Myth: The Fallen Lords

» see bungie.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

There is nothing to build in Myth and nothing to harvest. You get a fixed set of units at the start of a level and whatever survives at the end, so the whole game is terrain and formation, which in 1997 made it a strategy game with the economy cut out of it. Bungie shipped it on 7 November 1997 in North America and Eidos brought it to Europe on 2 February 1998.

The physics were the reason people remember it. Explosions threw bodies. Dwarves carried satchel charges that could be rolled downhill into a formation, and would also blow up in your own ranks if you misjudged the slope. Blood and severed pieces stayed on the ground for the rest of the battle, so by the end of a fight the snow told you exactly what had happened on it. In 1997 that was not a common thing for a game to bother with.

It sold over 350,000 copies and made Bungie about $14 million in profit, which for a studio of that size in 1997 was a serious result. Then Bungie built a service to run the multiplayer, and the service turned out to matter more than the game.

PC games arrived in Turkey as copies before they arrived as boxes, which is a dull fact with one sharp edge on it. A copy runs the campaign fine. A copy does not get a bungie.net account, and Myth's online play was the whole point of Myth. The wall between me and this game was not the Atlantic, it was a serial number.

~ the case file ~

~ what bungie.net was for ~

Bungie built the site and the matchmaking service for this specific game. It handled accounts and matchmaking, and it kept persistent records of who had won what, at a time when most PC games shipped you off to a third party like MPlayer or the Zone and forgot about you. By 2000 more than 100,000 people had registered accounts on it.

Then Microsoft bought Bungie in June 2000 and the studio's attention went to Halo. The Myth section of bungie.net was a cost with no product attached to it. The servers for The Fallen Lords went offline in November 2001 and the rest of Bungie's Myth service followed in February 2002.

~ the servers the players built ~

The community did not wait to be shut down. Players had already reverse engineered the metaserver protocol, and MariusNet went live on 1 November 2001, run by two people using their own hardware. Bungie then did something companies rarely did: it released the server code for free. PlayMyth was built on that code a few months later and became the main hub for years.

Bungie also handed the game source to a volunteer group called MythDevelopers, who kept patching a commercial product after its publisher had walked away. They disbanded in December 2003 and Project Magma took over the first two games. PlayMyth went down in October 2007 after being hacked repeatedly. MariusNet lasted until sometime after early 2014, when the hardware running it was damaged during a house move, which is a very small and very human way for a decade of servers to end.

~ where those addresses go now ~

bungie.net answers, and it is Destiny's backend. The domain built to hold rankings for a game about dwarves and satchel charges now holds the account state of a live service shooter, which makes it one of the oldest continuously useful game URLs in the business.

The fan servers did worse. playmyth.net redirects to bagrada.net, an unrelated web application. mariusnet.com resolves to a Chinese-language gambling portal that has nothing to do with anything. Project Magma is still going and still shipping updates to the 1998 sequel. That is the only reason any of it runs on a current machine.

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