This is great to hear given how much detective work went into it. Marty O'Donnell was impressed - so much so that he was moved to comment: "Hey everyone. On 24 March 2017, that work was published on YouTube alongside a Reddit post from Owen that revealed everything he and a Spanish-speaking audio editor called Tlohtzin Espinosa, or "Tlohtzin123" on Reddit, who had helped out along the way, had achieved. "Basically Bungie won't publish the work so I thought I'd try," he says. His ultimate goal was to release a Definitive Edition of Music of the Spheres so fans could listen to as close an approximation of the album as possible. Owen set to work, an internet detective with a Destiny obsession and a passion for music composition. "I saw an entire section about Bungie using snippets of the work before and how most of it was out there and I thought, hey, I could compile this," Owen remembers. In the document is a paragraph that reveals 40 minutes of the 48-minute suite is included in the Destiny game and its official soundtrack. When Marty O'Donnell's court case with Bungie ended in a settlement, Owen sifted through the 59-page document that was placed into the public domain. "I've always followed Marty news closely and that just didn't sit well with me that he'd been fired," he says. So, Owen is not only a Destiny superfan, but a Marty superfan. "Farthest Outpost is still on my phone to this day and I still refer back to it very often," he said. He played and loved Halo 3, like so many of us, but it was the music that caught his attention. Owen tells me his musical hero is Marty O'Donnell, former Bungie grizzled ancient, composer of Halo's wonderful music and Destiny's incredible soundtrack. "But the thing was, I wasn't hospitalised. "It's basically the same service they use for kids who have been hospitalised," he says. Things got so bad for Owen that he ended up on what's called Hospital Homebound for the rest of ninth grade. I wish they'd understood me better, why I was what I was." With the exception of one person I still talk to, I don't ever want to talk to any of them again. "If I were to guess I'd say it had something to with the people I was in school with for the first nine grades. "To be honest I don't really know when or why school began to crumble the way it did," he says. Right now, he's living at home with his parents.
Because of this, he hasn't gone to school in over a year, save a month at a private school that didn't work out. Owen tells me he has higher functioning autism as well as, at times, severe Tourette's. When we talk over Skype he speaks clearly and matter-of-factly, as if unpacking an algorithm. Owen Spence is a 16 going on 17-year-old Destiny fan and self-taught music composer from metro-Atlanta, Georgia. In fact, for this Destiny fan, piecing together Music of the Spheres and releasing a Definitive Version became a preoccupation that lasted more than a year. But that didn't put a particularly determined Destiny superfan off. To this day, Music of the Spheres remains on Bungie's cutting room floor, and it looks increasingly unlikely it'll ever see the light of day. The upshot was that its release had been canned, and Marty, who had spent two years on the project, was furious. The court papers said Activision had little enthusiasm for releasing Music of the Spheres as a standalone work, and that Bungie management felt O'Donnell was elevating his interest in publishing Music of the Spheres over the best interests of the company. Only afterwards, amid a messy lawsuit between the two parties that spilled out into the public domain, did we learn that his work on Music of the Spheres, which was intended to be a musical prequel to online shooter Destiny, had caused a rift within Bungie's board of directors.
In April 2014, veteran Bungie composer Marty O'Donnell took to Twitter to say he had been fired.