(For the latest batch of info, check out the front-page post “Exhibit 7: The Destiny Contract” or just jump to the last page.)
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“Once you start down the dark path,
forever will it dominate your destiny,
consume you it will.”
- Yoda

This page is a collection of all known information on Bungie’s next major project, Destiny. I intend to keep it updated as new clues are found, so be sure to check back later. If you have any new information, email me at ncsuDuncan@gmail.com or use the Submit page and I will consider adding it to this article.

I’m going to stick to a roughly chronological order, so new developments should be at the bottom of the last page. I’m also going to concentrate on solid info, with speculation and rumors added in depending on how they fit with other clues and how plausible they seem.

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April 2010

- On April 29th, Bungie and Activision announce that they have “entered into an exclusive 10-year partnership to bring Bungie’s next big action game universe to market. Under the terms of the agreement, Activision will have exclusive, worldwide rights to publish and distribute all future Bungie games based on the new intellectual property on multiple platforms and devices. Bungie remains an independent company and will continue to own their intellectual property.”

Harold Ryan, President of Bungie mentions that the agreement had been in the works for nine months.

September 2010

- The Halo: Reach ending credits contain a sci-fi sounding goodbye from Bungie to fans: “See you starside.” While it sounds like a hint, this may be unrelated to any future game as the phrase is used by the Bobs in Marathon 2.

October 2010

- During the question portion of a GDC Online panel about the Halo story, Bungie employee Joe Staten slyly responds to an inquiry about the next Bungie game with “Wouldn’t it be great if we could make a world that was always there for you? Wow. That would be great.”

January 2011

- Twitter user Supererogatory discovers that in July 2010 Bungie filed for copyrights on four new phrases under the artwork category: “Seven Seraphs”, “New Monarchy”, “Osiris”, and “Dead Orbit”.

- Former Bungie employee Jaime Griesemer starts a personal blog with the following entry on his resume:

“Unannounced Project, Game Designer          2008 – 2010
•  Participated in very early stages of project planning
•  Designed and built multiple gameplay prototypes in a modified version of the Halo engine
•  Helped to secure publisher funding partially on the basis of these prototypes”

Not much info to glean from that, but it is interesting to note that development was underway in 2008 (or earlier) and that it used a modified Halo engine for prototyping. Keep in mind, this doesn’t necessarily mean the new game is an FPS - the Halo engine is more than capable of handling a wide variety of game genres (like the space combat section of Reach’s Long Night of Solace).

February 2011

- Kotaku Australia publishes info from an anonymous source who claims Bungie’s next game is being developed under the code name “Tiger” with the actual game title to be “Destiny” and that it “mixes FPS elements into an MMO with a Sci-Fi setting.”

(The source also claimed Bungie unexpectedly fired a number of contractors, although Bungie quickly asserted that accusation was false. My own understanding is that an outside contractor was wrongly expecting to become a Bungie employee once his contract expired. When the end date came and he wasn’t offered a job he became angry and decided to leak the information he had. I could be wrong, but this is all irrelevant to the topic at hand anyways, so let’s move on.)

March 2011

- On March 3rd, David Aldridge gives a talk at GDC titled “I Shot You First! – Gameplay Networking in Halo: Reach.” During one of the final slides, “What’s Really Next for Bungie?”, he makes a comment regarding the MMO rumors floating around. Several prominent gaming news sites publish pieces quoting Aldridge and proclaiming Bungie’s next game to be “massively multiplayer.” If you watch the video of the presentation, however, it becomes obvious that the comment was just a joke:

“You may have heard the rumor that we’re making “World of Warcraft in Space”. As cool as that sounds, that’s not true. It’s not what we’re doing. The only thing that I can tell you today, is that if you love working on or playing massively… awesome multiplayer online action games, you should come talk to us; we are hiring across all disciplines for many positions.”

If anything, this quote sounds more like confirmation that Bungie is NOT working on an MMO as such a secret would probably preclude any MMO-related jokes.

April 2011

- Bungie’s website is updated with a hiring banner directed at developers experienced with the Playstation 3. This comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with their Activision deal, but it is additional confirmation that Bungie is no longer an Xbox exclusive studio.

May 2011

- On May 13th, Penny Arcade posts a video of their Ping Pong rematch against Bungie, a highly entertaining showdown that actually took place on April 1st. Vigilant fan Willeth notices an interesting new design on the shirt of Bungie employee Jonty Barnes. (Note that the leftmost symbol is simply the “Play” button from Penny Arcade’s video player.)

The main symbol appears to be a wing and the number seven, leading fans to believe it is the logo for “Seven Seraphs”, whatever that may be.

- On May 19th, Hitmonchan at HBO makes a discovery:

In December 2007, Bungie employees Harold Ryan and Martin O’Donnell registered “Podophobia Entertainment Inc.”, located at 434 Kirkland Way, which at the time was also the address for Bungie Studios. The dummy corporation had two trademarks: “Destiny” and “Be Brave”.

The source corporation as well as the earlier mention of “Destiny” from the February 2011 story gives these trademarks a believable link to Bungie’s next game. The logo matching the one on Jonty’s shirt in the Penny Arcade video confirms it. (Note that the font for “Be Brave” is simply the default used for all text trademarks.)

- Twitter user Supererogatory delivers again by discovering that on September 20th, 2010, website domains were registered for:

DeadOrbit.com
SevenSeraphs.com
NewMonarchy.org

as well as:

MansDestiny.com
PlayDestiny.com
DestinyUniverse.com
DestinyGame.com
DestinytheGame.com

All of these domains were also registered as .net and .org sites on 9/20/2010 except for NewMonarchy. That was registered as a .org site on 9/20/2010 but the .com site is already owned by an existing company and the .net address is not registered at all.

- On May 21st, NsU Soldier on HBO finds an interesting use of the word “Destiny” in ODST’s Coastal Highway level:

If Bungie’s next game really is called Destiny, it was very clever of them to include a reference to it all the way back in 2009. If you want to make a stretch, turn the Asklon logo upside down and compare it to the Destiny logo above. Regardless, note the basic shape created by the Earth and the Moon on that poster, I’ll come back to in the paragraph below on “Dead Orbit”.

- HBO forum poster Yaters makes a post on May 24th with a picture of a shirt his Bungie friend was wearing at a LAN party.

Yaters says that his friend had 4 or 5 different shirts in the set (presumably with different logos on each) and was told the meaning of FWC was “pretty generic and didn’t divulge anything.” Notice the Destiny logo on the upper right, matching Jonty’s shirt above.

A quick note: I just did a search for “Bungie” on the United States Copyright Office website today (7/1/2011). It shows that Bungie, Inc. has a copyright on “FWC 3×3 grid” registered on 05/07/2011 in addition to the previously mentioned Bungie, LLC copyrights of “Seven Seraphs”, “New Monarchy”, “Osiris”, and “Dead Orbit” made on 7/27/2010.

- Around May 21st, Louis Wu of HBO fame holds a LAN party attended by a few Bungie employees. He is given a shirt just like Jonty’s black shirt above, but is not told anything about it (he even asked if it was a “Seven Seraphs” shirt and got a noncommittal reply). It seems that Bungie is not trying to hide these new logos.

June 2011

- The Destiny logo is spotted again, this time on a beanie in Bungie’s New Beginnings vidoc from April 2010. (It can be seen around 3:00 into the video.)

- On June 24th, NeoGAF poster stephen08 notices the new staff picture on the Bungie Foundation page has a Destiny symbol in the background:

It is quickly pointed out that new Destiny shirts can be spotted in the group photo (as well as new looks at the previously seen shirts).

Louis Wu then posts a clear photograph he took at E3 of Steve Cotton’s red shirt:

Let’s just nickname this one “New Monarchy” for now just from the process of elimination, since I think we can safely assume we know the correct names for the two shirts below.

This shirt seems to depict an eye (and still has the Destiny symbol in the upper right). Now consider the classic Egyptian symbol, the eye of Horus, and note that the father of Horus was… “Osiris”.

For this last shirt, the third pic above seems to show two offset circles that could possibly depict a celestial orbit. It would be nice if we could make out the symbol in the middle of the larger circle, but for now lets just nickname this shirt “Dead Orbit”. Now note the position of the circles before you go back up the page and look at the “Destiny Awaits” screenshot again.

July 2011

- After receiving a tip on July 11th from a reliable source (who will remain unnamed) I searched for other websites registered on 9/20/2010 and discovered whois info for FutureWarCult.com.

The name was also registered as .net and .org versions on the same day, which matches the pattern established by the registration of SevenSeraphs.com and DeadOrbit.com on 9/20/2010. This leads me to believe that “FWC” means “Future War Cult”.

My source then suggested that “FWC” might actually stand for “Future War Council” and would fill a vaguely similar role to Halo’s “ONI”, but there is currently no registration for FutureWarCouncil.com to support that speculation.

- Seven lucky fans have hit the jackpot: their Bungie Bags O’ Swag contained a Golden Ticket redeemable for some extraordinary future prize. These tickets contained a URL for the “One in Seven” contest page on Bungie.net, which gives the following description:

“Bungie is having a One of Seven promotion. Each of the seven tickets entitles you to something extraordinary. On July 7th, 2012 and not a moment before, visit http://www.bungie.net/oneofseven to receive further instructions. Your ticket and the verification code contained therein are personal, one-of-a-kind, and not transferable. Do not reveal the hidden code beneath the scratch off before Bungie Day 2012.
Do not share your ticket or code with anyone else. Failure to follow these instructions will render your ticket, and the promise that it holds, null and void.”

So far, only two of the seven tickets have been publicly shown: one through a Swag Bag unboxing video and another through a picture in a Bungie.net forum post. While the winners have smartly obscured their prize codes in the pictures, the art on the back of the ticket is enough to send my imagination running wild:

While we have seen portions of this design before on Bungie’s “See You Starside” post from 7/7/2011, this is the first time we’ve seen seen it bearing the Destiny symbol. It seems to me that the star map is probably Destiny concept art. Curiously, the “See You Starside” and “One in Seven” header images also say “Per Audacia Ad Astra”, a latin phrase previously seen associated only with Bungie Aerospace, not Destiny. It doesn’t seem to be a stretch that Destiny will involve “boldly endeavoring toward the stars” considering the “Be Brave” trademark, but up until now I had simply interpreted it as a message about indie game developers using Bungie Aerospace to make top-quality games.

August 2011

- On August 2nd, Bungie.net underwent an extensive site redesign, introducing yet another version of what I will now call the “Destiny Map”. This new image is featured very prominently on the front page, while two new designs sit at the top and bottom of every page’s background. By combining the “Destiny Map” from the “See You Starside” post, the “One in Seven” page, and the new Bungie.net frontpage I was able to make this image:

Here is a version of that same composite with the brightness and contrast adjusted:

I was then able to figure out where the “Upper Nebula” and “Lower Nebula” from the Bungie.net background fit into the Destiny Map. The two actually overlap:

Note that the “Lower Nebula” background is actually composed of three separate parts of the Destiny Map. If you compare the final product to the Golden Tickets you can see we almost have the entire map put together:

- Dani over at NeoGAF noticed that the Bungie.net redesign also brought with it a new job posting on the Careers page: Economy Designer

“Create an economic system that will fulfill a player’s needs just as much as shooting an alien in the face. The Economy Designer at Bungie will develop a robust and rewarding game economy that drives player behavior toward intended goals and validate those systems through intense simulation, testing and iteration. You’ll design the systems and mechanics which drive in-game trade, satisfy the players’ need for possessions and wealth whilst ensuring rewards retain their intended value despite attempts to exploit or grief the system.”

This adds a small amount of credibility to the speculation that Destiny will contain MMO-like qualities. Of course, any Bungie job listings posted may actually pertain to Bungie Aerospace projects, but I feel hiring a dedicated Economy Designer is something that would only be required by a full Bungie game.

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