Interview with Bungie about Going Independent and More

November 27th, 2007, 23:44 Posted By: wraggster

As a composer, Marty O'Donnell (with Michael Salvatori) is responsible for one of gaming's most memorable scores. As audio director at Bungie, he's seen the company bought by Microsoft then break away again.

* You joined Bungie full-time ten days before it was sold to Microsoft. Now that Bungie's independent again, do you see your life changing much?
* Oh, yeah. Friends used to say: "You'll never work for a corporation." So when I ended up going to work for Bungie who were then bought by Microsoft, they said: "This won't last." It's never been a goal to stay as an employee of a large corporation. And that's also the spirit of Bungie: we stayed separate from Microsoft. And I think Microsoft always treated us that way: they allowed us our own building, they never tried to interfere with us, for the most part, creatively, and the relationship worked fine. But it was inevitable that independence was such a strong part of the DNA of Bungie, it was something we all knew had to happen again. And I think Microsoft agreed.

* Was Bungie feeling slightly stifled by being part of Microsoft?
* I don't think we had gotten to the point where we were being stifled, but I think Microsoft agreed that they would get the best stuff to publish if they had this independent company that they had a good relationship with. This is the problem being wholly owned and being employees: the mechanisms for reward and for penalty are just not strong enough. We really just thought it's going to be healthier for us as a small company to be closer to success or failure.

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