I've already said
once before that I'm no gamer. I've never even had a professional interest in the topic. It's just never been me, if you understand. Though perhaps understanding doesn't make much difference in cases like this. If that's true, then it's kind of possible to get where the other person is coming from. If you're able to say that you care passionately about something, then the need to justify that sort of fan devotion is a natural part and parcel of what it means to be a nerd and/or geek (choose whichever term you like; both seem to be interchangeable in the great scheme of things). That's why I kind of have to apologize for even choosing to write an article like this. In many ways it represents the intrusion of a passing amateur into what many will consider as protected ground. That means a lot of what you might have to say about any given video game is going to be judged on the final verdict you give to it. If you come out and say you just don't get the appeal of a franchise like
Mario,
Sonic, or the
Halo series, then you're kind of asking for a whole world of trouble that's best avoided at all costs. I can respect that. It's why I have to take the time here to explain that I come not to bash any one game or franchise entry that can be considered a legitimate classic. I'm after a different sort of specimen altogether.
I'd like to think that the reputation of what we might like to call the Pantheon Titles is more or less assured (always assuming (fair warning) that the fan base is successful in keeping the flame alive; that's advice worth taking; you've got no idea how easy it is even for masterpieces to wind up as forgotten memories, so heads up). This article isn't concerned with games like those. I'm aiming for the more middle of the road titles. Those platformers that are often considered fair to middling. The type of video game, in other words, where the popular reputation always remains somewhat up in the air. Such is the case with the Destiny franchise. Or at least that's how it has always seemed to me. The series has got its fans, don't get me wrong on that. Most of them are pretty well dedicated to their liking for this title and its content. I'm afraid it also has to be kept in mind that this has been very much a kind of minority opinion. The majority reception that every entry in the franchise has been met with tends to fall well into a mediocre at best type of rating. It's the sort of game where the buyer goes in with high hopes, and great expectations, only to come away asking a variant on the question, "Really, that's all"?

A lot of it seems down to the glaring contrast that comes from the way the games are marketed versus the experience of having to actually play through them. Every time Bungie throws a pre-release teaser trailer for one of their content, it always leaves the viewer with the impression that they're in for this kind of grand adventure in an outer space setting. So there's always this threat of a kind of tonal whiplash to be experienced when making your way through the final product. The most common complaints that players of
Destiny have made that I can recall off the top of my head (feel free to correct me on this) is that the setting, characters, and any possible narrative arcs are all flat and underdeveloped, and that this same criticism extends to the nature of the way the game is handled just on the level of simple mechanics and platforming. Making your way through the game is comparable to being invited into this awesome looking landscape painting, and then being slapped with the same "Do Not Touch" restrictions as you might find in a museum. The natural enough result is the type of experience that's best described by words like "cold", "sterile", and "difficult to get invested in",
There seems to be more than plenty of reasons for this being a common occurrence for the vast majority of players who give
Destiny a chance. The only real dispute in the matter seems to be where should the focus be when it comes to the game's shortcomings. Is it all just to do with the gameplay itself. Or do the problems exist at a more conceptual level? With all due respect to those whose focus remains locked in on the mechanics of the platform, I'm going to have to throw my hat into the ring with those who hold that the major problem with the
Destiny franchise lies with the way it was either conceived or executed in terms of planning, mapping, and above all, in terms of the game's
writing. I know there's this even split down the middle between those who like to focus on the mechanical side of gaming. There are players out there, in other words, for whom topics like the competition, the speed run, the playthrough, the high score, and just the way any game handles in terms of platforming, is of the most paramount importance. Then you've got this other camp, where the overall trends seems to be to treat a video game as a work of art, or even something akin to the great works of literature. Without making anything like a firm commitment here, I will say that it's easier for me to engage with a video game within the outlook and terminology of the second camp of gaming fandom. So that's what I'll do.
I'd like to take some time now to examine the overall aesthetic conception and quality of the Destiny franchise, in much the same way I would any book or film. In other words, I intend to look at the games as a piece of writing. I'm going to do it this way for a number of reasons. The first is because whether or not this is something I'm good at, it's the style of criticism I'm most used to. I said I was never much of a professional gamer for a reason. It wasn't the artform that got my attention the most as a kid, and that's pretty much how it's remained to this very day. I'm better at turning pages than game controls is all. So I guess you could say that, for better or worse, it's sort of like I wound up canceling out my ability to judge a game on its technical merits. There's no harm or foul there in the strictest sense, yet something of the full picture has been lost, perhaps. If that's the case, then all I can do is apologize. I no longer know how to look at games in any other way than the approach I'm going to employ here now. It leads me into the other reason for wanting to tackle this franchise from the more aesthetic crafting approach. I'm one of those guys who're willing to give games as art a chance.
It is possible to recall back to a time when video games were the most basic of things. It was no more than taking the plot of King Kong and condensing it all into four levels whose gist all amounts to the same thing: rescue the girl. Or you could take the ancient idea of the labyrinth, and turn it into a space populated with ghosts. Then again, there was also a time when you could boil a game down to the goal of shooting alien invaders on Earth, or in outer space. Sometimes you didn't even need aliens. You could make do just as well with meteorites. The point is that when video games first became a big thing, they weren't exactly known for their narrative depth. Hell, one of them amounted to little more than a simple game of Tennis. Still, as the old saying goes, that was then, this is now. I think even the original game designers from way back when (those who are still with us, anyway) probably remain astounded (albeit pleasantly so, for the most part) at how far the progression of technology has allowed games to advance. These days we've reached a point where some games can be considered legitimate movies in their own right. Sometimes this is great, as in the aforementioned Halo franchise. At other times, the results turn out to be less than desired. Here I'm not just thinking of the Destiny series in particular, but also of the wasted potential that was Assassin's Creed (see this video for that).

This is the issue that stands out the most to me when it comes to a console platform like Bungie's somehow abortive attempts at a second space adventure series. It's the lens through which I intend to take a general look at the always somehow only half-finished content of Bungie's other secondary world. There still exists a great deal of possibility for looking at video games as actual works art, whether from the perspective of design or narrative. The seeming failure of the
Destiny games to reach such vaunted heights seems to stem less from the quality of say, background art, and more to do with how it is all utilized.
A rose red city half as old as time amounts to a pretty picture. It also stops at being just that unless it is paired with something that is able to lend it a greater sense of depth, such as
tying it in to a well told story. That, for me, is the main problem with the
Destiny universe. To understand more about why this is a problem, it helps to take a closer look behind the scenes.
An Alleged "Story" Outline.Here's the part where things get mixed up. In the strictest sense, I'm not sure it's even possible to claim that this franchise has anything like a cohesive, over-arching narrative to it's name. I can't say with any certainty that there's an actual story to be had here at all. A lot of that is down to mismanagement by a combination of some (not all) of the game's developers and the corporate interests in charge of the Bungie studio, and it's final products. If you started to roll your eyes at that last sentence, then trust me, it's almost possible to claim you "might" be too nice in this case. Which is a polite way of saying that trying to find a story in
Destiny is a lot like looking for a single scrap of dialogue or description in a waste pile full of blank sheets of writing paper. The problem with trying to assign anything like a fixed narrative to this series is that the minute you begin to so much as critically examine and tug at the slightest bit of story threads, it becomes almost remarkable how fast the whole thing begins to unravel, leaving both players and even just casual onlookers holding the same handful of empty pages.
That sounds like a hell of a harsh criticism to make, even before we've got any sort description of what the story is about. Well, in terms of giving the game a chance, all I can say is that I tried, and now I have nothing to show for it, or almost, anyway. There is one scrap of information that was salvageable in what otherwise turned out to be less of a video game, and more the chronicle of a platform development studio and its road to inevitable downfall. I'll get to all that in a second. Right now, since it's obvious the audience is owed at least something in the way of a narrative to hang on to, even if only by a thread, here's the closest the game is ever able to offer us in terms of a narrative setup. It all starts one day when an allied space flight becomes the first mission to land human beings on the surface of the planet Mars. At least I think's supposed to be the first? It's hard to tell. This is just one example of the many narrative details that games remain sketchy about. Anyway, within the secondary world that Bungie attempts to lay out for us, we take our next giant step into the cosmos. The first astronauts to land on the Martian surface reveal that they are here because they are trying to follow a signal that has reached them all the way from somewhere on the surface of the legendary Red Planet. We follow this nameless trio of intrepid pioneers as they make their way across the planet's deserts and mountains.
Finally, they reach the top a peak, and everyone comes to a complete halt as they gaze upon the source of the mysterious signals being sent to up from the depths of space. The narration takes over from here. "We called it the Traveler, and its arrival changed us forever. Great cities were built on Mars and Venus. Mercury became a garden world. Human lifespan tripled. It was a time of miracles. We stared out at the galaxy and knew that it was our destiny to walk in the light of other stars - but the Traveler had an enemy. A Darkness, which had hunted it for eons across the black gulfs of space. Centuries after our Golden Age began, this Darkness found us, and that was the end of everything. But it was also a beginning (
web)". Now you might be thinking, so far, so good. What happens next? In all honesty, I wish I knew. Like I said, here's the part where things get mixed up, real fast.
The Fascinating Influences and Inspirations for Destiny.
If you want to talk about a game like
Destiny, sooner or later the whole conversation segues into the topic of how it all went off the rails. That's become something of an inevitability after the passage of years has done a lot to reveal all the drama and bad blood that wound up going on behind the scenes. Most discussion of this franchise tend to end on that note of company fallout, and the costs it's accumulated. That's a very understandable sentiment, yet it still doesn't quite do justice to the whole picture. Before the floor fell out from under everyone, there was still what you might call a brief moment of "magic time". A moment of quiet and enjoyable inspiration before greed, hubris, and other vices got in the way of things. So in order to get the full picture of what went wrong with
Destiny, it helps to go as far back to the beginning of the story as possible. It's just the best way to make sense of how it all turned out. Now here's the part where things can get a bit messy and contentious. Trying to get a grip on the failure of Bungie's latest attempt as a console series can often devolve into a bitter game of backlash, one in which the only solid rule is the refrain of "They said - I Say". Let that be a benchmark for how messed up things have gotten behind the scenes. It's a mantra shared by all parties.
It got bad enough to the point where there were lawsuits involved. So that just adds an extra bit of fun to the proceedings. This goes double if you're an uninvolved bystander who's just trying to make head or tails of the whole debacle for the sake of as clear a picture of what went down, or how it can explain how the final product released on the shelves turned out to be such a hodgepodge mess. That's the sort of challenge I'm faced with here in trying to make sense of what happened to Destiny. The basic rule of thumb for anyone who gets interested in this franchise has become as follows. Look around all you want, you'll never be so cautious that won't step on someone's toes sooner or later. It's perhaps the most thankless position any critic can ever find themselves in. It's also the type of situation that's become more of the norm in the current version of media entertainment. If you take even a quick look around at places like Hollywood, you'll see an industry going through its own state of existential crisis. There's a noticeable loss of a lot of the older forms of media professionalism that allowed the industry to survive and sometimes even thrive in more challenging situations. Apparently, that same loss of capability has now made its way into the world of video games. When a problem reaches that level of a collective trouble, it's kind of a glaring red sign that you've got some sort of major issue on your hands, and most of the higher ups in the industry seem to have no clue at all how to handle any of it. It's disconcerting, to say the least. The worst part is that too many people have their egos wrapped up in everything.
And so, here I am as just a fan commentator caught up in a troubling, yet somehow familiar situation. Believe it or not, I can think of at least one famous literary name who summed up this dilemma once before. I believe it was the British novelist Graham Greene who once observed, "Sooner or later...one has to take sides. If one is to remain human (
web)". So that's what I'll have to do here. I've had to figure out which former Bungie team member is trustworthy enough to convey at least the possibility of an accurate record of events for why the
Destiny games turned out like they did. For better or worse (or however you want to take it), this has meant that my ultimate source for behind the scenes information has become composer and musician Martin O'Donnell. He used to be one of the original core of the game development team of Bungie's operations. In addition to being the in-house composer for the soundtracks of the games created at the studio, O'Donnell was also one of the sounding boards for story ideas and concepts when it came time to figuring out what the next big project was going to be.
I'm going to have to rely on O'Donnell's testimony here, because for all intents and purposes, he's turned out to be the one with the greatest amount of information of how
Destiny got started. He also has his own story of how things ultimately went wrong. A good place to start is with an interview O'Donnell gave to broadcaster Kate Remington. It was all done as part of an online NPR program called
Music Respawn. It's a podcast devoted to exploring the artistry that goes into the music made for your favorite video games. Remington herself does a good job at setting the scenes to help ease us into the main crux of this story. According to an article she wrote on the topic of
Destiny, it all started not long after the release of the third installment in Bungie's popular and critically acclaimed
Halo franchise. "
Once Bungie had shipped Halo Reach, the studio went dark while they worked on their new game. The developers asked Marty (and later, O'Donnell's fellow music composer at the studio, Michael Salvatori, sic) to compose music with themes that would help the creative team brainstorm what direction the new game would take. Early in development, everything was on the table, even straight-up fantasy (web)". From here, O'Donnell is able to relate the story in his own words.
In his interview with Remington, Marty is able to take his listeners back to what Kate refers to as "the origin story of how it was created in the first place". Remington is interested in a particular suite of music that O'Donnell composed as a prequel for the game that would become Destiny, rather than the final product in and of itself. This might sound like an odd place to start talking about the contents (or lack thereof) to be found in the finished platformer as we now have it. However, I have to argue that choosing to focus in on O'Donnell and the music he composed for the project is the best candidate for getting at the core of Destiny because out of all the background details I've been able to dig up about the games, it is the work of this composer and his friends in the Bungie music department who has ever come the closest to giving an idea of what sort of creative concept Destiny was supposed to have. It means, for better or worse, that it all began like O'Donnell tells it. It began in the early 2010s, with what was by that time something of a standard practice at the company. The group at Bungie during that era (of which O'Donnell and Salvatori were then a part) had gotten in the habit of constructing what Marty refers to as "musical prequels" for the games that were under development during that time.
It meant the composition, construction, and eventual performance and public release of what were really musical concept albums that were meant to convey an idea of whatever game Bungie was developing through the use of song and instrumentation. It was something O'Donnell and Salvatori had done already at least once before with the Halo series. Not long after the completion of that third game in the former franchise, there was talk of casting about for ideas that would make up a new video game series. "Little did we know", Remington informs us, "that the origins of Destiny go back...a lot earlier than I thought; as early as 2009". Here's where O'Donnell is able to elaborate the details for us. "We were working on Halo: Reach, and we were working on Halo 3: ODST, simultaneously. And then, up in a little corner of the studio were two guys, Jason Jones and Jaime Griesemer, who were just beginning to work on this "New Thing". I don't even think we had a name for it yet. The secret code name was "Tiger". So, by 2009 it was interesting. Once a year, Bungie would have sort of a "What are We Working On" team meeting. And it was sort of a big deal. We would have team presenters come up in front of everybody, and this one was at a theater in Kirkland, to present progress on things we were working on. This was one of the unusual times when we had three things going on, simultaneously.
"It was August of 2009, and ODST was almost finished and ready to ship. Halo: Reach still had a probably year and a half to go. And then there was this new thing called Destiny that had just some concept art, and some pretty pictures of some vague concept of what this thing was going to be like. But we still wanted to present it to the team". As part of this presentation, O'Donnell started to compose a series of notes, melodies, and audio harmonics that might be termed a musical rough draft for what would go on to become the original creative idea behind Destiny. Looking back on it for the interview, O'Donnell was able to recall the thought process that led to what turned out to be perhaps the first small though real moment of inspiration for the game. "I knew we were going to have a presentation that day", Marty elaborates. "I'm like, "Okay, Destiny needs to have a whole new feeling to it. I knew it was going to be unearthly, but our Solar System. (It was to be) mysterious, and with a bit of a Fantasy element to it. We wanted it to feel more Fantasy than just Sci-Fi. So I played around...I do this periodically, when I need to. And I did it again on this thing for the Bungie Days presentation of Destiny. I think there was a nice video that was attached to it that had concept art. Joe wrote this cool little script. Joe Staten wrote this script about "What if the sun blinked"? What if something happened in our Solar System that changed everything? And so this was the music to accompany that.
"I wanted it to be Fantasy and Sci-Fi, and mysterious. I'll tell one other sort of weird thing", O'Donnell says, "if anybody cares". It's here that the composer relates the story of the most peculiar inspiration to help spark an idea for either a video game or its music. This is what happened. "Just a month prior", O'Donnell tells us, "I met an author at an art convention...at Orcas Island called Kindlings Fest. Anyway, the author's name was Michael Ward, and he wrote a book called Planet Narnia. It was his discussion of of how C.S. Lewis came up with The Chronicles of Narnia. I was fascinated by this because I had read a ton of C.S. Lewis. I also had a book called The Discarded Image by C.S. Lewis. Which is just a beautifully fascinating book that talks about the Medieval Image of the universe. Which is of course pre-Copernican and, you know, Earth geocentric. It's a beautiful Image, but (Ward, sic) had written this book called Planet Narnia where he put it all together about Lewis's fascination with that Image of the universe. Which is not scientifically correct, but in a certain way, more beautiful. It also is the inspiration for so much art, story, literature, myths, gods, and goddesses. (Even, sic) the days of the week. I mean you just name it, it's all over the place. It's one of the reasons why the number seven is so important. So that was all in my mind way back in 2009. So...I just sort of jumped on that.
"Without having a full understanding of what Music of the Spheres might be I was already using the...Latin names of the planets to do this little choral thing...Eventually I had the London Symphony choir singing that for The Hope, which was the last piece...That goes all the way back to 2009, and I was inspired by this idea of the pre-Copernican view of the universe". My initial reaction to all the info that O'Donnell is giving his listeners here is to ask "Are you sure this all happened in the early 21st century? 'Cause it sounds an awful lot like the kind of idea that would get tossed around as a notion way back during the 1980s. I doubt I'm being all too controversial here in claiming that the era of my childhood was quite possibly one of the latest (though hopefully not the last) of the great peak cultural moments in the human arts. Yes, there a lot of cheesy stuff to go around back then (for every Blade Runner or Amadeus, there were things like Killer Klowns from Outer Space (yes, really). However, on the whole a lot of it was canceled out by what can only be described as a remarkable bumper crop of creativity in both the literary, cinematic, and yes, sometimes even the video gaming arts. The point here is to note just how much O'Donnell's words are able to strike that chord of fitting nostalgia.
Nor does the peculiar intrigue of the composer's literary inspirations for his music stop there. It's interesting enough to note that if you decide to go way back in the historic records, to the point where you can like dig into the actual Medieval Lore that fired O'Donnell's Imagination, it's just possible to make one or two discoveries that carry a lot of tantalizing potential from a literary-artistic perspective. For the most part, it's in the way the era portrayed some of its entertaining pantheon of beasts, monsters, marvels, and elemental creatures. What I mean is that, it's like, if you study some of the actual Fantasy mythology of the Arthurian times, you can begin to make the slow discovery that the concept of interstellar visitors from space, or even other planets was alive and well even during the days of Geoffrey Chaucer. It wasn't just that you could run across encounters with visitors from other worlds, either. The nature of the Imagination in that period appears to have been of such a quality as to find a lot of easy ways to blend the interplanetary with what writers like Tolkien might have referred to as the Elvish crafts. What all this means in artistic practice is that it is just possible to claim that the Middle Ages had their own version intergalactic extra-terrestrials. Once you make this discovery, it becomes easy to draw a chronological history from the original Medieval inspirations for Tolkien's Children of the Stars, and from there the Poetic Image begins to evolve and develop through the centuries. Until at last you wind up in the present day incarnation of the tropes in the form Steven Spielberg's E.T.
I'll have to admit, it's one of the most fascinating literary lineages in the history of the narrative arts. The fact that such an Image has been able to hold on and maintain it's grip on our imaginations says a great deal about the staying power of what Jung referred to as Unconscious Archetypes. This then was the creative web, or matrix out of which O'Donnell and his collaborators drew to begin constructing their own secondary world. So far as I'm able to gather, then, it seems that Destiny was meant to have an actual, proper story attached to it at some point. According to Marty, the team behind this narrative consisted of Jones, Griesemer, Staten, Salvatori, and himself. For all intents and purposes that seems to have been the original core story development team for the game. What little hints we've been given about the original narratological shape that the video game was meant to take is described well enough in the summary Remington gives in an article she wrote on the topic for Music Respawn. "Eventually Marty decided to organize the suite based on the pre-Copernican idea of the Earth being at the center of the solar system. He wrote music to represent the moon, the sun, and the planets that could be seen with the naked eye: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. He created a key structure in which the key for each of the eight pieces would follow an eight-note scale, beginning and ending with C, so hearing the last piece, The Hope, would feel like a homecoming (ibid)". And then the story gets interesting.
The Beatle.
It seems that when the original Destiny story team where getting ready to solidify their initial concepts into a musical prequel format, someone had the idea to see if they could maybe get a big name performer attached to the project. Someone who could help give the game as wide a spread of public attention as possible. At point, an odd as hell suggestion was made. Why not get someone like Paul McCartney involved? It's got to be one of the most half-baked, left field ideas anyone's ever had. The curious part in all this is how the improbable became the actual. The details of how one of the original remaining members of the Fab Four got involved in scoring the soundtrack for a video game is outlined in detail with Mat Ombler's Polygon article, Bungie and the Beatle. It details the series of events that led to the company getting McCartney on-board with the idea for Music of the Spheres. According to the article, the Bungie representative most responsible for bringing the co-creator of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band on board was a man named Lev Chapelsky. "Chapelsky’s relationship with Bungie went back to 2001, the year the original Halo shipped. He was general manager of Blindlight, a company he founded to provide Hollywood production services to the video game industry. In the case of Bungie, this mainly involved casting actors and producing voiceover work for Halo titles.
"Over the years, Blindlight had been responsible for placing a lot of celebrities that had appeared in video games. The company brought all five Star Trek captains together in 2006’s Star Trek: Legacy, the only time they’ve worked together outside of the TV series. It also got Robert Downey Jr. and Edward Norton to reprise their roles as Iron Man and The Hulk in Sega’s 2008 games Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk...Chapelsky was used to making big requests. And asking one of The Beatles to write music for a video game? This was one of his biggest. “That was always our thing about getting celebrities for games,” Chapelsky says over Skype from his home in Palm Springs. “If we had a role in Fallout for the president of the United States, we’d start with the most unattainable and then draw a long list of 100 or so and work down from there.” So after O’Donnell’s work on Halo: Reach was finished, the pair started reeling off names of people O’Donnell could collaborate with for the music in the game that would become Destiny. “I said, ‘Let’s do that list,’” says Chapelsky. “‘Who would be the one person on Earth that you would like to create music with for this?’” O’Donnell immediately said “Paul McCartney.”
“I was gobsmacked by the idea of working with Paul,” says Chapelsky. “I’m a huge fan of The Beatles. It would be insanely beautiful on so many levels. However, as to whether that was the right fit for the product and the market? Honestly, I had some reservations there. “I said, ‘Well, Marty. I love you, I trust you. Okay, let’s do it.’ But I also thought, This isn’t going to happen. But we can give it a shot, move down, and then maybe find the next Trent Reznor.” McCartney may have seemed like an unconventional choice to score a sci-fi shooter, but you could have said the same thing about Steve Vai, Nile Rodgers, Incubus, Breaking Benjamin, Hoobastank, and John Mayer contributing music to Halo 2. Not only were Halo’s soundtrack releases commercial successes (Halo 2: Volume 1 sold more than 100,000 copies in the U.S.), they helped these bands and artists reach a new audience for their music". It turned that the unlikely yet genuine key to getting McCartney on-board with the project was down to the songwriter's innate, natural, and seemingly open-minded sense of musical eclecticism. Chapelsky explains, “He wants to try and do everything at least once. He wrote an opera. He’s done classical music. Every subgenre you can imagine, he’s done. He’s ticking off all the boxes of music that exist in the world, but he hasn’t done anything [for] games — and that spells incredible opportunity.”
It was this angle of stretching his generic boundaries as a musician that Chapelsky highlighted in the initial company letter that he sent to the Beatle on behalf of Bungie. Apparently the historical record shows that the guy must have said the right thing. because not long after, this happened. One day, not long after, "Chapelsky answered his phone. “Lev, you’re never gonna believe this,” he remembers an associate telling him, “but tell Marty he’s gonna have to get a flight to L.A., because we just got an email back from Paul’s people in London.” His associate was right: Chapelsky couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Sir Paul McCartney wanted to meet them and learn about Destiny. And if that meeting went well, he’d be writing music for the game alongside O’Donnell" Turns out, that's what happened. With Chapelsky acting as a liaison between the two, McCartney and O'Donnell got together for the first time at the Blindlight headquarters. All the testimony about that meeting tells the same story. It all went off like gangbusters. O'Donnell was relieved that McCartney was getting along well with everyone, and was taking a keen interest in the idea of creating a score for a console game. He made just one stipulation to them.
"Of course, McCartney had done some research in advance of the meeting and had questions about the scale of violence in Destiny. He didn’t want his name associated with anything that could damage his image. “I saw that question coming,” Chapelsky says. “I knew that my first answer to Paul had to be honest. ‘Yes, Paul. This is a game where you, the player, engage in killing. That’s a fact. However, there are no humans that you kill. They’re only aliens, and these aliens are trying to destroy not only you, but all of humanity. It’s your job to save humanity from extinction. You’re the person that enables hope for the future’ –– and I threw that [out], and he actually said, ‘Hope for the future’ … I can work with that!” I'm going to have to push back on at least one aspect of that paragraph. Ombler frames McCartney's misgivings about violence in terms of personal vanity. What he never stops to consider is that it could very well have been a case of the former Beatle remaining true to his own 60s countercultural values, and making sure he didn't compromise or sellout any of his beliefs. It's a possibility that never seems to enter Ombler's mind, and it's easy to detect the note of showbiz cynicism creeping into the article at this point.
In a way, it's a fitting warning for the pronouncements that Ombler makes later on about the eventual fallout that O'Donnell had with Bungie. It's the dark half of the tale I'll have to examine in just a minute or two. Before that, however, there is one last bit of fun to be had in the trivia that's revealed about Paul's reception of the main springboard for Destiny. "O’Donnell started discussing the idea that he’d been working on since 2009 called Music of the Spheres, an orchestral suite inspired by C.S. Lewis and based on a model of the universe proposed by Pythagoras and Aristotle called Musica Universalis (Universal Music), in which the movement of the planets creates musical harmonies. This idea spans 2,000 years of history, but O’Donnell wanted to put his own twist on it with Destiny’s lore. “I’ll never forget Marty saying, ‘I have this thematic idea that has this planetary theme going on and I look back in the history of literature and art and there’s this old canon of mythology around Music of the Spheres,’” says Chapelsky. “And he started trying to explain the concept to Paul, which is very complicated and abstract, but he didn’t have to. Paul just said, ‘I love Music of the Spheres!’ He knew everything about it! They started comparing authors and books on it; it was a creative mind-meld.” For those keeping score, this means that one of the artists responsible for pioneering and codifying the sound of modern Rock music is also familiar with a now obscure and esoteric way of looking at the known universe. It begs a lot of fun questions.
I mean like where did McCartney ever pick up on all this stuff? Why is he such a fan of this ancient piece of Medieval lore. What specific parts of this Discarded Image does he like? And what makes it all so appealing to him? It really is a case of learning some fun, new bits of trivia about one of your favorite artists. As it reveals a side to them that you never knew about before. The best part of learning about the elder Quarryman's liking for the Elizabethan World Picture is that invites all sorts of intriguing speculations as to how this particular bit of fandom within the circle of the Beatles themselves might have influenced anything that McCartney has done in the past, or even going forward? If I had to speculate, then I do remember hearing the story of how at one point the Beatles were looking to get an actual adaptation of Lord of the Rings off the ground, with them taking over a lot of the main roles. Yes, really. Supposedly, this was one of those ideas that never got past the talking and planning stages. The point, however, is that if you want me to try and pinpoint where one of the Fabs might have developed a fandom for this Cosmographical idea known to both Tolkien and Shakespeare, it might have come from the band's shared liking for the writings of Middle Earth. Or at least there's one possible explanation.
Whatever the case, when Paul heard that O'Donnell's concept for Destiny involved the idea of the Seven Heavens, he became enchanted with the idea, and agreed to help create the score. There's been a popular perception floating around that Bungie just brought the Beatle in for the sole sake of performing the song Hope for the Future, which was one of the few pieces of publicity that the game company put out in anticipation of Destiny's release. The idea is that Paul came in for like maybe just one day, laid down his vocal track for the song, collected his paycheck, then split, with him having nothing else to do with the making of the game. However, Mat Ombler has to be given this much credit. His article does help set the record straight. Far from being just a one and done deal, it turns McCartney was heavily involved with constructing the Music of the Spheres score. While work on Music of the Spheres was already well underway by the time of this meeting, McCartney began sending musical ideas and phrases to O’Donnell and his longtime friend, collaborator, and Halo co-composer, Michael Salvatori, that could be incorporated into the album.
“Paul would send us demo tapes of the ideas that he had, and it was on us — mostly me — to find the moments where we could weave his stuff into our music, because we were already so far along with writing Music of the Spheres at that point. In some songs, it’s kind of subtle, and in others, we used full sections of what he did,” Salvatori says. McCartney’s contributions ended up shaping five of the eight tracks that feature in Music of the Spheres, which was released years later on June 1, 2018, as part of a limited-run collector’s edition box set: The Music of Destiny: Volume 1. McCartney is also credited on numerous tracks in the Destiny OST due to his ideas being incorporated within the main soundtrack. McCartney’s contributions ended up shaping five of the eight tracks that feature in Music of the Spheres, which was released years later on June 1, 2018, as part of a limited-run collector’s edition box set: The Music of Destiny: Volume 1. McCartney is also credited on numerous tracks in the Destiny OST due to his ideas being incorporated within the main soundtrack. McCartney’s contributions ended up shaping five of the eight tracks that feature in Music of the Spheres, which was released years later on June 1, 2018, as part of a limited-run collector’s edition box set: The Music of Destiny: Volume 1. McCartney is also credited on numerous tracks in the Destiny OST due to his ideas being incorporated within the main soundtrack.
"One of McCartney’s prominent contributions was a three-note horn melody that O’Donnell discussed in a 2016 IGN interview. This became one of Destiny’s main musical phrases, and was used in a variety of tracks including “The Path,” “The Prison,” and “The Hope.” “Every song that Paul did have an input on, it’s not minor,” Salvatori says. “If you look at any of the old Destiny trailers, that [horn melody] was the thing that would always play at the end, so that was pretty important. We put it there and I think that made him really happy, and it made us feel like we were tied together. As the pieces go on, in some cases, there’s just a little bit of Paul, and in others, there are whole sections that were arrangements of a little bit he sent us where we blew it up, made it fully orchestral and played it for eight bars or something.” Some of the ideas that McCartney submitted were also experimental in nature, according to Salvatori, including tape loops created using the same vintage material on old Beatles tracks. “Those early tapes that he sent us were interesting because they were very raw, unpolished ideas just sorta strung together,” Salvatori says. “It was a little bit surprising that he didn’t polish his stuff more at first — but that also shows that he trusted us.” So the pieces of the story were all coming together.
The Poet.
I think the testimony of Jay Weinland, a former Bungie lead audio engineer, sums up the basic situation of that time, and how the original concepts for the game were being worked out by Salvatori, Staten, O'Donnell, and McCartney. "(The) music that we recorded for Music of the Spheres was the heartbeat of what was going on with Destiny at the time". It's a statement we'll have to circle back to. Before that, however, there remains at least one more piece of the puzzle at the center of this almost franchise. It's all explained once more by Kate Remington, in yet another Destiny related episode of Music Respawn. There she talks about how "Being able to listen to the music is just such an incredible experience". At the same time, "it's, well, not really the tip of the iceberg. It's just one component of of this whole vision that Marty had for Music of the Spheres. And he told me that his friend, Malcolm Guite, who is a poets and a scholar in Cambridge, a C.S. Lewis fan and scholar, wrote poems after listening to these pieces. And I know one of the things that he was really hoping for was that somehow the music and the poetry would end up together for people to enjoy at the same time (web)". As such, some introductions are in order.
Malcolm Guite is and remains at the time of this writing a Professor of English Literature at both Cambridge University, as well as St. John's College at Durham U. When you go back to examine his personal history, what's remarkable about his early life is just how much it seems to tread over the same personal ground covered once before, not just the of likes of C.S. Lewis, but also of J.R.R. Tolkien. Like the author Lord of the Rings, Guite was as an Anglo-Brit within the country of Africa. Guite's infant years were spent in Nigeria, as opposed to Tolkien's Bloemfontein, however. In addition, he had the luck of being allowed to live out a seemingly normal childhood, with neither of his parents succumbing to illness, thus allowing him to experience something that both Tolkien and Lewis never really got in retrospect. Malcolm was allowed the gift of a fairly normal childhood. Much like Lewis, however, Malcolm was sent to a British Boarding school in England for his education, and much like the author of Narnia, he received a wake up call about the English Class structure. This came in the form of the shoddy and debilitating state of the British education system. Also like Lewis, it was a very traumatic experience, and it seems that Guite has dedicated his own present career as an educator in the service of reforming the very Institution that he now works for. The rest is simple enough to tell.
After managing to survive the cesspool of private schooling, Guite won a scholarship to Cambridge's Pembroke College where he began to discover an affinity for the poetry and writers of the Romantic Movement. A simple way to describe a long and complex process might be to claim that Guite remains one of the few self-proclaimed disciples of the Philosophy of Romanticism that I know of. It's an outlook that has determined both his scholarly and literary endeavors. This has included, believe it or not, being offered the chance to work on a video game. Before we get to Guite's work on Destiny, it is worth listening to the testimony of Owen Spence, a passionate Destiny fan, on how a previous encounter during Guite's college days wound up as an intriguing possible bit of foreshadowing in terms of his later role within the Music of the Spheres. According to Spence, Guite "shared a really interesting story about Paul McCartney from way before Music of the Spheres was even being worked on...When Malcolm was my age (i.e. about 17 to 18, sic)...his father sent him out to a boarding school in England...So he's sent to this...school, and it's just the most beautiful campus. It's like there's this lake. You just look out the school window...and you see this huge lake...and there's this beautiful mountain range in the background. It was just the most beautiful campus from what I've heard.
"And, so, when they would do exercises for physical education, they'd run laps outside, around the school. Malcolm, instead of doing that, he would go to, like, a cave. Because there were all sorts of caves around (the school grounds, sic). And he had a stash of beer and cigarettes in one of those caves. So...as all of the students would start running, at some point (Guite, sic) would head to the cave, and then he would head back and finish with the rest of the students, and no one would notice he was gone. One day, he's sort of in this cave, right? And he hears voices outside, and it's like, "Oh God, they found me"...So he starts booking it outside, and he runs into, or crashes into someone. The next thing he knows, right there is Paul McCartney. It turns out the Beatles were actually shooting a picture at this beautiful campus, for one of the things that they were working on. None of the students actually knew about that. So Malcolm just runs into Paul McCartney and Paul hears about this stash that he had, and it's just about the funniest thing. So you fast forward all these years to when Malcolm is working on poetry for a Paul McCartney music work. And he told this story to Marty, who then told this story to Paul. And all these years later, Paul McCartney says, "Oh yeah, I remember that!". So it's like it came full circle. It was a great event for him". It also reminds me of something said by another author.
Vladimir Nabokov, of all people, was of the opinion that life is made of patterns of interlacements. The significance of one event might find ways of, as Spence says, coming full circle. So that what seemed an insignificant random chance encounter in the past somehow winds up taking a greater sense of weight when some further action or encounter happens to serves as a bridge, or connecting thread of meaning between the past and the present. It's a phenomenon that Nabokov remained interested in all his life, and it just struck me as funny that it sounds for all the world as if Guite and McCartney had experienced one of those Nabokovian moments. Anyway, the way in which the Cambridge Literature scholar and poet came to work with Sir Paul on Destiny is something Spence talks about on the Respawn podcast. According to Owen, "(Malcolm) and Marty actually met at a gathering of artists and theologians on the Isle of Wight. Believe it or not, Marty and Malcolm's very first conversation was about Music of the Spheres and these sort of Medieval concepts. That was their very first conversation.
"So, from the moment they met, I guess it was just, "Let's do something with this"! Because obviously they were both interested in it. They were both passionate about it. So Marty hires Malcolm to write his poetry for Bungie. This story is really interesting, when Malcolm wrote the first two poems, which basically inspired the layout for all fourteen of them. I don't know exactly what this incident was. (However, sic) there was, like, this bus accident, or something. (Guite, sic) was in some huge accident. And he was at the hospital waiting to be operated on" The crucial point was that throughout the ordeal that followed, the Professor kept his writing notes for the Destiny poems, and kept scribbling away in his idea book even as he was being taken to the OR. "(So), first of all, he's writing this high on morphine because he was in pain, and all that stuff. His leg was like in a million pieces at the time". So there he was, a tenured and decorated scholar of English Literature who one day found himself high as a kite, having to bide his time "on the floor of this hospital, waiting to be operated on. There were people (there with him, sic) who were in a lot worse condition than he was. So (Guite) was like at the bottom of the list" in terms of medical care and expenditure. And so writing was a solace for him.
In fact, what the podcast describes next bears an almost uncanny resemblance to what Stephen King once described about recovering from his own automobile accident. In Prof. Guite's case, the shared experience went something like this. According to Spence, "He looks out the window, and it's snowing, and there's a full Moon. Sound familiar? So he starts writing this poem about what was going on outside, and it becomes the Music of the Spheres poem for the Moon. I don't how much of the morphine influenced that. (However), that was an interesting story (ibid)". For my own part, as someone who has taken time to listen to Guite's verses recited on their own YouTube channel, knowing the immediate autobiographical context which seems to have been a driving force for the first set of lines in the poetic cycle gives an odd sense of resonance to the verses Guite chose to express the nature of Earth's nearest celestial neighbor. It's all the more affecting if you go back and make a study of the Medieval astrological lore about the Moon itself. To artists like Chaucer or Shakespeare, there was a very fine line between the ability of Luna (or Diana, as she was also known) to be both a blessing, or a curse. She could be a cosmic force that drives men mad, just as much as she could be a guiding light for travelers trying to find their way by the light of the stars. A lot of this is down to the relative geographical nature of the Lunar satellite, in and of itself. On the one hand, it's a useful compass point. On the other, it can't always mark the way to you need to go. It's this ambivalent, tight-rope walker quality that Guite is able to capture in his poetic lines of description for what he called The Path.
For his own part, Guite describes his involvement with the Destiny team in more measured, self-effacing tones. "A number of years ago I was given an interesting poetic commission and I am at last in a position to reveal what it was, and some hint of its contents. I had come to know the composer Marty O’Donnell, who is famous, amongst other things, for having composed the music for Halo, and for Destiny, two major games for the computer game company Bungie. When he was working on the music which would help to frame the game Destiny, a game whose narrative and architecture draws on the classical and mediaeval idea of the heavenly spheres, each with its own character and distinct music, he composed a beautiful new suite of music called ‘The Music of the Spheres’, and as we had talked together about the ‘seven heavens’ of the mediaeval world-view he asked me if I would compose a suite of poems to go with the music. I came up with a sequence called ‘Seven Heavens, Seven Hells’. It consists of fourteen poems, arranged in seven pairs, which I composed in direct response to Marty’s music but also drawing inspiration, as we both did, from the mediaeval ‘seven heavens’, the crystalline spheres of the planets with their different characteristics and influences.
"The whole approach, both to the poetry and the music, which Marty and I discussed early was a response to the idea, based in mediaeval astrology of ‘opposing pairs’. Each of the seven spheres has a certain cluster of associations and influences, Venus with Love, Mars with war and martial valour, the Sun with gold, but also poetry and inspiration etc. But equally it is possible for each of these celestial influences to become corrupted and malign, for, as St. Augustine says, good is primal and evil is always a corruption of some original good. Astrologically this is expressed in the idea that there is a diurnal, or good and light-filled aspect of each sphere, but also a nocturnal or dark aspect. Michael Ward, whose work Marty and I both admire, draws this out brilliantly in Planet Narnia, his account of the Seven Heavens in the thought and writing of CS Lewis. So my poems are paired for each sphere, starting with the diurnal and following it up with the nocturnal. The form of these poems is the ‘roundel’, a development of a mediaeval form pioneered by Swinburne. In a roundel the first phrase of the first line becomes a kind of chorus or echo repeated elsewhere in the poem. So in my sequence that first phrase is common to both poems in the pair, but differently developed according to its heavenly or infernal form". Here is where Guite gives his readers the first hint of things going wrong behind the scenes.
"Happily, Bungie liked the poems when I presented them and I signed a contract with them, to use the poems in Destiny. The original plan was to have a stand -alone release of Marty’s music first as a CD etc, with my poems as part of the liner notes to accompany the music. However, this plan was abandoned, and though I was credited as ‘poet’ when the game came out, the poems were never released. But now I am happy to say that Bungie have released the music. In anticipation of the vinyl being shipped later this year, a creative group within the ‘Destiny Community’ have, after talking with Bungie, and with Marty’s blessing and mine, produced a very beautiful video sequence incorporating each poem, and presenting the music with images. My contract with Bungie means that I cannot publish the poems in full myself until two years after they have officially released the music (web)". So far, this article has consisted of a series of interconnected tales of creation going on backstage. A lot of it is heading turning, yet it can also be insightful and fun, at the very least. The more observant readers in the audience, however, might have a nagging question at the back of their minds. It goes like this.
"What you've just told us all sounds like the recipe for either a very intriguing Science Fiction book, movie, or even one hell of a video game. That still leaves one important question unanswered. What about the game itself? What sort of content does it have? Is it good, or not worth playing. Where's the story"? The answer to that last question still remains what I said a while ago. I haven't the faintest idea, and I wish I knew. In terms of the gameplay, from what I've seen, the whole thing handles like your basic Third Person Shooter platform. You're given a customizable player sprite to work with. Then, once you hit the start button, you're dropped into just a handful of the Seven Symbolic Planets that O'Donnell and Guite were going on about, and the rest of your time is spent just shooting at an interminable number of mooks whose soul reason for a digital half-life is to see how quick you can get them squared in the line of your sights before mashing the attack button on a kind of mental auto-pilot. Do it enough times and sooner or later you're bound to discover that the greatest reward for a complete waste of time comes in the form of Carpel Tunnel Syndrome. You can throw a flock of seagulls in there, if you want. That's still about it. There's very little in the way of a draw for me with these games. I wish I could say that once the pieces are assembled it all amounts to a greater whole. That'd be a lie, however. In fact, I can't even say that any of the pieces were ever put into the game. Instead, all we're left with is a meandering journey with a lot of empty pages in terms of a destination.
That's the easy critique to make of Destiny, and its one that's been made even by its detractors. There may be a certain sense in which they are correct. However, the casual critics still risk missing the overall meaning of what they've got on their hands. Considering all this amazing backstory about ancient Medieval concepts informing the idea of an interplanetary space adventure, everything that we've just read or heard leaves open a veritable window of creative possibilities. There are just so many ways to go with how Bungie could have handled the material that Staten, O'Donnell, Guite, and McCartney gave them to work with. The real question is how does a good creative idea go wrong?
Conclusion: The Story and Game that Never Was.
At the start of this article, I said that gamers tend to come in two types. Those who are in it just for the sake of the gameplay, to the exclusion of all else. Then you've got those players who are drawn to a platformer not just because of its mechanics, but also because the narrative behind the action acts as a natural enough draw on their time and effort. It's a two-for-one deal that is able to satisfy the best of both worlds. I bring this dichotomy back up again, because it seems that if I've learned anything from studying the rising and falling fortunes of the Destiny franchise, it's that it really does seem as if the narrative based gamers tend to outweigh those focused on the platforming features. This is not to deny that the latter type of gamer still exists. It's just that there's something about the human mind that responds better to any stimulus if its a got a good narrative attached to it. The basic rule of thumb here seems to go something like this. If you've got a good yarn to go along with you're game, then while it's impossible to guarantee anything in showbiz, it's not all that unreasonable to say your hopes of being remembered and acclaimed years later can stand a much higher chance of coming true, more often than not. Human beings seem to live in a realm of meanings bounded by myths, legends, and stories.
It just seems to be our most basic of operating features. Perhaps its this narratological need of the human mind which also explains why the general reception to the Destiny games has been so consistent in its mixed to negative response. It's all summed up well enough by gaming journalist Paul Suddaby. "Destiny was arguably the biggest game of the year. As a massive undertaking from Bungie, expectations were high upon its release and sales followed accordingly. Now that the game has been out for a while, it's become apparent that some marketing snafus and a few key design mistakes held Destiny back from becoming the game everyone was hoping it would be. Few games have ever had as much hype as Destiny. Excitement for the game started building even before it was announced; as soon as Bungie declared that they were moving away from the Halo franchise, gamers everywhere were giddy with anticipation for their newest project. The Halo games were all top-of-the-line products, with tight multiplayer, and cinematic campaigns that resonated with many people. Destiny was expected to be great even before anybody knew anything about it.
"Then the marketing machine rolled in and the hype got out of control. The game's initial reveal was nothing more than some concept art and some story details from a leaked document, and people were already hooked. Eventually the game was officially revealed to the media as the first instalment in a series of games to be released over ten years. Everything about Destiny just screamed epic, and media outlets and trade shows had a never-ending supply of new details, previews, and trailers for the game. Unfortunately, this massive hype contributes to Destiny's most obvious flaw: it over-promised and under-delivered. All of this press was filled with details about the game, and how it was to be one of the biggest and most expansive experiences the medium had ever seen. Players were told they could explore their entire solar system in a massive multiplayer open world, with a strong narrative to tie it all together and a solid competitive shooter included on the side.
"The game that actually launched is a pale imitation of the game that was promised, containing only a few planets in our solar system, and a narrative that manages to be cliché and boring and yet also border on incoherence. The gameplay feel of the shooting and movement is excellent, but the game has nowhere near the amount of content people expected, and much of what was promised simply never came to fruition. Even worse, trailers for the game even just months before release featured characters, cutscenes, and environments that are nowhere to be seen in the final product. This type of marketing is disingenuous, and does nothing but leave a sour taste in players' mouths. It's unclear at this point whether this was an intentional deception on the part of Destiny's marketing team, or if there were more complicated issues that led to the discrepancies between what was advertised and what was released. Game development can be complicated, and things don't always go as planned. What we can learn from this is clear however: don't promise more than what you are confident you are capable of delivering".
Suddaby is smart in asking the key question. Where does the problem with the final product lie? As it turns out, an article by Jason Schreier is able to go as far to a complete answer to that question that I've been able to dig up. It's titled The Messy, True Story Behind the Making of Destiny. According to what Schreier was able to dig up, the original focus of the franchise "was to be a cross between a traditional shooter like Halo and a massive multiplayer game like World of Warcraft. It was going to become a cultural touchstone. “We want people to put the Destiny universe on the same shelf they put Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter or Star Wars,” Bungie COO Pete Parsons said in an interview two years ago. Reports suggested that the publisher Activision had committed to a ten-year deal worth $500 million to make that happen.
"Two years ago, something went wrong. Destiny’s writing team, led by the well-respected Bungie veteran Joe Staten, had been working on the game for several years. They’d put together what they called the ‘supercut’—a two-hour video comprising the game’s cinematics and major story beats. In July, they showed it to the studio’s leadership. That’s when things went off the rails, according to six people who worked on Destiny. Senior staff at Bungie were unhappy with how the supercut had turned out. They decided it was too campy and linear, sources say, and they quickly decided to scrap Staten’s version of the story and start from scratch. In the coming weeks, the development team would devise a totally new plot, overhauling Destiny and painstakingly stitching together the version that’d ultimately ship a year later, in September 2014. The seams showed. Reviewers singled out the story in particular, knocking the vague plot, thin characters, and opaque dialogue. One line, unconvincingly uttered by a cold lump of person-shaped metal named The Stranger, encapsulated the game’s narrative problems: “I don’t have time to explain why I don’t have time to explain.”
As you might expect, "questions remain. How did such an ambitious game wind up with such a bare-bones plot? Why did Bungie seemingly change so much of the story before it shipped? And how did it ship in a state that required so much tweaking after it launched? What really happened behind the scenes of Destiny? For the past 13 months, I’ve been investigating the answers to those questions. After conversations with over half a dozen current and former Bungie employees, all speaking anonymously because they were not authorized to talk publicly about these issues, the story that has emerged is one of a studio that was overwhelmed by a sudden reboot, a ruthless production schedule, and a number of other debilitating factors including the technical challenges of a brand new game engine. Bungie’s last Halo game, Halo Reach, had come out in 2010. The studio had been working on its next big thing at least since then. Despite that, much of Destiny as we know it today wasn’t actually conceived until 2013, a year before it shipped.
"In February of 2013, Bungie invited journalists to their offices in Bellevue, Washington for the official unveiling of Destiny. Details had been trickling out in the previous months thanks to early leaks, but this was the big blowout—the event where the well-regarded studio would finally reveal what they’d been doing since releasing Reach in 2010. What they did show was ambitious: They promised that Destiny would be “the first shared-world shooter,” a game where you could seamlessly meet up with friends and strangers among the swamps of Chicago and the rings of Saturn. Over the following year, Bungie would publish trailers with equally ambitious claims: “You hear shots ring out, and you look to the left and there’s your friend,” said one Bungie staffer in a Destiny video. “There he is, like there was no matchmaking, he just pops right in.”
"When Destiny finally came out in September of 2014, players immediately noticed that something was off. There was no grand, Star Wars-caliber story. In fact, there wasn’t much of a story at all; Destiny‘s missions were at best vague and at worst incoherent, strung together by a mess of proper nouns and hilarious dialogue. Proclaims lead actor and constant companion Peter Dinklage during one early mission: “The sword is close. I can feel its power… Careful! Its power is dark.” That’s one of the game’s more memorable lines. Thanks to the discrepancies between Bungie’s promises and the final product, rumors spread that Destiny had gone through major changes late in development. Fans went back through Bungie’s old videos, pinpointing characters and missions that weren’t actually in the game, like the planet Saturn and a blue-skinned alien who was shown in one cut-scene pointing a gun at the player’s character. It was almost wishful thinking: Surely, fans thought, Bungie couldn’t have intentionally released a game with a story this bad? Surely the plot was changed at the last minute? Turns out they were right.
"In the summer of 2013, just over a year before Destiny came out, the story got a full reboot, according to six people who were there. Bungie ditched everything Joe Staten and his team had written, reworking Destiny’s entire structure as they scrapped plot threads, overhauled characters, and rewrote most of the dialogue. The decision was made against Staten’s wishes, sources say. Destiny project lead Jason Jones and the rest of senior leadership were unhappy with the writing team’s supercut, and their reaction was to scrap it all...Everyone I spoke to agreed on one point: Bungie’s senior leadership, including Jason Jones, didn’t like what they saw. Some in the studio took issue with the rhythm of progression, which would have shown players all four main planets—Earth, the Moon, Venus, and Mars—within the first few missions of the game. (Obviously the moon isn’t technically a “planet,” but in the parlance of Destiny, the two are interchangeable.) According to one source, Jones also told the team that he wanted a less linear story—one in which the player could decide where to go at any time. That became one of Destiny’s key pillars.
"So in July of 2013, Bungie’s leadership decided to totally reboot Destiny’s story. They kept much of the lore and mythology—the Traveler, the idea of Guardians, enemy races like Cabal and Vex—but they overhauled Staten’s entire plot, according to the people who spoke to me for this piece. Over the next few months, Jones did two pivotal things, sources said. He designed the interface we know now as the director, a sleek set of maps in which missions are presented as nodes within each planet. He also organized a series of extensive meetings called “Iron Bar” where he and other top creators at Bungie like art director Chris Barrett and design lead Luke Smith would figure out how to cobble together a new, less linear plot for the game. This small group of developers spent the next two weeks sketching out a new plot and figuring out how to fit in the story missions they’d created over the past few years.
"In the weeks after the reboot, the Iron Bar group—along with a team of designers and producers called Blacksmith (because they’d hammer and polish the “Iron Bar”)—came up with a new plan for Destiny. They rescoped the game...They changed the order in which players would progress between each planet. And they cut apart each story mission, splicing together encounters from a variety of old pieces to form the chimera that was Destiny’s new campaign. “[The design team] would have to cobble together and cut and restitch and reuse a bunch of stuff that was already built for a different thread, but now tie it together in some way that fit this amorphous, ‘You pick which way you’re going in the director’ story,” said one person familiar with Destiny’s development. “The priority was, ‘Hey, we have to take a bunch of content that we’ve spent millions of dollars on, we need to cobble it together in a way that is not going to break continuity, and we’ve gotta do it quickly.’" “So if you were going from point A to point Z in the course of [the original, pre-reboot story], they would take out section H-J because it was really tight encounter design and they’d put it off to the side and say, ‘How do we get H-J in this other storyline?’” said a source" “It was literally", as one anonymous, behind the scenes whistler blower so aptly described it later on, as "like making" up a "Franken-story (web)".
It's that last metaphor that best sums up the problems at the heart of the franchise. It might have started out as a linear concept with a coherent storyline. However, it also ended up as the merest patchwork hodgepodge. A conglomeration of fragmented bits and pieces of narrative that were stitched together at the last minute by studio brass who had lost, or maybe even never had all that much faith in the product they were marketing. What Schreier's article has to say about Bungie developer and CEO Jason Jones is suggestive here. Reading the report, I get the impression that there might have always been this parting of ways when it came to envisioning what the game should have been. Staten, Salvatori, and O'Donnell, for instance, were thinking in terms of story and world-building. Jones, however, always seems to have been thinking about nothing more than an open-ended co-op platformer. The kind of setup where words narrative concerns, or even setting really aren't all that paramount. The kind of scenario Jones seems to have had in mind, in other words, was like his own version Super Smash Bros. The kind of game where all you need is an arena to compete in, and not much else. If this is the plan, and you're the boss, then why not make that crystal clear to your subordinates and employees?
The strength of any cooperative project like this, whether artistic or commercial oriented, depends on the ability of all concerned to make sure they are united under a shared vision for their game. Otherwise, it's just making it up as you go along. Now to be fair, that is an accurate description of what even Shakespeare did while he was writing his best work. The difference is that was all the case of just a single artist working with little in the way of other hindrances. With no other distractions begging for his attention, and little in the way of other obligations, the Bard of Avon was able to focus on crafting as entertaining a narrative as his Imagination could manage. Shakespeare had the benefit of being just himself in that regard. I say this not to compare apples and oranges, however. All it's meant to do is point out what the story doctors on a group project are up against when any possible creative vision they might have is at loggerheads with the thinking of the executive branch of the company they work for. It speaks to a debilitating lack of focus on one part of the team, and that's generally considered a big "do-not-go-there" red light when it comes to the effort of trying to make a creative video game.
It's not a question of too many cooks spoiling the broth, so much as one single crack in a suit of armor rendering the whole setup useless. If, as I think, there was probably never any real meeting of either the artistic or corporate minds at Bungie when Destiny was in development, then it really does seem as if O'Donnell and all his collaborators were fighting an uphill battle that they didn't even seem to be aware of until it was too late. It gets even worse once you stumble across an interview O'Donnell gave to YouTube vlogger Kelly Von Achte. It was a conversation the former Bungie composer did a while after he left the company. Among the other bits of information he shares in that video is that he never seems to have left voluntarily. It appears he was forced out of Bungie for what might be termed "creative differences". The long and short of a complex and convoluted story is that at some point, the goals of Bungie's policy as a company switched from making a good game that players will enjoy, to one where the real focus is "How do we maximize our profit margin"? It's possible for such a question to make logical sense in a business setting, yet Jones and the others seem to forget one thing. You have to make sure your product meets the needs of Supply and Demand! You can't just create any product and then plop it on the retail shelf with a sticker attached reading "Buy My Shit"! You need to give the customer a reason for even wanting to own a copy of your game in the first place, otherwise it's bad business!
The thing to note is that all I've done here is to give an outline of even the merest necessities of good economic policy, and yet Jason Jones and others at Bungie headquarters are acting in ways that seem oblivious to even the most basic of these requirements. It's the kind of thing that has to be mind-boggling to the average, observant consumer. At the same time, from my own vantage point, I can't say it's nothing I haven't seen before. In fact, the behavior of Jones and the other controlling interests at Bungie might almost be seen as conforming to a collective pattern I've seen emerging in the current Entertainment Industry as a whole. There seems to have been a growing drop off in media literacy and utilization in the worlds of cinema, gaming, and perhaps even the publishing market to a troubling extent. It just seems like there's a lot of CEOs and corporate suits who apparently have no idea of how to handle the artistic aspects of human media. This in and of itself might not be new. What is, however, and what remains baffling to this day is that the people entrusted to run a media company in a responsible fiscal manner are showing signs of not having so much as a single clue of how normal business operations are meant to work. That's the part of all this which is a real head-scratcher for me.
I'm pretty much clueless as to why this should turn out to be the current state of affairs. It's counterproductive. It benefits no one. Above all, it runs counter to all functional commercial interests, and if left unchecked could be responsible for a decent amount of economic instability somewhere, at the very least. If I'm being honest, I can't understand why the Bungie company hasn't filed for bankruptcy at this point. So far as the Destiny franchise is concerned in all of this, here's the best way I can put it. The more I think it over, the best I can say is that I think I've got a clear enough idea of what might have happened if George Lucas had come up with Star Wars today, instead of way back during that prime time of independent productivity in the 60s and 70s. If Lucas was like this young-ish Millennial or just this up-and-coming Zoomer artist looking to put his name on the map, and he'd still managed to come up for all the original ideas that we know as the Galaxy Far, Far Away, then it probably would never get off the ground. There wouldn't be a studio either willing or able to realize the director's own creative vision for all of the original trilogy. It just can't be done in today's settings.
I think it's best to let that realization stand as a parable or (what's more fitting) an Allegory for what happened to Joe Staten, Marty O'Donnell, Mike Salvatori, and Malcolm Guite and all of their shared dreams for what Destiny could have been. Hell, they even had one of the freakin' Beatles involved, and they still got stiffed when it came to company priorities. Which just begs a further question. Would any of the Fab Four be able to leave an impact the way they did in today's media environment? To be fair, it's possible they would have been able to carve out a niche for themselves in the Indie Music scene. However, it's an open question in my mind if the current social media landscape would have allowed them to get as firm a hold of the popular imagination like the one they established for themselves in the 60s. Let that be a further allegory for how Fortune's Wheel has turned for any an all such ambitions at the present moment. So what does all this leave the critic to work with in terms of a final product to analyze? Well, for me, it's one of the greatest ironies to find myself confronted with.
Someone comes along with a product that calls for a carefully examined, and fairly judged review. The punchline, however, is that Destiny is an artwork that more or less dissolves in your hand the minute you pick it up to examine its contents. It's like trying to sift through an empty sandbox. All the critic gets for his troubles is so many handfuls of dust. It leaves the reviewer faced with something of an unexpected dilemma. How on Earth do you critique a story, or a game, that doesn't exist, in the strictest sense. It's like Jason Jones and the other suits at Bungie have constructed an accidental Zen Koan. Is the game a fact, or a fiction? Under these circumstances, I'm afraid it's almost impossible to give anything like a complete review. And before anyone else points out the obvious, yes, I am aware of the various expansions that have been added to the game over the years. I'm also not sure they count for much. Bungie has kept a series of "content" additions going with their Frankenstein version of O'Donnell and Staten's original concept. They come in the form of expansion packs, and each one I've looked at puts me in the mind of the same thing. It's like watching episodes of a piss-poor Sci-Fi series where there's no real creativity to be found on-screen, and everyone looks to be asleep at the wheel.
The brightest spot in all of this might be the inclusion of longtime Bungie voice-actor Nathan Fillion. However, it's also as YouTube critic Alex Beltman points out in his series of videos on the franchise. The trouble that Fillion faces in working on Destiny is that he's never giving much of a script to work with. Like every other figure in the finished product, we are not dealing with three-dimensional characters with fully understandable narrative arcs. Instead, both the player and the games' various NPCs are little more than empty ciphers meant to hurry the gamer along to the next bit of platforming. The mistaken notion being a video game doesn't need a hook that can lure and draw prospective players into having a reason for picking it up and playing it. The logic here is like saying a book doesn't need to have text in it in order to be legible. It's like failing to grasp that the reason even journals, diaries, and writing notebooks exist and fly off the shelves on a regular basis is because they are made because words have to be placed on the pages. It's their sole, purpose, it's all they do. Again, it's like we're confronted with this strange mental compartmentalization that thinks its okay to separate any and all business products from their content. It's as if they seem to think you can just hand off an empty jar to the next customer who comes along, and congratulate them for their new bottle of air. The logic in such a scenario is so flawed, I'd almost have to ask if the sellers were delusional in some fashion.
Yet this is what Bungie continues to do with Destiny over and time again. The most egregious example of this being the company's recent habit of archiving, or erasing one of the few expansion packs to receive generally positive acclaim. Players in general have pointed to a DLC known as The Taken King as an example of what the games should have been like to start with. I will also note in passing that one of the reasons it seems to work so well is because because it reuses the basic outline, and even some of the settings and characters from Staten's original script. This is something the viewer will pick up on if they read through Schreier's article above. In fact, this bit of backstage trivia also lends a very plausible reason for why Bungie might decide to erase this particular DLC from its expansion pack lineup. If it becomes too popular or well known, it runs the risk of giving Staten legal standing to sue the company for creative mishandling and plagiarism. It's the sort of case that the artist could win if it ever got to court. So instead of paying the kind of damages which would put a dent in the company's earnings, Jones and Bungie merely erased it from the game's stockpile. Again, this is the kind of thing O'Donnell hints at in his interview with Von Achte. It was normal policy over at Bungie. This means we can have the addition of a toxic work environment as a contributing factor to Destiny's woes.
With all of this in mind, I'm afraid I'm left no real choice except to give this game a failing grade. Perhaps the most galling thing about this final call for me is that a bit of digging backstage contains a lot of hints that it maybe never had to be this way. There's a moment in one of Alex Beltman's many critiques of the game that sums it up nicely. "I saw this complex flow chart of how each piece of "content" has led to where we are in Destiny, at this point. And imagine how cool it would be if any of this had weight, drive, and character growth behind it. But because this game has to be an "Online Service", everything has to be half-baked, and lean more towards grinding, than anything else (web)". The closest I've come to any of that is learning about how all of it was originally supposed to have its narrative and thematic base in a Creative Idea revolving around this Medieval concept of the Music of the Spheres. It was and remains the single point in the entire Destiny saga where my mind continues to shake itself awake in excitement at all the places and ways you could go in handling such a concept.
Let's just say that for a time period commonly referred to as the Dark Ages, those old medieval folks sure knew how to craft a very bright Image of the universe. If you took it, and applied it to a game, like O'Donnell and Guite wanted to, then it makes your brain light up with all the creative potential of such a setup. There is room enough in an Idea like this branch off into several differing story paths which nonetheless could all co-exist under the same roof. You get the sense that if done right, what you had on your hands could be able to stand alongside other secondary worlds like Middle Earth, or the Far, Far Away. Instead, however, all we're left with is clues and rumors of hints at a greater narrative tapestry waiting to be told. For someone to come along and see if he or she can do something creative with it. It's Guite's collaboration with O'Donnell and McCartney which sticks out the most to me in all this. He is responsible for a set of poems which, to this date, are the closest Destiny ever had to something approaching a narrative through-line. It would be interesting to discover how you develop something like that. In the meantime, I'm afraid that the ultimate irony of the Destiny franchise is that not only are we dealing with a case of artistic Inspiration being stifled, we're also dealing with a case of history repeating itself, after a convoluted fashion. It's like what happened to the poet Coleridge.
Once upon a time, the author had a dream inspired by his reading in ancient Chinese history (that plus a healthy does of Opium before shut-eye probably had a lot to do with it, as well). In the dream, Coleridge was able to catch glimpses of a creative, visionary idea of the dynasty established by the Emperor Kubla Khan. Since this was all just a dream version of history, however, everything was heighted a degree or two above the historical reality. You didn't just get the usual luxuries of a normal "Stately Pleasure Dome" constructed on commission from a ruler with a near limitless wealth of funds to have it built. Instead, as the dreamer continued to explore the palace, the facts of history soon began to give you to the almost inevitable elements of Fantasy. So that as you traveled along, you soon came to the underground cave system which somehow existed beneath the palace, and there found a hidden stream which might very well be enchanted. Or you'd come across a girl playing on a harp, and realize soon enough that she might not be entirely human. According to Coleridge, when he woke up from the dream, he had the entire outline of the poem and even its words all clear in his head. He spent most of the day setting down what would become the poem known as Kubla Khan. As the Lake Poet told it, everything was going smoothly, until a visitor arrived at his door on business from Porlock.
Whoever this individual was, Coleridge was torn away from his writing desk to attend to other matters. He must have been gone a goodish enough amount of time. For when he returned, the Poet discovered (perhaps not at all surprised) that his vision of the poem and its verses and outline had all vanished back into the depths of his Unconscious, and he knew from experience that while a writer may play the game of Go Fish with the Imagination, you can never really try and force Inspiration up from the depths. Lots of people had tried, then as now, yet time and again the results of such desperate grasping were less than stellar, more often than not. Rather than the casual and easy grace found in works of natural Inspiration, there is this hollow, unauthoritative quality to it. The pieces of the creative work might not fit all that well together. Or if they did, then everything still had this lifeless quality about it. The story didn't leap off the page the way a True Narrative would. Such a final product would behave, in other words, very much like what audiences got with the released content found in Destiny. I think that's the best way to explain what happened with this game franchise. It turned into a riff on the same dilemma that Coleridge was faced with when trying to write one of his own poems. The twist here is that everything either was completed, or very near completion, before it all got tossed away.
It's an unfortune set of circumstance for both the artist and audience to find themselves in. In the strictest sense, I'll have to described what happened to the original Creative Idea for Destiny as a textbook example of what to not let happen in the first place. It may not have started out as a demonstration of bad writing, yet that's what it turned into when it didn't have to. In comparison to its earlier exemplar, Coleridge, at least, was able to have a bit of luck on his side. He was dedicated enough to his craft to realize that he'd failed the Muse, rather than the other way around. So with that in mind, he did the one honorable thing left to him as a writer. He told his readers the truth. Kubla Khan is a poem that concludes with a note of apology to its readers. Coleridge closes out his composition almost as an impromptu lecture on the nature of how the Imagination works in an Inspired act of creative writing. When you're in the zone, and the Muse is running hot is when you've got the best chance of creating genuine Art. It's also just as possible for the Inspiration to fail and taper off, leaving the writer with little more than hints and fragments. It's what happened to Coleridge's Pleasure Dome, and the same thing wound up getting the better of Guite, O'Donnell, and McCartney's attempt to create a latter day Xanadu. There was an Inspiration there, and then it all got taken away/
Like I said, this is not an ideal condition for any critic to work with. In the strictest sense, I remain unable to give any kind of critique. Because I can't pass judgment on a game or story that I might have played. Criticism can only work with whatever it's given. If the final product is thin on the ground, as it is with Destiny, then it's like I don't really have any other choice. I'll have to declare it a failure on all essential counts. It doesn't work either as a game or story. Hell, if I was part of Bungie's marketing department I'd send the whole thing back with a recommendation to not release until we'd got a more coherent package to deliver to customers. O'Donnell goes into a lot of the reasons why there was so little common sense to go around at the company in his interview with Von Achte. Beyond that, however, it is Coleridge and his experience with failing to tell a complete poem that acts as a fitting summation for the ultimate nature of Destiny. It was a vision caught in a moment of Inspiration, and then it was lost. All we're left with is the question of what might have been. It's all kind of baffling, in a way, when you consider just how good the company used to be at telling this kind of story.
For those who think I'm implying that Bungie is incapable of telling the where the sophistication of the story is well matched by the gameplay, I think it helps to bear in mind that they've already told this story at least once before. This is not the first time that the team of O'Donnell, Salvatori, and Staten have crafted a product based upon ideas from the Medieval, or Discarded Image of the universe. They did it way back with the production and release of Halo 3: ODST. If you want an idea of what a good version of Destiny might have looked like, then go play that game. There you'll find an entire platformer molded under the same rubric of thought as that found in the Middle Ages. There are subtle allusions scattered throughout that earlier game which clue us in to the fact that the entire campaign and most of its content is based off of a very famous and specific work of Medieval literature. Once you put all the hints in order, you realize that you're playing a futuristic re-telling of part of The Divine Comedy, by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri. To be specific, a lot of the plot beats to both the game's levels, and even some of the Easter Eggs scattered about it contain clever allusions to the first part of Dante's epic, The Inferno. The game even contains a line about being dropped feet-first into hell.
From there, the player has to make their way through nine levels of gameplay, each of which gets structured in some fashion after the Medieval poem. Staten even went so far as to create an entire scripted Easter Egg called Sadie's Story, in which the title protagonist comes across encounters with various people and obstacles who serve to act as callbacks to all of the eight major themes in the first part of Dante's poem. A somewhat good introduction to these aspects of the game can be be found here. A better and more advanced exegesis can be found in this essay. The TV Tropes fan site also does a good job of laying out how the Commedia is structured in the game. Dante has even been given his own honorary reference page on the Halo fan wiki. Let that stand as a testament to just how good a game Bungie can churn out so long as the corporate side is willing to get out of the way of the company's creative team. In that sense, it becomes easy to see that Staten, Salvatori, and O'Donnell really were the artistic heart of Bungie during its own golden age. In other words, a lot of what is now enjoyed and looked back on with fondness in the Halo series came from them. I bring all of this up merely to demonstrate that it was in fact possible to achieve a good experience out of Destiny.
Games like ODST can stand as a good example of what we could have gotten out of Bungie's next big follow-up to Halo. As it stands, however, I'm afraid I'll have no choice except to give this franchise a less than stellar recommendation. All we're left with here are the bits and pieces of a greater idea that could have been. There is one other intriguing possibility, however. What else could you do with an idea like that? The hints of the secondary world crafted by the music of McCartney and O'Donnell, combined with the poetic verses and imagery of Malcolm Guite are suggestive enough to wonder if it's still possible to tell some kind of story there? It would be interesting to see what , if anything, can still be done with a creative setup up like this. Destiny is still a story that's out there, begging to be told.
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