Bungie West

This article is about the division of Bungie which made Oni. For the company proper, see Wikipedia's article. For a complete list of the specific names behind Oni, see the Credits page. For the list of companies associated with Oni, see Rights.

Bungie West refers to the West Coast studio that Bungie operated in San Jose, California from 1997 to 2001. Its first and last released game was Oni, which it developed for Windows and the Mac OS, and which Rockstar ported to the PS2. Bungie West was founded as a satellite studio staffed only with developers, and so they were mostly self-sufficient when it came to the actual development work, and other business functions were handled by the main Bungie office in Chicago.

Even though the common understanding is that Bungie West started operations in 1997, the first documented evidence of Bungie West's existence goes back to March of 1996, in a Usenet post by Eric Klein, Jr. Klein had been hired away from Apple Computer by Bungie to serve as their Director of New Business Development, handling licensing of Bungie technology to other companies, as well as other duties, and apparently he convinced Bungie to open a studio near him instead of moving him to their main studio in Chicago. His Usenet post's signature gave the location "Bungie Software Products, West Coast Office, 1048 Bubb Road, Suite B, Cupertino, CA 95014", although there is no evidence that anyone else worked at this office, and the address appears to be a residential neighborhood 10 minutes from Apple, at least in the present day. (Klein would leave Bungie in 1998.)

On 4/22/1997, Bungie filed as a business entity in California and began hiring new employees; at this time, the address given for mailing résumés was c/o Brent Pease at "Bungie Software, 1150 S. Bascom Ave., Suite 27, San Jose, CA 95128". Thus it appears that the "real" Bungie West did in fact start in 1997, and only ever operated in San Jose (to be exact, Bungie West was in a suburb west of San Jose known as Campbell, which is only a few miles east of Cupertino).

On June 19, 2000, it was announced that Bungie had been sold to Microsoft and would be joining their offices in Redmond, Washington. After releasing Oni in January of 2001, Bungie West was folded so that Bungie could finish the move to Redmond. Some of the San Jose staff moved to Bungie's new location in Microsoft's office complex in Redmond, Washington, while some employees went to other studios, or formed their own, such as Oni's Design Lead Hardy LeBel, who formed Tyrant Studios. Today, Bungie's sole office is in Kirkland, Washington (since the separation from MS in 2007), and seven of the men and women behind Oni still work there; the list of those names is found in the footnotes to the article on Oni.

You can see a tour of Bungie West back in its short-lived glory days in this tour video from 2000, guided by Dave Dunn, one of Oni's level architects.