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Taken from the Myth 1 & 2 Strategies and Secrets books; a good read if you haven't already:

MYTH I

In the last five or six years, computer games have progressively moved from modest developments to huge Hollywood-esque productions with movie stars, sound stages, and million-dollar budgets. Indeed, computer games are no longer created by a couple of teenagers sitting in their parents’ basement with a Commodore Amiga and a bag of pork rinds. They are massive endeavors that require teams of professional artists, programmers, and writers. As I was playing Myth for the 342nd time (while writing this book), I began to wonder just what went into making Myth the incredible game that it is. So I put a call in to the guys at Bungie to try and find out the answers, and guess what they said? “We haven’t got time to talk to you, we’re too busy making Myth. If you want to learn about the game, you’re going to have to come here.”

Rather than being discouraged by Bungie’s busyness, I packed my bags and hopped on the first plane from Calgary to Chicago (well, okay, Calgary to Salt Lake City to Chicago). Upon my arrival, those crazy dudes at Bungie greeted me warmly and gave me a jam-packed, two-day Myth cram session. This chapter covers the var- ious areas involved in the creation of Myth, including detailed interviews with people intimately involved with Myth’s production. So without further ado, here’s the inside scoop on the making of Myth.

THE GENESIS OF MYTH
All games come from some initial idea (usually from the game designer), and in fact many games’ genesis stories have become folklore in the gaming community. In Myth’s case, the common theory on the genesis of the project is that Jason Jones, the game’s designer and lead programmer, was watching the bloody battles in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart and came up with the idea. However, Jason has a different account. (I still think Braveheart influenced the Berserks—just check out those half- painted bodies!)

BART: So, where did the idea of Myth come from?
JASON JONES: Well, it’s really not all that glamorous. I could probably lie and make up something cool, but I’ll tell you the truth instead. We started out doing the natural extension of Marathon, which would have turned out to be something along the lines of Quake. At that time, the first screenshots of Quake were already out, and we sort of knew where they were going, and everybody else did too. We were going to try and do one of those sorts of games, and after about two months of working on it, nobody was really into it at all, and I just had the feeling like we weren’t going to be able to pull it off in time.
The whole time we were working on the Quake-like game, we had been talking about this other game that nobody thought would work out, and we’d been calling it “The Giant Bloody War Game.” We’d sit around talking about the Quake-like game, trying to be serious and make some serious decisions about it, and everyone just kept talking about “The Giant Bloody War Game,” laughing, having fun, etc. After about two months of that going on, I just showed up at the office one day with the map editor in its most basic form. It could just adjust the heights and stuff and import the color map, and in one day we switched our project from a shooter game that would have had us chasing our competition’s tail to what has basically become Myth.

GRAPHICS AND ANIMATION
The rolling 3D terrain of Myth is nothing short of spectacular, and with a 3DFX graphics accelerator in the mix, it becomes even more incredible. The maps were created by artists using conventional technology, and then they were extruded to give them height and depth. When you look at the detail in the maps, sometimes it’s almost as if you’re looking at a photograph. The artists were also responsible for the characters in the game. The Undead characters were drawn by Rob Martell, and the Light side’s characters were drawn by Mark Bernal. I had a chance to sit down and chat with Mark about the various creative aspects of the game for which he and Rob were responsible.

BART: The characters in Myth are sprites and not polygons (which seems to be the way many other games are headed). Obviously you thought that sprites could do the trick for Myth (and they did), so what made you make that decision?
MARK: Well, we had done 2D sprites before in Marathon, so we already had a sense of what we had to do to make it look good, but the SGI makes it much easier to create 3D-looking sprites.

BART: What did the SGI mean exactly to you as an artist in creating this game?
MARK: It sped up the process of actually creating the views of the characters substantially so that we could get into more interesting things like the lighting effects on the characters and the details. It also made it much quicker to bang out art that we needed quickly, like getting various views of a Satchel Charge or an Exploding Bottle.

BART: You did all the characters on the side of the line; which character(s) are you most proud of?
MARK: Well, I’m surprised by the Dwarf because he was one of the first characters created, but yet he still seems to stand up pretty well [to time] and remains one of the stronger characters in the game [see Figure 12.2].

BART: How did you go about doing the animations for the characters? I’ve seen the art for the various animations of the Archers, and it’s very impressive. Did you get a bow and arrow and start shooting?
MARK: Well, it was interesting making the action for the Archer to shoot his arrow. There’s a lot of things going on there—like how does he draw the arrow from the quiver, and what’s the correct pose for shooting? There are also three angles for shooting to higher elevations. We used reference materials on archery to help get the look just right, but we also used ourselves as examples to ensure that the motions were realistic. This was also true of the other characters, like the Dwarf dropping a Satchel Charge or the Warrior bringing down his sword. It was fun.

BART: The maps are perhaps the most impressive part of the game. They’re spectacular to say the least! Tell me about the process of creating a map.
MARK: Once again, the maps had a lot to do with reference. We’d spend time surfing the net, looking at pictures, but we also spent a lot of time looking at things in everyday life. You know, like “Hey, look at that dirt, look at that rock!” Rob would sometimes say something like, “Hey, you guys have got to look at the exit ramp coming to work; it’s cool the way you can see the cracks in the cement and the rocks crumbling down.” That sort of stuff happened a lot. Also, Myth has the added aspect of seasons, so we had to incorporate snow, rain, deserts, marshes—you name it, we tried to put it in. In the end, I wound up doing over 10 of the maps. By the way, the maps take about 10 days to produce from start to finish, although now I can probably do it faster.

THE PROGRAMMING
What really makes a game like this run is the engine—the guts of the program. I was lucky enough to chat with two of the three programmers—Jason Jones and Jason Regier—about the intricacies of Myth.

BART: The physics in Myth are really cool. Did any of that evolve from the Marathon engine?
JASON JONES: Well, we really liked the way the physics had evolved in Marathon. We liked the way grenades arched through the air and how bodies left the ground when hit, and the idea was to just build on that and place it into a game where you were dealing with tactics rather than video game reflexes. That’s where it started, but as we went along it got a lot more carried away, like now everyone has their own pieces, and it’s a lot more complicated [see Figure 12.3]. I guess that we were trying to take the engine we used in Marathon and use it in a game with an entirely different genre.

BART: Everything looks so realistic. Was it a big problem to achieve those effects?
JASON JONES: Yeah, it was. There’s a lot of ways to solve a computer equation, and although you know of the “right” way to do it, there’s usually another way that may be easier but is just as good. With physics, however, you can’t really do that. For example, if you want to have an Archer hit a target that’s at a higher elevation and moving, you have absolutely no alternative but to solve the equation. It’s not real, but it’s about as real as you get, and if the arrow doesn’t fly through the air right, or doesn’t bounce off a tree like the gamer is expecting it to, they’ll notice. There’s just no good way to cheat with the physics, but the end result is very cool.

BART: The tools used for creating Myth look very impressive. Did you design those in-house?
JASON REGIER: We have a whole suite of tools for Myth, but there are three main tools that we use. One is called the Tag Editor [see Figure 12.4]. Myth lies on top of a flexible file system, and every one of those little bits that goes into Myth is called a Tag. The Tag Editor lets you edit everything from the physics of the game, to the color of the units, how they move, and how they attack. There’s another tool that we use to import graphics called the Extractor, and there’s a third tool called Loathing. Loathing is basically the map editor for Myth. You import your map into it, you change the heights, and you place your units on the map in Loathing. The fourth tool that complements Loathing is called Fear. Fear takes care of all the mod- els; it is used to import the 3D rendered models into Myth.

BART: From my limited experience looking at these tools, they look like they could be included with the game as editors for the public to use. That seems strange to me that a programming tool would look so user-friendly.
JASON REGIER: Well, I helped to write some of the tools. In fact, I wrote the Tag Editor myself, and when I did it, I tried to make it user-friendly for a reason. I can tell you that if a tool is not user-friendly, we (the guys making the scenarios) are not going to spend the same amount of time working on and refining the mis- sions as we do when they are user-friendly.

TAKIN’ CARE OF BUSINESS
Alex Seropian is the CEO and cofounder of Bungie Software, and he was nice enough to take some time to discuss the business end of creating an intricate computer game such as Myth. In the last five years, several games have been created with budgets of millions of dollars—no kidding! In fact, it was rumored that Wing Commander IV was in the 12.5 million-dollar range. Heck, many Hollywood movies don’t have budgets that big! So it was with bated breath that I waited to hear how Bungie, with only three programmers and two artists, was able to make one of the most advanced and exciting games ever created for this genre.

BART: I recently interviewed a company that had just made a game that was based on an existing engine, and they used something like nine programmers and six artists over roughly the same length of time it took you to make Myth. Bungie is obviously a very small company, so how did you manage to put out such a superior product (from scratch) with only three programmers, two artists, and a partridge in a pear tree?
ALEX: Obviously, we’re smarter (laughs). Well, I think we just have a very tight team of very smart and dedicated people working for us here. We think we have cool ideas, and we work very long hours to produce the product you now see. However, I think it’s safe to say that we could easily have used more people in the creation of Myth, but it’s worked out very well nonetheless.

BART: With so much time and money going into one game like Myth, the only game you’re working on, how important is Myth to Bungie?
ALEX: It’s huge. This industry is all hit driven, and for a company that’s only going to put out one game a year, it’s got to be a hit. Otherwise, you can’t really make it work for very long. Other companies [the big ones] can support 20 titles a year with a couple of hits and the rest dogs, but that’s not the reality for us. As a small developer getting started in the PC market, and with over a million dollars spent to create Myth, and a million more to put it out and market it, if the game fails we don’t really have another million dollars to do it again. So I think you can see how important it is to get it right the first time.

BART: What’s Bungie’s motivation?
ALEX: Well, the motivating force behind Bungie isn’t actually the do-or-die economic side of it; rather, we’re in it purely to make the best game possible.

BART: Where does a million dollars go? ALEX: A lot of the money goes to the staff; then there’s equipment. You know, the SGI alone was over $80,000 (gasp from Bart!). Yeah, and that’s just for one. BART: Was it worth getting the SGI?
ALEX: For us, yes. It was exactly the tool we needed, and it worked out well because the artists that used it didn’t need it at the same time. And if you look at the graphics in the game that came out of it, we’re very happy with the results.

BART: You used animated cutscenes. Were they very expensive? Why did you choose Disney-like animation? Was it cheaper than rendered computer animation?
ALEX: Well, the cutscenes were about $150,000 (for just over three minutes of animation total). And then there’s the sound guys; they don’t come free either. For the decision on which kind of animation to use, we bid it out and the rendered stuff came back higher.

BART: That’s a good thing because I really think the cel animation you have is great, and really adds to the fun of the game. So, what’s ahead for Bungie?
ALEX: We’ve got a new studio out in California, and they’re working on an entirely new game engine unlike anything we’ve ever done before. Otherwise, we don’t have our plans set in stone, but we probably want to do a Myth scenario pack and a sequel.

MYTH II

Myth: The Fallen Lords was a huge critical success, chosen as Game of the Year and Strategy Game of the Year by a number of major game magazines. Still, the bright lights at Bungie were dissatisfied. Like any great development team, they wanted to take the Myth engine to greater heights, providing heaps of great entertainment for loyal Myth fans along the way.

As with the original Myth project, I found myself hopping on an airplane to Chicago to find out first hand what went into creating the great sequel that is Myth II: Soulblighter. This chapter features interviews from the Bungie CEO, producer, lead programmer, lead artist, and even the sound studio that created Myth II’s haunting background acoustics.

MYTH II: A NO-BRAINER

First on my list of important Bungie folk to chat with was Alex Seropian, CEO and cofounder of Bungie Software. Second was Tuncer Deniz, producer of Myth II. Both gentlemen have many years of experience in the gaming industry, from game creation to journalism, so it’s always interesting to hear what they have to say about their new products.

BART: Myth: The Fallen Lords, was very successful critically, but, although it sold well, it wasn’t a blockbuster game commercially. For these reasons, did you ever doubt you’d do a sequel?
ALEX: Myth was a pretty large success for us. There were still some things at the end of Myth that we wanted to do, but we just ran out of time. Myth was a terrific product, but we knew we could a lot better, so pretty much when the product [Myth: The Fallen Lords] was done we decided to move ahead with Myth II.

BART: What sorts of things did you aim to improve with Myth II?
ALEX: We had a lot of specific design goals for Myth II. Part of those things are enhancements to the engine as well as the gameplay. There were some things in the gameplay and artificial intelligence that made the game—the original—annoyingly difficult, and those were some of the things we wanted to enhance. In addition to that, we decided to touch basically every facet of the game. We wanted to make the music and sound better, the graphics—so we basically retouched every area of the Myth gaming experience.

BART: One of the knocks against Myth had to do with its difficulty. Some gamers found the game a little too challenging. Was this something you addressed specifically?
ALEX: Yeah, the feedback we got from many Myth I players was that the game was really hard. We got a few calls from people that couldn’t even get past Level 1, and, granted, that was probably our fault, because we had played our game for over two years, and got used to playing it and probably lost perspective on how difficult it would be for the average gamer. So Myth really appealed to core gamers, because they really got a challenge.

In Myth II, we basically tried to increase the gap between Timid and Legendary levels. That means Timid is easier and Legendary is even harder, and there are three other skill levels in between Timid and Legendary for gamers to choose from. In addition to that, the way Myth II is set up lends itself more to a more logical strategy path, making it a lot easier to understand your ultimate goals for each mission. The challenges themselves are not easy, but you will understand what the goal is for each mission.

BART: Myth I was developed with an incredibly small team, by today’s standards. How many people worked on Myth II? Was it a big leap to set development of Myth II in motion?
ALEX: That’s a good question. First a little background. Myth I was created with four programmers and three artists over a two-year period, which is a gargantuan effort that’s unheard of in this industry. Because the underlying engine was already developed, we decided that Myth II only needed two programmers, and we concentrated on art and level design by using four artists and two level designers.

BART: The animated cutscenes in Myth were very good, but I understand you’re not using the same type of animation for Myth II’s cutscenes. The last time we talked, we discussed the merits of cel animation versus rendered animation. Did this issue come up again when you were considering the cutscenes in Myth II?
ALEX: Myth definitely has a different style to it, almost like a classic kind of look, and we just thought that rendered animation wouldn’t look as good with it, so we went with cel animation. Some people liked it, some people didn’t, and in the final analysis we decided that it looked a little more cartoon-like than we wanted. For Myth II we decided to go with a Japanese company and have more of an anime style, more of a cutting-edge, rougher-edge look and feel to the animation.

Really, the reason we wanted to use cel animation over rendered animation is that we have a lot of characters running and moving around in cutscenes, and it’s just not possible to get the kind of fluid motion we think is necessary out of rendered animation. It just looks more robotic and clunky than cel animation.

BART: What’s cool about Myth II that ’ll make people want to go out and buy it after playing through Myth I ?
TUNCER: Myth I was a great game. It was definitely very challenging, it had lots of excellent levels, and the graphics were outstanding. We decided going into Myth II that we wanted to create a sequel that was not just a rehash of the first game. Early on we tweaked the engine: one of the things we did was to make the terrain mesh four times finer, so you’ll notice the terrain is more detailed and smoother. In addition, the characters have more frames of animation, so they move much more smoothly. We’ve also been working with our sound designers to greatly enhance the sound quality throughout the game. Lastly, because the Myth engine was pretty much intact, we spent our time concentrating on really great level design, which will make Myth II a joy to play—not a rehashed sequel, but a new game.

THE GUTS

A few technical and artistic aspects of Myth II are worth exploring. I sought out Lead Programmer Jason Regier for inside information on how Bungie pushed the technological envelope with Myth II. Mark Bernal, lead artist for Myth II, and Tuncer Deniz, producer extraordinaire, put in their two cents.

BART: Myth is a unit game, because the landscapes are made with polygons, but the actual game units are sprites. Why did you stick with sprites over polygons in Myth II? Is it a performance issue?
TUNCER: Yes, it’s definitely a performance issue. The reason we went with sprites for the characters is because in Myth you can have 100 units on the screen at the same time, and if they were all polygonal models, even those with the fastest home computers wouldn’t be able to play the game.

BART: What was the biggest challenge in creating Myth II?
TUNCER: Basically, we had eight to nine months to create this sequel. Since we made a lot of changes to the engine, we couldn’t just start creating new levels and monsters. A lot of time was spent in exploratory thought. For example, we made enhancements to the engine, we made the units a little smaller, and we had to develop the story line. The other part of it was that a lot of the people that worked on the first Myth have moved on to other Bungie projects, so there was a learning curve for many of the people that were new to the Myth universe.

BART: What challenges were involved in developing the graphics for Myth II?
MARK: The biggest challenge was that there were many, many more models in Myth II than in Myth I. In Myth I, we were battling a lot in open fields, but in Myth II, there are many models (houses, windmills, fences). This was probably the biggest challenge. There are also indoor environments that posed a big challenge for the programmers, because units in these levels can be right beside each other, yet separated by a wall and can’t see one another, so some programming changes were made to accommodate these differences.

BART: It’s been mentioned that the units in Myth II are actually smaller. Did this have a big impact on the art department?
MARK: Oh yeah, we did every character over, not only just in the rendering, but also we animated them differently—actually, almost from the ground up—and the textures were changed on some of older characters.

BART: What differences were there from a programming standpoint between Myth I and Myth II?
JASON: The Myth engine was changed greatly to allow the level designers a lot more freedom to make the levels they wanted to make. One of the things we wanted to do was to give the game a grander feeling, and to do that we made the terrain mesh four times more complex than before. This way you can have more grand vistas, and you can actually see ruts in roads and furrows in fields.

Also, Myth seemed to have a lifelessness about it, so we’ve added things like ambient life, towns—in fact, we’ve made towns bigger and included moving polygonal models such as windmills and drawbridges. With all these additions, the game’s engine had to be modified to allow Myth II to run fast enough on today’s average hardware.

BART: What kinds of things did you do to the overall engine and interface to make the game easier to play?
JASON: We redid a lot of the interface. One of the goals we had with Myth II is for the user to be able to play the game with just a mouse, so we added a control bar down at the bottom, so that you can choose commands and formations. Also, we rewrote most of the camera movement code to make it easier to use. The cool thing about the interface changes that we made are that Myth I players won’t even notice the changes, but new players will have a much easier time picking up the game.

THE SOUND GARDEN

For Myth II’s sound, Bungie stuck with a tried-and-true winning formula in Total Audio, a sound studio with an extensive background in advertising and computer games. (In fact, the guys at Total Audio did the sound effects for Riven, which speaks for itself.)

I visited the studio on the day the mission text for the first eight missions was being recorded. I learned that creating the sound for a game like Myth II is no small affair, and even the readings for the first eight levels had to be read and reread by the actor. The result is a professional reading that truly adds to the gaming experience. Marty O’Donnell and Mike Salvatori are cofounders of O’Donnell Salvatori Total Audio, a sound studio based in Chicago.

Although I visited Mike and Marty, the following interview was conducted via e-mail, and the answers are composites of what Total Audio’s two principal players had to say.

BART: Tell us a little about your company.
MARTY & MIKE: We’ve been around since the early ’80s, working on music and sound for commercials and film here in Chicago. A jingle we wrote that people seem to remember is “We are Flintstones Kids, 10 million strong and growing...” We’ve done work for McDonalds, Sears, Kellogg’s, and many others over the years, but I’ve always been interested in games.

We got a chance to work on sound design for Riven: The Sequel to Myst, and that lead to our work with Bungie. There are several other projects in the works right now, including an RPG with over 100 different voice acting roles. I feel it’s our job to create the total audio environment for each game in such a way that the player will be drawn completely into that world.

BART: Was there anything special about how you approached doing the sound for Myth II?
MARTY & MIKE: The approach to sound design on Myth I was unique, in the sense that Bungie didn’t want any music during gameplay; therefore, we had to rely on other means to have audio create reality and emotion. We felt it worked so well that we didn’t want to change that approach for Myth II. For me, sound makes it real and music makes you feel, and since we are able to set the emotional tone for each level using music in cutscenes and under the narrations, we can really concentrate on making the environments and action sound as real as possible.

BART: Was there any difference between Myth I and Myth II in terms of how you approached the sound?
MARTY & MIKE: We were limited by the number of sound channels we could use on Myth I. This time we have more channels, stereo ambient background sounds, 3D audio, real-time effects (with the SBLive), and some room for context-sensitive in-game music. The music during gameplay is kept to a minimum because we feel that, just as in a film score, music should only come in at appropriate times.

It’s important to create music and sound effects in keeping with the style of the animation and the mythical world that Bungie has created. The actors are directed to be totally in character, and they take it very seriously. That’s what makes those moments of comic relief successful. “Sorry about that.”

BART: How did you do the ambient sounds? Do you have any interesting stories about how some of them were created?
MARTY & MIKE: The key for us is to have as much randomness in sound design as is found in nature. That’s not possible yet, but we’re getting closer. The audio loops are played back in random and shifting orders, and there are many individual sounds that get played randomly and at random times throughout any given area. It’s fun just to sit back and hear what we’ve created played back differently each time.

Many sounds are taken directly from nature—wind, water, fire, etc., but many other sounds are completely fabricated. Crumpling paper can be made to sound like the Trow freezing in position; a strange bird call was pitched down, reversed, and morphed with a human yell to create an unearthly cry. I have a bundle of dry grape vines that has come in handy many times for all sorts of bone-crunching and skull-shattering sounds.

Interesting history, thanks for posting these.