There is a twinkling sound every time you turn on the original Destiny that lives on in the hearts of anyone who spent hundreds of hours playing it. Over a decade later, Destiny 2‘s newest expansion transported players back to those fond early days by re-using the old menu music for The Edge of Fate’s login screen.
It’s a short form video nostalgia-bait meme come to life. POV: you wake up in 2008, the last 17 years were just a bad dream, it’s time to run Vault of Glass again, a new DLC is just around the corner, and, oh, where is Xur this weekend? For anyone who has spent years toiling away on the sci-fi shooter’s loot treadmill, hearing the Destiny 1 menu theme is like hearing an old hit single you’d long forgotten about come on the radio and instantly hit you like a ton of bricks.
At a time when the identity of Destiny has never felt more contested and the future of Bungie as a studio has never felt more uncertain, the music is a beautiful reminder of the things about the game, now 11 years going, that originally hooked fans all that time ago. I didn’t drive home during lunch breaks to play just for kicks. The game really was that good.
The music was composed by people who have long since left the studio, including Martin O’Donnell, who went on to mount a failed anti-woke Congressional campaign, and Michael Salvatori, whose layoff from Bungie in 2023 shocked long-time fans. It’s an echo from a period in both gaming and the world that feels like it was a life-time ago, or three. And it harkens back to an era of Destiny that lives much more fondly in many players’ memories than the last few years of the MMO FPS.
Anytime the state of modern Destiny 2 has players down, or seasonal missteps burn people out, there’s a predictable ritual of fans looking back and pining for the good old days when the sci-fi lore was less convoluted and held more promise, and when the shooter felt new, unique, and unburdened by the economic constraints of a live service, micro-transaction-fueled content model. Remember the Cosmodrome? Remember the wizard from the moon? How did it all go so wrong?
Of course, the truth of the matter is that Destiny fans have always been caught in a constant quantum state of flux between “it’s so over” and “we’re so back.” The game has died and been reborn more times than any other multiplayer blockbuster in the genre. And still we return, chasing that old high again, even as more and more of our comrades wash out in the ebb and flow of annual updates. The old music is a nice welcome back, but it remains to be seen if the rest of The Edge of Fate can deliver even an inkling of what those vibes are inspired by.
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