page_title: Myth (video game series)
section_title: The Fallen Lords
hierarchical_section_title: Myth (video game series) / History / Development / The Fallen Lords
caption_attribution_description: English: Jason Jones, one of the founding members of game developer Bungie and project lead for Halo and Halo 2, at E3 2006.
context_page_description: Myth is a series of real-time tactics video games for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS. There are three main games in the series; Myth: The Fallen Lords, released in 1997, Myth II: Soulblighter, released in 1998, and Myth III: The Wolf Age, released in 2001. The Fallen Lords was developed by Bungie, and published by Bungie in North America and Eidos Interactive in Europe. Soulblighter was also developed by Bungie, and was published by Bungie in North America and GT Interactive in Europe. The Wolf Age was developed by MumboJumbo, and co-published by Take-Two Interactive and Gathering of Developers for Windows and by Take-Two and MacSoft for Mac.
  All three games received generally positive reviews. The Fallen Lords was especially lauded, and is credited as a defining title in the fledgling real-time tactics genre. Reviewers praised its plot, graphics, gameplay, level design, online multiplayer mode, and differentiation from traditional real-time strategy games. It went on to win multiple awards from publications such as PC Gamer, Computer Gaming World, Computer Games Strategy Plus and Macworld. It was also a commercial success, selling over 350,000 units worldwide.
context_section_description: Myth: The Fallen Lords was originally conceived by Jason Jones as Bungie was nearing the end of development of Marathon Infinity in late 1995. They had planned to do another first-person shooter as their next game. However, when Jones saw the first screenshots from id Software's Quake, he became concerned that Bungie's new game would be too similar. As such, he approached his colleagues with the question "What do you think about having this world with 100 guys fighting 100 other guys in 3D?" His idea was to bring Bungie's experience in 3D action games to a real-time strategy game. The team agreed their new shooter was developing along lines too similar to Quake, and, as such, they abandoned the project, and switched focus to what ultimately became Myth.
  Dubbed "The Giant Bloody War Game", initial inspirations were films such as Mel Gibson's Braveheart and literature such as Glen Cook's The Black Company. Doug Zartman, Bungie's director of public relations and one of the game's writers, explained "we wanted to capture the feeling that you get watching large groups of people clashing on the open field." However, he was also eager to differentiate the game from standard RTS games, saying,
  We tried real hard to come up with a term that was different from "real-time". We're calling it a "multimetric tactical game". "Multimetric" - I made that word up - because it's not an isometric game in the conventional sense. There are many angles a player can have and many views the camera can take. And we're calling it "tactical" because there are no elements of the game that focus on resources or management. It's strictly a tactical game.
  Once they had decided on the basic game mechanics, which ultimately became known as "real-time tactics", they drew up a list of elements they wanted to avoid (RTS clichés, references to Middle-earth, allusions to the Arthurian legend, any narrative involving "little boys coming of age and saving the world") and those they wanted to incorporate ("any ideas that contributed to the visual realism of the game," such as a 3D landscape, polygonal buildings, particle-based weather, and battlefields littered with body parts). They were also determined to include a robust online multiplayer mode as a key gameplay feature.
  Work on the game began in January 1996, with a major early decision being to develop and release the game simultaneously for both Mac OS and Microsoft Windows. To date, Bungie's only Windows game had been a port of Marathon 2: Durandal, with which they had been unhappy, and they were determined The Fallen Lords be a genuine cross-platform release. As such, 90% of the game's source code was platform-independent, with 5% written for PC subroutines and 5% for Mac-specific functionality. All of the game's data was stored in platform-independent data files called "tags", which were automatically byte-swapped when necessary and accessed via a cross-platform file manager.
  Although The Fallen Lords employs a fully 3D terrain, with 3D polygonal buildings, the characters are 2D sprites. To bring the 3D environment and the 2D characters together, the team developed four separate programming tools; "Tag Editor" (edited the constants in the cross-platform data files), "Extractor" (handled the 2D sprites and the sequencing of their animations), "Loathing" (the map editor), and "Fear" (dealt with the 3D polygonal models such as houses, pillars, and walls). Of the four programs, Jones explains,
  The Tag Editor lets you edit everything from the physics of the game, to the color of the units, how they move, and how they attack. There's another tool that we use to import graphics called the Extractor, and there's a third tool called Loathing. Loathing is basically the map editor for Myth. You import your map into it, you change the heights, and you place your units on the map in Loathing. The fourth tool that complements Loathing is called Fear. Fear takes care of all the models; it is used to import the 3D rendered models.
  By November 1996, Bungie had a demo with rudimentary gameplay in place. In an effort to c
caption: Jason Jones conceived of Myth as an alternative to Bungie developing another first-person shooter.
exif: {}