Bungie

Bungie, Inc. is an American video game company based in Bellevue, Washington, and a subsidiary of Sony Interactive Entertainment. The company was established in May 1991 by Alex Seropian, who later brought in programmer Jason Jones after publishing Jones's game Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete. Originally based in Chicago, Illinois, the company concentrated on Macintosh games during its early years and created two successful video game franchises called Marathon and Myth. An offshoot studio, Bungie West, produced Oni, published in 2001 and owned by Take-Two Interactive, which held a 19.9% ownership stake at the time.

Microsoft acquired Bungie in 2000, and its project Halo: Combat Evolved was repurposed as a launch title for Microsoft's Xbox console. Halo became the Xbox's "killer app", selling millions of copies and spawning the Halo franchise. On October 5, 2007, Bungie announced that it had split from Microsoft and become a privately held independent company, Bungie LLC, while Microsoft retained ownership of the Halo franchise intellectual property. It signed a ten-year publishing deal with Activision in April 2010. Its first project under this deal was the 2014 first-person shooter, Destiny, which was followed by Destiny 2 in 2017. In January 2019, Bungie announced it was ending the partnership, and would take over publishing for Destiny.

Sony Interactive Entertainment completed its acquisition of Bungie in July 2022, with Bungie remaining a multi-platform studio and publisher.

Among Bungie's side projects is Bungie.net, the company's website, which includes company information, forums, and statistics-tracking and integration with many of its games. Bungie.net serves as the platform from which Bungie sells company-related merchandise out of the Bungie Store and runs other projects, including Bungie Aerospace, a charitable organization called The Bungie Foundation, a podcast, and online publications about game topics.

In the early 1990s, Alex Seropian was pursuing a mathematics degree at the University of Chicago, as the university did not offer undergraduate degrees in computer science. Living at home shortly before graduation, his father's wishes for him to get a job convinced Seropian to start his own game company instead.

Seropian's first video game was a Pong clone, written and released nearly 20 years after the original, called Gnop! (Pong spelled backwards). The game was created in 1990, almost a year before Bungie's official incorporation, but was released under the Bungie name and is considered by Bungie as its first game. Seropian released Gnop! free of charge, but sold the source code for the game for US$15. Gnop! was later included in several compilations of early Bungie games, including the Marathon Trilogy Box Set and the Mac Action Sack.

Seropian officially founded Bungie Software Products Corporation in May 1991 to publish Operation: Desert Storm. Seropian culled funding from friends and family, assembling the game boxes and writing the disks himself. Operation: Desert Storm sold 2,500 copies, and Seropian looked for another game to publish.

Seropian met programmer Jason Jones in an artificial intelligence course at the University of Chicago. Jones was a longtime programmer who was porting a game he wrote, called Minotaur, from an Apple II to the Macintosh platform. Jones recalled, "I didn't really know [Alex] in the class. I think he actually thought I was a dick because I had a fancy computer". Seropian and Jones partnered to release the role-playing video game as Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete in 1992; while Jones finished the coding, Seropian handled design and publicity. The game relied on then-uncommon internet modems and AppleTalk connections for play and sold around 2,500 copies, and developed a devoted following. Both Seropian and Jones are considered co-founders of Bungie.