.... the more they stay the same. This is old, REALLY old. It was written in [url=http://www.xboxaddict.com/forums/showthread.php?50353-About-Bungie-and-release-dates]1996 by Matt Soell[/url] whose job title at the time was "Keeper of the Bungie Way". Essentially he was Urk, DeeJ and a couple of other titles/roles/hats rolled into one. It was posted on Bungie.Net back when they had a "soapbox" where employees could rant and whatever was on their minds. The page(s) and content have been lost over the various revisions of Bungie.Net, so I had to dig a bit for the text. It was a different era, but it is amazing just how applicable "major problems" in 1996 aren't all that different than they are today. Just squint a bit and it is almost like listening to someone speaking frankly today (which they can't, because of "market pressure"). [url=https://web.archive.org/web/20021026182808/http://www.bungie.net/perlbin/blam.pl?file=/site/0/site/bnet/soapbox/soapbox96_10.html]Here it is. Some sections are more relevant than others.[/url] I'll quote some that catch my eye. [quote][u][b]Selling Out[/b][/u] Over the course of the last year, we've had to deal with an interesting new charge. Ever since we announced our intention of porting Marathon 2 to the Windows 95 operating system, we've received all manner of phone calls, faxes and e-mails accusing us of "selling out." This makes me laugh. The idea of "selling out" implies (to my mind anyway) implies the lowering of artistic, aesthetic or ethical standards to make a quick buck. Imagine you play in a rock band. You are meandering along in your small-time rock band way, trying to write creative and original songs which you hope will someday catapult you and your bandmates into the limelight. Suddenly a band called Mr. Whipple and the Triple-Nippled Crippled Hippos release a single that sells a billion copies and propels them to the top of the charts. Their concerts sell out in minutes, their videos are in heavy rotation on MTV and they sweep all sorts of music awards shows. They are also making enough money to fill several grain silos. You want your band to be as rich, famous and universally adored as Hootie, I mean Mr. Whipple. So your band changes their style. You write a bunch of new songs that sound eerily similar to their songs. You cut your hair the same way and wear the same sort of clothes. In short, you try to look, sound, and act just like the much more famous band in the hope that doing so will somehow interest fans, record companies, and other people who might want to give you money. Maybe you succeed; maybe you don't. But you've traded your creativity and individuality for a shot at a lot of money. That's what selling out is. Bungie hasn't done that. We're still making original games. We still think they're good. If we didn't think they were good, we wouldn't release them. Thankfully, other people still agree that our games are good, and keep buying them. We have no need to sell out. So why do people persist in making that utterly groundless charge? Because of...[/quote] [quote][b][u]Platform Bigotry[/u][/b] Some of you out there are still under the delusion that ONE TRUE FLAWLESS COMPUTER exists, and you are one of the intellectually-superior people who bought one. People who bought the same brand of computer are brothers in arms, companions in your struggle against the OTHER PEOPLE who bought the BAD AND TOTALLY USELESS COMPUTER. And you spend a lot of time arguing the point in any newsgroup you can access (except the advocacy newsgroups, of course.) Please stop. The whole "My Mac/PC/Amiga/BeBox/Linux box is better than your puny little {insert computer name here]" debate is stupid. It's a result of living in a society which seems to be losing the intellectual capacity to handle grey areas. Black/White, Republican/Democrat, Mac/PC. No in-between, and no sympathy or even basic respect for people who don't make the same choice you did. Are we really so pathetic that we can't accept people who buy a different kind of computer? Are we really so starved for things to do that we must resort to flooding newsgroups with irrelevant blather trying to prove that one computer is better than the next? So many of the postings I read on this subject (try as I might, I never seem to find a way to killfile all of them) are so vituperative that I have to wonder why the posters are so insecure. I suppose it's obvious, in a sense: anyone who spends two to five thousand dollars on a way-cool computer can get uncomfortable if someone accuses them of wasting their money on an inferior machine. But the freakish fanaticism some people display towards their computers mystifies me. It reminds me of those guys who spend a lot of cash on a flashy car and make a big show of it to others in order to compensate for certain...shortcomings. Evangelism should not be totalitarianism. If you have opinions, you are entitled to express them. So is everyone else. Deal with it. If you feel the need to vent some sort of bizarre hatred for an operating system you do not use, please try to confine it to the relevant advocacy newsgroups. And please, don't write to us accusing us of "selling out" just because we don't feel like confining our development efforts to a single platform. Life is too short, and there's a big world out there. A big world full of all sorts of computers, and all sorts of people who want cool computer games. We want to make them ALL happy. We don't discriminate. And neither should you.[/quote] Anyway, take what you will from this. I just like remembering old things.