Bungie doc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qnj5xSLNksU

Saw this today. Someone did a doc on Bungie from 1991 till now. Haven’t had time to watch. Anybody here watch yet? Should I scrap my book?

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Anybody here watch yet? Should I scrap my book?

I skimmed it. No, you shouldn't.

There's nothing new in there that all saw. It's all stuff that's well known, or little tidbits pieced together from public interviews.

It's honestly not even worth the 45 minutes to watch (based on the fifteen random minutes of it that I've seen). At least for most of us, I would imagine. I don't mean that disrespectfully, either. I saw the person's post on reddit about it earlier today and skimmed some of it. It seems like it's put together well enough, there's just nothing in there for folks that have been following Bungie forever. "Documentary" is a strong word--it's more a brief summary of the highlights Bungie's history.

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This reminds me!

A pilot based on Masters of Doom was just ordered! The ID saga might be a limited series soon!

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This reminds me!

A pilot based on Masters of Doom was just ordered! The ID saga might be a limited series soon!

Yeah I just heard about that today on the Giant Bombcast. TNT ordered a pilot, I think?

Could be interesting. Halt and Catch Fire was a decent show, so a good drama from that sort of thing can definitely be done.

Unrelated, but did you see that Detroit: Become Human is the PS+ game this month? Does that change your stance on not playing it, or are you actually in full boycott? I started it, but I'm not sure how I feel about doing so.

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This reminds me!

A pilot based on Masters of Doom was just ordered! The ID saga might be a limited series soon!

Yeah I just heard about that today on the Giant Bombcast. TNT ordered a pilot, I think?

Could be interesting. Halt and Catch Fire was a decent show, so a good drama from that sort of thing can definitely be done.

Unrelated, but did you see that Detroit: Become Human is the PS+ game this month? Does that change your stance on not playing it, or are you actually in full boycott? I started it, but I'm not sure how I feel about doing so.

You realize I was gifted a physical copy right? I haven’t played it.

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Nah, I guess I didn't catch that.

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I hope it's good, the book was a great read!

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qnj5xSLNksU

Saw this today. Someone did a doc on Bungie from 1991 till now. Haven’t had time to watch. Anybody here watch yet? Should I scrap my book?

No, don't do that.

Weird Twilight Zone shtick for no apparent reason.

Mentions Alex twice before Jason once. So, OK I guess by chronological standards if you're going by release dates of products and the formation of the legal entity, but it doesn't fit the "vision of one man" angle his Rod Serling persona sets out.

Halo music over college campus footage from the early 90s way before Total Audio was ever involved with Bungie. Yes, I get that this is what everyone knows, but if the point of this video is only to tell/show people stuff they already know, what's the point?

Even just as a Bungie timelime recap, there are better videos out there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1x2sNtYVBo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dgT0vx3dis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ryDOYgZ0e0

DOOM music playing over Pathways and Wolfenstein footage. WTF?

Looks like the Pathways footage is ripped from somewhere else-- the top of the frame is cropped out halfway up the menubar. Looks awful.

"a building in Chicago"

Stock footage of skyscrapers.

Oh dear lord.

Myth footage of Crow's Bridge with a credit to "David Brown".

I think the content is from here, a Bungie Day fan video from 2011; not sure if this person captured the footage; there are no other Bungie related videos on that channel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCLsiwT3MUo

Looks like this doc got ALL of its footage of older Bungie games from this one 10 minute video.

All this old low FPS footage is being stretched out with slow motion to fit the VO and the result looks really, really ugly.

The panic over a game missing a launch date by six weeks is kind of hilarious in the context of what comes later.

Use of typography is really, really terrible. Numbered lists in really large type that don't justify their existence, and then closeups of type that are way too small to read.

Some of the 4:3 footage is pillarboxed with blurred edges, but some of it is just being stretched and that looks terrible.

Myth-era JJ quote put aside a photo of JJ wearing an FWC t-shirt. Maybe get something a little closer to the correct time period?

The writing is full of cliche connecting phrases such as "when it was all said and done" that would be better left out.

Ten minutes in.

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Ten minutes in.

So 1991-1999 gets nine minutes.

More 4:3 video, some stretched, some pillarboxed.

There's 16:9 footage of Halo 1 that has to come from the PC version, so it doesn't appear as if old footage is being used for authenticity, they just didn't bother to try and get fresh captures of any of the older games; Marathon and Myth are still quite playable.

Halo 2 music on top of Halo 1 footage (Impend). Of course evoking mood should be priority #1 but it seems to me the H1 soundtrack is diverse enough to give you what you want without mixing things up.

...and we follow that up with Halo 1 music over Halo 2 footage (Devils Monsters)

Weird phrasing regarding Jones' absence from the H2 team and Phoenix (MMO?) I mean, sure, MMOs were a thing, and WoW came out in 2004, but I don't remember hearing that Phoenix was an MMO before now. Maybe the author is mixing it up with Phoenix Dynasty, which is an MMO?

This seems like just a place to throw all the footage he has access to. We switch from footage of new features for H2 to Pentathlon footage with an aside about how that's a Bungie tradition. But it doesn't really serve his thesis, if he has one. I think that now that he's on to the Halo era he's just copying the timeline of a lot of the DVD extras available with editions of the game.

The video has now switched to a countdown centering on H2 crunch, which feels like an awkward shift.

Really blurry H2 cutscene footage and stretched JJ interview footage. There's no connection in this segment between these things; he used the cutscene footage from the same clip he took the interview footage from. It should either have been pillarboxed, or used capture footage from somewhere else to clean up the quality and fix the aspect ratio. Not that there was any particular reason to use that cutscene footage with that interview footage; they were just together in the clip he took from some DVD extras that went with Halo 2.

The thesis of many of the H2 crunch focused interview segments up to now has been the admission that Halo 2 was released unfinished.

The VO then states that H2 was made finished and ready for release.

I know he has to move on and cover the actual release of the game, but the way this is presented sounds like a contradiction. H2 was released, but it was not finished.

Unnecessary inclusion of a sexist joke from a late night host that "maybe 3 women" are in line for H2 at release.

There's a shot in here of Halo 2 footage that is actually both letterboxed AND pillarboxed. Kill me. Thankfully it's brief.

Sixteen minutes in and I think the only individuals mentioned by name are Seropian, Jones, Griesemer and O'Donnell. Staten and Timmins have been on screen and given quotes but no lower third identifying them, and no mention of them in the VO.

VO says "Halo 3 got a full year of pre-production"

Cut to interview footage of CJ Cowan, no lower third, repeating almost the same phrase. It's so close it feels very redundant, and again, the removal of names other than the ones everyone already knows seems deliberate.

21 minutes in.

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Cut to interview footage of CJ Cowan, no lower third, repeating almost the same phrase. It's so close it feels very redundant, and again, the removal of names other than the ones everyone already knows seems deliberate.

21 minutes in.

Now we're talking about Epsilon leaks. If you've got 45 minutes to do the history of Bungie, not sure this rates a mention, really. I know the author doesn't really have a thesis beyond "chronological history of Bungie" but it really does seem like we're just going down a checklist of "what footage do I have access to".

Halo 3 a success "despite leaks" that spoiled the ending. Not really sure why anyone would have expected the ending being spoiled to have negatively affected sales.

OK, now we're on to ODST subbing in for Chronicles as the 2nd contractual game for MS, and now Cowan gets a lower third, but it's one from the footage. It feels like it got in there just because it happens to be in the source footage, and watching this it feels like it would help to contextualize this footage if I already knew who Cowan was.

Ok, I've never been a fan of prerendered, non-engine trailers for Bungie games, but using the existence of the ODST trailer as an indication that "something was wrong with the project" seems wrong to me. Only justification for this seems to be the $60 price tag. No mention of the price drop.

The reuse of chapter titles from other vidocs/Bungie games has gotten silly, and at least once they're on screen with other titles, which looks awkward. We've already re-used

Feet First Into Hell
A Brave New World
Once More, With Feeling

and it's really lazy.

Refers to the Covenant as a faction in one part of a sentence, and then as a race in the 2nd. No mention of Elites or Sangheili. Immediately switches to talking about the engine... ? and feature checklists.

Mention of the marketing cost for Halo 3. There's been hardly any discussion of the business side to this point-- I think sales figures were mentioned for ODS (of all things) and other titles as well, but it is weird that this one fact is mentioned in isolation, both mentioned in the VO and an on-screen title.

30 minutes in.

Gnop, ODS, Minotaur, Marathon, Marathon 2, Marathon Infinity, Myth 1 &2: 9 minutes (~1 per entry, not equally distributed)

Marathon as a series hardly gets a mention, Gnop/ODS get more screen time, disproportionate amount of Myth coverage is about the installer bug, almost no mention of the multiplayer lobby system that would give rise to lobbies in Halo and form the foundation of Xbox Live's entire system

Oni, Halo 1, 2, 3, ODST, Reach: 20 minutes (~3 min per entry, also not equally distributed)

There's now 15 minutes remaining for D1/D2, which would include:

Vanilla D1, Dark Below, House of Wolves, Taken King, Rise of Iron
Vanilla D2, Curse of Osiris, Warmind, Forsaken

That would work out to ~2 min per entry, but I'm guessing he'll gloss over some of the smaller expansions.

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30 minutes in.

Gnop, ODS, Minotaur, Marathon, Marathon 2, Marathon Infinity, Myth 1 &2: 9 minutes (~1 per entry, not equally distributed)

Marathon as a series hardly gets a mention, Gnop/ODS get more screen time, disproportionate amount of Myth coverage is about the installer bug, almost no mention of the multiplayer lobby system that would give rise to lobbies in Halo and form the foundation of Xbox Live's entire system

Oni, Halo 1, 2, 3, ODST, Reach: 20 minutes (~3 min per entry, also not equally distributed)

There's now 15 minutes remaining for D1/D2, which would include:

Vanilla D1, Dark Below, House of Wolves, Taken King, Rise of Iron
Vanilla D2, Curse of Osiris, Warmind, Forsaken

That would work out to ~2 min per entry, but I'm guessing he'll gloss over some of the smaller expansions.

We're now spending time on the Twilight Zone framing device. Still not sure why it's being used, or why here.

VO audio here is not as good because the setup is obviously different-- and it's distracting that the onscreen talent is looking down, presumably at the script, instead of into the camera as Serling did. It makes it look like his eyes are closed.

More title reuse.

"Hope for the Future"

Talking now about the "Tiger" engine (Destiny). Wonder if he'll mention the parts of that which were backported to Reach.

He's mentioning now that "speed" is a problem for the Destiny engine. Suspect he's trying to gloss over a lot of technical details here, I'm not sure that the lack of clarity is because he doesn't understand the issue himself, or just because he's trying to present it as simply as possible to avoid getting bogged down in technical details.

Moves back to the subject of leaks.

We're now 3 minutes in to the Destiny footage and it's all concept art and pre-release footage, haven't shown any release footage at all.

Activision contract gets mentioned together with the first D1 teaser footage. No mention of the contract becoming public as a result of Activision litigation.

Framing for all of the Destiny era is "Activision vs Bungie" but it's unclear what, if anything, this is based on other than reductionism.

VO's FIRST MENTION of Staten is when he leaves. You know, it might have helped underscore how important this departure might be if you had ever mentioned him before. You've used footage of him, but the video never mentioned his name, his job title, or said anything about his contribution to Halo. Not even a grunt voice-over mention.

Firing of O'Donnell gets reduced to "Bungie vs Activision". No mention of Ryan despite several Halo-era interview clips where other employees refer to "Harold".

"So began the journey of Bungie and the community"

No. Just... no. The interaction of Bungie and the Bungie community does not start in 2015 with the response to Destiny 1.

"Destiny was a new experience for Bungie. It was a game about discovery, finding out what the players want, and having the game evolve over time... unlike Halo, a game that Bungie knew everything about before the game released"

That is just wrong. I get he's trying to draw a contrast here, but this is not correct. It ignores all the private and public betas that Bungie had for Myth and Halo, suggests that Halo did not change over time in development, both in terms of story and gameplay.

This is followed up with a decent point on how multiplayer is harder to balance than Halo because of how broad and deep the sandbox of weapons and abilities is.

36 minutes in, D1 expansions get their first mention. 9 minutes left.

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I watched this video in Orlando this weekend; I had some free time in my hotel room. (It was either this or an episode of Stranger Things. Clearly I made the wrong choice in hindsight, but I didn't know it at the time.)

When it ended, I thought "I wouldn't even BEGIN to know where to start criticizing this thing." And so I left it alone.

I'm glad you didn't. :)

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I watched this video in Orlando this weekend; I had some free time in my hotel room. (It was either this or an episode of Stranger Things. Clearly I made the wrong choice in hindsight, but I didn't know it at the time.)

Yeah, I would not have made that choice. I'm only watching this because of....

(checks notes)

Cody.

Thanks, man.

When it ended, I thought "I wouldn't even BEGIN to know where to start criticizing this thing." And so I left it alone.

I'm glad you didn't. :)

I felt obliged.

Of course now it just makes me think somebody needs to do a much, much better job of this.

NoClip hasn't done anything on Bungie, have they?

NeoGAF thread:

https://www.neogaf.com/threads/the-bungie-documentary-1991-to-present.1491730/

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I watched this video in Orlando this weekend; I had some free time in my hotel room. (It was either this or an episode of Stranger Things. Clearly I made the wrong choice in hindsight, but I didn't know it at the time.)

Yeah, I would not have made that choice. I'm only watching this because of....

(checks notes)

Cody.

Thanks, man.

When it ended, I thought "I wouldn't even BEGIN to know where to start criticizing this thing." And so I left it alone.

I'm glad you didn't. :)

I felt obliged.

Of course now it just makes me think somebody needs to do a much, much better job of this.

NoClip hasn't done anything on Bungie, have they?

NeoGAF thread:

https://www.neogaf.com/threads/the-bungie-documentary-1991-to-present.1491730/

I don’t think Bungie would agree to do a no-clip thing. Those are basically marketing videos anyway, and Bungie has Jim McQuillan who can just make a ViDoc that would probably be better.

Also thank you narc for the summary.

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I don’t think Bungie would agree to do a no-clip thing. Those are basically marketing videos anyway, and Bungie has Jim McQuillan who can just make a ViDoc that would probably be better.

Agreed. I like their presentations but it's also very clear that it's not really an independent view of anything, not in any real sense.

Also thank you narc for the summary.

You're welcome.

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This is followed up with a decent point on how multiplayer is harder to balance than Halo because of how broad and deep the sandbox of weapons and abilities is.

36 minutes in, D1 expansions get their first mention. 9 minutes left.

So 9 minutes left to talk about:

Dark Below
House of Wolves
Taken King
Rise of Iron

D2 Vanilla
Curse of Osiris
Warmind
Forsaken
Shadowkeep

So ~1 minute each, I guess.

Now we're following up on the "slow updates because of the engine" point, but it looks like he's pegging this to the DLC release schedule, which more or less followed the contract, and not patches, which is really what was affected by the problems iterating content in the Tiger engine.

D1 got about as much DLC as it was planned to get, pretty much when it was planned to get it, although one could argue that faster development time would have meant more content...

OK now we're getting to the patching/weapon balance issues. Some Datto footage, along with a credit and VO by datto, which means he gets mentioned earlier than most of the Bungie employees quoted in this video.

We're now going over all the additions and improvements, as well as live events funded by microtransactions, over footage from Taken King and accompanied by music from House of Wolves.

38 minutes in, first mention of Rise of Iron. That gets addressed quickly so we can move on to Luke Smith introducing Destiny 2, accompanied by music from... RIse of Iron.

I think if chronology was going to be your primary organizing principle it might be important to, within each chronological section, match the music and imagery with the period and release(s) you're talking about.

"The game had a lot of content, but none of it was meaningful endgame content, according to the fans"

.... I guess D2's first raid doesn't count?

He's comparing reddit shitposts about COO content with... the Myth 2 installer bug.

Five minutes left. I think I need to take a break before I finish this.

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He's comparing reddit shitposts about COO content with... the Myth 2 installer bug.

Five minutes left. I think I need to take a break before I finish this.

Outsourcing to VV is positioned as some kind of "trick" used to counter community complaints.

I swear the first two mentions of annual passes were complaints, but the last one is positioned as some kind of improvement. There doesn't seem to be much consistency on this issue-- he's just summarizing a source without citation at different points, so at some times annual passes are bad because you have to buy them, and other times, they're good because then you don't have to buy individual DLCs.

"Inside of a quarterly earnings report, Activision had stated that Forsaken had underperformed, and did not meet expectations. This would quickly make waves through the Internet. This was Destiny's biggest experience, and it was not satisfying. What followed from Bungie employees would submit Bungie's final stance between the publisher and the gamers."

Okay, he lost me at the end of that last sentence and I needed breadcrumbs to get out.

At several points the narrator talks about "expectations" but it's not clear what he's talking about. In the above, I'd clearly assume that Activision is talking about financial results, but then he dovetails that right into "this was Destiny's biggest experience, and it was not satisfying". That's not really the opinion of ANYONE I know regarding Forsaken. It might not have satisfied Activision's expectations, but it isn't clear this is a reference to that, and even if it is, it's redundant.

The video treats Bungie's dumping of Activision as if it is somehow more momentous than their departure from Microsoft, which is... interesting, to say the least.

The New Light experience is summarized as "it's a free version of the game"... yeah, that's true, but...

The script and the delivery are flagging near the end of this.. "what turned into two college kids making games"... no, that's what it was when it started, what it *turned into* was a 700+ employee self-publishing independent developer.

...and now the Twilight Zone framing device again, which this really did not need. He's closer to looking at the camera this time, though.

A lot of talk here about ideas and freedom... even though what those ideas are, or why freedom is necessary to express them, was not something this video ever talked about. There was never, ever any discussion of themes, of any of Bungie's titles, old or new.

Credits go to "The Dudes" and "members of the discord" (Don't know if he means Destiny 2 or his own). Should have been a lot more mention of the producers of professional docs and vidocs he used footage from, but okay.

I have dunked on this enough. It's not as bad as I make out, as I've focused almost exclusively on things I saw either as flaws, or that I would personally have done differently.

There's not much meat on the bones here, at least not for the audience here at DBO. Most of the info covered is from the Halo and Destiny eras, which most recent fans know better than the older stuff, which gets little attention here. It's a decent enough summary of major events in Bungie's timeline, but there's no clear thesis or theme that hangs the content together aside from chronology.

Maybe the next video on the channel will be more... ah, I see, it's "The Ultimate Waifus Tier List"... ok I'm done.

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Earlier I posted that we didn't need a part 2. That was because I could already tell "There's not much meat on the bones here, at least not for the audience here at DBO" and I wanted to spare you.

That said, thanks for suffering on our behalf. The more you know about something, the more you realize that a lot of youtube experts don't know that much.

Good job, narc.

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That said, thanks for suffering on our behalf. The more you know about something, the more you realize that a lot of youtube experts don't know that much.

I'm 9 minutes in… and there are already numerous things that are just factually incorrect lol.

No dude, the "Bungie building" didn't burn down…

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That said, thanks for suffering on our behalf. The more you know about something, the more you realize that a lot of youtube experts don't know that much.

I'm 9 minutes in… and there are already numerous things that are just factually incorrect lol.

No dude, the "Bungie building" didn't burn down…

Yeah there really needs to be a better version of this, probably much longer, better presented, more accurate and complete, probably divided up into segments with strong thematic connections and the link between those segments being largely chronological, instead of this thing.

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That said, thanks for suffering on our behalf. The more you know about something, the more you realize that a lot of youtube experts don't know that much.

I'm 9 minutes in… and there are already numerous things that are just factually incorrect lol.

No dude, the "Bungie building" didn't burn down…

Yeah there really needs to be a better version of this, probably much longer, better presented, more accurate and complete, probably divided up into segments with strong thematic connections and the link between those segments being largely chronological, instead of this thing.

Soon™️

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Earlier I posted that we didn't need a part 2. That was because I could already tell "There's not much meat on the bones here, at least not for the audience here at DBO" and I wanted to spare you.

Yeah, but the guy worked 9 months on it, apparently, so I figured it was at least worth 45 minutes to watch and see what was there, and it's important to recognize that not everybody has been paying attention to Bungie since the 90s, so not everyone's perspective is the same.

That said, thanks for suffering on our behalf. The more you know about something, the more you realize that a lot of youtube experts don't know that much.

Still necessary to practice critical reading and media literacy, yup!

Good job, narc.

Thanks!

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Phoenix was not an MMO. It basically sounded like a cross between Minecraft and Rampart.

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I've missed you, Narc.

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Bring it home, narc.

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