Continuing our conversation with Bungie's Marty O'Donnell, the longtime Bungie composer talked about how Bungie wants to gain more recognition as a studio, similar to Blizzard or Valve. While there are legions of Blizzard fans and Valve fans, there aren't so many Bungie fans as much as there are just Halo fans. As the developer continues to build its new IP for Activision, it's looking to change that.
We asked O'Donnell if Bungie is sort of stuck having to cater to Halo fans now or if they can expand their audience. "We absolutely love our fans," he began. "I mean, Bungie was building a community of people that were doing social networking kinds of things long before even Facebook came out. I was like, 'Wait, we sort of invented Facebook. Oh, dang it, we didn't invent Facebook.' So yeah there's absolutely no way that we don't evolve. And by evolve I mean we're not going to do something so revolutionary that we leave all of our fans and community behind and they're just like, 'What the heck is this?' I don't think we're even capable of doing that, at least in intentional ways, because that's just not where any of our hearts are."
"We love the games we make. We love our fans. We're not just going to suddenly do something that's so out of left field that nobody can relate to it. It just doesn't make sense. We totally are thinking, 'How do we bring our community along with us?' We were fortunate enough to keep Bungie's name up front while we were making Halo. But certainly the Halo fan is a bigger set and the Bungie fan is probably a smaller subset of that. I think we have a pretty good Bungie awareness out there but we certainly would like to pull everyone who's a fan of games with us and expand with that. Halo probably has a bigger marketing pizzazz than Bungie does, but we're working to change that."
We noted to O'Donnell that Hollywood has plenty of stars with directors like Steven Spielberg or James Cameron, whereas the games industry only has a small handful of stars that anyone would have a chance of recognizing in the mainstream. Bungie, however, isn't hoping for any kind of stardom for anyone on its team. It's more about boosting the Bungie name as a whole.
"I think individual stars in the game industry, we have examples of that and they're out there but that hasn't been Bungie's way. I don't think it's Blizzard's way; I don't think it's Valve's way. Blizzard and Valve are pretty successful companies and people know them. If there's a new Valve game I know I'm going to pick it up. People probably are not chomping at the bit for Activision's new game. They don't think about it that way. They're going to think about a studio who works at Activision and say, 'Where is that new game?' Peter Molyneux is going to make a new game, whether it's published by Microsoft or somebody else and if you're a Peter Molyneux fan, you're going to say, 'Well, where is he now? What is he doing?' We sort of like that Blizzard is ... Bungie is around exactly the same time Blizzard was and we've been friends with a lot of those Blizzards guys for years and we have a lot of respect for them and I don't think about individual rock stars in Blizzard as much as I think about Blizzard. If it's a Blizzard game it's going to be amazing. And we hope the same thing happens for Bungie," he said.
2 Comments
April 14, 2011
This task would be pretty easy. One idea would be to release Marathon in a updated state for free or close to free for PC, 360 and PS3 so people can see they have been making awesome story driven games for a long time other than jut Halo.
April 16, 2011
Unfortunately the Halo generation doesn't really know what AWESOME games Bungie had made before that. I wish to see the rebirth of Myth and Marathon in a different modern way like Bungie only can!