Bungie: Halo, Marathon and the Console Shooter Reborn

Bungie started as a cult Mac developer and became one of the most important shooter studios in the world. Founded in 1991, it built a devoted following with the deep sci-fi first-person shooter Marathon and the real-time tactics of Myth. Then it made Halo: Combat Evolved, the game that launched the original Xbox, reinvented the first-person shooter for consoles, and grew into one of gaming's biggest franchises. Later, striking out on its own again, it built Destiny, a shared-world shooter that players have poured years into. Few studios have reshaped a genre this completely, or this often.

This is the studio's run: the Mac cult classics, the Halo revolution, and the shared-world shooter. Here is the map.

From the Mac to Master Chief

Long before Master Chief, Bungie was the toast of the Mac underground. Marathon was a first-person shooter with a genuinely ambitious story told through computer terminals, dense with AI and conspiracy, and Myth traded base-building for tense, tactical real-time battles. That taste for smart systems and deep sci-fi lore never left. When Bungie moved to the Xbox and built Halo, and later Destiny, it brought the same ambition to a vastly bigger stage. The cult Mac studio became a genre-defining giant without losing what made it special.