Bungie hadn’t yet revealed the game to the world, but in February they began teasing it to fans. The game was still in an early state, but a story was beginning to take shape. The rest were assimilated into the Blam! team. Myth II had just released and some of that team splintered off to work on the never released and still mysterious Phoenix project.

Ī video showcasing the evolution of Halo, made by Bungie for their Fan Fest at E3 2002.Īs 1999 dawned, Blam! became Bungie East’s main project. This, combined with the progress being made on third-person action title Oni, would spur the first major change in the game, from RTS to 3rd person action game. Curious how it would play, one day Charlie Gough, a programmer on the project, hooked up controls to a single unit. Even at this early stage, the game featured fun, bouncy vehicle physics, though at this point mostly for tanks. There was some hilly terrain punctuated with a handful of buildings, a bunch of Marines, and a couple of vehicles. In its earliest incarnation, it was just a testbed a next-generation terrain engine for Myth or another RTS game. This new project thus got a working title that would have to be changed before release: “Munkey Nutz.” Not wanting to have to tell his mother he was working on something called “Munkey Nutz,” Jones changed it to a favorite word of Bungie employees: Blam! It would be the first game in Bungie’s history to start development on the PC instead of the Mac. Marathon and Myth had both been working titles that Bungie ran out of time to change before release. It was given the initial code name of “Armor, ” but this was quickly changed to avoid the game actually shipping with that title. Clockwise from top left: two ambient life studies, Covenant experiments, Elite experiments, early Forerunner tanks, and the first doodles of the Master Chief.

Myth the fallen lords demo