Even elite giant units could be taken down with a fierce fight--with enough men.

The False Start

Some games just aren't as great as they could be out of the box. Unfortunately, Myth was one of them. As with some other early 3D strategy games, the biggest problem most people encountered was the interface. Not only did the game absolutely demand that you control the game like a first-person shooter--with one hand on the keyboard for the camera and a hand on the mouse for commands--but some of the controls were particularly unintuitive. And, par for the course in 1997, there were some major bugs with a few graphics card models, like 3dfx's Rush cards and Rendition's cards.

But the v1.1 patch released in the weeks following the initial release fixed all the major complaints. For starters, it refined the standard controls by adding an extra, more distant zoom level to give a more strategic view of combat. The unusual "gesture click" system for changing formation also started providing obvious feedback on how units would change formation. And since the way melee units approached a fight could radically affect otherwise equal odds, the AI for melee units was refined to do a better job of surrounding enemies. With these fixes, and a bunch of improvements to Bungie.net, Myth was suddenly the great game it was meant to be.

Powerful magical units could dominate the battlefield, but each had its weak points and needed protection.

Even though we take 3D graphics for granted nowadays, it took some time for game designers to figure out how to use the technical innovations popularized by 3D action games like Doom and Quake and apply them to other game genres. Bungie was ahead of the curve with Myth: The Fallen Lords, the first major real-time strategy game with a fully rotatable 3D camera and support for hardware acceleration. Years before Halo's explosions were blowing Covenant high into the air, Bungie created a robust physics engine to make Myth's 3D battles much more interactive: Molotov cocktails bounced down from advantageously high terrain, arrows could be dodged as they arced through the air, and body parts rained down from catastrophic, earth-rippling explosions. But Myth was so much more than a milestone in 3D gaming history.

Breaking the mold of RTS games' resource gathering and building conventions, Myth still stands as a unique example of lightning-fast tactical gameplay. Getting the most use out of a limited number of soldiers involved setting ambushes, maneuvering formations of melee and ranged units, and carefully conserving successful warriors, who improved their fighting skills with every kill. The tide of battle could turn in a split second--a lesson commonly learned when a wight (a diseased undead suicide bomber) or Molotov-tossing dwarf snuck up on one side while you had the camera turned to watch the main combat. Losing a man suddenly meant something when you knew his name and couldn't replace him with unending reinforcements. The dryly spoken "Casualty" and the more emphatic "Casualties!" messages just underlined the bloody scenes that unfolded before you.

The lack of reinforcements also added dramatic weight to the single-player campaign's appropriately gloomy Tolkienesque story, which opens just as the last few human cities are about to fall to the Fallen Lords' armies. Rather than following the allies' inevitable defeats in major battles, you command small bands of humans, elves, and dwarves on critical side missions, each of a small enough scale for veterans from one battle to have a key role in the next. However, the tactical focus never keeps the story from feeling epic, in good part because of excellent production values outside of the 3D fights. At each stop along the way, the gravelly voiced narrator--one of the best narrators in any game--reads from the journal of an unnamed companion, accompanied by a slideshow of hand-drawn illustrations.

But though the campaign provided poignant drama and lasting challenge, Myth's multiplayer was even more exceptional. Few if any RTS games have ever offered as much variety: cooperative play, large team games, small free-for-all matches, and bunches of game modes. Since it was only a matter of time before the opposing armies were decimated, matches were timed and often quite short, and the swift game format in turn made it relatively painless to experiment with oddball tactics. But because Bungie.net was such a slick multiplayer service--complete with stats tracking and cool reward icons for ranked players--matches were never hard to find, and short games meant more games. No game since has even tried to match those fantasy battles that piled the carnage knee-high.

I'll admit it was the bouncing Molotovs and their real-time destruction that first sold me on the game, but I couldn't know the consequences when I signed onto Bungie.net. Logging hundreds and hundreds of hours over the next year, I worked to get one of those cool "emperor" rankings icons and to compete in clan games and tournies. While the big team games made for epic fights, I'd risk my rank in any free-for-all game type, from the frenzied deathmatch-like "body count" to "territories"--the best strategy game mode ever. The territories games demanded that you vie for control of many points across the map, and it's those games that I still think about, with the bluffs to keep players away, quick fights to persuade them, and ruses, like hiding undead units underwater, then sneaking them in for a capture in the timer's last seconds.