rather than another first-person game. The team agreed with Jones that their new shooter could end up as being very similar to Quake, and, after working on the project for two months, changed it to a strategy game. Dubbed "The Giant Bloody War Game", the team's initial inspirations for Myth were films such as Mel Gibson's Braveheart, "with its close-up portrayal of bloody melees between large forces," and literature such as Glen Cook's The Black Company series, "in which gruesome tales of battle contrast with engaging and intriguing characters." Speaking of the influence of Cook, Doug Zartman, Bungie's director of public relations and one of the game's writers, claimed: Similarly, programmer Jason Regier explained they wanted to set the game in "a dark, amoral world where opposing sides are equally brutal and their unity is torn by power struggles within the ranks. We dreamed of gameplay that combined the realism and excitement of action games with the cunning and planning required by strategy games." Zartman further stated: "we wanted to capture the feeling that you get watching large groups of people clashing on the open field. We wanted to recreate the blood-letting and grisly reality of large-scale battles." Although Myth is, by definition, a real-time strategy game, he was also eager to differentiate the game from other RTS games: Once they had decided on the basic game mechanics, their first task was to draw up a list of elements they wished to avoid; specifically, RTS clichés, obvious references to J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth, allusions to the Arthurian legend, or any kind of narrative involving "little boys coming of age and saving the world." On the other hand, elements they did wish to incorporate included "ideas that contributed to the visual realism of the game," such as a 3D landscape, polygonal buildings, reflective water, particle-based weather, battlefields littered with severed limbs, and explosions that damaged the terrain permanently. They were also determined to include a robust online multiplayer mode and allow hundreds of troops to appear on a battlefield at once. Cross-platform Work on the game began in January 1996, with four programmers, two artists, and a product manager. Originally, the game was to have no music whatsoever, but composer Martin O'Donnell, who had recently been hired by Bungie, convinced the developers this was a bad idea, and he, Michael Salvatori and Paul Heitsch were commissioned to compose a soundtrack