Bungie might be gaming's good guys but they sure were dicks to Marty O'Donnell.


You may recall that Bungie fired one of their founding fathers, Martin O'Donnell a few months back. It's never been said publicly why this was the case but as I understand it, America sort of runs on some fire-at-will law in most states so he was sacked pretty easily from his job as music composer.

Marty may have been the author of his own misfortune, I simply don't know. Marty said publicly that it was 'without cause'.

But what we do is the manner in which the firing happened shows the the big wigs that run Bungie are have employed some dick moves on Marty. They canceled his shares in the company! That's bullshit, antagonistic and probably retaliatory behaviour - and to my mind is pretty much stealing as shares are property.

Having already been awarded 95K in a separate action from Bungie, a ruling has now said that Marty must have his shares in the company back.

Venture beat reported the result of a recent arbitration process between Bungie and O'Donnell"

"The arbitrator found that O’Donnell demonstrated substantial likelihood of proving that he was one of seven founders of Bungie (which originally had the name Arete Seven LLC) and that the company gave him 1.27 million shares of class B shares in October 2007. Those shares were converted into 336,375 shares of Bungie’s Series B-1 Preferred Stock in 2010, when Activision started making a lot of noise about Destiny. He was also issued 48,000 shares of Bungie’s common stock. And in December 2010, O’Donnell signed a contract extending his employment through 2020."

The agreement held that O’Donnell would give up his unvested founders’ shares if he left voluntarily. Given he was fired, it would appear Bungie were in breach of their contract.

We do have to appreciate that while video games are cool, Bungie is there to make a profit. There could be solid commercial reasons why Bungie fired the most famous composer in gaming history. Maybe he was going tone deaf? That would make some sense at least right?

One wonders now what the REAL DEAL was with Joe Staten leaving....

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