Pathways Into Darkness - Development

Development

Pathways was Bungie's third title, after their previous game, Minotaur: The Labrynths of Crete, sold around 2,500 copies. In the summer of 1992, Jones was living in dorms at the University of Chicago when he saw Wolfenstein 3D, a shooter game with three-dimensional (3D) graphics. Inspired, Jones created a rough 3D-graphics engine for the Mac that simulated walls with trapezoids and rectangles. Originally, Bungie intended Pathways to be a straightforward 3D version of Minotaur, but they quickly found that the top-down perspective of their previous game did not mesh with the 3D presentation. An additional consideration was that the developers wanted to create a game that did not rely on then-rare networks and modems, an issue in marketing Minotaur. The rest of 1992 was spent tweaking the graphics engine.

Work on the game's storyline and levels began in January 1993. Jones recalled that starting from cliché plots they moved towards "very interesting and unique but extremely difficult to understand stories". One of the more complicated stories cast the player as one of a group of Roman soldiers who discovered a mountain spring that extended their lives. Every seven years one soldier would be picked to descend into the caves and bring back more water. If the leader died, a new one would be selected to undertake the journey to ensure their survival. "It was a very interesting plot since your quest wasn't necessarily virtuous, it didn't involve doing good things or saving the world," Jones said. "It was just you were chosen, more or less against your will, to become the next leader of this freak cult of immortals." The final plot occupied a middle ground between the simple and complex stories, because the developers did not want to force players to become deeply involved in the story.

While Bungie founder Alex Seropian handled the business aspect of Bungie and produced the game's box art and promotional material, Jones programmed the game, wrote the story line, and contributed to the game's manual. Whereas Jones had single-handedly coded Minotaur, the small staff for Pathways was due to lack of money for a large team. To speed implementation, Jones built a level editor for the game that allowed him to add objects, monsters and walls to the levels. The game's levels and mazes span 40 million scaled square feet. Jones' friend, Colin Brent, did much of the art and creature design, reducing Jones' workload and, in the programmer's opinion, improving the art. Each monster was drawn by hand in different states such as stationary, moving, attacking, and dying. They were then scanned into the computer and added to the game; if there were problems, they were redrawn. Once the final drawings were complete, the images were colorized in 24-bit color using Adobe Photoshop. Despite the game's advanced graphics, Pathways was designed to work on any Macintosh model; it was one of 30 applications that ran natively on Apple's PowerMacs on launch day.

By July 1993 the game was behind schedule; only the above-ground portions of the pyramid were complete. Jones put in eighteen-hour days for the month leading up to the MacWorld Expo where the game was to be sold; he finished the game in a relatively bug-free state just before the Expo, and Bungie had 500 shrinkwrapped copies of the game available for sale at MacWorld.