Remember Destiny, Bungie's ambitious, but ultimately-too-flawed-to-live, MMORPG/Shooter/Peter-Dinklage-tormenter? No? I don't blame you. It came out in 2014, riding the most hype any one thing can have without Flavor Flav screaming in the sidecar. It was a resounding disappointment. Rightly derided for having little content variation, punishing mechanics, and worst of all: no story. In fact, that's being too generous. Destiny had the anti-story. It was a series of events seemingly tailor-made to destroy the very integrity of the word "story." It was just a list of base cliches and terrible tropes strung together incoherently, all read to you by Peter Dinklage, whom you could actually hear slowly losing the will to live as the script went on.

Gage Skidmore

Looking like this the whole time.

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I loved it.

I played it all the way up until last week, when I finished "Age Of Triumph" -- the game's last round of mini-content. There will be no more updates. The game is over now.

Why on earth would I keep playing that clusterfuck for three goddamn years? Was it some sort of meta-gulag for an unappreciative gamer? The curse of an especially modern witch? A dare gone terribly wrong?

Yes! To all three!

It's uh... it's been a busy year.

But there's also this: If you have the patience, the persistence, and a blatant disregard for the inherent value of your own time, Destiny actually has one of the best stories in gaming. It just didn't make it into the game itself. Well, not all of it, anyway. The explanation is very complicated, the situation is entirely unique to this particular game, and the reason why it all happened is balls-on-the-stove crazy. Bear with me here, because while I am going to try to be brief about the fantastically stupid story behind the making of Destiny, we do have to start from the very beginning to understand the very end.