Destiny: The Taken King is celebrating its 10-year anniversary today, September 15, 2025. Below, we look back at how it came to represent the years of Destiny, and live-service games more broadly, that would follow.
Ten years ago, Bungie performed a miracle. It also, unfortunately, invoked a curse.
In 2014, the studio renowned for the Halo franchise launched Destiny, which promised to blend its penchant for dynamic single-player campaigns and kinetic multiplayer gameplay with the framework and community-oriented features of MMOs. And while the game was released to an excited and impressionable audience, it floundered. Its opening salvo felt limp and incomplete–a sentiment that later reporting would confirm–but it maintained a playerbase through a spate of smaller middling DLC releases leading up to The Taken King, Destiny’s first major expansion and saving grace.