Saturday, April 6, 2013

Myth II: Soulblighter wanted to harvest your computer's soul




Myth II: Soulblighter wanted to harvest your computer's soul

Some people may not realise it but before Bungie was known as the company that made Halo, they made other games. Marathon, Oni and Myth were all popular games in their own special ways and brought Bungie enough attention so that whilst developing Halo: Combat Evolved, Microsoft was keeping a real close eye on them and ultinmately bought the company.

That might not have been the case if Bungie had not have realised they'd made a huge screw up with Myth II: Soulblighter.

In 1998, Myth II: Soulblighter was about to be released and in short, it had a problem where it decided to delete the game users' data.

It turns out the uninstaller programme on the games's disc contained a particularly stupid coding oversight which deleted the entire contents of the folder where Soulblighter had been installed. If that happened to be the computer's root directory rather than the intended default location, uninstalling the game basically removed Windows and the rest of the content from the PC's hard drive thus creating a giant brick.

Bungie clearly could not let this happen (it would be terrible for their brand name and a total dick move) and so had to replace the already pressed game at their own cost with new pressings.

I spied an internet forum post that said "only the marketing person who discovered the bug had his hard drive wiped" so perhaps this bug was grown into a legend by the fact that it could have been terrible rather than it having actually happened. Either way, Halo didn't delete anyone's hard drive did it?

Extra for Experts: It is Myth's music, Siege of Madrigal, that can be found as an Easter egg in the Halo games.

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