Myth

Myth is a series of games started by Bungie: real-time tactics in a fantasy setting inspired by Celtic mythology and Glen Cook's The Black Company novels. Along with Marathon, Myth is one of Bungie's classic pre-Halo series.

Bungie made the first game, Myth: The Fallen Lords, and the second one, Myth II: Soulblighter. As usual for Bungie, there are multiple references to these games in Oni, from musical themes to quotations and other Easter eggs.

The third game Myth III: The Wolf Age, was developed by Mumbo Jumbo after the Microsoft purchase of Bungie led to the Myth IP being acquired by Take-Two Interactive (explained here); development was rushed and fans generally agree that the game did not fulfill its potential.

Unlike Oni, Myth shipped with multiplayer and was modding-ready to begin with; Bungie also released some of their development tools. Later, the Myth II source was provided to some fans through an NDA with T2, which has allowed a group of fans called Project Magma to continuously maintain the game application and improve it down to the modern day.

Uninstaller bug

Myth II has some historical notoriety over its colossal uninstaller bug. Though it was fixed before the game released to the general public, the uninstaller was originally scripted to recursively remove all files in the same directory as itself. This meant that if you placed the game files at the root level of a hard drive (not inside C:\MythII\ but C:\ itself), your entire hard drive would be deleted along with the game.

You might wonder why someone would ever place the game's files on their hard drive without any enclosing folder, but the v1.0 installer would do this if you simply clicked on "c:\" as the custom install location in the Browse dialog. The files would not be placed inside a MythII folder but directly under C:\; thus the uninstaller's recursive deletion would run from C:\ as well.

The bug was discovered when this happened to a Japanese localizer at the end of the game's development. Bungie decided to stop production on the game, tear open the game boxes on the assembly line, and replace the game discs. This cost the company approximately $800,000, a difficult financial blow for a small game studio, and was a key factor in deciding to sell Bungie to another company.

External links

Community links: Myth.Bungie.Org (original home of Myth fans); Project Magma; What is Myth?; The Tain archive (mod repository); The Tain forum; Bagrada.net metaserver (Internet matchmaking)

Myth on Bungie.net: Picture galleries

Myth on Wikipedia: The Myth games are documented extensively on Wikipedia, starting HERE.

Myth art by Guido: Myth stuff