Halo: A Space Opera From Bungie 9782377843572

Table of contents :
Couverture
Page de titre
Foreword
Preface
Part I: The Origins of Halo
Chapter 1 – Bungie: a Two-Man
Chapter 2 – The Rising Stars of
Chapter 3 – A Studio in Metamorphosis
Chapter 4 – Halo Is Born
Chapter 5 – Bungie: A Microsoft Studio
Chapter 6 – Halo: The Path of Game Development Never Runs Smooth
Chapter 7 – The Xbox Hit Game
Chapter 8 – Halo 2: The Most Eagerly Anticipated Game of Its Generation
Chapter 9 – Xbox and Bungie Evolve
Chapter 10 – Halo 3: the Game That Made the Xbox 360
Chapter 11 – Microsoft and Bungie Part Ways
Chapiter 12– Halo: Reach, Bungie’s Farewell to Halo
Part II: The Game Universe
Chapter 1 – In the Beginning, There Were the Forerunners
Chapter 2 – War with Humanity
Chapter 3 – War Against the Flood
Chapter 4 – Humanity Begins its of the Stars
Chapter 5 – The Spartan-II Program
Chapter 6 – First Contact
Chapter 7 – The Covenant
Chapter 8 – A Lethal Game of Hide and Seek
Chapter 9 – The Spartan-III Program
Chapter 10 – The Fall of Reach
Chapter 11 – War of the Halo
Chapter 12 – War’s End
Chapter 13 – Consequences
Part III: Analysis
Space Opera, the Bungie Way
Where are they now?
Conclusion
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Copyright

Citation preview

For Yann, Fabien, Teddy, Neal and Lucas,

my Spartan brothers at whose sides

I’ve fought many a battle.

FOREWORD

h

ALO WAS CONCEIVED in a drafty old building that used to be a

school, so cold in the winter that mice nested in our computer cases to stay warm. I joined Jason Jones, co-founder of Bungie, in the gritty south Chicago office to lay the foundation for a new sci fi game. We didn’t have a master plan. In fact, we called the game Monkey Nuts, a code name that remained for several years into production. I was hired to help build the vision for a bold new game Jason had floating around in his head. To my delight and surprise, that vision was less defined than I thought. That put a lot more pressure on me to help him build that vision before we brought on other members to the team. While creating a world which the player would get to inhabit, as well as the characters, vehicles, and weapons we would play, the development of Halo took a few massive turns that nobody on our team expected. From real-time strategy to third-person action to a full-on first-person shooter, we often struggled to find exactly what it was we were building. It really wasn’t until the final year of development that we finally understood Halo’s transformation. But this realization came so late that completing the game for its debut at the launch of the brand-new Xbox console presented some significant challenges for the team. Along the way, the journey of developing Halo was filled with so many moments of joy and celebration, along with extreme difficulties and times when the very existence of Bungie was in jeopardy. After Halo CE launched to great success, our young team was still trying to figure out how to handle the pressure of continuing the franchise

with another hit. We needed to grow, which was directly at odds with keeping our small-team culture. We needed to follow a more corporate structure, which bucked against our brash origins within that old schoolhouse in Chicago. And, as much as we knew Microsoft owned our studio, we remained fiercely independent all along the way. I think the pride in what we created, and our spirit of independence is one part of what held us all together. But the other massive part was the community that had grown along with us and supported us through thick and thin. In this book, my hope is that you’ll appreciate the amazing stories of how Halo was created. I hope you get an in-depth look at the missions and lore of the universe and get a rare behind-the-scenes glimpse at what it was like building the franchise. Most importantly, I also hope you’ll come to know the many talented people who poured all their creativity, love, and care into building this universe that so many fans have come to adore now for decades.

Marcus Lehto Art Director – Halo 1, 2 & 3

PREFACE

O

N NOVEMBER 9, 2004, after a long and arduous three-year

development process, Xbox and Bungie finally released the hotly anticipated Halo 2, forever changing the destiny of many gamers. And not necessarily in the way that some of Bungie’s staff had expected, despite the fact that they fully believed in the potential of their new baby. You see, the collector’s edition of Halo 2 came with a second DVD containing the making-of the game. A filming team had been following most of Halo 2’s development, and the resulting film, with a run-time of over 50  minutes, covered the key stages of the game’s development, like the E3 2003 presentation and the ensuing crunch, before reaching its conclusion, so full of hope, a few days before the game’s release. For many gamers out there, this was an opportunity to get to know the men and women that had made Halo possible, to put faces to the names featured in the end credits of Halo: Combat Evolved. The video also provided a heartwarming view of the relationships between the studio’s staff, who could be seen joking and pranking each other, as if they were a group of friends still together at college. It was more than enough to make many teenage boys and girls dream of a career in video games. Because that was exactly what the making-of achieved: it gave people a vocation. At Bungie and elsewhere, many developers that are now busy working on the games of the future are there thanks to the image of the industry they saw in this making-of. Because Halo had lighted a fire inside them. That’s exactly what happened to me. In 2004, video games were my passion and I liked to think that one day, I would be one of the chosen few who were paid to test video games. But it was only when I got my hands on Halo 2, and watched the making-of for the very first time that I realized just how many opportunities existed out there. Including shining the spotlight on the

men and women who made video games. In general, gamers are only familiar with a few big names. People like John Romero, Shigeru Miyamoto, Warren Spector, Hideo Kojima and Michel Ancel are well known to gamers, but they are just the tip of the iceberg–of the ice floe–that is the video game industry and the hundreds of studios it contains all around the world. Every day, these offices are filled with a huge variety of highly talented individuals, people who each have their own story that deserves to be known. With every press of a button or click on the mouse, every time we look at the screen, we are discovering their creations and putting them to the test. These are men and women who, sometimes for decades, have kept us entertained and nourished our dreams. I always thought it was a shame that they remained faceless. So I decided to do something about it. It was the dream of a somewhat naive teenager who had no idea of just how much work it would take, but I started my own little blog. I soon realised this. Then, from 2006, I decided to focus on Bungie, my favorite studio, and while I was waiting for the release of Halo 3 alongside millions of other gamers, I started collecting press cuttings, videos, and interviews, and anything else I could find about Bungie and Halo. I spent my evenings collating this information in a database that I kept under lock and key on the family computer. This implausible collection was not meant to be shared, and in truth it was of only limited interest. One thing I can say about it, though, is that it helped me understand the industry I was so passionate about. From a game’s development to the moment it hits the shelves, including the relationships between the studio and the publisher and the vying for influence within a single company, I thought I had it all pinned down. In 2013, then, when I joined the team at Jeuxvideo.com (the leading video game news website in Europe), I thought I was ready. But I had another think coming. The truth is that nobody can truly know and understand such a unique industry until they’re on the inside. Until they’re part of it. Journalists like me are at best privileged spectators. Privileged because their job brings them into

regular contact with studios and publishers, to whom they can speak and ask questions. And, sometimes, see how video games are made from the inside. Their next task is a relatively straightforward one: to share what they have learned with their audience, in an easily digestible way. For six years, that was precisely what I tried to do for the readers of Jeuxvideo.com. But being a journalist is a constant race against the clock, and we all too rarely have time to work free from any constraints. We learn to make do. Some excel at it, and have written and continue to write high-end journalism. For me, though… I needed more time, more space. So, when Third Éditions contacted me in the summer of 2017 to suggest I write a book about Halo, I didn’t even have to think about it. What they were giving me was an opportunity to open a window onto the studio’s private life, one that all fans of Halo and Bungie could look through. To tell the full story of these men and women who, sometimes without getting any credit, had left their mark on video-gaming history. And with it our lives. This book, entitled Halo: A Space Opera From Bungie, was published in the original French in December 2018, and since then my life has never been the same. A few months after the book came out, Bungie got in touch to offer me a role with the company. The circle was complete. Fifteen years after watching the making of Halo 2 for the very first time, I was suddenly working alongside the same faces I’d seen on the screen. In the credits for Destiny 2, my name features just below that of Lorraine McLees, the woman we have to thank, among other things, for the design of the Pillar of Autumn, the iconic human ship in Halo: Combat Evolved. I welled up the first time I saw it. As I write this preface, it has been six months since I left Bungie, and I still find it hard to believe that the past two short years spent at the studio are anything more than a dream. And the craziest thing is to think that none of this would have happened if I hadn’t watched that video back when I had just turned 16. If this book serves to pique your interest, to teach you something, and to help you see your calling, just like the making of Halo 2 did for

many of us, then all of my hard work will have paid off. Because that’s all we hope for when we start working on a project like this. The time has come for me to shut up, to stop talking about myself and start talking about far more interesting people, so all I’ll say is enjoy the read! Welcome to the Halo universe.

THE AUTHOR: LOÏC RA LET A former History student, he joined Jeuxvideo.com, the main french video game outlet in 2013, and as a journalist, he became their Xbox expert. While covering and reporting on everything related to Xbox, he also set himself appart in the french video game medias as a specialist of Bungie, 343 Industries, Halo and Destiny. In 2019, he was hired by Bungie and joined its Community team, working on Destiny 2, most specifically on two expansions (Beyond Light, The Witch Queen) and six seasons, among other things. He left the studio in 2021 and he is now enjoying some much needed rest with his wife and newborn son.

PART I

THE ORIGINS OF HALO

Chapter 1 – Bungie: a Two-Man While it’s true that today, 343 Industries are the loving custodians of the Halo franchise, that hasn’t always been the case. Indeed, the history of the Master Chief saga is intimately linked to the history of Bungie, its original creator. This is true to the extent that it’s impossible to disentangle one from the other, despite the fact that Bungie has turned a page on Halo for good, and is now busy telling different stories, in different universes. If we are to understand Halo’s history, we’ll need to go back to when Bungie was first founded and further, to explore the backgrounds of Alexander Seropian and Jason Jones. Because as is often the case in video games, it all began with an everyday encounter.

THE FOUNDING FATHER For as long as he can remember, Alexander Seropian had always wanted to be a businessman. It was an unusual dream for a young boy, perhaps, but one that never left him. When he was aged just ten years old, he took part in a fundraiser for the hospital where his father worked, selling popsicles door-to-door in the Chicago suburbs. The act of exchanging these little icy treats for money brought him an intense feeling of satisfaction. But the young Alexander Seropian had other passions, too, and one in particular was occupying an increasingly large place in his life: video games. He discovered this new hobby in the mid-1970s when his parents returned from Sears department store having bought him a Telegames Personal Arcade, a cheaper version of the Atari 2600. He was spellbound by Pong. No sooner had he arrived at college, than he was visiting the computer

room at every opportunity. It had just been equipped with eight brand new Commodore PET computers, which he used to learn the basics of computer programming. At home, meanwhile, his parents decided to invest in his new passion and bought one of the first Macintosh computers, at which he would spend lots of his free time after class. He learned Pascal1 and began programming his very first games. One of his first creations was an American football game that he designed from scratch to test how well he had mastered C,2 a programming language. Even more than video games, programming was Seropian’s first true love. He liked putting together lines of code and seeing the result come to life on the screen. Better still, he knew that if he made something people were interested in, then he could sell it, which was a step towards founding his own company. This was an idea that he never really gave up on. While he was growing into a talented programmer, Seropian also completed his education without a hitch. A popular pupil among both teachers and his peers, he was a young man who bore no resemblance to the stereotypical geek, lonely and bullied by the high school jocks. He secured a place at the University of Chicago where he quickly earned a reputation–and not always for the right reasons. Born with a keen eye for business opportunities, Seropian decided to sell his notes from class, especially the ones he took in chemistry. “Half the freshman class at UC took chemistry, and it was an 8am lecture, a 90-minute lecture. Half the class never showed up. I had a Mac and I knew how to use Quark Xpress or whatever at the time. I would take notes, or actually my girlfriend would take notes, and then I would type them up, format them and sell them.” Seropian generated some publicity by putting up posters around campus mocking the chemistry professor, and in particular his accent. “The professor had a very thick accent. One of my taglines was, ‘If you can’t understand the accent, just buy my notes.’” It certainly rubbed the chemistry department at the University of Chicago up the wrong way, and they tried to shut his little business venture down. Seropian’s computing talents didn’t go unnoticed for long, and he was invited to a series of interviews at different Chicago-based IT

companies while he was still a student. One of them was Microsoft, which has offices in the Illinois state capital. Seropian ultimately began his career there as an intern, where he joined a team responsible for making programming tools. When they offered him a full-time job, he was faced with a dilemma: should he complete his college education, accept the job offer from Microsoft, or even start his own company, which had been his secret ambition for years now? One day in May 1991, he decided to see what his father thought about it. “His advice was to take a job and learn some stuff and then, once I knew some stuff, I could go start the company,” Seropian explained in 2013. But our young programmer wasn’t really listening. He’d already made his decision. What he was really looking for when he asked his dad for advice was validation and encouragement. He saw his dad’s advice as a challenge, and a few days later on May  19th, he founded his own company, which he named Bungie Software Products Corporation. To get Bungie up and running, Seropian borrowed some money from his parents and a few family friends. He built his own disk duplication machine, and started making games. Before his internship at Microsoft ended, Seropian had pilfered a not-at-all insignificant number of blank disks, which he used to distribute his first games. Gnop, the best-known of these early games, was a copy of Pong, the first video game Seropian owned. With his floppy disks in hand, he hit the streets giving out free copies of Gnop, and later other games that he would try to sell. The venture would ultimately prove to be in vain, and before long he had lost the money he had borrowed. But Seropian was undeterred, and kept trying again and again until he managed to make a bit of money. Then he came to a realization: if he really got behind it, Bungie could one day grow into a flourishing company. This was when he set about making Bungie’s first real game, Operation: Desert Storm, which was released in October 1991. As its name implies, the game was inspired by the Gulf War, which had ended a few months earlier. It was a top-down game in which players controlled a tank as they battled their way across 20 levels before facing the final boss: Saddam Hussein’s

giant head. Developed on Macintosh, Seropian’s computer platform of choice, the game managed to sell around 2500 copies. Not bad for a game made by a student, but still not enough for the young entrepreneur whose plans were bigger than these modest sales figures. However, it was too big a job to take on alone, and he decided to start looking for a business partner, someone who could help him develop better quality games so that Bungie could finally take off. Seropian had someone in mind straight away: one of his classmates from college.

STRENGTH IN NUMBERS This classmate was none other than Jason Jones, who Seropian had met through Pete Hallenberg, a mutual friend. The two classmates had known each other to say hello to for a while now, having both signed up to the same artificial intelligence class. Seropian was very quickly impressed by Jones, or at least by his computer. Seropian recalls that, “He had a machine with 8  MB of ram–which for 1990 was insane!” At college, Jones lived in a small dorm and his clean, pristine, and tidy dorm room contained only a bed, a desk, and, most importantly, his computer, with an equally oversized screen. Artificial intelligence wasn’t the only interest shared by Seropian and Jones: they were both also fans of Apple computers. Like Seropian, Jones had taught himself the basics of IT and programming at an early age. At high school, he started to learn a number of programming languages, particularly Applesoft Basic and 6502 Assembly, and later Microsoft Basic 1.0 when his parents bought him a Macintosh 128k. Eventually he discovered C on an Apple II, but he also learned to use it within a PC environment. These skills enabled him to get a job for a small computer-aided manufacturing company before he even started college. Jones spent a full year designing programs for the company’s machines, and used the money he earned to develop his knowledge and skills. For example, he bought himself a copy of the Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop (MPW) software development environment, and quickly

learned to use it. This meant that he could write the code for several Mac games, as well as converting the code of one of his old Apple II games so that it would run on a Macintosh. This game was Minotaur, and while it might not look it, it was way ahead of its time as a dungeon-crawler with procedurally generated levels. Thoroughly playtested by Jones and his friends, Minotaur had been refined again and again over the years, while Jones was still programming on the Apple II, with improvements that included a LAN mode. At a time when the internet barely existed, this demonstrated some real technical prowess, but made the game’s conversion a more complex matter. It was when he had almost finished the Macintosh port of the game that he met Alex Seropian. The two students got on well enough, despite their very different personalities. They did have one thing very much in common, though: the desire to make video games and to earn a living from it. Thoroughly convinced by both Jones’ skills and his plans, Seropian offered to help him finish Minotaur and then to publish it through Bungie. At first Jones was reluctant, mainly because he had never intended on selling his creation, which he didn’t think was sufficiently polished. But Seropian managed to persuade him, and Bungie had its second game. While Jones finished work on Minotaur, Seropian took care of the marketing side of things, and designed the box in which the game would be sold. Called Minotaur: The Labyrinth of Crete (so there were no misunderstandings), the game didn’t fare much better than Operation: Desert Storm, also selling around 2500 copies. While the game encountered a certain popularity in the dorms of the University of Chicago, where Jones was living, its success was confined to a circle made up of a few geeks who grasped the subtleties of network gaming. We are talking about back in 1992, and Minotaur needed AppleTalk or a modem to work. This was without any doubt an outstanding technical innovation, but the general public were completely ignorant of online gaming, and even gamers would not necessarily have the right equipment. The game did, however, pique the curiosity of the Mac gamer community. Admittedly, there was hardly a large selection of games to choose from for the Apple

computer, and as Jones himself would state a few years later, there was only limited competition between developers. So despite its faults, Minotaur attracted attention nevertheless, as did Bungie.

1  A programming language created in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth, primarily for educational purposes. 2  A programming language created in 1972 by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, fathers of the UNIX operating system. It influenced later languages, like C++, Java and PHP. It’s one of the best-known programming languages.

Chapter 2 – The Rising Stars of Their first attempt may not have been the hit they had hoped for, but Seropian and Jones soon found that they had a lot in common and decided to become more than one-off business partners. Jones officially joined Bungie and Seropian split the company with him 50/50, as equal shareholders. They both felt that great things were possible and that together they could make a living from their passion. That said, they would spend several months bouncing ideas around without any concrete results.

PATHWAYS INTO DARKNESS Jason Jones wasn’t short on ideas. Nor on talent. He was keen to exploit the latest technology in the video game industry and began working on different graphic rendering solutions. Indeed, Jones wanted the next Bungie game to be in 3D. Like others in the industry at the time, he had seen and played id Software’s Wolfenstein 3D, and was immediately interested in the technical challenge the game posed. He spent months designing a game engine and development tools that would ultimately enable him to begin work developing a new game. Bungie didn’t yet know what their next game would be, but they did know that they now possessed extremely robust technology with which to build it. After sounding out a long series of ideas, the duo began working on a 3D version of Minotaur, before abandoning the project. In an interview with Inside Mac Games a few months later, Jones revealed how, “We pretty quickly decided that Minotaur was not well suited to a 3D environment since so much of the game relied on the top-down point-of-view.”

The top-down view was dropped, and Bungie began working on its first FPS. While Jones laid the foundations of the game, he and Seropian set out to enlist the services of a few friends to give them a hand. It would be one of Jones’ friends, Colin Brent, who came to their aid, offering his talents as an artist. In Minotaur, Jones had drawn the characters, monsters, and objects found in the labyrinth himself. While this did give the game a certain charm, it also clearly revealed it to be an amateurish effort. Their new game, Pathways Into Darkness, needed to do better. Brent’s job was to bring the very detailed world imagined by Jones to life. At that time, shooters didn’t have much in the way of plot, and Jones believed that they could serve as a vehicle for a good storyline as much as any RPG did. While he was working on the code for the game, he came up with a number of different storylines. One was about an archaeologist whose sister had been kidnapped by the game’s antagonist, who held her to ransom in exchange for an ancient artifact that the hero must find and return. However, this script was too obviously similar to Indiana Jones, and it was back to the drawing board. Jones wanted something that was richer, deeper, and more complex, so he wrote the story of a secret community hidden from the world among the peaks of the Swiss Alps. The community was made up of old Roman soldiers who had found the secret to eternal life thanks to a magical spring discovered on the fringes of the Empire. Water from the spring extended the lifespan of all who drank from it. The soldiers came to loathe death and clung to life for centuries. Every seven years, the leader of their community had to return to the spring to fetch more water so that the soldiers would never die. It was a dangerous journey for one man alone, and if the man failed to return, the immortal soldiers would elect another of their number to bring the water back to their village. And it was this unwilling “volunteer,” sent to meet certain death, that Jones wanted players to control. He liked the idea that the main character was more of a victim than a real hero, a man who was not allowed to choose his own destiny. On top of that, his mission wasn’t a worthy one: it was to carry out the orders of a community that had been desperately clinging to life for far too long. “I think it would have been burdensome,” Jones would

admit a few months later. This idea was also scrapped, but Jones was undeterred: he wanted to tell stories. A fan of sci-fi and fantasy, the young developer would eventually come up with Pathways Into Darkness, a lighter pitch that was still Lovecraftian in many ways, in which an American soldier explores a Mayan pyramid. Players were tasked with travelling into the bowels of the pyramid to activate a nuclear bomb and stop a powerful, godlike being from awakening. The game took the form of an FPS and contained plenty of action scenes, as well as several RPG elements that brought greater depth to the gameplay experience. While multiplayer mode was once again included, Jones and Seropian had learned from their mistakes, and it was possible to play Pathways Into Darkness without AppleTalk or a modem. And they distributed their roles more effectively. While Jones was writing the final lines of code needed to enable network gaming, Seropian contacted the press and gave presentations at a number of American trade shows, such as MacWorld in August 1993. July was a stressful month for the two friends, as they worked flat out to finish Pathways so that it would be presentable for MacWorld. But they did it. When the game was finally released a few weeks after MacWorld, it very quickly sold several thousand copies, and eventually recorded sales in excess of 20,000 units. Jones and Seropian weren’t expecting it, but Pathways Into Darkness was a genuine success and quickly picked up a number of awards, like adventure game of the year from the Inside Mac Games website. Better yet, the small community of Bungie fans suddenly expanded, becoming a real asset for the studio as word of mouth drove sales. After only a few years of work and with three games under its belt, Bungie was now the standard-bearer of Mac gaming, or at least its rising star. It was a role that Jason Jones really loved, and he wasn’t shy about letting people know. Generally a discreet and reserved individual, Jones revealed himself to be a lot more self-assured when asked about Macintosh gaming: not only did he state that the studio would remain loyal to the Apple brand for the foreseeable future, but he also predicted, in words spoken into an Inside Mac

Games mic, that the day was soon coming when Mac gamers would no longer need to envy PC gamers. “We still haven’t caught up with the PC, but I think we will, and I think we will soon. And if nobody else does it, I’m going to do it.” In confirmation, Jones teased the studio’s next games, code-named Mosaic and Marathon. Both to be released on the Mac, of course.

MARATHON: DOOM, MAC-STYLE The modest success that was Pathways Into Darkness did Bungie a lot of good. The company’s financial resources grew to the point that Seropian could consider himself a real businessman. While Jones got to work on Bungie’s next two titles, his partner took care of the rest. Bungie then hired several people who would join the studio over the course of the development process for Marathon and Mosaic. The latter was quickly abandoned after being presented at MacWorld in San Francisco in January 1994. Jones nevertheless retained some of the game’s concepts and incorporated them into Marathon, beginning with a comprehensive AI system that enabled the various enemies encountered by players to react to their actions. Marathon was now the only project in development at Bungie, which continued to hire new staff. Jones brought in a Duke graduate, Ryan Martell, who took a break from his studies to help Jones write the code for the game. He also called in another friend, Greg Kirkpatrick, who he worked with on the storyline for Marathon. Both men were passionate about sci-fi, so they wrote a story about a space station, the UESC Marathon, that orbited a human colony in a faraway galaxy. At the start of the game, Marathon station is attacked by a gargantuan alien spaceship belonging to the Pfhor, who commence hostilities with an electromagnetic attack that damages the station’s three artificial intelligences. Tycho was destroyed, Durandal lost its mind, and only Leela remained in any condition to help the player on their quest. The player’s job was to hinder the enemy advance through Marathon, before discovering that Durandal had formed an alliance with the S’pht, a race of alien cyborgs held prisoner on the

Pfhor ship. Together, they repel the Pfhor assault, and Durandal even takes control of their ship, before leaving the sector. A happy ending, after all. Players also had to seek out all the terminals that Jones had dotted around the levels, which were the only way to understand the events unfolding aboard the Marathon during the game. This method of delivering the game’s narrative would win over a lot of fans when the game came out. But before it did, Bungie would need to hire again. It was impossible to finish work on Marathon within an acceptable timeframe with the current staff numbers. And so Bungie’s first real employee was a certain Doug Zartman. When Colin Brent, the artist to whom Pathways Into Darkness owes its bestiary, decided to return to college, Seropian posted a classified ad in one of Chicago’s free newspapers. “Help us making kick-ass games for the Mac,” it read. As a fan of both video games and Mac computers, it immediately caught the attention of Doug Zartman. He already knew of Bungie and applied without a moment’s hesitation. Zartman didn’t really have the skills required for the role, but he turned up for the interview anyway and showed Seropian some of his drawings and design ideas for a strategy game. Seropian politely informed him that he wasn’t suitable for the advertised role, but he did offer him another job. And so Zartman found himself providing a bit of tech support for the studio alongside his main role taking care of PR for Bungie, which was eating up too much of Seropian’s time. But Bungie still hadn’t found a replacement for Brent, until, that is, they met a Frenchman by the name of Reginald Dujour to take his place. A graduate of the French National School of Fine Art and a veteran of the French Foreign Legion, Dujour was studying in Chicago when he answered the Bungie ad. He drew the game world for Marathon and was also involved in designing a number of the game’s levels. This significant enlargement of the team meant that Bungie had a desperate need to find some new premises ASAP, because up until now Jones and Seropian had been working in Seropian’s apartment. But money was tight: Bungie moved into 1945 South Halsted Street, in Pilsen, a neighborhood on the south side of Chicago. It wasn’t a

particularly appealing place: the offices were in what had been a Catholic school for girls, and were in a sorry state of repair and infested with rats. Marcus Lehto, who would go on to become Bungie’s artistic director, recalls how, “In the winter time, it was so cold that mice lived in our PCs just to keep warm. They would often poke their heads out of the desk cord holes and look at what we were doing.” To make matters worse, the building next door was used by crack addicts on a daily basis as a place to buy and sell drugs and to get high, a situation that caused quite a few problems over Bungie’s time there. But the team were in fine spirits when they moved in and pushed on with their work on Marathon, which was beginning to take shape. Much to the displeasure of the fans who loved its game world, Marathon wasn’t a sequel to Pathways Into Darkness. Jason Jones was unequivocal on the matter: he didn’t like making sequels and preferred to create new game worlds and design new game systems. Nor was he afraid of a challenge. Then Doom was released in late 1993, and it had a real effect on the development of Marathon, whose level design suddenly seemed dated. The new shooter from id Software, which would soon become the ultimate benchmark for the genre, used more curves and fewer right angles, and applied a range of mind-blowing graphical effects. Jones didn’t let it get him down, and got back to work improving his own game engine and tools. He added a major new feature, and gave players the ability to look up and down. Unlike most of its contemporary FPS, Marathon demanded more accurate aiming from players. It was also a good way for Jones to show off his game engine, which had the ability to display textures on the ground and the ceiling (a rarity in 1994), which helped make Marathon a game that was as unique as it was gripping. In order to accelerate work on Marathon and make more short demos to generate a buzz around the game, Bungie hired Alain Roy, a developer who had been noticed a few months earlier when he bypassed the copy protection for Pathways Into Darkness. Impressed by Roy’s talent, Alex Seropian offered him a fixed-term contract. Roy accepted the offer and spent the summer of 1994

working at Bungie. He quickly struck up a friendship with Jason Jones (they were almost neighbors) and worked on shading for the game. He optimized Jones’ code and helped Marathon run more smoothly. He also worked with Jones on the game’s multiplayer mode, which Jones saw as one of the game’s key features, as he explained during Marathon’s development: “The first time you play a game it might surprise you, but in the long run it’s not very difficult to figure out how the computer will react in different situations. That’s why I like playing network games, because human opponents are completely unpredictable.” It was with this in mind that he demanded PvP mode, where players could face off against each other. With Roy, he spent many a long day working to improve Marathon’s netcode, taking just a few short breaks in the middle of the day. While the neighborhood around the Bungie offices was far from a tourist destination, it did conceal a few pleasant surprises, like the burritos from La Cocina, where the whole staff at Bungie ate almost every day, and a peaceful little park filled with greenery. While Roy basked in the sun, Jones kept working on a little laptop, making sure that the latest changes to the code worked as they were supposed to. With the game almost finished, in August Bungie’s little team traveled to MacWorld in Boston for Marathon’s public unveiling. It wasn’t quite finished, but Jones and Seropian were feeling confident. And the trade show vindicated their confidence: Marathon was a hit with the gaming public, and Bungie proudly announced that the game would be ready in two weeks. Seropian also used it as an opportunity to launch pre-orders. But this was a schoolboy error: in the end, Marathon wouldn’t actually be ready until mid-December. As soon as they got back to Chicago, the Bungie team decided to launch the game and test the single-player campaign one more time. When they did, they found little bugs dotted throughout the game. Maybe they only noticed them due to Jones’ near-pathological perfectionism, or because they were feeling under pressure after excellent player feedback in Boston, or maybe they were just seeing the game with fresh eyes after a few days away from the studio.

Whatever the case, Jones and his team began to rework some parts of the game. And then some more. And then another, and another, and another, working 14-hour days to rebuild the game’s 21 levels. The whole team gave their all. Seropian, for example, reworked some levels while he was also busy designing the music and sound effects for Marathon, with assistance from Zartman whose voice was used for some of the game’s characters. And Seropian didn’t stop there, also designing the game’s packaging. It took the form of a weird pyramid-shaped box that wasn’t exactly suited to being stacked on shelves, but was immediately recognizable. Seropian and Jones also hired another new member of staff to help them in their work, Jonas Eneroth. A graduate from Georgetown University which he left with two degrees–one in finance, and the other in IT– Jonas earned his stripes over the course of years spent making mods for PC games. A talented game designer, he caught the eye of Jones and Seropian who got in touch to offer him a job. Eneroth took them up on the offer and immediately started work on redesigning Marathon’s levels. The game was finally finished and ready to be released on December 14. Marathon was a huge success from its very first day on the shelves. It sold 100,000 copies in six months, unprecedented figures for the Mac world in general, let alone Bungie itself. The problem was that the studio was in no way ready to handle such success. Fans pillaged their stock at MacWorld in January, not even flinching at the $70 price tag applied by the staff at Bungie, who were blown away by their game’s success. The studio was inundated with calls from all over the world, mainly from potential buyers or customers who were having technical issues when installing or running the game. Seropian placed a new classified ad in the Chicago Reader: “Tech support. Must know Mac. Games a plus.” One Matt Soell responded to the ad. At the time, Soell was just a student who had played Marathon during the Christmas vacation. When he saw the ad, he guessed that it was from Bungie and decided to try his luck. The phone lines at Bungie were saturated with calls, but he eventually got through. The voice on the other end of the phone was

none other than Alex Seropian. Delighted to be speaking to someone who knew of Bungie and loved Marathon, Seropian immediately offered Soell the role, and he joined the studio without delay. When he arrived at 1945 South Halsted Street, Soell discovered a studio in a state of absolute panic, struggling to handle the thousands of requests they were receiving every day. No sooner had they got back from MacWorld than the studio was filled with all kinds of boxes and trash. But things would soon get better, partly down to Soell’s hard work. Soell had already completed Marathon multiple times, and knew the game almost by heart, so he could answer calls from stuck players. He eventually persuaded Alex Seropian to relaunch Bungie’s AOL page, which had been inactive for months, and he used it to answer the deluge of queries the studio was receiving. One year earlier, Alain Roy had already suggested that Bungie launch its own website, but he was unable to convince Seropian that it would be useful.

A FULL TRILOGY Marathon’s success gave Jones, who had never had any interest in making sequels, food for thought. Some of his ideas for the first game hadn’t made it into the game, and given the public’s enthusiasm for the Marathon game world and all the mysteries in its storyline, Bungie decided to begin early work on Marathon 2. And yet, something was bugging Jones. Until very recently, Bungie was made up of just two people: himself and Seropian. Bungie was their decision, their baby. They had been able to count on a few people for outside help, people like Colin Brent and Alain Roy, who had worked on Pathways Into Darkness and Marathon, but they weren’t official Bungie employees. But Bungie was now a genuine small business, and one that was hiring. This worried Jones. In a 2013 interview with Ryan McCaffrey from IGN, he explained his state of mind: “I think it was after Marathon, where I realized, ‘My God, we’re going to make another game. People are going to want it. There’s this company and people come to work here and they have wives

and children and they depend on that. We’re paying for their insurance.’” It was a particularly pressing concern as the studio continued to grow, hiring a new artist, Robert McLees in 1995, followed by Mark Bernal, another, two months later. The rest of the team remained the same. Jones supervised the project and worked on the story with Kirkpatrick, while also giving Martell a hand, and Alain Roy now worked remotely as a consultant. The three artists had a real challenge ahead of them, as the sequel to Marathon, which quickly became known as Marathon 2: Durandal, was no longer set on a space station, but on the surface of an alien planet. This meant that the game environments were bigger and needed to be filled with content. Jones used it as an opportunity to rework his game engine so that it could display a larger number of objects. He also added some new features, like being able to use two weapons at once and to swim. Still obsessed with multiplayer games, he added several different multiplayer modes, particularly the option to play the Marathon campaign in co-op mode. This was the beginning of a long tradition at Bungie. The team quickly laid the foundations for the game’s story: the player was a security officer with a duty to obey orders from the AI, Durandal, who had kidnapped the player to help it continue the fight against the Pfhor. On Lh’owon, the S’pht homeworld, the player is tasked with finding a powerful artifact to use in the battle against the aliens. As players progressed through the game, they discovered that the Tycho AI had been recreated by the Pfhor. Tycho then reveals to the player that it was in fact Durandal who enabled the Pfhor to discover Marathon’s location: the AI had long forgotten its primary purpose and was no longer concerned with protecting humans or the S’pht destiny. Indeed, the AI wanted to uncover the history of the Jjaro, an ancient alien race with advanced knowledge, that the S’pht worshiped as gods. Durandal was hoping to get its hands on their technology and achieve godlike status itself. After being captured by the Pfhor, the player is rescued by a human commando. Their next job is to reactivate an ancient S’pht AI known as Thoth. With Thoth’s help, the player can ensure that the last

humans in the system can return to Earth. They then come into contact with the S’pht’Kr, a tribe that had left Lh’owon before the Pfhor invasion, and who had been plotting their revenge for millennia. Together, they destroy the last Pfhor forces remaining on Lh’owon before they are able to destroy the planet’s sun. The humans and the S’pht’Kr then raid the Pfhor homeworld. The game ends with a short encrypted sequence in which Durandal returns to Earth on board a gigantic Jjaro spaceship. In this way, Bungie left the door open for a sequel, one which would make Marathon a complete trilogy. Upon its release on November 24, 1995, Marathon 2: Durandal was a huge success. This time, though, the studio was ready. What they could not have foreseen, however, was the reaction of the fan community when it uncovered that Bungie was working on a Windows 95 port of Marathon 2. Seropian and Jones wanted to branch out beyond the Macintosh world, and to reach more gamers. And so they launched the PC port of Durandal and also began work designing a compilation entitled Super Marathon that contained the first two games, to be released on Apple and Bandai’s small home console, the Pippin. The studio’s fans accused it of selling out, mailing in swathes of enraged letters. The situation was made even more bitter by the fact that the PC release of Durandal didn’t go as well as expected. The port had taken a long time to develop, and by the time Marathon 2 was released it had to compete with Quake and Duke Nukem 3D, two games that were far more technically advanced. To make matters worse, the specialist PC press took a dim view of Bungie’s efforts and panned the game, often without ever even playing it. Bungie was now typecast as a “Mac studio” by many observers, and it wasn’t a flattering reputation to have, especially in an industry characterized by wars between consoles and platforms. But despite all of this, the mood down in Pilsen remained relaxed. Bungie had become like a little family, a fact actively encouraged by Seropian, who many describe as doting father. He ran the studio with an ambience of open camaraderie, where every member was happy

to contribute their own expertise and to learn from the others. Proud of its independence, the studio was founded on a unique mentality in which everyone learned by experimenting and then sharing their discoveries and advances with the other members of the studio. The relatively low average age naturally facilitated close relationships between the employees, to the point that everyone forgot all about the less-than-ideal conditions they were working in. The team preferred to just laugh it off. Bungie was certainly selling lots of games, but Seropian had his eye on its expenses and a move into new premises wasn’t yet feasible. And strangely, the staff at Bungie had grown fond of their premises, despite their being no shortage of shady goings on. Like the time, one fine morning, that the staff arrived at work to find out that someone had broken into the building and stolen a laptop. Another night, while Jonas Eneroth was smoking a cigarette outside the entrance to the studio, he was threatened by an unknown assailant armed with a revolver. And the picture wasn’t much rosier inside the premises. One morning, Bungie’s phone line was suddenly cut off, and with it the studio’s internet connection, which was hardly a sustainable situation. The telephone operator, AT&T, sent a technician to investigate, but he was unable to find where the line entered the building. In the end, Jones took him down to the basement where they discovered row upon row of old desks and benches. Furniture from the old school had been left beside what must one day have been a swimming pool, and whose bottom was now covered in some kind of stinking mud. The swimming pool would go down in Bungie legend as the “pool of death,” providing plenty of banter for the studio. When the time came to start work on Marathon Infinity, the studio was in sound condition. While the atmosphere remained similar to what you’d find inside a college dorm, the team had expanded and grown more professional, especially since the arrival of Eric Klein, a former Apple employee. Klein joined Bungie not long after the release of Durandal, and offered Seropian his experience in managing the business side of Bungie. This was a boon because although Bungie was home to plenty of talented developers, nobody

had any training in business and management. Seropian was learning on the job and received valuable guidance from Klein and Eneroth, whose knowledge came in very handy in growing Bungie and helping the studio to reach players all over the world. Better armed and better prepared, Bungie began development work on the last Marathon game in total peace of mind. The only fly in the ointment was the departure of Greg Kirkpatrick, a writer on the first two games in the trilogy, who left Bungie because he hated living in Chicago. He moved to Brooklyn where he founded Double Aught, his own studio. However, Kirkpatrick wasn’t done with Marathon, having signed a contract with Bungie that meant Double Aught would lend a helping hand to Jason Jones and Alex Seropian’s staff as they developed Marathon Infinity. Help that came in handy, because Jones wanted to put on a real show for the final game in the trilogy. Marathon is the series that propelled Bungie into the big time and enabled it to become a bona fide video game studio, one that was independent, stable, and with a bright future. Knowing that the fans were passionate about the Marathon universe, and that they’d spent the past two years analyzing every line of the game, Bungie wanted to give them a treat and came up with a complex, winding story filled with twists and references to the first two games. Better yet, Jones decided to offer fans the ultimate gift, by giving away the in-house development tools, Anvil and Forge, with the game. The former was used to edit graphics and physics, while the latter was a complete level editor with a wide range of options. The aim was to enable fans of Marathon to make their own levels and enjoy playing in the game universe for as long as they liked beyond the base game. This was, however, no mean feat. The studio’s development tools were complex, and the aim was to make Forge and Anvil accessible to gamers with no coding experience. Deniz and Eneroth set about this delicate task and took the time to draft a user guide. They were assisted by Jason Rieger, one of the studio’s latest recruits, who joined the studio in March 1996. The former Qualcomm engineer immediately began specializing in the more technical tasks, and while he was working with Deniz and Eneroth, he also took charge of

the Super Marathon project. And he wasn’t the only one with multiple responsibilities: Jason Jones locked himself in an office and started thinking about the studio’s next game, which he wanted to be something radically different from Marathon. Marathon Infinity was another successful launch for Bungie when it was released on October 15, 1996. Fans praised the new multiplayer modes, but more than anything else they loved the plot of the final instalment in the trilogy with its more varied narrative components and the joy it seemingly took in leading players in one direction only to find a twist in the plot. But Bungie never really had time to celebrate this new success, because 1997 got off to a very busy start.

Chapter 3 – A Studio in Metamorphosis For Bungie, the time had come to leave the Marathon era behind. Jason Jones had lots of ideas for Bungie’s next game as the studio prepared to embark upon what would be one of the most pivotal chapters in its history. This was due to the fact that in addition to developing a new game, Bungie was about to go on a hiring spree that would shape the years to come.

MYTH: AN UNEXPECTED RTS While the small team working on Marathon Infinity was forging ahead, Jason Jones kept his thinking cap on. At this point, he’d been working on FPS for five years, and while he enjoyed turning Marathon into a trilogy, he wanted to make something different. And most importantly, no more sci-fi. At least, not for the time being. Because Jones had another passion: history and the Middle Ages. He began dreaming up a game in which players could control hundreds of units at once and play against other players with their own armies, all set in a 3D environment that would have a real impact on which strategies were effective. After getting a few ideas down on paper and looking at what technical solutions were possible, he presented his idea to the studio, where it was received with much excitement. A number of Warcraft fans worked at Bungie and they fell in love with the idea of developing a more dynamic, more technically accomplished game. And so Jones handpicked a small team that worked in isolation from the rest of the studio to begin the development of Myth. The rest of the staff would have to wait months to see the first fruits of their labors.

The first technical demos they saw were particularly impressive: the team had created a huge playing area in three dimensions, all governed by a physics engine more advanced than the one used in Marathon. The camera could be controlled freely, to zoom in or out depending on where the combat was taking place. Technically speaking, this was a real coup. This was, after all, mid-1996, and most strategy games were still in 2D. With Myth, Bungie had an opportunity to revolutionize the genre, and the team knew they’d struck gold. More good news: for the first time in the studio’s history, a game was being developed for both Mac and PC from the outset. This meant that on the day of its release, Myth would be able to reach a larger audience than any other Bungie game thus far. Work resumed with renewed intensity. Jones, McLees and Zartman worked together to write the story, dreaming up a medieval fantasy world filled with betrayals and brutal wars. As was their custom, Bungie put a lot of effort into crafting the game world, and with the specific aim of making this new creation an even more beautiful experience, the studio decided to work with a real composer to create tracks to accompany the loading screens. Up until now, writing what little music featured in Bungie’s games had generally been Alex Seropian’s job, and while his work was certainly up to scratch, Bungie could do better. They just needed the right resources. By chance, a Chicago-based composer who was also a fan of video games took the initiative of contacting Bungie himself. This mysterious musician was one Martin O’Donnell.

MARTY One day, with the development of Myth in full swing, Tuncer Deniz received an email from someone he had never met. The email was straight to the point: “Look, I’m local, I’m working on the sequel to Myst, you guys should hire me to do whatever you’re working on.” The email came with kind regards from Martin O’Donnell. Deniz’ attitude was “say no more,” and he immediately sent a reply inviting O’Donnell to come to the studio. Bungie hoped that Myth would

launch them to the next level, so they needed to have all their bases covered. In this light, a real composer was manna from heaven. Although he didn’t know it at the time, Deniz had changed Bungie’s future forever. Because O’Donnell was no ordinary composer. Born in 1955 to a movie director father and a piano teacher mother, Martin grew up in comfort in Westchester, Pennsylvania. There was, of course, a piano at home, and as a child he could never resist tinkling the ivories whenever he passed by. His mother gave him his first lessons at a very young age, just when his father introduced him to the soundtrack to Ben Hur, which he fell in love with. Music quickly became O’Donnell’s greatest passion, and he dreamed of becoming a movie soundtrack composer. His mother introduced him to classical music, but also pushed him to explore other genres, something that allowed him to stand out from his peers. So it was that, at just ten years old, he was playing the hit Blue Boogie on the piano at the school festival, making the audience go wild. In just a few years, Martin O’Donnell had mastered the major classics by Beethoven, Bach and Debussy. After high school, he was immediately offered a place at Wheaton College Conservatory and quickly established himself as the most gifted student in his year group. And yet, from his very first year at Wheaton, O’Donnell was never really happy. Something was missing, he just didn’t know what. It was on the day of an exam that he finally realized what that thing was: even though he was still a freshman, O’Donnell got up on stage to perform two particularly technical pieces of music. He earned the top grade, as usual, but while his girlfriend and other students were busy congratulating him, he realized that he just didn’t like performing. He started thinking about changing direction, but which one should he take? It would ultimately be the drummer in a little rock band he joined that suggested looking into composing. “Oh, I never thought about writing (music),” O’Donnell would admit many years later. And so, despite the warnings from his professors, who explained that changing course in the middle of the year was

not without risk, O’Donnell changed fields and left performance behind to focus on composing. Compared to when he first arrived at Wheaton, O’Donnell had greatly expanded his horizons by playing with his little band that combined rock, jazz, and fusion, and he had also made a lot of friends. One of them was a guitarist by the name of Michael Salvatori. It was Gail, Salvatori’s girlfriend, who introduced the two men: she and O’Donnell were classmates and she was convinced that the two young men would get along like a house on fire. And as it would turn out, she was right! O’Donnell and Salvatori became great friends, but they also developed a little rivalry, due to playing in different bands. But that was never enough to wreck their blossoming friendship: Salvatori was only too happy for O’Donnell to borrow his personal cassette recorder, and when the latter discovered a small recording studio in the Wheaton suburbs, he immediately shared his discovery with Salvatori, who could then hire it for a few dollars. O’Donnell also had a new dream. No longer did he want to work on movies: he wanted to be a rock star. To that end, once he had completed his college degree, he decided to stack the odds in his favor by moving to California. Together with Marcie, who he had married one year earlier, he moved to Los Angeles in the fall of 1978 to study his masters in composing. He enrolled at the University of Southern California and joined the medieval music ensemble, where he developed a new interest in Gregorian chant. He also learned how to play the Renaissance flute and studied Bartók’s string quartets. After completing his masters, O’Donnell stayed another year in California, having decided to consolidate his computer skills. “I had a feeling that the world was moving in the direction of software technology and I didn’t want to be left behind,” he explained. Ultimately, in 1982 the couple left the California sun behind and returned to Illinois. They moved to Chicago, where O’Donnell planned to join the conservatory and teach music. By this time, the young man had long abandoned the dreams of his youth: he no longer wanted to be a movie composer or even a rock star. He didn’t

want to monetize his art, but the move and the birth of his first child meant that that would have to change. Now a young father, he worked on a series of small jobs in the movie industry, which he got through the connections of his father, Robert. He worked on one shoot after another as a stagehand: a physical, tiring job, but one that enabled him to feed his family. He missed music, though. And so, when the director of the film he was working on stopped by to suggest he compose the music he needed, O’Donnell didn’t think twice. “At first I told him, ‘Well, I don’t wanna prostitute my art,’” recounts the musician. “So, I actually said that, I actually meant it. Thankfully, the very next day the director came to me and said ‘Hey I have got 500 dollars, if you score this film we’re working on’. I’m like ‘Yeah absolutely!’” The only hitch was that when he accepted the job, O’Donnell was completely lacking the technical resources to make good on his commitment. What he did have, though, was a plan. He knew that his old friend Michael had opened his own studio in Chicago after leaving Wheaton. He called Salvatori and proposed the following deal: if he helped write and record the music he’d been asked to compose, he’d split the $500 with him 50/50. Salvatori agreed immediately. Once they’d been paid, the two friends decided to team up. Thus, they founded Total Audio Studios and soon began picking up small contracts for the movie industry, naturally, but mainly for TV. The duo that was O’Donnell/Salvatori proved to be an extremely effective one. O’Donnell was everything that Salvatori was not, and viceversa: O’Donnell wore his heart on his sleeve and was always on the lookout for new opportunities, while Salvatori was more retiring and preferred to stick to what Total Audio did best. Musically, O’Donnell had extensive technical credentials, while Salvatori adopted a more free-flowing approach. This chemistry enabled Total Audio to grow into a genuine small business that came up with a series of jingles for TV ads. In 1985, they won the contract for the famous Flintstones vitamin ads, which were very popular in the United States. O’Donnell and Salvatori bounced ideas around, and a tune by O’Donnell came out on top. They decided to enlist the talents of Salvatori’s

daughters, who sung the lyrics for O’Donnell’s composition. Once the jingle aired, it became a rapid success in the USA, getting stuck in the heads of millions of young Americans. It has been reworked several times since then, but remains in use to this day. Following this first national success, Total Audio picked up another juicy contract, this time for the Mr. Clean brand of household cleaning products. In the early 1990s, O’Donnell started to think about Total Audio’s future. The studio couldn’t just compose ad jingles forever, and it was purely by chance that he developed an interest in video games. Although he owned Nintendo consoles and was a fan of video games, he had never thought about making it his job. And then one day, as a favor to a friend, he gave a young Josh Staub a tour of the Total Audio studios. The teenager had a lively interest in music, which was why his father had persuaded O’Donnell to let him drop by the studio. When Staub immediately noticed the video game boxes on O’Donnell’s shelves, the conversation naturally switched to video games. Josh told him that he had some friends who were working on a video game, and that he’d like to show it to O’Donnell. “He was 18, he lives in Spokane, Washington. It seemed cute to me. He had friends that make computer games.” It would turn out that O’Donnell was wrong to scoff at Josh, but he didn’t yet know it. Josh Staub’s friends may indeed live in the sleepy city of Spokane, but they were working for a studio that would soon be causing a buzz: Cyan Inc. The little team was busy working on Myst, an adventure game of the kind gamers had never before seen. This included O’Donnell, who was blown away when Staub showed him the beta version of the game. The composer did, though, say that the music, as good as it was, was not up to the same standard as the rest of the game. He started thinking about whether Total Audio could make an entry into this field. O’Donnell would explain how, “I loved the soundtrack in Myst and it inspired me to get into the industry. I knew that it could get even better in terms of fidelity and professional production. Live musicians, actors, and film quality sound design was finally able to be used because of vastly improving processor

speed and memory.” With Myst, O’Donnell had glimpsed a bright future. He wondered if he could invest and buy shares in Cyan, but Staub said it was impossible. Then O’Donnell stayed up all night playing Myst. He knew that he had to get in touch with Cyan one way or another. O’Donnell wanted to work with the studio, and to that end, between 1993 and 1996 he did all he could to attract the attention of Robyn and Rand Miller, the two founders of Cyan and the creators of Myst. It went so far as to become a running joke at Cyan, who decided to name the venomous frogs in Riven “Ytram,” which was Martin’s nickname “Marty” spelled backwards. O’Donnell nevertheless got his way in the end, ultimately receiving a contract to compose some of the music and sound effects in Myst II: Riven. As had been expected, Myst was a resounding critical and commercial success, and Cyan began work on a very promising sequel. O’Donnell was over the moon, but Salvatori less so. He told his friend that he would rather focus on Total Audio’s traditional business. So it was that, while continuing to manage the studio’s business, O’Donnell became increasingly interested in the video game industry. But he didn’t know much about it at all. To remedy this lack of knowledge, he headed to the Computer Game Developers Conference3 in Santa Clara, California, held from March 30 to April 2. There, he met George Sanger, Scott Gershin and Tommy Tallarico. Over the following months, O’Donnell would make contact with swathes of developers, including Michael Land, Peter McConnell, and Clint Bajakian, who was then working at LucasArts. Over the course of a year, O’Donnell went from one meeting to another, accumulating knowledge and building up an idea of what video game music needed to be like in order to evolve. In parallel, O’Donnell was still working on Riven, the sequel to Myst. As part of this job, he travelled to the other side of the country to visit Cyan. On his first visit, O’Donnell was witness to a bizarre ritual that began every day at 2pm: an alarm sounded in the studio offices and all the developers stopped working. Were they downing tools for lunch? That was a possibility, but in actual fact the Cyan

development team were all meeting in the game testing room to play a game that they were all crazy about. That game was Marathon. O’Donnell had never heard of it, but he was soon intrigued. No sooner had he returned to Chicago than he logged on to a developer chatroom he had been using for a while, and stumbled upon the fact that Bungie’s offices were located in Chicago. Yet again, O’Donnell was completely in the dark. But as soon as he found out, he was single-minded in his intent: to find them, and offer to work with them. This was how he got hold of an email address and contacted the studio, without really knowing who would read his message. When Tuncer Deniz replied the very next day and invited him to drop by the studio, O’Donnell couldn’t be happier. Nor would his first encounter with Bungie curb his enthusiasm. Up until that point, the only studio that O’Donnell had seen was Cyan. Myst’s global success had earned a lot of money for the company, enabling the team to enjoy all the comforts of the biggest companies. “They had a beautiful new space in the north woods surrounded by huge pine trees and waterfalls,” the musician explains. “Their interior working space was spectacular and filled with cutting-edge computers and workstations. Then I visited Bungie on the south side of Chicago. If you saw the movie, Animal House, you’ll be able to picture what it was like.” Despite that first impression, O’Donnell quickly came to like the little family of developers, each of whom was as passionate and unique as the next. Take, for example, Matt Soell, who was proud to display a dog’s head on his desk, pickled in a jar; or Jason Jones, the head of the studio, who was always walking around in torn jeans with a bandanna tied to his head. Jones and Seropian suggested that he start off by taking over the sound design for Myth, and to compose a bit of music for the game’s few cinematic cutscenes. O’Donnell completed the task with gusto and quickly returned the initial samples. The studio liked his work so much that they amended the contract between Total Audio and Bungie: O’Donnell was now tasked with composing a more comprehensive soundtrack that could accompany storytelling sequences and the game’s different menus. Salvatori, meanwhile,

preferred to keep his distance, and while he decided to focus on the studio’s usual sources of work, he nevertheless encouraged O’Donnell to pursue this new path. And so the composer got to work, all while continuing to canvas other studios, because after all, Bungie was just another everyday client… for the time being. This was how he came to sign another contract with Valkyrie Studios, for whom he composed and produced the music for their RPG Septerra Core: Legacy of the Creator. The composer almost failed to make it into the end credits when, in 1999, the Total Audio studios caught fire while O’Donnell was still working on the game’s soundtrack. Fortunately, picking through the still smoking ruins of their former studio, O’Donnell and Salvatori managed to find a few saved copies of O’Donnell’s different recordings that could still be used.

THE NEW HEROES OF PC GAMING Meanwhile, the developers at Bungie were still making progress on Myth: The Fallen Lords. The game was growing more impressive with each passing day, thanks in no small part to its physics engine. In the latest version of the game, rain and snow reduced, or outright nullified, the effects of explosives. Archers had to be positioned with care, because the range of their bows changed depending on whether they were on top of a hill or at the bottom. The game did away with some of the traditional aspects of strategy games, like resource management, freeing players to focus on pure tactics. The studio had the utmost confidence in its work. And yet, despite initial demos that were very promising, the press seemed to ignore Myth, hardly mentioning it at all. Even though the game was supposed to be released for PC, the specialist press still had Bungie pigeonholed as “just” a Mac studio whose games weren’t really worth noticing. This sometimes gave rise to situations that were surprising, to say the least, like the time that the editor of the highly respected Computer Gaming World discovered Myth for the very first time at a small American trade show. He was amazed that he’d never heard of it, or ever received any beta versions of the game. The small group

of employees who had attended the trade show were embarrassed. “I was prevented from telling him the truth,” Soell says, “which is that he would have seen it months ago if his writers would return our phone calls.” While the studio was struggling to garner any media attention, Seropian and his closest advisors were diversifying their business, and founded Bungie Publishing. The first game that the company backed was Weekend Warrior, developed by Pangea Software, which it published for Mac in December 1996. Bungie next published the Mac port of Abuse, a game developed by Crack dot Com and released in February 1996. This 2D shooter had caught the eye of some staff members at Bungie, and the company offered to publish and distribute it for Mac. It was released a few months later, on March 5, 1997. On October 31, Myth: The Fallen Lords hit the shelves. Much to the studio’s disappointment, the initial reviews were somewhat lukewarm: the interface didn’t always work, and given how hard the game was (a Bungie specialty) this fell afoul of several reviewers. The result was that the team had no time to sit back and rest, and immediately got back to work to speedily develop a corrective patch that was released a few weeks later. Bungie’s fast action won it no shortage of praise and better yet, it enabled Myth to make a name for itself with the same speed. The game was a real hit. It soon sold several hundred thousand copies and won a series of awards, winning the accolade of game of the year from MacWorld, Computer Gaming World and Computer Games Strategy Plus. At PC Gamer, which before this point had never been kind to Bungie, Myth was named strategy game of the year. The gaming community agreed, and 100,000 of them signed up to play online. To that end, Bungie launched bungie.net, a community website where players could access online servers for PvP gaming. At Bungie, it was time to pop the cork on the champagne. They were celebrating the acclaim and the satisfaction of having cracked the PC market, of course, but most of all they were celebrating the profits. Myth’s excellent sales figures opened up new possibilities for Seropian and Jones.

Almost automatically, they began work on a sequel, and began thinking about the studio’s future. Seropian had long been planning to sell Bungie to one of the big names in gaming, because life as an independent studio was becoming increasingly difficult. Indeed, with just 25 employees, payroll wasn’t astronomical, but they had to do everything in-house and the slightest error could prove fatal. But now, thanks to the success of Myth, Bungie was in a far healthier financial position. So instead of selling to the highest bidder, Bungie now had plans to grow. Indeed, for months now Jones and Seropian had been receiving applications from young developers, only to see them have a change of heart once they realized that they would need to move to Chicago. Bungie then decided to open a second studio in San Jose, California, named simply Bungie West. At E3 in 1998, Bungie announced that it was currently working on two titles: one a sequel to Myth, which was being developed in Chicago, and a new game called Oni, which was primarily being developed by Bungie West. Change was also afoot in Chicago. The company’s new cash flow situation meant that it could change premises, and the team moved into the seventh floor at 350 West Ontario Street, further north in the city. The move proved to be a particularly epic one, because even though Bungie had paid a removal company to move the old premises into the new one, the staff also pitched in and used their own cars to move certain boxes. The new premises weren’t brand new, but they were certainly nicer than the old ones, with a fitted kitchen and break room with a few futons. They also offered the advantage of being close to O’Donnell’s and Salvatori’s studio, and the developers regularly visited Total Audio to enjoy the studio’s hospitality and comfort.

MYTH II: A COSTLY BUG Unfortunately, though, the staff didn’t really have time for a break. Although for the first few weeks Jason Rieger had been working on Myth II alone, he was soon joined by the rest of the studio, including

a few new hires. These new faces included one Jaime Griesemer. This diehard fan of the first Myth stood out thanks to The Myth Grimoire, a little website he set up while the game was in development, where he posted a stream of short articles containing the latest Myth news. A theoretical physics student, Griesemer never planned on pursuing a career in video games, but he was such a big fan of Myth that when Bungie offered him a job working on Myth II, he accepted it without a moment’s hesitation, all the more so as he was already living in Chicago. He started out as just a beta tester before discovering that he had some talent as a level designer, and after spending some time playing around with the level design tools, he was given the opportunity to make the multiplayer maps for Myth II. The game’s development was particularly exhausting because the studio execs had planned a release date of November 1998, giving the development team just one year in which to produce a quality sequel. Those futons in the new offices would get some serious use, especially by people like Rieger who didn’t always have time to go home to sleep. Because when it came to Myth II, there was no question of just churning out a bog-standard sequel: Bungie had standards when it came to quality, and the studio wanted to wow its fans. The team worked tirelessly and came up with a whole range of new features, like a drawbridge system that could be activated when an allied unit managed to infiltrate an enemy fortress. The AI was given a full overhaul, and there was even an option to replace the spouting blood with streams of stars, so that younger gamers could play the game. In summer 1998, the team was burnt out and eased up on the pace. November 1st wouldn’t happen. The game would be released when it was ready. But everyone was aware that they couldn’t drag their heels: the studio was in better financial shape, but eventually it would need fresh income. Bungie couldn’t afford too big a delay: contracts had already been signed and the studio would have to pay fines if it failed to meet its deadlines, especially with certain retailers. As part of a vague attempt to keep spirits up, Seropian himself went out to buy food and bring it back to the office to feed the team that was working almost day and night without

break. At long last, on December 28, Myth II: Soulblighter, to give it its full name, was finally ready. The studio quickly shipped the first copies of the game, sending them on their way to stores all over the country. Everything seemed to be going to plan: the developers had managed to make exactly the game they had in mind, and they couldn’t wait to hear what players thought. To help it on its way, the studio had even made Myth II more accessible than earlier Bungie games, which all had a reputation for being very hard. “It’s not about making it easy,” Jones would explain. “It’s about not making it discouraging.” But at this point the studio was blissfully unaware that in Tokyo, on the other side of the world, the person responsible for localizing the game had discovered that it contained a major bug. Or at least its uninstall program did. When users tried to uninstall the game, it completely wiped everything on their hard drive. Everything was deleted, with no possibility of being recovered. When word reached Bungie, very early in the morning, Jones and Seropian were not yet in the office. 200,000 copies were all ready to go, packaged and about to be shipped. 150,000 of them already had an owner, thanks to pre-orders. The situation was critical, but Bungie still had time to find a solution. When Martin O’Donnell found out, he headed straight to the studio and found it in a state of complete panic. In the time it took the two bosses to get to the office, the few employees already at work had begun looking into the bug and trying to figure out where it came from. There was still time to react, but under no circumstances could the game be delivered to players in its current state: the future of the studio itself was at stake, because a scandal of this magnitude could easily force it to close down. When Jones and Seropian finally reached the office, the bug had been found and a patch already prepared. The two bosses then needed to decide on a plan of action. “I very much remember discussing what we should do once we discovered the bug,” Seropian recounts. We put ourselves in our players’ position and also thought about how we would want to look back on this in 10 years. We certainly didn’t want to be responsible for deleting people’s hard drives.” So Bungie did

something very brave for a company of its size: it recalled all of the boxes that had already been shipped, and replaced the faulty CDs with newly printed ones. The studio’s staff would head out and track down all of the games that had already been shipped and which, fortunately, had not yet reached the stores. Without a doubt, this course of action saved Bungie’s reputation, but it was a very, very expensive one: the cost came in at around $800,000, eating up most of the profits from Myth II. The game was well-received by critics and fans voted with their wallets, but even though the game was selling more and selling faster than its predecessor, it wasn’t enough. Bungie had lost a lot of money, placing the studio in a difficult financial position. But Jason Jones had more than one ace up his sleeve: while everyone at Bungie was still busy working on the first Myth game, the company’s co-founder had shut himself away to lay the foundations for a new game. When Myth II was finally released, his secret side project had grown considerably. It would come to be known as Blam!, and it would shape the future of Bungie.

3  The Computer Game Developers Conference (CGDC) became the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in 1999.

Chapter 4 – Halo Is Born While most of Bungie’s staff were working on Myth II, Jason Jones settled down in a corner of the studio and began thinking about the next big project. Bungie West would henceforth be working on Oni, a third-person action game that combined shooting sequences with hand-to-hand combat. While some staff from Chicago would join them in working on that project, the entire workforce of Bungie East and West couldn’t all be kept occupied working on the one same game. A new project was needed to keep the majority of the troops in Chicago occupied. Although Jones had enjoyed working on Myth– a brand new world inhabited by knights, dwarfs, and fortresses–his first love was sci-fi, and its siren song was too powerful to resist. And so he began work on a new game, this time set in a futuristic world. It was an RTS in appearance only, because Jones still didn’t have a clear picture of exactly what the game that was currently codenamed Armor would become. But in the beginning, he used an improved version of the Myth engine to try out his ideas. On September 24, 1997, Bungie trademarked the name of its new game. It was just a code name for the time being, but Jones liked to hit the ground running: Marathon and Myth were also both just code names, and were never intended to become the permanent names of each series. So given Bungie’s track record with code names for games, it was worthwhile registering Armor from the outset, even if the name might be dropped at a later date. But the name, like the game itself, would go through a lot of changes over the coming months.

THE FANTASTIC FOUR

To pave the way for Armor, Bungie was hiring. In particular, the studio hired two new artists, Marcus Lehto and Shi Kai Wang, who would soon be responsible for creating Bungie’s unique visual identity. Lehto wasn’t really a new face, having already worked for Bungie in 1996 when the studio began working on Myth. The son of a pastor from Ohio, he discovered a real passion for art and sci-fi when he was just eight years old, when his sister and her boyfriend dragged him along to the movies one night in 1977, where he was introduced to Star Wars. It was this passion that led him to enroll at Kent State University in 1987, where he studied industrial design. After earning his degree, Lehto spent two years working in industrial design at Karen Skunta & Co., which is where he heard Bungie mentioned for the very first time. As a longstanding fan of video games, he suddenly began thinking of a possible career in that field. “We played Marathon constantly since it was the only good game on the Mac at that time,” Lehto recalls. “I reached out to Bungie in 1996 and started freelancing with them at night, sending UI and other content to them for Myth: The Fallen Lords. Lehto joined Bungie fulltime in fall 1998, where he would work on Armor. Shi Kai Wang, who joined the project shortly after Lehto, had a completely different background altogether. Having just graduated from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he also earned a degree in industrial design, Wang was applying to work at both FASA Corporation (Battletech, Shadowrun, etc.) and Bungie. He presented both with a thick portfolio that he had been able to flesh out while he studied by working for a small studio named Mobeus Design, recently founded by one of his friends. Bungie liked the work of this young concept artist, and wasted no time offering him a position. He then joined the trio made up of Jones, Lehto and Robert McLees, who had already laid the foundations of Armor. In early 1998, Armor was looking like a real spiritual sequel to Myth, and the foursome were busy using and trying out loads of different ideas. Jones really liked Starcraft, but just like with Myth, he preferred to steer clear of some of the genre’s clichés, like resource management. Like Myth, Armor was based primarily upon an

extremely powerful physics engine, comprehensive management of 3D graphics, and the tactical positioning of different units. While the team was busy experimenting, the artists were at work modeling the game’s first units. At this point, the Armor universe was remarkably generic: it had tanks and 4x4 with decidedly modern designs, a few aliens, Marines and, notably, special armored soldiers. It was Lehto’s very first contribution to Armor, and although he didn’t know it at the time, this character would soon become something of the game’s icon: Lehto recalls how, “The very first asset I designed, built in 3D and animated was a very simple ‘super soldier’ character. I still remember how excited we were to see six of these characters running alongside a basic tank in a blank world for the first time. It was at that moment that the potential for what we were making started to unlock in my head. As time went on, I continued to rebuild and rethink that character design, which ultimately became the Mjolnir armor for the Master Chief.” But at that point in the design process for Armor, nobody knew they would one day become Master Chief, and in actual fact, nobody knew what the game itself would be like. Jones didn’t have any concrete ideas. He tried out a few ideas with the studio’s latest tools, and listened attentively to input from Lehto, McLees, and Wang. One day, they invited Martin O’Donnell to come and have a look at the prototype, which was still in its very early stages: the little team really wanted to hear what he thought, and Jones wanted O’Donnell to compose the beginnings of a soundtrack. “It looked a lot like Myth,” the musician explained. “They were using its engine and it had that isometric camera, except it was sci-fi.” Perhaps because O’Donnell didn’t seem overly impressed, Lehto decided to show him some storyboards he’d been working on for the past few days. One of the things he’d drawn was a Marine facing off against a massive, armored alien that looked like a giant lizard. The alien creature was the work of Shi Kai Wang, who had been entrusted with creating the different aliens that the players would face. O’Donnell didn’t know it, but he was one of the first people outside the small development team to encounter the Sangheilis, more commonly known as the Elites in the Halo universe. What did make an impression, though, was the point of

view used in the storyboards. Here, there was no more isometric camera, but a point of view that was much closer to the characters, like a third person camera. “I remember thinking that looks a lot cooler, but too bad the final game won’t be that.”

A 4X4 CHANGES EVERYTHING While Jones was trying to get a good picture of what Armor would really look like, Wang, Lehto and McLees kept crafting its world. Wang had made a lot of progress in conceptualizing different alien races. He thought that his time at Mobeus Design served as a good warm-up. The game he had worked on, entitled Esoteria, was also set in a futuristic world populated by aliens and armored super soldiers. When trying to breathe life into the aliens that would become the Covenant, he drew on his own personal influences in Japanese comic books and animation (Katsuhiro Otomo, Masamune Shirow, Akira Toriyama, etc.), while also drawing on his observations of nature. For example, it was when studying the anatomy of different birds that he came up with the Jackals: fragile but annoying creatures, especially when they were protected behind their imposing energy shields. As for the more-amusing-than-dangerous Unggoy, or Grunts as they are also known, they were a deft blend of monkey, crab, and tortoise. When it came to designing the first alien vehicles, he spent a lot of time researching how the shells of beetles, as well as some forms of aquatic life, worked. It was an idea that he got straight from Marcus Lehto: “When I was a kid, my family took a vacation to Cape May, NJ,” the project’s artistic director recounts. “While playing on the beach, this strange alien looking animal crawled up from the ocean near me. I was alarmed by this thing but also amazed at how cool it looked. It was a horseshoe crab, a prehistoric arthropod whose sleek but brutish design was burned into my brain forever. When it came to designing our enemy ships for the game, I drew from that experience and made a large tank that closely resembled a horseshoe crab in shape, blended with the iridescent shell of a beetle.” Based on these initial concepts, Wang

conjured up a whole series of vehicles, one of which was the Banshee, a small flying vehicle whose appearance owed as much to sharks as it did to certain insects. Everything about the Covenant had to imply technology that was leaps ahead of our own; it needed to evoke fear and otherness, so that players felt that what they were seeing had emerged from the imagination of another civilization, whose aesthetic norms and concepts were light-years removed from our own. McLees loaned a hand, creating a unique alien race nicknamed the “Flood.” These creatures with their disgusting appearance were initially intended to serve as a bioweapon wielded by the Covenant. McLees dreamed them up one day while examining his cousin’s thumb after he had hit it with a hammer and it had developed a nasty infection. His thumb’s rather repugnant appearance inspired the artist who, after making a drawing of his cousin’s thumb, used it as the basis for an entire bestiary of repellent creatures. They all had different names, shapes, and roles, but they all shared this strikingly unique visual identity. But out of all the monstrous creatures created by McLees, one is more complex than all the rest. Its name? The Librarian. This non-combatant Flood was then intended to archive its victims’ memories so that it could extract all kinds of information from them, which it would then transmit to the Flood soldiers. Keen fans might here spot the origins of the Gravemind, the Flood’s ultimate hivemind, which would pop up years later in the plot of Halo 2. Before that, though, this idea would be reworked and used in the “Truth and Reconciliation” level of Halo, in the form of the Proto-Gravemind that had absorbed a number of Elites and, more importantly, Captain Keyes, from whom it was trying to extract information. But that would not be until two years later. As for the name “The Librarian,” it would be repurposed even later, this time for a major Forerunner character. “Forerunner” was a term that didn’t yet exist at this stage in the creative process, but would become increasingly important to the game universe as the series progressed. At the same time, Lehto was also responsible for a task that appeared to be more straightforward, but which was just as technical

a challenge: designing the initial human vehicles which were gradually replacing the old, extremely generic 3D models that were used in the first iterations of Armor. He dreamed up a new kind of helicopter, as well as a new 4x4, whose beefy suspension system made fantastic use of the game’s physics engine. Armor was a strategy game, but just like Myth, it relied heavily on managing three dimensions and an extremely accomplished physics engine. The 4x4, baptized the Warthog, could travel at breakneck speed, and its suspension meant that it could absorb any shocks along the way without it ever being a cause for concern. The team, which had now amassed a few new members, found its ultra-bouncy handling funny, and the developers decided to conduct a little experiment: they moved the aerial camera and pinned it to a Warthog. Once that was done, the team spent a bit of time driving the Warthog around the vast map designed to test out the different concepts in Armor. As it turned out, driving the Warthog proved to be a whole lot of fun. A few years later, Jones would even affirm that “Our physics are better than a lot of racing games.” At that time, Jones was still deep in the thinking process for Armor, and still wasn’t really sure of the direction in which to take the game. True, the initial idea started off using the Myth II engine, but making another RTS wasn’t on the table. In any case, Jones had no idea what the game would become; he just wanted to try a few things out. In the end, the light-bulb moment came when the team discovered just how much fun it was controlling a single unit in third person. Armor was not now destined to become an RTS game, but rather a third person action game. However, there was no way that the tactical and strategic component that gave rise to the idea would be abandoned: Jones saw Armor as a game in which players would cooperate, to beat either the AI or another team of humans. Online and co-op gaming were now part of Bungie’s DNA, and as a game designer, it was also what Jason Jones got really excited about. But despite the studio’s persistent advances in artificial intelligence, Jones thought that it would be impossible to create AI-controlled

enemies that were as unpredictable as other people. This last point would prove to be absolutely decisive for Jones.

BLAM! So that was that: Armor would be a third person shooter. In early 1999, Myth II was delivered at long last and the new game, no longer a mere side-project for a handful of developers, became the focus of the entire studio. This was also when they decided to give it a new name, since Armor was neither catchy nor really representative of what the game was about. But Bungie still had the same problem: they were having a really hard time finding a name that they genuinely liked, and whenever they gave a project a code name, it always ended up being the game’s permanent name. In an effort to stop that from happening again, Bungie went with Munkey Nutz, but was soon forced to change it again: however funny the new name was, it was also really embarrassing, especially when Jones was trying to tell his parents about the new project he was working on. It would ultimately be Robert McLees who suggested Blam!, a very popular bit of onomatopœia often heard around the studio when the devs were playing against each other, and even on the Bungie forums, a few years later, where “blam!” would automatically replace any curse words. There’s also a real story behind the name: Bungie’s new premises were located on a very busy Chicago Street, where there was generally a lot of traffic, and the staff would regularly hear near-collisions out on the street. “You’d hear the screech of tires and then nothing. So I’d yell ‘Blam!’ Just so there was some sense of completion.” This time, the studio had definitely found a code name that was zany enough to never be chosen as the game’s official name. It would not be long before fans learned of the project’s existence, and on February  15, the fansite marathon.bungie.org received a mysterious email from an unfamiliar address at Bungie: mailto:[email protected]. The content of the message was even

more mysterious, taking the form of a strange poem evocative of the AI in Marathon. I have walked the edge of the Abyss. I have governed the unwilling. I have witnessed countless empires break before me. I have seen the most courageous soldiers fall away in fear. [I was there with the Angel at the tomb.] I have seen your future. And I have learned. There will be no more Sadness. No more Anger. No more Envy. I HAVE WON. Oh, and your poet Eliot had it all wrong: THIS is the way the world ends.

The poem was signed, “A friend of a friend.” In total, marathon.bungie.org would receive five emails, and the website admins naturally shared the content with the community. A sixth and final letter would be discovered in September that same year, hidden on the CD of an updated version of Myth. Bungie’s fans were immediately obsessed with these cryptic messages, known as the “Cortana Letters,” and tried their hardest to find out more. They were eventually convinced that Bungie was teasing a new Marathon: indeed, Cortana was the name of Ogier the Dane’s sword, Ogier being a legendary knight who featured in many epic poems in 13th century France. As these poems would have it, Ogier was one of Charlemagne’s loyal paladins. Some fans quickly spotted the connection: the famous Roland de Ronceveau was, according to legend, Charlemagne’s nephew, and he owned a sword called Durandal. The same name as the AI in Marathon. Bungie had fun with their insight, and offered perfectly enigmatic answers to the community’s questions. Little by little, Bungie was generating a bit of hype. At least it was among its fans: despite Myth and Myth II being given simultaneous Mac and PC releases, Bungie was still perceived as a Mac studio. In-house, though, there’d been some changes:

while a Mac version was certainly on the cards, Blam!, the game that would become Halo, was developed first for PC. A first for the studio. While Bungie was having fun with its fans, work on the game was progressing at a steady pace. Now that Jones knew what kind of game Blam! would be, the team was wasting less time on conceptualization and instead developing ever more content. Ideas weren’t short on the ground, but they needed to be made into reality. Blam! would be set on an artificial world in a very distant star system, where Humans would encounter an alliance of hitherto unknown alien races with whom they would need to do battle to assert their domination of the strange planet. Jones had a very specific idea in mind: he wanted his new baby to abandon the usual action game structure, often being composed of different levels that players need to complete one by one, in a linear fashion. He wanted to offer something more organic, where players were free to take whichever course of action they thought best: “There won’t be any occasions when the gameplay stops and a dialog box pops up to say, ‘you have now finished X level, now you must go do Y mission,’” Jones explained. “Instead, the player will have a great deal of discretion as to where they go in this world and how they choose to wage war against the aliens.” At that point, Bungie had its heart set on giving players free rein, and the developers had created a series of tools to deliver on this promise. Weapons, in particular. Robert McLees was in charge of designing the game’s many weapons. A keen survivalist, McLees was also passionate about physics and firearms. As he was particularly fussy when it came to weapons, he worked flat out to make sure that each of the human weapons was realistic. Functional, not flashy. To that end, he made one of the first versions of the famous MA5B assault rifle, which would quickly become one of the series’ iconic weapons. He also designed a pump-action shotgun, sniper rifle, and revolvers… All very traditional weapons, truth be told, but Bungie wanted players to intuitively understand how the human weapons worked, and then invent more exotic weapons for the aliens. While most of McLees’ concepts were retained for the final game, a number of them weren’t, including a long machete (the

human equivalent of the aliens’ energy sword), and even flamethrowers. McLees was particularly proud of the flamethrower, but it was no good, the developers couldn’t get it to work properly: the flames didn’t spread in the way they wanted them to, and they soon abandoned the idea of being able to turn anything you could see into a blazing inferno. The weapon was useless for the time being, but it would make an appearance in the PC version of the first Halo game, before being officially added to Halo 3 eight years later. The design would barely change in those intervening years. With a view to enhancing the game’s tactical and cooperative aspects, Bungie tested a number of features, such as a “super jump” that could be triggered by holding and releasing the jump button. The longer the player held the button, the more powerful the jump. The idea was dropped, but not completely, with the team planning for a while to add a jetpack to the game that would let players fly for short distances. This, too, was put to the side. However, they did keep one of the ideas they came up with, and that proved very popular with the staff at Bungie: the game contained a number of different rocket launchers, and one of them, a particularly powerful one, required players to use a laser marker to target enemies so that the rockets found their target. Blam! would also need a plot, and a few people put their heads together, beginning with Jason Jones, Robert McLees and Jaime Griesemer. But the team couldn’t come to an agreement on the story: some on the team thought that the most important thing was to make a game that was fun to play, and couldn’t understand why anyone would want to waste so much time on the story. The year was 1999 and while some games, like Marathon in particular, endeavored to do it, very few shooting games really tried to tell a story. But it was what Jason Jones had wanted to do ever since he teamed up with Seropian to form Bungie. In the meantime, the success of Half-Life, proved that a shooter could be more than just a series of rooms and maze-like corridors to spray down with a machine gun. And so it would be that Blam!, like its predecessors, would tell a story. Several potential storylines would be sounded out.

The first was set on a strange planet far from Earth, where players assumed the role of an Empire soldier who encounters a group of indigenous people: humans, but less technologically advanced. They decide to train them to prepare for the next Covenant attack on their homeworld. Jaime Griesemer, meanwhile, suggested an alternative story that was heavily focused on the Flood. He also came up with the term, “Gravemind.” In his plot, the humans that the Empire discovers were used by the Flood in a rite of passage: as soon as they reached adult age, young males were thrown into a vast forest, filled with Flood. Any that made it out of the forest emerged with enhanced intelligence, but also more aggressive. But the studio couldn’t come to an agreement. And so they kept thrashing it out. They did all agree on one thing, though: the mysterious planet would be home to traces of a long since disappeared alien civilization. The world needed to be populated with buildings and ruins to make players think that this race was once prosperous, and highly evolved. Marcus Lehto was the man tasked with designing the many structures that would dot the game map, and when the time came to start making the initial sketches of this alien architecture, he found inspiration in his past: “I tapped into my childhood as a preacher’s son and delved into the mythology and reverence of ancient religions to create something that felt awe inspiring to explore,” Lehto explained. “I always wanted what we saw of the iconic Forerunner architecture to feel like just the tip of an iceberg. The rest of the massive structure lived far below the surface in the structure of the Halo ring itself. I was lucky to find an artist, Paul Russel, who totally understood the approach I was taking with the Forerunners, and he ran with the design aesthetic and built some of the best stuff I’d ever seen.” And together, Russel and Lehto laid the foundations of what would soon be known as the Forerunner civilization. The artists kept up their work and populated the planet with a whole taxonomy of living creatures. Gradually, a new ecosystem came to occupy the space. Players were even supposed to be able

to ride some of the wildlife as a faster means of transport, or for more effective attacks on Covenant troops. But the engineers tasked with coding the AI were going round in circles: it was impossible to make these creatures behave in a convincing way. They were trying to give them a group mentality, the docile behavior seen in animals who live in herds. But it was to no avail. On the other hand, people like Jones thought that the planet would be more mysterious if it was completely devoid of both inhabitants and wildlife. Primarily, though, they were giving a lot of thought to how the Flood would affect the story as it unfolded. Jones wanted the new enemy’s entry into the game to come as a surprise. The Flood’s appearance would be all the more surprising if it were the only other form of life on the planet, apart from the humans and the Covenant. That was the decision that won the day: while Halo’s definitive plot was still far from being written, Jones already had a few ideas about what kind of story he would like to tell, and how. With E3 1999 rapidly approaching, the studio decided to start work on a demo to show to journalists at the expo. The game engine for Blam! no longer bore any relation to the one that had powered the first prototypes imagined by Jones, Lehto, McLees and Wang. Although the game was still very far from complete, in technical terms it was already highly impressive. The game world was gigantic, but was nevertheless filled with detail: the sky was filled with clouds that moved overhead, which in turn had a dynamic effect on light levels; the particle effects were breathtaking; the effects of the game’s physics engine could be felt absolutely everywhere, from rocket trajectories to the way their smoke trails dissipated; but most impressive was the fact that the main character, a cybernetic soldier in green armor, could move from indoor areas to vast outdoor spaces without any loading times. For its first PC game, Bungie hadn’t pulled any punches when it came to resources poured into the game, and the developers put their whole hearts into it. In its current state, though, it was impossible to play, and more than anything else, Blam! resembled a souped-up technical demo.

Still a bit distrustful of the press, Bungie decided to make the trip to E3 to unveil its new game, but only “behind closed doors,” meaning in a private space to which only those who had received an invitation would be granted access. Journalists even needed to sign a non-disclosure agreement barring them from talking about what they had seen. However, despite the gag order, a rumor began to circulate around the Los Angeles Convention Center: on its stand in a room that was closed to the public, Bungie was showing an absolutely amazing game. Those who had seen it couldn’t get over it, and regretted that it had to be kept secret, and for some, it was the best game on show at E3 1999. To be clear, this meant that Bungie had made a big impression indeed, because that was a year that the press also had access to Black and White and Freelancer, and the latest projects from Peter Molyneux (Populous, Syndicate) and Chris Roberts (Wing Commander). Doubtless giddy on the reactions from journalists seeing Blam! for the very first time, the Bungie staff present at E3 answered a few questions and presented very confidently. They assured the journalists that, for example, the game wouldn’t be built around levels, and so there’d be only one huge world to explore. This was indeed one of Jones’ very first ideas, but tests conducted at the studio found that exploration perhaps wasn’t as much fun as it was made out to be, and Blam! would place a greater focus on action.

MACWORLD 1999 When they returned from Los Angeles, Bungie met with some representatives of a small company that specialized in brand strategy. Because historically the studio had struggled to find names for their games, Jones and Seropian and the rest thought that a helping hand might be in order. The staff all got together in a meeting room to hear the first round of possible names. But none caught on. There was a second meeting, with the same result. They ultimately suggested Covenant,4 which was barely any more popular, but without anything better, they decided to go with it. While in the

meeting, one person decided to say out loud what many of them were thinking: the name didn’t really work. That person was Paul Russel. He was then invited to suggest a few names of his own. Some of his suggestions were quite interesting, like Age of Aquarius, Solipsis or even The Crystal Palace, while others were dismissed immediately, like Hard Vacuum and The Santa Machine. Eventually, Russel suggested Halo. While the naming process was trundling on, the world on which the game was set had completely changed shape: it was no longer set on a planet, but on a ringworld, an idea borrowed from Larry Niven who had published a novel entitled Ringworld in 1970. Bungie had been playing around with this concept for a while already, and the world imagined for Blam! was changed as a result. The name Halo, then, made a lot more sense, but it wasn’t popular with everyone. Top of the list of its detractors was Jason Jones, who opposed the name mainly because of its religious connotations. But it also had some fans, including Martin O’Donnell. After a lengthy discussion, the whole studio finally came round to the idea of Halo as the name for their game. Bungie could now start teasing and marketing its game, a process that began a few days later on May 20, just a few days after E3 1999 closed. An old fansite, mythII. com, that had posted no new content for months, was suddenly updated: its homepage displayed a mysterious illustration, accompanied by the following words: “Halo. Or was it Blam!?” The fans went wild, and made the connection with some of Cortana’s poems that had mentioned angels. Soon they would discover the whole truth. For months now, the studio had been discussing whether to unveil Halo at a MacWorld event. This time, however, Bungie wanted a higher profile. Jones and Seropian were not going to be satisfied with just an everyday stand: they wanted Halo to be revealed at the trade show’s opening conference, a conference hosted by Steve Jobs, the big boss at Apple. This was no mean feat, because Jobs had never shown much of an interest in video games. It was a fact well-known in the industry. Trip Hawkins had left Apple and founded Electronic Arts precisely because the head honcho at Apple had no desire to waste

his time with video games. Bungie, however, had a card up its sleeve, and it happened to be an ace: in early 1999, they had persuaded Peter Tamte to join the studio as executive vicepresident. Tamte knew Jobs well, because Jobs had headhunted him while he was still director of MacSoft, the leading video games developer and publisher on Mac. Tamte worked at Apple for a year as marketing director, but he soon got bored. He missed video games and, like any gamer, he was familiar with Bungie and their games. Seropian hardly had to twist his arm to persuade him to join the company. And so, with MacWorld approaching in July 1999, the studio execs turned to Tamte: he had to persuade Jobs to give Halo a spot at the opening conference. Tamte obtained an appointment for a private presentation at Apple’s head office in Cupertino. Jones set off with a Halo demo, but before he’d even left Chicago, he had a feeling that things wouldn’t go as well as he hoped: for the moment, Halo only worked on PC. This meant that he would have to present the game on a computer that was a competitor to one of Apple’s flagship products. Jones took a flight to California, taking one of the studio’s young recruits with him: one Joseph Staten. Staten started working for Bungie in 1998. His career had been unconventional, to say the least: he graduated from college in 1994 with one degree in drama, and another in international relations. He spent two years working for a non-profit, living in Japan where he taught English. When he made it back to the United States, he earned a master’s in international relations and started looking for a job. He initially applied to join the CIA, without success, before going to work on a California vineyard for a year. When he started work at Bungie, he worked on a series of smaller jobs: he had a spell at Bungie Publishing, where he took care of PR and designed the studio’s stands when he travelled to present games at trade shows. But his situation soon changed when, in 1999, he was asked to focus on Oni. The game, which was still in development at Bungie West, was having some problems. The project had stalled, so Bungie decided to hire its way through the impasse. The studio hired Hardy LeBel, a designer at Namco, and offered a contract to

Lorraine Reyes, an artist whose graphical Japanese style was the perfect match for Oni’s artistic direction. Oni was a third person action game that combined shooting sequences with hand-to-hand combat, and featured a cyberpunk visual styling reminiscent of Ghost in the Shell. There was no shortage of good ideas for the project, but Bungie West couldn’t get it going. Staten would be tasked with writing the game’s different missions. It was no coincidence that he’d been given this role: he loved to write, and regularly did so in his spare time as a way to unwind. Jason Jones got on really well with Staten, who was hilarious, highly intelligent, and full of ideas. And so the two compadres set off together for California, accompanied by Peter Tamte. When they got there, there was no hanging around: Jobs was a very busy man. Jones and Staten found themselves alone in a room with the big boss at Apple, who wanted to know what they had come to show him, and quick. Tamte stayed outside: “I was not there for the actual presentation with Jason and Joe. Because that’s not how you did it with Steve. Steve always wanted to deal with the creator.” Staten sat down, stayed quiet, and let his boss give a presentation about Halo. Jones finished off preparing the PC they’d brought with them and launched the demo. He then began his presentations, explaining the game’s concept, and describing some of the technical particularities. He spent a lot of time on the transitions between indoor and outdoor environments, which demanded zero loading time. Technologically speaking, it was a real achievement, and he wanted to be sure that Jobs fully grasped these subtleties. But while he was moving the character around the screen to showcase the different light effects generated by the presence of a sun, Jobs interrupted the presentation: “Yeah, but you know, at Pixar,5 we can render dozens of suns.” As reserved and laconic as Jones was, the boss from Bungie was no wallflower, nor the type to let himself be intimidated. “Yeah, but can you do it in real time?” came his retort. That question and everything that it implied left Jobs speechless for a few seconds. He rose and, walking towards the door that led out of the room where the presentation had

taken place, replied simply: “Okay, you’re in.” Despite the fact that Jobs had no real interest in video games, this decision came as no surprise to Peter Tamte who, a few years later, would explain that the head of Apple “… was always the type who could recognize something that had the potential to change the world.” Bungie, of course, were jubilant at having had such an opportunity, because the MacWorld opening conference was a hotly anticipated event, and not many video games had managed to secure such a prestigious spot alongside Steve Jobs. This summer, then, it would be Halo’s turn. There was just one snag: the event was just two weeks away and the game still didn’t run on a Mac. And so Bungie began a long race against the clock, adapting Halo for OpenGL. Three days before they would set off for New York, Joe Staten met with Martin O’Donnell, and informed him that Bungie would need some music to accompany its presentation. The composer, though, was faced with two problems. The first was that the Total Audio studios had been ravaged by a fire a few months earlier, and O’Donnell and Salvatori had a lot on their plates. Bungie wasn’t Total Audio’s only client, O’Donnell had hardly done any work on Halo, and he wasn’t really familiar with its world, which gave him very little room for maneuver. The second issue was that the game engine converted to run on OpenGL still couldn’t produce any sound. Instead, Bungie would have to play O’Donnell’s track using a CD player, and press play exactly when the presentation began. It was a bit of a MacGyver move, but it would work. With that settled, O’Donnell went to see Seropian, and told him about his plan. He planned on hiring a small orchestra and some vocalists, so that he could make a soundtrack worthy of the event. Seropian, however, was still keeping a close eye on the studio’s finances, and wasn’t too pleased at the idea. Bungie was still paying for the bug in Myth II, and its income streams were drying up. To make it easier to swallow, O’Donnell made a proposal: Bungie would only need to pay to cover the recording for the composition. In exchange, Total Audio would retain all rights to the piece of music, licensing them to Bungie for the Halo presentation. Seropian consented and O’Donnell left with

$3500 in his pocket to pay a few musicians and cover the recording expenses. But Halo was still unfamiliar to him. He knew that it was a shooter set in a sci-fi universe, and that it had armored soldiers and aliens, but that was pretty much it! O’Donnell liked to understand the work for which he was composing, so he turned to Joe Staten, who gave him three adjectives to work with: ancient, mysterious, epic. That was what the music accompanying the demo had to provoke. O’Donnell had just a few days to compose and record the track that would accompany Halo’s first public presentation, subjecting O’Donnell to far more pressure than he was used to when working with Bungie. He got in his car and sped to Salvatori’s home, where the partners had been forced to work ever since the fire. On the way, O’Donnell gave some thought to Staten’s instructions and analyzed each of the adjectives he’d provided. “Okay, ancient… Monks are ancient, so I’m gonna start with some sort of monks’ chant.” O’Donnell had studied medieval music while in Los Angeles, and it was one of his favorite genres. But, just like a jingle, the music for the presentation also had to be effective and get stuck in the heads of those who heard it at MacWorld. While he was a huge aficionado of classical music, O’Donnell also liked rock. One of his favorite bands was the Beatles, and there was one song in particular by the British rockers that he had long admired for its melodic structure: Yesterday. Composed of a sequence of high and low notes, the melody of Yesterday’s couplets inspired O’Donnell, who applied this style of composing to the Gregorian chants he had in mind. He finally found something that worked really well, and sang it in a loop while in his car so that he didn’t forget it before he got to Salvatori’s place. He arrived and found Salvatori in his basement, where he’d set up his personal studio that the duo had been using since Total Audio had been reduced to ashes. O’Donnell already had the melody, but there remained a lot of work ahead. With Salvatori, he wrote and composed the rest of the track, incorporating violin and percussion. Work was progressing quickly, and they wrote and recorded everything over the weekend, thanks to help from some musicians O’Donnell had hired for the job. O’Donnell then got in touch with

three vocalists who had already worked with Total Audio in the past. O’Donnell and Salvatori joined them and together they sang the melody they had composed on Friday. Because Bungie was leaving for New York the very next day, O’Donnell and Salvatori had very little time left to polish their creation. O’Donnell was determined to add new lines of vocals to the composition, but sung in a very different style. Indeed, for the past few days, he’d had something very specific in mind: Qawwali, a form of devotional singing originating on the Indian subcontinent. It was a genre that he liked, but couldn’t really perform. Fortunately, one of the singers he’d recruited for the Gregorian chant knew someone who could help him out. When that person showed up at the studio, O’Donnell warned them straight away: he had absolutely nothing written down, just a few ideas in his head, so they were going to improvise. O’Donnell gave him a few examples, until the visitor told him that it sounded really good. Why didn’t O’Donnell just record the chant himself? O’Donnell felt awkward, but he got down to work. Many years later, he would explain how, “I was always embarrassed about that, because I thought I’m probably making fun of somebody by accident. I don’t know what’s legit and what isn’t. I’m just using my ears and I’m improvising nonsense syllables.” Despite O’Donnell’s doubts, the track was finished, and that Tuesday he delivered the CD containing the latest version to Bungie, and they all set off for New York. On July 21, the day the conference began, panic reigned behind the scenes. Jason Jones was particularly nervous, and with good reason: the demo contained a bug that made it crash upon launch. Bungie knew about the bug, but nobody had managed to find the cause. With a few hours to go, the team that had traveled to the conference got a big fright when the CD containing the track composed by O’Donnell got snapped when someone stood on it. Fortunately, O’Donnell had thought to make a copy that he had kept on his person, just in case: crisis averted! All that was left to do was to start the music and the demo at the same time, and hope that they were in sync. Up on stage, Jobs was blazing through the announcements. After unveiling Quick Time TV and making a few

announcements about Mac OS 9, at long last he introduced Halo, explaining that it was the coolest game he’d ever seen. He was then joined on stage by Jason Jones, who made his entrance to a round of applause. The two men shook hands and Jones, visibly stressed, spoke a few words about what he had come to present, and moved towards the right of the stage, where a table and several computers were to be found. He hunched down over one of them, grabbed the mouse, and immediately clicked and launched the demo. Behind the scenes, there was a sigh of relief: the demo hadn’t crashed. As Jones was heading back towards center stage, a Gregorian chant filled the auditorium. The Bungie logo appeared on the giant screen, before disappearing to show some kind of control room filled with holograms. The camera panned down to focus on a soldier in green armor, typing away on a virtual keyboard. What we were seeing was design from the mind of Shi Kai Wang who had, at Marcus Lehto’s request, reworked his boss’ efforts to create a character with a more streamlined silhouette. The soldier then runs out of the room, weapon in hand. After passing through a few corridors, he reaches a large hall in which floats a number of strange vehicles. In the middle of the room, two large aliens armed with energy swords appear. The Gregorian chant gives way to percussion, which is soon joined by a number of violins. The music builds towards a crescendo, while the soldier calls to the two aliens and then takes flight. He finally makes his way out of the strange building, and those watching were treated to an amazing, verdant world, bathed in light. The human eye is always drawn towards the sky, and here it found a long, broad strip of land and water stretching up towards the clouds: the action wasn’t taking place on Earth, but on an unknown world shaped like a ring. The violins surge as the soldier is reunited with two of his comrades. They climb aboard a huge 4x4 and escape at maximum speed before being caught by two more aliens, whose flying vehicles make the 4x4 easy prey. A high-speed chase then ensues. In the back of the human 4x4, one of the soldiers activates the turret and machine guns the pursuers, who respond with shots of bluish plasma fire. Through it all, the 4x4 keeps moving, bouncing around the narrow earthen track. The music becomes less dramatic when the three

soldiers find a small alien flyer. The Gregorian chant returns while the flyer is evading enemy fire, and the camera pans over to another armored soldier who waves a flag bearing the Bungie logo. The demo ended to rousing applause from the audience. Many of those present found it hard to believe that it was “just” a video game. Most of those present had never seen anything so realistic, so impressive. And it was as big a feast for ears as it was for the eyes. Behind the scenes, the Bungie developers were ecstatic: the presentation was a success and they knew that MacWorld would guarantee Halo unrivalled exposure. MacWorld was covered by both the specialist and mainstream press, and Apple did not unveil any truly memorable new products that year in New York. This meant that there was nothing to eclipse Halo, as the unveiling of the Macintosh G3  may have done, had it not fortuitously been revealed at the San Francisco MacWorld a few months earlier. Just after the presentation, Bungie issued its first press release about Halo. It provided a bit more context and offered a glimpse of what the Halo world, which was rapidly taking shape, held in store: “The player is a military recon unit of the human race’s fledgling planetary empire. Pursued by alien warships to a massive and ancient ring construct deep in the void, the player must single-handedly improvise a guerrilla war over land, sea and air, using the arsenals and vehicles of three distinct cultures. Using everything from composite swords to orbital bombardment, driving everything from giant tanks to agile combat aircraft, players wage intense warfare over and under the surface of this world.” The armored character shown in the demo still had no name and, truth be told, wasn’t really the story’s protagonist. Over the days that followed, the studio would be answering plenty of questions, and it became apparent that there were many things yet to be finalized. Inhouse, the soldier was known simply as “Chief,” which was merely a remnant of the time when Halo was still an RTS game: these armored soldiers were the most powerful human units, and had been given a name that reflected this status. But at this stage in the game’s development, he was just one character among so many more.

TAKE-TWO: AN UNEXPECTED ALLY One month later, on August 12, a press release from publisher Take-Two Interactive announced that it had acquired a 19.9 % stake in Bungie. Bungie’s management thought that the sale was a necessary one, with Bungie now employing more than 40 staff members working in two separate studios. That all cost money–a lot of money–especially given that work on Halo and Oni was far from complete. Indeed, the studio would have a long wait before its next major cash injection. Take-Two, meanwhile, was growing slowly but surely, and more importantly yet, had made a series of sound decisions. In March 1998 they had acquired BMG Interactive, a subsidiary of BMG Entertainment, thereby picking up its games catalog, which included none other than a certain Grand Theft Auto, developed by DMA Design Limited. Soon-to-be renamed Rockstar North, the studio was incorporated into Rockstar Games, a new subsidiary formed by Take-Two, where it continued working on its increasingly popular GTA series under its new publisher. Bungie was another brick in the edifice that Take-Two was patiently erecting. The contract binding Bungie to Take-Two was extremely simple: in exchange for a certain sum of money, Take-Two obtained the publication and distribution rights for upcoming Bungie games, which included Oni and Halo. Much of Take-Two’s burgeoning success, however, was based on the home console market, and this was rapidly evolving. Nintendo and SEGA were fading into the background, and although SEGA had recently released an extremely promising new console, the Dreamcast, Sony had already announced the PlayStation 2, an ultra-powerful new console with an added ace up its sleeve in the form of a DVD player. Having entered the console market five years earlier, the Japanese manufacturer quickly established a solid position and now dwarfed its competitors, all while attracting an ever-wider audience. For Take-Two, it made no sense at all to miss out on such a booming market. But Bungie didn’t have the resources to undertake the development of Halo and Oni for PC and consoles both, so Take-Two added another clause to the contract: the publisher would make the ports of the games, which it

would entrust to Rockstar. Bungie had, of course, given a lot of thought to releasing the game on the PlayStation 2, but as of yet no functional demos had been developed. Take-Two was more confident, even daring to imagine a release on both the PlayStation 2 and the Dreamcast. The partnership with Take-Two came in quite handy to Bungie, as the publisher gave the studio the resources it needed to match its ambitions, most notably through the kind of high profile that Bungie had never really had as a small independent developer. This included arranging press tours, and American journalists were being invited to see Halo from late 1999 onwards. When Take-Two revealed its catalog of upcoming games, Bungie’s game featured prominently, raising its profile further still. Halo was soon front-page news: Next Generation, PC Gamer and the rest all published interviews with the developers, who seemed confident in their game. In-house, however, it was a different story: despite the not-at-all insignificant financial support from Take-Two, the game was still far from finished. But the arrival of another video-gaming giant would soon put that right.

4 A biblical word for “alliance.” 5   Steve Jobs acquired Pixar from Lucasfilm in 1986. Despite Jobs’ difficult relationship with Michael Esner, CEO of the Walt Disney Company, Pixar and Disney worked hand-in-hand until Jobs agreed to sell the studio in 2006.

Chapter 5 – Bungie: A Microsoft Studio While Bungie pushed on with work to develop Halo, at Microsoft head office in Redmond, four men were getting together and plotting the future. Ted Hase, Otto Berkes, Kevin Bachus and Seamus Blackley had, for just over a year, been wanting to get Microsoft into the video game industry. It was a plan that Blackley took particularly seriously as it was his idea, and he was a former game designer to boot. He was all too familiar with the problems that games development studios encountered when developing a game, and he thought that a gargantuan company like Microsoft had the resources to provide them with a machine that would let them give free rein to their creative genius. It was a plan that would enable Microsoft to become a major player in video games, carving out a space where everyone could flourish: Microsoft, of course, but also gamers and developers. These four men possessed a drive that would prove decisive for Halo.

XBOX, THE FIRST MICROSOFT CONSOLE Back in 1999, the idea that Microsoft could manufacture a home console and make games on a par with Nintendo and Sony still seemed far-fetched. Microsoft was interested in video games, but wasn’t making any major moves in the sector. And yet, the signs were there if you knew where to look: the company from Redmond had just successfully launched DirectX, its API6 designed to facilitate making games for Windows computers, and in 1999 it acquired FASA Studio. Microsoft had also signed a contract with Ensemble Studios and published Age of Empires, which was encountering

spectacular success on PC. But that wasn’t enough to make Microsoft a credible player in the video game industry, especially because the company was still making schoolboy errors. This is what the developers at FASA found out to their expense: no sooner had the studio been acquired than the staff was moved to Redmond and split up across different departments in Microsoft Studios. FASA itself was then broken up. It was a way of doing business that made sense at Microsoft, which was first and foremost a software designer, but which ran contrary to the way that most video game studios worked. However, the success encountered by DirectX would encourage some people to see the bigger picture. Those included Jonathan “Seamus” Blackley. This giant among men, with his pierced ears, certainly stood out in the corridors of Microsoft. Passionate about jazz and physics, Blackley’s odyssey in the video game industry began in the early ’90s when he was hired by Blue Sky Productions, which merged with Lerner Research to become Looking Glass Studios shortly thereafter. He worked with Warren Spector on Ultima Underworld and System Shock, before designing the physics engine for Flight Unlimited. When he fell out with the studio management, Blackley left Looking Glass and was headhunted by Steven Spielberg. The famous director who brought the world E.T. and Schindler’s List, among others, had taken an interest in the video game industry and wanted Blackley to develop a game based on Jurassic Park. This was how Jurassic Park: Trespasser came about, a first-person action and adventure game. Blackley and his team developed an incredibly powerful physics engine that amazed anyone who saw it in action. The gaming press added to the buzz, of course, as did figures like Jerry Sanders, the CEO at AMD, who would waste no time in using Trespasser to promote his microprocessors; or Bill Gates, who would send his personal congratulations to the team after seeing a demo that he found absolutely brilliant. Alas, upon its release Trespasser was a total flop. The game was filled with bugs, but more than that, its intense realism got very boring, very quickly. Industry magazines had no

mercy for the game, sometimes awarding it the dubious honor of worst game of the year. That made the situation untenable for Blackley, who already had an extremely fraught relationship with his superiors. And so he decided to resign from DreamWorks Interactive, convinced that he would never set foot in the video game industry again. “I figured no one would trust me to make a game again because I fucked up,” he recalls. “I was an emotional disaster.” He then set off on a self-imposed exile and traveled all over Europe, where he visited the castles of France and Great Britain, and toured a number of major Second World War sites. Belied by his imposing frame and keen intelligence, Blackley was actually a very sensitive person and had a very hard time hearing the criticism of his game, which he took personally. Worse still, he hated how Steven Spielberg, with whom he had grown close, was being criticized and mocked following the failure of Jurassic Park: Trespasser. It left him feeling hurt. Eventually, in early 1999, Microsoft offered him a role on the DirectX team. He accepted the offer, and with a heavy heart he moved into his new office–a small, windowless room–where he would spend many a long month. Blackley was chatty by nature and never short on witty remarks, but he kept a low profile at Microsoft. At least he did until the day that Sony released the first details about the PlayStation 2. It piqued his interest and reminded him of the years he spent at Looking Glass and DreamWorks Interactive. But he wasn’t the only one with an eye on Sony’s announcements. The Japanese brand wanted to find a way into even more homes, and its strategy revolved around the PlayStation 2’s built-in DVD player, which would make the console the home’s main entertainment device. These were plans which would ultimately place Sony in direct competition with Microsoft, which had been harboring the same ambitions for years now. Microsoft had floated on the stock market just three years earlier, quickly becoming one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful companies. The campus it had erected in Redmond was growing from one month to the next, attracting ever more IT workers and businessmen. It also attracted a lot of geeks, many of whom worshiped the company’s founder, one Bill Gates. Himself a visionary businessman and computer genius, Gates had

revolutionized the software industry and picked up a lot of followers in the process. Many of them were staunchly loyal to Microsoft, and worked to make sure the company was always growing and becoming more powerful. Despite this positive dynamic, in those days Microsoft had a bad reputation, particularly among the general public and especially in the wake of an antitrust case brought by the American government. Indeed, Microsoft had been nicknamed “the Borg,” an empire whose scale and malevolence was matched only by its ridiculousness and stupidity. Holders of this opinion would cite the various bugs found in Windows, or accuse the company of stealing other people’s ideas while fearing its intrusion into everyday life. This strange dynamic was mostly like water off a duck’s back to Blackley, who still harbored his video game dreams. Revitalized, he made a lot of friends at Microsoft, people like Otto Berkes, with whom he worked with on DirectX. Blackley specialized more particularly in graphics, and was quick to understand that with DirectX, Microsoft boasted a weapon that was unrivalled in the industry. “We could smoke the PlayStation 2,” he would state, one day. He then began thinking about how to get the most out of DirectX, and quickly came to a conclusion: by designing a machine that was easy to use, like home consoles, but whose casing contained the best PC technology available at the time. Others had been entertaining the same ideas in secret, and when Blackley began talking about it, he quickly found three willing companions: Otto Berkes, Ted Hase and Kevin Bachus. All of them were from the DirectX team. Back then, Hase’s role was to promote DirectX to developers, and Bachus was a marketing project manager. Between the four of them, they possessed the full set of skills needed to design and market a games console, at least in theory. They bounced a few ideas around and exchanged a few emails, agreeing on what steps to take next. The project was in no way official, but what the foursome didn’t know was that the Microsoft execs were growing increasingly interested in video games, especially since Sony had revealed its intentions for the PlayStation 2. The highly

enthusiastic Ken Kutaragi, father of the PlayStation, had stated his intent to kill PC gaming with his new console. This was a threat that could not be dismissed, because although Microsoft was not a major player in the video game industry, most PC gamers used Windows. There was no question of Microsoft letting itself be muscled out of the equation. In addition to Blackley’s small team, a number of other people at Microsoft were thinking about how to enter the video game market and take on Sony at its own game. In March 1999, the Microsoft execs got together for a conference. In attendance were Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. The meeting was particularly important because, on this occasion, the two head honchos at Microsoft intended to redefine the company’s strategy for years to come. Sony’s recent announcements had certainly piqued the curiosity of some execs, like Robbie Bach, the future head of the Xbox division, as well as Rick Thompson, vice-president of Microsoft’s hardware division (which was then making computer keyboards, mice, and joysticks) and Jon DeVaan, the man in charge of WebTV’s operations, a company that Microsoft acquired in April 1997. WebTV had designed a kind of multimedia decoder that let people surf the internet on their TVs. The concept caught the eye of several executives at Microsoft, including Bill Gates, who saw in it a new way to sell Microsoft products. None of the three men were aware of the plans being hatched by Blackley and his colleagues, but they had all decided to make a serious incursion into the video game industry as a whole. Indeed, it was a maturing industry and Microsoft expected it to become even more important in years to come. And so Bill Gates issued his first instruction to start looking at the design of a games console, or at least a machine that could compete with Sony’s PlayStation 2. The timing couldn’t be better for The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, as some people at Microsoft had come to call them. Despite this, however, Blackley’s team were particularly mistrustful: victory was not yet within their grasp. A lot of Microsoft executives disliked their ideas, preferring those proposed by WebTV which they thought would be easier to pull off. Buoyed by this support, WebTV asked for Blackley, Bachus, Berkes and Hase’s

project to be terminated, in favor of their own. Bill Gates responded immediately: he asked that a meeting be scheduled where both teams could present and defend their ideas. The first such meeting took place on March 31, 1999 and was chaired by Craig Mundie. Bad luck for the DirectX team: Mundie was the man from Microsoft who had first approached Steve Perlman, the WebTV founder, and it was he who had started negotiations to acquire the company. Blackley’s team naturally saw him as an adversary, but they refused to let it dampen their spirits. And so Bachus launched into an extremely detailed presentation of their plans, and the other camp issued a scathing response that deemed the project unrealistic, especially because the machine that the DirectX team would create had to contain a hard drive, a particularly costly component. For Blackley and his team, though, it was vital, because it would enable the console to run a modified version of Windows 98. Here, again, they came in for fierce criticism, with several members of the WebTV team believing that it would be impossible to develop a customized operating system in the time available. Mundie soon picked his winners, a decision made all the easier since the DirectX team had not really taken the different costs engendered by the design of their machine into account. They did, though, have one argument that was hard to ignore: the console would be DirectX compatible, which would guarantee the support of the great many developers who had already learned and mastered the language. That was a claim the WebTV could not make. In the end, the result of the meeting was a decision to hold another, this time attended by Bill Gates himself. But this first face-off had been so heated that many of the execs present at the meeting decided to arrange another one with all those present, ahead of the meeting with Gates. Its purpose was to establish a series of good conduct rules to avoid another bust-up in front of the big boss. Still filled with distrust, Blackley’s team decided to use Bachus’ email address to send an email directly to Gates himself. They wanted to make sure that nobody was twisting their words or misrepresenting their ideas. Unlike the WebTV machine, the console conceived by Blackley was basically a small PC designed exclusively for gaming. It was a perfect way to get ever more

Microsoft products into homes all over the world. Naturally, this intrigued Gates, who told them to keep pursuing this direction. Bingo! The meeting with Bill Gates would go ahead on May 5, 1999. The spokesperson for the DirectX team was Nat Brown, supported by Blackley and Bachus. Brown was a renowned engineer at Microsoft, and joined the foursome after he got wind of their plans. He was highly respected by Gates and therefore constituted a heavyweight ally for the team. Brown meticulously described their plans, especially the hardware aspect. And because during the previous meeting they had been caught out by their lack of precision regarding the costs incurred in manufacturing their machine, this time Brown showed up with an extremely detailed PowerPoint presentation. They estimated the cost of manufacturing the console at $303 per unit, and yet again, the hard drive was the most expensive component, with Brown estimating the cost at $55. He was, though, able to reassure the audience that the cost of these components would fall over time, according to Moore’s law. The WebTV team immediately called this point into question, arguing that neither Sony nor Nintendo’s next console would feature internal hard drives, so why should Microsoft bother with one? Fortunately, this was when the DirectX team found a new ally in the form of Ed Fries. A model Microsoft employee since 1986, the young Ed Fries had been an avid gamer for as long as he could remember, and had even designed a few games as a teen, a feat that also landed him his first job. A gifted programmer, Fries quickly established himself at Microsoft after working on the Windows 2.0 version of Excel. He then climbed the ranks and after a role leading a technical team tasked with developing Excel, he was appointed to the head of the team tasked with creating Word, Microsoft’s own word processing program. In 1995, he took over the helm of the games division, and so he had been following the discussions about a Microsoft games console very closely. When he finally spoke up, it was to contradict the WebTV team: Fries thought that the hard drive was absolutely essential, especially for online gaming. The internet was not yet in every home, but in his opinion one day it would be, and Microsoft

had to be a pioneer in that sector. The hard drive could be used to store updates, reduce in-game loading times to an absolute minimum, or even do away with memory cards. Gates had a lot of respect for Fries, which meant he gave a lot of weight to his words. But he was wondering… Could PC games easily be converted to a format that could be played on the console? Blackley was only too happy to reply that yes, they could. Thanks to DirectX, which both PCs and their planned console used, games could be ported very easily, providing an easy way to pad out the console’s catalog of games at minimal cost. After the WebTV team had presented their project, it was clear that Gates had already made up his mind: he gave his approval for the DirectX project. But the little civil war between the two teams wasn’t over yet, with a new meeting scheduled for 17 June. Blackley and his team had time to form a small group of engineers around them, and they designed an initial prototype for the console. The idea was to show that the console, as they conceived it, was ultimately an easy-to-use PC that could load a game within just a few seconds of being powered on. It was a success: at the meeting Blackley launched the machine and, in a few seconds flat, he had stood up and was playing Tomb Raider on the meeting room TV in front of all those present. It was a hard blow to take for the WebTV team, who had still thought they had one major advantage over their rivals: before then, they had been the only team to have already designed a working product. They had wisely thought that hands-on experience would prove them right in good time. But the very next day, their presentation failed to impress anyone. Gates gave his blessing to the DirectX team and its console, which was then known as the DirectXbox. They soon got to work, and a hierarchy began to take shape. The project was supervised by Robbie Bach, head of Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices Division. Then, a new project manager was appointed in the form of Jay Allard. Jay had an excellent reputation at Microsoft earned through his work to prepare the company for the rise of the internet, which was becoming increasingly present in everyday life. Finding this new world fascinating, Allard had himself

designed Microsoft’s first internet server, enabling it to become a major player in the nascent internet industry. It was Nat Brown who told him about the DirectXbox: Brown was preparing to leave Microsoft, but he didn’t want to leave Blackley, Berkes, Bachus, and Hase out there all alone, as they still had plenty of enemies inside the company. He knew that Allard was well-liked and well-respected by Gates and Ballmer, making him a serious asset for the console. While the team was growing and knuckling down to designing the console, Blackley and Bachus began canvassing developers. The console would need games if it was going to sell, but they still needed to persuade games studios and publishers to take it into consideration. And so they set off on a long series of business trips that would last several months. Their main problem was that they didn’t actually have much to show during these first meetings. And even later, with the year 2000 rapidly approaching, the prototypes they were unveiling were still light years away from anything that would resemble the final console. But they had a strategy and, most importantly, they had a way with words. Blackley was gradually becoming a true-believer evangelist for what would become the Xbox. A former developer himself, he knew how to talk to artists and understood what they needed. He had a way of whispering the right words, especially to those who were beginning to resent Sony’s stranglehold on the industry over the past few years. The PlayStation dominated the video game industry to such an extent that the brand had become absolutely vital, a fact that Sony was only all too aware of, and leveraged accordingly. Many developers, and Western ones especially, were growing increasingly fed up with the attitude of the Japanese console manufacturer, which they saw as smug and pretentious. But they still had their doubts: could Microsoft really carve out a space in the games console market? Many didn’t think they could. Including in the press. Although Microsoft had not yet made any announcements, some information had leaked–as information has a tendency to do– and rumors spread rapidly. The question being asked was this: how could a company specialized in software, and with so little experience in video games and hardware,

establish a foothold in such a competitive industry, and one in which even SEGA and Nintendo were showing signs of fatigue? But Microsoft was a fast learner. The company was contacting a wide range of component manufacturers, beginning with Nvidia. Nvidia was a small company specializing in the design of graphics cards, and one that had managed to make a name for itself in a particularly competitive market over these past few years. Microsoft wanted to provide developers with the best possible tools. The more powerful the console would be, the more freedom developers would have to bring their ideas to life. And the more sensational the games, the bigger appeal the Xbox would have. It was while Microsoft and Nvidia were holding a series of calls and meetings to discuss the chip’s design and how much it would cost, that the team first began thinking about how the console would look. This job was assigned to Horace Luke, a young designer who had recently been hired by Microsoft after working with the company as a subcontractor for several years. When he was settling down to draw his first sketches, Luke realized that most of his pencils had been stolen. The only one left was green, which nobody seemed to want. It wasn’t really a big deal, so he started to draw. He had read a few consumer surveys and their results were unequivocal: in people’s minds, the color green was associated with technology. These findings were all the more true given that a few months earlier, the whole world had encountered The Matrix, which was a blockbuster in cinemas all over the world. Part thriller/part sci-fi, the movie’s themes included hacking, virtual reality, and intelligent machines. It was also filled with the color green. Blackley wanted his console’s design to really stand out, the complete opposite to most other products produced by Microsoft which, in his opinion, focused primarily on making joysticks, mice, and keyboards at as low as cost as possible. Design was never an important criteria. When Luke presented his initial ideas, the color green was adopted immediately. The console had been known as the DirectXbox up until now, but was increasingly being referred to by its nickname: the Xbox. This was actually very timely, because Allard and his engineers had quickly

come to see that the console would never really be able to run Windows irrespective of what form it took. The system would be too power-hungry and the machine wouldn’t be able to perform to its full capabilities. This went against the whole philosophy of home consoles, which were specifically designed for gaming and which could produce highly satisfying results using components that were less advanced than those used in gaming PCs. Sidelining Windows, though, also meant kissing goodbye to DirectX, and Allard knew it. But therein lied the rub: while Gates had opted for the DirectX team’s project, it was precisely because the machine could run Windows and DirectX. “Too bad,” Allard thought to himself, convinced that what really mattered was making a good games console, and that was something Microsoft could do without having recourse to Windows. At 4pm on February 14, 2000, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer held a final meeting to take stock of all the work so far, and approve a final schedule for the next steps. As it happened, Gates wanted Microsoft to reveal the Xbox at the Game Developers Conference in March of the next year, so it was important to him that everything went without the slightest hitch. And yet, what was supposed to be a routine meeting would soon become something else entirely when Gates and Ballmer found out about the latest developments on the Xbox. It’s worth noting at this point that the two top men at Microsoft weren’t known for their level-headedness and easy-going natures. Generally friendly and quick to smile, Gates revealed a completely different side to his character when he was angry, and because he knew he had a tendency to fly off the handle, he never hesitated to say exactly what he was thinking, even providing a play-by-play explanation of why he thought what he had just heard was a bad idea. It was a long and painful process for any staff on the receiving end. But Ballmer was probably even worse. His thundering voice could frequently be heard booming down the corridors at Redmond, which he liked to stalk with a baseball bat in hand. Angry and hotheaded, the CEO of Microsoft was a figure feared by many of his employees. But the two men were also highly intelligent, and knew a

good idea when they saw one. Bachus, Fries and Allard, then, hoped to convince them, even though the project no longer bore much resemblance to the one that Gates had approved. Inevitably, when Gates learned that the Xbox wouldn’t run on Windows, he exploded. And so began what Fries, Blackley, and others would later call the Valentine’s Day Massacre: the meeting was supposed to last an hour or two, max, but it went on, and on, and on. It was getting to 7pm or 8pm, and the discussion still wasn’t over. Allard, Fries and Bachus had to call their wives and tell them that they would be home late. This was no evening with friends, though. Instead, Gates and Ballmer continued to rant and rave, going back over everything that had been done and every decision that had been made over the past few months. Eventually, the three men did manage to cool the situation and calm their bosses down. The Xbox would no longer be a PC in disguise, but a games console in its own right. Gates and Ballmer knew that they were going to spend billions of dollars over the next few years, and that it was unlikely that this console would make any money for Microsoft. Their plans, then, needed to be bolder, more prescient. This is why the console came with a hard drive and an Ethernet port so that the Xbox could connect to the internet. Fries and Allard had the firm conviction that these components would give the console a considerable advantage and make the Xbox brand a pioneer in video-gaming history. As improbable as it may have seemed, Gates and Ballmer ultimately gave their blessing to the Xbox team, who left the meeting feeling shaken. There was some good news among it all, though: the WebTV team was now out of the game for good, and Ed Fries had his boss’ approval to release the funds needed to compile a fleshedout games catalog. This was an extremely fortunate development because, just a few days after the Valentine’s Day Massacre, he received an unexpected call. On the other end of the line, he recognized the voice of Peter Tamte, vice-president of Bungie.

SAVING PRIVATE BUNGIE

While Microsoft was working on its first games console, things had grown complicated for Bungie as they gradually realized that the development of Halo was going to get very expensive. This was all the more true given that it wasn’t the studio’s only project, with Bungie West still working on Oni out in San Jose. Take-Two’s contribution had given the company some temporary financial relief, but it wouldn’t last. So Seropian and Jones started giving very serious thought to selling the studio. They had already rejected quite a few offers they had received when they were in a more solid financial position. Interested companies included Activision, as well as scores of less prestigious companies. Later, Alex Seropian would explain that Bungie had no reason to partner up with publishers who had nothing to offer apart from money. “They weren’t doing anything interesting and they didn’t have much of a future. They didn’t have an idea for what could be successful […] We didn’t have that sort of conceited viewpoint of, ‘We’re doing something interesting and you’re not doing anything. Why should we partner with you?’ But it felt that way.” Nevertheless when Bungie’s bank balance started to look a bit hollow, Seropian and Jones found themselves forced to reconsider their options. Their first thought was Apple, and indeed why not? Bungie had been Mac gaming’s flagship studio for nearly ten years, and Steve Jobs had anointed Halo himself when he invited it onto his stage at MacWorld in July 1999. Once again, Tamte leveraged his contacts and called Phil Schiller, Apple’s VP for marketing. He got straight to the point: Would Apple like to buy Bungie? Schiller couldn’t answer that question himself: he would have to discuss it with Steve Jobs. He did, and Jobs gave it some thought before turning down the opportunity. To tell the truth, while Halo had certainly impressed Jobs, he still wasn’t much interested in video games. So that made for a very short conversation between Bungie and Apple. While this was happening, Seamus Blackley and Kevin Bachus were making the rounds of games studios. Blackley had plenty of friends all over the world and managed to persuade a lot of people to work with Xbox. This was how they got through to Lorne Lanning,

whose teams were working on a new Oddworld game for Xbox, as well as Tomonobu Itagaki, the creator of Dead or Alive, who took a real liking to Blackley. There were some more difficult encounters, too, like when the duo met with Shinji Mikami and a number of Capcom execs in Japan. The discussion was particularly frustrating for Blackley and Bachus, who needed to use interpreters to communicate with the mind that brought us Resident Evil. Mikami pushed to hear Microsoft’s vision for video games, but nobody was able to give him a real answer, not even Microsoft’s Japanese representatives. Bachus understood that something wasn’t right, and at the end of the meeting he asked one of the interpreters directly what it was that Mikami wanted to know. As soon as he understood, Bachus lit up. It was actually a very easy question to answer for the Xbox, because it was the same thing they’d been saying to all of the Western developers since the very beginning of their trip: Microsoft saw video games as an artform. This went down very well, all the more so due to Nintendo and Sony adopting positions that were far less gratifying for artists. For Nintendo, video games were first and foremost a toy, while for Sony they were a form of entertainment. But the meeting was over and despite Microsoft following up on the encounter, Capcom never got back to them. As it would turn out, soon after the meeting, Nintendo signed a major contract with Capcom that would see the GameCube get some nice exclusives, like Resident Evil 4, while Sony and its PlayStation 2 would get Devil May Cry. But it wasn’t exactly plain sailing with Western developers, either. In 2000, Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin, the co-founders of Naughty Dog, had reached a threshold, and they knew it. The studio was famous for Crash Bandicoot, released on the PlayStation, but they felt that something was missing. Like many in the industry, the developers at Naughty Dog had heard about the Xbox and it had piqued their interest. Could they change sides? Well, why not? As long as Microsoft made a persuasive proposal. And so the duo decided to call Ed Fries and invite him to their studio in Santa Monica, on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Fries, of course, accepted

the invitation, but the meeting was over quickly: the partners at Naughty Dog doubted that Microsoft could keep its promises and didn’t think for a second that the console would be as powerful as Fries was promising. As for Fries, he didn’t push the matter either. At that time, the Microsoft staff visiting games developers had to make do with console prototypes that were too early-stage to convince any sceptics. Other developers, though, showed more of an interest, beginning with Bungie, who had learned of the console at a Microsoft and Take-Two event in New York in January 2000. Take-Two had invited some of its flagship studios, which included Bungie, to come get a look at the first Xbox prototypes. Tamte and Seropian travelled to New York where they met with Blackley and Bachus, but more importantly where they saw a prototype of the console and a series of technical demos. What Seropian saw was that the Xbox was ultimately very similar to the PC and developing for a console like that would be a piece of cake. As for Microsoft, they were also very familiar with Bungie, because several people on the Xbox team had been fans of the studio for years now. Top of the list was Ed Fries, who was a big fan of Myth. The two parties, then, found some common ground, and when Seropian told them that he would like to publish games for the Xbox the Microsoft team was immediately enthusiastic. After all, their console needed games. By any means necessary. Seropian returned to Chicago and discussed what he’d seen with Jason Jones, who listened attentively. He liked what he was hearing. What the Xbox was offering was something that was genuinely new for a games console, and something more similar to what was possible with PC gaming. The console promised to be particularly powerful and, more than that, Xbox planned to develop a bona fide online gaming service. This made it a perfect fit for Jones and his passion for multiplayer gaming. Jones and Seropian didn’t want to just sell to the highest bidder, they wanted the sale to make sense and to be a good thing for Bungie, a good thing for their future games. Microsoft could offer them precisely that, and they knew it.

Why stop at a contract for a few games, when they could offer Microsoft the opportunity to buy the studio? This would put an end to Bungie’s financial woes, and they would develop games exclusively for the Xbox. Seropian liked the idea as much as Jones. The former because he knew that Microsoft had bottomless financial resources, and the latter because it was an opportunity to play a role, no matter how small, in the design of a new console… And to make games for it that would enjoy huge visibility as standard. Discussions between the two parties would take on a markedly different character: what was supposed to become a straightforward publishing agreement would gradually transition into a full buy-out of Bungie. Tamte knew Ed Fries well, as they had worked together on several occasions when Tamte was still at Apple and Microsoft was porting some of its games over to Mac. After discussing the matter at length with Jones and Seropian, he finally picked up the phone, called Fries, and explained the situation: Bungie was strapped for cash and wanted to work with Microsoft. Better yet, Jones and Seropian were willing to sell. For Fries, the opportunity was too good to miss: Halo would be an excellent launch title for the Xbox. The game showcased everything the console was able to offer, from its power to its accessibility for developers and its online gaming. In short, the perfect partnership: the alliance would be just as good for Xbox as it would for Halo. What’s more, the Xbox was made official by Bill Gates himself at the Game Developers Conference on March 10, 2000. There, he got up on stage and unveiled a mock-up console, a giant silver “X” with a translucent green gem at its center. The console’s design was yet to be finalized, but Gates wanted to reassure consumers and developers: it would be available soon and, most importantly, it would be the most accomplished console in the history of gaming, delivering next-level power and features. Bungie reacted to the announcement six days later, in a press release written by Seropian himself: “Xbox is a prime example of a console entering the market at the leading edge of technology, which is where we want our games to be.” The press release would be cited by Microsoft, which

would use this and other quotes to promote its console on the new Xbox official website. And it wouldn’t go unnoticed, especially by fans of Bungie, who had eyes everywhere. Nobody, though, suspected what was about to happen. Because following the conversation between Fries and Tamte, Microsoft and Bungie would hold a series of meetings, mainly in the offices of Bungie West in San Jose. Seeing the top Microsoft execs in the Chicago studio would pique the curiosity of the staff. Indeed, most of them knew that Bungie was in trouble. And yet, there had been no redundancies; on the contrary, the company was still hiring. But Jones and Seropian were very close to their staff, and the little Bungie family had no secrets from each other. No secrets apart from Jones and Seropian’s decision to keep the fact the Bungie was currently in discussions with Microsoft quiet. That said, the deal was still far from struck: Bungie was contractually bound to Take-Two, which meant that there were three parties in the negotiations. Ed Fries was the man in charge of discussions with Take-Two, and he got exactly what he wanted. In the end, Take-Two would retain the rights to Bungie’s earlier games, including Oni, the game in development at Bungie West which it would publish as it saw fit. Microsoft meanwhile, would acquire Bungie and the license to Halo, which would become an Xbox exclusive. The acquisition also meant that Bungie’s staff was now employed by Microsoft, and they would all need to move to the campus in Redmond.

THE END OF AN ERA AT E3 With E3 looming, Seropian and Jones decided to keep their lips sealed about the Microsoft deal, so that Bungie could focus on what was most important: making a new demo to reveal at the show. While Jones and Seropian were in negotiations with Microsoft, work on the game was making excellent progress, especially following the arrival of some new hires. The art team was bolstered with the hiring of Lorraine Reyes, who had been working for Bungie as a freelancer since October 1998. A talented illustrator, she had been approached

by a member of Bungie staff who had attended the same school, but initially turned down the offer she received. At that time, Bungie was looking for artists to bring the work on its new game–code name Blam! –to life. She turned the offer down, then reconsidered when she heard about a second Bungie project, Oni, whose Japanese anime aesthetic struck more of a chord with her. She returned to Chicago and met with Bungie, and when she showed them what she could do, she was hired on the spot. In parallel, Bungie hired two fans of Myth in Paul Bertone and Christopher Barrett; the first was a game designer, the second a specialist in game environments. They were both avid consumers of fantasy and began working together on a project that Jason Jones had been mulling over for a while now, and that they called Phoenix. The game was a blend of strategy and action in which players could build their castles and ramparts stone by stone, and then face off against other each other and destroy enemy fortifications. It was a construction game that would later earn its fair share of comparisons to Minecraft, a game that would only be released a decade later. Martin O’Donnell, too, had now become a Bungie employee. Total Audio was still in business, but O’Donnell had fallen in love with Halo and wanted to join the rest of the Bungie team on their adventure. Ironically, although he was one of the last to join the company, he was one of the first to learn that Bungie had been acquired by Microsoft and that the studio would soon have to move. It was Seropian who brought him the news when they met at the Los Angeles Convention Center. The show hadn’t yet opened, but Bungie had completed its first tests in the little “Halo” theater they had built for the occasion. “The first showing the next morning was for some VIPs and after it was over Alex pulled me aside and told me that Microsoft had just made an offer he couldn’t refuse,” O’Donnell recalls. “I had just joined Bungie as an employee ten days earlier and was pretty shocked to learn that we were all going to become Microsoft employees and be moved en masse to Redmond Washington.”

It was a secret that O’Donnell would keep for the duration of E3 2000. The event proved particularly successful for Bungie who, once again, had impressed the press with Halo. The demo was also longer and more fleshed out than what the studio had shown at MacWorld the previous year. The action was no longer focused on the armored supersoldier but followed a number of different characters, including Marines in a variety of very different roles. Bungie didn’t want Halo to restrict each soldier to a particular class and therefore a specific role; it was the players themselves who would determine their roles depending on their own skills and playstyles. Some would be excellent pilots, while others would be decorated snipers. In actual fact, the game didn’t really have any characters. It already had the alien enemies, and the name “Covenant” was already in use, as was a phrase that would clearly state their intentions: “Your destruction is the will of the gods, and we are their instrument.” It was a phrase that would be cast aside, only to be uttered by the Prophet of Truth seven years later in Halo 3. Only the supersoldier would make it into the final game, whose look was very similar to Master Chief, as players would discover one year later. Marcus Lehto himself was behind the design of this new armor, which was thicker and very different from that imagined by Shi Kai Wang and shown at MacWorld 1999. “I liked this design, but felt it was too slimmed down to fit the character that had fictionally evolved, so I rebuilt the Master Chief again, this time as a highly capable soldier blended with the armor of a tank.” Up until that point, the soldier in his bulky armor had always been accompanied by others like him; this time he was alone and, most strikingly, appeared as more of a cyborg than anything human, no matter how powerful a soldier. When he spoke in the demo, he had a robotic voice and used the syntax of a computer program. It was apparent, however, that this soldier more than any other featured in the demo was an elite warrior, the one the human army sent in to resolve the prickliest situations. After taking out two Elites with a sniper rifle, he gives way to the more expressive, more human Marines. Halo was still a thirdperson shooter, but the studio now seemed to have a more focused vision for the game. Bungie had streamlined its gameplay and some

vehicles had been removed, like the helicopter–deemed too futuristic–and the Doozy, a small boat that would let players take the fight out on to the ringworld’s oceans. One interesting tidbit is that before it was removed from the game, taking control of the Doozy forced the camera into a first-person view. This was something that Jason Jones had been wrestling with for a while now, and he began asking himself the following question: would Halo not be more fun in first person? While nothing had been decided, the developers had added in a first-person perspective here and there when using different weapons of gadgets. It wasn’t just added in at random, of course; it all depended on comfort and usability. When taking aim with a sniper rifle, for example, the camera switched to first person for more accurate shots. But the more time passed, the better the first-person view seemed in relation to the rest of the game. Nevertheless, Halo remained what was basically a TPS, as can be seen from the E3 demo. But when Microsoft acquired Bungie, Jones started giving the matter more serious thought. Halo would soon become a console game, and Jones had doubts about the thirdperson view being the most suitable for playing a shooting game with a controller. He wanted players to find his game as immersive as possible, and he came to think that a first-person view with the controller’s trigger acting as an extension of the gun shown on the screen would deliver a much greater sense of immersion. But for the time being, the boss at Bungie had other things on his mind: his studio had been bought out, and drastic change was coming to the lives of many people whose daily bread he had been providing for years now. And he knew it wouldn’t be easy to persuade them all to relocate to Redmond.

A ROCKY MOVE Bungie and Microsoft may have been discreet, but rumors of the acquisition had been spreading like wildfire since June  9, 2000, especially online and on the Bungie forums. It would be June  19 before Microsoft officially announced its acquisition of Bungie, and

because Bungie was neither very big nor very prestigious, Ed Fries snapped it up at a very reasonable $30m. The acquisition meant that all of Bungie’s staff now worked for Microsoft, and would have to move to Redmond. Bungie, though, hadn’t waited for the official announcement before discussing it with their staff. Not long after E3, Seropian and Jones got them all together in one room and broke the news. It came as a real shock for the developers at Bungie, who were very proud of their independence. For many of them, Microsoft symbolized evil incarnate, and represented the polar opposite of everything Bungie stood for. The thought of becoming Microsoft employees shook this little group to its core. Some of the staff, like Marcus Lehto and Max Hoberman, had suspected that something big was going on, but it was still a huge leap from feeling like something was up to imagining that in the very near future they would all be working for Microsoft. “Everybody in the office was pissed off because we liked being independent,” Shi Kai Wang explains. While some of the staff seemed genuinely enthusiastic at the idea of starting a new life, others were devastated. Then Martin O’Donnell took the initiative to get them out of the studio and head out for something to eat: “There were a couple hold-outs who just couldn’t stomach working for Microsoft.” Their reaction didn’t really come as a big surprise to Seropian who, like any good dad, tried to reassure his kids. He sent out a group email containing details of the agreement signed with Microsoft. He wanted to give them as much information as possible to reassure them about the studio’s future. Microsoft, meanwhile, was determined to do things right this time. Ed Fries had heard about the failure with FASA, and Jordan Weisman, the studio’s former boss, was at hand to advise him. For a while there was even a discussion about whether Bungie, like FASA a few years earlier, would have to move or not. Weisman argued in favor of Bungie. He knew the studio and knew how its teams worked, but more than anything else, he knew their mentality. Bungie wouldn’t last three months if it faced the same fate as FASA. Weisman may have been unable to convince Microsoft to let Bungie stay in Chicago, but he had more success in making them understand the importance of keeping the team together, in a space reserved only

for them. And there was no shortage of buildings on the Redmond campus. But when a few members of staff at Bungie traveled to Redmond to visit their new premises, what they found there left them nonplussed. Microsoft had set them up on the Millennium Campus, in a small building typical of the software giant in that era. The studio was made up of lots of little private offices, sealed off and isolated from each other. That was the culture at Microsoft, where every employee had the right to a certain level of comfort, and the ability to shut themselves away when they needed to work in peace and quiet. The exact opposite of Bungie, then, where people were used to working in open-plan offices and liked being all together, if only so that they could bounce ideas around out loud. Seropian explains how, “We’d always worked in an open environment. Over there, people would turn around and say, ‘Hey, this shit’s broken, can you fix it?’ ‘Oh, what’s going on?’ ‘Oh, you’re trying to use it like that, OK. Let me turn this thing around.’ You don’t get that with everybody working in their own office.” It was the lifeblood of the studio: irrespective of their roles and responsibilities, the developers talked to each other, debated, and analyzed, and in order to do that, they needed to be together as much as possible. And so Bungie asked Microsoft to remove the walls in the space they would be working in. Ed Fries understood their request and work began immediately: the studio was expected to move in on July 17, which didn’t leave much time. In Chicago, things had been going a bit better since Microsoft representatives had visited the developers and answered their questions. These representatives included Ed Fries, of course, as well as Stuart Moulder and Jon Kimmich, all of whom had been involved in the negotiations. Interesting fact, Kimmich already knew Seropian well from when the latter had been an intern at Microsoft. Moulder and Fries tried to placate the staff at Bungie, who were particularly distrustful. Moulder organized a Q&A session to reassure everyone, with mixed results. Fries wanted to be sure that nobody would resign from Bungie before the move. Indeed, while he was

delighted to have acquired Halo, the thing that he was most interested in was the talent found within the company. It wouldn’t be possible to finish the game without the people who designed it. But he didn’t want to force anyone. “What Alex [Seropian] did was super smart,” Moulder recalls. “He said, ‘I’m not going to try and persuade anyone. Everybody should be able to make their own decision.’ It was absolutely the right thing to do. I think most would follow Alex and Jason, but for some key people I think it was really important that they had a chance to talk directly and hear what our plans were.” Seropian and Jones presented a very confident face, and it wasn’t just a front to reassure their staff. Because Microsoft was in desperate need of games for its new console, and because Halo was already looking very promising, Bungie had a strong hand in the negotiations and Seropian and Jones knew how to play their cards right. This meant that Seropian would retain a strong role as a decision-maker, one which on paper would allow him to stand up to Microsoft when necessary, and therefore protect the interests of not just Bungie, but also his projects. In the real world, though, things are never that simple: a lesson that Seropian would learn a little while later. At Bungie, though, nobody was fooled: Microsoft would always be a very large company, and sooner or later there would be constraints on their freedom. But when the small delegation set off again for Redmond, Moulder felt like he’d managed to reassure staff at the studio, if only a little: “I don’t think anyone felt like, ‘Okay, I believe everything we just heard.’ I think it was, ‘Well, this guy doesn’t seem to be an asshole, he seems to actually like games, and will probably try to do the right thing.’” It would ultimately be Jason Jones who managed to rally his troops, with some well-chosen words. Chris Butcher remembers how, “He said that Microsoft is building the biggest canon in the world, and they’re pointing it right at Sony, and we can be the bullet in that canon. And we can make a very big impact on the course of the game industry.” Because even more important than saving Bungie from bankruptcy, it was the opportunity presented by Microsoft that motivated Jones and Seropian. By giving the Xbox

one of its best exclusives, Bungie could become one of the highestprofile studios around. This was what Alex Seropian admitted as far back as June 2000, when asked to explain why he had sold Bungie: “If I were to look at the different platforms out there, I’d say the company I want to be making PC games is Blizzard, the company I’d want to be making PlayStation games is Square Enix, and the company I’d want to be making Nintendo games is Rare. If we get to be the company making Xbox games, that kind of opportunity just doesn’t come along too often.” In the end, all but two or three members of staff at Bungie would agree to the move. For most of them, there was never any question of walking away from Halo: the game had already demanded so much work, and the developers were passionate about what they were doing. Most of them knew they were working on something that was one-of-a-kind, something that if it was made well, would make video-gaming history. Martin O’Donnell was front of the line. Now a Bungie–and therefore Microsoft–employee, the composer never gave a moment’s thought to leaving Halo before it was finished. The way he saw things, the studio had grasped an amazing opportunity: to give a new and ambitious console one of its main launch titles. Meanwhile, he and his wife had been looking into the area around Redmond: “I didn’t mind moving to Redmond because we had good friends who had recently moved to Seattle and we knew we’d be welcome there.” And yet, the musician couldn’t see himself settling permanently in the State of Washington. Once Halo was finished, he would move back to Chicago with his family. That was his plan, in any case. It was the same story for Marcus Lehto: “My wife and I never thought we’d move too far from our family in Ohio, but the idea of moving out to the Seattle area was intriguing. Many of us at Bungie thought we’d give it a couple years, then move back. But, for those like myself, we were struck by the intense natural beauty of this area and just fell in love and rooted in for good.” Ultimately, the move would go ahead as planned. The staff moved into the Millennium Campus, where they found a wing of a building waiting only for them. Contrary to what some of them had feared,

they weren’t split up and spread around the different studios within Microsoft. It was a situation that would give Bungie something of a special status, and pique the curiosity of existing Microsoft staff. So while work on Halo recommenced smoothly, Microsoft employees, not really familiar with the way a games development studio worked, took advantage of the opportunity to take a stroll through Bungie’s open-plan office, sometimes even bringing their kids with them. “Like it was a zoo,” Jaime Griesemer would say many years later. Before long, tensions appeared. The developers were working long hours, and they were regularly interrupted by Microsoft “colleagues” who had a totally different way of seeing their work. “They had an internal process [at Microsoft] where you could set up an interview with any other team to talk about joining them, and within a month we were getting a request every day. A guy in database software said, ‘Hey, I want to work on a game, can we go out to lunch?’” At Microsoft, moving between roles was an everyday occurrence, and depending on their skills and goals, employees could move from one department to another, with the only requirement being to contribute their expertise and help a project achieve completion. This was how Ed Fries and even Phil Spencer ended up on the Xbox team. But for Bungie, it was a non-starter. To begin with, the staff at Bungie would stop Microsoft employees from using their parking lot, before making it so that only people who worked for Bungie could access the studio. Not even Ed Fries’ pass would open the doors to Bungie. The studio may no longer be independent, but the developers had retained the same mentality, and niggling issues with Microsoft would become more commonplace over the months ahead. But it was never too much to handle. According to Martin O’Donnell: “It’s funny that right from the get-go we had so many weird, rubbed-thewrong-way problems with Microsoft. But they were never that big of a deal. Ed Fries was a really good guy. I’m not saying he got us 100 % right away, but he did by the end. He totally understood who we were and appreciated what we were bringing.”

6 A programming interface.

Chapter 6 – Halo: The Path of Game Development Never Runs Smooth No sooner had Bungie moved into the Microsoft campus in Redmond than it recommenced work on Halo. The software giant’s acquisition of the studio was a game changer for Bungie. No longer were they developing a PC game, or even a Mac one; now, they were developing a console exclusive. And not just any console: the Xbox. Microsoft had officially confirmed the console’s existence a few months earlier, but it still didn’t exist in any tangible way. Bungie had to take a significant proportion of their work so far back to the drawing board, adapting their tools to a console that nobody was really familiar with. Fortunately, the Xbox team regularly discussed the Xbox project with Jason Jones and a number of the engineers, because the console was first and foremost designed for developers after all. Seamus Blackley and his team were unshakeable in their belief that the Xbox would be a better console if they sought out input from the people who actually made games. And yet, Bungie had no time to waste, because Microsoft wanted Halo to be ready for the Xbox’s release. While no final date had yet been announced, Jason Jones and Alex Seropian knew that they had around a year to finish their game. Ahead of them lay a grueling marathon effort.

AN FPS CRAFTED FOR CONSOLES Jason Jones had been trying out different points of view for Halo for a few months now. He was losing ever more interest in the thirdperson point of view, and the acquisition by Microsoft brought a whole new perspective: Halo would be an Xbox game, which meant

it would be played with a controller. Running contrary to popular opinion at a time when there were not many FPS games on consoles, and when those that did exist tended to be lambasted by the gaming press and players alike, Jones thought that the point of view used in the game needed to be changed: Halo had to become a first-person shooter. He decided to pitch the idea to a few members of the team, like Marcus Lehto. The game’s artistic director recounts how, “Obviously, we played around with it functioning in third person but it was pretty clear to us that it needed to transform into firstperson.” Especially because Jones was steadfast in his belief: the best way for players to feel a connection with what was happening in the game was if it was happening around them. But that hadn’t always been his opinion, as Paul Russel wryly recalls: “Jason was the one that was dead set against first-person for a long time. Then he’s like ‘Wait, we can’t make third person work, let’s change it back.’ That’s what happens when your lead is a crack addict.” A series of meetings later, and a decision had been made: Halo would be an FPS. The next task was to create controls that were worthy of such a game, otherwise Bungie’s baby would soon be condemned to the discount bin. This job was entrusted to Jaime Griesemer, who had been skeptical about it from the outset. Griesemer loved video games consoles and working on the Xbox was an exciting project for him, but he also knew the constraints he faced, and that console FPS had never been a hit with players. “Even playing GoldenEye felt like garbage next to PC shooters. It’s fine given the constraints, but I would play against my friends and destroy them since I was the only one playing it like you would on PC. Everybody else felt handicapped by that controller.” Despite his reservations, Griesemer got to work and it would be his research that gave rise to some key gameplay features that are so characteristic of Halo. Unlike Rare, who had brought the world GoldenEye 007 on the Nintendo 64, Bungie was lucky in that it was developing a game for a console whose controller had two analog joysticks. This offered a major advantage, because it let players aim and move with a certain degree of precision. Jones wanted the main character’s movement to be on the slow side, the opposite of PC shooters like Quake and Unreal: in his view, this

speed was unnatural, and he wanted players to feel like they were controlling a real human being, and there’s not a man or woman alive who can move at that speed while firing a weapon. Bungie saw Halo as a tactical shooter in which players had to make lots of decisions and take action in line with what the environment and their equipment dictated. Slower movement was part of this approach, and this decision, made even before Halo joined the Microsoft family, was a significant advantage for Griesemer, making his work easier: slower movements would only make aiming easier. Working with a few of the engineers, Griesemer wrote several pages of code that the game would use to interpret the player’s actions. “How fast did you move there, what are you looking at? If it’s an enemy, we can assume that when you slow down, you’re trying to aim,” he explains. “So there are pages and pages that interpret the input that comes in, in a way that isn’t blatant and in your face. We tried to conceal how much help we’re giving the player.” According to Stuart Moulder, this feature hidden deep inside the game basically served to improve player movement, so that players were performing “the movement you wanted, not necessarily the one you were making.” But they needed to strike a fine balance, because Bungie had no intention of providing players with what amounted to auto-aim. Indeed, the studio had built a solid reputation while developing games for Mac: the games it made were fun, challenging, and featured excellent graphics. Halo needed to be true to this heritage and wouldn’t be making things easy for players. While the game’s development was progressing at a steady pace, Griesemer spent several months refining his controls. Refining its gameplay. Bungie–and Griesemer in particular–wanted to change the way people saw FPS gaming on consoles. “Everyone– developers, gamers, reviewers, everyone involved in the gaming industry–knows that FPS controls on a console are doomed to be awkward and clumsy,” he would say in 2002. “It’s a universally accepted fact. However, we knew that if we were going to do Halo on Xbox, we were going to have to change people’s minds about that. We weren’t going to do extreme auto-aim, we weren’t going to have

everyone running around in slow motion or only allow to fight two enemies at once. We knew that would make designing the controls much tougher.” Griesemer’s experiments gradually led the studio to dream up a new way of playing shooting games. The main character is an armored space marine, so he should be strong and able to absorb a lot of damage. Despite the game’s tactical dimension, on many occasions the main character would be surrounded by several enemies at once, and players would have to eliminate them quickly or face the game over screen. It was just that, since moving and aiming would be less responsive than on a PC, they needed to find a way to make players hardy enough so that they weren’t forced to constantly be looking for health packs, which would ruin the pace of the game, not to mention any enjoyment. The team then came up with a new health system: the soldier’s armor generated an energy shield which was displayed on the screen in the form of a bar that diminished when players took damage. Once the shield bar had been emptied, the player would start losing life points. But players could get the shields back up by taking brief shelter from the action so that the energy shield had time to recharge and refill. It was an ingenious system that offered many advantages. The first was that it was gentle on newbies, giving them a bit of leeway by not punishing them too severely for any mistakes. The second was that it enabled the very best players, those who could aim swift and true, to dive right into the action and come out victorious. This last point, of course, is what gives players that sense of power and endurance found in no other game. When they were designing what would become Master Chief, Marcus Lehto and Shi Kai Wang wanted him to look like a tank, and while Master Chief’s appearance certainly evolved between the initial concept art and the game’s release, this idea of “tank-ness” even made it into the gameplay: indeed, Master Chief is extremely enduring and can absorb many hits from the enemy before he falls. This, too, was a question of balance, as Griesemer explained in 2003: “It was really clear that our encounters were going to be set up in a way that you would be able to play like you were extremely tough, but at the same time you would be vulnerable if you got overextended.” Unlike other developers, Bungie

understood that it was impossible to mimic PC FPS games, and that a game like Halo meant adopting a completely new approach. It wasn’t a matter of innovating just to do something new, but rather finding the best way to live with a series of constraints. And doing so with as much ingenuity as possible, so that Halo would be something genuinely unique and fun to play. JUST PLAYER ONE Bungie always followed the same process when developing its games. They began with designing the technology underpinning the game, such as the game engine, for example. Next, they began looking at different gameplay concepts and possible features, and began testing them in multiplayer sessions. Once multiplayer mode had shown it could work and all of the different ideas had been tested, refined and approved, work began on designing the singleplayer game. This was how both Marathon and Myth were developed. Halo’s development was no different, with the exception that it had undergone a few major transformations as the process went on. Initially an RTS before becoming a TPS, Halo was now an FPS, which in some ways was just as well, as the studio boasted some real expertise in FPS games. Up until now, Halo had been presented mainly as a multiplayer, co-op game, but little by little it was evolving into a single-player action game. That was how Bungie liked to work, but it was also the procedure imposed by developing a game for the Xbox. We were now in late 2000, and the latest news from Microsoft was somewhat underwhelming for Bungie: in the end, the console’s performance would be lower than had been hoped. This was particularly true of the RAM, with the console ultimately having less than Bungie had counted in its minimum requirements when Halo was still a PC game. That concept of a game without levels and featuring vast battlefields, the tactical and co-op aspect to the game… Almost all of that had to be dropped. For much of the project, it was back to the drawing board. Halo would now be a predominantly single-player game, and this meant that it needed an entertaining campaign. Jason Jones still thought that FPS could tell real stories. Marathon had made a tentative effort, and then Half-Life

had truly shown the way. Halo would have to follow that same path, drawing inspiration from movies and books. Jones would entrust Joseph Staten with writing the game’s storyline and directing the cinematic cutscenes that would regularly punctuate the adventure. Staten used a number of ideas that were already floating around, like the conflict between humans and aliens, the ringworld, and, of course, the soldier in green armor. That soldier had hitherto been just one unit among a whole army of others, but he would marinate in Staten’s creative juices to become the game’s main character. And he was no cyborg, but a man who science and human technology had transformed into an elite warrior. The Spartan-117 was stronger, faster, and smarter than other soldiers, and he was also the last of his kind. The artists at Bungie had put a lot of work into his design, stretching back to the early days when Halo was still known as Armor and then Blam! He first came to life on the sketchpads of Shi Kai Wang, but once his drawings were modelled in three dimensions, the team thought that it looked too effeminate; Lehto wanted this unit to look like a modern-day tank, so it needed a brawnier outline. Lehto would take Wang’s drawings and add his own touches, and in the process become the father of Master Chief, as we know him today. Wang’s drawing wouldn’t go to waste, though: Bungie would hold on to it for years and it would eventually be used to design the Spartan-III SPI armor. Another sketch also appeared in Catherine Halsey’s journal that came with the limited and collector’s editions of Halo: Reach. Now, Halo had a real hero of its own. He just needed a name. In the meantime, a nickname would do: something that was clear and easy to use. The first thought was to simply refer to him by his rank, but then you’d need to find him one that was fitting of his role. Captain, sergeant, commander… It was Robert McLees who found the sweet spot: because he served in the Navy, he could be ranked Master Chief Petty Officer. It was a rank that gave him a certain authority while also ensuring him a combat posting, rather than a command role. So while the team were looking for a real name for the character, he would be known simply as Master Chief, a nickname that would come to stick. Just like with the code names of their games, Bungie never really took the time to find a definitive

name for Master Chief, and the temporary nickname became permanent. And as with Master Chief, who had existed for a long time before being given a much more prominent role, when crafting the Halo universe Staten leaned heavily on what had already been designed, especially by Marcus Lehto and his team. He came up with new names and new roles, and molded a new story from old ideas. The story would be set in 2552; the human empire was now ruled by the UEG (Unified Earth Government, or United Earth Government), or rather its armed forces, the UNSC (United Nations Space Command). For centuries now, humanity had been colonizing the galaxy and had a presence throughout the Milky Way. Its expansion, though, would bring it into contact with the Covenant Alliance, a group of several alien races that then declared a merciless war on humanity. A war that the UNSC was on its way to losing, outnumbered and outgunned by an enemy with a major technological advantage. Now Staten just needed to find a cause for the Covenant to be fighting for. They weren’t just another enemy faction in yet another intergalactic conflict: they were on a crusade, a holy war against humanity. “These guys just can’t be random aliens,” the writer explains. “There has to be some compelling reason why they’re unified to keep this Halo ring safe, some sort of religious significance.” With this, the game’s title, which up until now had referred primarily to the ringworld on which it was set, took on a whole new meaning. It was also important to note that when the foundations were being laid for Halo’s storyline, Al-Qaida had not yet attacked the Twin Towers in New York, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had not yet begun. It was a creative decision that would have real repercussions in later years. In any case, Staten would continue to draw heavily on the Bungie artists’ concept art to bring the Covenant Alliance to life. He came up with a name for the Elites, the armored alien soldiers: the Sangheili. These creatures had emerged very early in the creative process of Bungie’s artists. Designed by Shi Kai Wang, in Halo the Elites were the main source of trouble for Master Chief, as they were equipped

with a rechargeable energy shield that had to be taken down before a fatal strike could hit home. Big, fast, and intelligent, the Elites were often armed with a mysterious energy sword, made up of two blades connected by a handle which was used to turn the blades on and off. In designing Covenant weapons and vehicles, Wang looked to aquatic life for his inspiration, which explains the rounded lines– almost like a drop of water–of the sword that would soon become an icon. Jason Jones, meanwhile, for a long time insisted that the Elites have a tail, to make them more menacing. Wang didn’t agree: “I felt it made the alien look too much animalistic, rather than a sentient, technologically enhanced creature.” The debate between the two points of view would rage on for quite a while. All the more so as Wang knew all too well the problems that this appendage could cause. Wang wasn’t just a concept artist, he was also responsible for modelling these characters in 3D. He knew that the tail would be a nuisance when the Elites boarded vehicles. Where would they put it? There was even an idea of shortening the tail and placing it on the front of their pelvis… but this idea was quickly dropped, for obvious reasons. Jason Jones had to accept it: the Sangheili couldn’t have a tail. There was one point, however, on which he would not concede: the aliens had to be colorful. Very colorful. Much to Wang’s consternation: “I probably wouldn’t have made the Covenant guys so colorful, but that was a request from Jason. ‘Shinier, brighter! More colors!’ And I’m like ‘Dude you’re fucking nuts man, these things are like rainbows, it’s horrible.’” If Wang eventually did do as he was told, it was because his boss had a good reason for making these demands, and Wang eventually came to understand that these exaggerated colors played a role in improving the gameplay. The Elites’ armor was colorcoded: the blue ones were the least fearsome, while the red ones were generally tougher and better equipped. Elites in golden armor were commanders and ferocious enemies for Master Chief. These colors, then, enabled players to easily spot enemies on the screen and assess the danger level, prioritizing which enemy to kill first, for example. This would be all

the more relevant due to the fact that gamers would now be playing on a TV rather than a computer screen: they would be a fair distance from the display, making these colors a real advantage in terms of seeing what was going on, especially at a time when consumer televisions offered only limited image resolution. It is also interesting to note how Halo’s garish colors gradually disappeared over the years and as TV image quality improved. And these flashy colors didn’t just apply to the Elites, but to every enemy encountered in the game. Wang also designed the Unggoy (the little Grunts) and the Kig-Yar (the Jackals). The Grunts are small infantry units that are easy to dispatch individually but who, in large numbers, can be very troublesome for the player. The Jackals are harder to kill because they hide behind an imposing energy shield worn on their wrist that protects them from incoming fire. Neither the Grunts nor the Jackals wore armor, but Bungie nevertheless found many ways to make them visible on-screen. These included the color of their uniforms and also of the Jackals’ shields, which came in neon orange or blue. Their weapons fire fluorescent green or pink projectiles, making it easy to spot the source of incoming fire. These cues are extremely valuable to players due to the large number of enemies on screen at once, and Bungie needed to strike the perfect balance between the person holding the controller feeling like they were controlling a real supersoldier, while also ensuring that the enemies posed enough of a threat to regularly place players under enough pressure to produce intense, and therefore satisfying, gunfights. The design of the different alien races would also play a role in this. 2001 came round, and work was moving along nicely. The studio was growing, as staff from Bungie West gradually made the move to Redmond to join work on Halo. When Microsoft acquired Bungie, they agreed with Take-Two that the San Jose studio would finish work on Oni before becoming permanent staff at Microsoft, and as the game was entering the final stages of production the developers began joining the main team in what proved to be a significant wave of reinforcements that would enable Halo to become a richer, more

complex game. This was the point at which the Flood, designed by Robert McLees, entered the game’s storyline. While McLees had imagined the Flood as a kind of bioweapon the Covenant used against planets that they were invading, Staten gave it another role, with Jason Jones’ consent. Under Staten, the Flood would now become a faction in its own right and enter the fray at a critical point in the game, turning the traditional conflict between humans and aliens into a war with three belligerents. This new role also provided Staten with an opportunity to add context to the game, especially with regard to the origins of the ring world and the many strange ruins found upon it. He then began writing the history of a galactic empire, an extremely advanced alien civilization known as the Forerunners, who reigned over the galaxy for millions of years. Despite their power and all of their knowledge, the Forerunners were powerless to stand against the Flood, who they engaged in a desperate war. Following years of combat, the Forerunners began building several weapons of mass destruction–the Halos–that were capable of wiping out all forms of life, not with the aim of permanently eradicating the Flood, but rather to deprive it of its sustenance: the life forms that it corrupted and fed upon. Finding themselves cornered and their civilization already doomed, the Forerunners chose to sacrifice themselves and activated the rings, thereby cleansing the galaxy of the Flood. But placing the Flood at the core of the game’s storyline would not be without problems for Halo: when the game was assessed by the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), it would get a Mature rating in the USA, meaning that it was not recommended for players aged under 17. “That was without them seeing that the Flood could be chopped apart and disassembled,” a highly amused Robert McLees would reveal in 2010. It had to be said, though, that the different creatures that made up the Flood were particularly repugnant. When McLees had first designed them back in the days of Blam! these deformed monsters were colored white and pink. McLees, though, was colorblind, and when he was adding the finishing touches to his design for the Flood he colored them in brown and greenish tones that were more fitting for the image that Jones had in mind for this new enemy.

Jones wanted the Flood to be terrifying, and indeed, he already had an idea for the exact moment that the Flood’s existence would be revealed to the player. Its entrance into the Halo storyline, and the manner in which its discovery was portrayed, would be key to the reception the game received from players and the press a few months later. 2001: LOST IN SPACE Although Halo’s storyline was slowly coming together and steady progress was being made on the development side of things, Bungie was still under a lot of pressure due to the rapidly approaching release of the Xbox, scheduled for November 2001. As if juggling all the usual priorities involved in designing a video game were not enough, Bungie also had to work on Xbox prototypes that bore no relation to the console that would ultimately be released. Microsoft’s console had also been officially unveiled in January at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Up on stage before the press were Seamus Blackley and Bill Gates, who unveiled an imposing black console decorated with a gleaming green circle. Gates delivered a carefully crafted speech and focused on the group’s technological prowess as much as the “human story” of designing the Xbox in an era when Microsoft’s popularity was at a low point. “A few years ago, we started talking about it at Microsoft. We asked ourselves: ‘What about us? What will be our contribution to the evolution of video games?’ And the most passionate gamers working for us replied: ‘Well, let’s do it, and we’ll see.’ At the time, it seemed like a crazy idea, but they never let it drop.” After a short conversation with Blackley, who called him “dude,” Gates found himself face to face with none other than Dwayne Johnson, The Rock himself, who was then a World Wrestling Federation star and hugely popular with gamers in the USA, who couldn’t get enough of THQ’s wrestling games. But Halo would be a no-show at the CES, and with good reason: Bungie was working flat out to design a demo that could be presented at in March at Gamestock, a trade show that

Microsoft had been organizing for a few years now. The developers were faced with a real challenge: Nvidia had informed the team that its graphics card would turn out to be less powerful than billed. It was a hard blow to take because when the studio left PC development behind to work on the console, it had already been forced to make a number of compromises. However, when Jason Jones and Joe Staten went on stage at Gamestock 2001, held in the brand new Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle,7 they had had their confidence topped up. This was because they didn’t show up empty-handed, and what they were about to show was incredibly impressive. And they knew it. They were about to reveal to the public one of Halo’s most memorable levels, one that truly showcased a series of the game’s qualities. As a result, the announcement had been meticulously prepared. Let’s go back a few months, here: on the Millennium campus, Marcus Lehto was working alone in one of Bungie’s meeting rooms. In front of him was a gigantic whiteboard to which he’d taped 25 pieces of paper. These sheets represented the 25 levels planned for Halo, and each was named according to their location on the board: A10, A20, A30, A40, and so on. Each sheet was packed with a whole range of details, from the level’s narrative structure to its level design, including the different combat sequences and their layouts. “There’s no way in hell we’re going to build all of this,” he was thinking to himself. And he was right. The majority of these levels were still at the concept stage. A gargantuan effort still remained. Perhaps even too much. Some levels had already been discarded, because the studio execs knew that they would never be able to finish it. Not enough time, not enough money, not enough everything. Bungie had had big plans for its game, but the buyout, the switch to first-person, and Microsoft’s toing and froing with the design of its console had turned an already ambitiously complex project into an impossible one. Up on the board, however, there was one level that shone more than the rest thanks to the size of its environments and the variety of set pieces it contained. The level had gone unnamed ever since Lehto first set up the board, and was known only by its

number: B30. B30 had been around for a while, because when Halo became a first-person shooter for the Xbox, it was the level that most of Bungie’s designers and engineers used as a playground where they could try things out. Jaime Griesemer used it to refine the controls for the joypad, Chris Butcher still used it on a daily basis to test AI reactions, and even Joe Staten used it to check that the dialog of computer-controlled allied soldiers was triggered properly. This expansive sandbox provided a fine demonstration of what Halo would become, because it could be used to show different vehicles in action: the Warthog, of course, but also a Banshee, the Covenant’s small combat flyers. You could move from an indoor to an outdoor environment–and vice versa–with no loading times, and show off the full power of Bungie’s game engine, be that through the superb graphics or the consistency of its physics engine. And yet, the level itself was pretty straightforward: it was a little island lost in the middle of one of the oceans found on the Halo–a Halo that you could see streaming into the sky as soon as you land on the beach. The staff at Bungie soon came to love B30, and it was quickly added to the game where it was baptized The Silent Cartographer. In this level, Master Chief is tasked with finding the Halo’s map room to help UNSC troops ascertain their location, before eliminating a Prophet, one of the Covenant’s political and spiritual leaders. The studio, however, couldn’t come to an agreement on the appearance of the Prophets, and the one from The Silent Cartographer was removed from the game; it would not be until Halo 2 that players would set eyes on the brains behind the Covenant. Fortunately, this removal–one of many made throughout the long process of creating the game–had no bearing on the quality of B30 as a level, nor its appeal. In fact, the level was already varied and well-crafted enough for Jones to decide to showcase it in a non-definitive version at Gamestock. And so, on March 13, a squad from the studio set off for Seattle. Jason Jones was there, of course, as was Staten, who would accompany Jones on stage to present the game, as well as Matt Soell and John Howard, the game’s lead designer. All four of them

knew that they were in for a long day: Microsoft had invited 170 journalists from all over the world to discover the games that would accompany the Xbox on the day of its release and over the following months. This meant that it wasn’t an event to be taken lightly by anyone, and certainly not by Bungie. It had been almost a year since Halo had last made a public appearance, and this would be the first time that it had been on show as an Xbox game, and especially as a console FPS. There could be no mistakes. To make things easier, Microsoft had formulated a straightforward schedule: in the morning, the developers would go on stage to present their games, and in the afternoon the journalists could try them out and interview the devs. Ed Fries, who was both the organizer and host of this year’s Gamestock, fired the starting pistol with a short speech before inviting Lorne Lanning, the boss at Oddworld Inhabitant, to join him and comment on a technical demo of his game. This was followed by Amped, Project Gotham Racing, Dead or Alive 3, Fusion Frenzy and Azurik. The audience was enraptured, but there still hadn’t been a peep from Halo. Fries then pretended to draw the proceedings to a close, before remembering that he’d forgotten the game they were all waiting for. The act wasn’t very convincing, but it did get a laugh from the room, before calming down when Jones came on stage and introduced Staten, who grabbed a controller and launched the demo. And Staten had put together a little show of his own. For the past two years, he had been the one writing the demo videos for Halo, and he had become a master in the art of showcasing the game’s various qualities, whether that be through a judicious camera angle or a well-thoughtout script. For this year’s Gamestock, Bungie wanted to show that just because Halo had moved to a new platform, that didn’t mean that it was any less impressive, and that the world it offered was as vast as it was mysterious. So Staten had planned his presentation carefully, from the very first second of his demo. The cutscenes hadn’t been recorded yet, which is why the Gamestock 2001 version of The Silent Cartographer doesn’t open with the famous Pelican landing scene, featuring Halo’s troop transport vehicle. There was no

fighting on the beaches, either. Instead, Staten began the level on board a Banshee, the small Covenant flyer. He flew carefree through the skies of an unknown planet, accompanied by the first notes of a soundtrack Martin O’Donnell had made for the occasion. A small blue planet could be seen in the sky, before Staten made a sharp turn right and the broad strip of the Halo was shown soaring upwards from the horizon. It was a huge structure, but not big enough to conceal the outline of a second planet that was even bigger. The Banshee kept turning, and a small island appeared in the middle of the ocean; viewers were treated to some lens-flare effects, and the waves in the ocean reflected the light from the sun… The game hadn’t really started and Halo was already blowing people’s minds: visually, it was spectacular and demonstrated that the Xbox was able to create graphics that were a feast for the eyes. This was all the more true when you realize that the development kits that studios like Bungie were using provided barely 50  % of the power that the Xbox would be able to deliver upon release. A lot of work had gone into the different lighting effects, as Jason Jones would reveal ten years later: “We were so proud of these lens flares, the little volumetric flashlights. I think that Bernie (Freidin, an engineer at Bungie) and I spent like six hours one night, just running around watching the Marines. From like midnight to 6 in the morning.” After gracefully soaring around the island, Staten finished by landing gently on a beach next to a Warthog. When he got out of the aircraft, the camera strangely remained in third person: this was when you saw the main character, Master Chief, running towards the Warthog, whose gun emplacement was already occupied by a Marine. When the camera settled behind Master Chief, Staten started to explain the Halo storyline, and it became apparent that the main themes of the final game were already in place. The Covenant have been at war with humanity for a long time already, and following an attack on yet another human colony they set off in hot pursuit of a UNSC warship. To stop the aliens from discovering the location of Earth, the warship plotted a random series of coordinates and took flight at warp speed. This is how the humans came to discover this strange ringworld on which they were forced to execute an emergency landing.

Fortunately for them, the warship was carrying an elite soldier, the last of his kind. This was the character that players would control, and who would help the warship’s survivors to defeat the Covenant troops that had followed the humans down onto Halo. While Staten was finishing presenting a general outline of the game’s storyline, he climbed aboard a Warthog and drove off along the beach, just as the first few notes of a tune that’s now well known to fans of the series began to play. Percussion, violins, a marching rhythm: indeed it was the track O’Donnell had composed for the MacWorld 1999 presentation. Back when O’Donnell had composed it, it was never intended to become the game’s main theme: after all, he had composed and recorded it in a rush, with just three days to go before MacWorld. But that didn’t stop the tune from being a hit with the press and, for that matter, with almost everyone who heard it. Including the people at Microsoft, who wasted no time in offering O’Donnell and Salvatori tidy sum in exchange for the rights to the track. After negotiating the terms, the two musicians also got Microsoft to agree to giving them a share of the income for any secondary uses of their track, such as if the game’s soundtrack ever went on sale to the public. This would prove to be some penetrating foresight, because when the contract was signed Microsoft had zero intention of doing so. “But who knows,” O’Donnell said to himself, “Maybe one day it might pay off?” Staten continued his Warthog joyride and used it as an opportunity to showcase the allied AI dialog system: when the Warthog hit a bump and caught some airtime, the Marine in the back of the vehicle let rip an unconvincing “Yeeeeeaaaah!” Truth be told, that was pretty much all that the AI was able to do at this stage in the game’s development, and all we can say is that the shout didn’t go down as well as hoped. In the shadows, Jones took the blow without flinching. Yet. Staten, meanwhile, had finally reached his destination: an alien building where a number of Covenant troops were waiting for him. The Marine powered up the gun emplacement and answered the enemy fire that was ricocheting from the Warthog’s chassis. In a surprising turn of events for the time, many of the aliens then decided to flee or take cover behind different parts of the scenery. Staten then

reversed and drove towards another entrance, higher up. After parking the 4x4 in a strategic position from which the gunner could mow down the enemies found there, Staten dismounted and the camera changed perspective. Now, the time had come and the public were seeing Halo as it would be on release day for the very first time: in first person. Master Chief opened fire on the enemy with an intimidating assault rifle, a weapon that would soon become an iconic part of the game. Most fans simply referred to it as an “assault rifle,” but its official designation was the MA5B Individual Combat Weapon System, or the MA5B for short. Rob McLees had invented the MA5B back when Halo was still known as Armor and was just a prototype for Bungie’s next RTS. It originally came with a grenade launcher, an idea that would later be dropped. But that didn’t stop McLees from refining his pet project. A keen firearms aficionado, he gave the MA5B a digital ammo meter, as well as a working compass, a feature that gave rise to several unexpected complications. In order for it to work, McLees had to get to grips with a series of tricky calculations, because on a world like Halo, magnetic coordinates weren’t aligned with its rotational axes. In the conference room, the audience wasn’t paying special attention to the weapon being used. Instead, they were gripped by the reactions of the aliens, who demonstrated a surprising level of intelligence. The AI would attempt to flank, regroup, flee, or rally around a more powerful ally. This had never been seen in an FPS. But this intelligence wasn’t enough to stop Staten defeating them with no real problems, as the difficulty level had been tailored to his purposes. Indeed, Staten wasn’t yet fully used to the gamepad controls and sometimes struggled to aim properly, but that didn’t have any adverse effect on the demo that was steaming ahead. Nor did he neglect to show another of the game’s unique features: hand-to-hand combat. Unlike many games, Halo didn’t force players to switch weapons to inflict physical attacks like punches or butt strokes, because Bungie had allocated a specific button to this particular action. Grenades were given the same treatment, as John Howard would explain to journalists the following month: “We like the frag grenades so much they have their own button so you don’t have to switch weapons to backpedal into

cover.” Grenades had a special place in Halo, showcasing as they did one of the game’s major assets: its physics engine. As the guests invited to play Halo for the very first time would discover just after the press conference, the physics engine was particularly consistent, which could produce situations that were as surprising as they were amusing. It was possible, for example, to throw a few grenades under a Warthog so that the explosion blew it up into the air, perhaps to fall on a group of enemies. When Staten brought his demonstration to a close, the audience was ecstatic. The move from the PC to the Xbox had certainly had an impact, and it’s true that Halo was a very different game now compared to what it was supposed to be in the beginning, but there was no contesting the end result: the game was breathtaking. Halo was a beautiful game, but more than that, it wasn’t satisfied with being just another linear FPS in which players progressed through wide corridors filled with enemies. The level shown at Gamestock that year was quite extensive, and invited players to experiment to find the best way to complete their mission, meaning that each player could play the game in their own favorite style. One of the game’s features proved very popular, even though it was a result of switching the development to the Xbox: the limited weapons. Indeed, players could only carry two weapons at once, unlike on most FPS where the main character’s pockets could be stuffed with pistols, pump-action shotguns, grenade launchers, machine guns, sniper rifles and assorted rocket launchers without ever seeming to get weighed down. Bungie meanwhile, planned to offer something a little bit different and wanted Halo to mark a break with how things were done in Doom-like games, where players could amass a collection of increasingly powerful weapons, rendering those used at the start of the game useless. Jason Jones, in particular, wanted every weapon in Halo to have its own strengths and weaknesses, so that players would carry the right equipment for the different situations they encountered. At the same time, this system provided a bit of leeway and let players develop their own playstyle. “We wanted to give the player a good reason to pick up those weapons. Only carrying two

seemed like the best way to do that,” Jamie Griesemer reveals. “One of the other reasons we did it was that a lot of times you would just always have the perfect weapon for the situation at hand. We wanted to make it so the player didn’t always have the perfect tools for the job and had to improvise and attack things in different ways.” And yet, the reasoning behind this game design choice lies in the technical limitations of the Xbox, including its low RAM that made it impossible to change weapons smoothly without harming the graphics. Indeed, when Bungie conducted its initial games testing, weapon changes were smooth enough, but the weapons’ textures took a while to load. The reason was simple: Halo was extremely resource-hungry, and although the developers were optimizing their code as much as they could, they were short on time. So while they hadn’t made the gameplay decision to limit the number of weapons carried up until then, the technical constraints made up their minds for them. Back on the Redmond campus, Bungie, as well as all the staff at Microsoft Studios, were invited to attend a small party organized by Seamus Blackley and Jay Allard. The two men wanted to thank Ed Fries and all his staff for their hard work so far. Gamestock 2001 was a resounding success, and they wanted to give recognition where it was due. The way they chose to do so, however, was somewhat controversial. When the Bungie staff made their way into the room where the party was taking place, their jaws hit the floor. “We walk in, and the Xbox team has decorated the whole place to look like this crazy neon green nightclub,” Hardy LeBel, the designer behind Halo’s multiplayer mode, recalls. “They had these nurses who must have been strippers, walking around in these incredibly tiny microskirts, like nurse costumes micro-skirts, handing out these neongreen-glow-in-the-dark jello shots to everybody. And we were just a bunch of software nerds, like we walk in there, we’re looking around like ‘Wooooow’.” Blackley, though, had a very different reaction. While he was one of the organizers, he hadn’t arranged the scantily clad women, and he knew that this wouldn’t go down well with Microsoft. For a moment he even thought he might get fired. We

know that he wasn’t dismissed from his job, but Microsoft’s reaction wasn’t long coming. “And then maybe twenty minutes after we left the party, we started to get e-mail after e-mail from every level of our hierarchy at Microsoft basically saying: ‘This is inappropriate, this is not how we do business, this is not how we portray…’” But it wasn’t enough to dampen the spirits of the young team, who got back to work with renewed confidence. The presentation at Gamestock had gone perfectly, and feedback from the press had been more than positive. Except, perhaps, for Staten, who was given a dressing down by Jason Jones: he had not forgotten the Marine’s ridiculous shouting during the demo. Staten was under pressure from different directions, because while he was writing the storyline for the game, he was also responsible for making Halo’s various cutscenes. The issue was that the studio lacked the right equipment to make them, and especially that many of the levels had been removed from the game. When a level was scrapped, it meant that entire sequences of the storyline ended up in the trash along with it, and to avoid inconsistencies Staten had to redo certain cutscenes and dialog to make sure players received the missing information. “Which is why you get a crummy cinematic of Captain Keyes saying, ‘I was hanging out in my prison cell and I happened to overhear these aliens talk about this place we’re on, called Halo.’ There was a whole level there where you actually figured that out.” Able to see the funny side of things, Staten would soon give himself an extra job title: Duct Tape Guy. The further the game’s development progressed, the more levels Bungie was forced to remove, and the more ideas it had to scrap. Staten patched up the storyline to the best of his ability, but all of this work fixing up holes in the storyline left him with little time for the cutscenes, which he failed to get done on time. He made most of them himself, using extremely basic tools. He moved characters around and triggered the animations that had been created especially for the occasion. When he had everything where he wanted it, he started recording, positioned his “camera” in the right spot, and then used the resulting videos to create a montage that would become a cutscene. Staten,

then, was a real movie director; it’s just that his actors were made from pixels and polygons. It was no mean feat, because he needed to position characters in the right place–to the nearest inch! –for them to interact properly with each other. This is the case in the introduction to the game, when Master Chief meets Captain Keyes and shakes his hand. “[The animations]… were authored separately, so getting them to actually shake involved slightly nudging their spawning points closer and closer, until it actually worked.” And when patience and meticulous attention to detail failed him, Staten was forced to use sleight of hand. This is particularly true when making cutscenes featuring the Pillar of Autumn, the human warship that appears in the opening seconds of the game. Designed by Lorraine Reyes, the Pillar is one of the stars of the game, but it has a major weakness: it can’t move. To simulate its movement, Staten had to place cameras around the ship which was actually just hanging in space at a full stop. The cutscenes were also used to define or redefine the roles of different characters. On paper, Halo only had a few characters: Master Chief, Cortana, Captain Keyes, and 343 Guilty Spark, a Forerunner AI encountered later in the game. For quite some time, Keyes was known simply as “Captain Exposition” at Bungie, because he tended to be the character doing the talking during the exposition cutscenes, which grew in number as levels were removed from the game. Sergeant Johnson, meanwhile, was known as “Sniper Sergeant”; he wasn’t a major character and was never intended to become one, because in Bungie’s eyes he was just a very deliberate caricature of Gunnery Sergeant Apone, Al Matthews’ character in Aliens. But that was before he garnered huge popularity with fans thanks to his many lines of dialog improvised by his voice actor, David Scully. The role of the AI evolved dramatically, too. The AI that joins Master Chief throughout the game by being uploaded into his armor was imagined very early in the game’s creative process, because its name had been used since the very earliest days of Halo, when Bungie was sending out its famous “Cortana Letters.” Up until now, Cortana’s role was simply to assist Master

Chief in combat, but she ended up being uploaded into his armor and becoming something more akin to a friend, or even a mother. She hadn’t always had such a benevolent role, though. Indeed, for a while Staten and Jones were considering making her the game’s main antagonist. In that storyline, Cortana had been separated from Master Chief, and when he finally found her, she had lost her mind and was trying to take control of the Halo in order to dominate the universe. This storyline wasn’t pursued, doubtless because it had too many similarities to the plot in Marathon. It would, however, be used by Microsoft and 343 Industries as the basis for Halo 5: Guardians in 2015. Staten’s missed deadlines and the many issues he encountered had a knock-on effect on someone else’s work: Martin O’Donnell. The composer liked to know the game he was writing music for, and the constant changes of direction meant that he was making only slow progress on the different tracks that would accompany the player. O’Donnell was a fan of dynamic music that changed according to what was happening in the game. This meant that he needed to understand each level and what occurred in it, which was not easy to do when the structure or the levels were changing week to week. And when Bungie finally made up its mind and decided that Halo would have 10 levels rather than the 25 that had at one point been planned, it was Staten’s delays that slowed down O’Donnell: he had to deliver various compositions to accompany the cutscenes, but because they weren’t finished it was impossible for him to make any progress. Notwithstanding these delays, Staten and O’Donnell worked together well, and despite their obvious differences in personality, they liked working together and were inspired by each other’s ideas. They were in perfect agreement about how to pace the game with the music and cutscenes. They wanted to be sure that the game would contain moments of tranquility and calm, even silence, from time to time that wouldn’t be ruined by the game’s music. “It gives you a sense of where you were,” Staten explains. “Good context with not a lot of overhead. The rest of the time, you’re just inside your own head.” The two pals also worked together on a lot of

the voice acting. Each of them delved deep into their address books to find the right actors. The gig was to play Master Chief’s voice, so O’Donnell was looking for an actor with a deep voice, and he knew someone who might be just right: Steve Downes, an actor he’d already worked with on Septerra Core: Legacy of the Creator, the RPG from Valkyrie Studios. To play Cortana, Staten found the ideal candidate when he called Jennifer Taylor. Taylor had been in the same theater class as Staten at college, so he knew that she had the voice Cortana needed, and more importantly still: he knew that she’d recently moved to Seattle. For a while, Taylor was asked to put on a slight British accent, which landed her the role. O’Donnell, however, would change his mind after seeing Taylor’s work on No One Lives Forever where she played a British woman; the two voices were too similar, so there would be no British accent for Cortana. In the end, Cortana would ultimately retain just a few typically British colloquial expressions. O’Donnell and Staten would record a great many lines of dialog (sometimes just a few pieces of onomatopœia), because they wanted each character to have their own identity, no matter how minor their part. Special care was taken with the Marines. “Marty and I both felt like if we were going to create these characters, even the little guys that run around with you, it’s important they have distinct personalities, a sense of humor–that they feel real,” Staten recalls. “If they did, the world would feel real, too.” But these soldiers, who would prove to be an immediate hit with fans, almost failed to make it into the final game. This was despite the fact that they were one of the game’s main strengths, including in the eyes of Chris Butcher, the Bungie engineer who made the AI for the first Halo game. He explains how, “In Halo, we weren’t really sure what role the Marines were gonna play. As soon as we had an AI that could fight meaningfully, we decided to put friendly AI in there, along with the enemy AI, because from Oni, I had really enjoyed making the little TCTF troopers that were running around with you in there. So we decided that the friendly AI was gonna be pretty important because it was one way of making the player feel committed to humanity. For the part of Halo where you’re off by yourself, you’re just the Master Chief and Cortana. Or maybe for some of these levels, you’re just

Master Chief and Cortana isn’t with you. It’s a very isolated kind of experience. And so, we wanted to make sure that we grounded the player at the start of the game, by making them feel as if they’re really part of this larger story of these humans, who crashed on this ringworld, and nobody makes it out alive of course.” O’Donnell agreed with Butcher: he believed that players would grow attached to the Marines. Not everyone in the studio agreed, though, with some not understanding why there was any need to expend so many resources on what many saw as mere cannon fodder. What’s more, most of the Marines were modelled on the faces of different devs at Bungie, but that didn’t stop Staten and O’Donnell putting a lot of effort into the cutscenes they were developing. There was one in particular that they found hilarious: the cutscene where Master Chief is watching a recording obtained from the helmet of a missing Marine. Players would see several scenes from the Marine’s life, in which they would hear the soldiers chatting and joking around together. In one of them, the Marines are on board a Pelican on the way to their next mission. For this particular moment, O’Donnell wanted the Pelican’s speakers to be playing Paint It Black by the Rolling Stones, but Bungie wasn’t able to obtain the rights. In the end, O’Donnell had to quickly compose a short rock track and make do. Despite the sense of urgency and the many sacrifices that the developers were forced to make, Halo was making good progress, and surprisingly everything seemed to be coming together, much to the relief of studio management. Jason Jones, meanwhile, was working overtime. Earlier in the development process, he had to roll up his sleeves and get his hands dirty writing code, but now his role had evolved into more of a project manager. He made decisions, guided the staff, and tried to direct them according to his vision. But that wasn’t necessarily where his talents were most useful, as O’Donnell would explain a few years later: “Jason understands all the different aspects of how a game gets put together, and on a small team he’s in there working on whatever needs doing. But it’s hard to say that he’s a visionary leader, because he doesn’t cast a

vision and convince people to get in line or put their best efforts behind it. And whatever he’s focused on at the time, that’s all he’s focused on.” After all, Jones was a developer and a creative before being a leader, a member of management. This was something that could be seen in the studio’s organization chart, and even in the credits of Bungie games: he left the role of studio director to people like Alex Seropian and later Pete Parsons, and worked on Halo and Halo 2 as a project lead, never director or executive producer. A game designer more than anything else, he liked to throw himself right into his projects, with a small team alongside him. Like with Project Phoenix, which in 2001 was still on the backburner. But the studio’s co-founder was forced to stick to his role as a leader when time was of the essence. With the Xbox’s release date looming and E3 only a few weeks away, Halo was still far from finished. And so the studio started hiring extra staff and moved all of its existing teams over to work on Halo. Secondary projects, like Project Phoenix, were put on hold. Paul Bertone, a game designer and former employee of Bungie West, was one of those affected. A few months from the release date, he was reassigned to work on Halo even though he wasn’t really that interested in the project. A fan of fantasy, Bertone didn’t really like sci-fi, and when he began working with the team he planned to leave as soon as the game was finished, and go back to working on Phoenix. Bertone wasn’t the only one who suddenly found himself working on a game he knew almost nothing about: around a dozen developers gradually joined the Halo team, which Martin O’Donnell found hilarious to watch. “Scchhluupp. That sucking sound. Marty used to walk around the office all the time, just driving his coffee cup around, making that sound as different people got sucked into the Halo team. He loved doing that,” Bertone recalls. The most pressing emergency was E3. Microsoft planned to announce the price of their console, and to give away a bit more info about its upcoming developments. While Bungie was struggling to finish Halo to schedule, the Xbox division was facing the same kind of problems, and in-house it was common knowledge that not

everything would be ready for the console’s release. This was the case for online gaming, for example, and what would become Xbox Live would have to wait. But Microsoft also had some good news to announce, like its partnership with SEGA, which had recently withdrawn from the video games console market. Destroyed by Sony, SEGA had watched its market share melt like a snowman in July, and was forced to cease production of the Dreamcast. From now on, SEGA would go on as a games developer and publisher. In an effort to make the transition to this “new” activity go a bit smoother, the Japanese publisher signed a juicy contract with Microsoft and Xbox, with whom it maintained close relations. Indeed, for almost two years now, Microsoft had wanted to acquire SEGA and the two parties had been in lengthy discussions about a possible buyout. It never came to pass, but it meant that the staff at the two companies had forged very close links. At the Xbox conference at E3 2001, nobody was really surprised to see Peter Moore, president of SEGA of America, go on stage to reveal which games would soon be available on the Microsoft console. They included the next two games in the NFL 2K and NBA 2K series, both sports games that harness the Xbox’s online gaming service. This was a big announcement, because SEGA’s sports sims were very popular, especially in America. A fine announcement that came in stark contrast to the Halo presentation, that was disappointing for Microsoft and the journalists in attendance in equal measure. For the first time since it was unveiled, Bungie’s baby fell flat. The studio hadn’t really had time to work on a new demo, and Joe Staten was back on stage to present a more polished version of The Silent Cartographer. The demo contained nothing that was really new, and as those who got their hands on the demo would later attest, there was still a lot of work to do. The game was filled with placeholder content and the frame rate was very low, even for a console game. The journalists found the same technical issues in the new The Silent Cartographer demo, just as they did in the multiplayer mode on show on the Microsoft stand. That’s right: for the past few months, a small group of developers had been working on this part of the game, which was shown for the first time at E3 and in which

two teams of eight players competed in “Capture the Flag” mode. This was made possible thanks to the Xbox’s network gaming features, which enabled four consoles to be networked together. As Halo’s multiplayer mode could accommodate up to four players in split-screen mode, that meant up to 16 players could join a game on a LAN network, which had never before been seen on consoles. Bungie wasn’t aware of it at the time, but Halo’s multiplayer mode would prove pivotal to the game’s success. A DYNAMIC DUO SAVES MULTIPLAYER It’s already been said, but it’s worth repeating: Bungie’s usual process when starting work designing a game was to begin with its multiplayer mode, in which they would play against each other to try out their ideas. They would test gameplay concepts and then use feedback to improve them, turn them into something else, or do away with them entirely. It was this process that brought us Minotaur: Labyrinth of Crete, Pathways Into Darkness, Marathon and Myth. But when it came to Halo, Bungie was faced with a real problem: the game had indeed began life as a multiplayer game–first as an RTS and then a TPS– but it had evolved since then into an FPS. What that meant in practice was that between the initial concepts of 1998 and the game as it was in early 2001, there was a huge gulf. Entire oceans, in fact. While it was still in TPS format, Halo looked a lot like what Battlefield would one day be: battles between 10 and 20 players on large maps. Players were supposed to do battle by shooting at each other, of course, but also by meeting a series of objectives. The game featured vehicles, which were used either to travel around the map more quickly or support the advance of allied troops. Several game modes were designed, with gameplay that was very different depending on the makeup of the player’s squad. In one example, one team attacked a stronghold occupied by the opposing team. The game played out over several rounds: the attackers had to close in

on the base, while the defenders tried to repel their assault. The attackers then had to blow down the door to the fortress, or infiltrate it by stealth via a hidden doorway, or destroy the stronghold’s antiaircraft artillery. The idea was for the attackers to penetrate deeper into the fortress with every successive round. These were the kinds of games that Jason Jones and his staff had in mind when they were laying the foundations for what Halo’s multiplayer mode would be like when the game was released. The hitch was that in the meantime, the game had switched to a console FPS, whose game design focused on its story and single-player campaign. True, the campaign could be played by two players in split screen mode, but that wasn’t enough for Bungie and certainly not for Jones, for whom multiplayer was absolutely vital. The entire studio, though, was working at full capacity to finish Halo on time. If a multiplayer mode was going to be designed, then it would be by a miniscule team with derisory resources at their disposal. Fortunately, Bungie’s staff included two men who were experts in emergency rescues. In August 1999, a new hire walked through the doors at Bungie West. His name was Hardy LeBel. Headhunted by Bungie while he was still working at Namco, LeBel was in good spirits when he joined the team in San Jose because he knew the studio and was aware that the team had been working on a project called Oni for a while. He had been offered a role as lead designer and tasked with getting Oni’s development back on track after three long years bogged down without much progress. “It had been a disaster,” LeBel recounts. “I mean I think it’s probably safe to say that the project was stalled for years, the team was really split in terms of what kind of project they wanted to make.” With support from Michael Evans, Bungie West’s lead programmer, LeBel managed to save the game, which was released on PC on January  26, 2001. Take-Two, the game’s new owners, entrusted the PS2 port of the game to Rockstar Canada, with results that LeBel would describe as “awful.” With Oni delivered, LeBel and Evans waved goodbye to California and set off to join Bungie in its new home on the Microsoft campus in Redmond. They were some of the last members of Bungie West to make the move.

Chris Butcher, David Dunn and Hamilton Chu, the three pillars of Bungie West, had already been assigned to the teams working on Halo. LeBel realized that he would imminently be facing the same fate: there was less than a year left to finish the game, and Halo was still looking far from presentable. Until recently, there had still been the possibility that LeBel and Evans would start working on what was supposed to be Bungie West’s second game, but it was clear that Halo could not risk any delays. While they were awaiting to learn their fate, LeBel and Evans received a visit from Jason Jones and Alexander Seropian, who congratulated them for their fine work on Oni. LeBel recalls, “They said, ‘Look, you guys did some good work on Oni, how would you like to put multiplayer back into Halo?’” He couldn’t believe his ears. While Bungie West was still based in San Jose, the team had taken part in many a Halo playtesting session back when the game was still a multiplayer game that looked very much like what Battlefield would become, as we’ve already mentioned. LeBel, then, knew what the multiplayer mode would be like, and he loved it. Indeed, he still couldn’t quite believe that it had been scrapped. “I nearly lost my mind,” he would remember, many years later. I’m like ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘Yeah we’ve got to cut multiplayer’ cause there isn’t time and resources to put it in the game.’ And I’m losing my mind, I’m like ‘It’s the most important part!’” As it happens, this was precisely the reaction that Jones and Seropian had been hoping for, because they didn’t want to entrust such important development work to just any old tech guy. Determined to save Halo’s multiplayer mode, LeBel and Evans went right back to the drawing board to design a new game mode. As surprising as it may seem, when LeBel was getting to work putting his initial ideas down on paper, his own approach to Halo’s multiplayer mode was more along the lines of a party game than a competitive FPS. While he openly admitted that Unreal was one of his primary sources of inspiration, LeBel’s mind regularly wandered to a particular Japanese brand. “I wanted to make a party game with shooter mechanics. I wanted to make a game that Nintendo could ship but it was using shooter mechanics,” he explains. “And that

affected the game types that we chose, it affected the sound effects that we designed, the visual effects that we designed.” This meant that LeBel was moving diametrically away from the original concept for Halo’s multiplayer mode, which some had always seen as a kind of military combat simulation. But this part of the game had to be accessible, fun, and, more than anything else, balanced. Balance. This was the watchword of multiplayer gaming in Halo, where players all had to have access to the same weapons and be able to do the same things on the game’s various maps. This drove LeBel to request some additional coding: up until that point, he had mainly been using what had already been created for the single-player campaign, but he needed something new. This was especially true when it came to encouraging movement across the maps, to give players a reason to focus their attention on particular areas. To facilitate this he designed a power-up system, something that would need the green light from Jason Jones. The brains behind Halo had never for one moment thought that his game might include powerups. LeBel and Jones held lengthy discussions, and the game designer ultimately persuaded his boss, who gave his assent, and two power-ups were developed on the fly. The first enabled the player-controlled character to become temporarily invisible, while the second gave the player an overshield that could soak up even more damage. The team designing Halo’s single-player campaign loved the idea so much that they decided to scatter a few of these powerups throughout the game’s different levels. Indeed, the work to develop Halo’s multiplayer mode had a number of positive consequences for the rest of the game, especially when it came to the variety of weapons available. The pump action shotgun and sniper rifle both made it into the game, when for a long time the developers had been leaning towards keeping one and scrapping the other. This was much to the relief of Jason Jones, who loved the sniper rifle: “Snipers are like bacon, they make anything better,” he would happily exclaim one day. This also explains why Master Chief starts the Truth and Reconciliation mission with a sniper rifle in hand… Other weapons were also given a total

overhaul, like the Covenant plasma pistol. Before then, its overcharge shot fired a swarm of little green balls of plasma, which inflicted heavy damage on whoever they touched. It was an effective feature, but didn’t really make the plasma pistol stand out from the rest of the weapons in the game. Bungie wanted the human weapons to be instantly recognizable to players, to make it easy to put them to proper use. For the Covenant weapons, though, the designers wanted to create otherworldly weapons with surprising effects. And so the plasma pistol was modified: its overcharge shot now fired a swollen ball of plasma that generated an EMP effect when it struck its target. This could paralyze vehicles and, even better, shut down the shields of Elites in campaign mode, or enemy Spartans in multiplayer games. This major modification gave rise to what many players would come to call the “noob combo”: an overcharge shot from the plasma pistol followed by a headshot from a precision weapon. It was a highly effective way to take out most Elites in the game, as well as opposing Spartans in player vs. player matches. In multiplayer mode, this made the plasma pistol a formidable–and feared–weapon, with players even developing strategies to get their hands on one before the enemy team. But despite Joseph Staten and John Howard being proud to announce to IGN in April 2001 that Halo’s multiplayer mode was in the final stages of development and would definitely be part of the game upon launch, the reality wasn’t quite so cut and dry. LeBel was still learning to use the development tools at his disposal, but more than that, this was his first time designing multiplayer maps himself. He had plenty of ideas, though. LeBel had planned to ship Oni with a game mode of his own design, but his ideas were dropped due to a lack of time. Heartbreaking for a game designer. “We just never had the resources to do a single-player game with multiplayer,” LeBel confesses. “And there was just no way I was gonna go and have no multiplayer again.” That was an attitude that would see LeBel and Michael Evans pull a series of all-nighters. At first, Evans worked to convert a selection of tools designed for multiplayer mode in Oni, before incorporating them into Gorilla, the suite of development tools

used at Bungie. It was no easy task, but it had to be done and dusted in record time, before they started looking at the issue of network gaming. Elsewhere in the studio, some people were even wondering if online gaming should be dropped from the finished game. Harold Ryan, then a test manager for Halo and who would go on to become CEO of Bungie, was party to these discussions: “We were having arguments about how many people can actually connect the boxes together. We were like “Hmm, maybe in college dorms, people are doing it, but who’s gonna bring a TV to their friend’s house?” But network gaming was close to Bungie’s heart, and if there was to be a multiplayer mode, then it had to be online. But there was a snag: while these discussions were being had, Microsoft had announced that online gaming on the Xbox wouldn’t be available at launch. Halo would be, though, as part of the studio’s launch day line-up. This news was met with some frustration at Bungie, but it did make their job much easier: Evans now just had to find a way to make LAN gaming work. So while Evans was off looking for a solution, LeBel kept learning. The former lead designer found himself forced to wear lots of different hats and learn several new skill-sets on the job. The first new job he had to learn was how to draw and model game maps in 3D. With none of the studio’s artists available to help, he powered on his computer and launched 3D Studio Max, a 3D modelling program. Fortunately for him, it had a reasonably comprehensive tutorial and allowed users to test some of the more advanced features on a step-by-step basis. With this, LeBel made his first map and started playing around with what he could do. After a few hours, he had obtained a pretty convincing result and decided that it was good enough for the final game: this map would make it into the game as Rat Race, a small map made up of a maze of corridors containing a number of teleporters. It was also a map completely free from vehicles. But LeBel hadn’t forgotten that vehicle combat was one of Halo’s specialties, and that its multiplayer mode should showcase them, too. And he still remembered what the game was supposed to be like before it was moved onto the Xbox. He designed a large map, playing around with its scale, and placed a base and two Warthogs at each end of the

map. In just a few hours he had created Blood Gulch, the map that players would see on Microsoft’s stand at E3 2001. Despite its simplicity, Blood Gulch would quickly establish itself as a player favorite, even featuring in most subsequent games in the series, sometimes under another name. Beyond its layout, the map was also particularly well-suited to experimentation. Because in addition to the game modes he had himself designed, LeBel also wanted to give players the freedom to make up their own kinds of game, and a vast sandbox like Blood Gulch was probably the ideal place to put the wildest ideas to the test. And this wasn’t a design feature he had plucked out of thin air. LeBel was a big fan of shooting games and while he hoped to create a Nintendo-style party game, he looked to two of his favorite FPS for inspiration: Counter-Strike and Unreal. It was the latter that taught him just how important it was to give players the ability to customize the game as they see fit. Maybe they’d want to play a game where everyone spawned with a sniper rifle and rocket launcher, and moved at four times normal speed. This was the kind of whimsy that LeBel made possible when he created an extremely comprehensive match editor that players would have loads of fun with upon the game’s release. Inside Bungie, however, there was one person in particular who had no time for LeBel’s little experiments. And that person was Robert McLees. “One day I was sitting at my desk, and Rob McLees showed up at my desk, and he is a very intense guy, just super intense,” LeBel recounts with an air of mockery. “And he’s like ‘Hardy, are you trying to piss me off?’ and I’m looking at him and I’m like ‘Lord no, I’m definitely not trying to do that, what’s the problem?’. And he said ‘Do you realize that the magnetic coordinates for every single multiplayer map are incorrect?!’ And I’m like ‘What are you talking about Rob?’” A latecomer to Halo’s development process, LeBel didn’t know that the assault rifle’s compass was fully functional, and so he hadn’t taken this into account when creating his maps. The result was that the weapon’s compass just didn’t work, a fact that enraged McLees’ inner firearms fanatic. Simultaneously amused and frightened by McLees’ over-the-top reaction, LeBel promised to fix his mistake as soon as possible, a promise that he was sure to keep. “That’s the

level of passion that the people at Bungie, the longtime Bungie people really have. Had,” LeBel explains. “It’s just, like, nobody cares about the end product anymore.” In addition to questions of game design, LeBel also had to painstakingly go over the tiniest of details in the multiplayer mode, right down to the color of the armor worn by competing teams of Spartans. “I really wanted players to be able to set their own colors for their teams in multiplayer. And that was just something that we had to cut ’cause we didn’t have enough time. He [Michael Evans] said ‘We can only have two colors, what should they be?’ I didn’t hesitate. I just said ‘Red and blue.’ Why? Because those are the colors in Unreal. I mean, that’s what I grew up playing. I know those colors work.” This decision made on the fly would leave a lasting mark on the imagery of the entire Halo series, because even today in Halo 5: Guardians, the battle between reds and blues rages on. As would the multiplayer soundtrack, much of which was composed by LeBel himself. “I’m the only uncredited audio designer on Halo,” he likes to remind people, with a smile. In the final few months of development, LeBel and Evans would be bolstered by reinforcements to their team, especially on the programming side of things where Adrian Perez and Stefan Sinclair would lend a hand, along with a few artists like Chris Carney who would work to embellish the maps created by LeBel. There was one aspect of multiplayer, though, where LeBel was going to have to make do with what he had: the sound design. Officially, it was Martin O’Donnell, composer of the game’s soundtrack, who was responsible for the various sound effects. The task was entrusted to Jay Weinland, but both he and O’Donnell were working at full capacity and neither had time to help out LeBel, who could regularly be found loitering outside the composer’s office. “Marty was super busy doing single-player, and doing all the voice-over stuff, and things like that,” LeBel explains. “And so I kept saying to Marty ‘I need sounds for multiplayer.’ And he’s like ‘Hey I will get to it soon.’” But O’Donnell would never have the time to get to it, soon or otherwise: the various changes to Halo’s single-player campaign kept causing delays to his

work due to regularly having to change the music and re-record dialogue. He just never had time to work on the sounds LeBel needed. The next time LeBel went to see O’Donnell to ask for help, O’Donnell finally cracked: “He walked up to my desk, he literally put his hands in front of my face, and he’s like ‘Don’t even say the word multiplayer to me, I’ve got no time for that right now, don’t even bother me, ‘and I’m like’ Marty, it’s got to be today or never.’ So he grabs his headphone off his desk, and he hands them to me. He hands me his headphone and he hands me the key to the music library. Which is his collection of sound effects, which are all on DVDs, CDs, and shit like that. And he’s like ‘Look, if you need sounds, you get the sounds. No one here has time to help you.’” And so LeBel picked up the headphones and the key, and got to work rifling through O’Donnell’s gargantuan music library alone. There, he discovered that O’Donnell hadn’t been entirely straight with him: O’Donnell and Weinland had already completed a series of recording sessions for multiplayer, using a voice actor called Jeff Steitzer. Bungie had been in contact with Steitzer for a long time, and he had initially been selected to voice Master Chief, but the studio ultimately panicked at the idea of giving such an important role to such an unknown quantity. That was how O’Donnell came to offer the role to Steve Downes, with whom he’d been working for several years already. In compensation, Bungie offered Steitzer another role: the multiplayer announcer. The voice that would later become known as the “Voice of God” could be heard quite regularly throughout each match, giving a line of commentary for any action that saw players earn a medal. The announcer’s voice and implausible expressions would prove a hit with many players, making Steitzer one of the stars of the game. Despite these hurdles, Evans and LeBel managed to get multiplayer finished to deadline. It was nothing like what had been envisaged two years back, and truth be told it didn’t serve up anything really revolutionary, with LeBel preferring to stick with the safe options. There were no outlandish game modes, just tried and tested features proven to work through years of experience and use:

the designer ultimately wanted everything to be “bulletproof,” as they say. Along with a few members of the studio, they tested every map and every game mode tirelessly, for hours on end. LeBel gathered feedback and took criticism on board, making some changes as a result. As such, one game mode was scrapped: for a while known as “Ogre,” it would see one overpowered player equipped with the best weapons on the game face off against a group of players who had to work together to vanquish their foe. The player who made the killing shot would become the Ogre in the next round. It was an interesting idea, but LeBel couldn’t get the balance quite right, forcing him to leave it by the wayside. So that was how, in just a few months, he would conjure up a multiplayer mode that would revolutionize FPS gaming, and ultimately the entire video game industry.

DOUBTS SETTLE IN We’re now a few months out from the game’s release and LeBel, like any other member of staff at Bungie, had no idea of the impact Halo would have upon its release. Indeed, their thoughts were running in the other direction. Many at the studio had had niggling doubts for months now. The game had drastically changed since its first demos were revealed, and some still had doubts about making a shooting game where story was such a prominent feature. Microsoft had also been late getting the final Xbox development kits to the developers, forcing them to work to a punishing schedule in order to make up the delays. As it stood, and with just a few months to go before its release, Halo was struggling to run at more than ten frames per second. The press had seen it with their own eyes at E3 2001. Up until this point, Bungie’s new game had been the stuff of dreams for many game journalists. But switching Halo from the PC to the Xbox had caused doubts to take root. When Next Generation magazine wrote about the game in May 2001, it was to report that it had tried out a level of the game that was only just playable, and that contained only two different kinds of enemies. Jason Jones may well have explained that developing for Xbox was really straightforward

and took much less time, but it didn’t quite ring true: Next Generation, and many others, had doubts that the game would be ready for the Xbox’s release. At Microsoft, too, people began asking questions. While Ed Fries trusted the studio, others started to think that Halo might not be the jewel in the crown it had been made out to be these past few months. Microsoft executives regularly came to visit the staff at Bungie to give them an earful. Other games were in development that would be absolutely amazing, they said. Hardy LeBel recalls Azurik: Rise of Perathia in particular, developed by Adrenium Games which Microsoft was putting a lot of faith in. “We had Microsoft guys show up in the studio and say, ‘Okay Bungie, you’re working on this game, but wait ’til you see Azurik. Azurik is developed by the R&D department at Microsoft, and they’re going to rock your world.’” Bungie also heard talk of other games, like Splinter Cell, developed by Ubisoft, and Blinx the Time Sweeper from Artoon, two other games that Microsoft was really pushing. So while some execs tried to put pressure on Bungie, the tactic never really worked, serving only as a fresh source of motivation for the developers to perfect their gameplay loops and optimize their code. More than anything else, these conversations with Microsoft revealed the very special relationship the studio had with its employer. Bungie may belong to Microsoft, but it had been making it clear that they weren’t like the rest of the company from the very first day it was acquired. But Bungie’s way of doing things and its independent culture didn’t go down well with everyone at Microsoft. That’s just not how things were done at the software giant. Bungie was being given preferential treatment which rankled no small number of people at Microsoft, people who hoped that Bungie would at last fall into line if Halo failed to do as well as predicted. That’s not to say that anybody wanted the game to be a failure, of course, and Microsoft did all in its power to support the studio, especially in terms of marketing. Because there was one thing Microsoft didn’t really like about Halo: its name. Martin O’Donnell was one of the first to find out: “We had been living with that name for over a year and had made quite a number of

promotional trailers with Halo as the name and the monks singing over the title screen. Once we arrived in Redmond and had settled in to work on the Xbox version we got a call from the PR folks to have a meeting. The only ones from Bungie to show up at the MS PR meeting were Jaime Griesemer and I. They made the pitch to us about how to market the game and how excited they were that it was going to do well with the fans. The only thing they insisted on changing, based on their research, was the name Halo. We asked to see what they were using for testing with the sample demographic and it was a horribly cut together montage of action shooting scenes accompanied by speed metal music. They told us the test subjects were confused by the name because it didn’t seem like a war game name. We said thanks but no thanks and left the room. Eventually we had to compromise with the PR/Marketing folks at MS and let them add the extra ‘Combat Evolved’ name. We didn’t want it, but it turned out ok. It’s the name printed on the box, but it doesn’t show up in the game itself.” At Microsoft, the prevailing opinion was that the name Halo all by itself didn’t tell players that they were going to be playing as a supersoldier. Worse yet, in some languages the word Halo sounded too feminine. This was something that must be avoided at all costs, back in a time when most gamers were young men. AAA productions, and action games in particular, never shied away from playing on macho clichés in their communication materials in order to appeal to this demographic. In the end, Bungie agreed to add a sub-title, which didn’t go down too well in-house: at the time, very few games had sub-titles, and the one suggested by Microsoft wasn’t exactly catchy. Griesemer recalls, “We thought that was the stupidest thing ever. It doesn’t mean anything, it’s not really informational, and it’s not even good grammar.” And indeed, even today the sub-title Combat Evolved is rarely–if ever–used by former members of Bungie staff to talk about the game, which they instead refer to as Halo, or Halo 1. This slight change in the game’s name, however, did nothing to assuage the many doubts that were being aired, even in-house. On paper, the game was no longer as revolutionary as it was one year

ago. For Hardy LeBel, Halo represented only a slight evolution in the FPS genre: “My thinking, at the time, was ’Okay, we’ve taken a very successful formula for first person shooters, and we added vehicles. And that’s a great innovation, it’s a great step forward. But it’s not like something the world has never seen before. […] I looked at it as kind of like a very reasonable step forward. I think what I wasn’t necessarily taking into account was the fact that it was so welladapted to work on consoles. And that was really two innovations in one.” LeBel wasn’t the only one questioning the game. Within Bungie, the most optimistic voices were expecting at best a modest success similar to what they had achieved with Myth and Myth II, for example. But what did they know?

7 Now the Museum of Pop Culture.

Chapter 7 – The Xbox Hit Game Bungie was now on the home straight, and getting ready to introduce gamers all over the world to Halo: Combat Evolved. The developers didn’t know it at the time, but they were about to pass through a decisive moment in their history, the kind that changes the lives of a studio and its staff forever. Because Halo wouldn’t just be the best game to accompany the launch of Microsoft’s Xbox, but also one of the biggest commercial phenomena in the history of video games. This success was made possible by its epic story, its enthralling universe and, most of all, its totally unexpected multiplayer mode.

THE HOME STRAIGHT On October 10, 2001, Bungie’s big day had come: Halo: Combat Evolved was finished. Jason Jones was up at the studio until dawn to make sure that his new baby was as ready as possible. The game had to be delivered to Microsoft without delay, so that copies could be sent out to the various different classification bodies, like the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) in the USA. Once the classification phase was complete, production could begin! And indeed it would… barely three weeks before the Xbox was released in November 15. The deadline was particularly tight, even for the video game industry. Of course, there was a valid reason… In this case, it was an event that was as unforeseen as it was unprecedented. The kind of delay that Microsoft could never have predicted. To get to the bottom of this delay, we need to go back to

August 2001, just over a month before Jason Jones signed off on the long and convoluted development of Halo: Combat Evolved. Summer was drawing to a close, and Bungie was working flat out to finish Halo. The levels were all ready, multiplayer mode was working. The only thing still to come was the cutscenes that Joseph Staten was finishing off, and a long list of bugs to put right. Thousands of bugs, in fact. Seropian and Jones knew that the game wasn’t deliverable in its current state, and so the entire month of August was spent fixing bugs. It was a task that was as complex as it was painstaking, because bugs had to be identified before they could be fixed, and finding them could be a real headache. And yet, there was no time to spare, because Microsoft was imposing a deadline on the various studios working on Xbox launch titles: September 11, and no later. That was the day that a long process would begin for Halo and other Microsoft Studios games. They needed to obtain their classification before Microsoft’s factories could start the production process. The next step would be to send hundreds of thousands of copies of the game all over the world, where they would patiently wait in warehouses before being shipped to their points of sale a few days before the official Xbox release date. This left Microsoft with just over two months. The software giant liked to give itself plenty of time to avoid any delays, but that wasn’t how things worked at Bungie: in a games studio, you run down the clock. And truth be told, the team was anticipating delivering their work at the last minute. Joseph Staten recorded the game’s last cutscene on September 8, three days before deadline. But there was a problem: in their current condition, none of Staten’s videos had audio. This meant that it was vital that they be forwarded to Martin O’Donnell who would add the music, dialogue, and various sound effects he had created with Jay Weinland, Bungie’s sound designer. The math was simple: they had three days before Halo was sent off for classification, and 33 cutscenes to edit. If they did 11 per day, the game would be ready for the evening of September 11, and Bungie would meet the deadline set by Microsoft. So O’Donnell got to work. On September 10, he had finished 22 cutscenes: he

was on schedule and he could just make out the finish line. When he went home that day he could relax, because he knew that tomorrow his work would be done. Halo would be ready, and after that it was out of the studio’s hands. The developers all knew that between the classification phases and the game going into production, they would have a few extra days to iron out any stubborn bugs. This would be needed for multiplayer, in particular. O’Donnell was going to hit the hay and try to forget about the game he’d spent three years working on for just a few hours. The next day, it would all be over. Sadly, the universe had other plans. On September 11, 2001, O’Donnell got out of bed and went to have breakfast with his family. When he found his wife and daughters, they were in front of the TV, rendered completely speechless. Terrorists had attacked New York and two airliners had crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre complex in the heart of Manhattan. “My wife and my daughters are freaking out, and I see what’s happening,” O’Donnell remembers. “While we’re watching this thing, I realize I don’t know if the world is ending. I called Jay [Weinland] and he was already at the studio. I said, ‘What are you doing? Go home. Who else is there?’ He said that everybody was. I’m like, are you kidding me? We had all gotten to such a fever pitch that we thought we couldn’t even lose a day. It was really kind of insane. I went over and made everyone go home.” The world stood still, but this meant that Bungie could keep working without such a pressing deadline. For weeks, the country and its economy were working in slow motion, the result of the trauma inflicted by the attacks and the emotional shock, which was very raw. Large companies weren’t immune from the effects, not even Microsoft, which asked its staff to follow President Bush’s advice and avoid long journeys. Unfortunately, some staff were already away on business when the attacks occurred. This was the case for several members of the Xbox division, in particular, who had been touring the country on a series of meetings ahead of the console’s release. The group included Robbie Bach, the director of Xbox, and Seamus Blackley. In a twist of fate, Blackley was in New York on September 11, or rather, above New York. From the plane,

he watched the thick plumes of smoke darken the Manhattan skies, and his flight was diverted to Buffalo as a safety precaution. Bach, too, was in New York that day, but unlike his colleague, he was still in the city when the first plane struck. American airspace was quickly locked down, and his flight to Seattle, like so many others, was cancelled. The big boss at Microsoft and the few colleagues he was with then decided to hire a car and get back to their families on the other side of the country as soon as possible. It would take them around 50 hours to travel the 2850 miles to Seattle. It goes without saying that the schedule initially set by the Xbox team had been turned completely on its head, but there was a silver lining: Bungie now had a few more weeks to refine its game. Or more specifically, the multiplayer mode in Halo: Combat Evolved. When played on the same console everything worked, but the LAN mode was packed with bugs that made it difficult to play. Bungie faced a dilemma, and even made plans to remove that particular feature. Within the studio, some wondered whether it wouldn’t be better to just remove multiplayer mode altogether, rather than shipping an incomplete game mode. In the end a few developers, accompanied by Jason Jones, pulled a series of all-nighters to fix the remaining bugs. So it came to pass that, over the night of October 910, 2001, they had done it: Halo: Combat Evolved was finished. A few bugs remained, but Jones wasn’t worried about them. They were almost unnoticeable. There was one last thing he wanted to do, though. In secret. Finding himself alone at last, he added one last line of code to his game. He made one value bigger: the damage inflicted by the magnum, the handgun used by Master Chief in the single-player campaign, as well as by the Spartans in multiplayer mode. To avoid the appearance of any new bugs, Jones thought it best to write a separate line of code rather than edit what had already been written, and the game would process his change during its loading screens, like the ones between two levels. Behind this unusual addition lay a carefully considered decision in game design: the magnum, like the sniper rifle, was one of the only weapons in the game that could pull off a headshot, which caused more damage

than a standard shot. The most skillful players could use the magnum and its scope to make short work of the toughest enemies like the Elites. In multiplayer, it would produce matches that were more interesting than assault rifle battles, because players would soon learn how many bullets, and therefore how much time, it took to kill an enemy. In a duel, though, the winner would be the one who shot with the most accuracy, or who was able to move around cleverly to dodge bullets. It would generate a bit of tension and give matches a bit of pace. With his line of code added to the game, Jason Jones turned off his computer. This time, it really was all over. When he got home, Jones was relieved, of course, but he couldn’t help feeling a bit frustrated. It was the first time in Bungie’s history that it had been forced to work to a deadline set in stone by an inflexible boss. And he didn’t like it. Halo was developed in a rush and that wasn’t the way things were usually done at Bungie. As an independent studio, Bungie could afford the luxury of pushing back the release of one of its new products by a few weeks or even months. But those days were over, and he knew it. Bungie now belonged to Microsoft, and while Seropian and Jones’ bosses seemed to care about the studio’s different needs, the company had already spent billions of dollars on their Xbox launch. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer were all too conscious of the fact that the console would earn zilch for Microsoft. But the two men had a long-term vision: this first console was just a seed, planted with a view to growing into a mighty oak. The Xbox should enable Microsoft to become a major player in the games console market, and they needed Halo and the other games if they were to get there. When they sold Bungie to Microsoft, Seropian and Jones were fully aware of this, and it was even part of what made their decision. Jones knew what it might mean, then, especially in terms of freedom. But that didn’t stop him from expressing his annoyance, most notably in an interview published on December 18, 2001, just a month following the release of Halo and the Xbox. When he was asked to name something that he didn’t like in Halo’s development, his answer was clear and straight to the point: “[The] Lack of time; Xbox launch as an

inflexible deadline.” That would also be the first and only time that a Halo game accompanied the launch of an Xbox console. However, despite his frustration, Jones was the first to admit that the development of Halo: Combat Evolved had gone amazingly well, despite its ups and downs. Because one thing was still true: while work on the game may have begun in 1998, the acquisition by Microsoft in 2000, and then the game’s port over to the Xbox meant that Bungie had to redo almost all of the development from scratch. Managing to make a game of such scale in such a short time frame was nothing short of a minor miracle, and the studio execs all knew it. “In the midst of those last days, I told a friend that Halo was like a cathedral self-assembling out of a hurricane,” Jones tells us. “The speed at which new bits of art and sound and design were smacking into just the right place and being mortared into the whole was astonishing. We all sort of sat around in the after days, collectively wondering how the hell it had all come together and having a nervous laugh at the whole thing because it seemed kind of supernatural.” Jones had an even harder time realizing that, for the first time in Bungie’s history, he had played the role of a supervisor, a guide. The studio had grown, and while he had been used to rolling up his sleeves and getting stuck in, Bungie’s co-founder now needed to take a step back and learn how to delegate. “I didn’t get to script a single level, wrote none of the dialogue, and only did a small amount of coding. Everyone else got to do the glorious work,” he would explain a few weeks after Halo’s release.

A RESOUNDING CRITICAL AND COMMERCIAL SUCCESS That glorious work was soon earning accolades from the press. On October 23, Microsoft began sending out the first copies of its new console to the big video game magazines. Of course, each Xbox came with a few games, one of which was Halo: Combat Evolved. The critics were unanimous, and perfect reviews started to stream in. The reviewers lauded the writing, the level design, the music, the artificial intelligence that blew everyone’s minds, and then

the game’s amazing playability. For the very first time, a console FPS felt perfectly playable. It took a few minutes to get used to, but the controller’s two analog sticks and the precision controls made Halo the first FPS that was comfortable to play with a joypad. Prior to Halo, GoldenEye 007 on the Nintendo 64 had delivered a generally acceptable experience, but the end result was far less convincing than in Halo. After months of hard work and experimentation, Jaime Griesemer had found the perfect balance: players did get some help, but at very low levels (the permissible margin of error was around 5  %), so that players felt like they had achieved something when they landed a shot, especially one to the head. The program for interpreting player input from the controller’s two analog sticks worked perfectly, delivering impressive precision. It was a bit of a revolution, in fact: indirectly, Halo had paved the way for many future FPS that would draw on Bungie’s work to make the move over to consoles in the coming years. On November 15, 2001, the Xbox was at long last available in stores around the world. The Xbox team, accompanied by Bill Gates, met at Toys “R” Us in Times Square in New York. It was there, at 00: 01, that the first consoles were sold. The first ever Xbox owner was a young man named Eduardo Glucksman. He had waited in line for 12 hours to be the first one through the doors at midnight. The icing on the cake was Bill Gates himself handing him his Xbox, after playing him at Fuzion Frenzy, a game developed by Blitz Games for the Xbox launch. As soon as he had his console, journalists descended on Glucksman to ask him about the Xbox and his passion for video games. The press had convened on the event en masse, mainly special correspondents from major dailies and national TV networks. Microsoft may not yet have convinced the specialist press, but the “generalist” press was watching the software giant’s entry into the video games industry very closely. This meant that it got a lot of press coverage. Gamers also quickly took to the console, especially in the United States, where the Xbox proved popular with an older, more tech-savvy demographic. The console was noticeably more powerful than the PlayStation 2, and featured some headline

technical innovations like the built-in hard drive and the Ethernet port that would soon enable the Xbox to connect to the internet. Both of these components would become musts for the next generation of consoles. And yet, when the Xbox hit the shelves, specialists in the field thought that these two gadgets wouldn’t count for much when weighed up against what they saw as the Microsoft console’s biggest weakness: the lack of a mascot, an iconic figure who could represent the brand with the green X. The Xbox had no Mario, no Sonic… not even a Crash Bandicoot. How could it march to battle against its competitors without a standard-bearer of its own? This was a question that Microsoft’s representatives were asked repeatedly, and one they could never really answer: “What a character game gives you is it makes it much easier for you to brand (your console),” said John O’Rourke, at the time senior director of Xbox marketing. “We don’t have to have it to be successful. But we’d like to have it.” This strange statement, and the simple fact that the press was asking about which character represented the Xbox, demonstrates how when Microsoft’s new console arrived in stores, Halo had not yet established itself as the console-seller8 it would become. Critics in the video-gaming press were enraptured by the game, but the gaming public had not yet made Master Chief’s acquaintance. But that day was coming soon. The Xbox launch proved to be a resounding success. Preorders placed nationwide were all fulfilled, and several hundred thousand consoles quickly found a forever home. At Microsoft, the celebrations were in full swing. But not quite so much in the Bungie offices. The staff were exhausted, and the prevailing emotions were happiness and relief at having delivered their game at long last. Low key drinks were organized, and then they all went home for a well-earned rest. “It was beautiful,” Jones says. “I went home and finally got to see what my house looked like. I had never really moved in. I still had my license plates from Chicago.” But exhaustion soon gave way to an amazing feeling of accomplishment in Bungie’s two co-founders. Halo was a smash hit and the sales figures were growing day by day. “People forget that

Halo wasn’t a chart-burner right off the bat,” Jaime Griesemer recalls. “I’m not even sure it was the best-selling launch title. But it had this insanely long tail, where every week the Xbox would sell a certain number of units and something like 50  % of those sales would convert into Halo sales. So it just kept selling. Two years after it came out, it was still in the top 10 sellers on the console. That’s almost unheard of now.” That appraisal is an accurate one, because in the first few days following the Xbox’s release, players turned mainly to the games that they were most familiar with, but thanks to word of mouth and articles in the gaming press, within a few weeks Halo had built an excellent reputation. Its success was undeniable: Bungie’s game was carrying the Microsoft console, just like Ed Fries thought it would when he bought the studio two years earlier. On April 8, 2002, the software company in Redmond was proud to announce that its shooter had crossed the threshold of one million copies sold. In those days, that was an outstanding achievement. Players embraced Master Chief, to the extent that he became the Xbox’s unofficial mascot. He was that iconic character that Microsoft was thought to be lacking. Players were enthralled by Halo’s gameplay, by its characters, by its mysterious universe, and its music. But there was something else that got them hooked on Halo. A powerful vector for transmission that enabled Bungie’s game to reach an ever-larger audience. And it was something that Bungie had never seen coming for even a split second.

REVOLUTIONARY MULTIPLAYER “Everybody was pushing to keep multiplayer in, but none of us knew just what it would mean,” Pete Parsons would reveal in 2013. Parsons was part of the Xbox marketing team when the console was launched. An avid gamer and already familiar with Bungie’s work, he started working for them as a studio manager in 2002. When he got there, he found a team that was still being blown away by Halo’s success: almost a year had passed since the game was released and sales were continuing to grow. The game was being picked up

by people of all ages, races, and backgrounds. Celebrities regularly dropped by the studio to meet the people behind their new favorite hobby. Justin Timberlake, Hayden Christensen, and Linkin Park–to name but a few–all visited the studio when they were staying in Seattle. But despite this, in-house Bungie was yet to fully grasp the scale of Halo’s success and the impact it was having on all those gamers. “It wasn’t until later when I’d be visiting someplace like Vegas and come across the Master Chief standing on the boulevard alongside some Transformers and Spiderman that it hit me how iconic a character he had really become,” Marcus Lehto tells us. “I’d take pictures with the poor guys in these suits under the intense sun knowing full well they had no idea I had designed the suit they were wearing.” In Halo: Combat Evolved, there was one feature in particular that Bungie and Microsoft had certainly underestimated: its multiplayer mode. Playable by up to four players in split-screen mode, it meant that Xbox owners could invite their friends over for a game. Halo’s controls and the depth of its multiplayer mode won over a lot of gamers, who decided to buy the console and a copy of the game for themselves. In the United States, where Bungie’s latest game was encountering the most success, Halo was becoming a real social phenomenon: people were getting together and hosting huge LAN parties in their homes, and Bungie staff would sometimes drop by. Despite the game’s success, the studio retained this special connection with players, and was in contact with them on a daily basis on its forums or by email. At every LAN party they visited, they noticed the same thing: people who were happy to get together and play, even though some of them were meeting for the very first time. Bungie had always boasted an extremely engaged community, but with Halo it took on a hitherto unknown dimension. In the USA and many other countries around the world, Halo quickly came to set the gold standard for console FPS games. GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark, two shooters released on the Nintendo 64 and known for their multiplayer modes, soon became ancient history: Halo had more variety, more depth, and it was more fun to play. It had become the

new benchmark for multiplayer FPS on consoles, and would inspire many new games to come, like Time Splitters 2 and the Call of Duty series. The multiplayer mode in Halo: Combat Evolved would also see the emergence of parody videos posted online and made entirely by fans of the game. These included a mini-series entitled Red Vs. Blue, whose first episodes appeared online in early 2003. Michael Burns and a few of his friends made use of a bug known to players that caused the Spartans to lower their weapons, with the effect that on screen, they appeared more relaxed than if they were constantly taking aim. They then wrote a series of scripts that they recorded themselves, and then used Halo: Combat Evolved’s multiplayer mode to play out their scenes. A satire of shooting games and military life, Red Vs. Blue quickly secured an audience and enabled Burns and his friends to start their own company, Rooster Teeth. Their web series would win swathes of awards and now spans around 15 seasons, with Red Vs. Blue and Halo serving as a launchpad for Rooster Teeth, which today delivers daily entertainment to nine million subscribers.

A SOUNDTRACK SETS THE SCORE Another thing about Halo: Combat Evolved that gained rapid popularity among its players was the soundtrack. Martin O’Donnell’s compositions had been lauded by the press, and the gaming public could only agree. It was rare for so many iconic tracks to be found in an FPS, with their percussion and soaring violins–sounds that were not usually heard in sci-fi games. Before long, players were demanding that the soundtrack be released on CD, just as O’Donnell thought might happen. In the past, Bungie had made its games’ soundtracks available for download, and O’Donnell had expected the same thing to happen with Halo. In the meantime, though, circumstances had changed: Bungie now belonged to Microsoft, which owned the intellectual property rights to Halo… and therefore its soundtracks. At first, O’Donnell came up against a brick wall.

“What happened was we finished Halo 1, and I went to Bungie or to Microsoft, and I said ‘Hey, there’s enough music in here, and the fans expect this, we should release a soundtrack for Halo 1.’ And Microsoft goes like, ‘Well, you know, we don’t normally do that, we need to think about it, we need to get people in a room and talk.’ And they just dragged their feet for a couple of months at least. I would keep going back to them, saying ‘Please, would you ship the Halo 1 soundtrack? I’ve got it ready to go, I can just make a CD and go.’ And that’s just not the way Microsoft did things, they had to analyze the business and stuff.” But a few months later, O’Donnell would find an unexpected ally in the form of Nile Rodgers. The guitarist and producer who’d worked with many international artists (including names like Madonna and David Bowie) was then in a New York studio recording Maroon 5’s first album. But something was distracting the band, and work on Songs About Jane was taking longer than Rodgers had planned. He eventually had to ask Maroon 5 why the recording sessions were going so slowly. Adam Levine and the rest of the band then told him about a new console and game that they’d been completely obsessed with for a few weeks now. They invited the producer to join them and check out Halo: Combat Evolved for himself. Rodgers wasn’t really a gamer, but he was intrigued. He sat down with them and watched them play a few games, before finding his ear drawn to the title music. He was immediately smitten with Halo’s compositions, and started trying to find out who was behind them. A few weeks later, Martin O’Donnell was invited to a meeting, but nobody would tell him what was on the agenda. As it turned out, the meeting was about the Halo soundtrack, but as there’d already been five meetings about it with absolutely zero results, O’Donnell wasn’t expecting this meeting to be a fruitful one, either. But then he opened the door and came face to face with Nile Rodgers, so perhaps this time would be different. Rodgers was delighted to be meeting the composer at last, and it was slowly dawning on O’Donnell what was actually happening there in that room. The producer had won Microsoft round in record time, and his production company,

Sumthing Distribution, would release and distribute Halo’s soundtrack. It was a first for both Rodgers and the games industry, as no video game soundtrack had ever enjoyed such a high profile. Indeed, the soundtrack’s commercial success would encourage plenty of other studios and publishers to release the soundtracks to their own games.

HALO GOES CROSS-MEDIA Jason Jones had always wanted to tell stories, wanted his games to be set in complex, internally consistent universes. With Halo, he knew that this dream could become a reality, if only because of Microsoft’s deep pockets. Of course, Jones was right: the software giant was home to people whose job it was to flesh out the universes of the studio’s various games. They wrote extensive background, collated all the information available about these virtual worlds, took part in the marketing campaigns, and even wrote storylines for the games in question. And of course, when Microsoft acquired Bungie and Halo, the idea of publishing a novel was floated quite early on. Joseph Staten was in on these conversations, and it was decided to tell the story of how the war between the Covenant and Earth began, as well as the origins of the Spartan-II supersoldiers, of whom Master Chief was the last of their number in Halo: Combat Evolved. The book, then, would tell the story of Halo before Halo. The idea didn’t go down too well with some staff at Bungie, who would rather keep Master Chief as a blank canvas so that he was easier for players to identify with. But after lengthy negotiations, the project was given the go-ahead. The actual writing of the novel was entrusted to Eric Nylund, one of the authors at Microsoft Game Studios, but he would have to curb his enthusiasm for a little while yet. His work was delayed for a while due to a number of legal constraints, but this at least meant that by the time he started the writing process Bungie had all but finished the game’s story. Nylund was also able to watch the full development process for Halo, meaning that he was now very familiar with the game universe. He

also had at his disposal a powerful tool: the lore book first compiled by Robert McLees and fleshed out by Joseph Staten over a period of almost two years. This weighty tome contained all there was to know about the game universe: how the ringworld worked, human technology, the finer points of Covenant society… Now, Nylund worked with Bungie to add some lore of his own. He invented the origin story for the Spartans, and for Master Chief in particular, which was when the person behind the visor was given a name: John. But before he could put pen to paper, Nylund had to get every last one of his ideas approved by Bungie. With that done, it would take him seven weeks to write Halo: The Fall of Reach. The name was a little bit misleading because the novel didn’t just describe what happened at the Battle of Reach, but also covered the thirty years leading up to the events in the game. It recounted the origins of the Spartan-II project, the children kidnapped to join the program and their indoctrination, the biochemical enhancement procedures that turned them into superhuman creatures… But also humanity’s first encounter with the Covenant Empire and the first battles between the UNSC and their alien foes. The novel ended with the Battle of Reach, and the Pillar of Autumn fleeing towards an unknown destination. This made it the perfect introduction to the Halo universe, which is precisely why Halo: The Fall of Reach was released on October 30, 2001, two weeks before the game. It didn’t exactly fly off the shelves when it was first published, but following the release of Halo: Combat Evolved its sales exploded. In early 2003, one hundred thousand copies had been sold in the USA and United Kingdom, but it would be a few years yet before The Fall of Reach was translated into other languages. Its success enabled Microsoft to sign a contract with Del Rio, the novel’s publisher, for another series of publications, including two new novels. The first, Halo: The Flood, is a novelization of Halo: Combat Evolved, while the second, Halo: First Strike, recounts the events that took place before Halo 2. It marked the beginning of a long cross-media adventure for the franchise which would go on to release a series of traditional and

graphic novels over the following years. With Halo: Combat Evolved now on sale, the staff at Bungie were enjoying some well-earned rest. They were thoroughly exhausted, and while the game’s development had gone well overall, the sustained pace of work imposed by the need to release the game at the same time as the Xbox had taken its toll on the health of some at studio. This was particularly true of Jason Jones who, shortly after delivering Halo, took a long leave of absence and was not heard from for several weeks. This absence was understood and forgiven by all at Bungie. At the time, Bungie was a team of some 30 staff, who all worked in the same friendly, family atmosphere they brought with them from Chicago. Big boss he may be, but Jones was part of this family where management hierarchies didn’t really exist. “Jason had a difficult time separating work from external life during the making of Halo,” Marcus Lehto would explain in 2017, long after he’d left Bungie. “It consumed him in a way that ultimately hurt him physically. He internalizes a lot and bears a lot of responsibility and burden on his own shoulders, for the team and the well-being of any project.” But the completion of Halo: Combat Evolved’s also ushered in a few happier events, like the wedding of Robert McLees and Lorraine Reyes, two artists who had been working together more often since Microsoft acquired Bungie and dissolved its marketing department, where Reyes was working as artistic director. The wedding did much to lift the spirits of the studio which, after a few weeks off, started getting ready for Jones’ return, and with him news of Bungie’s next adventure.

HALO 1.5 OR HALO 2? It was a reinvigorated Jason Jones who returned to work. He had spent a lot of time thinking: Halo was a very good game, but it was rushed, and he’d had to discard a number of interesting ideas. This was frustrating for the designer in Jones, who had been unable to fulfil his vision. But he knew that given Halo: Combat Evolved’s

runaway success, it was unlikely that Microsoft would be against Bungie developing a sequel. Jones’ first approach would be to gauge the appetite among a few key members of the Bungie team, like Martin O’Donnell. The old hand was shocked when Jones told him he wanted to make a sequel. “I remember Jason Jones coming over and saying ‘Yeah, I wanna start working on the sequel,’” the musician recalls. “And I’m like ‘Jason, you don’t do sequels, you don’t like to do sequels.’ The true story is he doesn’t like doing the sequels. He likes doing the first one. Myth II was a struggle for him personally. So he was trying to give the project lead over to Tuncer [Deniz]. But I knew Jason just was not a fan… Personally, he just sort of loses his interest in sequels. That’s my experience with Jason.” It was true: Bungie had already developed a number of sequels, but Jones played a smaller role in each new instalment. Marathon 2 was without a doubt the least painful for him because he still had a lot of ideas and was enthusiastic about trying them out and implementing them in the Marathon universe. The same could be true of Halo 2. But more than anything else, Bungie’s co-founder was worried about the fate of his team, as O’Donnell recalls: “I said ‘Wow Jason, that’s not what you like doing,’ and he says ‘Yeah, but… We brought all these people out here,’ And I said ‘You don’t owe anything to anybody, what you owe is to do your best work, and we all made a decision to move here and to do Halo 1, and that’s enough. That’s a great ride.” But Jones was adamant: “He says ‘No, there’s still stuff that hasn’t been done that I wanna do,’ so I said ‘Okay if you really wanna do Halo 2, let’s all get behind you and do it.’” The idea spread around the studio, where it was met with a lot of support. A number of developers were just as frustrated as Jones with having to develop Halo: Combat Evolved in a rush and being forced to take out so much content at the last minute because it wasn’t quite finished. “Everybody wanted to do a sequel,” recalls Jaime Griesemer, “Because there was so much cut out of Halo that we basically had enough ideas and concepts to make another game.” The studio’s engineers felt the same, knowing that they hadn’t been able to showcase what the Xbox was really capable of: “We had learned so much about the console and how we could take

advantage of it,” says Chris Butcher. “We had so many new directions we knew we could go in.” When it came to the Xbox team, however, they weren’t quite on the same track. Everyone was eager to see Halo 2, of course, but the schedule and financial imperatives imposed a few constraints of their own. Jay Allard, Xbox hardware manager, and Ed Fries, the software manager, regularly crossed swords. Allard knew that it would take Bungie time to develop Halo 2, but he was in need of big releases to fill the Xbox calendar for late 2002. He wanted Fries to put pressure on Bungie and get them to quickly churn out Halo “1.5,” which would be compatible with Xbox Live. The online gaming service was due to launch on November 15, 2002, and the Xbox needed games to help promote it. With the global success encountered by Halo: Combat Evolved’s multiplayer mode, Halo 1.5 would be destined for great things. At least, that was Allard’s thinking. But Fries couldn’t bring himself to force Bungie to rush out a new product, especially if it was one they didn’t have much enthusiasm for. By this time, Fries was very familiar with the studio and he knew that when Bungie began working on a new game, it had to be a genuine progression, a real step up from the previous game. Within Bungie, the initial discussions about Halo 2 were going well and the teams were raring to go: the game would be spectacular. Nobody envisioned for a moment revisiting Halo: Combat Evolved to deliver a version compatible with Xbox Live. Allard then suggested a downloadable extension that could give Halo a second wind and simultaneously generate Xbox Live subscriptions and console sales. But Halo had no need of a second wind: while Allard and Fries were talking about it, the game was still riding the top of the Xbox charts. What’s more, this extension would push back the release of Halo 2, which was unthinkable. Allard and Fries could find no common ground. Allard enjoyed a certain prestige at Microsoft because he had always managed to deliver his projects to deadline, and never late. These were mainly software programs and server technology. He was convinced that video game production could be managed in the same way. “J’s position was,

this is Bungie’s job. Go do your job. This is the single most important thing,” an anonymous source explains in Dean Takahashi’s book, The Xbox 360 Uncloaked. “When we tried to explain it to him, he couldn’t rationalize it.” Allard wanted the video game studios working for Microsoft Studios to operate like those working for Electronic Arts, another American publisher that had built a solid reputation by releasing a new FIFA game every year, and every year encountering the same success. But for many games, like Halo, this way of working just wasn’t appropriate.

WHAT ABOUT THE PC? Fries eventually managed to find a way to keep Allard happy: he would start work on a PC port of Halo: Combat Evolved. Microsoft had made a series of promises to PC gamers who wasted no time in voicing their anger when Halo became an Xbox exclusive. But there was no question of Bungie wasting its time on such a project. This meant that Fries would offer the opportunity to develop the port on behalf of Microsoft to Gearbox Software. Founded in 1999 by a number of industry veterans, Gearbox was still a small studio, and in 2002 it was primarily known for making extensions for Half-Life, as well as the PlayStation 2 port of Valve’s game. It was hardly an illustrious resumé, but that wouldn’t stop Fries from giving them Halo: Combat Evolved. But PC gamers would have to wait until September 30, 2003 to get their version of Bungie’s FPS. Upon its release, however, the PC port missed its mark, being lambasted by critics and players for its poor optimization. Despite its dated graphics, the game required a high-end gaming rig to be playable. And as if that were not enough, the co-op mode was missing, despite being one of the game’s major strengths. While the whole experience wasn’t really profitable for Microsoft, it was for Gearbox, which learned a lot through working on Halo: Combat Evolved, with the influence of Bungie’s game being particularly noticeable in Borderlands, released in 2009.

8  A term used to describe a game that was popular enough to encourage people to buy a console.

Chapter 8 – Halo 2: The Most Eagerly Anticipated Game of Its Generation At last, it was official: Bungie would start work on Halo 2. Now fully rested, the staff returned to work motivated to do a better job than with the first game. They were under fewer time constraints and, most importantly, they had lots of unused ideas that were oven-ready for the new game. What the studio could not know when they started work was that Bungie was about to go through the most challenging period in its history.

RARING TO GO In the beginning, Bungie had no intention of making Halo a trilogy. But when they got down to work on the sequel in mid-2002, there was an explosion of ideas. After locking himself away in a corner of the studio, Jason Jones came back to his colleagues and held a series of meetings, the first of which focused on the story for Halo 2. At top of the list were a few ideas that were set in stone: at least part of the game had to take place on Earth, and Master Chief had to meet Captain Keyes’ daughter, who blamed him for her father’s death. Keyes’ daughter then struck a deal with the Prophets, the Covenant’s leaders, to consign Master Chief to a fate of certain death. Joe Staten, who attended these meetings, recalls how, “She’s really mad at the Master Chief, so she puts a bomb on his back and throws him into a hole. I was like, ‘Hold on a sec, you want to make the daughter of Captain Keyes one of the villains?’ ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘it’s going to be great!’ I’m just like, ‘Dude, I don’t see it.’ I think the longest conversations that we had about Halo 2 were wrestling about

that one scene.” Jones was particularly keen to focus on scenes that showcased Master Chief. In one of them, the Spartan would find himself in orbit above Earth, and while looking down on a planet that had been ravaged by the Covenant, he would pronounce: “Only blood can pay for this.” A bit too corny, this particular scene was scrapped, but its spirit can be seen in the description of the Uprising mission in the release version of the game: “This is certain. The Brutes shall pay for the blood they have spilled.” And so was sketched the initial outline of the plot: following his victory on Halo in the first game, Master Chief returns to Earth only to see it attacked by a Covenant fleet. The battle was a short one because the aliens decide to flee, with the humans in hot pursuit. After a series of twists (the details had not yet been worked out), the Covenant and the USNC do battle on Earth in the final showdown. The final levels were a race against the clock to find a Forerunner weapon hidden on the planet. Of course, Master Chief would foil the Covenant’s plans, thereby putting an end to the war. But for this, the second instalment, Bungie wanted to make things a bit more nuanced. The first game’s plot was ultimately pretty straightforward, and there weren’t many reversals of fortune. With Halo 2, Bungie wanted to do better. “I don’t know if we are crazy or stupid, or if we just like good stories or what,” Jones would relate in the game’s making-of. “But we certainly worry about that a lot more than what you might think we’d have to in a game that’s mostly just about action and about not thinking.” And Joseph Staten had an interesting idea for a way to bring greater depth to the plot in Halo 2: give players the opportunity to see the conflict from another angle, that of the enemy. In this idea, on some levels players would control a Covenant soldier instead of Master Chief. He began imagining a Sangheili general stripped of his rank after failing to protect Halo. Rather than sentencing him to death, the Prophets gave him a chance to redeem himself through a series of suicide missions. He would then become the Dervish: the hand of the prophets. This name, taken from Persian, would later be changed at the suggestion of Microsoft’s marketing department, and Bungie would opt for a

more neutral name: the Arbiter. This change didn’t go down too well with Martin O’Donnell, who had already finished recording most of the voice acting. Staten shared his idea with Jaime Griesemer, before telling anyone else about it. The idea wasn’t received as well as he had imagined. Marcus Lehto recalls how, “Playing the Arbiter worked fine in the end, but it was something that I didn’t like. I wasn’t excited about it, and I felt like it was going way off the rails from where we started.” An opinion that was shared by Martin O’Donnell: “We had a great plot twist in Halo when you discover the Flood. We kept that secret from everybody–it was a wonderful moment and a great reversal, as everything you thought you knew was now different. I told Joe that I didn’t see that in Halo 2. He replied, ‘It’s when you realize that you’re playing as the Arbiter.’ But no, that’s not a plot twist. Not at all. I could never convince them it wasn’t. It wasn’t a good reversal; it was just a mechanic that was unsatisfying.” While Lehto and O’Donnell harbored some serious doubts, Staten found a lot of support elsewhere in the studio and his idea was approved. This meant that he would have to bring the Covenant Empire to life, to shed light on its society, and so the artists got to work. The first job was to finish off the concepts dating from Halo, beginning with the Prophets. This task fell to Shi Kai Wang and Eric Arroyo, who picked up Wang’s old drawings: these aliens needed to appear physically weak, and as sinister as they were intelligent. These weren’t warriors, but rather politicians, philosophers, thinkers. Wang hit on the right look by designing a creature that looked vaguely human in shape, but with giant eyeballs and long fingers. It wasn’t standing, but seated comfortably on a chair floating a few feet off the ground. Its garments implied a certain nobility while also accentuating the religious nature of their social standing. The Prophets now had a face. Bungie’s artists kept up their momentum by padding out the Covenant bestiary and building their world, and from an old concept for the Prophets, Wang created the Drones: flying insect-like creatures. Bungie wanted Halo 2 to contain a wider variety of enemies and developed a series of new concepts. These included

the Drinol, a gigantic monster. The studio saw it as a wild beast kept in captivity and starved by the Covenant, only ever to be released on the battlefield. For a while it was conceived as a possibility for a boss, but this was discarded because Jason Jones wasn’t very keen on the whole boss fight concept. Jones had for a long time been trying to distance his games from the clichés of the genre, especially those created by id Software’s Doom and the first wave of FPS that imitated it. These special battles needed to be meaningful and serve a narrative purpose rather than just an arbitrary test to access the next level. In parallel, Eddie Smith, a concept artist recently hired by Marcus Lehto, was beginning a far more important task: the design of a whole new alien race, the Brutes, who would play a central role in Halo 2’s plot. Something like a cross between a bear and a gorilla, these extremely tough but not always very smart creatures were destined to replace the Elites in the Covenant hierarchy. Staten wanted Master Chief and the Arbiter to join forces and do battle against the remnants of the Alliance. To make that possible, he needed a reversal, an event that was significant enough to cause the Elite to betray his leaders. This reversal would take place over a number of phases. Firstly, the Arbiter would be tasked with assassinating another Sangheili, the leader of a heretic faction. This heretic leader was in contact with 343 Guilty Spark, Halo’s protective AI in the first game, who revealed the truth about the ringworlds: The Great Journey that the Prophets spoke of did not exist; the Halos were weapons of mass destruction and the Forerunners weren’t gods. The heretic leader planned to make this revelation known to as many in his society as possible, before being robbed of the opportunity by the Arbiter’s successful completion of his mission. Growing suspicious, the Prophets decided to give command of their armies to the Brutes, who suddenly replaced the Sangheili. By the time the Arbiter realized that the heretic leader was speaking the truth it was too late: the Brutes were massacring Elites all over the galaxy. This triggered the Great Schism, when the Sangheili left the Covenant alliance and for a while fought alongside the UNSC

against the Prophets. The Brutes, or the Jiralhanae as they were known in the Halo universe, were given a very special treatment indeed, as it was Shi Kai Wang himself who eventually settled on the right look: his concept was approved and his creatures were ready for 3D modelling. Along the way, he used the opportunity to create a unique Jiralhanae character: Tartarus, the Brute chieftain. Unlike the soldiers under his command, Tartarus had silver fur that made him easy to tell apart. This wasn’t enough for Wang, though, who was looking for another way to make his special status clearly visible onscreen. In the end, he found inspiration in an unexpected place: “We were trying to think of a way to distinguish the Tartarus from the rest of the pack. And the main bad guy in Gremlins 2 had a giant white mohawk, and that worked extremely well. Everybody realized who’s the boss.” Tartarus would also get to star in his own boss fight, despite Jones’ thoughts on the matter. “I really enjoyed the chair, jumping on the chair and beating the snot out of Regret,” he explained in 2007. “That was cool. But it was risky. We really didn’t know how those [the boss fights] were going to turn out. They’re so different from all the rest of the gameplay. You play for an hour and a half, and then you got something completely different. And it’s, yeah, not all that satisfying. But there was a lot of fun in them. […] but this was definitely my least favorite of the three boss battles.” The Brutes weren’t the only ones to be given some extra attention. The UNSC was also given a thorough overhaul: a lot of Halo 2 would be set on Earth, and unlike in the first game, Master Chief and his allies would not be cut off from the rest of humanity. Human society, then, would be much more visible. Unisex uniforms were designed for officers, Cortana’s look was updated, and Master Chief’s armor was completely redesigned. The new look was explained very simply right at the start of the game: he had exchanged his old Mjolnir Mk. V armor for a newer model, the Mjolnir Mk. VI armor. Thanks to the progress the engineers had made with the new game engine, the artists working on the game could have a field day and create armor that was more detailed, more complex. Within reason, at least, because Lehto adhered to a principle of his

own: “Good design lives in saying something in the simplest way possible to convey an idea and function,” his philosophy goes. “It also must inspire the viewer with something that just feels good to look at, with proper proportions, areas where the eye can rest and just soak in the composition and the other adjacent details. It’s a fine balance that I see ignored far too often these days where complexity seems to be the driving force.” To perfect the armor’s design and make Master Chief look less stiff and rigid than in Halo: Combat Evolved, Lehto asked Eddie Smith to work with the studio’s animators when designing it. After producing a series of different concepts, Smith worked with Lehto to complete what would become Master Chief’s most iconic look. The design proved so popular with players that at E3 2018, Microsoft announced that a modernized version of the armor would be making its big comeback in Halo Infinite, replacing the armor worn by Master Chief in Halo 4 and Halo 5: Guardians. Said armor was extremely detailed, but Halo fandom had mixed feelings about it. In terms of gameplay, Halo’s designers also had plenty to keep them busy. One of the big new features was the dual wielding mode that would enable players to hold two weapons at once. Not any weapons they liked, though: it would primarily apply to small handguns. This new feature called into question the game’s golden triangle–the firearm/grenade/melee triptych–and meant that the weapons arsenal needed to be updated, at least in part. Robert McLees had a number of ideas already: he wanted to scrap the assault rifle from the first game and replace it with a new weapon whose name would better describe its abilities. The result was the Battle Rifle, more commonly known to players as the BR55 Service Rifle, or the BR for short. “If you’re like me, it’ll be the weapon that you fall back on throughout the entire game. Because it’s the go-to gun,” McLees claimed. “It’ll hopefully actually behave more like a rifle than the assault rifle did from Halo, which was more of a submachine gun. It suffered from the same things that all video game weapons suffer from, and that is they do not behave like their real-world counterparts.” A firearms fanatic, McLees had read and taken on

board the criticism some players aimed at his different weapons, and this time there was no way he was going to give them anymore cause. “We had a smaller team, right, and we had a very short time to make the game,” he explains. Fortunately, while all of this was going on, Halo: Combat Evolved’s success meant that Bungie could hire new developers, and with the team suitably bolstered it was easier to get some details dialed in. When it came to the gunplay, McLees and Nathan Walpole immediately looked to the military veterans on the team, who gave them a demo of their combat training: how to shoot, how to move, how to communicate… Halo 2 would need to show large-scale battles, not just small-scale guerrilla assaults like in the first game, and in an effort to ensure maximum immersion, they did a lot of research and trying things out. The BR wasn’t the game’s only new weapon. When it was added to the game, it had an effect on the gameplay itself, because in practical terms it replaced the magnum in Halo: Combat Evolved. Like the magnum, it was a semi-automatic weapon with great range and a scope for enhanced accuracy. As a result, the magnum had to undergo some changes, getting a new name and a new look: it was now the M6C Personal Defense System, and as its name implied it was primarily a defensive weapon whose reduced range and stopping power made it a weapon of last resort. While the magnum was rebalanced and given a makeover, the assault rifle was scrapped altogether, not even saved by its iconic reputation. It was replaced by another gun with similar capabilities, the SMG: a submachine gun that was small enough to enable Master Chief to carry one in each hand. As for the Covenant, they got a sniper rifle, a carbine to serve as the alien equipment of the BR, and players could now get their hands on the famous Elite energy sword, which was already featured in Halo: Combat Evolved, but which Master Chief was unable to pick up. It was the same story with the Fuel Rod Cannon, the Covenant equivalent of the rocket-launcher. The arrival of the Brutes meant that the developers had to create weapons of their own, which is how we got the Brute Shot grenade launcher with that ferocious

bayonet on its underside for use in melee combat, and the Brute Plasma Rifle, which was less powerful than the plasma rifle featured in the first Halo game, but with a greater rate of fire. To make it easier to tell the two apart, Bungie’s artists gave the Brute Plasma Rifle a red metallic coloring. In September 2002, work was progressing and the studio was feeling confident. Halo 2 would probably be ready for release in one year’s time. In agreement with Microsoft and the Xbox team, the first trailer was aired worldwide. In it, we saw Master Chief in his new armor, marching towards what looked like a space station orbiting Earth. As for the planet itself, it was clearly under Covenant attack. The Spartan grabs a BR, strides over to an airlock, opens the armored door and launches himself into space, falling towards one of the alien vessels. The trailer was unusual in that it wasn’t made using CGI, like most video game trailers of the time. In fact, it used the game engine itself, which offered a nice look at the work done on the graphics engine. Truth be told, the Bungie engineers had been working on a new version of the Halo engine for months now, and they had made significant progress. Halo 2 now looked like it would be one of the most impressive games of its generation, and that’s without really seeing much at all. Satisfied with how its trailer was received, Bungie got back to work… just in time for someone to throw a spanner in the works of what had previously been a welloiled machine.

ALEX SEROPIAN SAYS GOODBYE The shocking news came in September 2002: Alexander Seropian had resigned and was leaving Bungie. The studio’s cofounder, the man who began it all, had different life goals now, most important of which was his desire to start a family in Chicago where his and his wife’s parents still lived. It came as a hard blow for everyone. Seropian was one of the pillars of the studio, and his absence would ultimately have negative consequences for the team. “Alex was the heart of Bungie,” Paul Bertone explains. “He’s a family

man, and he brought that atmosphere to Bungie. There were all these other personalities bubbling underneath the surface, and they all trusted Alex without question. He’s the one that kept everybody at bay. Things just changed after he left. All of a sudden you had this whole group of people who had to figure out how to work together and deal with all these problems that Alex had been solving. A lot more politics started blooming at that point.” For Seropian it was clear that Bungie, which now belonged to Microsoft, would be working on Halo for a long time yet. Halo 2 would never be the last game for the franchise, even if that was what the studio had planned. A lot of work lay ahead on the sequel, and he didn’t want to repeat the same experience as last time. A development timetable that was too tight for a game of that scale, there was pressure to meet deadlines, complicated relationships with his superiors… It was all too much for Seropian, who would rather return to Chicago and start a new studio. A studio where he and his staff could work in peace. Because Seropian was sure that the crunch to make Halo: Combat Evolved wouldn’t be the last time that would happen. And he didn’t think that was a healthy way to work. Some at Bungie speculated that Microsoft had too tight a grasp on Bungie, and that Seropian didn’t like that he had been stripped of some responsibilities. This was a theory that Seropian himself shot down, stating that he had only the utmost respect for his managers, people like Ed Fries and Robbie Bach: “Great guys,” was how he described them to us. And indeed, in all the years following his resignation and all the way up to today, Seropian has never had a bad word to say about the people he worked with at Microsoft; the way he tells it, he enjoyed the experience. On July 31, 2013, in a long interview with Polygon, Seropian compared Microsoft to Disney, where he worked from 2009 to 2012: “If you gotta work for a big company, I would recommend either. For different reasons, too. Microsoft very much cares about the people that work there. […] The thing I found most interesting about Disney is that if you were to ask a hundred people which is the more creative company–Microsoft or Disney–most people would say Disney. The vast majority. I found the

decision-making there to be less product-focused and more financial-focused. Microsoft, granted, that might have just been a factor of the point in time and the point in the organization where I was operating. Microsoft was launching a new console. It was a new division. They weren’t expected to make any money. The bottom line on the P&L was not necessarily the most relevant factor. Things may be different now. But in terms of my experience, it was interesting ending up at a creative company that was more financially oriented than the giant business software company that was solely focused on product.” After returning to Chicago and taking a few months off, in 2003 Seropian founded a new studio: Wideload Games. He was joined by six of his old employees, including Mark Bernal, Matt Soel, Doug Zartman, and Alex Okita. All of them came from Bungie, and had been with the studio ever since the 1945 South Halsted Street days. In 2009, with a few successful games under its belt, like Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse, Seropian would sell Wideload Games to Disney. JASON JONES CHECKS OUT Martin O’Donnell called it: there would come a time when Jason Jones would get bored with Halo 2 and stop working on the game. And that’s exactly what happened in 2003, when work on Halo 2 was at a very advanced stage. The studio was working on a playable demo that would be ready for the press at E3 on May 13-15. Jones was filled with confidence: his team had put in a huge amount of work, and the initial results were already very promising. “This group of people is great,” he would later say. “I’m sometimes pretty awestruck by how smart these people really are, and by the good decisions that they’re making. Yeah, I’m really proud of these guys.” Indeed, he thought that the Halo 2 team were doing such a fine job that they no longer needed him, and so he left to offer a helping hand to another team working on a completely different project. After all, Halo 2 wasn’t the only game in development at Bungie: smaller teams were working on three other projects.

The first was Gypsum, a mythical fantasy adventure game being developed under Paul Bertone. A fantasy fanatic, when work was done on Halo he had sworn that never again would he be moved to work on a sci-fi game. Gypsum was his baby and he was very proud of it, and the first playable prototypes were promising, especially the combat system that he and his team developed from scratch. Another small team was working on Monster Hunter, the new project belonging to Hardy Lebel and Michael Evans, which made good on the promise that they could work on whatever they liked after doing such a good job with the Halo multiplayer. The final project was Phoenix, which Jones had launched back before Halo. It had been put on the backburner for a good long while, but with Halo: Combat Evolved delivered and more developers available at the studio, Jones wasted no time resuming work on the game in 2002. And Phoenix was the game that stole his attention in early 2003. The small team working on his old prototypes had gotten a bit lost. They were going round in circles and starting to lose hope. This was when Jones made it known that he was leaving the Halo 2 team to lend a hand to the Phoenix team. Seropian had moved on and Jones was working on another project: the managers of the Halo 2 team immediately recognized the danger. They were missing a project lead, and none of the existing staff were able to assume that role. Then one lunchtime O’Donnell and Staten levelled with their boss: “Joe and I took him out to lunch and said, ‘Jason, you can’t do this. You cannot leave the Halo 2 team.’ I told him: ‘This is the most important project Bungie has. I told you that you were going to get bored working on a sequel, but you convinced me you were going to hang in there, and put all your energy behind this.’ He’s like, ‘Oh, I can do both!’ Like he could run the Phoenix team and once a week check back in on Halo 2. Joe and I begged him, told him that wouldn’t work. And he did it anyway.” O’Donnell and Staten gave up: Jones wasn’t for changing his mind. He enjoyed working on new ideas, experimenting with new gameplay mechanics, and that was something Halo 2 was unable to offer him. O’Donnell nevertheless made one final request of Jones:

that he appoint his replacement. In the end, a small group of people would, at the boss’ request, take over the reins of Halo 2: Jaime Griesemer and Marcus Lehto, along with Chris Butcher and Michael Evans for anything that touched on engineering. But these appointments were not unanimously well-received, even among the new project leads: “I’d shipped one and a half games. I didn’t know what I was doing,” Griesemer explains. “Suddenly I was the only designer working on planning all the missions and all the enemies and everything, kind of in a vacuum. And I didn’t know anything about leading people.” Despite these doubts, the team put on a united front and pushed ahead with Halo 2. E3 was approaching and the demo was still not finished, but it did look likely to deliver a minor revolution in the video game industry.

THE WORST CRUNCH IN GAME DEVELOPMENT HISTORY It’s a word that’s all too familiar to anyone working in video game development, whether they’re freelancers or in-house staff working for a major publisher. That word is crunch. In the video game industry, the crunch refers to a period in which the development team will have to clock many hours of sustained overtime if they are to deliver their project on time. The crunch is part of video game industry culture, with everyone in the industry being roped into it sooner or later, to the extent that it is now seen as a normal part of the development process. In 2017, Luke Timmins, director of engineering at Bungie, gave a talk on the matter, in which he explained that there’s a difference between a good crunch, and a bad crunch: “There’s the crunch you want to do, and there’s the crunch you have to do. The one you want to do can be awesome, because you have passionate people who are excited and have cool stuff to work on. That can be really good, but you’ve got to be careful. People can be super excited and before you know it they’re working a ton and getting burned out.” Timmins knows what he is talking about, because in 2003 he and Chris Butcher were two of the main engineers working on Halo 2. And 2003 was the year in which

Bungie would experience the most trying period in its history, with one of the longest, most painful crunches in the history of video games. So painful, that 13 years later Timmins would reflect how, “The Halo 2 crunch almost killed Bungie as a company.” It all began with an E3 presentation that appeared to be a success on all fronts. The date was May 12, 2003 and Bungie was at the Los Angeles Convention Center getting its demo ready for the show. The studio had spent three long months working on this short gameplay sequence, and had managed to stick to its schedule. Bungie had learned a lot from E3 2001: they needed to surprise journalists and show them something genuinely new. But most importantly: you couldn’t lie to them. Being liberal with the truth had become something of a tradition at E3, where publishers never shied from presenting pre-recorded gaming sessions filled with effects and details that no real console could ever run. The aim, of course, was to blow the gaming community away, even if the end product would never turn out quite as billed. Microsoft, however, decided to trust Bungie to deliver the goods and the studio had developed a demo that was indicative of how Halo 2 would be upon its release. It showcased impressive urban combat scenes, set in a city on Earth during a Covenant invasion. “We wanted to have as little impact on our overall schedule as possible,” Jaime Griesemer recounts. “We wanted to use a level that was already in production. Of those levels, ‘Earth City’ had the largest range of gameplay options since it had infantry and vehicle combat. It was early in the game, so it wouldn’t reveal any major story secrets, and it had most of the vehicles and characters we wanted.” It was the perfect opportunity to reveal new gameplay mechanics, like dual wielding and hijacking vehicles. But not all the new features were 100  % complete, in particular dual wielding: in the demo, for example, you certainly could carry two SMGs and then switch to the BR Master Chief carried on his back before switching back to the two SMGs. This process would not make it into the final version of the game where, instead, when players switched weapons out of dual wielding mode they would automatically drop one of the dual weapons. But these were game

design concepts, and a lot of things would ultimately evolve before Halo 2 was released. These would include the BR, which up until now had fired a single bullet with each press of the trigger, but had been reconfigured to fire bursts of three rounds. The vehicle hijacking mechanic, which enabled the player to clamber upon a Ghost and dislodge its owner, had not yet been incorporated into the game engine, but the developers found a workaround to get it into the demo. Just like for the gameplay demo for Halo: Combat Evolved at Gamestock 2001, Joseph Staten was chosen to present Halo 2 to the press. Here, too, the difficulty level had been tailored so that he didn’t have to spend too long defeating the enemies he encountered. On the eve of the first presentation, the Bungie staff that had travelled to LA were doing some final checks on the demo, fixing a few bugs so that they could be sure the demo would run seamlessly the next day. As a trial run, the team decided to present Halo 2 to their colleagues from Rare. Microsoft had recently acquired the British studio, and this was the first time that Rare and Bungie had been at E3 together. They all met in the little theatre Microsoft had erected on the Xbox stand, launched the demo, and Staten began to play. It was all going swimmingly, until the console switched itself off. Reflexively, the developers set about looking for the bug that could have caused the crash, but everything seemed to be working just as it should. Staten relaunched the demo, only for it to crash after a few minutes. Bungie was in a state of panic, with no idea of how this was happening. E3 opened the very next day, and nobody was able to find the source of the problem. Eventually they discovered why the console had kept crashing during the dry run: the Xbox that was running the demo had spent the entire day on top of a huge speaker, and the magnet inside the speaker had damaged the console to the point that it was no longer working properly. They quickly got their hands on another Xbox and set it up in a safer location. This time, it worked: the Halo 2 demo was ready. Tomorrow, the first journalists would be arriving at the Convention Center, and the presentations

would begin in earnest. But for now, everyone headed to bed confident that all was well. On May 13, E3 opened its doors to the international press. Halo 2 was one of the most hotly anticipated titles that year, and the first glimpse of its gameplay had many a journalist drooling on their way to the Bungie auditorium. The first arrivals found their seats in a darkened room where they were welcomed by Joseph Staten. He chatted with the journalists in the front row while the auditorium filled up and when all the seats were taken, he climbed up on stage and welcomed them all. After a bit of small-talk, Staten was abruptly interrupted by a voice that seemed to come out of nowhere: it was Sergeant Johnson, who appeared on the cinema screen before the audience. Bungie had put a lot of effort into its presentation, and taken the time to record a few lines of dialogue with David Scully, Sgt. Johnson’s voice actor. Johnson was there to brief the assembled journalists, and to explain how they were about to witness a real-time demo. There’d be no smoke and mirrors here, just unadulterated gameplay. This news was received enthusiastically by the journalists, who appreciated this jibe directed at some studios with publishers that had no qualms about embellishing their presentations. With the introduction done, Staten grabbed a controller and launched the demo. And so the press got to see the progress Bungie had made with its graphics engine. And this progress was plain to see from the opening seconds of the video: it was clearly one of the most technically impressive games ever made for a console. Aboard a Pelican, Master Chief and a squad of soldiers close in on a teeming human city. With buildings layered atop each other as they scrambled skywards, and glittering with a thousand lights, the city is beautiful to behold, but it is also under attack by the Covenant. The aliens’ anti-aircraft defenses force the Pelicans to land, and this is when the gameplay truly begins. Staten takes control of Master Chief, equipped with a BR. He moves towards a makeshift shelter where a soldier points him towards the action. After walking for a few seconds, he reaches a long balcony overlooking the battlefield: the

streets have been overrun by the Covenant and the soldiers are on the high ground, trying to stop them getting any closer. Staten uses his weapon’s scope to take aim and fire off a few shots, earning a reaction from a number of journalists in the room. Another soldier tells Master Chief that they desperately need to destroy the huge Covenant AA emplacement that is holding things up. Already impressive in the first Halo game, the AI and the soldier’s dialogue demonstrates surprising responsiveness. The Spartan opens fire, before heading over to a machine gun emplacement set up nearby on a tripod. When he took control of the gun, the audience gasped: here was another interesting new feature. Staten rains hell down on the few Grunts below, quickly taking them out of the battle. Just then, two human bombers zone in on the alien AA emplacement and blow it to smithereens. What we were seeing unfold on the screen was real urban warfare, and never before had it seemed so dynamic, so visceral. Staten jumps over the balcony, stows his BR, and unholsters not one, but two SMGs, thereby revealing another new feature. By this point, the journalists are applauding in a state of rapture. Staten rides their enthusiasm as he empties his two SMGs into the Jackals he encounters. He makes his way through the level, revealing just how big the game is, or at least this section of it. Eventually he finds a dark tunnel that he enters, emerging in a different part of the city. This area has also been overrun by Covenant forces: Jackals aim their weapons at Master Chief and let loose several volleys of fire. The Spartan dodges their shots, jumps, and lands by a Warthog. While he takes control of the gun emplacement on the back of the vehicle, two allied soldiers climb in the front, and together they set off in pursuit of an alien vehicle. This was an opportunity to show that the allied AI had learned to drive, as well as a chance to take in a bit more of this futuristic city that seemed incredibly large for a shooting game. But every street, every road, and every square has fallen to the Covenant, and not a second passes that the screen isn’t dotted with explosions and plasma sparks. And the tour doesn’t go on for very long; all of a sudden a Phantom flies over the three humans and, before Master Chief can react, an alien lands on the Warthog’s hood. In a rapid movement, it

grabs the driver and flings him through the air. This was the first time that players outside of Bungie had seen the strength and brutality of the Jiralhanae, who were making their first appearance here. After dispatching the attacker, Staten turns his BR on more Brutes, before receiving a warning from Cortana that a Ghost is closing in on him from the right. This was a delicate moment for Staten, who now had to reveal another new feature: hijacking vehicles. He misses the first Ghost, but manages to grab on to the second. The animation elicits “Oooohs” and “Ahhhs” from the audience, who applauds when the Spartan ejects the pilot and takes its place in the cockpit. But Staten doesn’t have time to celebrate: as he opens fire on a few aliens, two Phantoms lock him in their sights. He is forced to beat a retreat, which has the effect of triggering a short cutscene: chased down a highway by a number of ghosts and the two Phantoms, Master Chief speeds into a long tunnel, shaking off the Covenant troop transports. At the other end of the tunnel, he is forced to leap out of his Ghost to nip through the armored doors that are closing before him, making it just in time. His pursuers aren’t so lucky, and crash into the door in a powerful bluish explosion. The Spartan gets to his feet, and looking up sees a huge Covenant cruiser flying over the city, raining down landing capsules. Before long, he finds himself surrounded by a dozen or so Elites with their energy swords activated. The Spartan drops one of his SMGs and grabs a plasma grenade before falling upon his foes. And here, the demo ended, the Halo 2 logo appeared on the screen, and the crowd went wild, still not quite believing what they had seen. In actual fact, these eight minutes or so of gameplay looked so amazing that many journalists questioned Bungie’s sincerity. That was real, live gameplay? Some didn’t believe it was. To find out, they revisited the presentation several times, to check whether each session actually was any different. It was a strategy that Staten found really funny: while some key parts of the demo were scripted, like the part where he pulled out the two SMGs or when he hijacked a Ghost, the rest was pure improvisation. The journalists couldn’t get over it. It was too big, too beautiful, too well-paced to be true. Halo 2

was up there with some of the most visually impressive PC FPS of the moment, including Doom 3 and Half-Life 2, which were starting to generate a bit of hype of their own. And yet, the journalists had to believe their eyes. The demo was no fake, just as Sgt. Johnson had promised. Doubts would nevertheless persist all week, much to the annoyance of the specialist video gaming press, which traditionally gave awards to the best games at E3. Back then, most magazines and websites had a rule to only give awards to games that they had been able to play or that had been played in front of them. This ruled out trailers, as well as the fake demos that were a widespread practice. Aware of this issue, Bungie decided to host a last minute session just when E3 was about to close, intended for the most important media outlets. This time, Staten would play the game while asking the journalists in attendance what they wanted him to do. It was the best way to prove that the demo was no fake. He agreed to any request, even the craziest, like throwing a grenade into an improvised field hospital. After watching Staten play for over half an hour, they all left feeling reassured: it was definitely a real-time demo. E3 was now over for Bungie, and it had been a great success. The game would soon grace the covers of most video game magazines, and the demo was unanimously lauded by critics who still couldn’t get over it. The buzz that had been fizzing away since the first trailer was released took on a whole new dimension after E3. Halo 2 was now the most eagerly anticipated game for this generation of consoles and, in light of the first game’s success, the press was predicting record sales for this sequel that would also be compatible with Xbox Live. Everything seemed to be falling into place to make Halo 2 one of the biggest hits in video-gaming history. You might think, then, that the studio would be popping open the champagne on the Millennium campus and celebrating its success. But you’d be wrong. In fact, the opposite was true. And for one very good reason: the demo was in no way representative of the actual progress made with the game. The developers had spent three months getting a playable sequence ready to go, but even then, Staten had to stay within particular areas and couldn’t stray too far

from predefined routes without risking crashing the game or falling out of the level. A lot of features, like dual wielding and vehicle hijacking, were shoehorned in and were not yet compatible with the game engine. Worse still, the engineers were as yet unable to get the graphics engine running on the Xbox, for the simple reason that Microsoft’s console wasn’t powerful enough. In short, this meant that although the game was supposed to be coming out in six months, almost nothing was actually finished. Halo 2’s success at E3 2003 was a wake-up call for the studio, who were now contemplating their situation in horror. “The New Mombasa E3 trailer was such a hack that we felt horrible after we came back from the show,” Shi Kai Wang would state a few years later. “It just showed us that we had nothing, and the amount of work that we had to make ahead of us was astounding.” Suddenly, the studio found itself in a state of panic, realizing that they had reached an impasse. Unless they started most of the work again from scratch: they needed to create a new graphics engine and scale down some of their ambitions, especially the size and complexity of the game’s different levels. A Herculean task, to put it bluntly. O’Donnell and Staten had seen this debacle coming when Jason Jones announced that he was abandoning the development of Halo 2 to lend his support to the Phoenix team, and the absence of Seropian and Jones was making itself keenly felt. The role of project lead had never really been filled, and the Halo 2 orchestra was missing a conductor. The team spirit and common purpose that had enabled Halo: Combat Evolved to be in a fit state for release despite the deadlines imposed by Microsoft had withered away. “Sadly, a lot of discussions at the beginning of Halo 2’s development happened in insular little groups that didn’t talk well with one another,” Marcus Lehto ruefully recalls. “And that was the crux of much of the conflict that would occur, because we didn’t have clear leadership.” Because Lehto, like the other people Jones had appointed to replace him, had no real management experience. This posed a problem that became a bigger issue with each passing day and as Bungie hired new staff. When Microsoft had moved Bungie onto its campus, the studio numbered some 30 staff working on Halo, but that number had now doubled. Bungie had grown too fast,

and the old hands lacked the skills they needed to manage so many people. But that’s not to say it dampened the general mood. Giddy when they commenced work on Halo 2, the teams had lost direction, constantly wanting to make things bigger, to make them more beautiful. This situation would cause Chris Butcher to make the following reflection a few years later: “The story of Halo 2 is kind of like a three part tragedy. The first act where we are all optimistic, and naive, we are all sitting down and saying ‘This game is about to be 72 times more fun than Halo 1, because we got all these great weapons and vehicles, and environments. We’re just gonna jam as much stuff as we can in!’” So everyone got to work and forgot that all these pieces of the puzzle would eventually have to fit together to make the whole picture. Everyone was working on their own contribution, beginning with the engineers themselves who spent months working on a particularly impressive game engine. Referred to in-house as the Stencil Engine, it used both stencil shadows, from where it took its name, and normal mapping. This could produce dynamic shadows that were more realistic, as well as use light effects to create the illusion of depth on most of the textures used in the game. But stencil shadows are extremely resource-hungry, or at least far too ravenous for a game like Halo 2. Unlike most games that were starting to use this technique, Halo 2 was made up of vast levels, and the Xbox was simply unable to manage so many dynamic shadows at once. These circumstances were only aggravated by the level designers who had also gone big with their own plans. The levels they had designed thus far were gigantic, which only served to make using Stencil Engine even more problematic, if not outright impossible. It was while making the demo for E3 2003 that they started to join the dots: they had to put all their different pieces together for the first time, and something wasn’t working. “Even that whole environment, the Earth City, was way too big for the engine at the time,” Chris Carney explains. “We ended up cutting out huge parts of geometry from that level, so you never actually saw that.” But the pressing need to be ready for E3 deprived Bungie of the time to give things a thorough overhaul. The developers worked flat out for three months to make a demo that was held together with pieces

of string. When they got back from Los Angeles, they needed to face facts: things couldn’t go on like this. The only way the engine would work was if Bungie made major concessions on the size of their levels. And this was absolutely off the table. Bungie then made the only viable decision open to them, and scrapped the engine altogether. It was back to the drawing board, and a real tight spot. Firstly, because it would take time to create a new game engine, time during which the other teams would be unable to test their work. Levels, gameplay features, AI… nothing could be checked to see if it actually worked. “We were building stuff that just couldn’t be played, in any engine,” says Butcher. “We built, and detailed, and went a huge way down the path with a whole bunch of environments and levels for the game that just totally didn’t make it. If you look at the level with the Flood, inside the quarantine area, that is the remaining 20 percent of a gargantuan, sprawling level that was meticulously built and hand-constructed, but that could never, ever have shipped in any engine.” And then there was Microsoft to deal with. Then began a long wrangling session between the Xbox division and Bungie, because it was now clear that Halo 2 would not be ready for release in late 2003. The Xbox execs were already working on their next console, code named Xenon, and they were dead set on the new console being released with a new Halo game. If Bungie was behind schedule on Halo 2, then it followed that they would be starting out behind schedule on Halo 3, and that was something that some people, like Jay Allard, could not allow to happen. This meant that Bungie now found itself in a situation similar to the one it was in three years ago: a game to deliver as soon as possible, and a graphics engine to start again from scratch. The difference was that Halo 2 was far more complex a game than its predecessor, and the stakes were much higher, too. Bungie was no longer just another independent studio, and Halo was now a household name with a rep’ to protect. Fans had lofty expectations. As did Microsoft. Up until now, the software giant had acquiesced to Bungie’s many demands, generally showing itself to be obliging. But the relationship could soon sour if Halo 2 failed to come off as planned. That was a fact that Bungie was all too aware of, and Jason Jones in particular: “It

was very clear at the time that the future of the studio was in Halo 2. And if Halo 2 failed, that the studio was gonna be a very different and less fun place to be in.” Of course this meant that Jones was forced to get involved. And so the co-founder launched a series of meetings to determine the immediate future and the fate of their current projects. Saving and finishing Halo 2 was the studio’s top priority, so all of its staff would be working to get it done. The decision was made to halt work on Paul Bertone’s Gypsum, as well as Monster Hunter from LeBel and Evans. “It was a bit of a bummer to stop it,” Bertone recalls of Gypsum. “Because now we have games like the Arkham series and Shadow of Mordor and The Witcher 3, and that’s the sort of free-roam combat that we were doing back then, but nobody’s ever seen it. Gypsum was my secondfavorite time at Bungie. It was a small team, we all sat with each other. We were doing something that I absolutely wanted to do, and I still want to do in my career.” Martin O’Donnell had seen the blow coming, and had warned his friend that, sooner or later, he would be forced to drop Gypsum, just like he’d been forced to stop working on Phoenix, to come and work on Halo: Combat Evolved. The same was true for the old Oni team, represented by Evans and LeBel. With Monster Hunter abandoned, the former joined the Halo 2 team fulltime, while the latter would, at Jones’ request, take his place supporting the Phoenix team. The project had been stagnating for a few years already, by this point, and not even Jones really knew what to do with the same few gameplay concepts they’d been playing around with for a good while now. Confident in LeBel’s ability as a game designer, Jones asked him to go and work on Phoenix for a while and ensure its viability. So it was that after putting together a playable demo, LeBel gave his verdict: it would be better use of the studio’s resources to abandon Phoenix and send its developers to work on Halo 2. It was with a heavy heart that Jones decided to take LeBel’s advice, and from that moment on, everyone at Bungie was working towards a single objective: to finish Halo 2. The engineers soon got to work, using some of what they had learned in developing the Stencil Engine to create a new graphics

engine, and picking up some techniques that had been used in the first Halo. Normal mapping was retained. All of that work would take almost a whole year, though, which meant that a lot of the developers had to work blind, and wouldn’t have much time to test their work. In an effort to save time, the studio was going to have to agree to a few sacrifices. Jones summoned a few team members to join him in a room in the Bungie studio known as the Clubhouse. With Paul Bertone, Joseph Staten and Jaime Griesemer, he took stock of the situation: the initial plans would have to be abandoned and the single player campaign scaled down. These were the only conditions under which Bungie would ever be able to get its new game delivered within a reasonable time frame. And it would be the later stages of Halo 2 that would bear the brunt of the cuts. “We had a game that was nine levels. Started at Earth and brought us out into the galaxy, and then brought us back to Earth for this grand conclusion,” Staten reveals. “Well, right about at that moment, Pandora’s box was opened, and decisions which were engraved in stone were rethought.” These included the idea to make a sequel to Halo 2, which would be the final instalment in what would be a trilogy. A decision was made to scrap the last three levels, which were going to be set on Earth. The humans and the Covenant were supposed to do battle to control the Ark, an immense Forerunner installation found near New Mombasa, where the whole game began. This idea was dropped, and the installation in question would re-emerge a few years later in Halo 3 as the gateway leading to the real Ark. This meant that Halo 2 would end on a cliffhanger, with Master Chief travelling to Earth aboard a Covenant-controlled spacecraft, having left Cortana behind on High Charity, the Covenant’s Holy City. While the initial plan had been for Master Chief and his AI to be split up at the end of Halo 2, nobody had dreamed that players would complete the game without completing the full story arc. But it would have to be enough as it was, even if that meant leaving the story open for a sequel, just as Halo: Combat Evolved had done. Work was already at too advanced a stage and there was too much left to do, to take the time to give the story and the levels that had already been designed a complete overhaul. The

decision to end Halo 2 on a cliffhanger didn’t go down well with anyone. “I was still confused when they came out of the clubhouse and presented it to the team,” O’Donnell recalls. “Joe said, ‘Okay, here’s how the ending’s going to go. We’re going to do this and this and this and…’ And I’m like, ‘Wait, Joe, are you saying that the last person you play in Halo 2 is the Dervish? And when you get to the end it shows a cutscene with Master Chief going back to Earth saying, “I want to finish this fight,” and we run end credits? ‘He said, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll work!’ I said no, it wouldn’t. People will be throwing their controllers at their TVs. We’re going to make it look like you’re about to be Master Chief going to Earth to finish this fight. And then you want me to climax the music, go to black and run credits? I couldn’t imagine a more horrifying ending. If you search for ‘worst endings in the history of video games,’ you’ll see Halo 2 right up there. It was like, this is worse than the ending to Back to the Future Part II. I could not believe what we were doing.” Staten, meanwhile, hoped that this ending would have the same effect as the one in The Empire Strikes Back, episode V of the Star Wars saga. It ends with the hero, Luke Skywalker, in hospital, and Han Solo abducted by Boba Fett the bounty hunter, who plans to deliver Solo’s frozen body to Jabba the Hutt. Skywalker had lost one of his hands in a duel with Darth Vader, who revealed that he was Luke’s father. No story arcs are resolved in The Empire Strikes Back, and viewers end the film with more questions than at the start. “It’ll be just like that,” Staten thought at the time. “Well, no. The Empire Strikes Back did a whole bunch of other little cool things that made that okay, which we didn’t do.” Staten’s confidence was based on the fact that the Dervish character–the Arbiter in the final game–had been carefully refined. He and Jones wanted him to be a protagonist that was interesting enough so that players weren’t disappointed to not always be playing as Master Chief. Halo 2 actually told two stories: that of a hero who is celebrated at the very start of the game, and in parallel the story of a defeated foe, condemned to a suicide mission. The former wanted to save his people, the latter to save his soul. The Arbiter’s story arc

is interesting in that as the missions progress, he learns that he has been lied to his whole life. His reactions are full of nuance, and ultimately very human. “Arbiter is a real challenge to the story because he’s not the Chief. He’s not human,” Jason Jones would explain in the making of Halo 2. “People identify with humans. People care about humans more. So we really have to put the Arbiter in a position in the story where he matters and where the player cares about him.” This meant that some sequences of the game had to be rewritten, like the Arbiter’s very first mission. Sent to a Forerunner gas mine located not far from the first Halo, where he had failed in his duties, the Sangheili was tasked with tracking down and killing the leader of a group of dissident heretics. It was originally planned that the heretic leader would be a Hunter, one of those enormous, armored creatures encountered in the first game. In fact, most of the heretics were supposed to be Hunters, who had gathered on a small moon visible from the first game’s Halo. The idea was quickly dropped. Firstly, because the Hunters were far too ferocious to feature in large numbers in a single level, and secondly because making the heretic leader an Elite facilitated the Arbiter’s character development: indeed, he would more readily doubt his beliefs when called into question by one of his own kind than by a gigantic armored monster with whom he had almost nothing in common. What’s more, by playing as the Arbiter, players could, for the very first time, wield a Covenant energy sword and use the stealth shield that rendered Elites invisible. Bungie did all it could to make the Arbiter attractive to players, whether through his personality or his gameplay. The studio needed to make this new character cool and interesting, especially because as work in the game progressed the studio was forced to scrap a number of levels, most of which were played as Master Chief. The level set on Cairo Station was scaled back, having initially tasked players with loading the bomb the Covenant had placed on the station onto a trailer. Master Chief would then have to tow the bomb through an entire section of the station before launching it out into space. “The original plan was to

have a level after this one called Covenant Ship,” Staten tells us. “And the Master Chief, much like he did in that announcement trailer for Halo 2, there was no bomb, he would man-up, pop the airlock, land on the Covenant Ship, tear it apart from the inside.” So that was a whole level that was removed from the game: Master Chief was going to hijack a Wraith (a Covenant tank) and make his way through the cruiser to find the engine room and blow its drive. But Covenant Ship wasn’t the only vehiclebased level not to make the final cut: shortly thereafter, Bungie also decided to cut a level called Forerunner Tank, which came just after Master Chief killed the Prophet of Regret. Under fire from the main canon of a Covenant destroyer, Master Chief would have to mount a new vehicle, a Forerunner tank, which he would use to travel across an entire level, dodging the Gravemind’s huge tentacles while making his way up to the caves inhabited by the Flood’s core intelligence. Designed in haste by Robert McLees, who saw the Gravemind as a sock puppet, the monster was supposed to have a much greater role in the game’s plot, but both its role and its screen-time would be limited to a few cutscenes. As for the Forerunner tank, it would disappear from the game completely. According to Jason Jones, the man behind the Forerunner tank, it was supposed to “be awesome, blow things up, glow a lot from little windows, move real fast.” Sounds like it would have been fun! Jason Jones’ return and the arrival of reinforcements from the Phoenix, Monster Hunter and Gypsum teams got the development of Halo 2 back on track, but the amount of work left to do was no less gargantuan. The studio was working almost round the clock for almost an entire year. And then what had to happen, happened: after a few months of crunch, the first signs of burn-out reared their ugly heads. It affected everyone, beginning with Jones himself. Sam Charchian, one of the Xbox Live team at Microsoft, recalls how, “It was just insane. I remember Jason Jones… I was walking over to visit those guys, and Jason Jones was walking out. He could barely walk. He was staggering like someone who was drunk, running into the walls. He hadn’t slept in like two days or something.” The

engineers weren’t faring any better, still hard at work developing a new engine for Halo 2. There were putting in unlimited overtime, because a lot of things depended on their work. “I had a log that I kept, of the times I went into work and the times I left work,” Chris Butcher remembers. “Day after day after day, seven days a week, getting in reasonably early and then not leaving before 11 at night. Seven days a week, for months and months…” More than any other team, Bungie’s engineers were under incredible pressure, because all progress made by the studio’s other departments depended on their own advances. That’s not to say that the other teams could take it easy: they needed to be ready for when the game engine was playable to test out the gameplay, levels, and features. Paul Bertone was now the lead missions designer, meaning that he was now responsible for designing all of the game’s missions. He needed to consider the gameplay as well as working with the studio’s different artists, especially those who were working on the environments in which his missions were set. When the game engine was changed, it meant that a lot of levels had to be redone, and as we’ve seen some were scrapped completely. Most of them, however, were scaled back or redesigned to fit the various changes to Halo 2’s plot. For Bertone, who had been pulled off his dream project, the Halo 2 crunch was particularly hard to swallow. But he wasn’t ready to quit just yet. “I slept at the office some obscene amount of days in a row, like almost an entire month at the end,” he recalls. “I kenneled my dog for almost two months. There would be mornings I’d wake up at home and not remember how I got there, and many others where I’d wake up at my desk, or somebody else’s. It was that way for a lot of people.” And this punishing pace didn’t only have an effect on the health of a few developers, it also started to affect the relationships between members of the studio, especially the old hands. Bertone now acknowledges that, “A lot of relationships got fractured, and that felt irreparable, at the time.” Martin O’Donnell could only agree: “The Halo 2 crunch was bad and damaged a lot of people’s personal lives. It hurt the team and broke some relationships inside the studio. Some of those broken relationships reverberate to this day.” The big

problem, though, was that while some conflicts were brewing inhouse, outside it was already open warfare.

WRANGLING WITH MICROSOFT When Bungie found itself with no other option than to start work on its game engine again from scratch in summer 2003, it meant that Jason Jones would have to take it up the ladder. Before that, though, he turned to Pete Parsons, who had been Bungie’s new studio manager since Alex Seropian’s departure. Parsons wasn’t one of Bungie’s new staff: he was part of the Xbox division where he had been part of the marketing team that launched the console. A video game fanatic, Parsons was delighted to be working in such close proximity to a studio as special as Bungie, and he soon developed a solid relationship with its staff. However, he still had to play the boss, which led to some tense discussions. When Jones told him that they’d need to push back the release date for Halo 2, Parsons panicked. Indeed, the Xbox division had never thought it would have to wait so long, and had already been putting pressure on Bungie to make an announcement about Halo 2 at E3 2002. But this was something that Jones and his team were in no position to do, especially because, in early 2002, Bungie was busy overseeing the international release of Halo: Combat Evolved, which included the localization process, for example. So while an announcement was indeed made in late September 2002, that wasn’t really in sync with Microsoft’s plans. A fact that some Xbox execs were not shy about airing in public. In The Xbox 360 Uncloaked, a book by journalist Dean Takahashi, there’s a quote from a Bungie employee who preferred to remain anonymous: “There was a lot of pressure. Some of it was dumb pressure.” Parsons, therefore, was well aware that a delay wouldn’t go down well with Microsoft, and the conversation ended up in Ed Fries’ office. Thankfully, Bungie had a special place in Ed Fries’ heart: he liked their games, he liked their philosophy and, most importantly, he wanted to inculcate a new mentality at Microsoft. Fries saw video game developers as artists, and as such

they couldn’t be expected to work like other developers at the company. They weren’t making word processing software, nor network infrastructure; they were creating works of art out of the ether. But this vision wasn’t one shared by everyone at Microsoft, or even in some sections of the video game industry itself. Fries, Parsons, and Jones carried on their conversation over a number of days, and word of it reached other personalities within Bungie, like Martin O’Donnell. The musician ended up having a heated argument with Pete Parsons when he tried to defend one of Microsoft’s main points: the need to get the game out before the end of the current financial year. That meant before the summer of 2004. “He said, ‘Marty, it’s inconceivable for us [Halo 2] to not be a launch title for Xbox Live,’ which was coming in November 2002, just a year after the first Halo’s release,” O’Donnell recalls. “And I said, ‘Yeah, and I want to have a baby in four months. There are just things that cannot happen.’ He told me, ‘You’ve got to understand that Microsoft has already planned their fiscal year.’ I said, ‘Fuck the fiscal year!’ Which became sort of a statement that everybody knew at the studio. I wasn’t saying screw Microsoft–I explained the only way you truly motivate a game development team, and especially Bungie, is by saying we have to get this done for E3, or get it finished for Christmas. If you say, ‘Oh, we need to get this done for the fiscal year,’ they just won’t. They will not do it. “Jones couldn’t agree more with O’Donnell. He told Fries that the studio could get the game out by spring 2004, but then most of the developers would hand in their resignation once it was done. Indeed, a motto had held sway over Bungie since its very earliest days: “‘Good enough’ sucks,” which reflected the mindset of the studio’s staff who refused to release a game that merely ticked all the boxes. Bungie liked to go all out with its games and give players a game that they could be proud of. Settling for less from Halo 2 to cater to Microsoft’s purely financial considerations was something that Bungie could never agree to. Fries, for one, took Jones’ warning very seriously. Back when Microsoft was in the process of acquiring Bungie, Fries was worried that some of the staff would choose to resign, but Fries and Stuart Moulder, accompanied by Seropian and Jones, had managed to

persuade most of the developers to join them in Seattle. And here, again, Fries understood that Bungie had reached a pivotal moment. The kind that could kill the studio for good. As it happened, the big shots in the Xbox division were meeting in July 2003 to come to a decision. Fries already knew that he wouldn’t be leaving victorious. For Robbie Bach, the head honcho at Xbox, and Jay Allard, the division’s hardware director, the needs of the platform took precedence over those of any individual game, including Halo. Of course, Fries disagreed with this standpoint, and a lengthy debate ensued. At the meeting, there was one man who was yet to make up his mind. That man was Peter Moore, the new Xbox marketing director. A colorful character, he had started working for Microsoft at the beginning of the year. He had never previously been a gamer, but he quickly grew passionate about this industry with a character all of its own. Originally from the United Kingdom, he had moved to the USA with his girlfriend when he was just 20 years old. He finished his college education, earned a masters from California State University Long Beach, before getting a job at Patrick USA, the American subsidiary of the French parts manufacturer. Passionate about sport and with a real gift for showcasing his products, Moore was headhunted by Reebok, where he worked until the late 1990s. It would be SEGA’s American division that gave him his start in the video game industry. In preparation for the launch of its new console, the Dreamcast, SEGA was looking for someone who could craft a new message and generate a tangible shift in how the brand was perceived outside of Japan. Moore worked at SEGA for 18 months, becoming the main face of the brand in the United States, which saw him pop up on most major publishers’ radars. A number of them soon began courting him, but it was Microsoft that ultimately persuaded him to join the Xbox division. When he sat down in the meeting with Bach, Fries, Allard, and a few others, he had been doing a lot of thinking: Xbox had been working on its new console for months now, and everyone was hoping that Bungie would be able to deliver a new instalment in the Halo series in time for the Xbox 360 launch. But while he was

listening to Fries, Moore realized that if Halo 2’s release was postponed, then the next Halo game would also be pushed back, and wouldn’t be ready for the Xbox 360 launch line-up. This was a red line for Microsoft. The software giant had accepted that it would lose billions of dollars on the first Xbox as the price of entry into the highly competitive games console market. But its next console would need to reverse this trend and make the Xbox the new industry leader. In the end, when Bach suggested a show of hands to decide whether Bungie should deliver Halo 2 before the end of that financial year, the result was compelling, with only Fries voting against the motion. Which isn’t to say he took it well. A model Microsoft employee for almost 20 years, Fries had led an exemplary career at Microsoft, quickly becoming one of the most respected figures in the company. But when he joined the Xbox division, he never thought he would have to fight so hard to see that the creatives were given their due respect. The months following the release of Halo: Combat Evolved were hard for Fries, who had unfortunately received little in return for the trust he had placed in certain studios. Take Tim Schafer’s new game, for example. Psychonauts had been in development for almost four years, but the game was still not ready despite Microsoft spending millions of dollars. Despite Fries’ support, Schafer was denied any further funding and was forced to walk out. As for Lorne Lanning, the brain behind Oddworld, when he saw that Xbox was losing the console wars against Sony, he negotiated his departure and set sail for brighter horizons. That left Freelancer, the new game from Chris Roberts. The creator of the successful Wing Commander series had opened a new studio named Digital Anvil in the second half of the 1990s. Its aim? To create the ultimate space sim, the one Roberts had always dreamed of. Wing Commander was a kind of sketch, a rough draft, and his new game Freelancer should blow it out of the water. But it was an expensive endeavor. The project attracted the interest of Ed Fries, who signed a contract with Roberts. Unfortunately, Freelancer’s development would be weighed down by a series or poor decisions, beginning with those made by Roberts himself who, after a few

months at work, packed his bags and headed for Hollywood to work on a Wing Commander movie. The movie was a total flop, but Freelancer was still leeching money from Microsoft. Microsoft would eventually buy the studio, which caused Roberts to resign, despite being the main director of Freelancer. In spite of these difficult conditions, it would be Erin Roberts, Chris’ brother and erstwhile partner, who would finish the job and deliver the game in early 2003. Unfortunately for Fries, his investment failed to pay off yet again, and Freelancer recorded very poor sales. All of which meant that when the time came to determine the destiny of Halo 2, Fries did not find himself in a strong bargaining position. Yes, he had been behind a few fine successes, but his portfolio also included some costly failures. But more than that, he was tired of having to fight to protect the games he believed in. He’d seen it play out again and again: imposing a schedule on artists didn’t work. In fact, the effect was often detrimental. Fries refused to let Bungie suffer the same fate, and when Bach and the others voted in favor of a spring 2004 release date for Halo 2, he tendered his resignation. If he wasn’t going to get enough time to see Halo 2 developed within a time frame that Bungie deemed acceptable, then he would be walking out the door. This was a “road to Damascus” moment for Bach and Moore, who were completely blindsided. Fries was very popular at Microsoft; they liked him and didn’t want to fall out with him, and so the fact that he was willing to resign over this ultimately made them listen to reason. Following negotiations with Pete Parsons, Jason Jones and Hamilton Chu, the game’s lead producer, it was agreed that Halo 2 would be ready for November 2004. It was in this atmosphere of tension that would begin the long crunch of Halo 2, a crunch that would demolish morale among Bungie employees, and foster Bungie’s feelings of defiance against its owner. Bungie’s tribulations during Halo 2’s development are now common knowledge, but some of those involved have a different take on this challenging period. One such person is Jaime Griesemer who, in 2017, expressed a very different opinion on the

events of that time. In particular, he criticized the edit of Halo 2’s making-of video that shipped with the limited-edition version of the game. In his eyes, things had been made to seem more melodramatic than they were. “If you watch the documentary we made for Halo 2, man, there’s a lot of whining. Instead of looking at how can we learn and move forward, the narrative became poor us, pity party, we all have PTSD, we can never let this happen again. That was a real changing point in the attitude of how we made Halo games, where we just stopped kind of pulling out all the stops and really going for it. Before, it used to be part of the culture to challenge people to do more. And all of a sudden it was: stop asking people to do more, don’t you remember what happened last time? It became really hard to break any new ground. I think that was when the turn-the-crank mentality started.”

HALO 2 AND XBOX LIVE: LIKE PEAS AND CARROTS In November 2002, Xbox launched Xbox Live, its online gaming service. Following a lengthy development process, Xbox Live ended up going live later than planned after encountering the same kind of design complications that plagued the Xbox itself. The first presentations of Microsoft’s new service certainly generated plenty of feedback, it’s just that most of it was negative. Some major publishers, such as Electronic Arts, could not understand why Microsoft should generate more income from their games, giving rise to a series of disputes. And the press was no kinder to Xbox Live; just like among the gaming community, still fresh in their memories was the fate of SEGA’s final console, the Dreamcast. The Dreamcast already boasted a working online gaming system as far back as 1998, but that wasn’t enough to stop the console’s speedy demise. In the early 2000s, the internet was still seen as just another gadget, and online gaming was a pastime for wealthy, technophile gamers. The question on everyone’s lips, then, was why was Xbox pushing so hard for it? Ed Fries’ face lights up at the memory: “The console world kind of pushed back and said ‘those are not console-y things

to do, you guys don’t get it.’ But we really did get it because we have already seen it be successful on the PC. We had seen that multiplayer play is the future.” Despite these warnings, a number of figures within the Xbox team were ready to bet the farm on online gaming. Jay Allard, in particular. An internet fanatic since the technology was still in its infancy in the 1990s, the Xbox hardware director had a dream of his own: to enable Microsoft’s first console to bring gamers from around the world together. It would be a major selling proposition, representing a technological and social quantum leap like very few others in the history of video games. He was the main voice agitating for Microsoft’s first console to come with an Ethernet port. But it was a long battle to get there, against others on his team as well as elsewhere in the company. The most skeptical included Bill Gates himself, who Allard thought he would be able to win over. He was so confident that he made a bet with Cam Ferroni, one of the execs on the freshly formed Xbox team: he wagered one thousand dollars that he could get Gates to change his mind before the end of 1999, a date that gave him three months to pull it off. It was Ferroni who would end up $1,000 richer. But that wasn’t enough for Allard to walk away with his tail between his legs, and he continued to launch meetings, research, and projects so that the Xbox could offer an online gaming service that was more comprehensive, more polished than that of the Dreamcast. To that end, he visited Boyd Multerer in August 2000 and asked him to find the best way to make use of the Ethernet port. Multerer then formed the first full-time team dedicated to developing Xbox Live, which was then known simply as Xbox Online. This did not go unnoticed within the Xbox team, where many thought that forming a team for that purpose was a waste of resources more than anything else, a distraction that the Xbox could little afford, especially now that the console was behind schedule. And nobody shared Allard’s belief in the mass uptake of broadband internet. Allard, though, was convinced that as soon as broadband became available, large numbers of households would have the equipment needed for online gaming to make a breakthrough. Allard was basing his predictions on his experience, but not just that, because he had sent members

of his team traveling across the United States to meet with internet service providers (ISP) and get a picture of what the American internet network would look like over the years to come. This series of meetings held in the early 2000s only served to encourage Allard, because every single ISP demonstrated real enthusiasm for Microsoft’s plans: just as Allard had thought, in the next two or three years the number of broadband connections would have skyrocketed, and the advent of console-based online gaming could encourage even more households to take out contracts for ADSL broadband. Over time, Allard was gradually able to establish the idea that Xbox Live would soon become one of the Xbox’s key features, and better yet, that it would make Microsoft a pioneer and give it a considerable head start on the next generation of games consoles. He won the support of Bill Gates and all the other Xbox execs, and all they needed to do was to market the service. And so the full force of Microsoft’s marketing apparatus was brought to bear on Xbox Live. Xbox enlisted two NFL stars, Payton Manning and Matt Hasselbeck, and had them play each other on NFL Fever 2002. The two players were physically located on different continents, and filmed by the Microsoft teams so that every second of this historic match could be recorded for posterity. Hasselbeck won, much to the consternation of the Indianapolis Colts’ quarterback. For the launch of Xbox Live on November 14, 2002, a launch party was held, during which Samuel L. Jackson would stand off against Freddie Prinze Jr on NBA 2K. The game would be played online, of course, even if they were both in the same room. Back on the Microsoft campus, Allard got his team together in the canteen, where they settled down with an Xbox and a few controllers. Allard and Ferroni launched MechAssault, one of the first Xbox One compatible games, and waited for a player to join them. When a stranger joined their game in the middle of a match, Allard and Ferroni turned on their mics and greeted the newcomer, explaining that they were part of the Xbox team and that he was one of the very first people to log in to Xbox

Live. The young man couldn’t believe his ears. He was overjoyed and played a few games with the Xbox team before they had to go. And yet, Microsoft wasn’t entirely satisfied: yes, Xbox Live was now online, and it was proving somewhat successful thanks to games like Ubisoft’s Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow. But it was still far from realizing its full potential. To get there, it needed Halo. The first game had proven a runaway success after its release, but it had no online gaming compatibility. And because Bungie wouldn’t let Microsoft hand its baby over to another studio to make a Halo 1.5 that was compatible with Xbox Live, the software giant was champing at the bit. Bungie was working on Halo 2 and fully intended to make it the spearhead of Xbox Live. Perhaps even the best multiplayer game ever released. Online gaming had been part of Bungie’s DNA since the studio was first founded, or near enough. Jason Jones was fascinated with it, and he’d invented a series of highly impressive solutions to play games on the internet at a time when resources were more than limited. It was natural, then, that Jones and some of his oldest colleagues saw in Xbox Live a way to make their wildest dreams a reality, dreams that they had themselves been chasing for years. Halo 2 would not be just another online FPS of the kind that were ten-a-penny on PC: it had to represent a real step forward for the whole video game industry. This was why Bungie and Microsoft would be working very closely together from 2003 to 2004. Because the studio had lots of ideas already, and was waiting for Xbox Live to evolve into something that could truly showcase Halo 2. The good news for the Xbox team was that Bungie had already been working on various concepts for its game, and some of them could be used in any game compatible with Xbox Live. Thanks to Bungie, Xbox Live would gradually incorporate the features that would build its reputation, and that are still in use today. And not just on Microsoft consoles. “The Xbox Team, we could develop with them or help them design and develop what they called the Tsunami Features Set,” Harold Ryan recounts. “Which was a lot of the new Live matchmaking features. We built our own friends list, with which you can now do friends and friends parties in

the Xbox Live dash. But we built it in Halo 2 first.” Bungie planned to create a real “virtual sofa,” where players could sit down and play together. The idea was simple: give gamers all the features they need to forget that they are miles apart, so that they can play together as easily as if they were sitting next to each other in the same room. In the early 2000s, it was perfectly possible to play and chat over voice in real time, especially on PC. However, the chatting part generally required a separate voice chat program, like TeamSpeak, and players needed to swap IP addresses so that they could connect to the same servers. It was functional, if not always practical, but it didn’t always run smoothly and could be annoying. For Halo 2, Bungie wanted players to be able to press a single button to be able to play and chat together, so the solution had to be simple and fast. It would be made possible via two major innovations in the video game industry: the friends party system, and a brand new kind of matchmaking. The former enabled two or more players to connect together, and then because they were in the same chat, they could then play with or against each other more easily. As for the matchmaking, it automatically looked for opponents at a similar level to the player’s own team, using a ranking system designed by Bungie. This was absolutely vital for Jones. “It’s hard to play with people that are a lower skill level than you, even if you really like them,” he explains. “Because you’re probably gonna lose more often, and you’re not gonna have as much fun. If I play with Chris, the two of us are ranked together as a team, and if he’s not as good as me, then that’s gonna take down my rank. The point is, Chris sucks.” To this Bungie added a new idea–playlists–which would allow players to choose what kind of games they wanted to play. Deathmatch, capture the flag… It was the person holding the controller who called the shots. This was a genuine revolution for the video-gaming world, and Bungie knew it. Even while the studio was in turmoil and the Halo 2 crunch was consuming the team, Chris Butcher remained optimistic: “If we do this right, if we are able to really pull off the engine and Xbox Live, in the social community… It’s gonna destroy everything else that’s out here.” Bungie’s ideas were met with real interest from the Xbox Live team, who would

immediately incorporate them into basic features of both the service and the console. The interface was redesigned to accommodate these new features, and to make it easier for players to access them. The Bungie executives were delighted, of course, since it would be hugely beneficial for Halo 2. After a few playtests, Jones was over the moon: “It was really amazing to get online for the first time when there were a bunch of people online, and just press the button and say, ‘I want to play,’ ‘Go find me some other people that want to play and choose a game type that’s pretty cool, and just stick me in it as fast as you can.’ And to have that process happen in like, five seconds was really incredible.” While the Xbox Live features of Bungie’s design were soon ready to go, the same could not be said of Halo 2’s actual multiplayer mode. It was the same story as for the single player campaign, with the first game engine’s shortcomings and its total overhaul. When they started out, the teams led by Max Hoberman envisaged a multiplayer mode that was very different to that found in the first Halo game. They intended games based around objectives, played on huge maps; basically, a return to what Halo was supposed to be like before it became an Xbox game. This time, they had a bigger team, more resources, and much better knowledge of what the console could do. And so they got to work on an initial prototype, which looked a lot like a game mode that is very familiar to fans of Halo today: the Warzone that was introduced in Halo 5: Guardians. It worked quite well, but would take an insane amount of work and mean putting multiplayer on the backburner once again, just like with Halo: Combat Evolved. This didn’t go down too well with Max Hoberman, who had been entrusted with overseeing the development of Halo 2’s multiplayer mode. He remembers, “All the stuff that had been such a huge hit in Halo was just being thrown out the window. I argued that we had to support people that wanted to play locally–through split-screen and LAN play. And that people loved the Halo multiplayer, so even if it wasn’t what we originally planned we needed to have it in there, and it would be a huge mistake not to.” Hoberman took his arguments to Alex Seropian (this

was before Seropian resigned) as well as to Jason Jones. The two co-founders agreed with him: Halo 2  must not have fewer features than the first game. Jones and Seropian then asked him to form a small team that would be tasked with developing a multiplayer mode similar to the one in Halo: Combat Evolved in parallel to the new mode, named Warfare. The team made such blistering progress that when the first issues arose in 2003 and Bungie decided to create a new game engine, Hoberman’s multiplayer mode was the only part of the game that was far enough along. Warfare, however, was at a standstill. Levels had been designed and the artists had created a number of environments, but the game designers weren’t able to come up with anything that was both different and fun. The concept was ultimately abandoned, and all of Hoberman’s team returned to work on the standard multiplayer, but he could still see the funny side: “The rest of the team called small-scale multiplayer the party game, which I thought was a little derisive.” But whatever their opinion, these reinforcements would prove vital, because it meant that Halo 2’s multiplayer now had a larger workforce behind it. A handful of developers had worked on multiplayer mode in Halo: Combat Evolved; Halo 2’s version could count on almost 20. It was on a completely different scale, and to a completely different budget. This time, nobody had to learn how to knock up a few levels on the job and in record time: Halo 2 had Chris Carney and Steve Cotton, two level designers assigned to building the different maps. A decision was made to use the environments designed for the singleplayer campaign as the inspiration, to link the two sections of the game and generate some internal consistency: it wasn’t about just making multiplayer maps, but also places that the player wasn’t able to go in the singleplayer mode. These maps help to flesh out the Halo universe, so they needed to fuel the fans’ imaginations. But the substance was just as important as the form, which was why Halo 2’s maps underwent extensive playtesting, one after another, by almost everyone at the studio. It was a job that the staff were only too happy to do, sometimes for hours every day. While Halo 2’s development was coming along well and the studio was making up lost time, the multiplayer playtesting sessions also served as a

teambuilding exercise, and a good way to take their minds off their work. Some used the sessions to settle old scores with a smile. But it was also a chance to check whether particular ideas actually worked. Ideas like offering players asymmetrical maps: “On almost every Halo 1  map, we had two bases that were pretty identical,” Chris Carney explains. “And at the beginning of Halo 2, we were trying to think of different ways where we could make our maps more asymmetrical. It’s fun to play as the attacker and it’s fun to play as the defender.” In Halo 2, one map expresses this idea particularly well, and it was a huge hit inside the studio. That map was Zanzibar. The attackers spawned on a sandy beach where there was a Warthog (equipped with a Gauss canon) and a Ghost. As for the defenders, they spawned on the other side of the map in a fortified building with a number of entrances, some of which led to machine gun emplacements up above. At the exit from the base, there was also a standard Warthog and another Ghost. Zanzibar was split across the middle by a gargantuan turbine, which forced the attackers in their vehicles to approach the base from a single direction. The map contained several different sections and lots of ways to interact with the environment, which meant that players could try out different tactics every time. Bungie had hit the nail on the head, and knew it had created a memorable map. For E3 2004, Bungie preferred not to show a new demo of the single-player campaign, instead deciding to showcase its new multiplayer engine. The map it chose to showcase was, of course, Zanzibar. New weapons, new vehicles (the Warthog with Gauss cannon), and most importantly new gameplay possibilities thanks to vehicle hijacking and dual wielding: the map was a great way to show what the game’s main new features could do, in just a few matches. At E3, it soon became apparent to anyone who was able to try out Halo 2 that the game would be a huge boon for the Xbox and Xbox Live, even more so than the first game.

A STAR-STUDDED SOUNDTRACK

While the whole team was plowing ahead with the development of Halo 2, one man in particular was less concerned by the project’s almost total reboot. It was true that Martin O’Donnell needed the plot to be finalized and the levels finished before he could put them to music, and it was all the more true that he needed the game engine to be finished before he could add the various sound effects for which he was responsible, but that said, he didn’t need a game engine to try out his creations. This meant that he was able to get to work on the soundtrack at a very early stage, and begin the composing process. One day, the phone rang: it was Nile Rodgers telling him that he knew a lot of people who would like to work with him on the soundtrack. He also said that if he liked, he could send him anyone he liked. Rodgers wasn’t one to brag, nor to tell tall tales: he was a world-renowned musician and producer and he had a huge list of contacts. O’Donnell’s curiosity was well and truly piqued, and he asked Rodgers who might want to work on Halo 2. He was very surprised to hear Rodgers name Steve Vai, one of the greatest rock guitarists of all time. “Here was somebody who could bring something truly unique to Halo 2,” O’Donnell thought. O’Donnell was familiar with Vai and really liked his work, so out of all the musicians that Rodgers suggested, Vai was the one he chose. A few months later, and O’Donnell received another call from his producer friend: he should book a recording studio because Vai was going to be in Seattle for a gig. They thought it would “Be a chance to record a few bits and pieces.” The session would actually last over three hours. After letting Vai listen to what he had already composed, O’Donnell guided the guitarist and let him improvise over certain sections. This was how Steve Vai came to perform, in his unique way, the main Halo theme. “I said ‘It would be great if you could play these melodies, and then play again and play some rhythms under it,’” O’Donnell recalls. “He and I went through a bunch of the pieces, and put it together that way. But of course, he came up with his own way of doing it.” That night, O’Donnell and Marcie, his wife, were guests at Vai’s concert, who met with them after the show. And the rock star was delighted: before going on stage, Vai had called his two sons to tell them that he’d been working on the Halo 2

soundtrack. The two kids were fans of Halo and greeted the news with unbridled enthusiasm. “He says, ‘Thank you, now I’m a cool dad.’ And I’m like ‘How is that even possible, you’re Steve Vai, how much cooler can you be?’” O’Donnell regales us, laughing. Even though he had enjoyed playing for O’Donnell and showed a real interest in the work of Bungie’s in-house composer, Vai didn’t play Halo and he’d gotten involved because he’d been asked. Other musicians, though, were far more eager. Aware that Nile Rodgers was in contact with Bungie and O’Donnell, a series of artists contacted the producer hoping to get a small gig on the soundtrack. Artists like Incubus and Breaking Benjamin, who would meet with O’Donnell while they were passing through Seattle and let him listen to what they had made for the game. Breaking Benjamin’s track, named Blow Me Away, was problematic because it featured lyrics, and the singing didn’t really blend in with the rest of the music, and in any case, it overloaded the player’s soundscape. Breaking Benjamin sent O’Donnell a new version of their track without the lyrics, which would go on to be included in the last part of Halo 2. As for Incubus, they spared no expense and recorded an entire suite, Odyssey, composed of four movements. The first was a progressive rock track called Follow, and it’s what can be heard when the Arbiter confronts the heretic leader’s troops aboard a Banshee. The track didn’t go down too well with Jason Jones, and he said so. In truth, the boss at Bungie didn’t like any of the outside contributions to the game’s soundtrack, preferring the work of the studio’s own composer, for whom he had a lot of admiration. “Marty’s pretty amazing,” he would say. “Marty makes pretty much everything we do twice as good, and that makes me really angry, ‘cause he’s just about the only individual who has that level of contribution to the team. But I would never say that to him.” So while he might not personally like these new tracks, he gave free rein to his composer, who was working with a series of different artists, including bands like Hoobastank and artists like John Mayer, who was not credited in the game… at least not under his real name. Mayer preferred to keep his agents out of it, and to keep things relatively straightforward: “He said ‘Don’t credit me or I’ll

get into trouble.’ He said ‘But just put my Gamertag in the special thanks, and then I could show all my friends.’” O’Donnell tells us, also sharing his surprise at learning that Mayer wasn’t just a successful pop act, but also an excellent guitarist. These regular visits by big-name musicians, as well as the casting of more famous actors–like Ron Perlman and Michelle Rodriguez– tickled the staff at Bungie, who gently poked fun at O’Donnell. They wondered if he didn’t have delusions of grandeur. But the composer kept a clear head and never hesitated to ditch anything that didn’t work for him or the game: it wasn’t a matter of getting more and more stars on board just to attract more players. This is why Maroon 5 don’t appear on the game’s soundtrack, despite being some of the first to express an interest in getting involved.

ILOVEBEES: AN XXL MARKETING CAMPAIGN At the other side of the Millennium campus, Microsoft was also keeping itself busy. We were now well into 2004 and they needed to plan for the release of Halo 2. At E3 2004, Peter Moore put on a show: on stage, he promised that the game would suffer no further delays, and announced the official release date. To prove that his word was his bond, he rolled up his sleeve to reveal a huge tattoo of the Halo 2 logo accompanied by the date “November 9.” It was a carefully prepared piece of showmanship from the Xbox marketing director, who had tried to keep his colleagues guessing while getting ready for the event: “During the dress rehearsal day, the day before, he walked around all day with his arm exposed, and a bloody patch on his arm,” O’Donnell recalls with a glint of amusement in his eye. “He was doing that just to mess with everybody. But we knew that something was gonna happen.” Even today, when it seems obvious that the tattoo was a fake, Moore maintains that it was real, a joke he has kept going for 15 years and that still makes him burst out laughing. In fact, he found it so funny that in 2007, when he announced the release date for GTA IV at the Xbox’s E3 press conference, he unveiled a new tattoo, this time on his left arm.

Unfortunately for him, the date on the tattoo (October  16th, 2007) was not the date that Rockstar’s game would ultimately be released, because GTA IV would not hit the shelves until April 29, 2008. But that was all just an appetizer for Moore, who wanted bigger things for Halo 2. It was one of the most eagerly anticipated games of that generation of consoles, and the marketing campaign had to be worthy of the game. That was when Moore decided to contact Jordan Weisman, the former boss of FASA Interactive. Weisman had left Microsoft in early 2002, shortly after the first Halo game was released. He had then set up a new company, Whiz Kids, which made children’s toys, before selling it on and founding 42 Entertainment. That was where he used his skills as a game designer to create a new kind of marketing campaign, known as ARG, for Alternate Reality Games. These generally took the form of paper chases or treasure hunts based on the universe of the product in question. The aim, naturally, was to get participants ever more interested in the product, interest that converted into purchases when the product was released. This kind of campaign was of interest for a number of reasons, especially its ability to reach people that initially have zero interest in the product in question. Because if they were done well, alternate reality games could win over fans of puzzles of any kind, gradually reaching ever more curious consumers. Weisman already had a few fine successes under his belt, like the The Beast ARG that accompanied the launch of Steven Spielberg’s film, AI, in the summer of the year 2000. In the United States, The Beast was played by some three million people before being applauded in the national press that was surprised at how innovative the campaign was. And all of that at a low cost, because alternate reality games were relatively cheap to produce. Chris Di Cesare, one of the members of Moore’s team, remembered The Beast, and he was the one who put the idea to Peter Moore, who gave his approval for a Halo ARG. With a team of a dozen or so staff, Di Cesare and Weisman would come up with a story about the UNSC Apocalypso, which one day finds a relic of unknown origin floating out in space. When the crew attempts to examine the relic,

there’s a massive explosion. The explosion splits the ship’s AI, Melissa, into a several different fragments, one of which is sent back to the past, to 2004. The campaign was launched in July 2004, at the same time as the Halo 2 release trailer was being shown in American cinemas. At the end of the trailer, the Xbox logo faded out and the name of a website appeared: www.ilovebees.com. But that was not all, because at the same time well-known figures within the ARG fan community were receiving mysterious honey pots from someone named Margaret Efendi. It was at this moment that the game began in earnest, because each of the honey pots contained a letter. When all the letters were combined, they spelled Ilovebees. That’s when they knew something was happening. The players quickly found the website belonging to Efendi, who appeared to be a beekeeper just like any other in the USA. But by digging around in the website’s code, they found a countdown timer, set to end on August 24. More similarly strange things were found, such as links to a blog by Efendi’s niece, who begged players to help her aunt repair her blog. It only took them a few days to find terrifying calls for help from an entity named The Operator. What followed was a complex series of events, but to keep it simple, players teamed up in their thousands all over the country to track down phone boxes where they could find more clues. Almost five hours of dialog had been recorded which, when played end-to-end, revealed that the Covenant had discovered the location of Earth. Ilovebees went viral in the USA in just a few weeks, on a scale that Microsoft had never dared dream. The company estimates that the campaign reached around three hundred million people, with 1.5 million people getting involved to some extent. During a TV debate between presidential candidates George W. Bush and John Kerry, a sign saying “I love bees” was spotted; in Canada, an American player taking part in the investigation was arrested by the border police, because he had entered Canada without permission; another defied a stay-at-home order from the authorities and left to find a phone box while a tornado ravaged the county. Ilovebees was a resounding success and received a number of awards, much to the delight of Jordan Weisman and Microsoft. As for Bungie, while it had been consulted

and had approved the storyline used in the campaign, the studio played only a very minor role in its design. Ilovebees ran for almost four months, ending just a few days before the release of Halo 2, and by then, the studio had far more pressing concerns.

A RECORD-BREAKING LAUNCH The final months of Halo 2’s development were an all-out effort. Despite the long hours, and despite the amount of work left to do, the studio could see light at the end of the tunnel, and what had been a desperate crunch became a more sustainable one. In the final moments of the development process, all the parts designed by different teams started coming together to make a full game, a real game, and one that worked. Jaime Griesemer probably says it best when describing this singular moment in the Halo 2 development process: “I like to think of it as jumping out of an airplane, with some silkworms and a needle, and having to make your parachute on the way down.” This feeling of exhilaration could be felt by everyone in the studio, because even though work was continuing at a blistering pace, the end was near, and Bungie knew that Halo 2 would be a great game. Paul Bertone, who had pulled a series of all-nighters and had only rarely been sleeping at home, shared Griesemer’s sentiment: “It feels to me like the excitement is coming back. Getting the missions together is pretty huge, it’s something that people haven’t seen for three years.” As surprising as it may seem, despite this marathon crunch, the studio found an explosive second wind when it reached the home straight. The staff weren’t getting any more rest, but they managed to find the energy for a final push so that they could together finish making the game they started working on more than two years ago. “Every day, I see something brand-new that blows me away,” Marcus Lehto recounts. I’m like ‘Gosh, how did you guys do that? It’s really neat stuff.’ It excites me, it makes me do better work. It makes all these other guys do better work.” Bungie used the end of the development process to refine the gameplay. It was perhaps the vehicles that were given the most

attention, receiving new features, some of which were a bit dumb, like the Warthog’s horn. But because they were designed and developed in half an hour, according to Jaime Griesemer, they didn’t take up much of the developers’ time, who already had a lot of work to do on the Ghost and Banshee. These two vehicles now boasted enhanced handling, including the Banshee’s ability to do barrel rolls and the Ghost’s speed boost. These decisions were made in order to serve up more exciting battles, especially in multiplayer: “The main reason we added the Ghost boost was to add more complexity to vehicle combat,” Griesemer explains. “In Halo, two vehicles would essentially just pound on each other until one of them died. The boost allows one player to try to escape from a losing fight, or enter combat suddenly from an unexpected direction. The Warthog is actually faster than the Ghost, but a boosting Ghost is faster than the Warthog, leading to interesting chases and fights.” The same logic applied to the Banshee’s stunts: “Instead of just circling around and around, dogfighting is much more dynamic and takes a lot more piloting skill.” Jason Jones, meanwhile, insisted that the Ghost’s weapons be reworked. He thought that they were correctly balanced, but not enough fun to use. “The guns on the [Halo 1] Ghost were balanced by making them really inaccurate. If you aim at something in Halo 1 with the Ghost and shoot at it, your shots are going all over the place. That balances the weapon, because it’s not overpowered. But it wasn’t balanced in a way that was empowering for the player. […] It wasn’t that fun. It didn’t make you feel awesome.” Jones thought that Bungie would need to find another way to balance the Ghost, such as a cool down system that forced players to ease off the trigger, just like with the Covenant plasma rifle. Nothing would come of it, though: the cannons would come with perfectly steady accuracy, and nothing would be added to make them less efficient. Indeed, because it was easy for enemies to hijack the Ghost, it already had enough of a weakness. Especially because for Halo 2, Griesemer and his teams had tried to create a genuine dynamic damage system: vehicles would change their appearance as they took damage, before eventually exploding. For the Ghost, even its chassis could explode, depending on how it was destroyed. Halo 2

was programmed with highly refined physics, and the developers were very proud of their work. It wasn’t easy, though, because in redesigning the Halo 2 engine, Bungie had incorporated Havok, a particularly powerful physics engine. But it needed to be integrated properly and given that special Bungie magic that had made the first game such a hit. The final stages of this task took time, which meant that some last-minute decisions had to be made, and some ideas scrapped. This was how the Huragoks, also known as the Engineers, were dropped from the game. Initially designed for Halo: Combat Evolved, the Engineers didn’t quite fit, and Bungie decided to remove them from the game even though a full 3D model had been developed. In Halo 2, they were supposed to serve as mere Easter eggs when players started a campaign on Legendary difficulty, but this idea, too, was abandoned. Out of the vehicles, it was the Mongoose that was scrapped. A small quad that could seat a driver and a passenger, in its initial design it was equipped with two small rear-mounted cannons. However, the team couldn’t find the right way to fit it into the game, because it didn’t work well with the Warthog and the Ghost, and broke the game’s balance. After trying out the Mongoose stripped of all weapons, the studio still couldn’t make it work and decided to take it out of the game. That didn’t stop it from making it into Halo 3, initially without weapons, but players would need to wait for Halo 2: Anniversary, ten years after the release of the original Halo 2, to be able to ride a Mongoose equipped with two frontmounted cannons. But after all these trials and tribulations, on November 9, 2004, Halo 2 had arrived. The launch was a major event: the game was released in 27 countries on the same day, in eight different languages. Microsoft spared no expense on the marketing, and late in the evening of November 8, players started gathering in front of toy and video game stores which planned to open their doors at midnight. The most impressive scenes were filmed by American TV in New York, in front of the Toys “R” Us in Times Square. Hundreds of people lined up in front of the huge store, which was decked out in

the colors of Halo 2 to mark the occasion. The game encountered a colossal success. A total of 2,380,000 copies were sold in just 24 hours, bringing in $25m for Microsoft. That was more than Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the other big-name release of 2004, which had only just recorded 2m copies sold despite being available since October 26. San Andreas would go on to sell more copies than Halo 2, but it’s worth noting that Rockstar’s game was released on a console that was in far more homes than the Xbox. Upon the release of Halo 2, there were 9,800,000 Xbox owners, certainly a respectable figure. But it was still light years away from the 24,900,000 PlayStation 2 owners out there. But that didn’t make Halo 2’s release any less significant, because in addition to the millions of dollars the game brought straight to Microsoft, the entire Xbox ecosystem also benefited. Indeed, it benefited to the extent that the Home & Entertainment Division (home to the Xbox division) turned a profit for the first time in its history, earning around $55m in the final quarter of 2004. Sales of its console would grow by 27 %, and the number of Xbox Live subscriptions would go through the roof. Before this point, Microsoft’s online gaming service had been a success, albeit a modest one, with the record for the number of players online at any one time standing at 40,000 players. Within 24 hours of the release of Halo 2, this figure had multiplied four-fold. Millions of players were soon rushing to do battle online, paving the way for many future games, and not just FPS. With Halo 2, Microsoft proved that online gaming was possible on consoles, and that it could be just as successful as online gaming was on the PC. The release of Halo 2, then, had an unprecedented impact on the video game industry. Its huge popular success, and especially that of its online multiplayer mode, would set the new standard for future generations of consoles, as well as for most video game production across all platforms. The next generation of consoles would all offer their own version of an online gaming service, and many new games would come with an online multiplayer mode over the months and years that followed. The games that have most benefited from the advances made with Halo 2 include the Call of Duty series, which makes use of certain Halo gameplay mechanisms as well as most of

Halo 2’s online features. This was what would enable Activision to reach unheard of heights in 2007 with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, a game which, doubtless more than Halo 2 and Halo 3 combined, brought online gaming on consoles to the masses.

Chapter 9 – Xbox and Bungie Evolve While the release of Halo 2 was a huge success, it came during the twilight moments of the Xbox’s life cycle. At that time, Microsoft had already been working on its next console for two years, hoping to release it before Sony did its PlayStation 3. This meant that Bungie had no time to waste in getting back to work on a launch title for the Xbox 360’s release. But with Bungie, nothing ever goes exactly according to plan.

BUNGIE LIMPS ON With Halo 2 delivered, Bungie could finally stop to lick its wounds. The crunch had left the staff all but wiped out, and their offices stood empty for weeks. Many team members preferred to keep their distance, at least initially. They needed to rest, spend time with their families, and get a change of scenery. For some, the development of Halo 2 was the final straw. The one that broke the back of the camel whose knees were already starting to buckle. The studio had gotten a glimpse of things to come when Hamilton Chu, the game’s executive producer, chose to resign rather than enduring the last few weeks of the game’s development. Then, in early 2005, Michael Evans followed suit. Evans was Bungie’s lead engineer, and his health had suffered during the development of Halo 2 and, having already experienced trying times while working on the multiplayer mode for Halo: Combat Evolved, he decided that twice was quite enough. Because Bungie was all too aware that work needed to begin on Halo 3. Indeed, before a troubled development process had forced Bungie to plan a third instalment, Microsoft already had plans

for the franchise: at E3 2003, while Steve Ballmer himself was giving a presentation on the new Xbox, he made an unscheduled announcement that Halo 3  might be on the way. That was back before Bungie had been forced to cut the Halo 2 storyline in half, and the second game was still supposed to be Master Chief’s final outing. Ballmer’s announcement did not go unnoticed, and some started to wonder whether Bungie was now condemned to make Halo games for Microsoft forever more. When Pete Parsons told the press, in October 2004, that Bungie would never be a one-game studio, nobody was convinced, especially in-house. Because in Bungie’s open plan offices, not many of the staff wanted to hear another word about the franchise. Nobody was happy with the ending of Halo 2, and much of the staff were frustrated at being forced to deliver a game that many of them considered to be unfinished. The direct result was that it became obvious that Bungie would have to start work on another sequel to give players a conclusion to the adventures of Master Chief. For some, it was a hard pill to swallow. The Halo 2 crunch caused untold damage to the private lives of many of the game’s developers. The studio’s team spirit was crumbling bit by bit, and the relationships between some executives were growing strained. Martin O’Donnell recalls how, “The end of Halo 2 was so horrible, I wasn’t sure if the team could stay together, it’d been such a grind. Relationships went, divorces happened. It was incredible.” One man in particular was now making himself and his family his number one priority: Jason Jones. Left exhausted after years of constant work, and in increasingly frail health, Jones took a step back and distanced himself from the company with no word of when he would return. He used this time away to marry his girlfriend, have kids, and to travel extensively. But while he was staying away from Bungie for now, he knew that one day he would need to return, and he was keeping himself busy working on little prototypes for games he had dreamed up himself. The benefit of this was that it kept his foot in the door to the video game world while also letting him plan the studio’s future, and think about what kind of new hires would be needed for future

projects. Jones knew that Bungie would need to make a sequel to Halo 2, but that was something he had little interest in doing himself, if any. But once again, he would fail to appoint any real project lead for Halo 3. All he did was entrust Max Hoberman with his role of project manager for Halo 2, which made Hoberman responsible for tracking work on the game. And there was plenty of work to do. After the game’s launch, not a soul could be found at Bungie for at least a week. When they did go back to the office, it was to find that there were major issues with the balance in multiplayer mode. Thankfully though, no players had picked up on it. “The single-player game was such a mess up until the very end–Jaime and Jason were rebalancing all of the weapons in the campaign for the two weeks before it went gold,” Hoberman recalls. “Unfortunately, the weapons were shared with multiplayer, and it broke the game.” Griesemer adds: “We caught that it was broken a lot faster than most of players, so we were able to sneak out a patch. People remember Halo 2 as being a great multiplayer game, and it was–but it wasn’t when we shipped it.” But no sooner were these issues fixed than Pete Parsons brought more bad news to Max Hoberman: while waiting for work on Halo 3 to begin in earnest, a lot of the studio’s staff–mostly artists–were left twiddling their thumbs. Microsoft wanted to occupy them with designing new multiplayer maps that could be shipped via Xbox Live, or as released as a hard copy. Hoberman was not a fan of this idea in the slightest: “The team had such a painful experience on Halo 2 that the priority was that everyone has fun and enjoys themselves, not that we put out a quality product. The DLC wasn’t great because of it.” However, Hoberman’s team would nevertheless deliver a total of nine new maps. The first two were given to players for free through a Microsoft marketing campaign in partnership with Mountain Dew, and the Killtacular and Maptacular packs shipped a few months later on June 5, 2005. The full selection of maps were included in Halo 2: Multiplayer Map Pack, a hard copy released in stores so that players without an internet connection could get their hands on the nine new maps, as well as the game’s latest updates.

NEW CONSOLE, NEW AMBITION? While Bungie was slowly recovering from the Halo 2 crunch, at Microsoft it was all sunshine and rainbows. It may be true that the Xbox wasn’t making Microsoft any money, but the release of Halo 2 had shown that with the right games and the right technology, anything was possible. And as early as mid-2002, the Xbox division had started planning for the future. Robbie Bach was still part of the project. Around him he built a team of Xbox veterans, fresh faces at Microsoft, and seasoned video game industry players. The software giant had got the lay of the land through its first console, but the next generation had to cement Microsoft’s green X as a permanent feature on the video-gaming landscape. Or better yet, enable Microsoft to go head-to-head with Sony. A code name was adopted for the project: Xenon. Determined to correct the mistakes it had made with is first console, Microsoft went on a hiring spree and commissioned a series of surveys and polls. In-house, they set a list of targets: attract more publishers and developers, especially Japanese studios; release the new console before Sony’s PlayStation 3, to gain market share more easily; deliver a console that was powerful enough to make full use of the first wave of HD TV, which should soon flood the market; and, most importantly, create a more elegant design than for the first console. A lot of research went into the console’s design: the Xbox was somewhat blocky, which had made it the brunt of jokes and criticism. And of course, that had a knock-on effect on the console’s image. Bach and Jay Allard were determined not to repeat the same mistake. There was a growing body of research that smooth, rounded shapes in white would have a greater chance of winning over the public once the console was released, scheduled for 2005. With its iPod, Apple had set new standards and new tastes in terms of industrial design. Black and angular devices now seemed severely dated, so Microsoft naturally decided to heed the advice of the design experts its representatives had met with. And experts… Microsoft met with heaps of them, and not just specialists in industrial design. The engineers working on the Xenon

would meet with developers at various Microsoft studios, including those at Bungie. Then fully occupied with Halo 2, Chris Butcher took the time to have a look at the different suggestions. And there were already some details that he didn’t like. In the configuration he was shown, the new Xbox would only have a single chip controlling its memory, meaning that the processor would have to go and find the resources it needed for some of its calculations itself. This was a decision that was probably dictated by Microsoft’s economic restraints, because this architecture meant that it could go without a dedicated graphics chipset. This idea didn’t go down well with Butcher, who would much rather see the next Xbox ship with lots of memory. Microsoft’s planned architecture was reminiscent of the first console, and that had worked really well, within certain limits. Limits that Bungie had unceremoniously stumbled upon during the development of Halo 2, when the game engine needed to be completely redesigned. But Butcher thought that just wouldn’t cut it for a next-gen console. Xenon would be supporting HD games and needed to send a huge amount of data through its circuits. But the Xbox division was so obsessed with what the new console would look like that it had forgotten the most important thing: what it would contain. It’s true that negotiations between Microsoft and IBM, ATI and Nvidia wasted a lot of the Xbox engineers’ time, and when the console’s external design was approved, they still didn’t know what components it would contain. When the partnerships with IBM and ATI were eventually signed, there were some challenges actually getting all the components inside the console’s casing. The engineers got the job done in the end, but not without discovering a few shortcomings, especially with regard to the internal cooling system. The components were all tightly packed in, making it hard for air to circulate inside the console, which got very hot as a result. Nothing to be concerned about, they thought: Xenon, which would become the Xbox 360, was an extremely powerful machine that could run HD games. It was normal that such a powerful console would produce heat. But what the engineers did not yet know was that this slight manufacturing defect would lead to others. In

compliance with European standards, Microsoft was using a guaranteed lead-free solder alloy, but the alloy in question was low quality. As a result, the heat the console generated would eat away at the soldering inside the Xbox 360, causing swathes of bugs and, very often, hardware failure in the affected consoles. Microsoft was aware of the problem because an engineer monitoring the console production process had noticed that a large number of Xbox 360s were defective as soon as they left the production line. Overheating consoles, underexploited RAM, DVD players that just refused to work… It was turning into a major problem for Microsoft because, in the summer of 2005, 68  % of the consoles made in the Chinese factories belonging to Flextronics and Wistron, Microsoft’s partners, were affected. But back in Redmond, nobody was really that worried. Indeed, it was quite the opposite. Steve Ballmer and the Xbox team had learned that Sony was having problems designing the PlayStation 3’s microprocessor, named Cell, that boasted incredible abilities. This made it highly likely that the console’s release would be pushed back, leaving the field wide open for the Xbox 360. Microsoft’s eagerness would end up costing it more than $1bn when Robbie Bach and Peter Moore came to understand the scale of the problem in 2006. There was one word in particular that was soon on everyone’s lips: RROD, of the Red Ring of Death.9 When three quarters of the red circle surrounding the console’s power button was lit up, it meant that the Xbox 360 was suffering hardware failure. Peter Moore and Robbie Bach alerted Steve Ballmer who, in a decision that would prove lifesaving for the Xbox 360 and the entire Xbox brand, decided to cover the cost of replacing every console that was affected. But despite these issues, the Xbox 360 quickly became a hit upon its release. These production issues did, however, make it more difficult to get products in stores, with defective consoles being set aside to be individually repaired. That naturally slowed down the delivery process all over the world, and the console was for a while sold out, especially in the USA where it soon raced past all initial estimates. In summer 2007, a few months before the hotly

anticipated release of Halo 3, 12 million Xbox 360s had already been sold.

BUNGIE GROWS Just as the first Halo game’s success had enabled Bungie to hire new developers, Halo 2’s would enable the studio to expand its workforce even further. Their next game was going to be released on the Xbox 360, a next-gen console capable of displaying HD graphics, a fact that was not without repercussions for the developers! The game would necessarily be more complex and demand the work of a larger team. This significant increase in the number of people employed by the studio was starting to become a problem, because the offices were no longer big enough to accommodate so many people. And so, Bungie was forced to move, and the company left the Millennium campus. The studio ended up in Kirkland, a few miles west of Redmond. Nestled between a forest and Lake Washington, Kirkland was a quiet city with a population of just under 50,000, lying halfway between Redmond, Seattle, and Bellevue. It was a convenient location that made it easier for the staff to get to the studio. The new offices were freshly built and had not yet been allocated a street number, a fact which encouraged the studio execs to contact Kirkland city hall and see if they could nab number 343 in tribute to Guilty Spark, the Forerunner AI. That wouldn’t be possible, said city hall, before offering them number 434 instead. Bungie took it, and the studio’s address was now 434 Kirkland Way. The staff soon renamed the new premises Bungie Towers, which was in itself a joke: the building was as flat as they come, with only two floors. It was, however, brand new and had every imaginable modern comfort, beginning with a large kitchen and lounge area. Out of all the offices that Bungie had inhabited since it was founded, Bungie Towers was by far the most comfortable. Especially because they were a fair distance from the Microsoft campus.

9  The term made reference to the Blue Screen of Death, which was all too familiar to users of Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

Chapter 10 – Halo 3: the Game That Made the Xbox 360 A short rest, and Bungie’s staff had to head back to the grindstone. It may well be true that nobody had conceived Halo as a trilogy, but the parts of the story that had been cut from Halo 2 meant that there was still enough of a story to tell to fill a third game. There was only one problem: when the studio first got down to work, it was not as healthy as it had been in the past.

A TEAM MORE CONFLICTED THAN EVER BEFORE Halo 3 needed to be out in the third quarter of 2007, which gave Bungie around two-and-a-half years to develop the game. So that it didn’t repeat the errors of the past–and especially those of Halo 2– Bungie launched a long pre-production phase that would last around one year. That gave the developers time to test out their ideas, get used to the Xbox 360 and, most importantly, come up with the best way of giving the trilogy a satisfactory ending. A fair number of Bungie employees had had enough Halo to last a lifetime, but they had such strong ties to the series that there was never any question of just rushing out a game so that it was over and done with once and for all. Everyone wanted the ending to be spectacular. “We knew that we had to do better than we did on Halo 2,” Chris Creamer recalls, “So it was going to be focused, concerted throughout, to make sure that Halo 3 was the jewel on the crown.” Having already been involved in the development of Oni, Creamer had slowly climbed the ranks to become a producer on Halo 2, thereby also becoming one of the studio’s executives. It was a promotion that had given him a front row seat to watch the execs rip into each other for

almost an entire year. And the effects were starting to make themselves felt. Halo 3 was still without a leader, and while Max Hoberman, to whom Jason Jones had passed the reins upon his departure, was supposed to be in charge, the reality wasn’t quite as straightforward, and several people started having regular arguments. In Martin O’Donnell’s view, “It was a clumsy start to Halo 3. We didn’t really have a clear vision for what it was going to be, or a clear leader. It eventually worked itself out, but it was very, very messy. In my opinion, Pete never had the balls to just say, ‘This is it, this is the way it must be, this is what Jason and I decided.’ He was trying to take a very soft approach and it didn’t work.” With Jason Jones missing in action, many of the studio’s big guns began battling for supremacy to see who would lead the development of Halo 3: Joseph Staten, Paul Bertone, Marcus Lehto and Jaime Griesemer. As for Martin O’Donnell, he preferred to keep a safe distance. The composer was no fan of all this infighting, and besides, he was busy enough with his own contribution. Out of the four pretenders to the throne, Joseph Staten was the first to blink. After yet another argument, Marcus Lehto said he didn’t want to work with Staten anymore, and the writer replied that the feeling was mutual. Exhausted, Staten took a step back from Bungie and took a long sabbatical that would keep him out of Halo 3’s development for a good long while. But his absence left Bungie in a pickle, because Staten was the main writer for Halo, and the director of all its cutscenes. To fill his role, a decision was made to form a small committee made up of staff at the studio. Their number included Rob Strokes and Peter O’Brien, who were tasked with using the committee’s ideas to form the general outline for the plot. This approach was a limited success, because there were also personality clashes inside the committee, as a somewhat bitter Jaime Griesemer told us: “The Halo 3 story was written by a bunch of guys in the middle ground saying: ‘I want to do it this way but I can’t explain why, and I’m not sure my idea’s better than yours so I’m just going to defend it loudly.’” Griesemer increasingly found himself at loggerheads with Paul Bertone, who also ended up walking away. Like Staten, he temporarily left the studio to take a step back and,

most importantly, to get a good rest. The problem here was that out of all the people fighting to be the Halo 3 project lead, Bertone was perhaps the best qualified, and his departure raised a few hackles: Bertone himself now admits, “I’m sure that pissed off a lot of people. I didn’t really talk to anybody from Bungie about it. I just went to Pete and said, ‘I need to take some time off,’ and just disappeared. I felt like I had nothing in the tank at that point, and the best thing for me was to recharge my batteries and then be able to come back, get my head down and do what I did during Halo that made it successful.” Staten and Bertone were soon followed by Hoberman, who also decided he’d like to take a step back from Bungie. The engineer even left Washington State altogether, returning to his home state of Texas and settling in Austin. At first he worked on Halo 3 remotely, but in late 2006 Hoberman resigned from Bungie for good. He then founded his own studio, Certain Affinity, and signed a contract with Microsoft. His first assignment? A new pack of multiplayer maps for Halo 2, the Blastacular Map Pack released on April 17, 2007. Certain Affinity would go on to make regular contributions to the Halo universe, as it was Hoberman’s company that made the DLC maps for Halo: Reach, and worked on the multiplayer mode for Halo 4 and Halo: The Master Chief Collection. The situation at Bungie was starting to raise a few red flags for Microsoft, who also lost their first representative within the studio when Peter Parsons decided to leave the company. The game changer came when Harold Ryan was appointed as studio manager. Having worked as a simple test manager up until that point, Ryan was suddenly propelled to the top spot at Bungie, where he would prove able to get the staff back on track. Not everyone was happy with his appointment, however, as we learned from a number of former Bungie employees we interviewed for this book. “There’s a long story behind how Harold became studio manager and I’d rather not go into it. Bungie tends to trust the people that are there, and promotes from within.” Despite the absence of some of the studio’s key figures, work on Halo 3 was coming along nicely. The one area that was still causing issues, though, was the plot. While the general

outline had been laid out, some details were still the cause of lively debate within the studio. Some thought that Earth should be completely destroyed at the end of the game, while others thought that players should finally see the face of Master Chief. The fate of the Spartan himself, as well as Cortana, was also being bounced around the studio, and nobody could really come to an agreement. In the end, it was Martin O’Donnell who spoke up and pointed out the main problem with the first drafts of Halo 3’s story. CJ  Cowan, the man who replaced Joseph Staten, tells it like this: “He’s like ‘I think it needs more punch.’ What it really needs is some death.” The way O’Donnell tells it, “I didn’t see any shape to the story. Nothing happy, nothing sad, nothing intense. You actually want to get to the point where the player goes ‘Oh wait a minute, I’d been this character for three games, they can’t possibly kill me.’ There is no sense of heroic action if there are no real consequences.” O’Donnell then offered a few suggestions: “I came up with a few moments that I thought would be important to the story, like making sure Lord Hood (Ron Perlman) came back, Miranda Keyes gets killed, Sgt. Johnson is killed by Guilty Spark, Master Chief kills Guilty Spark, and the Arbiter kills the Prophet of Truth. These were all moments that the story team had at some point suggested but somehow couldn’t agree on having in the final story. It didn’t take a lot of convincing but after I spoke with each member of the story team we agreed on all of those points.” One person, however, was very unhappy with these choices: Joseph Staten. When he returned to the office to work on the final script for Halo 3, he had to work with everything that had been decided and written in his absence, some of which he found very hard to swallow. “He never forgave me for having Johnson killed,” O’Donnell recalls with a laugh. “But we laugh about it now.” Inside the studio, a sense of order was gradually returning, with the staff settling into their roles. Jaime Griesemer took on the job of lead designer, while Marcus Lehto returned to his role of artistic director. Paul Bertone, back at long last, oversaw the design of the different campaign missions. The studio execs all simmered down and managed to work together. “I think a lot of the competition

between me and Jaime [Griesemer] was coming from my side,” Bertone now admits. “I wanted to work on systems and AI, and we butted heads a couple times. But once I came back we cleared all that air, got on the same page and really started to trust each other. That felt really good.” Joseph Staten took longer to return to the fold, but he was busy working on other projects for Microsoft and for Bungie. When he got back, he took on the role of writing director for Halo 3 and enriched the franchise universe with a few new ideas of his own, which were then incorporated into the game while it was still in development. Within Bungie, some of the staff wanted to expand the Halo universe, with Staten at the front of the pack. He worked with Robert McLees, and also a newbie to the company by the name of Luke Smith. A former freelance journalist at Kotaku, Smith earned a reputation while working at 1UP.com, where he wrote the News section. A gifted journalist with razor sharp penmanship, Smith aimed regular criticism at big names in the video game industry, and had caught Bungie’s eye after writing a long article about Halo 2 in which he pointed out some of its shortcomings. Having grown bored of how the American video-gaming press operated, and already a fan of Bungie’s work, it didn’t take Smith long to take the studio up on its job offer. For a few years now, Bungie had been trying to maintain the powerful connection that bound its community together. But Bungie was no longer a small independent studio. It now worked on gargantuan productions, its workforce had expanded, its fan community had grown from thousands of gamers to millions of players who were all as impatient as they were passionate about the game, and Microsoft was keeping an eye on them. This meant that the studio no longer had the same freedom it once had, or the same ability to speak to its fans, a situation that it had been trying to remedy for a few years already. This was why in 2003, Bungie hired its first community manager, in one Brian Jarrard. A few months later, in early 2004, a former journalist named Frank O’Connor joined Jarrard, and quickly became Bungie’s main spokesperson online. And now, with Smith, that made three of them who were interacting

with fans on a daily basis and hosting a series of Q&A sessions. Jarrard and Smith even presented a podcast where they regularly hosted guests from the studio, thereby shining a spotlight on some of Bungie’s longstanding personalities. But despite this close relationship, Smith kept his cards close to his chest when it came to what was currently in production, much to fans’ excitement. Because unlike at many other video game studios, Bungie’s community managers played an active role in developing the studio’s games. This meant that they had in-depth knowledge of what was going on, and were constantly being bombarded with questions from the community. This was particularly true of O’Connor, who soon became a living encyclopedia of the Halo universe. A successor to McLees and Staten, the man who fans came to know affectionately as “Frankie” was the heir to the series’ lore, to which he also made his own contribution. Indeed, he was the one who wrote most of the little story told by the Forerunner terminals hidden throughout Halo 3’s levels. These terminals contained old files and recounted the war between the Forerunner Empire and the Flood, enabling players to learn more about the ancient alien race. Following a similar trajectory to O’Connor’s growing importance within Bungie, the tension between some of the Grizzled Ancients, as the pillars of the studio were known, was enabling the next generation to make its name within the team. Mostly hired after the studio was bought out by Microsoft, they were Bungie’s new lifeblood, and while some of the executives had taken a leave of absence, they picked up the baton and made it possible for the development of Halo 3 to move forward without too many snags. And without ever forgetting their spiritual leader, Jason Jones. Still on leave from Bungie, the studio’s co-founder was nevertheless present at every meeting in the form of a life-sized cardboard cutout to which the studio team had stuck a photo of their boss. This fake Jason Jones was moved between different rooms so that he was always watching over his flock. Despite his long absence, his status within Bungie, and even Microsoft Studios as a whole, was never called into question by management: “He was thinking about what

else he wanted to do, and travelling a lot,” O’Donnell recalls. “All the while, he was still a Bungie employee. Because, you know, we had convinced everybody that all the magic sauce came from Jason.”

IN WITH THE NEW! Bungie had no intention of resting on its laurels when making the third game in the series, and just as it had done for Halo 2, the studio eagerly turned to the list of things it had not been able to do or get finished on time for the earlier games. And there was no shortage of ideas, be that in terms of new gameplay features or new game modes in general. When it came to weapons, Halo 3 was going allout, with an arsenal of more than 20 different weapons. These included some interesting new additions, like the M6 Grindell/Galilean Nonlinear Rifle, or the Spartan Laser, as it was more commonly known. It had to be charged before firing a powerful laser beam that made short work of armored vehicles and slowmoving or stationary enemy. The assault rifle made its big comeback, but not without going through a design overhaul so that it didn’t unbalance the game, or become too similar to the BR or SMG. Most of the UNSC and Covenant weapons had been given a slight makeover, and it was actually among the Brutes that most new additions were to be found. Because the Brutes had replaced the Elites in the Covenant hierarchy, they were now the player’s main enemies, and Bungie had to revise these intimidating creatures, in terms of both aesthetics and gameplay. In Halo 2, the Brutes were “bullet sponges,” in the words of Paul Bertone, which made them neither fun nor rewarding to encounter. “The design of the Brutes was not consistent about reinforcing that they’re meant to be worthy adversaries for the player,” Chris Butcher explains, and so the artists got down to work and quickly produced new Brute models with more polished equipment and an appearance that also communicated their violent, merciless natures. Their uniforms were covered in sharp metal and leather, in an aesthetic that was also repeated for their vehicles. Halo 3 didn’t do away with the Ghosts and Banshees,

but it did add some typically Brutish war machines, like the Chopper, a kind of futuristic motorbike that could crush anything that stood in its path. It was Eric Arroyo who designed the Chopper, and the process hadn’t been a straightforward one. The structure of the Chopper, with two large front wheels, meant that its pilot enjoyed too much cover from enemy fire. That made the job of players under attack unnecessarily complicated, while also providing too much of an advantage after hijacking the vehicle. Arroyo tried out several ideas, and with help from Griesemer they managed to come to an agreement on a definitive model. It retained the advantage afforded by the two wheels to the front, but left the rider’s back completely exposed. This meant that players needed to dodge the Chopper’s attack before trying to take the ride out from behind. That also contributed to the greater variety in Halo 3’s combats, as well as making them that little bit more challenging. The Xbox 360 was a far more powerful console than the Xbox, a fact that the developers initially found intimidating, as Shi Kai Wang explains: “Developing for the 360 has been awesome, great support and great hardware. The downside to the switch is the amount of content we’re trying to fill. The amount of time it takes to create content has more than doubled and has created pipelines that are much more complicated and unforgiving. It forced us to set priorities on what we considered important and necessary vs. plain aesthetics.” Indeed, the Xbox 360 was the console that ushered in the era of HD gaming for home consoles, an evolution that was not without consequences for games studios, who had to launch mass recruitment drives. Of course, it also meant that more ideas could be made real… In Halo 3 this is particularly evident in the battlefields: the series of sandboxes10 that formed levels in the Halo games gained in amplitude and detail in Halo 3. They were bigger, more complex, and contained more enemies and more vehicles. It was an opportunity for Bungie to improve a sequence that was featured in Halo 2 but that the developers weren’t happy with: the fight against the Scarab, the giant Covenant assault platform that Master Chief boarded and destroyed at the heart of New Mombasa. Bungie planned on bringing it back for Halo 3. “The Scarab was in Halo 2, but it was very

scripted,” Jaime Griesemer tells us. For Halo 3, Bungie planned on using the Xbox 360’s processing power to add Scarab to the list of vehicles that the AI managed in real time. Players would need to figure out the best way to destroy it for themselves, either by taking advantage of its weak points or boarding it to destroy it from the inside. For a while, the designers played around with a Scarab whose legs could be scaled by Master Chief: the idea was that once he had climbed to a certain height, he would be able to rip off the platform’s armor plating and slide a grenade inside its joints. Once the Scarab was off balance, the player would then just need to jump up onto the lowest platforms and make their way along to the reactor to blow it up. This idea was ultimately dropped, but the idea of placing weak points on the legs was retained. Thankfully, the UNSC had not been overlooked, with the designers coming up with new human vehicles like the Mongoose, which made it into the series at last, and the Hornet, a small helicopter equipped with a heavy machine gun and rocket launcher. Still with a view to giving players more tools to use during major battles, Halo 3 also introduced a new weapons category–heavy weapons–which caused the camera to switch to third person when used by Master Chief. When using heavy weapons, the Spartan moved more slowly and was no longer able to use grenades or his melee attack. On the bright side, though, he boasted some formidable firepower. So it was that heavy machine guns and rocket launchers were added to the Halo 3 arsenal, along with one of Robert McLees old flames–quite literally–in the form of the flamethrower. Initially designed for Halo back when it was still known as Blam!, it had been left out of the final version of the game due to the studio thinking that the physics engine would not be able to properly manage the flames spewed out by the weapon, or how they spread around the game environment. The weapon had even been spotted in the code for the PC port of Halo: Combat Evolved, but it would again be absent from Halo 2 and it would not be until Halo 3 that it officially saw any action, with a design not too far removed from McLees’ initial sketches. In parallel, the designers were working

on a new class of items, modestly known as Equipment, which would bring a touch more variety to combat. Flashbang grenades, antipersonnel mines, the power drain, antigravity packs, bubble shields… They would allow players to tailor their strategies or come up with new ones, or let them invent new ways of getting around obstacles. Halo 3’s guiding principle? Abundance. For the trilogy’s final instalment, Bungie wanted to give fans as comprehensive an experience as possible. Even the multiplayer mode was enhanced, with the addition of new Spartan armor. In Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2, players could only select the color of their character’s armor, which was otherwise the same as Master Chief’s. In Halo 3, not only could players don Mjolnir Mk. VI armor, but also a whole host of different versions breastplates, shoulder pads, helmets… they could all be unlocked by playing the game and getting particular achievements, which was also a way for the most hardcore players to show off their skills and commitment. But these new features, respectable as they were, ultimately paled in comparison to what one team of developers had been cooking up: a level editor known as Forge. It would allow players to edit the existing multiplayer maps, for example by moving particular weapons or adding more vehicles. It wasn’t the first time that Bungie had tried to do this, because the Marathon series had already boasted a map editor, also named Forge. The same was true of Myth and Myth II. Halo, too, was supposed to have one, back before the studio was acquired by Microsoft. The idea had been shelved, but now it was being dusted off for Halo 3. In the beginning, though, Forge was intended for the developers to use, and for Tyson Green’s team in particular, who were working on Halo 3’s multiplayer mode. Indeed, Chris Butcher told us how, “The Forge for Halo 3 started as Tyson and the other multiplayer designers saying, ‘I really don’t know if this is the right place for the Battle Rifle to be, so I want the ability to move it.’ Because in Halo 2 it was really painful that they couldn’t change where all the weapons were placed in the environment. So he built that system for Halo 3, and the stated design goal of that was ‘let the designers move where the weapons are on the map.’”

Forge, combined with the new Theater mode that let players view their games from any angle, would provide players with unlimited ways to customize their games, and also to share and showcase their own creativity. They were also fantastic tools for video editors, who had a greater online presence following the success of Red Vs. Blue. Their number included a young Canadian creator by the name of Jon CJ  Graham. Going by the username DigitalPh33r, he had been successfully creating content since 2007 with one of his first videos, Master Chief Sucks at Halo, which starred a Master Chief figurine. The figurine came to life when its owner wasn’t around, just like in the Disney Pixar film, Toy Story. The only difference was that unlike Woody, Buzz Lightyear and the rest of the gang, this Master Chief was extremely obnoxious with a vulgar, homophobic, sexist, and racist attitude. Of course, he also sucked at Halo. The success of this first video would encourage Graham to keep going, and after making two more episodes of Master Chief Sucks at Halo, he launched a mini-series called Arby ‘n’ The Chief, where the Spartan’s vices are counterbalanced by the calm, intelligent, and cultured personality exuded by an Arbiter figurine. Bungie soon spotted Graham’s videos, and gifted him some recon armor, which had previously been the exclusive reserve of studio staff, and which enabled them to identify each other when playing online. Arby ‘n’ The Chief would run for eight full seasons, and currently boasts tens of millions of views. Despite a complicated start, Halo 3’s development moved forwards without any snags, in what was a first for Bungie since its move to Seattle. The arrival of Jonty Barnes, an experienced executive producer, in September 2006  may well have had something to do with it. Barnes was an industry veteran who had made a name for himself in 1989 when he joined Bullfrog to work on the level design for Peter Molyneux’s second game, Populous. Barnes was well-liked by Molyneux, and went on to play a role on most of Bullfrog’s projects, contributing his expertise as a programmer to Theme Hospital and Dungeon Keeper. When Molyneux left Bullfrog to found Lionhead Studios, Barnes was one of

the first developers that the talented game designer reached out to and hired. At Lionhead, he led the programming team for Black & White, before being appointed director of Black & White Studios in 2002; this satellite studio was tasked with making a sequel to Fable, and it was Barnes who served as executive producer. When Microsoft acquired Lionhead in April 2006, Jonty Barnes became one of Bungie’s colleagues, joining the studio himself in September of that same year. In Barnes, Bungie had acquired not only a talented developer, but also an experienced manager with the skills needed to oversee every aspect of producing a AAA title. But that’s not to say that the team managed to avoid the end-ofdevelopment crunch. It was an easier, more tolerable crunch, of the kind experienced by most video game studios around the world, but it still forced Bungie to make certain choices. Bungie’s staff had a very idiosyncratic way of illustrating the situation: on a huge whiteboard, they had drawn a giant aircraft flying very close to the ground. To enable them to gain altitude, the passengers were jettisoning weight and throwing anything that wasn’t strictly essential out of the window. On boxes hurtling to the ground could be read: “Downward-aiming Banshees,” “personal hygiene,” “Harold’s lungs.” Even Paul Bertone himself had to rework a few missions so that they could definitely make it into the final game. He remembers how, “I took the Cortana mission, completely gutted it and rebuilt it in about three weeks–that mission where Gravemind is talking to you and Cortana is in distress. We didn’t have a lot of resources for that. It was a lot cooler on paper. And it had the transforming Flood, but I don’t think we did great there. It’s a kind of half-baked mission that needed to be there for the story, so we sort of threw it together, but I would’ve preferred not to do that.” Then one thing in particular had forced Bertone to work in a rush: Rob Stokes, with whom Bertone was sharing the role of lead designer for the game’s campaign mode, left the studio just a few months before the game was released. The MIT graduate, who had been working for Bungie since December 2002, had played a major role in designing Halo 2’s missions, single-handedly designing The Arbiter, The Oracle, Delta

Halo, and Regret. He belonged to the second generation of developers and had gradually taken on an increasingly important role in the studio, until he had become one of the most influential figures in Halo 3’s development. For Halo 3, Stokes’ role encompassed more than just the lead designer for the single-player campaign missions, because he had also led the initial preproduction teams and written many of the game’s cutscenes. His departure struck a heavy blow, and Bertone was forced to carry the extra workload. Cortana was not the only level to face this unfortunate fate, Tsavo Highway was also shortened, and one entire level was removed from the game. Known for a while as Guardian Forest, the level took place on a Forerunner compound in a verdant jungle. In it, Master Chief was supposed to do battle with a Forerunner creature known as the Guardian. These Sentinels were responsible for building the Ark, the Forerunner world where most of Halo 3’s action takes place. They were relatively large and equipped with a huge red eye that could fire powerful lasers. In the original plans made by Bungie’s designers, Master Chief was supposed to confront the Guardian and rip out its eye to use as a weapon. The level was ultimately removed from the game, but the concept art caught the eye of Steve Cotton, who changed the feel of the level by removing the mysterious mist that enveloped the jungle and changing the layout of the buildings. After a few weeks of work, he had turned it into a multiplayer map, today known as Guardian. When Halo 3 was released, the word Guardian would immediately intrigue the player community, especially those who were avid consumers of Halo lore, because it was a name mentioned several times in the game universe. In Halo 3’s multiplayer mode, players who strayed too far past the invisible edge of the map would mysteriously perish, with the only explanation provided being a short message displayed on the screen: “Killed by the Guardians.” A theory soon emerged in which Guardian referred to a highly evolved Forerunner Sentinel, and it garnered a lot of support when Halo Legends was released in November 2009. In one of the short films that made up Legends, a long Forerunner creature could be seen, and some people thought it was a Guardian. Bungie never offered a

response to this riddle, and it would not be until 2015 and the release of Halo 5: Guardians that the creatures made their first official appearance in the series.

BELIEVE Halo 3 was the first Halo game to be an Xbox 360 exclusive, but more than that, it was the final chapter in one of the greatest videogaming adventures in the 2000s. Naturally, then, Microsoft pulled out all the stops and began work on an XXL marketing campaign in 2006. It all began at E3 2006, when Bungie and Microsoft unveiled the first trailer for the game. The trailer was relatively understated: it showed a ruined landscape, probably located close to New Mombasa, as the remains of the city’s space elevator can be seen. Viewers then heard Cortana’s voice, and her image began flashing up on the screen. She makes the following statements: I have defied Gods and Demons. I am your shield… I am your sword… I know you… Your past… Your future… This is the way the world ends.

The last sentence was taken from Cortana’s very first letter sent in February 1999 to Hamish Sinclair, one of the members of marathon.bungie.org when Bungie launched its Halo communications campaign. It was itself copied from the poem, The Hollow Men, by T.S. Eliot. When Cortana disappeared, Master Chief appeared on the screen carrying the new version of the assault rifle, a decision that got the desired reaction from the fans. Indeed, nothing was a coincidence when Bungie was communicating about its games. The camera then panned out and rose to reveal what the Spartan was heading towards: a vast crater in which could be seen a mysterious Forerunner structure. Above, the sky is filled with Covenant ships, clouds and flashes of lightning. Then, the alien relic emits a light and opens up. The trailer ended on a big white flash, before the Halo 3 logo appeared on the screen, followed by that of

the studio. One last sentence then appeared to conclude the trailer: “Finish the fight,”11 followed by a date: 2007. The soundtrack, composed for the occasion by the ever-stalwart Martin O’Donnell, marked a return to the soundscape of the first game. As it happened, this model would be applied to the entire Halo 3 soundtrack; the rock notes of Halo 2 had not proven popular with everyone, and O’Donnell had a very specific structure in mind when he began work on the music for Halo 3. “I had to make a decision,” he told IGN in March 2016. “All of a sudden, there were a lot of themes that became so iconic for Halo, that to a certain extent I was kind of… I had to do something with those themes, to make sure that not only the fans were happy, but it actually made sense. And by the time we got to Halo 3, our plan was that it would be the ending of this grand and glorious space trilogy. That was gonna be the end of Halo. So in the most general way, I thought: ‘Well Halo 1 had this kind of score, Halo 2 kind of was…’ It was related to the Halo 1 stuff but it had a lot of new stuff, and a lot of guitars and rock’n’roll… I thought: ‘Well, on Halo 3, let’s go back to sort of what we did on Halo 1.’ So the big plan was A, B, A. Which is a form that I like for music. Halo 3 was just sort of a return to some of the classic Halo stuff. But this time I’m gonna try to use a big orchestra, and less samples and synth. So we revisited some of the pieces from Halo 1, but orchestrated them up and recorded them with big stuff. That’s how Halo 3’s music came about.” And of course, the soundtrack he created was a hit. In 16: 9 and in HD, the trailer was a clear statement that Halo was getting ready to join the next generation of consoles, a statement that came much to the fans’ delight. Ever since its conception, the franchise had been a showcase for Xbox technology, and Halo 3 could well become the most beautiful game ever seen on a games console. And the media’s enthusiasm was ratcheted up another notch when it was announced that a new trailer would be shown during the Super Bowl on December  4th, 2006. The final of the American football championship is the most-watched TV event in the United States, and provided unrivalled visibility to the different products advertised

during and around the game. Brands were more than willing to spend several million dollars for advertising spots ranging from 30 seconds to over one minute. Some of the Super Bowl ads are etched into popular memory forever, such as the McDonald’s commercial in which Michael Jordan and Larry Bird face off in an improbable shootout. More recently, Volkswagen made a big impression with its “Baby Darth Vader” commercial, where a young boy in fancy dress tries to use the Force to interact with his environment. For the 2006 Super Bowl, Microsoft planned to make a big impression of its own and entrusted production of its video to Digital Domain, a Californian company specializing in digital special effects, and whose name could be seen in the credits of many a Hollywood blockbuster: Titanic, Apollo 13, Armageddon, Transformers 3, Fast & Furious 7, X-Men Apocalypse… Directed by Joseph Kosinski (Tron: Legacy, Oblivion…), the commercial, entitled Starry Night, begins with two children lying on the grass, looking up at the stars. They wonder if there were other living beings out there in space, and if one day they might meet them. While they are chatting, the camera leaves them and focuses on a helmet hidden among the high grass. Before viewers have time to figure out that the helmet belongs to Master Chief, the scene undergoes a radical change: the helmet is still there, but the grass disappears to be replaced by arid, dusty soil. Now in first person, a scream is heard while the Spartan picks up and puts on his helmet. The camera switches back to third person, rotates around Master Chief and takes stock of his assault rifle. Master Chief’s hearing gradually recovers, and on the radio he hears soldiers worrying about his fate. “I think we lost him,” the viewer hears. “Not yet,” the hero responds, looking up at the sky to see Covenant plasma artillery zeroing in on his position. He grabs a strange object and, at the last minute, throws it at the ground and crouches down. All of a sudden, a shield is deployed around him, keeping him safe from a shell landing right in front of him. No sooner has it exploded than the Spartan rushes forward. He holsters his magnum and readies his assault rifle before throwing himself into a battle against Brutes and Apparitions. Against a black background, the Halo 3 logo appears, then “Finish the fight” and that same date of

2007, and that’s it. The scene’s intensity and the striking realism of the graphics would be burned into players’ memory, who had a lot to say about the strange shield Master Chief deployed: Frank O’Connor was soon inundated with questions from members of halo.bungie.org, and just like everyone else, they thought that the shield was in fact a new kind of grenade, because Bungie had not yet revealed anything about the game’s gameplay. As always, O’Connor deployed humor to dodge their questions, providing only enigmatic answers that players would then attempt to dissect, without much success. Meanwhile, Microsoft announced that a beta version would be released in the spring to test the game’s multiplayer servers. This was a major first in the history of the series, and as a result one that would generate a lot of noise, especially because the registration instructions provided by Microsoft were lacking in clarity. Microsoft initially invited players to log on to Halo3.com, while they were waiting for a raffle to be held. But protests from players would lead Microsoft and Bungie, in February 2007, to offer new ways to access the beta. Play three hours of Halo 2 and be one of the first 13,333 people to say so on Halo3.com, or join Bungie’s Friends & Family program, reserved for an elite band of studio associates and the most die-hard players. In the end most players, and especially those outside the USA, would go for the final option: buying the game Crackdown, which came with access to the Halo 3 beta. Developed by Realtime Worlds, this was a new title published by Microsoft, and the company wanted to leverage Halo 3 to boost sales of its new intellectual property. It was a tactic that worked extremely well, because as soon as it was released on February  20, Crackdown drew in a great many players: in just a week, 427,000 copies had been sold in the Unites States, and at the end of 2007  Microsoft would reveal that 1.5  million copies of Crackdown had been sold worldwide. On May 15, Microsoft at long last announced the release date for the final chapter in Master Chief’s adventure: September 25. It was perfect timing, because the game’s beta testing was starting the very next day, where players would discover Halo 3’s multiplayer

mode through a number of playlists and three maps: Valhalla, Blizzard and Altitude. The latter was a fine example of what the two men responsible for designing the multiplayer maps in Halo 3–Chris Carney and Steve Cotton–had been trying to do. Just like Zanzibar in Halo 2, it was a scenario map upon which there would be an attacking team and a defending team. For a while, Carney and Cotton had explored other avenues to make things even more exciting: “We stuck some towers in, and we put AI gunners on all the towers. So as you’re running up the hill, you just get tagged by all these AI guys. That’s a direction that we went and we were like ‘Wow it’s way too hard.’” So Carney and Cotton decided to wind things down a notch and make do without the AI. It all had to be played out between human players, but there nevertheless had to be an obstacle that the attackers had to breach: “Some of the specific things that we tried out were having a wall that you have to get past, that sort of define whether you won or lost the game.” When the beta closed, it had been a resounding success: around 800,000 players had done battle online, for a total playtime of 816 game years. Thanks to this beta, Xbox Live created a new record for the most players online. 2007 was a particularly good year for Microsoft and its communications, with the software giant able to keep up a sustained pace of marketing events. That year, even E3 seemed to be smiling on Xbox and Bungie, because the event changed format and was pushed back to July. Held in a much less ostentatious venue in Santa Monica, E3 2007 was a chance for Bungie to unveil a new trailer, this time using images taken from the actual game. After a short musical introduction from Corporeal, the trailer started to roll: viewers heard the voice of the Prophet of Truth as dramatic images passed over the screen. Sergeant Johnson being attacked by a Brute, Covenant ships glassing a planet, cities lying in ruin, consumed by flames. Then Master Chief appeared, and began a montage of action scenes taken from the game’s campaign. The reaction to the trailer was doubtless more lukewarm than Bungie and Xbox had hoped. It has to be said that it showed the new graphics

engine to be decent, but not at all outstanding, and the writing for the trailer failed to elicit the same epic emotions that had come to characterize every Halo reveal so far. This meant that everyone duly noted the date of September 25, and hoped to be pleasantly surprised. Especially because Microsoft was by no means done with its marketing campaign. A few hours before E3, on July 10, Bungie posted a video on its website, entitled Halo: Arms Race. This short film was the first in a series of three shorts that together made up Halo: Landfall. Arms Race, the first, showed UNSC weapons factories working flat out to make weapons and vehicles to equip its soldiers as quickly as possible. The second, Combat, showed two ODST12 soldiers fighting against several Brutes, before a Pelican dropped a Warthog and enabled them to make their escape. Unfortunately, one of the two ODST has been seriously injured to the lower abdomen. The final video, Last One Standing, is a direct sequel to Combat, and provides something of an explanation for the start of Halo 3 and how the UNSC was able to find Master Chief so quickly. At the end of Halo 2, Master Chief dramatically boarded The Keyship, a Forerunner ship used by the Prophet of Truth’s Covenant forces to reach Earth. What then happened was that, when approaching Earth’s atmosphere, Master Chief chose to jump out into the vacuum of space. Then, in an effort to retrieve him as quickly as possible, the UNSC dispatched two ODST troops to use a laser guiding system to calculate Master Chief’s trajectory and ascertain where he would come to Earth. They managed it, but not without some difficulty, as most of the soldiers had been savagely killed by the Brutes. Last One Standing was broadcast on the Discovery Channel on September 24, just a few hours before Halo 3 was released. The short films were directed by Neill Blomkamp in partnership with Bungie and Weta, filmmaker Peter Jackson’s studio. Weta provided most of the special effects, and also made the replica costumes, weapons, and vehicles that appeared in the three films. Weta’s quality workmanship actually caused some problems for Bungie: in 2009, five officers from Kirkland Police Department pulled

up in the studio’s car park. A resident had warned them that someone was walking along Kirkland Way armed with an AK-47 assault rifle. After searching for the suspect for about 10  minutes, one of the officers suddenly thought to drop by Bungie’s offices, as the company was now well-known in the city. The officer’s hunch was proven right: the armed man in question was nothing more than a Bungie employee bringing one of the replica sniper rifles designed by Weta back to the studio. Just a scare, then. No harm done. Halo: Landfall was the stuff of dreams for the fan community, because rumors had been circulating for a few months now that Microsoft, Bungie, and Peter Jackson were in discussion about making a Halo movie. What they didn’t know, was that this was more than just a rumor, and that the three parties had done more than just talk, as you’ll see in the following chapter of this book. As exciting as it was, Halo: Landfall was just a little taste of what Microsoft had planned for the release of Halo 3. In June 2007, a new ARG was launched, and while it wasn’t as successful as Ilovebees, it enabled fans to learn more about the end of the war between the Forerunner Empire and the Flood. In parallel, the Believe campaign was also kicking off. It focused on Master Chief and his apparent sacrifice to help humanity win the war against the Covenant. Bungie and Microsoft would build an imposing diorama depicting a battle scene containing dozens of characters, both UNSC troops and alien forces. At its center, a Brute captain was carrying the body of Master Chief, who held in his hand a Covenant plasma grenade. This diorama, known as the John-117 Monument, was exhibited on many occasions in a new series of short films. Museum, the first, revealed to viewers that decades had passed since the end of the war, and that the survivors had built the Museum of Humanity, where a variety of pieces recounting the history of the Human-Covenant War were on display. The John-117  Monument occupies the museum’s main hall, where the narrator is interviewing a veteran. The diorama was also the focus of a second film, a mockumentary about how it was made. Other interviews with veterans were also recorded, all hailing the bravery of Master Chief. They pulled out all the stops to make

the Human-Covenant War seem more real, more definite, and therefore more dramatic. Master Chief was portrayed as a hero, an outstanding human who inspired hope in those who fought alongside him. The tone was deliberately dramatic, without being maudlin. Microsoft would even install commemorative plaques here and there across the United States, celebrating the Spartan’s exploits. On September 25, when Halo 3 finally hit the shelves, the fan community was at fever pitch. How did the war end? Was Master Chief really going to die? Microsoft’s marketing campaign had done its job. On the first day of its release, Halo 3 sold 2.5 million copies: around 200,000  more than Halo 2 in the same time period. By the end of the month, it had crossed the 3.3  million mark. And, just as Microsoft had hoped, the entire Xbox ecosystem benefitted because the release of Halo 3 saw Xbox 360 sales explode, especially in the USA: they almost doubled in the month of September 2007, rising from 277,000 to 528,000 consoles sold. That figure beat the 501,000 Wii sold by Nintendo, as well as the 119,000 PlayStation 3 sold by Sony, whose sales figures actually fell slightly that September. According to Microsoft, 14.5  million copies of Halo 3 were sold in 2018, clocking up a total of 650 million hours of online gaming. It was a colossal success. And yet, the game was not spared criticism when being reviewed. While the abundant depth of its multiplayer mode was universally applauded, some reviewers pointed out the many holes in the campaign mode’s story, not to mention the graphics that were nowhere near as good as it would have been reasonable to hope. Without being ugly, Halo 3 was far from the graphical breakthrough that Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2 had been in their day. Especially because in the meantime, a game had been released that set the new standard. Developed by Epic Games and released as an Xbox 360 exclusive on November 7, 2006, that game was Gears of War, and it gave Halo 3 a run for the title of the console’s best game.

STIFF COMPETITION

While Halo 2 was without a doubt the biggest game released for the Xbox, the story of how Halo 3 came to dominate the Xbox 360 is less clear-cut. Bungie’s new game was faced with fierce competition from the moment it was released, something that the studio was not used to. Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2 were the two best FPS available on consoles–that much was beyond any doubt–and both were regularly lauded for their technical prowess as well as for the depth of their multiplayer modes, factors which placed them in a class of their own. However, the first Halo game’s success would spur on many other developers, some of whom would find Sony waiting with open arms. The Japanese manufacturer was desperately seeking its own FPS that could stand up against Bungie’s game, and they settled on a small Dutch studio by the name of Guerrilla Games who, in the early 2000s, was working on an FPS called Killzone. Like Halo, Killzone was originally intended for release on PC, but it caught the eye of the PlayStation execs, who signed a contract with Guerrilla Games: Killzone would be a PlayStation 2 exclusive. Porting the game over from the PC to Sony’s console proved to be a more complex operation than initially thought, but the game would finally be released on November 2, 2004, just a few days before Halo 2. While Guerrilla Games had insisted at great length that its game shouldn’t be compared to Bungie’s, some sections of the press, as well as PlayStation fans themselves, almost immediately began referring to Killzone as the “Halo-killer.” Killzone was beautiful to look at; Killzone was mature; and, most importantly, it offered lots of different game modes, and even an online gaming feature. Despite its obvious strengths, though, Guerrilla Games’ title would never really establish enough market share to dethrone Halo. But in 2005, another FPS series would come along to outshine Halo. Developed by California’s Infinity Ward, Call of Duty 2 was released a few days after the Xbox 360, and quickly started scoring points. The first game in the series, released two years earlier, had already proven a hit with PC and Mac gamers, but it was with the fourth instalment in the series, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, that it

exploded onto a whole new level. Leaving the battlefields of the Second World War behind, Modern Warfare gave players a taste of more recent conflicts, from Eastern Europe to the Middle East. Its online mode was based on the general principles laid out in Halo 2, and the results were sensational. With its more accessible, fasterpaced gameplay, it won over a huge gaming community, especially among players who had never played Halo. Halo 3 and Modern Warfare came out in the same year, just a few weeks apart, and they would soon become the most-played games on Microsoft’s console. But while Activision would keep banging out Call of Duty games, Halo 3 would remain the only Halo game on the Xbox 360 for years, a fact that enabled Bungie to build its community around one single game. The result was that shortly before the release of Halo: Reach, Halo 3 was still the most popular game on the X360, played more than Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Call of Duty: World at War, and Gears of War 2. It’s worth noting that in addition to its passionate fan community, Halo 3 could also count on still-growing sales. In 2017, Ars Technica revealed that it was the top-selling game on the Xbox 360: of the 486,000 Xbox Live accounts used as a sample, 53.3  % of them had Halo 3 in their game library. While Halo 3 was knocked somewhat off balance by the evergrowing popularity of Call of Duty, it also lost its status as the technical showcase for the Xbox brand, being overtaken by Gears of War from Epic Games. Released in 2006 as an Xbox 360 exclusive, the latest brainchild from Cliff Bleszinski (who also brought us Unreal Tournament) could draw on Epic Games’ expertise in developing game engines. Gears of War was the studio’s first game to use Unreal Engine 3, the brand-spanking new version of the company’s game engine, which enabled it to display strikingly realistic graphics. Inspired by the TV series Band of Brothers, Bleszinski wanted to tell the story of a group of friends swept up in the horrors of war. While going through some personally challenging times himself, the game designer invented a fictional world in which humanity is suddenly faced with an invasion of humanoid monsters that emerge from the

bowels of the planet. Both the gaming press and gaming community were immediately enraptured with the dark and extremely violent Gears of War, due to both the intensity of its action and its good gameplay design ideas. Bleszinski made no secret of the fact that he had spent a long time watching how games like Resident Evil 4, Kill Switch and Bionic Commando did things, in order to develop a thirdperson shooter based on an ingenious cover system. Featuring a solid multiplayer mode, Gears of War gave a lot of gamers something to do while they were impatiently awaiting the release of Halo 3, and gradually carved out a space of its own in the videogaming landscape. Its sequel, Gears of War 2, won over even more fans thanks to its Horde mode where one or more players could stave off increasingly powerful waves of enemies. It was in part thanks to Horde mode that Gears of War 2 became one of the most popular games on the Xbox 360. Its success would also serve as inspiration for Bungie.

BEING AN MLG-PLAYER: THE HALO ESPORTS CRAZE The success of Halo 3’s multiplayer mode would bring many gamers into contact with a world that they had never before been part of: esports. Halo as an esport is almost as old as the franchise itself, with the unexpected success of multiplayer in Halo: Combat Evolved inspiring Microsoft to launch tournaments as far back as 2002. The first official competition, the Halo National Championship, attracted its own commercial sponsors, and the final between the eight best American players was filmed in full. It’s interesting to note that competitors in this first tournament included two future big names in Halo esports: Doug Fabrizio and Aaron Martin. At the time, most competitions were played in Free For All mode, but that was enough for the scene to grow. Combat Evolved was featured in the World Cyber Games 2003 and was the only console game to be included alongside the regular fixtures of Starcraft, Warcraft III and Counter-Strike. The ultimate winner, Matt Leto, had travelled all the way to Seoul, but the journey was worthwhile as he came home

$20,000 richer, and now famous under his username, Zyos. In 2004, before the release of Halo 2, Zyos competed in a series of tournaments, mainly in the USA, where competitions were organized by Major League Gaming. This organization, formed in 2002, had the aim of making esports a professional sport, enhancing its visibility, and giving it the resources it needed to get there. It put its money on Halo: Combat Evolved almost from the outset. The game had become a real society phenomenon in the United States, enabling a large number of players to emerge onto the scene. And Leto wasn’t alone: a team of players also made a name for itself in 2003. Under the name of Shoot To Kill, or StK, its members were Doug “Stranglepurple” Fabrizio, Aaron “BigSauce” Martin, Jack “Cyrax” Ratigan, and John “Brese” Calabrese. StK began gradually climbing the rankings and regularly crossed swords with Leto, but one event in particular would cement their success: in early 2003, two brothers would join Shoot To Kill and create a buzz. They were Daniel and Tom Ryan, but many people knew them by their usernames: OGRE1 and OGRE2. The Ryan brothers had been playing with Shoot To Kill for months already on Xbox Connect, a program developed by a small group of fans so that they could play Halo: Combat Evolved. They began playing on the platform in 2003, turning StK into an outrageously dominant force on the Halo esports scene. Halo 2’s release would further boost the visibility of esports, in part because the title made good use of Microsoft’s Xbox Live, and showcased team gaming. In 2005 StK, then made up of the Ryan brothers as well as Dave “Walshy” Walsh and Ryan “Saiyan” Danford, was recruited by Team 3D, soon to be renamed Final Boss after a change of sponsors. The talent of this new generation of gamers enabled MLG to hold increasingly large events. In 2006, one esports competition was broadcast on national TV in America: Halo 2 Pro Series from MLG. The success of this initial foray into the world of television would encourage some major American TV stations–with ESPN at the front of the pack–to regularly broadcast competition highlights and compilations of the best battles. For the very best players, the rewards for their talents really began to take

off: MLG Las Vegas 2007 had a cash prize of $280,000 up for grabs, a larger sum than Counter-Strike had ever been able to offer at that point in time. Naturally, then, when Halo 3 was launched, Bungie and Microsoft had esports in mind, and they introduced a Team Hardcore playlist–soon replaced by an MLG playlist– featuring the rules and maps used in Major League Gaming tournaments. The term “MLGplayer” became popular, with many gamers adding the acronym to their gamertag, partly as a boast, and partly to inspire fear in their online opponents. Being an MLG player came with kudos, and for some players it was a source of pride… Even if they were only faking it. There were plenty of imposters, but many gamers dreamed of one day traveling the world and earning millions of dollars thanks to their gaming talents. At the highest levels of the sport, teams were forming and disbanding. Final Boss, for example, played in lots of different lineups over the years, welcoming into its ranks a whole series of toplevel players like Michael “StrongSide” Cavanaugh, and Justin “iGotUrPistola” Deese. For some, esports would serve as a career launchpad, with a number of former Halo pro-players now employed by 343 Industries, who took over the Halo license in the early 2010s. Most notably, this was the case for Andy “Bravo” Dudynsky, the former Final Boss coach, who was hired as a community manager in 2013. That same year, 343 Industries also hired Eric “GH057ayame” Hewitt, to harness his expertise when developing the multiplayer mode for Halo 5: Guardians. Other players branched out from the Halo scene to specialize in other games, with varying degrees of success. The best known among them is without any doubt Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, a former member of Final Boss, Renegades, and Team Liquid who, in 2017, exploded onto a whole new level thanks to Fortnite, the off-the-wall Battle Royale from Epic Games. The success of Halo esports, and Halo 3’s iteration in particular, owed a lot to the work carried out by the various designers of the multiplayer mode. The work of the map designers deserves recognition first and foremost, with Chris Carney’s team that included Steve Cotton, Justin Hayward and Mike Buelterman; as well as

Tyson Green and Lars Bakken, who tweaked the game and its balance right down to the finest details. Halo 3’s maps quickly became popular with players for their artistic direction and the level of detail in the environments: every player had their own favorites depending on different game modes and also for far more subjective reasons. Epitaph, for example, won over many more aesthetically minded players. They loved its unique design and came to call it the “Forerunner cathedral”. They weren’t actually far from the truth, because to design it Chris Carney drew inspiration from the layout of Chartres cathedral, in France. It included a nave, framed between two side aisles separated by small columns; a transept with crossing; a choir… Despite its tumultuous past, Guardian soon became one of the game’s most iconic maps due to it featuring in the most popular playlists like Team Slayer (4 vs. 4 deathmatches) and Free For All. This map, designed by Cotton, was the butt of some jokes within Bungie because during the testing phase, the map was nicknamed “Jub Jub” in reference to the Ewoks in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi due to it being set high in the treetops. Cotton wasn’t offended, because he knew that he had also created a map that was as successful as Lockout, which was hugely popular with players of Halo 2. “I wanted to take a lot of things that were working well in Lockout, but I didn’t want it to be Lockout,” Cotton clarified for us. “Scale-wise it’s very close. That’s intentional because the scale in Lockout worked well for the amount of players, but I think a lot of the connections, the circuits around the map, and the added lifts make it [Guardian] ultimately very different from Lockout.” The same forensic attention was given to the larger maps which were dedicated to Big Team Battle mode, in which two teams of eight players did battle in deathmatches or objective-based games. One of Cotton’s first maps was called Sandtrap, and it would soon come to be emblematic of Halo 3. It had it all: interesting artistic direction, a large game area, lots of vehicles, and an almost infinite range of winning strategies. It was the environment that initially intrigued players: Sandtrap was set within the confines of a gigantic Forerunner defensive wall that completely encircled the game area.

The most inquisitive fans struck out to reach the wall, finding there only death, killed by the infamous Guardians. But as big as it was, Sandtrap ended up being half the size Cotton had originally intended. At the time, he was working with Chris Carney on scenario maps–like Altitude–and together they were looking for ways to offer new gameplay experiences by adding AI elements. For Sandtrap, the concept was as follows: attackers started the match on the other side of the encircling wall, in another area of just as large a scale, where they would have to assault an access door to get inside the wall. But Cotton and Carney had a surprise in store for them: according to Cotton, “There was an initial opening into an area where attackers would fight up a sort of beachhead like a D-Day kind of assault. Once they made it through that, we had some pretty fun prototypes of massive guns aiming down on them.” But just like with Altitude, it made the map too hard and the idea was scrapped. Sandtrap was limited to the space inside the walls, a fact that made it no less interesting a map, because Cotton had a very specific idea of what he wanted: “I really wanted to make the ultimate Warthog map. And make it both vehicle- and infantry-friendly, which is pretty problematic in Halo 3 at times. The Warthog is my favorite vehicle in any game ever and I feel like maybe half of the levels we’ve had Warthogs in have been successful.” And Cotton pulled it off, because when Halo 3 was released, Sandtrap became the favorite map for Warthog drivers and fans of Big Team Battle mode.

10 Sandbox is a term traditionally used to refer to an open-world game. In the Halo franchise, however, a sandbox is a section of a level that’s more open than others, a bubble of freedom where players can try out their own strategy and move more freely than in the rest of the game. We will take a closer look at this later on. 11 A reference to the last words spoken by Master Chief in the ending of Halo 2. 12 Orbital DropShock Trooper, UNSC Special forces.

Chapter 11 – Microsoft and Bungie Part Ways It can be said that the relationship between Microsoft and Bungie had been, at the very least, a complex one ever since Microsoft acquired the studio. Periods of peaceful coexistence and cooperation were interspersed with far more polarizing moments, and the two companies were probably destined to part ways sooner or later. But nobody suspected that the first cracks had appeared so soon along the way, many years before the official split.

A LONG DIVORCE On October 5, 2007, while Halo 3 was proving a hit all around the globe, it was surprising to learn that Microsoft and Bungie had reached a gentleman’s agreement that would allow Bungie to regain its independence in the not-too-distant future. Microsoft would keep producing Halo games, initially with Bungie’s input, and then under its own steam. The news was surprising, because Bungie was Microsoft Studio’s figurehead and had given the Xbox, and later the Xbox 360, three of the biggest games in the history of the brand. The press and fans alike were surprised, but they would be even more astounded if they knew how long the divorce had been brewing behind closed doors. Indeed, Bungie and Microsoft had started discussing the matter long before 2007. To understand the roots of the matter we have to go all the way back to 2003, as Martin O’Donnell explains: “About a year into Halo 2’s development, I remember talking to Pete Parsons. The Halo team had gotten some sort of bonus check for you know, $12 or something, for the success of Halo. And it was like, wow, yeah. I’m exaggerating slightly, but

whatever the amount was, it wasn’t commensurate with the success. I thought: this is what happens when you sell intellectual property and you’re just working for a company, and how I’d love to ‘go pirate’ and start our own. So we and a small crew of people started talking about what we’d need to do to either do that, or convince Microsoft that they should share more.” At first, then, it was a financial dispute that set Bungie at odds with its employer. The studio still retained a defensive attitude towards Microsoft, and in Marcus Lehto’s view, while cooperation between the two companies had seen better days, that was also largely due to the studio’s idiosyncratic mentality: “They [Microsoft] were probably struggling just as much with us as we were with them, because we were kind of assholes back then. And looking from the outside, trying to figure out how to work with Bungie, well, Bungie is really hard to work with. It’s not a very collaborative studio when it comes to external forces coming in and saying, ‘Hey, can we give you some suggestions on what to do with marketing?’” And so an initial group began to form to discuss the studio’s future. Its members included Jason Jones, of course, as well as Joe Staten, Paul Bertone, Chris Butcher, Marcus Lehto and Martin O’Donnell. Following a series of meetings, they reached an agreement: Microsoft would have to increase the profit-sharing on income generated by Halo 2 upon its release. Microsoft agreed to the request and signed an agreement without much fuss. Things seemed to be getting better, they thought at the time. Except that meanwhile, the relationship between Microsoft and Bungie would start to become strained, in part because Xbox division execs–with the exception of Ed Fries–were pushing Bungie to get Halo 2 ready for release as soon as possible, and ideally before the end of Microsoft’s current accounting year, meaning by July 2003. Fries managed to win them a bit of extra time, and the studio was plunged into the heinous crunch covered in an earlier chapter. The success of the game wouldn’t really change things, which was unfortunate for Microsoft. Because at Bungie, dissent was brewing. “Halo 2 was so successful that we hit our profit cap for the initial deal we had worked out with Microsoft on day one,” O’Donnell explained. Once again, Bungie was left with the feeling that all the hard work it had put into

Halo 2 just wasn’t paying off. Anger was simmering away within the studio, to the extent that it became obvious to their employer. “The profit-sharing didn’t seem like it was as good a deal as we were expecting,” O’Donnell recalls. “So we told Microsoft that we were going to split off and start an independent game company.” It was a threat that the Xbox executives failed to take seriously, instead blaming it on the fatigue caused by a long, complicated development process. Especially because at that time, the studio was itself divided: Jason Jones was away, as was Joe Staten, and the small group of people making decisions was changing. They even gave themselves a nickname: The Blue Crystals. Butcher, Lehto and O’Donnell were joined by Harold Ryan, Max Hoberman and Ben Wallace, one of the lead engineers at Bungie. This small group met regularly and organized in the shadows, preferring to keep their distance from some members of the studio, as Jaime Griesemer recalls: “I was a little bit of a wild card, so they didn’t really want me in the meetings. And it was all sort of backroom stuff, and that’s just not my style. But as soon as I heard about it I was like, ‘Why aren’t we just talking about this in the open? Why is this random sampling of seven guys or whatever negotiating this deal?’” Griesemer’s comments did nothing to stop them. On the contrary, they left him even more excluded from the group. In 2005, the relationships between some of the studio’s executive were at their lowest ebb, and Paul Bertone and Jaime Griesemer regularly found themselves at loggerheads. These “backroom discussions,” as the lead designer called them, served only to fuel tension and mistrust among the Grizzled Ancients. Staten, who opted to take sabbatical leave after a long argument with Marcus Lehto, was also shut out of the discussion. “I was really not privy to any of those negotiations,” Staten would reveal in 2017. “Partially because I don’t think they wanted me to be part of the group, and partially because I had no interest in being part of it.” Harold Ryan and Martin O’Donnell ultimately decided to get in touch with some experts who could give them solid advice. They got the same answer every time: there was nothing stopping Bungie

certainly negotiating a split with Microsoft. With their confidence boosted, the pair decided to hire a negotiator by the name of Don Leeds, who helped get the Xbox execs and the Blue Crystals to sit at the same table to discuss the terms of Bungie’s departure. The first meetings were heated affairs. Microsoft owned the Halo license and had every intention of keeping it. Bungie, meanwhile, wanted to turn the page, to work on new games, rediscover its freedom and–most importantly–own the games it made. This was Jason Jones’ dearest wish, and he was very insistent. This made it hard for the two camps to find common ground, especially because Microsoft had no other studio that would be able to take over the license if Bungie ever jumped ship. And in actual fact, there was nothing stopping them from doing so. The 100  +  developers that currently made up the Bungie team could just choose to up and resign, and then go off and set up their own company. In the end, then, Microsoft would yield, albeit with a few conditions: Bungie had to finish making Halo 3, and then deliver two additional games. The time it would take to make these two new games should allow Microsoft to prepare for the transition, and to set up a team that could replace Bungie in making new Halo games. The studio would regain its independence, but it would stay tied to Microsoft until 2010. Microsoft’s proposed conditions suited the Blue Crystals, who were remaining pragmatic: independence wasn’t cheap, and Bungie would need the funds to cover its overheads while working up to the release of its first game as an independent studio. After months of discussions and negotiations, the two parties came to an agreement. Bungie would regain its independence and could start work on a brand new game, one that would be Bungie’s and Bungie’s alone. It would also retain all the technology it had developed in-house since the buyout. Microsoft, meanwhile, got to keep the Halo intellectual property, and would publish three new games set in the franchise universe: Halo 3, Halo 4 and another minor title that could be released between Halo 3 and Halo 4. Bungie’s declaration of independence was signed on July 7, 2007, but they still needed to announce it to the staff. And for a number of purely legal reasons, the news could not be made public until October 5, and a decision was made to wait until then. A few

days before Microsoft and Bungie issued their press releases, the studio execs gathered all the employees together in their conference room. When they entered the room, they were surprised to see, up on the stage seated alongside a few Bungie veterans, a number of members of the Xbox team, and especially their big boss, Shane Kim. After a short preamble, they heard the news: Bungie was independent once again. The conference room erupted, people were shouting and clapping: it was a reaction that took Kim completely by surprise, as he would relate a few years later: “Everybody was cheering, and my first thought was, ‘Jeez, what did we do to you guys?’ Because I actually think we were pretty good. But I got it, too. At a real visceral level, I got it. They wanted to be independent.” And so it came to pass that Bungie Studio gave way to Bungie, LLC. The new Bungie was founded by Jason Jones and a few of his historic managers, and together they sat on the company’s new board. Harold Ryan was appointed the CEO. In late 2010, Bungie LLC became Bungie, Inc. once it had fulfilled all the contractual obligations binding it to Microsoft. At the same time, the collective bargaining agreement was amended, entitling all studio employees to own shares in the company.

DESTINY CALLING That was that, then: Bungie would be independent once again. While Microsoft would be rushing to find a solution and form a studio to make the next Halo game from scratch, Bungie had to follow suit and plan for the future. The good news was that Jason Jones’ long absence had come to an end: the studio’s co-founder was back, and he brought with him a few ideas for the studio’s next big game. Inhouse, they had great expectations… perhaps too great, in the mind of Jaime Griesemer: “The expectation was he was coming up with the next big thing that we all were going to work on. I think he kind of felt that pressure whenever he was around the rest of the team. He was expected to come up with the next Halo. Which is ridiculous, because no one person made Halo, and no one person can roll the

dice and come up with Halo again. That’s just not going to happen. But that was sort of how the set-up was.” But when it came to the man himself, Jason Jones was not in the least bit worried. Not because he was convinced that the studio’s next game would be a hit, but simply because Bungie would always find a way to bounce back. As he honestly told IGN in 2013, “I was never worried that that’s what I would have to do, personally. I believe that there are always going to be people who are really excited to work on Halo, so that was never an issue. I don’t think anybody who gets their primary satisfaction by creating wants to create the same thing over and over again. But I was never worried about that.” Especially because Jones already had some ideas ready to go. As much as he adored Halo, the game as it was released in 2001 bore no relation to what he had originally dreamed up in 1997 and 1998, when he and a handful of developers were working on prototypes. He wanted to make something bigger, something less linear, something that was designed to make players want to keep coming back, again and again, and not just for the multiplayer mode. “The great tragedy of Halo,” he would reveal, “Is that for years and years it provided wonderful single-player and co-op content, and we provided people with almost no fun incentives or excuses, almost no reason besides their own enjoyment, to go back and replay it.” Jones had a few good ideas, but they were all still relatively vague. Within the studio, however, someone else had been working on the prototype for a possible new game for a while already. Jaime Griesemer was sick and tired of Halo, and he had made his feelings known to the Bungie board of directors on several occasions. He obtained their permission to start working on a brand new project. After all, the studio now had to plan for its future so why not let Griesemer do his own thing? Because who knows? The designer may well hit on something that they could use. Working alone at his computer, he would lay the general outlines of his new game, under the working title of Dragon Tavern. For him, the objective was clear: Dragon Tavern had to be everything that Halo wasn’t. It would be a thirdperson game in a fantasy setting. Players would have their own property–a tavern–that they could decorate and furnish just as they

liked. This private area of the game world would be accessible only to friends that the player invited over. But together, they could all set off on adventures in a shared game world filled with all kinds of battles and quests. It looked like an MMORPG, similar to World of Warcraft, but that wasn’t really what it was. Here, too, the rough draft was somewhat vague, but it was already more fleshed out than Jason Jones’ ideas. This was because Griesemer had already been in discussion with Chris Butcher to check that his ideas for an online co-op game were actually feasible. Butcher was quite enthusiastic about the idea and Griesemer got back to work, filled with new hope. But his spirits would soon be dampened. Summoned before the Bungie board of directors, he found out that the studio was not in a position to develop two different games at the same time. Only one project could continue, and, of course, it would be Jason Jones’. Griesemer attempted to argue the case for Dragon Tavern, and found support in Jones himself, who loved his colleague’s ideas. This meant that rather than consigning Griesemer’s idea to the trash, they would use concepts from it to enrich Jones’ game. Together, the two game designers would begin work on Bungie’s first post-Halo game. Named Project Tiger, it would keep Griesemer and Jones busy for years while the rest of the studio worked to honor Bungie’s contract with Microsoft. Project Tiger would undergo some radical changes over the course of the design process. For a while, it looked a bit like Diablo; a few months later, more like Titan, a project in development at Blizzard and that would ultimately produce Overwatch after a series of reversals. “I went to Blizzard for a while, and played Titan,” Griesemer told Jason Schreier in 2016. “And I was like, ‘Holy shit, you guys are working on the same game, down to character classes.’” Project Tiger’s pre-production process was particularly complicated, and the concept underwent a series of overhauls. And much to the chagrin of Griesemer, the more time went on, the more the game started to look like Halo. Because little by little, a few new members of staff had been lending a hand on designing the game, and it seemed like old habits died hard. “The studio was being

constructed in order to turn out Halo games,” Griesemer explains. “And so anything that was too far outside of what had already been done in Halo, we just weren’t culturally suited to do.” Especially because Bungie had been engaged on a massive recruitment drive for years now. And the new hires had applied for the job for one reason. “We were probably three hundred people,” he adds. And the huge majority of them had been hired after Halo 3 shipped. There were still quite a few members of staff at Bungie who had been around during the days of Myth and who had a soft spot for fantasy settings, people like Paul Bertone and Christopher Barrett, and it was the latter who would become the artistic director of Tiger. But more recently, the vast majority of developers had joined the studio because they were fans of Halo, and they were recruited with a view to making more Halo games. The artists were specialists in science fiction; the animators had spent years working on FPS; even the technologies Bungie had created over the years were all designed for first-person games. Little by little, the game imagined by Griesemer would morph into an FPS enriched with MMORPG mechanics, set in a sci-fi world with fantasy elements. Armored soldiers with magic powers, doing battle against alien and demonic invasions to protect the last human city. You, dear reader, have no doubt realized that this game was the one that would be released as Destiny. But that’s a story for another day. Here, we must return to the adventures of Master Chief and his comrades in arms.

AN UNEXPECTED RTS In late 2005, Bungie received an unexpected visitor: a few developers from Ensemble Studios, the people behind Age of Empires, were in Seattle and had dropped by to say hello. Acquired by Microsoft in 2001, Ensemble had something of a special status, as the company was still based in Dallas, Texas. Unlike with Bungie, Microsoft hadn’t tried to move them onto its campus, and Ensemble’s hundred or so employees were free to live their lives uninterrupted, far from Redmond. Among those who had made the

trip up to Seattle were Graeme Devine. A talented game designer and programmer, he was highly respected within Ensemble because, while the staff was generally on the younger side, he already boasted a long and illustrious career behind him. With stints at Atari, Lucasfilm Games (which would become LucasArts) and Activision, he had built his own studio and released the successful The 7th Guest before taking over the helm at id Software. Very close with John Carmack, one of the co-founders of id, he worked with him on Quake III and Doom 3 before being recruited by Ensemble in early 2003. On the day he visited Kirkland, Devine didn’t really know much about Halo. He took advantage of the visit to have a chat with Jaime Griesemer, as well as with Joseph Staten. The two groups got on swimmingly, encouraging Ensemble to reveal to Griesemer and Staten that they had an announcement to make. The staff all got together in the same room, and much to the surprise of Bungie’s staff, Devine told them that in Dallas, as they spoke, Ensemble Studio was working on a new project: a real-time strategy (RTS) game set in the Halo universe. When Bungie’s developers heard the news, their faces froze and their eyes hardened. An outside studio working on a Halo game? Unthinkable. Bungie was particularly protective of its creations, and of Halo in particular. Even though the studio was just emerging from the Halo 2 crunch and large numbers of the employees had no desire to hear one more word about the franchise, it was still Bungie’s baby, its very own. And it showed. Their behavior towards their visitors underwent a sudden and radical change. A change that Devine did not fail to notice. “I think we shocked them. I wouldn’t say it was hostile, but the reception was cold. And it’s not their fault. If somebody had come to us and said, ‘Hey we’re making this Age of Empires action game,’ we’d probably have the same reaction if we didn’t know what was going on.” To understand how this could come to pass, we have to go all the way back to 2004. Back then, Ensemble’s executives were attending a conference in Chicago, far away from the studio. While they were there, they experienced something of an existential crisis: known for Age of Empires, the studio wanted to break out of the RTS

pigeonhole, and was looking to diversify. But nobody was really that enthusiastic about the few projects that it currently had in preproduction, neither within the studio nor at Microsoft. The only concrete project in development at this point was Age of Empires III, which left some of the longer-serving employees feeling jaded. And low morale was infectious. One unusual thing about Ensemble was that the studio was mainly made up of young men for whom this was their first job. They liked working together and they liked spending time together. After a long day at the office, they hung out in each other’s homes, and some of them were even roommates. Basically, the atmosphere in the studio was brotherly and good-natured, and that would be all well and good in everyday life. In a games studio, it meant that when some people began to have had enough, others soon joined them, and this was exactly what happened at Ensemble in 2004. It was to remedy this situation that Tony Goodman, Chris Rippy, Dave Pottinger, Angelo Laudon and other execs all met in Chicago: they wanted to lift the mood of their staff with new projects, projects that weren’t another RTS if at all possible. After careful consideration, they left Illinois with three potential games. The first was an action-RPG; the second an MMORPG, since Goodman, the studio’s CEO, was a big fan of the beta version of World of Warcraft and wanted to make a game in its image; and the third, more unusual game was an RTS for the Xbox 360. This was an idea that came from Angelo Laudon, who had long been flirting with the idea of successfully crossing the genre over to the games console market. Many developers considered it to be an impossible task, because RTS games needed lots of controls, for which a mouse and keyboard were far better suited. But Laudon was sure he could pull it off. He also knew that Microsoft would be needing lots of new games ready for its Xbox 360, slated for release at the end of the year. Microsoft Studios had started moving away from PC games, and Laudon knew that with a console game, Ensemble would have a better chance of bringing Peter Moore as well as Phil Spencer, the director of Microsoft’s in-house studios, round to the idea. Before Microsoft gave Ensemble the green light to develop the whole project, the studio decided to entrust Graeme Devine, Chris Rippy,

and Angelo Laudon with making a prototype, with a few more members of staff assigned to lend a hand. Graeme Devine quickly came up with an idea for a fast-paced strategy game that was easy to pick up and play, set in a sci-fi world, similar to Starcraft, the RTS from Blizzard. But the hardest job would be designing the controls from the ground up. He and his colleagues spent a while studying Pikmin, a GameCube game designed by Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator behind Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda. At that time, it was the one console game that most resembled a strategy game. And it contained a treasure trove of good ideas. Devine and his team got to work studying lots of different games, picking up ideas here and there and then coming up with their own. This led them to developing “area of effect” unit selection: by pressing and holding the A button on the controller, players created an expanding circle that selected any units lying within its area of effect. In late 2005, the project–known as Phoenix–was brought before Microsoft, who really liked the concept they saw. But there was a roadblock: it was a risky endeavor because nobody had ever tried to make a console RTS before. Xbox had nothing against the idea, quite the opposite, but its executives would like to have some guarantees. Something that would attract players without fail. They soon found a solution: Ensemble would scrap the universe dreamed up by Devine and make a strategy game set in the Halo universe. This decision was a very painful one for Devine, who saw Phoenix as his baby. He deferred to Microsoft’s decision, but not without letting Phil Spencer and Peter Moore know that the job would be more difficult than they had thought. “When you’re presented with making Halo, you try to explain it’s not just a matter of calling these aliens the ‘Covenant’ and these humans the ‘UNSC,’ it’s actually a huge change. That, I don’t think came across very loud and clear. I think Microsoft felt that it was just a color change, a graphical change.” Phoenix, then, got a new name, and became Halo Wars, but someone still needed to get Bungie in on the plan. If Bungie wasn’t on board, Ensemble would never be able to make the game a reality. Bungie could teach them a lot about the Halo universe, its planets

and its characters. This was what led Ensemble to make that trip up to Seattle at the end of the year. When he saw Bungie’s reaction, Devine came up with a solution: he had brought one of the Phoenix prototypes along with him and suggested those present give it a try. He then spent many hours with Joseph Staten, who told him all there was to know about the Halo universe. When the team returned to Dallas, Devine felt like the hardest job had already been done: Bungie’s staff had played his prototype and given positive feedback, and Staten had answered all his questions with his characteristic passion. However, what lay ahead would be far more challenging. While Staten was delighted to be able to step away from Marcus Lehto and the development of Halo 3, he was soon the only person responding to Ensemble’s requests. Inside Bungie, anger was simmering away. And all the time getting closer to boiling point. Microsoft had given Halo to another studio, and Bungie wasn’t happy about it. Not one bit, in fact, and especially among the highest echelons. It was a state of play that served only to fuel the conflict between Bungie and Microsoft, and gave more ammunition to figures like Jason Jones and Martin O’Donnell, who wanted Bungie to own its own creations. Instead, they had been robbed of Halo, and that just would not do. Some staff even talked about whoring out the franchise, strong words that were aimed more at Microsoft than at Ensemble. While Bungie’s staff initially kept things in perspective and didn’t apportion blame to Ensemble, they soon made their displeasure known by ignoring most of Devine’s requests, who ended up speaking only to Staten. It was true that Halo Wars wasn’t being developed by Bungie, but the studio still had a right to oversee how the Halo universe was used. This meant that every time Devine needed to create a planet or a new character, he had to consult Staten. He even produced mock holiday brochures so that he could present the planets that Ensemble wanted to feature in the game in detail. Staten liked his attitude, and understood that Devine respected Halo and was trying to do right by the series. He offered guidance to Ensemble on the story, in particular advising them to set the new game long before the events in Halo: Combat Evolved. Better yet, Devine was one of the first people to read Halo: Contact

Harvest, Staten’s first novel. Devine then decided that Halo Wars would take place a few years after Contact Harvest, initially on the planet Harvest, before shifting the action to another planet called Arcadia. Of course, they added in a few Spartans, and wove the Covenant, the Flood, and the Forerunners into the story. On paper, Halo Wars had almost everything going for it to become a successful game, but in reality the situation was a little more complex. Devine was having major trouble with his art team, who couldn’t manage to recreate the world concocted by Bungie. In a fit of rage Rich Geldreich, one of the engineers working on the game, printed out 400 screenshots taken from Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2, and stuck them up on every wall around the studio. A few years later, he would reveal how, “I was pissed off that this game didn’t look like a Halo game.” And Bungie was of no help either, refusing to show Ensemble their work on Halo 3, which was currently in production. This meant that tensions arose between the two studios, but also within Ensemble itself, whose staff grew more divided with each passing day. The Halo Wars team, made up of around 25 staff, was understaffed, and despite their regular requests for help, none was forthcoming. Worse still, most of the studio’s resources were allocated to Tony Goodman’s MMORPG project, despite it not having received any approval from Microsoft. Goodman had also decided that his MMORPG would also be set in the Halo universe, hoping that this would persuade Microsoft to approve the project. The result was that most of Ensemble’s teams were working on a game that might very well be canceled overnight, while the Halo Wars team was struggling to make any progress. First announced at the Xbox Show 2006, the game was still very far from finished by the time of E3 2007, to the extent that the demo on show was in no way representative of the actual game. The designers were still engaged in a lot of reflection and were yet to finalize their decisions, but the presentation was nevertheless well received by fans of the franchise. But within the studio it was open warfare, and Graeme Devine eventually threw in the towel. Having grown weary of constantly arguing with his colleagues, he decided to step back and hand the

reins of the project over to Dave Pottinger. Over the following months, Devine would work only on the story for the game’s singleplayer campaign, no longer involved in the ongoing discussions about the game design itself. Unfortunately for Ensemble, things took a turn for the worse when, in late 2007, the execs at Microsoft Studios learned that a Halo MMORPG was in development without their go-ahead. Worse still, most of the workforce assigned to the MMORPG and to Halo Wars were obviously short-staffed, slowing the production process. Despite the fact that according to Jason Schreier, author of Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made, some former members of Ensemble disputed this version of events and assured him that Microsoft was aware of the situation, the software giant’s reaction would not be long coming. It had already been years since the studio delivered a new game, and it was obvious that the way the teams were being managed was counterproductive. One morning in September 2008, the staff were in for a big surprise when they got to the office and found a number of major Microsoft figures waiting for them, including Shane Kim. It was down to Tony Goodman to deliver the bad news: Microsoft had decided to close Ensemble down. But that didn’t mean that it had any intention of abandoning Halo Wars. The staff were offered the opportunity to stay on for four months in order to finish the game. Those who agreed would receive handsome compensation. Goodman, meanwhile, had plans to open an independent studio, and had negotiated a contract with Microsoft: the new company, named Robot Entertainment, would make Microsoft an online version of Age of Empires. The problem was that the funding offered to make the game meant that Goodman would be unable to keep all his staff. Half of them would have to go. This meant that for four months, the staff would keep working on Halo Wars, all the while knowing that once it was done, half of them would be out of a job. The atmosphere at Ensemble soon became unbearable, forcing Goodman to make his decision earlier than planned. Nevertheless, and despite the prevailing conditions, the

development of Halo Wars was going extremely well. It was to be the last game made by Ensemble Studios, and the staff wanted to be proud of their work. When it hit the shelves on February  26, 2009, Halo Wars received positive reviews and recorded decent sales, with one million copies sold by March 19. At the time of writing, Microsoft’s figures reveal that just over 2,600,000 copies of Halo Wars have been sold.

HALO 3: ODST: MOVIE, EXPANSION, THEN FULL GAME When Joseph Staten decided to take a temporary step back from Bungie in 2005, the writer treated himself to a few vacations before getting back to work. Not to play an active role in the development of Halo 3, though. Instead, it was to work with filmmaker Peter Jackson. An avid fan of video games, Jackson wanted to put together his own games studio, but because he had no experience in this area, he began to approach video game publishers and industry figures who he knew and respected. These included Microsoft and Bungie, and the three parties came to an agreement: Bungie would help Jackson to launch Wingnut Interactive, which would then make a new game set in the Halo universe. In the meantime, the filmmaker would begin making a film under the franchise. Seeing it as an ideal opportunity to keep away from Bungie Towers, Staten threw himself into this brand new kind of assignment. He then embarked on a series of trips between Seattle and New Zealand, sometimes taking Paul Bertone along with him. With Wingnut Interactive, they began sketching the outline of a new game, entitled Halo: Chronicles. Chronicles told the story of a normal human soldier who, over the course of the war, discovers an amazing Forerunner technology that gradually transforms him into a fearsome war machine. “Joe came up with the concept of ‘be the bullet,’” Bertone recalls. “We wanted to take the player on this emotional and gameplay journey from just being human to being a modified human. You were able to switch into this completely different combat mode, where the only way you could do damage was through a powerful melee attack. And you had two

hand weapons. One would push enemies away from you, and the other stunned them where they were. You also had a double jump and an auto-aimed long-distance dash that you could do from the air.” With help from Damian Isla, one of the designers from Halo 3, Bertone and Staten got a few prototypes up and running and put this new gameplay to the test on the first few levels of Halo 3, which was then beginning to take shape. But the player character’s unique abilities meant that the team needed to revise a few things, and even create whole new game systems. One of them was known as Kung Fu, after the films of the same genre: under this system, the AI would encircle the player, but only one or two enemies would engage them in combat, with the others waiting their turn to attack by staying hidden, for example. This system was needed because the player could take nowhere near as much damage as Master Chief due to the fact that they had no energy shield. “It’s funny, because the player was eventually going to become a Promethean, which is a concept they later used on Halo 4 and Halo 5 for the Guardians, and some other bad guys,” Paul Bertone reveals. While Bertone and Staten were working with Wingnut Interactive on Halo: Chronicles, Peter Jackson started work on a Halo film. He managed to persuade Guillermo del Toro to direct it, while Jackson would serve as the producer. At the last minute, del Toro was forced to pull out of the project and Jackson entrusted the role to his new protege, Neill Blomkamp. As it would happen, Blomkamp was a fan of the series, and was over the moon at being able to direct a movie adaptation of Master Chief’s adventures. Together with Jackson and Weta Workshop, they launched the initial pre-production phase of the project, which included manufacturing a few accessories. Weapons, costumes… but that’s not all, as Bertone tells us: “We were sitting in his big conference room, Peter talking away, and I look out the window and all of a sudden the Warthog drives by. They had built the fucker… and I was just like, ‘I’m sorry, the Warthog just drove by.’ Peter was just as excited. He was like, ‘Oh yeah, we should go check that out now.’” The small group of Bungie employees who were there simply couldn’t believe their eyes. For

the first time, their creations in the virtual world had been made into real-live objects that they could touch. The Warthog was fully functional: it drove, had 4-wheel drive, and had plenty of power under the hood. Naturally, the developers couldn’t resist taking it for a spin. But their enthusiasm got the better of them and Curtis Creamer managed to crash it by sending the Warthog into a skid and causing slight damage to a building. No real harm was done to driver or vehicle, but it did give them a bit of a scare. But all the excitement about these impressive replicas did nothing to relieve Joe Staten’s stress, as he had his mind firmly on the job. “I don’t know how to make a movie,” he explains. “I never worked in Hollywood. But we were dealing with some pretty high-powered Hollywood people to try to get this movie done. The Halo movie went through all kinds of different writing and directing partners.” And yet, far from Bungie, Staten was in his element. He met a lot of people and had regular exchanges with Jackson. He would visit New Zealand three or four times every year, making shorter or longer trips. The director was particularly interested in what Staten had to say and liked his various suggestions, and he never hesitated to amend the script when Staten thought something didn’t work. But despite all the best will in the world, the film was still not in production. It had a potential producer, that’s true, and even a director. But it still hadn’t received a green light from the Hollywood studios. Bungie wasn’t really familiar with how quickly the giant cogs of the movie industry turned, but they were starting to have their doubts. And Staten was the first: “Harold Ryan and I had to fly into Auckland, rent a car and drive to Peter’s. On that ride, we talked very honestly, and reasoned: ‘This movie’s probably not going to fly.’ Video game movies then, and I think still now, are unproven–can you be successful at any budget? Are you sure you’re going to be successful at $150  million? That’s a huge leap of faith for any studio to take. I’m not a Hollywood lawyer or an agent, but I could look at the deal and go, ‘You know, it’s going to be really hard for everybody to get comfortable enough to green-light this thing.’” Staten and Ryan would turn out to be right. “It literally happened within 24 hours,” Peter Jackson would explain in July 2009. I mean, we woke up one morning thinking we were making

Halo. That day we got the news that the studios, Fox and Universal, didn’t want to make the film anymore.” According to the director, the project was ultimately canned because Fox, Universal and Microsoft couldn’t reach an agreement. Jackson and Blomkamp, therefore, found themselves robbed of a project they’d been dreaming of for years. It was this turn of events that led them to work together on a new science-fiction film, this time set in an original universe with an original story. That film was District 9, which told the story of an alien community living in South Africa, where it was confined to ghettos, and victim to xenophobia and ill-treatment. Some of the replicas Weta had designed for Halo were repurposed and can be seen on several occasions during the film. A Halo fan, Blomkamp nevertheless earned a consolation prize when he was contracted to make the three shorts that form Halo: Landfall, part of the marketing campaign for Halo 3. With the film dead in the water, the relationship between Bungie and Weta Interactive would gradually run out of steam and Halo: Chronicles sunk with it. The concern, though, was that unlike the film, Microsoft had already publicized the game widely. Its existence was officially confirmed at the Xbox Show 2006, and in March 2007 Shane Kim in person gave more details about the game, like the fact that it would be released in episodes. In 2008, job ads posted by Microsoft implied that the project was still on the cards, with the software giant looking for engineers, producers, and creative directors to work on the project in partnership with a Hollywood figure. The name Halo: Chronicles was also leaked, forcing Microsoft to issue clearer details about the game. So when the game was canceled for good, Microsoft and Bungie alike found themselves in a difficult position. Microsoft because they had spent a long time talking up a Halo game that would never be made, and Bungie because they still needed to honor their contract with Microsoft and deliver a smaller Halo game while waiting for Halo 4 to be made. The latter was still scheduled for 2010, which left just over a year to produce a new game. It was all the more bothersome given that the studio was undergoing a major transitional period: Marcus Lehto had

launched work on Halo 4, soon to be renamed Halo: Reach, while Jason Jones and Jaime Griesemer got down to work on Destiny. As it was structured at that time, the studio found itself in no position to get a new team up and running to release a game in late 2009. Chronicles was canned, Staten, Bertone and the team working on the game found themselves left to their own devices. Fortunately, as Staten explains, this team had no shortage of motivation, nor of talent: “When that project [Halo: Chronicles] fell apart we were left with this really experienced core team of guys, all of whom had been around since Halo 1. All the more so given that Microsoft was willing to make a compromise: rather than making a whole new game, Bungie could just deliver an expansion to Halo 3, which would give sales a pick-me-up. Bungie liked the idea, but the Chronicles team put a little fly in the ointment: “Joe and I were interested in doing that, but less so in taking existing Halo 3 campaign content and reusing that in any way, shape or form,” Paul Bertone explains. “It’d have felt cheap to us, and we’d have gotten killed in the press. We wouldn’t have been happy working on it.” So while the team was refusing to reuse existing Halo 3 content, this left them exposed to new complications: if they needed to make new levels, new characters and new animations, more developers would need to join the team. And that was something nobody at Bungie really wanted to do. Back then, staff earned bonuses according to the projects they were working on: this meant that a small game like the one the Chronicles team was working on was less financially appealing than Halo: Reach, because it would generate less financial reward. The team, therefore, had fewer resources with which to deliver the game to deadline. But that wouldn’t stop them from making a game that was truly unique in the history of Halo. It was Joseph Staten who put forward the initial ideas for what would become Halo 3: Recon. The writer wanted to tell a more human story, and began rummaging through the Halo universe to find a suitable protagonist. For a while Staten even planned to create a brand new character, an Elite belonging to a special forces team. But the levels dedicated to the Arbiter in Halo 2 had been

controversial, and Staten was forced to discount this idea. Fortunately for him, the Halo universe was a vast one, and there was no shortage of possibilities. “We talked seriously about a game starring Sergeant Johnson,” Staten reveals. “Being a young Avery Johnson early in the war. We talked about just being a marine, maybe palling around with Spartans: what’s it like to be on the battlefield surrounded by Spartans? But then we hit the ODSTs and, for us, they’ve always been really interesting. We put them in missions when we need really tough marines. They have different combat capabilities than normal marines in Halo games, but they were always kind of mysterious characters… and we knew our fans liked them a lot.” The ODST, or Orbital DropShock Troopers, were indeed very popular among players of Halo. These soldiers, who wore armor similar to the Spartans, were highly trained Marines who were sent on the most dangerous missions. They were, in a way, the airborne infantry of the Halo universe, right down to the fact that they were deployed from space in landing capsules. This maneuver was a risky one, and a Marine had to have at least a bit of a death wish to accept such a posting. But their imagery was popular, and the ODST had a lot of fans, even though in Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2 and Halo 3 the spotlight shone firmly on the Spartans, through the character of John-117. Staten then had an idea: why not go back to New Mombasa, just after the Prophet of Regret and Master Chief had left the city? This would enable them to reuse some of the existing content from Halo 3, and therefore avoid monopolizing the time of too many artists. He dreamed up a story of a group of ODST that was above the city when the Covenant ship jumped into slipstream space, creating major electromagnetic disturbances. Their capsules went off course and the group was split up and scattered around the city. Players would control Blue, an ODST Marine on his first mission. It was Staten who imagined the story as a kind of noir novel, with the player on an investigation to track down their teammates. The idea was immediately popular, especially with Martin O’Donnell, who agreed to lend a hand to the team working on the game and compose its

soundtrack. “Once again I’m gonna give Joe Staten a lot of credit for just conceptually inspiring me to do something different,” the composer explains. “He wanted a film noir, a detective story, a day and a night in the city, and what would that be like, with this group of troopers, and a rookie, trying to find his buddies. And it was this sort of cool mystery of solving where did they go, what did they do, and all that. And so Joe said ‘Let’s make it like a film noir, with like a smokey atmosphere, Miles Davis and jazz, and stuff’, and I’m like ‘Wow, ok, jazz, who would have thought jazzy stuff for a Halo game?’ But I thought ‘That’s a really cool concept. It’s gonna feel totally different, everybody will know immediately they’re not playing the old Halo.’” The idea was also a hit with Paul Bertone, who wanted to work on an open-world game. He’d already played around with it on Gypsum, and now he had the chance to do it for real, because Staten’s ideas would work a lot better with that kind of level design. All the more so because Bertone was fed up with the linear progression of the Halo games. “I was just really interested in doing open-world. I was super fatigued on building the linear missions, with no excitement to make another Halo game. So I really pushed for the basic structure of ODST, just to be able to explore ideas in what felt like was kind of a safe project, because back then Destiny was going to be a fully open-world game, like Fallout and The Elder Scrolls series and stuff like that. And that was something I was super excited about.” And Halo 3: Recon would certainly be something different. Players started the game in a part of New Mombasa, with a series of objectives. It was the player who would choose where to start, and who needed to get their bearings and make their way through the city, always on the lookout for the Covenant patrols roaming the area. They no longer played as a Spartan, but as a smaller soldier without armor or a shield. To heal, they would have to find health kits or pharmacies. With 2008 coming to a close, the team had almost finished their game. The debugging phase was still left to do, but the game could be in stores as soon as it had received Microsoft’s approval. The only hold-up was that the game’s name would be changed. Known as Halo 3: Recon up until that point, Bungie was forced to change it to Halo 3: ODST after Microsoft’s

discussions with Ubisoft, who made the Ghost Recon series. The name had already been trademarked, and Microsoft had every legal right to use it, but because it wanted to maintain good relations with the French publisher, the company from Redmond stood down. For Bungie, it didn’t matter. There were more important things to deal with. Halo 3: ODST was a small game and it had to be introduced as such. That meant selling it at a price that reflected its status, while also leaving players pleasantly surprised. “People would think, ‘Wow, for a $30 expansion pack, this is almost as good as a full-fledged release!’” Martin O’Donnell explains. We had Halo 3 in the title so everybody knew it was an expansion pack, and for an entire year of talking about it to the press we’d say, ‘Yeah, this is a campaign expansion.’” But when Microsoft discovered Halo 3: ODST, the Xbox execs saw things differently to Bungie: in their view, the game was substantial enough to merit release as a full game, and therefore at a price commensurate with that kind of product, meaning $60. All the more so because the calendar for late 2009 was looking sparse for the Xbox 360, and Microsoft would make it more appealing by marketing Halo 3: ODST as that year’s big Halo release. The news threw Bungie into a panic, and they begged the Xbox execs to reverse their decision. “We were over-promising, with the threat of under-delivering,” O’Donnell ruefully recalls. “It was the opposite of what we wanted. It’d be a gem at $30. But as a major release, it was going to get dinged. And it was.” The composer may be exaggerating a bit here. Upon its release, the game received generally positive reviews, even if they were less enthusiastic than for the earlier games in the series. The game’s different structure, its atmosphere, and its music were a hit, and despite having no genuinely new environments and an aging game engine, Halo 3: ODST managed to win over fans, who particularly liked the new Firefight game mode. Similar to the Horde mode in Gears of War, it was packed with customization options and was just as playable in local multiplayer as online. It was the brainchild of Paul Bertone, and an idea that he’d been mulling over for a very long time. “Firefight really came from the idea of the

gravity room in Halo 1, it’s where you go up in Truth and Reconciliation, into the ship. That room has multiple entrances in, and these Elites start coming to attack you and they come out of different doors. What is it like to be trapped in a place and have to defend it from never-ending enemies, that continually get harder? We knew it was gonna be big, but we didn’t know like that fans would react to it the way they did.” Bertone hadn’t initially planned Firefight as a game mode in its own right. He had included it in the campaign in a number of sequences where players were forced to defend a position. Meanwhile, he designed a scoring system so that the best players could brag about their talents. “Just the idea that there’s this different mode where you can turn on scoring based on your skill, headshots, grenade sticks, all that, and you get more points or multipliers depending on difficulty. That ultimately led to ODST’s Firefight mode.” Firefight worked so well that it would also feature in Halo: Reach, that Bungie wanted to be perfect in every way. And indeed, as this was the studio’s last Halo game, Bungie wanted to go out on a high.

343 INDUSTRIES, A NEW STUDIO FOR HALO When Microsoft and Bungie came to an agreement about the studio’s independent future in July 2007, the software giant almost automatically began the process of finding a replacement. Of course, there was never any question of entrusting Halo to a partner studio: Microsoft would need to get its own team up and running in-house. That job fell to Bonnie Ross, a Microsoft old-timer. After starting work for Microsoft in 1994, Ross gradually climbed the ranks of Microsoft Game Studios to become General Manager in 2005. In 2007, she left this role behind to start work on the launch of a brand new entity within Microsoft Studios. She was soon joined by Kiki Wolfkill, who had been working as an artistic director at Microsoft for ten years, and Frank O’Connor, who left Bungie so that he could keep working on Halo. Before long, they were joined by other faces, people like Josh Holmes, the former boss of Propaganda Games, and Kenneth

Scott, who left his role as artistic director at id Software to join the venture. Together, they laid the foundations of a new studio that they named 343 Industries, in reference to 343 Guilty Spark. The name was trademarked in 2009, and the existence of “343i” was made official. Contrary to popular belief, very few Bungie employees left the company to join 343 Industries. Besides O’Connor, only a few people made the move: Chad “Shishka” Armstrong, a former member of the Bungie.net community and volunteer moderator of the forums, who had been hired by Bungie in 2004; Vic DeLeon, an artist specializing in game environments; and Seth Gibson, who had produced the character animations for Halo 3: ODST and Halo: Reach. 343 Industries was formed behind the scenes, because while Ross was recruiting O’Connor, Wolfkill, and the rest of the team, Bungie was still working on Halo 3: ODST, and would soon be starting work on Halo 4, which would become Halo: Reach. But 343 Industries would gradually start getting involved in anything and everything that fell under the Halo brand. In Halo: Reach, in particular, but also Halo: Legends, a compilation of short films, and Halo: Waypoint, which would come to replace Bungie.net by hosting all the stats for online games, among other things. When the Halo: Fall of Reach novel was republished, it was 343 Industries that oversaw the process and updated the book’s original cover. Little by little, the destinies of Bungie and Halo began to diverge. But the story wouldn’t be over without one last hurrah.

Chapiter 12– Halo: Reach, Bungie’s Farewell to Halo While Joseph Staten and Paul Bertone were managing the development of Halo 3: ODST, another team of developers led by Marcus Lehto began the pre-production process for Halo 4. Halo 4 was supposed to be the last game in the series made by Bungie, and the studio wanted to give fans of the series the send-off they deserved. So it was that the developers would spend three years working to create the ultimate game, one that would bring all their most audacious ideas together on a single disk.

A PREQUEL AS A SEND-OFF While Bungie’s last Halo game went by the name of Halo 4 for a good long while, that was mostly out of habit. In reality, the studio had absolutely no intention of making a sequel to Halo 3. It would mean too much responsibility and too many complications, because they would need to cooperate with Microsoft and the fledgling 343 Industries so that they were all on the same page going forward. But they still didn’t know when the new game would be set, and the debate was in full swing inside Bungie Towers. “I don’t know how the decision was made, but conceptually I remember talking about not continuing the Master Chief story,” Martin O’Donnell recalls. “It would be a prequel to Halo. So we were going to finish our Halo run without any need to figure out the Chief’s future. And we already knew there was a story about (the human colony of) Reach, and Reach is like Titanic, where everybody dies. So I remember saying, ‘Okay, everyone who plays this game knows that everybody dies.’ But Titanic was still a really compelling movie, even though you know the

boat sinks, you’re hoping it won’t sink. So that was sort of the philosophy around Reach.” And so it was settled: Bungie’s last Halo game would recount the events that took place at the Battle of Reach. Reach was a planet found a long way from Earth, but it had soon become the most important human colony. It was the bastion of the Spartan-II program, because that was where the supersoldiers were trained. Players had known the fate of Reach since 2001, because the story was told in detail in Halo: The Fall of Reach, the novel by Eric Nylund. After being discovered by Covenant scouts, the planet was immediately invaded by the biggest armada the aliens had ever assembled. After putting up heroic resistance for several days, the UNSC was wiped out and almost all the Spartans perished defending the last key objectives on Reach. Only a few of them would escape that fate, including John-117, who boarded the Pillar of Autumn at the last moment. But the game would not simply rehash the same familiar story: Halo: Reach would serve up another story, and shine the spotlight on other battles not involving Master Chief and his team. The game would focus on an elite unit, known as Noble Team, made up of six new Spartan characters. Spartans that were not like all the rest. They were not Spartan-IIs, but rather Spartan-IIIs, a new generation of supersoldiers. Bungie had to put some serious thought into these new warriors, inventing their backgrounds and lives before the game. But most of all, they wanted to humanize them, something which had not really been possible with the Spartan-IIs, and with Master Chief in particular. Marcus Lehto’s first decision would be a huge first for the series: to show the Spartans with their faces uncovered from time to time. He explains how, “We wanted to pull the helmets off of the Spartans, and we wanted to get to know each one of these Spartans up close and personal, they needed to be human.” The idea proved popular with most of the executives working on the project, who saw in it the opportunity to tell a different, more personal kind of story. Bungie wanted to tell a story reminiscent of The Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa’s film, or John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven. Saving Private Ryan, by Steven Spielberg, was also used as inspiration. Each individual member of Noble Team had their own distinct

personality: Carter-A259 was the team leader, and the archetypical charismatic leader who cared for the troops under his command. Catherine-B320, known as Kat, was both mischievous and highly intelligent. Due to his specialism as a sniper, Jun-A266 was often separated from the rest of the team, but his long moments of solitude were counterbalanced by an almost annoying penchant for boasting, a trait that was rare among the Spartans. He was the polar opposite of Emile-A239, who didn’t talk much but unleashed terrible violence on the battlefield, where he tended to fight at close quarters, be that with a shotgun or his favored weapon, a kukri machete that never left his side. Then there was Jorge-052, the team’s only Spartan-II. Older and more experienced than the rest of his teammates, he was also unusually sociable for a Spartan, especially a Spartan-II. The team was made complete by the player, who controlled Noble Six, serial number B312. Having served as a lone-wolf assassin and then a fighter pilot in a secret UNSC program, the opening of the game is where he takes his first action with Noble Team. He replaces ThomA293, deceased a few months earlier. It was the first time that Bungie had developed so many characters who would always be with the player, something that Martin O’Donnell would later think was a bit of a shame. “I would hear Marcus [Lehto] and some of the other designers talking about The Magnificent Seven and Saving Private Ryan, and Peter [O’Brien, one of the writers on Halo 3] and I talked about story a lot,” O’Donnell recalls. “We both agreed those are two different models. You don’t care about anyone in Saving Private Ryan through the combat. It was the down times when they sat around the fire, and one guy talks about being a teacher and this guy talks about his home life, that was its classic way of getting to know the characters. I said: if we’re going to use that model, we need dramatic moments where you get to know these characters without their helmets on, and you learn about them in some personal way. The other way is like The Magnificent Seven, where each individual has their own skills and what’s important is getting why they decide to try to protect the peasants. We either had to have those personal relationships with the characters; or we had to have moments where you care about the inhabitants of Reach by seeing

how they’re sacrificing themselves. I don’t think we did either of those things.” O’Donnell and O’Brien weren’t the only people working on the game’s storyline, of course, because Robert McLees was still busy enriching the Halo universe with new ideas; Joseph Staten was back in the role of writing director, but his problematic relationship with Marcus Lehto seemed to limit him to a supervisory role. That’s not to say he didn’t rewrite some dialogue and improve the scripts for some of the cutscenes in the final version of the game. In parallel, the rest of the staff were back at work and putting in the hours to give the Halo 3 engine a thorough overhaul. Since the plot of Halo: Reach had to be more human, more emotional, Bungie needed to add scenes made using motion capture to the game: within Bungie, and despite the talent of its animators, the prevailing opinion was that the studio’s animations were its weak point. So, in an effort to generate more realism, the studio bought the gear it needed and started recording sessions with real actors who, wearing a special suit, acted out the movements that the developers wanted to see in the game. Halo: Reach’s pre-production phase ran for an entire year, enabling Bungie to lay down solid foundations that would make it easier for them to make the complex game that Lehto and the rest wanted to see. There was, though, one problem: for the first time in its history, Bungie had two major projects in the pipeline at once, and while development was starting on Halo: Reach, Jason Jones and Jaime Griesemer were working on Project Tiger, which would become Destiny. And the more time went on, the more they would be joined by other developers. Some of the studio’s longstanding executives would spend very little time working on Halo: Reach, a fact that some of them would come to regret. In 2017, O’Donnell would reveal how, “I wasn’t super excited that some of the real stakeholders in the history of Bungie and Halo weren’t working on Reach. And there was a point where I was trying to convince them to bring Paul [Bertone] down and have him polish up the final design, and get [Joe Staten] down to help me get the dialogue for the mission script better than it was. I think I was rejected, so that was

tough, because we knew that the future of Bungie was with Destiny and Reach was our final chapter of Halo. It’s always important to make the thing you’re going to ship next be the best possible, and I felt like we were not doing that.” Indeed, most of the Grizzled Ancients were now working on Destiny, and some of the studio’s biggest names were only involved in the development of Halo: Reach. They generally got involved in the final stages of work on the game, giving feedback on particular aspects of gameplay or level design. This was the case for people like Shi Kai Wang, Chris Butcher, Paul Bertone, Jaime Griesemer and Christopher Barrett. That’s not to say that Bungie had completely abandoned Reach, which still had a lot of input from names players were familiar with, people like Paul Russel, Chad Armstrong, Lars Bekken, Steve Cotton, Vic DeLeon, CJ  Cowan, Dave Dunn, Chris Carney and Curtis Creamer. Because while Halo: Reach was first and foremost being made to fulfill an order from Microsoft, and while some developers like Jaime Griesemer had had enough of Halo, there were still plenty who didn’t see working on Halo: Reach as a death sentence. This is a point that, years later, Martin O’Donnell was keen to emphasize: “I wanna make sure that the fans know that we did Halo because we wanted to do Halo. And we did ODST because we wanted to do ODST. And we did Reach because we wanted to do Reach.” So that the absence of some of Bungie’s longest-serving execs wouldn’t be too keenly felt, a few new hires were given intensive training to bring them up to speed. This is particularly true of Sage Merrill, a game designer who joined Bungie in 2008. After working on the development of Halo 3: ODST, he was entrusted with filling the very big shoes of Jaime Griesemer as the lead designer of the Halo: Reach. At Bungie, the term “sandbox” referred to all the objects with which players could interact, and all of the tools they could use. The term covered weapons as much as it did enemies, as well as the various vehicles players could control. It was here that Jaime Griesemer truly shone, because he knew how to balance every component so that the end result was a game that was fun. This

ability is both an innate talent and a fine science, something learned with time and experience. Replacing Griesemer was not something that just anyone could do, which is why he would come to assist his young protégé. And he was sure Sage would be able to get the job done. “I was really happy with the handover to Sage. I told him, ‘Look, you’re basically like the only guy I can see taking over the Halo sandbox and doing a good job. And I want it to continue to be done well.’ So I felt good about where I left them.” This may be due to the fact that Griesemer was never far away, and he regularly made himself available. He helped to design the Warthog, for example, earning the jokey title of lead Warthog designer, but that’s not all, because just like on Halo 3: ODST, he would regularly come to help designers incorporate new characters without breaking the game’s delicate balance. “I helped out on ODST and Reach in a kind of consulting role,” Griesemer explains. “Mostly because they would be like, ‘Okay, we’re going to add a new character. But wait, nobody here understands how characters work. Call Jaime in here, and have him explain what all these fields do to somebody.’ Which was fine, I was happy to help in that way. And I helped a little bit at the end doing a little tuning and tweaking, because that stuff’s always really finicky.” Griesemer had good reason to be confident, because the team working on Halo: Reach was motivated, competent, and extremely meticulous, qualities that are apparent in all of the game’s levels. In a desire to go back to what Halo may have been if Microsoft had never bought Bungie, the developers created larger levels that were packed with more detail, inviting players to explore. Reach was a planet that fans had never before been able to visit, and the artists did all they could to make it a living, breathing place. They began crafting a story in which most of the planet’s first colonists were from Eastern Europe, and Hungary in particular, something that could be seen in the architecture of particular villages, the names of several cities and locations, and the language spoken by the first non-player characters encountered by the player. The planet may well have been colonized for almost two centuries, but it was still home to

many wilderness areas where very strange-looking animals could be found. While Halo: Combat Evolved had been forced to pass up on local wildlife, Halo: Reach generally had free rein. The local wildlife was also the subject of many debates among the team, some of whom wanted the Covenant to use certain animals in battle. Top of the list was the Gùta, a huge biped with razor-sharp claws, and one that Bungie had a lot of fun with. To begin with, it had just two Jackal riders, and then a few Grunts or Elites. They would even be encountered carrying two cannons strapped to its shoulders. To defeat them, players had to hijack them just like any other vehicle, and shove a grenade down its throat. “It was really goofy at one point,” Marcus Lehto remembers with a grin. But goofy wasn’t really the effect that Bungie was going for in developing Halo: Reach. The studio wanted the game to have a more mature tone: it was the story of a terrifying alien invasion, a battle lost before it had even begun, and the Covenant forces had to elicit fear. One choice was made that reflects this: in Halo: Reach, players are unable to understand what the enemy is saying, as they are speaking in their own language rather than in English, like in earlier games. “What if the Spartans and the soldiers don’t actually understand what the aliens are saying?” O’Donnell wondered. “What’s that gonna feel like? What if we can get back to having an alien feel really alien, and threatening?” The idea was approved and the Grunts’ funny comments and the Elites’ challenges disappeared from the game. One of the game’s producers, Dave Lieber, developed a tool to translate sentences written in English into Sangheili, the Elites’ language. “He actually programmed it himself,” O’Donnell reveals. “He was the only one who knows how to pronounce all the syllables.” The return of the Elites, who were replaced by the Brutes in Halo 3, made lots of the studio’s staff happy, and not just those who had joined the company after the third game. The newcomers to the team were delighted to be able to work on the Spartans’ iconic foes, but even older members of the team like Marcus Lehto were happy to be bringing them back to the fore: “Bringing the Elites back was something that was really a true joy for

us, because they’re such an awesome character to fight.” The Sangheili were the perfect adversaries for the Spartans, because they were intelligent, vicious, and often armed with formidable weapons. The camouflage they regularly used, as well as their energy swords and their ability to dodge shots made them very interesting enemies for mission designers, who could use them to design lots of varied scenarios. Because Halo: Reach was set before the events of Halo: Combat Evolved, the developers also used it as an opportunity to overhaul the arsenal of weapons available to players. Sage Merrill oversaw their design. The BR was replaced by a new rifle, the M392 DMR, which was semi-automatic, just like the BR featured in the E3 2003 demo of Halo 2. The assault rifle was completely redesigned: it was given a new name and became the MA37. This redesign was possible thanks to the game engine’s new abilities, which encouraged the studio’s artists to keep coming up with new ideas: “We looked at the Halo 3 assault rifle and it really does feel like kind of dated,” reports Scott Shepherd, the lead 3D artist working on the game. “It fit the tech then, but now we have all these new polygons to play with.” On Halo: Reach, artists had up to four times as many polygons to use on both characters and weapons. This meant that a lot of weapons could be refined, like the trusty old sniper rifle and shotgun. But it wasn’t about just giving the fans’ favorite weapons a cosmetic makeover: new weapons were also required. And they all had to adhere to Jaime Griesemer’s principle: every weapon must have its role; there could be no duplicates. This was how the focus rifle came to be designed, a new Covenant weapon that replaced the alien sniper rifle. It worked differently to its UNSC counterpart: players didn’t have to just hit an enemy to kill them, they needed to hold the trigger down so that the beam the weapon produced focused on the target. This meant that players needed to maintain contact for almost one and a half seconds. Covenant forces gained a counterpart to the DMR, in the form of the needle rifle. The principle was similar to the Needler, in that when three needles hit an unshielded enemy, the result was a particularly lethal

“supercombine” explosion. The needles were also faster, but no longer had any homing ability. The Covenant arsenal also received the equivalent to the human assault rifle in the form of the plasma repeater, and an alternative to the Spartan laser, with the plasma launcher. For the UNSC forces, meanwhile, not much changed in the end. They got a new grenade launcher that could cause an electromagnetic pulse (EMP), as well as another weapon for use only in the campaign or player versus environment modes. Going by the unassuming name of the target indicator, this small module was used to paint an area that would then be hammered by a small-scale orbital bombardment. It was a fun idea, but one that when it was first introduced nevertheless raised a few hackles among the various engineers working on Halo: Reach. “This was kind of a later inclusion into the sandbox,” recalls Steve Scott, then head of Bungie’s special effects division. “The designers came to me and said, ‘Hey, we want a device that launches artillery from space, and just continually pounds an area.’ And generally, one explosion is pretty expensive, when there are six explosions all happening within a short amount of time… It can be really tricky so… We spent a little bit of time tuning that just to make it right.”

REMEMBER REACH In parallel, Microsoft had launched the marketing campaign for Halo: Reach. It got off to a somewhat strange start, because the game was announced at E3 2008 not during, but after the Microsoft press conference. According to Don Mattrick, president of the Xbox division, the press was too busy to fully focus on the announcement of a new Halo game. It was a surprising decision, insofar that the Xbox conference was far from compelling, with the only big announcement being the upcoming release of Final Fantasy XIII on the Xbox 360, in a major first for the franchise that had up until then been tied to Sony. Especially because in Mattrick’s presentation, he only mentioned that Bungie was making a new Halo game and left it at that, not even mentioning its working title. The journalists writing

about the news wondered whether Bungie was working on Halo 4, laying the groundwork for their successor to pick up the baton. Late August 2008 then saw an extraordinary series of twists and turns. First of all, the Official Xbox magazine in the United States published two rumors; first, that the next Halo game wouldn’t be released on Xbox 360, but on Microsoft’s next console; and more extraordinary yet, that the game wouldn’t be made by Bungie nor even 343 Industries, but rather Gearbox Software, the studio responsible for the PC ports of Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2. Gearbox itself did nothing to calm the fervent reactions among players and the gaming press. The studio’s boss, Randy Pitchford, said of the top-secret project the studio was currently working on: “When you find out what this is, you’ll likely agree that I can’t oversell this one.” And when journalists contacted Gearbox in search of clarification, the studio opted for doublespeak: “We’ve been hearing from a lot of people regarding that rumor, as you can probably guess!” the studio responded on the Destructoid website. “We haven’t made any official announcements regarding any work with the Halo franchise–if we haven’t put out a press release announcing a title, it is just a rumor.” But neither the press nor the player community bought it: when a studio or publisher isn’t willing to issue a straightforward denial, it means something is cooking behind the scenes. While this was happening, the website Kotaku learned that Corrinne Yu, director of technology at Gearbox, had recently been approached by Microsoft and accepted a job that would lead her to work on the Halo franchise. What that job was, under what conditions, and with whom all remained perfectly vague. What was certain was that Yu was a highly respected figure. Often referred to as the “John Carmack of female programmers,” she had worked at both Ion Storm and 3D Realms, where she designed game engines, like the one used in Prey. At Gearbox, she oversaw development of the game engines for Brothers in Arms, Alien: Colonial Marines and, most importantly, Borderlands, the studio’s breakthrough title. But within the press, and even more so among fans, the situation involving Bungie, 343 Industries, and Microsoft was still unclear, and

nobody then knew that Bungie was contractually bound to make one last Halo game for its publisher. 343 Industries was known to exist, but nobody really knew what its exact role was to be. This meant that on August 30, 2008, when the Halo Waypoint Twitter account dismissed the rumor and revealed that Gearbox was not working on any Halo game, the press didn’t know who to believe. Even IGN, the leading website for video game news in the United States, had to contact Microsoft to make sure that the Twitter account in question really belonged to them. Corrinne Yu, meanwhile, would join 343 Industries a few months later, joining the team tasked with developing the engine for Halo 4, which would be released on the Xbox 360 on November 6, 2012. As for Gearbox, they would reveal their mysterious project on September 3, 2010: they would be developing the hotly anticipated title, Duke Nukem Forever. It would ultimately be at E3 2009 that Halo: Reach was officially announced to the public. Following a presentation of Halo 3: ODST, which was due for release in just a few months, Reach was revealed via a short and particularly intriguing trailer. In it, the planet Reach was shown from space, gradually being overrun by Covenant forces, its continents exploding into flames one after the other under the alien plasma cannon bombardment. The soundtrack was somewhat sparse, taking the form of a series of radio communications between UNSC troops, which made it immediately clear that the Spartans were down there fighting on the surface. The announcement unleashed a tsunami of enthusiasm from the fan community, for whom the Battle of Reach had achieved an almost legendary status: the game would depict the actions that took place before Halo: Combat Evolved, and should feature a whole host of Spartans. But the news was also tinged with sadness among the players, who soon learned that Halo: Reach would be the last Halo game made by Bungie. The game also caused a buzz at the Spike Video Game Awards, which were held in Los Angeles on December 12. It wasn’t rare for some games to be announced at the event, which publishers used to

screen new trailers. The ceremony was where the gaming public learned of Batman: Arkham City for the very first time, and got to see a new series of videos for previously announced projects like Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, Spec Ops: The Line and, of course, Halo: Reach. The sequence presented by Microsoft was a slightly reworked version of the game’s intro, in which Noble Six, the Spartan-III controlled by the player, joins the other members of Noble Team. No sooner has he arrived at his posting than he meets the rest of the squad, and while Carter tells him that he doesn’t want his lone-wolf attitude on the team, the Falcons they are riding in take off and fly into the distance, where the battle can be seen raging. A flash lights up the sky, hinting at the presence of a Covenant cruiser on the other side of the clouds. The differences with the final game’s intro are worth noting: Jun-A266 wears his helmet from start to finish; Carter, whose face is very different, doesn’t have a conversation with Colonel Holland, and he doesn’t brief the team. This is no routine mission: they are clearly setting off to war with the Covenant. All over the internet, fans were coming together to talk about the images they’d seen. Everyone was delighted with the presence of a group of Spartans, and while everyone noted the real progress made with the graphics since Halo 3 and Halo 3: ODST, some were quick to point out the lack of detail, and therefore expressiveness, on Carter’s and Kat’s faces. But that was just a tiny detail and did nothing to put players off. Quite the contrary. On February  12, 2010, Bungie and Microsoft announced the date that the beta version of Halo: Reach would become available: May 3. Signing up to the beta was extremely straightforward, with the only criteria being owning a copy of Halo 3: ODST. However, in the weeks and months following the announcement, Microsoft and Bungie would regularly give out extra keys, either to reward the loyalty of certain players, or just to make as many people as possible happy. Here once again, the beta focused on the game’s multiplayer mode, and enabled guests to discover new playlists like Headhunter, Stockpile, Generator Defense, and Invasion. Invasion proved to be hugely popular

because it saw a team of Spartans face off against a team of Elites, each with very different objectives. These game modes were the subject of much debate within Bungie, because some developers wanted to serve up objectives playlists only, notably by picking up where Steve Cotton’s and Chris Carney’s (unsuccessful) work on Halo 3 had left off. Others, though, refused to do away with classic Halo playlists, including Paul Bertone who, while he played a less active role in the development of Halo: Reach than he had in Halo 3 and Halo 3: ODST nevertheless made sure his opinion was heard. “I was all for adding the objective modes, but wasn’t keen on that being the only multiplayer experience in there,” he told us. “Because, honestly, we tried to build that into every single Halo game, and we never pulled it off. When you get down to requiring communication and coordination by people who don’t know each other, and don’t give a fuck about each other, it’s just really hard.” The new game modes that resulted from this process were designed so that players didn’t need to be in constant communication in order to win: that would be reserved only for the top players. Especially because players would already have to focus on new gameplay mechanics! This beta was an opportunity to get to grips with the new weapons that Bungie had designed, as well as new mechanics like assassination, a short, animated third-person sequence in which players could stab an opponent when approaching from behind, and which required them to press and hold the melee attack button. The biggest new feature was without a doubt the introduction of loadouts: at the start of every match, players could choose a loadout made up of two weapons and an armor power-up. Known as Armor abilities, these were created by Sage Merrill and other designers as the natural evolution of Halo 3’s equipment, with the exception that they no longer had to be picked up from the ground in order to use them: they were part of the Spartan’s armor and could be used regularly in return for running down a meter that automatically recharged after a certain time period. In 2010, Merrill told GameInformer to “Think about loadouts as kind of a ‘dynamic class system.’ We liked some of the elements you get with a class, but we’re not changing your base model or locking you into that choice. You drop in with your

preferred play style, but if you decide your chosen loadout isn’t working, the next time you spawn you can select something different.” While some players were surprised at these new features that radically changed how Halo multiplayer worked, the beta was a phenomenal success, attracting 2,700,000 players for a total of six million hours of play. Microsoft even decided to extend the beta by a whole day, eventually closing it on May 20. Fans were champing at the bit, and at Microsoft they were already sure that the game would blow all the records set by Halo 3 out of the water. At E3 2010, Microsoft and Bungie revealed a gameplay sequence featuring frenetic action, in which Noble Team’s Spartans were assaulting a beach in order to get to a building under Covenant attack. Players did not yet know it, but what they were seeing was a draft version of Long Night of Solace, which closed the first half of the game. It was the second part of the demo that contained the biggest surprise for players: Noble Six climbed aboard a small combat ship and joined the UNSC forces in orbit above the planet, where they would take part in an all-out space battle. This was all new for Halo. Unfortunately for those who were hoping to see a multiplayer mode based on this sequence, Bungie soon made it known that this sequence belonged only to the single-player campaign and that there’d be no space battles in multiplayer. Not even the unveiling of a new Firefight mode, padded out with more features, could soothe fans’ disappointment. But that was nothing to worry Microsoft, who continued rolling out its marketing plan. Microsoft had already been broadcasting a commercial entitled Birth of a Spartan since April 28. The video depicted the chemical augmentation process for a young CarterA259, turning him into a Spartan-II. In fact, Birth of a Spartan was part of a wider viral marketing campaign which, in the summer of 2010, was accompanied by new videos following the same format: it was a way to introduce Reach and its different characters as they were before the battle, and therefore before the events of the game itself. In substance, the new marketing campaign was similar to the one played in Halo 3, insofar as Microsoft and Bungie were once

again working with 215  McCann, the communications agency they had contracted to make the various Believe videos. But in its form, Remember Reach was very different, because it placed the focus on the human drama rather than the Spartans’ heroic actions. The intended purpose was clear to see: to tap into players’ emotions by presenting Reach not as a battle, but as a real genocide. The soldiers would die, of course, but so would the millions of civilians living on the planet. The title of the marketing campaign reflected this intention, and players had already seen it in Halo 3: ODST, graffitied on different walls throughout New Mombasa. It was as much a rallying cry as it was a reminder of the duty of remembrance. Remember Reach would be accompanied by four more videos over the summer of 2010. Directed by Noam Murro (Smart People, 300: Rise of an Empire), who was also behind Birth of a Spartan, they were entitled New Life, Spaceport and Patrol, and depicted three snapshots of life on Reach. The first showed a young couple living in a small house in a place called Visegrád; the man wanted to move to Manassas, while his partner wanted to stay where they were, because their family had been living in that area for generations. As they are finishing their conversation, a patrol of soldiers rushes past their home. As the title implies, Spaceport was set on a spaceport, in this case the one above Manassas. A mother needs to take a short trip offplanet for work, and she’s comforting her child. She kisses her husband and then heads towards the boarding gate. Patrol begins with three soldiers talking about Noble Team’s most recent mission. That morning, the Spartans had intercepted a group of insurgents who were trying to hijack a supply convoy. While they’re joking about it, a radio transmission asks them to get to the Visegrád communications relay, which is no longer responding. The three videos all ended in the same way: the slogan “Remember Reach” appeared on the screen, while in the background Reach’s sun could be seen setting behind the planet, leaving it in the shadows. What the videos showed was everyday life as it was happening shortly before the events of Halo: Reach, and it

was precisely by heading to the Visegrád communications relay that Noble Team would, in the first moments of the game, discover that the Covenant had invaded the planet. At the end of summer 2010, the videos were edited together to form one longer film. It concluded with the three following sentences: “Remember when there was a tomorrow. Remember where it all began. Remember Reach.” But it was on August 26 that the marketing campaign’s most memorable video was released. Entitled Deliver Hope, it focused on the character of Catherine-B320 as she crossed a battlefield carrying a nuclear device under her arm. The scene was an impressive one, because it featured a lot of different characters–including each member of Noble Team–and it didn’t skimp on pyrotechnic effects. While she was traveling towards a Covenant ship just above the city where the fighting was taking place, she was attacked by a Banshee. It dropped a plasma bomb that detonated a matter of inches from the Spartan; she spun through the air before falling to the ground, severely wounded: her helmet’s visor was broken, her vision blurred, and she was rendered unable to move. Just then, another Spartan appeared alongside her, and saw the gravity of the situation. He picked up the bomb and used his jet-pack to take flight towards the enemy ship. When he reached inside, he only had a few seconds to deploy the bomb, and the monstrous ship exploded, felled by the nuclear weapon. The Spartan had no time to escape. The music, limited to just a few notes of piano and then a faint female voice choir, was filled with sadness. The fans understood: this was a scene that took place a few months before the Battle of Reach, and the Spartan who gave his life to complete the mission was Thom-A293, the same one the player would replace as part of Noble Team. They also guessed that this was the mission that saw Kat lose her right arm, since in the various images fans had seen from the game, it was noticed that she had a bionic prosthesis. The tone was set: Halo: Reach would not be the story of a victorious battle; it would be the story of how the Spartans were wiped out. This wasn’t news to

fans, but with this series of videos, the awful truth became much more real. In Bungie Towers, they were ready for the game’s release. The development had been completed without any major issues. Most of the developers’ ideas had made it onto the final disk, which was delivered to Microsoft on August 4, 2010, ready for printing. In the end, only a single mission was cut from the final game: taking place just after New Alexandria, the level would have seen players crossing a city as it was being glassed by Covenant forces, before seeing them board and gain full control of a Scarab. The designers had a lot of fun with the idea, and managed to create a working prototype, but the mission was ultimately dropped: instead, Noble Team would flee New Alexandria aboard a Pelican. No big deal, then, even though many fans would have loved the opportunity to control a Scarab. A few plot elements were also cast aside: for a while, Bungie had given a more important role to Sára Sorvad, Professor Sorad’s daughter, who the player meets in the game’s first mission. She was supposed to be something like Halo: Reach’s Cortana, accompanying Noble Team on its missions, and giving the Spartans the benefits of her scientific knowledge. The idea was soon abandoned. “None of the Halo games were very easy,” summed up Marcus Lehto, the project’s director. “But, the smoothest run was our final game in the series, Halo: Reach. By that time, we’d become more of a well-oiled machine as a studio and were more confident producing such a large project.” This production capacity was all the more surprising given that the last few months of development took place in unique circumstances: it was a transitional period for Bungie, who were gradually moving out of 434 Kirkland Way. Over the course of the year, the staff had begun moving out and preparing a new studio in Bellevue, on 106th Avenue. To make Destiny, its first game as an independent developer, Bungie had been on a massive recruitment drive and the Kirkland premises just couldn’t accommodate that many people. The board of directors got their hands on former

multiplex movie theater, which they converted into a studio. As staff finished their work on Reach, they joined the rest of the team in Bellevue, while others, like Lehto and O’Donnell, oversaw the last few weeks of work. The composer and his team would be the last to leave the old studio: “Usually the audio team is the last one to finish, and we couldn’t build up a new recording studio and change our tech in the middle of finishing Reach. So we were the last ones in the old building at Bungie. Everybody else was over in the new building, starting to gear up for the big Destiny push.” Bungie Towers, though, wouldn’t stand empty for long. In the following months, 343 Industries would start moving in, and push on with their development of a game that was, at that time, top secret: Halo 4. 434 Kirkland Way would ultimately be left behind in 2015, not long after the release of Halo 5: Guardians, when 343 Industries would join the rest of the staff at Microsoft Studios on the Redmond campus. Upon its release on September 14, 2010, Halo: Reach outperformed Halo 3, just as Microsoft had predicted. In the United States, on its first day on sale it brought in $200,000,000 for Microsoft, some $30m more than its predecessor. One month later, 3,300,000 copies of the game had found a home in the United States, and it became the third game in history, after Halo 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 to exceed three million sales in a single month. A feat that was all the more impressive given that Reach, like Halo 3, was only available on the Xbox 360, unlike Activision’s shooter. And just like Halo 3 did in its time, the release of Halo: Reach breathed new life into the Xbox itself, with 483,000 consoles being sold in the same period. At the time of writing, no figures are available to assess the total numbers of copies sold, because Microsoft, strangely, stopped publishing them. However, it can be estimated that these sales would be in the region of eight million copies. One week before 343 Industries released Halo 4, Microsoft claimed that 46  million games had been sold across the entire franchise. This is a statistic that includes Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, Halo Wars, Halo: Reach and Halo:

Combat Evolved Anniversary, a remastered version of the first game in the series produced by 343 Industries. While Microsoft then began to keep quiet on the matter, it is because despite the initially excellent sales and the gushing reviews in the press, a few months after its release Halo: Reach was subjected to a lot of criticism from players themselves, and saw its community shrink considerably. Because deeper beneath the surface, the game contained a number of defects that could only be noticed after spending a few dozen hours playing the game.

LOTS OF NEW FEATURES, FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE When Halo: Reach came out, the fans went wild. The singleplayer campaign was probably one of the best in the series thanks to its well-written story and plenty of standout moments. Whether through its epic battles or moments of pure tragedy, Halo: Reach made an impression and to this day it remains one of fans’ favorite installments. Because in addition to its campaign, Firefight and its countless customization options were also a clear success, while a new community also took shape: the Forgers. Halo: Reach shipped with a new version of Forge mode, named Forge World, that was far more advanced than the minor feature it had been in Halo 3. This time, it was no longer restricted to just changing the location of particular weapons, or which vehicles featured on the multiplayer maps; here, players could build entire maps using components ready-made by Bungie. “God bless Steve Cotton for Forge World,” Marcus Lehto would state a few years later. “He gave himself the task, like ‘Hey let’s create the ultimate Forge experience.’” Cotton was firmly convinced that a full level editor that players could use to make multiplayer maps from scratch would be a huge success. And he was right: fans quickly seized on the tool, despite it not being particularly user-friendly, and recreated a number of highly popular maps like Sanctuary and Blood Gulch. The sharing feature that came with it left them rapturous. Two weeks after the game came out, Bungie announced that two million files were already hosted on

the content-sharing system set up by the studio. To play a map, players just needed to visit a given player’s profile, see what they had shared, and download the file they wanted. It was a seamless process and did a lot to enrich the experience of playing the game. In the first few weeks following its release, and even for months thereafter, Halo: Reach was a monumental success. Some even considered it to be the best game in the series, the cherry on top of a giant cake that Bungie had been baking for more than a decade. Proof of its popularity can be seen in that fact that, in 2017, it was one of the most played backward compatible games on Xbox One, ranking in fourth place behind Call of Duty: Black Ops, Rayman Origins and Skate 3. According to Microsoft, Halo: Reach still boasts a lively community to this day; this means that there are still enough players to keep the publisher interested in the game and looking after it. For proof, look no further than the fact that it would not be until January  30, 2018 that the advanced statistics tool Halo Waypoint, 343 Industries’ community website, removed its Halo: Reach tab. To explain this decision, Microsoft and 343 Industries point out the aging technology and code, as well as changes in their privacy policy. And yet, a few months after its release, the popularity of Halo: Reach would take a sudden nosedive. Unlike Halo 3, which kept drawing new players for almost two years, the community of active players on Halo: Reach would begin to stall, and then shrink. A year after its release, its multiplayer servers were hosting between 50,000 and 70,000 players per day; in the same time frame, Halo 3 was hosting at least double. All around the internet, loyal fans of the franchise were pointing out a few defects that were causing them to step back from the game. Top of the list: the initial multiplayer maps worked quite poorly. And with good reason: they were all taken from the single-player campaign. Wanting to tie the different parts of the game together, Bungie designed these levels to enable them to extract some segments to turn them into battlefields, be that for multiplayer or Firefight. Since Halo 2, artists like Carney and Cotton had always tried to make it so that players recognized the location as

soon as they saw a map. That was achieved through the artistic direction and the inclusion of particular components in the environment. A map like Sandtrap, for example, was obviously set in the desert on the Ark that Master Chief crossed when he arrived on the Installation; Standoff was probably set in Kenya, not far from New Mombasa; and Construct couldn’t be far from the Ark’s Cartographer, the destination for both Master Chief and the Arbiter. The result was that the Halo universe gained some internal consistency. Halo: Reach would take things much further in that direction, but the idea was soon found to contain a number of flaws. In non-objective based games, the lack of symmetry, in particular, tended to create strong points where players grouped together and that served as the focal point of the action, a tendency that made other parts of those particular maps less interesting. Players discovered lots of weaknesses in the level design which they exploited as much as they could, much to the despair of beginners and hotshots alike. There was also the issue with “bloom.” This affected several weapons, including the DMR which, like the BR in Halo 2 and Halo 3, was favored for its versatility and its accuracy. The term “bloom” refers to a specific action of the weapon’s reticle, which expands for a fleeting moment after a round is fired. On paper, this little touch was supposed to imitate the loss of accuracy caused by the weapon’s recoil, which forces players to reposition themselves properly before firing again. Of course, when firing round after round it results in a clear loss of accuracy, which might not be an issue for newbie players, who are happy to fire wildly and hope that some shots hit home. But it added a random factor to battles, which proved extremely unpopular with longtime fans of the series. Even though it was a console FPS, Halo had nevertheless amassed a community of hardcore gamers thanks to its demanding gameplay that was almost completely devoid of aim assist, a standard feature on FPS playable with a controller. In principle, this meant that good players, and especially those who had spent long hours practicing, had a significant advantage over beginners. The bloom mechanic narrowed this advantage, much to the annoyance of the most demanding players. It caused such an uproar that in September

2011, 343 Industries, which had taken over management of Halo: Reach, would release a series of updates that initially let players download settings to apply to custom games. The idea was for players to try out Halo: Reach without bloom. The setting’s success soon forced 343 Industries to begin gradually imposing ZB (standing for Zero Bloom) on some playlists, but for many players the damage had already been done. Another detail that turned many players off was the lack of bleed through, which meant that as long as an opponent Spartan had some shield left, they would suffer no additional damage. In Halo 3, after three shots with the BR, opponents could be finished off with a melee attack: it was powerful enough to destroy the remnants of the shield and completely wipe out their life bar. In Halo: Reach, the same strategy did not work, because the melee attack no longer broke through the shield: it destroyed only the remaining shield, forcing the player to attack again. The lack of bleed through had an effect on every fight, causing imbalances by making the needle rifle and magnum far more powerful than they were supposed to be, for example. Players once again voiced their displeasure, because this small change had a huge impact on how Halo was played. But bloom and the removal of bleed through were nothing compared to the main complaint from players: the loadout system and the introduction of power-ups into the game. Halo had always been based on the same idea: that all players began the game on a level playing field. It was only once the match began that roles were assigned, according to the opportunities encountered or the strategies of the two teams. With the introduction of power-ups–like the sprinter ability, being able to form a healing bubble, or becoming invisible– matches were turned on their heads. Indeed, power-ups would come to serve as the focal point for all the hatred felt by players. These included Armor Lock, which enabled the player to become invincible for a few seconds, in return for being unable to move. Rapturously received by the public when it was first revealed in the single-player campaign, Armor Lock was quickly deemed to be “for noobs,” due to it being extremely popular with beginner players

to whom it offered some very reassuring cover. It was far less popular with seasoned veterans, however. Using Armor Lock tended to put duels between two players on pause, sometimes providing enough time for an ally to come to their aid and defeat the opposing player who was already weakened by their first battle. It created an imbalance in how combat was conducted, and slowed the pace of the matches. In short, then, it corrupted the very nature of the game. In the world of esports, the game was very quickly shunned: after just a single season, Halo: Reach was removed from the MLG circuit, even though it had been Halo 2 that enabled MLG to make a name for itself and carve out its own corner of the video game industry back in 2004. The result of all of this was that many fans abandoned Halo: Reach. Halo was certainly known for its single-player adventures, but it was the multiplayer modes in Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2 and Halo 3 that had enabled the series to become a video-gaming mainstay and make such a lasting impression. Halo 2 had defined what online gaming should be like on consoles, and Halo 3 had elevated it into a fine art. Halo did this so well that it drew huge numbers of players and became a phenomenon in its own right, both within the small world of video games and far beyond its boundaries. The lukewarm success of Halo: Reach, and its gradual abandonment by some of the most dedicated players, would herald a long fall from grace for the franchise, that in the space of just a few years went from being a video-gaming monument to a relic of days gone by. So it was that when 343 Industries revealed Halo 4 for the first time at E3 2011, they were all too aware that a very delicate task lay in front of them. But that’s a whole other story.

WORKING WITH 343 INDUSTRIES Throughout the development of Halo: Reach, Bungie ended up working regularly with 343 Industries, who would be taking over the franchise once the game had been delivered to Microsoft. Bungie did not always find this to be a straightforward experience, all the more

because it had already seen some of its staff resign. Those included Frank O’Connor, who left to join 343 Industries in May 2008, where he became creative director of the franchise. It was a role that he was perfectly suited to, as over time O’Connor had become a living encyclopedia of the Halo universe. He joined 343 Industries with a desire to make sure that the series’ lore remained internally consistent as it grew. With his charismatic and endearing character, O’Connor was an extremely popular member of staff at Bungie, and his departure hit a lot of people hard. “I didn’t know Frankie had made his decision to go to 343,” O’Donnell tells us. “I found out on a weekend. He had told Harold Ryan on Friday, and Harold told me that afternoon, and then I called Frankie and said, ‘Let’s get together for coffee.’ I spent two hours trying to convince him, asking: ‘What can I do to have you stay with us, rather than go to them?’ But there were tons of reasons why 343 was better for him at the time, and I couldn’t convince him to stay with Bungie. In the long run, he probably was right. I think he might’ve seen some things that I wasn’t seeing.” But while several members of staff at Bungie made the move over to 343 Industries between 2008 and 2010, the flow ran in the other direction, too. But it did so for very different reasons: some staff from 343 Industries joined the team working on Reach to learn how the studio worked. This was the case for Josh Holmes, who would go on to be the creative director of Halo 4; he served as an executive producer on Halo: Reach, and paid close attention to how Bungie operated. Holmes knew Halo, of course, but it was with Reach that he truly discovered the series. He used it as an opportunity to learn all he could. But while Holmes was accepted into the production team without any misgivings, the relationship between Bungie and Microsoft had cooled considerably, and discussions were often fraught. The Redmond firm was trying to oversee a major transition in the handover between the two partner studios. It wasn’t just about entrusting development of future Halo games to a new studio, but also making sure that the transition went smoothly enough for the entire Halo ecosystem to emerge intact, without players being aware of any real difference. And for that, Microsoft

needed to get hold of some data owned by Bungie on its website, Bungie.net. 343 Industries was already working on a website to replace Bungie’s platform that contained all the latest news from the studio and about Halo, as well as its forums and, most importantly, individual stats for each player. These were very popular with fans because they were extremely detailed, and often a source of pride. To build this new community platform, 343 Industries would seek out an old acquaintance: Max Hoberman, a former member of Bungie and founder of Certain Affinity. “At some point, the nascent 343 group reached out to us at Certain Affinity, and I’m fairly certain it was at Frank’s [O’Connor] bidding. They were interested in doing a Halo digital download game. So we pitched a bunch of ideas, we had some really cool ones–I still have one to this day that I’m dying to make–and we all locked onto one that we were super excited about. We got really close to putting a contract in place, and then the Halo Waypoint website came along and it had become a priority. So, the other stuff we were thinking about doing got canned, and we ended up going on to Waypoint. I won’t lie, I was pretty bummed. But it did rekindle this relationship with Microsoft, and then we got pulled on to work on a multiplayer map pack for Halo: Reach. Halo Waypoint, the new reference website for all fans of Halo, went online on February  22, 2009, but it would not be until March 31, 2012, that it would play its full role, when it began hosting player stats that had been transferred over from Bungie.net. Bungie and Halo’s separation was a difficult one. Yes, the studio had spent more than a decade working on the license, and it had gone through some very hard times when making particular installments. But Halo was still its very own, its baby, and in-house the farewells were hard to take. “It just was hard,” Martin O’Donnell recalls. “This was our baby that we never owned. And we were going to give it over to a bunch of strangers.” So while some members of the studio were in regular contact with 343 Industries to facilitate the handover, O’Donnell withdrew to his recording studio: “I had no desire to talk to 343, because I was 100  % Bungie, and 100  %

Destiny. I mean, essentially at that moment we were competitors, right? We were trying to make the Halo-killer and they were trying to make Halo. It’s not like we had any animosity, but there was just no way that was going to happen.” And as surprising as it may seem, even Jaime Griesemer started having doubts in those final days. He had given his all to Halo, and after working on the third game he had had enough of the franchise to last a lifetime. So when Project Tiger evolved into something that was looking more and more like Halo, it irked him. It was as if he was unable to step out of Master Chief’s shadow. And yet, while Master Chief was getting ready to leave Bungie behind, Griesemer was on the fence. “I considered going over to 343 for a while. I thought, well, I definitely know how to make a Halo game better than those guys, so maybe I’ll go over there. But my heart wasn’t in it, so I wouldn’t have done a good job over there, either. And they had their ideas for where they wanted to take it as well.” Bungie bid its final farewell to Halo on July 8, 2011, just after the studio had celebrated its 20th anniversary. It was through a long message from Eric “Urk” Osborne, one of the studio’s community managers, that Bungie revealed its plans for the immediate future. It would be a new chapter in its already-long career. The project didn’t yet have a name, at least not in public. But that hadn’t stopped a few mischievous developers from hiding a clue in Halo 3: ODST, in the form of a poster stuck to a wall in New Mombasa. It showed the Earth looming large beneath a smaller white sphere. The image was accompanied by a short slogan: “Destiny awaits.” It would be two more years before Destiny made its first public appearance, and Bungie would experience many more challenges before then. But Bungie was under no illusions. Osborne concluded his message with the following few lines which in hindsight seem almost prophetic: “This isn’t a goodbye. It isn’t The End. Instead, it’s the very beginning of a new journey that will stretch the limits of what we are capable of. Ancient engines are now rumbling deep within the heart of our studio, and their energy will power us through the upcoming

darkness. Like all dark times, ours will be broken first by a single strand of light–a tether reaching out to bind us all together again. One day, we will awaken in a wondrous new place and we will remember just what it was that drew us together at the beginning of it all. We will look up to the heavens, and find hope. Thank you for everything. See you starside.” The letter, even just its last line, echoed the last message Bungie had sent its fans, including those who never visited Bungie.net. For many players, it was their last contact with the studio that had kept them dreaming for an entire decade. It can be read at the very end of Halo: Reach, the last Halo game developed by Bungie. As the Pillar of Autumn disappears off into the distance, towards the first ringworld, a message appeared on the screen: “To all our faithful fans– Thank you for playing Halo: Reach. Over the past decade, we’ve shared some of our most memorable experiences together, inside the far-reaching expanses of the Halo universe. It’s been one hell of a ride. And we couldn’t have done it without you. As we continue marching toward our ultimate goal of World Domination, Bungie remains inspired and fueled by you, our passionate fan community. So Play. Forge. Film. We’ll see you starside.