Bungie: We Screwed Up on Halo 2
January 26, 2007
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In an Edge Online (UK) article, Bungie’s Halo staffers discuss working with Microsoft and the Halo series’ ups (3) and downs (2).
“We had about four to five weeks to polish Halo at the end. No more than that. And that last five per cent is responsible for 30% of the success of the game, or more. That’s the period in which we really had a perfect storm,” said technical lead Chris Butcher. “The team was all there, everything was working great, the Xbox hardware was finally there and good, and we just were able to relentlessly execute on that. The entire game came together within that four- to six-week period.”
None of that “polish” time, Butcher says, was there for Halo 2. “We miscalculated, we screwed up,” he said. “We came down to the wire and we just lost all of that. So Halo 2 is far less than it could and should be in many ways because of that. It kills me to think of it.”
The multiplayer experience for Halo 2, Butcher adds, “is a pale shadow of what it could and should have been.” And actually playing Halo 2 multiplayer? “I cannot do it. And that’s why I know Halo 3 is going to be so much better.” Wow.
Bungie composer Marty O’Donnell discussed working with Microsoft: “The concept that Bungie wouldn’t have a launch title for the Xbox 360 was almost impossible to conceive of. That was really hard for the suits to swallow. It was like, no no no, we have to have a Bungie launch title. But I remember saying that there’s nothing better than for Bungie not to be able to have a launch title, and for Bungie not to be defining the Xbox 360. I know it’s scary for everybody, but it’s not scary for us. We make games. We don’t ship platforms. We don’t push platforms. As soon as we think that that’s what we’re about, as soon as we think that Bungie’s a platform company, we are, in my opinion, doomed.”
Well, let’s raise our glasses to Halo 3, right, guys?
