Bungie

Alex Seropian and Jason Jones started Bungie in Chicago in 1991, and for years it was one of the few serious game studios on the Macintosh, with Marathon (1994) and the strategy game Myth. Steve Jobs showed off Halo at Macworld 1999; the following year Microsoft bought the studio, and the game became a launch title for the original Xbox in 2001 instead.

Bungie went independent again in 2007, made Destiny (2014) with Activision publishing, and was bought by Sony in 2022 for $3.6 billion. That one studio built the flagship for both Xbox and PlayStation is one of the industry's drier ironies. Layoffs in 2023 and 2024 showed that even an expensive acquisition comes with a budget.