A Decade Ago The Taken King Saved DestinyAnd Then Cursed It

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.