Alex Seropian, Jason Jones and a Mac studio, 1990–1998.

Bungie began as one student’s side business in Chicago. The Chicago Reader, in a long feature by Bill Mahin published on 23 March 2000, traced the company’s genesis to 1990 and the basement apartment of Alex Seropian, a mathematics undergraduate at the University of Chicago. Seropian had written Gnop!, a take on Pong whose notable feature, the paper said, was a recording of his own chuckle that played whenever a player lost. He released it as shareware under the label Bungie. By the time he graduated in May 1991 he had a second title, the tank game Operation Desert Storm, which he sold at trade shows because shops would not stock it. Wikipedia dates the formal founding of Bungie Software Products Corporation to May 1991.

Seropian described those months to Polygon in an interview by Russ Pitts published on 31 July 2013. The university had no computer science degree, he said, so he took the classes anyway, majored in maths and taught himself to program. He asked his parents and their friends for money, built his own diskette duplicator, packaged the games and went looking for distribution, breaking even twice before the business made money. He also told the magazine that when he asked his father whether to take a job offer or start the company, his father advised getting a job before starting a business; Seropian said he started the company the next day.

The second founder arrived through a classroom. The Reader reported that Seropian met Jason Jones in an artificial-intelligence class at the University of Chicago and, visiting his dorm room one day, saw him playing a game he had written for fun. Seropian persuaded him to polish it and sell it, and Jones left college to become his partner. That game, Minotaur, came out in February 1992 and let several players link their computers to play one another rather than the machine. Pathways Into Darkness followed in August 1993. Both men had long used Macintosh computers, the paper noted, and the early catalogue was built for the Mac. Wikipedia describes Seropian and Jones as Bungie’s co-founders, with Seropian handling business and marketing and Jones much of the creative and technical work.

The studio then moved out of home. The Reader said Bungie took a proper office in Pilsen and began hiring artists and programmers, and that in May 1994 Doug Zartman joined to provide technical support for Pathways before becoming the company’s public-relations voice. Work on Marathon started that spring. After five years in Pilsen, the paper reported, Bungie moved in March 1998 to a building on West Ontario Street in River North, with two large open rooms for the teams working on Myth II: Soulblighter and another project that had not yet been announced.

Microsoft in 2000, independence in 2007, Sony in 2022.

Bungie’s ownership has changed several times. IGN reported on 20 June 2000 that Microsoft, Take-Two Interactive and Bungie Software had announced a deal under which Microsoft would acquire Bungie, while Take-Two, in exchange for its stake in the studio, took the complete rights to the Myth and Oni franchises, trademarks included. The same report said that Bungie’s in-development shooter Halo would not come to the PlayStation 2.

Seropian explained the decision to Polygon in 2013. Bungie had entertained other offers, he said, and was not looking to sell. The conversation with Microsoft started after the company toured a demonstration of the console it was building; when the Bungie team realised the machine was essentially a PC with a controller, they called to say they could probably make Halo for the Xbox. Seropian said Bungie was given its own wing at Microsoft, built out as an open space, and that Mac players sent what he called amazing hate mail after the purchase. He said he did not think either company could have done what it did with Halo without the other.

The studio moved west with its owner and later left it. The Puget Sound Business Journal reported on 19 March 2009 that Bungie had announced its spin-off from Microsoft in 2007, after the release of Halo 3, with Microsoft keeping an interest in the developer. Polygon added in January 2019 that in the 2007 split Microsoft kept the rights to Halo and set up a new studio, 343 Industries, to oversee the series. The 2009 report said Bungie was then based in a former True Value Hardware store in Kirkland, Washington, and was moving to a converted cineplex in the Bellevue Galleria; a Kirkland official quoted in the story said the company had a preference for high ceilings. Wikipedia gives Bungie’s headquarters as Bellevue, Washington.

As an independent company, Bungie signed a publisher for its next world. Wired reported on 29 April 2010 that Activision had agreed a ten-year deal to publish the next action series from Bungie, that Bungie would own the intellectual property, and that a team led by co-founder Jason Jones was developing it. That series became Destiny, which Polygon said debuted in September 2014, with Destiny 2 following in September 2017. On 10 January 2019, Polygon reported a joint statement in which the two companies said Bungie would own, develop and publish the Destiny franchise itself, with Activision handing over publishing rights.

Another change came in 2022. The Verge reported on 15 July 2022 that the acquisition of Bungie by Sony Interactive Entertainment, announced in January, had closed. The report quoted chief executive Pete Parsons saying Bungie would continue to independently publish and creatively develop its games, and said Bungie staff had stated that future games would not be PlayStation exclusives. Sony Interactive Entertainment has owned Bungie since 2022.

A name, a voice and a small team inside a big company.

A game studio’s identity usually reaches players before the game does. The company logo appears on a splash screen or a short animated ident in the seconds while software loads, then again on store pages, trailers, packaging and the credits. Because those seconds repeat every time someone opens a game, the ident tends to be short, legible on a phone or a television, and quiet enough that it does not compete with the title that follows. Animation studios use the same device in front of their films, often with a brief piece of motion or a sound cue that returns from release to release.

Much of the visible branding, though, belongs to the work rather than the company. Characters, mascots and title logos carry the recognition, and a studio name may sit underneath them in small type. Some companies let a recurring character stand in for the studio; others keep the studio mark plain so that each new game or film can look different. Ownership changes add another layer: when a studio is bought or becomes independent, the parent’s mark may appear beside its own or drop away. For designers, the practical point is that a studio identity is a set of placements — a splash screen, a store icon, a credit line, a website — and each needs a version of the mark that works at its size and in its moment.

A tone of voice, a T-shirt and two logos.

Bungie’s identity started with its tone of voice. The Chicago Reader wrote in 2000 that a jaded, attitude-laden and often sophomoric humour had been an integral part of the company’s corporate identity from the beginning, and credited Doug Zartman with nurturing it. The paper reprinted his reply to a fan who had asked how the studio recorded the cry of a Pathways creature called the Skitter: the team, he wrote, had to find one, bring it to the office and sample its screams, breaking several state and federal laws along the way — or, if the reader preferred, the sound was “a combination of electronic and computer-generated waveform technologies.” The joke works because it parodies the language of a press release while answering the question.

That voice reached clothing early. The Reader described Bungie taking Marathon to a Macworld show, where the stand was mobbed and journalists crowded round, and said staff had brought T-shirts carrying a single blunt line of copy on the back. Zartman explained to the paper that a game of solitaire might beat a player but would never hurt them, whereas Marathon’s aliens would. On that shirt a slogan, rather than a symbol, did the identity work.

The company name has stayed constant through every change of owner. Seropian released his early shareware under the Bungie label before the corporation existed, the Reader said, and the business kept the word as Bungie Software, through its years inside Microsoft, as the Bungie LLC described by the Puget Sound Business Journal in 2009, and under Sony. Wikipedia records two logos over that span: one used from 1994 to 2009, and the current mark, in use since 2009 — the year the Business Journal reported the studio’s move to Bellevue.

The studio’s website is part of the same system. Wikipedia describes Bungie.net as the company’s site for company information, forums and game statistics, and as the home of the Bungie Store and of the charity The Bungie Foundation. The domain carries the studio’s name rather than any single game’s, so the same address has served through the Halo years and the Destiny years.

Working arrangements have also shaped how the studio presents itself. Seropian told Polygon in 2013 that inside Microsoft, Bungie had its own area of the building built out as an open space, where someone could turn round and ask a colleague to fix a problem on the spot, rather than being split across the parent company’s departments. When Sony’s purchase closed in 2022, The Verge quoted Parsons stressing that Bungie would keep publishing and developing its own games.

For a design guide, Bungie shows how a short, unusual company name and a consistent comic voice can carry an identity through several owners and two logos. Compare Naughty Dog and Minecraft, two other game brands in this library. For this guide we use studio black, slate and Chicago brick with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Bungie’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.