Sony's acquisition of Bungie in 2022 was one of the most surreal transactions to take place in the games industry in recent years, and the irony of PlayStation buying the company that created the de facto mascot of Xbox isn't lost on former Xbox executive Ed Fries, who led Microsoft's acquisition of Bungie 26 years ago.
Fries, who was VP of game publishing at Microsoft during the original Xbox's launch, appeared on a recent episode of The Expansion Pass and shared his extremely unique perspective on what it's like playing Marathon, a first-party PlayStation game developed by Bungie... on his Xbox.
"Bungie, and I'm having so much fun in Marathon, by the way ... Bungie, the premier team when I left, I couldn't imagine that they'd have a fight with the guy who took over for me after I left," says Fries, seemingly referring to Xbox leadership's alleged pressure campaign to force Bungie to release Halo 2 before it was ready, something Fries was vocally against. "They ended up leaving, and then they, you know, had funding from [NetEase] for a while, and ultimately got bought by Sony.
"To me, it was so weird to launch Marathon and see a PlayStation logo come up, even though I'm playing on my Xbox."
Fries was instrumental to Xbox buying Bungie back in 2000, and he reiterates this by saying he "made the initial call" and "left the acquisition," adding that he never would've believed Bungie's trajectory if you explained it to him way back then.
"If you would've told me, 'Oh, Bungie will be part of Sony, you know, 25 years ago, I'd be like 'What? No, I don't think so.'"
I'll be real, if you told 2015 me that 99% of what's happening in the world today would eventually happen, I would believe almost none of it, and that definitely includes the people who made Halo working for PlayStation. All of the other stuff is a little too depressing to talk about here.
