A few days ago, I e-mailed Andrew Meggs and asked him if he could answer a few questions of mine. This is how he responded:
Q - Does MJ have the design documents?
A - Technically yes, but design at bungie was an evolutionary process that
mostly took place around tables and on whiteboards as the game developed. The design documents are only a couple of pages produced at the beginning of the project, with guidelines like "small children who save the world are me". The actual games are by far the most authoritative (and frequently only) written information Bungie produced concerning the world of Myth.
Q - Has Scott written relatively faithfully do these design documents when composing the story?
A - Warcraft could probably be made to fit within the "documents" without
too much difficulty.
Wow. So the design documents are no more than a basic few pages concerning how the game should be invented and innovated upon, like a memo to the staff. Still, this gives them a lot of right concerning the story, just as Sili and I both believed.
Q - Do the rights from Bungie that were obtained by MJ through Take Two entail MJ's (Take Two's) full ability to change the story of Myth however it wishes and it still oblige with the original story? Basically, do you have the rights to the original story by Bungie; does Take Two own it?
A - Let's put it this way: if Take Two (or a development team contracted by
them) felt that Smurfs would be a good addition for reasons of gameplay, they would probably go in and a few lines of flavor text would be added to explain it. Bungie probably would have done the same.
Ah, so then that means that not only does MJ have as much right to change the story as Bungie did, but there is no actual story to be violated by MJ.
In general, you guys at the asylum are just trying too hard. There's no master plan that's slowly being revealed. The mythology and the "cycle" were just backstory to which the games alluded in order to add flavor, and Bungie themselves didn't formalize exactly how it worked and even refer to it in different, contradictory ways. Those contradictions don't mean there's something more subtle going on that needs theories to be invented; they mean somebody at Bungie wasn't paying much attention to the window dressings on their game about tactical combat.
Well, then it seems that MJ has as much right to the story as Bungie did. They are continuing a story that would otherwise be lost or ended. Sili, it seems I can see how your point of view that there is a difference between MJ and Bungie is true. However, this difference doesn’t seem to go beyond writing styles; it can’t since there isn’t anything for it to be wrong with.
If you enjoy trying to create a complete, self-consistent fictional
universe based on a few fragments, go for it -- I get off on writing
assembly code, so we all have our hobbies and obsessions. However, you
should realize that for the most part, what you're doing is more
creative writing than research. The Asylumites will probably flame Scott for
every detail in which what he makes up doesn't agree with what they've made
up, but I can almost guarantee that a Myth 3 story made up by someone
employed at Bungie would be as much if not more divergent, yet in that later
case the presumption would be that the forum posters were the ones in error
rather than the game's creators.
Hmm…profound words…what does this mean for the Asylum?
So, then MJ truly is the rightful successor to Bungie, taking over where it left off, its material as canon as Bungie’s.
We can make a few conclusions in a summary:
•MJ has the design docs.
-However, these are no more than an outline for constructing the basis of the game’s story.
-They contain little or no information regarding the advanced plot as we know it.
•Scott is following the design docs.
-Even a game as different as Warcraft can fit into this.
•Take Two (MJ) has the full rights to change the story however they choose.
-The story of Myth is evolutionary and isn’t confined to any set of thoughts, ideas, or creators, but only by the official productions for it.
-Any further production by the owners of Myth have as much right to their own form of canon as the original designers. Every piece is canon in its own way, each an individual description or interpretation of events. Each of the soon-to-be-seven pieces of canon is to be taken as truth individually, though the stories can be intermingled to create a more complete picture.
-Our speculations and ideas are no more than that, nothing actually able to back up what we may or may not believe. This is another reason we should work together rather that debate over, literally, nothing.
-Myth III will be as consistent with the other Myth canon materials as would anything made by Bungie.
Many thanks go out to Andrew Meggs and the MJ crew for making this knowledge possible. I believe I speak for us all when I welcome them open-heartedly into our Asylum.
