Pathways into Darkness is a first-person shooter adventure video game developed and published by Bungie in 1993, for Macintosh personal computers.

Players assume the role of a Special Forces soldier who must stop a powerful, godlike being from awakening and destroying the world.

Pathways was critically acclaimed and won a host of awards; it was also Bungie's first major commercial success and enabled the two-man team of Jason Jones and Alex Seropian to move into a Chicago office and begin paying staff.

On May 5, 1994, a diplomat from the alien race known as the Jjaro appeared to the President of the United States and informed him that on May 13, an ancient godlike being sleeping beneath a pyramid would awaken and destroy the Earth.

Reaching the pyramid on foot hours after the rest of their team, the player must complete the mission before the god awakens in five days.

[6] In the pyramid, the player finds bodies of squad-mates, the remains of Spanish-speaking treasure hunters, and fallen members of a Nazi expedition from the 1930s who were looking for a secret weapon.

The game's ending changes depending on whether the player has a radio beacon to call for extraction, and when the nuclear device is set to explode.

[7] Originally, Bungie intended Pathways to be a straightforward 3D version of Minotaur, but they quickly found that the top-down perspective of their previous game did not mesh with the new 3D presentation.

An additional consideration was that the developers wanted to create a game that did not rely on then-rare networks and modems, an issue in marketing Minotaur.

[7] Jones recalled that starting from cliché plots, they moved towards "very interesting and unique but extremely difficult to understand stories".

One of the plot ideas cast the player as one of a group of Roman soldiers who discovered a mountain spring that extended their lives.

[7][9] Whereas Jones had single-handedly coded Minotaur, the small staff for Pathways was due to lack of money for a large team.

[7] Despite the game's advanced graphics, Pathways was designed to work on any Macintosh model; it was one of 30 applications that ran natively on Apple's PowerMacs on launch day.

He singled out the creatures for specific praise, likening them to "something that might have come from a brain-merge of Tim Burton, Anne Rice and Hieronymus Bosch" instead of simple line drawings.

[15] Criticisms of the game included the difficulty level; Blum found some segments too difficult and that it was possible to spend hours playing before realizing that the player had made an irreversible mistake.

[9] The game made Bungie enough money that the company was able to move from Seropian's apartment to a dedicated office in Chicago's South Side.

[21] A Mac OS X port of the game was produced by Man Up Time Studios in 2013, members of whom were early Bungie fans that became acquainted with the company through Pathways.