: Did Bungie give MJ the right to create more than one??
: Geez... They need to buy back the rights...
Actually MJ's M4 had a pretty interesting concept, still based on the same flawed back-history they developed for M3, but at least it was original and not just an erroneous retelling of known events.
: And I'll bet that somehow, this whole problem all started
: with Microsoft buying Bungie. Stupid Bill Gates!
: Stupid!
Actually it started with dividing their efforts between Bungie East with Myth II, Halo AND Phoenix, and the new Bungie West with Oni, then Myth II had a massively expensive recall, Oni took for damn ever to get done, meanwhile Bungie released NO NEW PRODUCTS betwen late 1998 and early 2000 (just rehashes like the Codex), leading to massive loss of cash. So they sold just shy of 20% of themselves to Take Two to get the cash they needed to not die, finally shoved Oni out the door to less then phenomenal results, STILL hadn't released Halo...
And then along comes Microsoft offering them tons of money and a shot at being pioneers of a new hardware platform AND the ability to not do nearly as much of the business work which they had, in the previous few years, showed that they really sucked at (no offense Alex), and all they have to do is sell their very immortal souls and give Take Two intellectual properties deemed worthy of their 20% share, which turned out to be the Myth and Oni franchises. (Of course they're not gonna sell the projects they're still working on, and what's the franchise of a five year old first person shooter series worth to a company like Take Two?).
So a Myth story newb with a couple decent games to his name scratched out a (highly detailed, though still erroneous) design doc, got together with a bunch of executives and some famous programmers and other industry folk, and pitched it to Take Two, who gave them a crappy deal with way too little time and money. Then they grabbed some (highly talented) fanbois to make most of the content, worked their butts off to meet Take Two's deadlines, and finally had to throw out the best they could manage before the executives fired everybody on the team who had any talent and decided to close down the shop that actually made GAMES in favor of a porting house in Texas.
And that... is where babies come from.
Erm, Myth 3. Same difference.
