Bungie went from hand-packed boxes in a Chicago flat to a Sony takeover
Bungie's first game was a free Pong clone called Gnop!, with its source code sold for $15. Its founders later folded Macintosh game boxes by hand in a one-bedroom Chicago apartment. Two decades on, the studio behind Halo and Destiny was bought by Sony in a deal valued at $3.6 billion.
Alex Seropian was studying mathematics at the University of Chicago, which offered no undergraduate computer science, when his father urged him to get a job. He started a game company instead, founding Bungie in May 1991 with money from friends and family. Its first boxed title, Operation: Desert Storm, sold 2,500 copies. In an artificial intelligence class he met Jason Jones, who was porting his game Minotaur to the Mac. Jones handled code and creativity, Seropian ran the business and never wasted a dollar, and his wife largely supported them while they worked.
They stuck with the Mac because its market was more open. Pathways into Darkness, a first-person game from 1993, became their first real hit and paid for a studio on Chicago's South Side. Marathon followed in 1994, built by a team working 14-hour days for nearly six months; demand after its Macworld showing was so strong that staff spent a day in a warehouse packing boxes to fill orders before Christmas. When Bungie announced a Windows version of the sequel, Mac loyalists flooded it with angry mail. Myth, a tactics game, came next and was its first simultaneous Mac and Windows release.
Halo was unveiled in 1999 during a Steve Jobs keynote as a game for Mac and Windows. Then, in June 2000, on Bungie's ninth birthday, Microsoft bought the studio and turned Halo into an Xbox exclusive. It sold more than 6.5 million copies and became the console's flagship series. Myth and Oni went to Take-Two, which had owned 19.9% of Bungie.
Bungie regained its independence in 2007, though Microsoft kept Halo, and made Destiny under a ten-year Activision deal signed in 2010. Sony completed its purchase in July 2022. Destiny 2's player numbers later fell and a Marathon reboot underperformed, prompting a $765 million impairment.
Source: Bungie
