by Peter von Kleinsmid

Myth: Total Codex was released a little before Christmas 2000, and included Myth I, Myth II, and a new campaign made by players for Myth II (which can be loaded from the web, but it's enormous). This compilation is still a great value and an enormous wealth of gameplay for those who missed the first two games.

Myth I and Myth II were developed by separate groups at Bungie software (www.bungie.com), which some many months ago joined Microsoft Games as its own division. At about that time, they sold their almost-finished game Oni, and the rights to develop the Myth series, to other companies. Bungie still runs multi-player servers for Myth and Myth II, and Bungie still supports Myth and Myth II at www.bungie.net. The main place to find and download all Myth mods is at a third-party web site called The Mill, which currently offers about two thousand files to download, most of them mods and levels and new units.

A Myth II mod - The Seventh God.

This year, TalonSoft published a for-sale Myth II mod/remake on CD-ROM, called Green Berets, set during the Vietnam War. This is a complete modification of the game which can be run without installing Myth II.

Steve Jackson Games published a role-playing source book for their Generic Universal Role-Playing System (GURPS), which has a lot of background information on the game world that isn't readily available elsewhere, as well as a system for how to convert GURPS characters to the Myth II computer game using the editor, and so on. It was used as a source book in the development of Myth III.

Just before the release of Myth III, a compilation of recent player-made mods for Myth II was published as its own CD-ROM product as Myth II: Worlds. Since not everyone has a fast connection to the Internet, this offers an entire CD-ROM stuffed with some amazing complete re-workings of the game to other worlds and genres. Even for those who do have a fast connection, this is a good way to get a massive amount of them conveniently.

Myth III: The Wolf Age was developed by a team called Mumbo Jumbo. At least one of the developers worked on Fallout. The team was formed by God Games for this project. Myth III's campaign is set 1000 years before the events of first Myth game, and covers events which before were only legends. Intriguingly, the heroes of The Wolf Age are apparently the ancient former selves of the arch villains of the first two games (the Fallen Lords). The most obvious change in the Myth III engine is that the units, not just the landscape, are rendered in 3D (3D-looking 2D sprites were used in the earlier games, on a 3D landscape). The level of detail on the character textures has increased by an order of magnitude over Myth II.

Myth III - Trow Iron Warriors are very tough.