In some ways, it’s the end of an era in online gaming. In others, it’s a promising new beginning. Peter “Mordia” Marks recently announced that Bungie.net’s long-running Myth II game servers will be shut down on Friday, February 15. It isn’t the end of the line for Myth online play, however, since the team is offering the Myth Game Server as open source code.
Bungie Studios became part of Microsoft in 2000. At that time, Take Two Interactive Software — which up until then had a minority investment stake in Bungie — acquired the long-running Myth series part and parcel. Still, Bungie continued to offer support for Myth II’s online play via Bungie.net, the studio’s own home-grown online gaming service.
Since then a new Myth game has been produced — Myth III: The Wolf Age — by MumboJumbo Games and published for the PC by Take Two (and for the Mac by MacSoft). Myth III eschewed Bungie.net support for online game play between Macs and PCs via GameSpy, so the necessity of Bungie.net’s Myth servers has been diminished as fewer players continue to depend on the service. Regardless, there’s still an active community of Myth II fans out there — fans that Marks and the rest of the Bungie.net crew expect will keep the flame alive on their own.
“This is the raw Myth II metaserver source code, stripped of a few proprietary bits of code, but still run-able,” noted Marks. “You can modify it in any way you want and use it for most anything you want. The only real conditions are that you don’t then try to sell it and that you leave all the copyright and other legal notices with the code. Be sure to read the short, but very legal license agreement that comes with it before going nuts, but afterwards, go nuts.”
The Myth Vault Web site will serve as a central repository for developers and mod experts interested in continuing work on the Myth Game Server software; it’ll also serve as a forum for folks interested in discussing the server code and what can be done with it. Marks doesn’t discount the possibility the site might also link to fan-run servers, leader boards, and other points of interest as well.