"Earth's Enigmas" - Unreleased Bungie Poetry from 2013 (Destiny)

by OS_Epsilon, Wednesday, December 26, 2018, 12:31 (1948 days ago)

In 2013, Bungie’s audio director Marty O’Donnell was at a meeting on the Isle of Wight when he met a poet named Malcolm Guite. They talked about pre-Copernican astrophysics and realized they both shared a passion for the topic. Marty was writing a suite of music for Destiny at the time called Music of the Spheres, and he suggested to Malcolm that he should be the one to write poetry for the project.

That idea became “Seven Heavens, Seven Hells”, a collection of 14 poems inspired by the planets, Marty’s music, and Michael Ward's Planet Narnia novel.

To help Malcolm understand what Destiny was about, Joseph Staten, lead writer at Bungie in 2013, gave Malcolm a list of thematic phrases that contained the essence of Destiny. These included key phrases like “guardians," “the city,” “golden age,” “the darkness,” and more.

Malcolm was inspired by these ideas and wrote a 15th poem. This poem utilized the phrases provided by Staten and his own creative ingenuity. He called it: "Destiny: Earth's Enigmas"

While Bungie never used the poem in the game, you can listen to it here, narrated by Malcolm himself - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESAQOmFJiA8

You can read notes from Malcolm about it here - https://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/2018/12/26/earths-enigmas-a-lost-poem/