- Shishka
- |
- Exalted Mythic Member
Posted by: ApoX
Yeh i know that Halo is awesome thus having lots of fans following them, but you have games like GTA-Series, Splinter Cell, Doom, Half Life. They have got a huge fans aswell, and i have checked their sites, im interested in some of them aswell, though none seem to compete with Bungie..Or are my eyes to much destracted?
Bungie, like Id or Valve, started very small. However, the difference has always been the level of interaction between Bungie and their fans. When Bungie was a small Mac developer, Miguel Chavez, Bungie's official #1 fan, had a small gathering at a MacWorld, just for Bungie fans. A few Bungie employees, mainly out of curiousity, showed up to see what it was like.
That was the beginning. Since then, Bungie's relationship with its fans has grown. Bungie now runs the Fanfest, and they hold it during E3 (Macworld doesn't make much sense anymore, does it?). Bungie doesn't just post to their own forums; they post to other fan forums, such as HBO, and spread their update information all over the internet. For that matter, they don't just post in forums, they've given their fans the option of running their own forums as part of the Seventh Column!
The difference between Bungie and other developers is that they feel their fans are part of their family, and it shows in their work and in what they do for us. For example, two E3's ago, the housekeeping at the hotel I was staying at grabbed my shwag bag, meaning I lost ALL the stuff I had gotten at Fanfest. I posted about it over at HBO, and two weeks later a package showed up for me. Sketch had grabbed a t-shirt, a number of stickers, some way-old (and awesome) Bungie memorabilia, and the Myth soundtrack. John Butkus, one of the animators, grabbed a copy of the first OXM Halo exclusive, took the poster out, and passed it around the office. 40 or 50 different Bungie employees signed it. Lorraine Reyes-McLees, Bungie's resident super-duper artist, signed the cover of that OXM (with a cute little sketch), and also added the blue miniature master chief to the package. Keep in mind, this was BEFORE the action figures were actually released.
Another good example is Offensive Tetraboxing. OT was a large HBO LAN party held at Louis Wu's house. Sketch flew in from Seattle (the party was in Connecticut), brought boxes loaded with Halo and Halo 2 goodies (including the limited edition Halo 2 calander), and the camera crew that was filming for the documentary.
Personally, the fact that Bungie adores their fans at least as much as their fans adore them is one of my favorite things about Bungie.
While I cannot say Bungie is the only company that communicates with its fans, I'll say with complete confidence that