No clue, to me it's a labor dispute. As a people manager I would not put up with an overbearing employee for very long. He made his case to market the music indepently of Destiny and the leadership did not feel it was a effective use of time and money. Instead of coming back later with a stronger case he pitched a hissy fit. He was probably handled delicately for a while before leadership decided they needed to sever ties. The money issue was probably due to some language in the contract that voided his compensation if he did anything detrimental to the company. The legal battle was over money owed not who owned the music. If I had to guess the judge felt that Mary's behavior did not harm the company therefor he should be paid as agreed in his employment contrat.

That's what I thought. I'm still not used to people not knowing the originals here. It's okay, we all gotta start somewhere, I just can't continue to assume people know who Marty or Staten or Greisemer or anyone else are anymore. I'm talking to myself here lol, but moving on... Your summary seems to be correct for the most part. I guess all that needs to be said is that Marty was one of the only people left that actually knew that what he was doing. He was part of what made Halo successful. He knows better than the dink managers fresh out of community college who only pay attention to numbers. But I digress. I don't think he could have come back with a better plan, because his plan was correct. And how does one improve upon that? I guess they didn't want the same kind of success that Halo's music had? Doesn't make sense to me, and I guess it didn't make sense to Marty. I'd probably partially lose my mind too if people like that were telling me how to do something, especially if they were telling me to do something the wrong way. I remember people wanting the song from Halo 3's announcement trailer as a separate MP3. Problem was, it had been mixed in with all the sound effects in the trailer and the original music had apparently been discarded (since it was unique and would never be used again). Under his own volition, Marty went through and remixed everything (or did audio magic, I don't know audio terms) so that the music was isolated, and then he (and Bungie) released the music for free. Today's Bungie would have told him not to do that because there was no profit involved. But see, he actually cared about us. The company cared about us. They did little things like that all the time. Sometimes large things. Now, literally no action can be approved unless it can be proven to create monetary profit. This is the fundamental problem with Bungie now. They no longer put their consumers/fans above potential profit. And that's just a shame. I'm sure there are many good people at Bungie still, but their actions are being thwarted by the selfish and ignorant management team, or whoever makes the horrible decisions. Not blaming Activision per say, but I'm sure a lot of the management staff is from Activision... Edit: I should also mention that the [i]real[/i] original Bungie (before Halo) and the [i]real[/i] originals (like Jason Jones) were even [i]better![/i] I was too young to experience it fully, but from what I've heard, it seems, internally, Bungie descends with each new game series. This descent seems particularly far though.

I think of games in the same manner I think of my car. I enjoy driving it but I gave zero thought about who designed the instrument panel or the body. I have no idea who works in the plant where it was made and I have no urge find out.