but the Mac market was all friendly and lame. So it was easier to compete," Jones said. After Minotaur, Bungie began work on a 3D graphics version of the game, but realized that the game's format was not suited to a 3D environment. Instead, Jones and Seropian wrote a brand-new story for what became Pathways Into Darkness. Since Bungie had no money and Jones was the only one with the available time, he single-handedly coded the game on a Macintosh IIfx, passing art chores to his friend Colin Brent. Pathways was successful enough that Bungie moved from a one-bedroom apartment to an actual office. Bungie's next project started as an update of Pathways but evolved into a science fiction shooter game, Marathon. The game included state-of-the-art graphics, network multiplayer, and voice support, and won a number of awards on release in 1994. Jones recalled that he was surprised anyone ever completed the game and sought to atone for some of its shortcomings with its sequel, Marathon 2: Durandal, which was also released for Microsoft Windows. The Marathon series was followed by a series of real-time strategy games, starting with Myth: The Fallen Lords in 1996. Bungie continued to expand, and in 1997 work began on a new project, codenamed Blam! (Jones had changed the name from Monkey Nuts because he could not bring himself to tell his mother about the new game under that title.) Blam! evolved from a real-time strategy game to a third-person shooter to a first-person shooter called Halo: Combat Evolved. Jones role in development was unlike Marathon and Myth, where Jones was involved in developing more than half the levels and much to most of the story. Instead, he was the project lead and a manager, barely providing any code to the game. He would read war journals by authors such as John Kinkead and Winston Churchill. In 2000, Microsoft acquired Bungie, moving the team from Chicago to Washington State. Jones recalled that the buyout was a "blur [...] We'd been talking to people for years and years—before we even published Marathon, Activision made a serious offer [to buy us]. But the chance to work on [the Microsoft Xbox console]—the chance to work with a company that took the games seriously. Before that we worried that we'd get bought by someone who just wanted Mac ports or didn't have a clue." Around the same time, a