Destiny preservationists have managed to bring the original game to PC with plentiful bells and whistles, and it’s caught the attention of Bungie boss Josh Deane.
YouTube user Flummoxed posted a 4K, 105 FOV, 60+ FPS demonstration of Destiny 1 running on PC with mostly correct behaviors. When it was picked up on Twitter by DestinyNostalgia, Deane shared the post, writing, “Seems like a pretty game, wonder if it will do well…”
With new Bungie leadership promising to stay committed to Destiny as they work to restore cut Destiny 2 content (but not, crucially, make any new content for it), some fans have interpreted Deane’s words as a potential sign of things to come, or are at least willing to pin their hopes on it. The usual hype merchants, like YouTuber Aztecross, have unsurprisingly taken this inch for a mile.
Will Bungie revisit Destiny 1 in some form? With the studio down hundreds of developers, racing to prop up Marathon, and barely keeping the lights on in Destiny 2, I very much doubt it, and it would take more than a pithy tweet to convince me otherwise.
On Bluesky, aknumbers, lead developer of this D1 project, reacted to Deane’s response, calling it “post 2 in my series ‘is the funniest possible thing about to happen.'” Bungie reviving D1 while D2 dies would, indeed, be something to see.
What’s undeniably significant is that Deane, head of product at Bungie as well as Marathon general manager, shared this D1 project at all without a cease and desist in tow.
The GitLab hub for this project – specifically, its Claude explainer – notes that it is “a preservation project on owned media. The goal is to keep a game that depended on retired online services playable, by writing a server that answers what the client asks for. The work is: observe what the client needs, build it, serve it, verify it.”
“No game, patch or firmware assets are included or redistributed; the repository contains only original code and clean-room protocol documentation, kept deliberately separate from copyrighted content,” the GitLab hub adds, distinguishing this D1 from some of the projects in today’s vibe-coded recomp boom that have ended up in the iron sights of legal teams or other developers. This is hitched to the emulator shadPS4, but it is not a readily distributable copy of Destiny, which actually works in its favor.