We have a winner. Former musical composer for Bungie, Marty O’Donnell, has won his lawsuit against the developer and Activision.
O’Donnell was suing the two video game juggernauts for being fired “without cause” back in April. Bungie claimed the two split “as friends,” but withheld O’Donnell’s founders’ shares with the company, claiming he left voluntarily.
While O’Donnell composed music for the prolific Halo series, he also composed a score for Destiny called Music of the Spheres. Reported by VentureBeat, the famous composer is now entitled to $95 thousand dollars in unpaid wages. He also gets the choice of “192,187.5 shares of vested Bungie common stock, the cash equivalent of 20 percent of his referred and common stock valued as of April 11, 2014, or the cash equivalent of 50 percent of his vested common stock valued as of July 2, 2014.” The value however, is not exactly clear because Bungie is not a publicly traded company.
The court documents also listed the timeline of the split. According to the documents, O’Donnell had a fall out with Activision’s marketing team over the musical score for Destiny’s trailers. Activision decided not to use O’Donnell’s Music of the Spheres soundtrack for their E3 trailer. This led O’Donnell to act out against the publisher.
“During E3, O’Donnell tweeted that Activision, not Bungie, had composed the trailer music. He also threatened Bungie employees in an attempt to keep the trailer from being posted online and interrupted press briefings.”
After things became a bit more dysfunctional, O’Donnell took a vacation from the company, and came back disengaged.
“After a brief vacation/sabbatical in early fall, O’Donnell returned, worked on the story and recorded dialogue, but wrote no additional music. His supervisor and the audio team did not consider him to be fully engaged in the work of Audio Director. For reasons unrelated to O’Donnell’s performance, the release date was again moved, to September 2014.”
O’Donnell was then terminated in April 2014, Destiny was released in September 2014, and the rest is history.
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