you loose Alric! All you have to do is AAARRRGGGHHH!!!!