By Bill Mahin
A lot of the staff looked exhausted, especially Regier and Mark Bernal, one of the artists. “There was a point near the end of summer, early fall,” said Bernal, “where it was just very difficult–the point where you basically can’t get away from it, where you dream of it.” When he would come to work in the morning, he’d look up at the sky “knowing that those few minutes would be all I’d see that day.” He figured he was “running at 70 percent capability. You find yourself making mistakes–your mind is not thinking as it used to.” He made up for it by working even longer hours.
On November 21 the staff spent a long afternoon in a meeting. One of the agenda items was evaluating the level known as Down a Broken Path, where the ostensibly simple goal was having the player’s troops escort Rurik, a village leader, safely into town. Jason Jones, cofounder of Bungie, wasn’t happy with the way Rurik moved through the terrain, because he looked like “a complete fucking moron.”
Six people worked straight through that night, including Bowman, who now held the Myth II work record–he hadn’t left the office for eight days in a row. “My wife and daughter visited yesterday,” he said. After she left he tried to send her flowers, but the order got screwed up.
Jones’s cleaned-up game, Minotaur, which came out in February 1992, was Bungie’s first multiplayer game; it allowed several players to hook their computers together and play one another instead of the computer–a rarity at the time. They took the game to trade shows and figured out how to market it through mail-order catalogs, selling about 2,500 copies.
In May 1994 Doug Zartman, a PR person for the American Bar Foundation and a percussionist-vocalist for the band Spiney Norman, showed up, portfolio in hand, wanting to be an artist. He’d been a gamer for much of his life, though he’d majored in sociology and anthropology at Carleton College. Seropian and Jones hired him–their first full-time employee–to do tech support for Pathways. But he soon became its PR person–its “mouthpiece,” according to the current in-house directory.
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But they spent a lot of hours doing it. “A minute doing anything other than working on Marathon was considered a wasted minute,” Matt Soell, who was hired in 1995 to take over tech support, later wrote in the Marathon Scrapbook, the story of the game’s development. “So activities like sleep and lunch were carefully kept to a minimum.”
