Life After Halo

OCTOBER 5, 2007 — just weeks after Bungie Studios unleashed Halo 3 — news emerges that the developer is set to leave Microsoft and return to its independent roots. The split hailed an end to Microsoft’s near-eight-year ownership of Bungie, a company it bought on the strength of a one-level game demo called Halo.

You've come a long way, Master Chief.

Before moving to Seattle from Chicago to join Microsoft in 2000, Bungie was still a relative unknown, a developer bursting with ideas but one yet to realize the true scope of its potential. Now, almost a decade on, Bungie has grown into one of the world’s leading game developers — a company once again ready to take its destiny into its own hands.

FINISHING THE FIGHT

Given the magnitude of the split, Bungie’s first days as master of its own destiny were surprisingly low-key. Within days of Halo 3’s launch, senior staff members were back in the office steering the studio on its new course, aware that with Microsoft’s safety net removed, it would now live and die by its own decisions, successes, and failures.

“I took about two days off before moving on to another project we’d been working on for a couple of years,” recalls Paul Bertone, Halo 3’s design lead, who joined the company shortly after the Microsoft takeover. “It wasn’t a case of ‘We’re the new Bungie, what are we going to do now?’ We already had things we were working on.” With two projects canned during the development of Halo and Halo 2 (much to the chagrin of the team), Bungie’s newfound freedom is finally permitting it to dedicate itself fully to multiple projects.

"The main reason we did this was to keep Bungie together," says Bungie artist Marcus Lehto.

These determined (yet unassuming) new beginnings were a world away from what had transpired just days earlier during the company’s final, momentous collaboration with Microsoft — the launch of Halo 3. “I was in Seattle at the Best Buy retail store with about 1,000 fans for the launch,” recalls community and PR director Brian Jarrard. “It was Microsoft’s biggest-ever launch event. We had simultaneous groups of people in six cities around the U.S. and in Europe.”

But the manic fan reception that greeted Halo 3’s launch in Seattle was to prove a mere sideshow compared to the stunning scenes that were simultaneously taking place in Los Angeles, where head of production Jonty Barnes was witnessing the biggest launch in gaming history: “An entire city street had been closed for the launch,” he recalls. “Throngs of fans were chanting our name. Some people had even been lining up for two days to be at the event. While I was meeting the crowd, [some] 50-year-old TV-news reporters kept coming up to me with their camera crews, asking about ‘some Master Chief guy.’ It was absolutely incredible. It really was like the release of a Hollywood movie. It was one of the most amazing nights of my life, and a very humbling experience. I think Halo 3’s launch announced to the world that games are now on-par with movies.”

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