Bungie’s Josh Deane Just Posted Destiny 1 Running on PC
By AJ Hanson on · 5 min read
Destiny 1 has never been on PC. It’s been twelve years, two console generations and an entire sequel, and PC players still only know the Cosmodrome from YouTube. So when the person running product at Bungie shares footage of it running on PC himself, people pay attention.
Yesterday, Josh Deane, Bungie’s Head of Product and the general manager of Marathon, quote-posted a video from Flummoxed showing Destiny 1 running on PC at 4K, 60fps with a 105 field of view. His caption, written with a completely straight face, was “Seems like a pretty game, wonder if it will do well…”
That’s all there is. No trailer, no blog post, just one post and an ellipsis. Paul Tassi at Forbes picked it up this morning, and the Destiny community has been reading tea leaves ever since.
Why one post is getting this much attention
It’s the timing. In June, Monument of Triumph was announced as the final content update for Destiny 2. Players showed up for the send-off anyway, enough to push the game past 160,000 concurrent players on Steam. Then last month, Deane and studio head Poria Torkan came out and said Bungie isn’t done with Destiny. Vaulted campaigns, destinations and raids are coming back to Destiny 2 for everyone, and new Destiny stories and games are planned after that.
A Destiny 1 remaster wasn’t part of that announcement. Tassi makes a fair point that a remaster isn’t really a “new game,” so it wouldn’t fall under that promise either. It would be its own separate project.
It also isn’t a wild idea. Sony owns Bungie now, and Sony will remaster anything that stays still long enough. Destiny 1 getting that treatment at some point always seemed likely. Who would actually build it is anyone’s guess. Bungie already has the unvaulting work and Marathon on its plate, and Tassi expects Sony would hand it to an outside studio.
What we’d want from a Destiny 1 remaster
Keep it Destiny 1. Don’t bring over aspects, fragments or tiered gear. D1 is simpler and rougher around the edges than D2, and that’s part of why people miss it. If we wanted Destiny 2, we’d play Destiny 2.
Bring over the quality of life improvements. Going back to a Destiny where you can’t clamber up a ledge is going to be painful for a week. Fix the stuff that was annoying, and leave the stuff that made it what it was.
The Taken King and Rise of Iron have to be included. Taken King is the expansion that turned D1 from “great gunplay, shame about the story” into the version people still talk about. Remastering vanilla D1 alone would mean remastering the weakest version of the game.
Wrath of the Machine. It’s the one D1 raid that never came over to Destiny 2, and plenty of players never got to run it. There’s some chatter it could show up in D2 as part of the unvaulting, but getting it back in its original setting would be the bigger deal.
There’s a catch, though. So much of Destiny 1 has already been ported into Destiny 2 that Tassi figures only around half of it would actually be new to someone who played through D2. Venus, the Vault of Glass and plenty of the old strikes have already been brought back, which takes some of the shine off a full remaster.
Where we’ve landed
Can we all take a breath for a second?
This is one post. A guy who works at Bungie shared a fan’s video of Destiny 1 and joked about whether a game that sold millions and kept people playing for a decade might “do well.” That’s it. It’s a dev having a laugh about his studio’s back catalog. By lunchtime the internet had turned it into a remaster, a PC port, a raid lineup and a rough release window.
Nobody at Bungie has said the word “remaster,” and nobody has said “PC.” The whole theory rests on a sarcastic caption and an ellipsis.
And look, we understand why. Destiny fans have had a rough couple of years. The game we’ve sunk thousands of hours into was told it was done, then told it wasn’t, and the comeback plan so far is getting back content we already paid for once. When that’s where things stand, a tongue-in-cheek post starts to look like a press release. We’re so hungry for anything Destiny that we’re picking through a single post for clues.
We’re not above it, obviously. We just spent four paragraphs on what we’d want from a game that doesn’t exist. But having fun with a rumor and treating it like a roadmap are two different things. If this turns out to be nothing, nobody at Bungie broke a promise, because nobody made one.
So until there’s an announcement, a trailer, or a store page, this is a nice video of Destiny 1 at 4K with a funny caption. We’ll be rewatching it, and that’s as far as we’re going with this one.