Royalty Free Music And Totally Awesome Microphone Sounds To Replace Bungie's Award Winning Composer Martin O'Donnell

Three Bungie executives and some nerd accepting some sound award thing

Long time Bungie employee and worldwide respected composer Marty O’Donnell was released earlier today from the company he’s been with since 1996. At the time of the firing, O’Donnell was one of the last remaining Bungie employees from before their 2000 acquisition by Microsoft and, after decades of creating award-winning scores for Bungie games such as Oni, Marathon and of course Halo, it was revealed via an official blog post that Mr. O’Donnell was released to allow Bungie to take it’s sound design in a different direction with their upcoming game Destiny. 

“Look, we were all thrilled with Marty’s work on the Halo series and the fact that Halo 2 was the best selling video game soundtrack ever was totally cool,” said Bungie in the official blog post announcing the firing, ” but there are like tons of free songs out there on the internet so it only makes sense that we go in this direction.” Utilizing a mix of downloading random videos from YouTube and royaltyfreemusic.com, Bungie assures fans that the Destiny soundtrack will be unlike any of their previous games.

Bungie also promises that royalty free tracks such “Techno Sci-Fi 1” and “Future End 1” will provide the same great atmospheric tension you’ve come to know and love from O’Donnell while “Make Me Feel 30” will be more than sufficient to convey the emotions of the main character; another strength of O’Donnell that won’t be lost with the new music tracks. The new direction will allegedly save the company millions of dollars over the course of the game’s development but Bungie claims that the move is about more than just money. 

“Let’ be honest here - is music composition really that hard?” Bungie asked in their blog post, “Why would we spend millions of dollars paying a guy who claims to be an expert, while our mailroom guy Steve (who let me remind you has his own band) is willing to do it for $100 and a Master Chief statue.” The former mailroom guy turned lead musical composer Steve Dickens has already filled the void left by the legendary Marty O’Donnell according to several sources inside Bungie. Knowing the eventual firing was coming, several executives took it upon themselves to prepare Dickens for the move, and had him get started right away so there would not be a gap in production. 

The announcement post also hailed Mr. Dickens as a “hard-working, enthusiastic and talented mailroom guy who we’re pretty sure will be just fine doing this music thing.” To date, Bungie claims that Dickens has produced upwards of 5000 sound effects for the game already, dwarfing the output that Marty did in years of working on the project. “Marty always took way too much time planning, refining, and making everything all perfect,” Bungie said, “but with Mr. Dickens, we are able to get many more sound effects much quicker. Without wasting time going to sites, researching sounds for weeks and having an annoying focus on not sounding like shit, we are able to save a ton of money without sacrificing much quality. Can anyone really tell the difference if that gun shot is an accurate and well-researched gun sound or just Steve making noises into his mic? We sure as hell can’t.” 

Bungie has confirmed that the switch will not delay production of Destiny in any way and they wish O’Donnell the best doing whatever it is he does at some other company.