As Bungie’s storied online shooter completes its first decade, we look back on an odd game that has always been worth talking about – and ask why it’s like Marks & Spencer
Destiny is 10 years old, which is an aeon in video game terms. It’s also one of the most fascinating games of the last decade, sometimes for unlikely reasons. On the surface, this is a lavish online prog-rock space shooter made by Bungie, the creators of the Xbox classic Halo. You bundle together with friends, deploy somewhere amid the glittering vistas of a futuristic version of our solar system, and then shoot people/aliens/robots to get better loot.
None of this is exactly unprecedented, and that’s maybe the point. You could argue that Destiny’s touchstones are games like Halo, for its gunplay, World of Warcraft, for its persistent online spaces, and – this is where it gets a bit odd, granted – the deathless British retailer Marks & Spencer. This last point is because, above all else, Destiny is a game of fluctuating fortunes, and those fortunes seem to fascinate everyone close to video games, regardless of whether they actually play Destiny or not. Just as a lot of people in the UK seem to have a secret sense for whether M&S is currently on an upward or downward trajectory – there is no middle ground – everyone in games knows whether Destiny is in boom or bust mode. Is it now better than it’s been in ages? Or is it a shadow of the game it was two, five, seven years back? Destiny is our ever-reliable topic of fretful conversation.
