Looking Back *IMGs* (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Monday, August 25, 2014, 10:51 (3531 days ago)

As we enter the final stretch of the very long wait for Destiny I thought it would be a lot of fun to look back on where we've come from and what we've done. So, in no particular order (other than chronological) here's what I see when I look back.

- The Alpha Lupi ARG and the opening of DBO: What an exciting time this was. After years of watching and wondering what Bungie was up to we finally got our first insights... and a new place to talk about them. The new forum here at DBO was strange and unique and an interesting departure from HBO's odd self. It was great fun to watch as the community came to grips with UBB code and the automatic *NM* indicators that were added in a bit after the forum's launch. There was the fun, very short period where the forum was split between those that could post a blank message without triggering the automatic no message icon and those that couldn't.

The mini-ARG Bungie gave us was both neat and challenging. It took our best puzzling minds (read: not mine) to quickly come up with solutions. Eventually, we had potential Guardians across hemispheres coordinating within minutes of each other to unlock the next piece of the puzzle. Perhaps the best thing about this introduction to Destiny is the way it has stayed relevant all these months later. Halo 2's ilovebees ARG was a fantastic bit of story telling and player interaction and creativity... but ultimately and unfortunately its story was forgotten by the Halo series. Alpha Lupi, though, has continued to show up again and again as we've learned more about Destiny. There's still at least one great mystery to solve. One I think will be solved eventually: Who is the speaker and subject of the "Signal Received" desktop we were rewarded with at the end of the ARG?

-Help us Design the DBO logo!: Whoa ho! We had a website and a meeting place but DBO had no logo. In a jumpstarting of creativity graphical types poured a ton of passion into providing our community something it could call its own. Dozens of designs and variants were submitted with a simple and elegant design by Dean Hofmeyer (unhh) getting the final nod.

- GDC 2013: Until the recent Beta, Bungie's Destiny inspirations panel at GDC was our best and most in-depth look into Destiny. It's where we learned about Guardians and their classes and races. It's were many of Destiny's best concept art pieces originated from. We got our first chance to see Grognok. We got our first good glimpses of The City, The Traveler, and some of our enemies. If you care about where Destiny is coming from I highly encourage you watch the hour long video.

- The DBO Challenge Week 1: Write a haiku: The first week of the DBO challenge was terrific. So many haiku on so many subjects. I myself went a bit haiku crazy posting 43 of the short poems. Like all the DBO challenge threads this one is highly worth looking back on. My favorite from me:

So Much Talent Here
Should Form Our Own Studio
Copyright Issues

The DBO Challenge - Week 2: Favorite movies in Paint.: There were so many good and (surprisingly) even great entires here. Here’s some of the more notable examples:

Sadly, a few images have been lost to time and hosting services, but still, what a fantastic thread!

-The DBO Challenge - Week 4: Legacy Limericks: We made it back around to poetry, of a sort, for week 4 of the DBO challenge. All sorts of great and funny limericks in that thread. Too many good ones to post so I'll just leave you with my favorite from me and encourage you to view the thread:

The world was clogged with pollution
The chrysalis its only solution
The Syndicate’s plan
Sell one to every man
Here’s to some rapid evolution!

- The DBO Challenge - Week 5: Imaginary Arsenal: I wrote in my notes that this was my favorite of the DBO Challenges, and that's probably still true, but not as true as I first thought. I hadn't expected to have so much fun or see so much good art in the previous weeks. Anyway, Week 5 was pretty amazing in general and to me specifically. I loved all the crazy weapons people came up with. We saw the Mercury Bow from Oni make a return. We saw Tribble launchers and half-assed duck-taped exotic weapons and base destroying keyboards and strange sea shells. Read through the posts. They were all great!

I also liked this week for the tear I went on giving everybody's weapon it's own short story. Some were short and simple, others were longer but I had a great time. This was also the week that got me into doing Destiny fan fiction and in particular had me post one of my favorites stories: Mercury's Vault of Questions. There was something special about that story, but it never would have happened without the weapon inspirations and other's stories in the Week 5 thread.

- The DBO Challenge - Week 6: TV Shows in Paint: We returned to bad (GOOD!) art in Week 6 of the DBO Challenge. Not much to say, but here's some of my favorites gleaned from the thread:

- E3 2013: FINALLY we got to actually see some of what Destiny would be. And in classic form with Staten narrating! And look at all the things we got to see. Old Russia, Ghosts, Fallen, Colony ships, Spider Tanks, Public events, Sparrows! This might not be the absolute best Bungie demo ever (Halo 2 Realtime forever!) but it was pretty close. It was especially fun to find all these places again in the Beta. Now, a bit more than a year later I've fought that Spider Tank and ridden a Sparrow and Space Magic-ed enemies. Great fun.

- Alpha Lupi / Music of the Spheres! *OMG IMGs* I loved this topic because of the way it showed just how well thought out Destiny was. Unfortunately, it's now a bit bittersweet with Marty's mysterious departure. :(

- Fallen Alphabet? Score another one for DBO's great thinkers and puzzle solvers! Amazingly, I even got to count myself among their number for once. It was great fun to stare at and invert and sharpen and adjust images trying to make out letter from letter. In some ways I count this as the last great DBO puzzle... at least for the time being. Or maybe those would be the /Sekhmet/ puzzles, but they were so beyond me I've kinda forgotten about them... Anyway, a big thanks to Pyromancy for hijacking my silly thread about Mars and the pyramid ships. :)

- Speculation Saturday #1: The Golden Age: When DBO opened for business I knew I wanted to be something of a bigger presence than I had been at HBO. All of the above was part of that but the Speculation Saturday series was the ultimate form of what I wanted to do. I really enjoyed trying to pull in everything we knew about each of the topics and present them in an optimistic way that informed and encouraged others to add their own thoughts. Soon, the series will be eclipsed by the flood of information from Destiny itself, but I hope these little articles and their responses will hang around as sign posts of what the community thought of Destiny at the time.

- +1 This no message post by Leviathan is my favorite post in all of the board. It was in response to an intentionally silly rant of mine against +1ing posts and was an absolute perfect reply. I still laugh when I come across it.

- Avatars!: Around Bungie.Org the smallest changes are often the most monumental. Being allowed our own avatars was one of those "There are those who said this day would never come. What are they to say now?" type moments.

- Bu buh! Ba da da bu BUH!: Ok, yes, at first glance this thread title makes very little sense, but it marks my second live interaction with the DBO community. I created this topic in response to the most terrifically silly moments of one of the few Community Game Nights I've been able to attend. Here, just let me quote the relevant part for you:

What's the most awesomely amazing flag return you've ever taken part in? Yeah, that's cute. Tonight our Bungie.org team experienced one 9.79 times better. Imagine, if you will, that funny little island on Forge World. The one past the long slanted tunnel near Blood Gulch, with the mountain in the center, and the beaches and hilly green space around the edges. Now imagine playing a decently, satisfyingly difficult game against an enemy who you scored once on and who scored on you once in return. Now, and this is the key that will prove that we had 9.79 times the fun you had, imagine a group of very enthusiastic Bungie.orgers humming, chanting, and otherwise abusing the classic, upbeat portion of the Halo theme. It was one of the most glorious moments of my Halo multiplayer career. I mainly handled the high end of the "bu buh's" while others took on the challenge of preforming the more central "da - da da da - da da da da da da - da da da da da da's" that form the core of the theme. Video Games Live had nothing on us. Nothing at all. Soon the flag was captured and a few minutes later victory was ours. While sweet, it was just one victory among thousands, but our “exquisite” rendition of the Halo theme will forever live on.

- Grimoire: While the Fallen Alphabet thread was one the last of the great DBO puzzle solving initiatives I participated in this thread is very likely to be the last true enlightening info-dump / speculation threads before Destiny ships. So many interesting things came from the Grimoire pages people found in the alpha. The role of Ghosts. "Shake it off, we've all been dead before." The dark times after the collapse. I'm certain we'll have epic story discussion threads in the weeks and years to come, but we will probably never again have such a good bit of rampant speculation taken from pre-release info.

- And last but certainly not least, The Beta! All in all, I don't think Bungie got the word out about Destiny as well as it could have. But the Beta, and to a lesser extent the Alpha, showed the world that Destiny was good. There are so many great stories that came out of the beta that I'm not even going to try and list them all. The whole thing though, the exploration, the team work, the discovery... it was a grand few days. It's pretty amazing. We had around 55 pages of DBO spread across a year and a half but have generated 15+ pages in the weeks since the beta.

So yeah, good times. In some ways I'm amazed at how long ago the opening of DBO feels and yet how short it seems... at the same time. So, those are my thoughts looking back but I'd love to hear youes guyses favorite moments. Anything I missed? Anything that stood out to you that didn't stand out to me? Speak up and be heard! Relive the past! Smile!

:)