http://www.insidemacgames.com/news/story.php?ArticleID=961Wednesday, September 20, 2000
news@insidemacgames.com Bungie Liberation Organization Debuts
4:09 PM | Michael Eilers | 1 comment
The purchase of Bungie Software by Microsoft sent waves of shock and disbelief through the Mac community earlier this Summer. Fans of Bungie's RTS titles Myth: The Fallen Lords and Myth II: Soublighter were perplexed by the move, which resulted in the sale of these two titles to Take Two Interactive, while of the actual servers for the games were moved to Redmond, WA with the Bungie team. Myth fans have since experienced outages and the disappearance of the servers for the demo versions of these two titles, as well as only intermittent updates to the Bungie.net news page.
Seemingly worried by these developments, a mysterious team known only as the 'Alphas' has launched the Bungie Liberation Organization, an 'underground movement' dedicated to preserving the existing Bungie.net service for online players of the Myth titles. Their mission is to organize resistance against any changes that Microsoft may be tempted to make in the Bungie.net service, such as making it pay-for-play or shutting it down altogether. Here is their manifesto, from the web site:
We are an organized resistance to the subjugation of the Myth The Fallen Lords and Myth SoulBlighter game servers by Microsoft. We don't mind Microsoft running them as long as they don't attempt to make any stupid changes to their mode of operation, performance, free status, or existence.
We repudiate any unconstructive behavior towards anyone . We are here to make our cause known to the entire gaming and computer industry. Only through an organized effort will Microsoft hear us. BLO is that voice! Join us! Make sure that our game is not swallowed whole by the beast!
Among their list of demands is a request that Bungie should acknowledge that the company committed itself to free online service in perpetuity when it made that feature a large selling point for the games themselves. For more information on this organized resistance movement, check out the BLO web site. While the Alphas may seem a little paranoid, their concerns are not without merit -- Matt Soell indicated in a forum post several days ago that some Microsoft employees they have spoken with were unhappy that the Myth servers ran on Linux, as of course Windows NT is the platform of choice at the Redmond campus.
