Across thousands of hours spent slaying gods and protecting humanity from the Darkness, one of the most important memories that Mac — better known as Mactics, a streamer and YouTuber who built a career helping hundreds of thousands of Destiny players master the game — has from the franchise seems like an unremarkable one.
He stood on the roof of a decaying structure in the Plaguelands section of Old Russia on Earth while his girlfriend, Liv, stood a short distance away, perched atop a nearby building. Over their shared comms, Lord Saladin grimly recalled the fall of the Iron Lords. Across the way, Liv waved to Mac. He smiled and waved back. In real life, they were hundreds of miles apart, and their hearts were breaking.
“It’s quite random, but there was a sequence during the Rise of Iron campaign where the two of us were on opposite ends of a structure while some dialogue was playing, and she just waved at me and I waved back,” Mactics told Polygon via email. “This was after months of being apart, and I can’t remember a time since then that I had had a stronger feeling of being right by her side.”
Nearly a decade later, Mactics stumbled across that memory again while preparing to say goodbye to the game that helped keep them together.
On May 21, Bungie announced that Destiny 2 would receive its final live-service content update on June 9, as the studio shifted its focus toward incubating new games. Destiny 2 wasn’t shutting down: Bungie promised to keep the game playable, just as the original Destiny remains playable today. But after nearly 12 years of the Destiny franchise, the announcement nevertheless marked the end of an era. There would be no more content, no new Strikes or Raids, and aside from the hollow hunt for the perfect Edge Transit roll, no real reason to keep playing.
Six days later, Mactics shared the story of how Destiny had become inextricably linked with his relationship on social media.
Mactics and his now-wife began dating during their sophomore year of high school. When graduation came, they chose colleges hundreds of miles apart. They decided to try long distance rather than abandon a relationship that had already lasted several years. The transition was brutal.
They wrote physical letters to each other, spraying them with cologne or perfume. They exchanged sweatshirts carrying each other’s scent. They would even fall asleep together over FaceTime. None of it could capture the casual intimacy they had taken for granted when seeing one another every day required only a short drive. Then they tried Destiny.
Mactics had started playing the original Destiny around April 2016, after hearing his brother talk incessantly about the game. His girlfriend, meanwhile, wasn’t much of a gamer. Mactics suggested that they try playing together as another way to spend time with each other from afar. What began as a single virtual date soon became a nightly ritual.
“Despite being so far away from each other, seeing her Guardian and her seeing mine made an indescribable difference,” Mactics wrote in his May 27 post. “Our digital characters were a catalyst to manifesting each other’s presence right next to each other despite what felt like being on different sides of the world. We experienced every story, every adventure, every strike and every raid together over and over and over.”
Both played Hunters, the class defined by its agility, precision, and gunslinger flair. “Hunter mains through and through,” Mactics said. His wife would eventually get a Hunter class insignia tattoo. But they never invented elaborate backstories for their Guardians or role-played outright. The fantasy wasn’t what mattered. The time together did.
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