page_title: Myth: The Fallen Lords
section_title: Origins
hierarchical_section_title: Myth: The Fallen Lords / Development / Origins
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: The Fallen Lords is a 1997 real-time tactics video game developed by Bungie for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS. Released in November 1997 in North America and in February 1998 in Europe, the game was published by Bungie in North America and by Eidos Interactive in Europe. At the time, Bungie was known primarily as developers of Mac games, and The Fallen Lords was the first game they had developed and released simultaneously for both PC and Mac. It is the first game in the Myth series, which also includes a sequel, Myth II: Soulblighter, set sixty years after the events of the first game, and also developed by Bungie, and a prequel, Myth III: The Wolf Age, set one thousand years prior to the events depicted in The Fallen Lords, and developed by MumboJumbo.
  The game tells the story of the battle between the forces of the "Light" and those of the "Dark" for control of an unnamed mythical land. The Dark are led by Balor and a group of lieutenants, whilst the Light are led by "The Nine"; powerful sorcerers known as "Avatara," chief amongst whom is Alric.
context_section_description: The Fallen Lords was originally conceived by Jason Jones as Bungie were 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, the initial screenshots of id Software's Quake had just been released, and when Jones saw them, he felt Bungie's new game was shaping up as 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?" Bungie had worked on several 3D action games for Mac OS, and Jones' idea was to bring that experience to a real-time strategy game rather than another first-person game. The team agreed with Jones that their new shooter could end up as being very similar to Quake, and, as such, after working on the project for two months, Jones explains "in one day we switched our project from a shooter game that would have had us chasing our competition's tail to what has basically become Myth."
  Dubbed "The Giant Bloody War Game", the team's initial inspirations for Myth were films such as Mel Gibson's Braveheart, "with its close-up portrayal of bloody melees between large forces," and literature such as Glen Cook's The Black Company series, "in which gruesome tales of battle contrast with engaging and intriguing characters." Speaking of the influence of Cook, Doug Zartman, Bungie's director of public relations and one of the game's writers, states
  One of the things we liked was that Cook presents this pretty amoral world. One side is sort of the good guys, because the narrator is on that side, but they're not on a moral high ground over their opponents. It's not a simple good-evil dichotomy. We're dealing with a sophisticated world here, with politics and treachery and betrayal from both sides - as much conflict from within the ranks as from the enemy.
  Similarly, programmer Jason Regier explains they wanted to set the game in "a dark, amoral world where opposing sides are equally brutal and their unity is torn by power struggles within the ranks. We dreamed of gameplay that combined the realism and excitement of action games with the cunning and planning required by strategy games." Zartman further states "we wanted to capture the feeling that you get watching large groups of people clashing on the open field. We wanted to recreate the blood-letting and grisly reality of large-scale battles." However, he was also eager to differentiate the game from the RTS genre, 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 would ultimately be called "real-time tactics", their first task was to draw up a list of elements they wished to avoid; specifically, RTS clichés, obvious references to J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth, allusions to the Arthurian legend, or any kind of narrative involving "little boys coming of age and saving the world." On the other hand, elements they did wish to incorporate included "ideas that contributed to the visual realism of the game," such as a 3D landscape, polygonal buildings, reflective water, particle-based weather, battlefields littered with severed limbs, and explosions that damaged the terrain permanently. They were also determined to include a robust online multiplayer mode and allow hundreds of troops to appear on a battlefield at once.
caption: Jason Jones conceived of The Fallen Lords as an alternative to Bungie developing another first-person shooter.
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