The first Halo I ever finished was 2009’s real-time strategy affair Halo Wars. That has to be something you don’t often hear. Most players’ first brush with a series as monstrous as this is undoubtedly some core Halo spectacle viewed from behind the muzzle of an assault rifle, not highlighting a convoy of units in eagle eye as a stand-in, custodial god of war. It feels like a fitting way to measure my unusual relationship with Master Chief, the UNSC, Covenant and everything else that Halo is, so we’ll go with it.

Not that I wasn’t envious of a capable console shooter, with or without four-player deathmatch. The original Halo: Combat Evolved may not have been the first home attempt at the genre, but it was arguably the most important. As close as its inspirational competition could get, the likes of Medal of Honor, Quake II and GoldenEye, none which I was ever that great at, felt comparative years behind. Bungie followed the unlikely lead of Argonaut Games’ Alien Resurrection, which mapped moving and aiming onto separate analog sticks over a year before the Xbox launched. That precedent aside, though, the Bellevue-based studio set the standards for the modern shooter genre almost singlehandedly.

He wasn’t wrong. By the time Master Chief had come to prominence as the hero, the star, of the multiplayer console FPS—and the term “Halo_-killer” was inadvertently coined—I was too busy sneaking through _Metal Gear Solid 2’s Big Shell to pay that much attention.

Its rise would be inevitable. In my early teens, a friend once showed me a few screens of some rudimentary marines riding a now-iconic buggy over a sweeping plain, talking about how this, not yet outside of Mac exclusivity, was going to be the next big thing. At least, that’s how I remember it.

Somewhat ironically, Halo began from a strategic position, rather than being mapped from the outset as a shooter. The project evolved spiritually as a kind of outcropping from the clotted battlefields of Bungie’s 1997 tactical game Myth, trading a Braveheart aesthetic for more of a Starship Troopers vibe, and then rendering everything in anthill 3D. Even as a primitive vehicular prototype, emphasizing the physicality of the terrain, there wasn’t really anything that looked quite like it.

That pedigree wasn’t easily won. Bungie’s story rivals gaming’s most volatile, its marriage to Halo growing steadily uneasy under fatigue, hubris and the weight of blockbuster expectation when it wasn’t at risk of being outright consumed from within. Yet like Master Chief, Halo is defined by a devotion to fight: even when it stumbles, the series manages, valiantly, to up the ante. Xbox just wouldn’t exist without it.

Still, it all might have been left behind as an Iain Banksian footnote without a foundation in gameplay: tight, sophisticated, smart and unapologetically rapt in the romance of new frontiers. And if Halo’s campaign did things that were thought impossible for CRT play, its revolutionary, sticky multiplayer, germinating in university dorm tourneys, flourished to become a combat universe unto itself—a literal Halo Nation.

This was finally the back entrance I needed. Halo may have spawned a legion of fans on the back of its legendary shooting, but across a number of interviews I did with Bungie vets, I was told it isn’t how they see the series’ core. Instead, as former Microsoft Games Studio head Ed Fries puts it, the games at their best are “vista moments”—evocative and hard to pin down, and maybe best encapsulated by the camera slowly tracking out above the bluffs in Halo 3’s debut trailer , Master Chief diminishing in the weight of the moment. That there’s an emotional core entombed somewhere under the stratum of dropped bullet casings and alien corpses is no secret among many the series’ many architects.

For me, any devotional attention paid to Halo Wars proved to be an accidental crash course in mythology. As I went deeper, an entire universe started leaking out at the seams, referencing just enough for me to later get absorbed by the overtly cerebral vignettes in the 343 Industries-funded Animatrix_-like Halo Legends, 343 having taken over the Halo series when Bungie spilt from Microsoft after 2010’s _Halo: Reach.

Whether you prefer vistas or ordnance, where Halo may go from here feels at once predictable and expansive; think of these stories as a patchwork roadmap from a number of people who lived it, replete with detours and roughly sketched paths, all in pursuit of answering that question.

For better or worse, Halo was a perfect storm. As its history has been told to me—a tangled knot of design, contracts, platforms, ideas, direction and incredible achievement—an ideal distillation is something that could realistically never be recreated. Perhaps the saga is saddled with an impossible legacy, its most fascinating points deviations from that mode, some left unseen.

Jaime Griesemer Cutting his teeth as map designer on the Myth series, Griesemer eventually took on a jack-of-all-trades role throughout the series development that ran the gamut from multiplayer to mission design. He’s also responsible for designing Bungie’s now-famous FPS console controls.

Alex Seropian Bungie’s original founder, Seropian partnered early with Jason Jones, turning the bootstrapped company into a legitimate developer of series like Marathon and Myth. The “father” of Bungie, ex-members credit Seropian with giving the studio a family feel, even as he oversaw its business dealings.

What follows across the three parts of our exclusive oral history are direct accounts from the people who made Halo, in its many and varied guises, since the 2001 debut of Combat Evolved. You will be reading:

Max Hoberman Initially hired to help Seropian with company business, Hoberman started Bungie’s Halo community team before taking charge of Halo 2’s Xbox Live multiplayer. Hoberman’s success with 2’s online integration led him to leave Bungie during Halo 3 to found his studio, Certain Affinity, (mainly) creating multiplayer components for Halo and other series ever since.

Paul Bertone Bertone’s work on studio prototypes and making maps for Myth II led to nuts-and-bolts mission building on Halo and design lead positions on Halo 2 and 3. After the conclusion of the initial Halo trilogy, Bertone led ODST’s development as director, creating its open world and Firefight systems.

Joe Staten While only credited on Halo as “cinematics director,” Staten was actually the primary driving force behind the series’ far-reaching narrative, creating the personality and humor of Master Chief and imbuing each script with the Hollywood-styled drama it became known for. Best known for his work on the noir-esque ODST.

Marcus Lehto The first person to work the original Halo prototype with Jason Jones, Lehto drove Bungie’s art team to build the look and feel of the UNSC and Covenant forces and rich environments, creating a colorful, multifaceted look that’s become unmistakably synonymous with Halo over the years. Considered the father of Master Chief.

Marty O’Donnell Bungie’s in-house audio expert from before the studio’s Halo era to his departure with Destiny, O’Donnell defined the series’ sound as much with its iconic theme as he did its shifting musical style (note Halo 3: ODST’s smoky jazz), casting choices and influence on creative direction.

Kiki Wolfkill While getting her start with Halo as executive producer of Halo 4, Wolfkill has since expanded her role to shape the narrative direction of the Halo universe itself, developing and producing trans-media projects like Halo 4’s Forward Unto Dawn, The Fall of Reach animation and most recently the as-of-yet untitled Halo live action series with Steven Spielberg.

Dan Ayoub 343 Industries’ head of external development, Ayoub works with teams outside of Microsoft to get Halo-related projects made on the publishing side. Originally joining the studio to help Bungie finish Reach, he has overseen projects like Halo Anniversary, The Master Chief Collection and Halo Wars 2, among others.

Stuart Moulder Then the general manager of Microsoft Game Studios, Moulder played a key role, along with Fries, in the acquisition, management and support of in-house developers like Bungie, shaping the Xbox platform as a whole.

Ed Fries Former Head of Microsoft Game Studios, Fries oversaw the entire development slate for Xbox, and was instrumental in the company acquiring Bungie, among other studios. A lifelong programmer and tinkerer, Fries also is also the creator of Halo 2600.

Peter Tamte A businessman in game publishing (and former Apple employee), Tamte was Bungie’s executive vice president. He convinced Steve Jobs to introduce Halo at Apple’s annual Macworld event—putting both the game and Bungie on the map—and helped broker the deal for Bungie’s acquisition to Microsoft.

Tim Longo A veteran of Crystal Dynamics and Lucasarts, Longo’s experience with major franchises played a key role in his leading Halo 5’s development as creative director. He is responsible for guiding the team-centric design and expanding 343’s Halo beyond Master Chief and Cortana—an approach that seems likely to continue into the future.

Josh Holmes After taking over as creative director to finish out Halo 4’s development, Holmes has become 343’s head of internal development, in charge of planning future projects and growing the studio on a macro level, as well as serving as executive producer across multiple Halo titles.

Ryan Payton Headhunted by 343 after leaving Kojima Productions in 2008, Payton challenged the nascent studio to think differently about what a Halo game could be as Halo 4’s creative director. Though replaced by Josh Holmes, Payton’s narrative contributions would help define what the finished 4 would eventually look like. He left Microsoft to found his own independent studio, Camouflaj, in 2011.

Frank O’Connor A former journalist hired by Bungie to liaise with the community and business in the Halo 2 era, O’Connor is the only member of their old guard to join 343. As franchise director, he currently oversees everything related to the universe’s overall presentation, from business development to its creative thrust, and has played a large role in writing numerous Halo stories, including Halo 4’s.

Marty O’Donnell (Bungie’s in-house composer) Bungie was a total seat-of-the-pants operation at the time. It was this scrappy place—a bunch of guys, pizza boxes and sweat socks on the floor. It was like walking into a frat house or a dorm or something. So I was the professional and they were like a bunch of kids, just goofing around. That was the impression I got.

Marcus Lehto (Halo prototype designer) Bungie had just wrapped up Myth: The Fallen Lords and was embarking into Myth II’s development. Their first offices were in South Halsted in Chicago—not a very savory area of town, but it served us well. The place was this giant old building, with lots of room for the company to grow, even though at that time we only had maybe 12 to 15 employees. So I came on board, and I was immediately working on a small "side project" with (Bungie co-founder and Halo director) Jason Jones.

Marcus Lehto I was hired to provide more of a creative vision. Jason at that time was hands-on programming every day, all day, so it was really fun for me, problem solving through those initial steps. Then we brought on a few more folks and began building a real, playable prototype. It was a top-down, lots-of-units-on-the-ground kind of game.

The integration of vehicles right from the very start was a leap that I hadn’t seen before. Just driving freely across terrain was not something that had existed. You had racing games and you had shooters, and there was no overlap at all between the two, except maybe (Bally Midway’s 1983 arcade game) Spy Hunter. So I was pretty impressed.

Jaime Griesemer (Halo series mission design) They were looking at Myth and thinking it would have done better if it were sci-fi, and looking at StarCraft and thinking that would be better without all the resource management. And Bungie had always invested a lot in its engine technology, simulating things, and relying more on the physics to provide the gameplay. So they wanted to one-up all the sci-fi RTS games, and have vehicles that really moved like vehicles, and terrain that really mattered because it was 3D.

Marcus Lehto That was 1997. Our “side project” was the first baby step of Halo. What Jason wanted to do at that time was, in the spirit of Myth, a real-time strategy, real-time tactics game.

Max Hoberman (several Halo series roles) We used to call Marty “The Elder Statesman,” to just remind him that he was old.

Marty O’Donnell Within a week it’d changed—Jason really didn't want to tell his mom that he was working on something everybody called “Monkey Nuts,” so they changed it to “Blam!”.

Marty O’Donnell We knew Myth II was coming out and that there was also a smaller group working behind closed doors on something new. One day I went over there and they asked me in—they wanted to show me what they were making and get my advice about audio and music. That was when I first saw Halo. It looked a lot like Myth. They were using its engine and it had that isometric camera, except it was sci-fi—there were all these little tanks that you moved around, space marines fighting aliens in different kinds of vehicles.

Jaime Griesemer We were going to use primitives for interiors—sort of sliced-out subsections of level parts that could snap together in lots of different ways. Like, one room and one hallway that you could kind of configure however you wanted to. (Similar to DOOM’s SnapMap feature).

Marcus Lehto Jason really didn’t have “Halo” yet—he didn’t have the universe in his head. It really was a collaboration from the beginning, a journey we took together. And as more individuals introduced their own creative ideas and unique perspectives, it continued to evolve and grow.

Max Hoberman I remember seeing guys like Shi Kai Wang, an artist we hired really early on, working on concept sketches for the Covenant vehicles and units. Those left an impression. And Marcus’s actual models too, for the first version of Master Chief and the Warthog—I first saw those in-engine on Jason's machine, with his little playground demo when it was still an isometric perspective.

Marcus Lehto I like the feeling that the Warthog’s not a Ferrari. It’s like a Hummer or a Jeep, something that’s meant to get beat up, meant to get shot at, meant to grind its way through the most horrifying terrain and terrible circumstances that lay ahead of it. I built it so that it had four-wheel steering. We wanted take these really tight corners, hot-dogging around on the terrain, with lots of throw in the suspension so it could jump these big hills. And we were like, holy shit: Why aren’t we driving this instead of allowing the AI to drive it?

Jaime Griesemer Then, canonically the story goes, they made a mode where you could just attach the camera to one of the units—just looking for different kind of ways of controlling RTS units. And it was so fun to be in the Warthog driving around over hills that they kind of got the bug to just make a game about that.

Marcus Lehto Master Chief started out as, and always was, that human tank. He was a guy in powered armor. But the mobility that he had, the shape language that broadcasted this presence of strength, needed to continue to evolve—he started out very, very blocky. When we first started I think he had maybe 400 polygons in him. It was ridiculous.

Marty O’Donnell Marcus showed me these early storyboards, which showed the camera as kind of third-person, with one of the marines running around and attacking an Elite alien. I remember thinking that looks a lot cooler, but too bad the final game won't be that. I just thought: this is what Bungie makes, they make these kind of games. And I think they didn't want to make first-person shooters anymore, because they had done the Marathon trilogy and they were tired of that.

Jaime Griesemer At first you had one gun, an assault rifle that would shoot grenades, and there was a little single-person boat, they called it the Doozy. And that was the whole game. This was when 3D accelerators were really kicking off, so the number of particles you could throw up and the water reflections—you hadn’t seen this stuff yet. So I just got to run around on the beach and blow up palm trees for a while.

Marcus Lehto When I created the Master Chief and the Warthog, I was having fun. I thought: Okay, let’s place ourselves in the year 2500 and imagine a world where we’re at war with these alien factions. Pretty standard stuff in sci-fi, but it was something that you didn’t then see very often in games and certainly not in this more freeform, exploratory, third-person action shooter type.

Jaime Griesemer At first I was sent over to San Jose in summer 1998, to interview with the Oni team at Bungie West. So the first time I ever got to see Halo it was third-person. I think they called the marine “future soldier” or something like that. He was supposed to one of the RTS units on the battlefield, but he was not Master Chief.

“It wasn’t even clear that there was going to be a story at the beginning. It was a simple multiplayer game to begin with.” —Joe Staten

Alex Seropian (Bungie founder) Once the Warthog was in that scene and you could pile dudes into it, experimentation started with the viewpoint and the camera just kept getting closer and closer. And controlling it, just that double tactile nature of load a dude in, get a dude out, hands on the steering wheel—it was like, this shouldn’t be an RTS game.

Marty O’Donnell We were going to do a behind-closed-doors showing at E3 in 1999, before the game’s public debut at Macworld in July. Any press that wanted to see it had to sign an absolute mum’s-the-word, non-disclosure agreement. And that caused more buzz than anything, because the press was saying, “The E3 title we really like is something from Bungie that we can’t talk about.” So that really set us up to be able to knock it out of the park when showing it to Steve Jobs.

Marcus Lehto We tried all kinds of multiplayer stuff. Jason wanted something like a hilarious super jump where the longer you held crouch, the higher your jump would be. So you’d let go and fly 300 feet. We had all kinds of crazy interactions, and we thought, “Alright, we’re all having fun here, so something is right.”

Jaime Griesemer We had a four-versus-four single elimination mode, and we used to knock off development at 4pm every day and just play for two or three hours.

Joe Staten (cinematics and narrative direction) It wasn’t even clear that there was going to be a story at the beginning. It was a simple multiplayer game to begin with. Like a lot of Bungie games, that’s where prototyping starts and how they find the fun.

Jaime Griesemer The team was eight or nine people when I joined, mostly working on the engine front. The first thing that I worked on was multiplayer, so some of what I did was weapons. You know, making a shotgun and sniper rifle and hitting all the fundamental shooter components.

Max Hoberman I thought it was a good idea for Bungie to diversify. You know, changing up the product range a little bit and not putting all their eggs in the strategy basket. I had an enormous amount of trust in Jason, and didn't question his design and development decisions.

Marcus Lehto But Paul just wrote it up on our whiteboard wall. And then Jason or somebody else was like, that’s it. That’s awesome. It was simple—it described enough about what our intent was for this universe in a way that created this sense of mystery.

Marty O’Donnell Nobody liked “Halo”. It was like, oh, it's too religious, it's too ambiguous, and it's too on the nose because [the ring world] looks like a halo. And it's so hard to see that stuff ahead of time. Because why would it be Halo? I might've even said, you know, in my day, that was the name of a shampoo for women.

Jaime Griesemer It was just days before we were going to announce at Macworld. We still didn’t have a name, and we actually hired a branding company to come in. They came up with hundreds of names and it finally came down to “Covenant”. That was going to be the name of the game, and there were several logo treatments. I actually sat not too far from Paul Russel, one of the artists. He was like, “Covenant? That name is stupid.” So he came up with five or six alternatives, one of which was Halo.

Joe Staten Peter was also the reason we got into Macworld that year, because he was a former Apple employee. So we got an audience with Steve Jobs.

Peter Tamte (Bungie’s then-executive vice president) I decided to join Bungie in 1999. I had interest in helping an entrepreneurial company grow again, and the company had had some financial setbacks in ’98. Part of it was that Myth II had shipped with an awful recall bug, and Alex [Seropian] made it clear one of the priorities was to generate cash. So Bungie re-released some of back-catalog products in collections, which helped a lot, and entered into a distribution agreement with Take-Two, selling them a small percentage of the company. That gave them cash flow.

Marcus Lehto We put a lot of effort into building that in-game trailer. That’s where we started compiling more information that would give Master Chief a personality and the Covenant a reason for existing. It’s when things started to really click as far as what this universe was.

Marty O’Donnell I said to Joe, “Emotionally, what are we trying to say here?” All I knew at the time was that the game was space marines versus aliens. He said, “I don't know what the story’s going to be yet, but it needs to create a feeling of ancient, epic and mysterious.” Monks singing make you feel ancient, so I wrote the melody, which my composing partner and I, and a few other singers, performed. It was one of those fun things we really didn't have any time to second-guess.

Peter Tamte Steve was always the type who could recognize something that had the potential to change the world. He was good at that. After he saw it, that was it. And just a few weeks later Jason would be on stage to show the world the first glimpse of Halo .

Marty O’Donnell I had one weekend to come up with the Macworld presentation music. Joe told me, “We’re going to be on the stage with Steve Jobs, he’s going to introduce it, and Jason’s going to do a live scripted demo.” We had no ability to put sound on anything, because up to that point all our sound work had been on PC. There was no way to get that working on the Mac in time. So I remember sitting with Alex and saying, “Look, let me do a score, and we’ll just have music play along with whatever this is. Let’s do it up right.”

“Halo was one of the five most anticipated games on three different continents, before we had spent one dollar on advertising.” —Peter Tamte

Joe Staten So, the sun was shining, with the lens flare, and Steve sort of stopped the demo right there and said: “Yeah, but you know, at Pixar, we can render dozens of suns.” Jason’s immediate reply to him was: “Yeah, but can you do it in real time?” There was this pregnant pause and Steve’s says: “Okay, you’re in.” And he picked up his Fudgsicle and walked back into his office, and that was it. So that’s how we got in, a little bit of chutzpah and an OpenGL tech demo running on what was soon to be the Mac.

Peter Tamte 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.

Joe Staten Jason, Peter and I went out to Apple headquarters to pitch this demo to Steve. He came into this little antechamber where we set our PC up, eating a Fudgsicle: “Whaddaya got?” I didn’t really say anything because I was just there in case the demo didn’t work. So Jason talked him through the demo, and Jobs sat there pretty quietly. The demo started you on the inside and then moved outside, and Jason made a very big deal about the transition and how it was very rare in games.

Peter Tamte Right away I got thrown right into the thick of things. Another thing that I did right after joining Bungie was call my old boss at Apple and asked him to be the one basically to introduce Halo to the world. That was Steve.

Marty O’Donnell Everybody was talking about how this game from Bungie looked and sounded different. And I knew that no matter what people thought about game music, getting melodic hooks into people's heads is unbelievably powerful for branding. So in my mind when I wrote the theme it was like I was writing a jingle for Halo.

Peter Tamte I think what made Halo such a successful game was evident in that initial demonstration, this feeling of adventure and exploration within a very interesting world and the freedom to go anywhere. And after it was introduced at Macworld by Steve, it just exploded. I always tell people Halo was one of the five most anticipated games on three different continents, before we had spent one dollar on advertising.

The guy was thinking about trying himself and he asked me to repeat it, so I did. And Bob just said, “Marty, why don’t you just do it? It sounds great!” And I said, “Oh no, I can't—I don't know what I'm doing, I'm just making it up.” He said, “Yeah, who cares?” 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.

Marty O’Donnell I wanted an Arabic chant—Qawwali—after the monks and orchestra. So my main jingle guy, Bob, had someone come in that Monday after we finished everything, and it was time to record the chanting part over the top. And I said to the guy, “Look, I've got nothing written, I just need somebody to improvise.” He asked me where I wanted the part, so we stood there with our headphones on listening. Then it was time, and I sang it.

Jaime Griesemer The reaction was amazing. I think we kind of blew people’s minds about what was possible in a shooter, so they were really excited. And then we sucker punched them.

Peter Tamte It became apparent that there might be an opportunity for Bungie there. Alex and I talked that night, and I ended up calling Ed within a day or so. And he immediately said, “I hadn’t thought of that, but you know what, this is interesting.” So he sent a team out to Bungie to play the game.

Peter Tamte In January of 2000, Take-Two had invited two of their leading developers to attend a meeting with Microsoft in New York, to show off this new game console that they were building. So it was me and Alex, with Sam Houser and Terry Donovan from Rockstar, and at dinner that night we started talking with the Microsoft team about their plans for game support to launch the Xbox.

Ed Fries (former head of Microsoft Game Studios) One day out of the blue, the phone rings and it’s Peter Tamte, who I knew a bit. Basically he said Bungie’s going broke—not an unusual call at the time, since developers and publishers were often going out of business—and they needed to be acquired. I was very interested. At the time I had two years to pull together an Xbox launch portfolio, but was kind of in a panic trying to figure out how we were going to have games at Christmas 2001, for hardware which at that time didn’t exist.

Ed Fries We worked out the deal pretty much that I wanted with Take-Two—I really only cared about Halo and Bungie’s people. The team would move from Chicago to Seattle, and Bungie West in San Jose would finish and ship Oni and move up to join everyone else. So, Take-Two got Bungie’s back catalog plus Oni, and I got the team plus Halo. Which in retrospect was a good deal.

Alex Seropian We liked Ed and Microsoft was a company we knew. And if the acquisition worked, Bungie itself could be so much bigger. But we still had this deal with Take-Two, so we couldn’t do the Microsoft deal because they had distribution rights to the game. So the complexity was getting the rights back.

Max Hoberman I was probably more aware than most that Bungie was in a financially risky place. And Bungie was such a proudly independent company, I think for the majority—certainly of our fans, but I think even internally—the whole acquisition really caught them off guard.

Alex Seropian We had always thought some day, maybe, we’d get bought and it’d be awesome. But we had had conversations with other companies like GT Interactive, offering to buy us in stock. Like, we’re going to do an IPO and you’ll be rich. And then we’d never hear from them again, because it was all lies.

Stuart Moulder (then general manager, Microsoft Game Studios) First-person shooters were generally tunnel-based back then, kind of claustrophobic experiences. And that Halo was outside in this alien landscape, it had a sense of galactic scale that was really amazing to see, even in that really nascent stage.

Jaime Griesemer Growing up I was a console kid, for sure, so Xbox was exciting to me. But I was pretty skeptical that Halo was going to be right fit because there hadn’t really been console shooters. 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.

Marcus Lehto In order to actually feel like you were firing a gun, to have that connection now that you had a controller in your hand, it had to be first-person—it felt too distant and separated in third-person. We wanted to truly connect to the character, to the world you were exploring. It really was Jason’s insistence around that same time that we be more connected to the players themselves, and going first-person was the best way to achieve that.

Joe Staten Halo had very organically become a story about whoever was behind the gun. We didn’t know who that was yet, but it was a guy in the cool iconic armor that Marcus made. It wasn’t until after we went to E3 2000, which was right around the time Microsoft got interested in us, that it started to sink in that, holy shit, we’ve got to make a game now.

Marcus Lehto So we sat down and we’re like, “Okay, now we’re going to make this game for the Xbox… How is this going to work?” Obviously, we played around with it functioning in third-person but it was pretty clear to us that it needed to transform into first-person.

Stuart Moulder After A.I. we asked, “Okay, what are our bets on?” We hoped third-parties would have some good titles. We had Halo, we had Munch’s Oddysee and this game called Azurik that (former Microsoft chief technology officer) Jay Allard had started which was a piece of shit, so we knew nothing was going to come of that. Munch’s Oddysee was too quirky to be a tent-pole title. So it was kind of all on Halo.

Ed Fries Nobody knew what was going to be successful. I probably had 30 or 40 games going on between Xbox and PC, and we were doing a deal with Steven Spielberg about this new movie he was doing called A.I., which was going to be really big. We had three games in development on that alone, none of which shipped. So you’ve got to imagine this environment of panic combined with adrenaline, but money’s mostly no object at the same time. So we were spending lots of it, trying to do all this crazy stuff.

“Talk to anybody and they pretty much say without Halo the first Xbox would’ve been the only iteration, which I think is probably true.” —Marty O’Donnell

Marty O’Donnell Everybody knew the key to the selling on Xbox was making the controls work. If they didn't feel right, it didn't matter how polished everything else was, it was just going to fail.

Jaime Griesemer The real shine of the Halo controls is all in the small details. Like how you can only carry two weapons, so you just need one button to switch between them. A lot of why that came about was due to technical limitations—you don’t want to switch to a weapon and then wait for its animation and textures to load.

Stuart Moulder It essentially buffers your movements, so that you get the movement you wanted, not necessarily the one you were making. Which gives you a really controlled, precise experience, beyond what your thumb could actually give you, unassisted.

Jaime Griesemer There’s a lot of code in Halo that interprets what you’re doing—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. 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.

Marty O’Donnell Nobody is more responsible for the feel of Halo controls than Jaime Griesemer. He was the one that really thought everything about the controller through. Like, what is it you do with a mouse and keyboard that you have to now do with the thumbsticks? Nobody had figured that out. And he was sitting there, really fine-tuning controls, probably more than anybody.

Ed Fries Here was a group of PC guys who'd never done a console game trying to put this game out that's not really a console game next to, say, Lorne Lanning, who had a successful history with Oddworld on the PlayStation. Nobody knew Bungie in the console world—but they did the day after launch.

Stuart Moulder In my head, I thought Halo would be our Corvette. Chevy has Corvette not because it drives revenue or makes them a leading brand, but because it’s the one sexy thing they’ve got. There’s the Malibu and all this other shit, but Corvette, that’s 50 years of being pretty fucking awesome. I didn’t know if Halo was going to sell a lot of units or not but it was going to be sexy as hell—it was going to show what the platform could do, what no other platform could do.

Ed Fries I would get, “Who’s your character?” You know, Sega has Sonic, Sony has Crash, obviously Mario for Nintendo. “What’s yours?” And that’s never a question I had a good answer to. But at the same time, if you looked at what was going on in PC gaming, it was a really exciting time, with networked multiplayer—LAN deathmatches with all these games—but there was no equivalent on the console. So Xbox bridged that gap.

Marty O’Donnell For people whose first introduction to consoles was with PlayStation it was a really hard sell—nobody really thought Microsoft would make a box that was going to unseat Sony. It’s surprising that they did as well as they did. I mean, talk to anybody and they pretty much say without Halo the first Xbox would’ve been the only iteration, which I think is probably true.

Stuart Moulder 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.” For them it was more like, Xbox is important enough and this is important enough that they won't fuck with us, and will actually try to make it work. That's about all you can really hope for—they were willing to take a leap of faith.

Max Hoberman Alex and Jason did a really good job spinning the buyout internally as an amazing opportunity that could help shape the future of this brand-new console. The best way to do that, and the only way to do that effectively, was to do it right next to the team building the console.

Stuart Moulder I went to Chicago and had an open Q&A, where anybody in Bungie could ask questions. What Alex did was super smart—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.

Jaime Griesemer None of us had ever seen an Xbox before we signed up. I think it had only been announced a few days before Microsoft met with us. It just signified such an incredibly dramatic change—in platform, timeframe, living location, just everything.

Jaime Griesemer I didn’t unpack for six months. Microsoft’s movers came, somebody packed up my tiny apartment, moved it all out to Seattle. I bought a bed and just unpacked the clothes that I brought with me. There just wasn’t time for anything else, because we were working crazy, crazy hours.

Paul Bertone For almost a year we worked on “Phoenix,” and it just wasn't coming together. We had good ideas, good-enough technology, and a really close team. But our leadership was lacking a little bit. We just couldn’t get that crystalized idea into a bug-free prototype that people could play and get behind and believe in. Then in April or May 2001, Halo called. I went over to its single-player campaign, the engineers moved over, and all our artists got absorbed.

Marcus Lehto We had an insanely short period time to figure our shit out—to actually convert Halo from a third- to first-person game and build a real world. I swear, it was like nine months. Just a ridiculous period of time to build the entire first game and ship it.

Paul Bertone (Halo series mission building/design lead/director) I was one of the last people hired in Chicago to work on a PC successor to Myth—codenamed “Phoenix”—and we found out about the buyout in the first two weeks. We ended up with a kind of siege warfare game, like Rampart, where one player was the attacker and the other the defender. It had trebuchets that could smash down walls, which could be destroyed brick-by-brick—that was pretty cool. But Halo was always calling.

Jaime Griesemer It was a bunker. We’d be all working our asses off and somebody from another part of the company would bring their kid through our space to look at what was going on, like it was a zoo or something. It got a little antagonistic, to the point where we would tow Microsoft employees out of our parking lot.

Marty O’Donnell Millennium was absolutely the most Microsoft-looking place you could be in. The other team just down the hall from us, who we ate lunch with and crossed paths going to the bathroom, was Encarta. You couldn't have had two more diametrically opposed cultures, the Encarta people and Bungie.

Ed Fries I had a whole wing of the Millennium Campus set up for Bungie. I took them on a tour, and they hated it. It was classic Microsoft at the time, all rows of private offices. It was very much a programmer-centric company; like, close your door if you don't want to be disturbed. And they're, “We don't want this, we want cubes.” Back then, the only people who had cubes were maybe administrative people doing accounting. But to Bungie it was about this open, collaborative working environment, which I understood eventually. So we had to go and tear out all the walls.

Jaime Griesemer We started out in a cubicle nightmarescape. Then we moved to the Millennium Campus in Redmond, and we were there for a number of years. That’s where we shipped Halo.

Paul Bertone 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.

Jaime Griesemer As individuals I think they understood, but Microsoft still struggles with creative endeavors. They had an internal process 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?” No, we can’t. So we got kind of territorial, where a Microsoft keycard wouldn’t give you access to Bungie.

Stuart Moulder At that time Microsoft organized by discipline—so, all programmers are here, all artists here, all game designers here. But with Bungie we said, “We're not going to fuck with you. We're not going to fuck with your titles, we’re not going to fuck with your internal organization structure.” Alex remained head of Bungie and everyone still reported to him.

Jaime Griesemer The big thing that we were worried about was what had happened with (MechWarrior developers) FASA, the studio that Microsoft bought before us. That was another Chicago company, and we knew a bunch of those guys. Microsoft brought them all over, split them up amongst a bunch of internal teams, fired a bunch of key people and basically destroyed the entire studio, the IP and everything.

Marcus Lehto It was a massive undertaking, and we were very green at that time. I mean, imagine a bunch of 25-to-30 year olds trying to make this game together, figuring it out as they go along. Our relationship with Microsoft was pretty good then, but we still had this chip on our shoulder as this independent developer, and continued to maintain it—to our detriment in the end. But we learned a lot from them.

At some point they said, “Okay, we’re going to do a subtitle.” And this was before subtitles were the thing every game had. We thought that was dumb, but whatever, we could ignore it. Eventually they came back with Combat Evolved, and 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.

Jaime Griesemer They hated the name. They said that it doesn’t mean anything, and to people it does mean something to, it’s not on-brand, because what we’re selling is the super soldier, not this weird space junk. In every foreign language it sounds stupid, it’s feminine—they had so many reasons why the name should be changed. They went for months and months, and they came back with a bunch of names. It was another border dispute.

They said, “If there's one thing you take from this meeting it’s that we absolutely think you should change the name.” And we just laughed out loud. It was like, we are not going to listen to you. They’d had somebody cut a two-minute video together to heavy metal, all quick cuts and fast action. No story, no nothing. I'm like, what's this? This didn't look or sound like Halo at all.

Marty O’Donnell I remember Microsoft hired a marketing firm who had done a bunch of work and wanted to make a presentation to the top guys in Bungie. Nobody wanted to go do it, so Jaime and I said we would. So we go to this room, and the suits are at the conference table with the Microsoft people, and they had this PowerPoint that showed how well we were testing in all these demographics and all this stuff.

Marcus Lehto I vividly remember building, literally on 3x5 index cards, a number and letter system. A10, A20, A30 and so on for each one of the missions. B30 was “The Silent Cartographer”. I pinned them to a board and I just stared at it for hours. There must’ve been 40 of those cards of there, and I’m like: “There’s no way in hell we’re going to build all of this.”

Joe Staten Over the course of a number of weeks, we set down some very basic principals. We thought up the alien race—a conglomeration of different races—and talked about what they might be, quickly putting those ideas into a basic level progression. Then I had to go down to San Jose for three months to help ship Oni.

Marcus Lehto We didn’t know what we were going to do for the game’s campaign. We had a rough idea as to what could happen, but no means of understanding how we were going to construct it. Where was the Master Chief going to go? What kind of pitfalls we were going to throw him into?

“Microsoft hated the name. They said it doesn’t mean anything. They had so many reasons why it should be changed. It was another border dispute.” —Jaime Griesmer

Marty O’Donnell It's funny that right from the get-go we had so many weird, rubbed-the-wrong-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 percent right away, but he did by the end. He totally understood who we were and appreciated what we were bringing.

Marty O’Donnell The plan was for Cortana to have a slight British accent. So we tried Jen’s British and she was good, but she had also done No One Lives Forever , and that main character was British. And I thought the voices were too similar.

Joe Staten Jen Taylor, who Marty hired to play Cortana, was someone I went to college with. She and I were theater majors together, and I knew she'd moved to Seattle. So when Marty and I were talking about voice actresses, I said, “Yeah, I'll bring in my friend Jen, she's got a really great voice.”

Jaime Griesemer Those swords came in a “three-pack”—Durandal, Cortana and Joyeuse. We thought, “Well, Joyeuse sounds lame, it has to be Cortana.” Everything in Halo was named in this totally bizarre way.

Joe Staten When I got back I started to dig in with Jason on the Covenant’s religion, why they would band together. Even in Halo we had the idea for a prophet. You’ve got to give people some indication of what the power structure looks like. These guys just can't be random aliens. There has to be some compelling reason why they’re unified to keep this Halo ring safe, some sort of religious significance. I'm a student of history as well as creative writing, so looking back across time it was just natural that religion would in some way inform any great union of creatures.

Jaime Griesemer Cortana came along well before Microsoft. That was another totally crazy thing. Marathon had this AI named Durandal, which is a famous literary French sword . When we decided on a similar AI in Halo, we looked at that idea again.

Joe Staten 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. If they did, the world would feel real, too. If they didn’t, it would feel like a made-up video game world.

Marty O’Donnell And there are still a few lines in there like “toady about,” and “sod off,” little British colloquialisms. And then there was Sergeant Johnson—he was just a caricature unashamedly lifted from Aliens. He wasn’t even supposed to that much of a main character, but everybody loved him because his actor, David Scully, improvised tons of lines. So we ended up with several different lines that the game could randomly choose from. This adaptive audio was really important for player immersion.

Joe Staten Marty said, “Just be you. A little bit older, but you.” And Jen, of course, is now the voice on every Microsoft phone, right? It's funny how life comes together.

Jaime Griesemer I was in the meeting where Master Chief was named. I think it was me, Jason, our artist Rob McClees and Joe Staten. We were already working with (Fall of Reach author) Eric Nylund, who came up with name John. But you weren’t going to run around getting called John in the game—that wasn’t going to fly. So, in thinking about other ways we could name him, Rob said, “Well, we could give him a rank.” I was like, okay, Sergeant then. But Rob said, “Well, he’s a marine, right? So it has to be a naval rank.”

Marty O’Donnell I remember saying, “People are going to start falling in love with different marines.” But they were mostly just cannon fodder. I said, “Joe, please, let’s at least end with Sergeant Johnson showing up on your ship and saying, ‘Good to see you Chief!’ or something.” Then people would say, “Wow, at least one of our guys survived.” And Joe said: “No, don’t worry, I don’t think anybody’s going to fall in love with these guys.” Everybody did.

I wanted one of our early artists, Shi Kai Wang, to design all of the Covenant. He took these curvilinear forms from sea creatures, shells and iridescent textures from a horseshoe crab carapace. And that purple, green, blue—color was super important to defining them.

Marcus Lehto We also decided there should be a clear distinction up front between the Covenant and the UNSC (human forces). It’s ridiculous to think that 500 years from now we’d still be using ammunition-based weapons that fire lead slugs and shoot casings everywhere, but we did it because the aliens had laser weapons.

Joe Staten It was a pretty lively discussion inside of Bungie, how much personality should we give this guy in the green helmet. I felt that he couldn’t just be an empty vessel, and that we could do better than Half-Life’s Gordon Freeman. We can make it his story and the player’s story at the same time. So I focused on the simple ways that we could give players a sense of character. Which is where Master Chief’s wry humor comes from.

So I said, “Okay, he’s a Commander. He’s like James Bond.” Rob is a stickler for military accuracy, and he’s the reason the shotgun shells have a little dent where the firing pin hits. He said commanders don’t get sent into fights. So we looked up ranks in the US navy, and above this certain line you’re no longer considered expendable. Looking there, Master Chief was the highest non-commission officer rank that’s considered expendable. We thought the name sounded stupid, but it just kind of stuck.

Ed Fries I got an email from (Microsoft chief executive officer) Steve Ballmer, which was unusual for me. It was pretty short. It basically just said, “Steve Jobs is mad that you bought Bungie, call him and calm him down.” And then it had a number. Okay, I guess I have to call Steve Jobs.

Jason was never super interested in figuring out the details of the story front to back. He really enjoyed laying down tent-poles. Like the Flood reveal, for example—I don’t know where this is going to come in the story, but a really critical part of this game has to be the change of an enemy, from who you think your enemy is to another.

Joe Staten We wanted players to get that the red Grunt is harder than the orange Grunt or the blue Elite isn’t as tough as the gold Elite, so we had to make sure it was dead-bang obvious when you saw them. Marcus really pushed to make the art incredibly readable.

Ed Fries The deal I made with Steve required that Alex and I appear at the next Macworld, on stage in front of 11,000 hardcore Mac fans. It wasn't my first choice. But we agreed. I think it went okay—nobody booed, there were no snipers.

In games you’re often ripping out a chapter, or you’re changing weapon values. I sometimes liken it to some punk kid walking on to a film set with a paintball gun and just lighting everything up. Halo was very much like that. I can’t remember how many levels were cut.

Joe Staten My entire time at Bungie, I was the duct tape guy. A level would get cut: Can you put some story duct tape over this giant gap? 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.

“We looked up ranks in the US navy. Master Chief was the highest non-commission officer rank that’s considered expendable. We thought the name sounded stupid, but it just kind of stuck.” —Jaime Griesmer

I said to him, “Hey, I know you're mad.” The irony was that when we acquired Bungie, we didn't have a job for Peter Tamte, and I felt really bad about that. But Peter was leaving to start a Mac porting company—and I said we could license our IP to him. Jobs said, “Okay, that sounds good.”

Paul Bertone I came on for the last four months. I didn’t know the scripting language, how the engine worked, how encounters were meant to be built—there was still a lot that needed figuring out. So, there were a lot of conversations with Jaime, a lot of brute force, sitting at my desk, and coming up with how I wanted an encounter to play out. I'd just work on it until I hit something that I could not do.

Stuart Moulder The way the levels were laid out was almost like a LEGO set in glowing Covenant blue, so much that on many of the levels you see arrows on the floor. They weren’t put there by Forerunners for the Covenant to get around, but by one of our testers, who would always get lost. That’s one of the more ludicrous artifacts seen in the game.

Paul Bertone And the designers worked really hard to make each area unique. Take the two Pillar of Autumn levels, in the air and after it’s crashed. The artists worked their asses off to make that look and feel different in almost no time. It was like, you're going to have like three weeks to take that initial geometry, crack it open a little bit, make it look like the fight is done, like a whole side of the ship got blown out. It was a moment of pride for people.

Marcus Lehto There was no way we would be able to build everything for the story, which worried us. We were up against a very hard deadline. So I floated the idea of reusing some of the environments—and we shamelessly reused at least three or four, played through backwards and modified a little bit. But we really needed to do it

Paul Bertone Multiplayer is actually something that was on the chopping block until very close to the end of the project, which would've been an obvious tragedy.

Jaime Griesemer Multiplayer was also kind of bad until very shortly before the game shipped. You would just shoot at a guy forever, and they wouldn’t die. Me and a couple of the other designers, including Max, said: “You know what? We’ve got to hit the reset button.” So we flattened it all out and rebuilt it from scratch. It’s amazing that it came out as well as it did, really.

Marty O’Donnell It was just really fun, but it was also really scary. Right at the end, Joe was going to deliver Halo’s cutscenes. I was going to do all the music and (Bungie’s other audio guy) Jay Weinland was going to do the sound effects. But it just kept getting pushed back. Alex was tearing his hair out, everybody was freaked out, like we weren't going to get this done. But how do I score a scene if I don't know if it's 30 seconds or a minutelong? I can’t.

Jaime Griesemer It wasn’t like we had a lot of experience, or were experts. But this incredibly talented team got it done, despite the fact that a lot of them, including me, didn’t really know what they were doing.

Marty O’Donnell The whole game was coming together so late. Some of that stuff we got in just at the very end. Jason and Joe and me and a couple other people had a big picture; but everybody else was just so focused on their area that I just don’t think they knew what else was happening. It was intense.

Jaime Griesemer I kind of thrive on chaos. And you get in a position where you can’t second-guess or doubt or be overly analytical about what’s happening, because it’s got to happen right now.

Max Hoberman The original plans for multiplayer, pre-Microsoft even, were always to do something less head-to-head and more arena-based. On Halo the team just ran out of time and ended up shoehorning it in. It was never really by design, the way it worked. It was just a scramble to get something done.

I’m there, and I don't know if Halo is a hit. We've had hits, and this certainly deserves to be one, quality-wise; and we’re going to market the shit out of it because we’re Microsoft. But we don't know what people are going to say. The one thing we can count is we love this game, and now that we no longer need to be testing it, we still like playing it. And that's not true for a lot of games that get shipped.

Stuart Moulder You could really feel that there was something magical to Halo when Bungie was wrapping it up. Nobody can predict a hit, but what you can predict is the quality.

While we’re watching this thing, I realize I don’t know if the world is ending. I called Jay 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.

Finally, Joe delivered all 33 cutscenes, and we had three days to add sound effects and music. We had to finish 11 per day. That first day I finished 11, right on schedule. That was September 10, 2001. I woke up the next morning, my wife and my daughters are freaking out, and I see what’s happening.

Ed Fries Bungie saw Halo as the long vista, the epic moment—you know, when you're standing at the top of the deep pit and you have to go down. For them it's the quiet before the storm. The other part matters too, but that was what was special about Halo.

We were excited for people to get Halo into their hands. But also we were terrified. Then the reviews started coming in, and people started connecting to it. To our relief it reviewed very well, which made us feel really great and energized about what we were going to do next with Halo—at the time, we weren’t sure we were going to do a sequel. We didn’t have a vision for where the game might actually take us, in its universe. We were kind of riding by the seat of our pants at that point.

Marcus Lehto We had created what we thought was a fun game, but we had to cheat pretty significantly in order to wrap its campaign, and deliver a story. So we understood the fallacies of the game inside and out. We knew what we had to leave behind, because we just couldn’t finish it otherwise.

Jaime Griesemer People forget that Halo wasn’t a chart-burner right off the bat. 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 percent 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.

Master Chief is part of that, and that relationship between him and Cortana and the player. You’re this epic character, but you’re an epic character in a losing battle. Halo is about winning the battle but losing the war. That's what it's always about, which is really interesting. It’s like, “I'm going to win this battle, but the aliens are getting closer and closer, and soon they’ll be on Earth.” And then what? I think that's part of what makes Halo, Halo.

Marcus Lehto Jason had a difficult time separating work from external life during the making of Halo. It consumed him in a way that ultimately hurt him physically, too. He was not well when we eventually began making Halo 2.

Paul Bertone I didn’t get the chance to celebrate with the Halo team. I immediately went back to work on “Phoenix”. I think I only had a week off, and then I was right back to this other game that I really wanted to make.

Marty O’Donnell I was thinking: that’s probably it. I’ll probably move back to Chicago. We’d ship Halo, just the one game, and that would be the end of it.

Marcus Lehto Halo took its toll on a lot of individuals in the studio. And Jason was of them—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.

Marty O’Donnell After Halo shipped, everybody was gone for a month. I remember there were moments after we were finished, and the place was empty.

Marty O’Donnell At the same time we were watching the success of Halo and seeing how people were playing it. That helped Halo 2 take shape. Then we brought the Oni team up and converted them into working on Halo’s multiplayer. They were promised that after that was done, they could do any game they wanted to do, so they started working on a game called “Monster Hunter”. Not the one you know today, but we had a game called that in 2002.

Marcus Lehto Halo 2 was now time to really spread our wings and do some cool stuff with the engine. We were exploring different avenues there, and the story was going off in different directions.

Jaime Griesemer Everybody wanted to do a sequel, because there was so much cut out of Halo that we basically had enough ideas and concepts to make another game. I mean, towards the end we were saying, “Okay, which are we going to cut, the shotgun or the sniper rifle? We don’t have time to do both.” We decided to lose the shotgun. Only, of course we didn’t—a small group of us stayed late for a couple nights and got it in there.

Marty O’Donnell At some point in early 2002, Jason came to me and said, “Marty, you know, I think we should really work on Halo 2. I’ve got a bunch of ideas I want to do.” I told him to slow down. That he didn’t like doing sequels. He’d never liked them. He said, “You know, I owe it to everybody here.” I was like, that’s the complete wrong reason to do something! You don’t owe us anything.

Marty O’Donnell To a certain extent 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. So he’s sort of like this choke point.

Finally we talked through what was interesting about that idea. I think what Jason really cared about was, at some point, that the superhuman Master Chief had all his tools taken away from him, and then faced an even bigger challenge. And that became, for better or worse, the Master Chief being pulled away by the Gravemind and set on a different path.

And the other thing that “needed” to happen, in the sequel, was that Captain Keyes has a daughter, and 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.

Joe Staten There were a couple things Jason was extremely passionate about that I left on Halo’s cutting room floor, because I just couldn't figure out how to make them work. So they came back around for Halo 2. He said: “There should be a scene in the game where the Master Chief is standing on an orbital above Earth. The Covenant’s attacking Earth, and Chief puts his hands on the glass and he looks down and says, ‘Only blood will pay for this.’ That's got to be in the game somewhere.”

Max Hoberman 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. I was mostly telling Alex and Jason, and I guess they agreed with me.

Marty O’Donnell We knew down the line Xbox was going to be plugged into the internet, and deliver online gaming, and one of Jason’s big pushes at that point was for Halo to have a strong online side.

Max Hoberman The original plans for Halo’s multiplayer had been to do something very novel, something akin to Halo 5’s Warzone, with larger maps, more players and AI. And when the team started on Halo 2, they wanted to revive that, but completely scrap the smaller arena-based multiplayer mode of the original, and local split-screen. All the stuff that had been such a huge hit in Halo was just being thrown out the window.

“I think everybody had their own priorities for the sequel. For me, I felt passionate about exploring this whole other world, that isn’t all about Master Chief. The other side.” —Joe Staten

Marcus Lehto 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. And that was the crux of much of the conflict that would occur, because we didn’t have clear leadership.

Paul Bertone We started to work on like a third-person fantasy action game, like a beat-em-up, codenamed “Gypsum”. That lasted from around the start of 2003 to that June. It was pretty cool. It was a bit of a bummer to stop it, 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.

So, Hardy did. They made a playable build, it wasn’t up to scratch, and he told Alex and Jason to kill it. Which they did, but Jason wanted the “Phoenix” team to survive.

Marty O’Donnell Almost immediately the “Monster Hunter” team was pulled into Halo 2. Then their lead, Hardy LeBel, was asked to help the struggling “Phoenix” team. Alex and Jason told him that they were unsure if “Phoenix” was going to work, but they wanted him to work like crazy on it, get the team up and running, and then report to us whether it should be killed.

Marcus Lehto The solo campaign was chaotic. There were too many cooks trying to drive the project in different directions.

The rest of the team called small-scale multiplayer the “party game,” which I thought was a little derisive. I just dove in and started planning with this incredibly small team and no resources. And in six months we’d been incredibly productive. In comparison, the big Warfare mode had had zero work done on it—nothing at all—and the single player game was starting to be in a bit of a crisis.

So eventually they said, “Hey, you’re right. We should have a smaller-scale arena multiplayer. But we don't have anyone to do it. And you keep saying you want to be in development. Do you want to be in charge of that?” So I said, okay.

“Gypsum” was my second-favorite 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.

But then 9/11 happened right before we shipped Halo. And the tone and atmosphere at the time was very complicated, especially when it came to Islam. At the last minute somebody in legal said we couldn’t use Dervish. Half of it was like we shouldn’t appropriate somebody else’s religious beliefs for some goofy sci-fi game, and part was we don’t want to antagonize anyone. It was a really complicated mix, and we just said okay.

Jaime Griesemer For 97 percent of the game’s development, the Arbiter was the Dervish. I’m going to be careful here because I don’t remember all the details, but that name refers to a special, set-apart role in the religion of Islam, a kind of holy warrior. So it really fit the idea of this distinguished, extremely powerful, almost blessed-by-the-gods warrior.

Joe Staten It was like, what if you are the guy who lost the Halo ring? What if you were the guy whose butt was on the line for protecting the most valuable religious object in the entire world, and you blew it? That seems like a pretty interesting story, and one we should tell.

Jaime Griesemer I think the first conversation I had about Halo 2 was with Joe about story ideas. That was when the idea of playing as the Dervish, later called the Arbiter, first came up, to see the Covenant from another side.

Joe Staten I think everybody had their own priorities for the sequel. For me, from a storytelling point of view, what we wanted to do was Halo, but bigger and better, in a lot of different ways. And something I felt passionate about was exploring this whole other world, that isn’t all about Master Chief. The other side.

Marty 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 now was different.

Joe Staten We didn’t want to churn out another copy of Halo. We wanted to do something unexpected and give people a view on the Halo world that they didn't think they'd get, and make that really relevant for gameplay. On that score, I think Halo 2 succeeded pretty admirably.

Marcus Lehto We always joked about Halo being a space opera. Halo 2 was the quintessential space opera moment of the saga. 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.

Marty O’Donnell Dervish had been in place for a long time, and we had all these lines of dialogue recorded, saying the word all over the place. We said to Microsoft’s geopolitical experts, “Look, you approved this a year ago. We asked you about this stuff.” We were really upset. I thought that there was nothing we could do. But we cut out every word from every character that ever said the word Dervish, and re-recorded all those lines to try to match them, saying “Arbiter” instead. I think there were user manuals that were already printed with Dervish in them. It was horrible.

Jaime Griesemer I think if we just kept ourselves to the things we cut from Halo we would’ve been okay, but we didn’t do that. We tripled everything. The engine was torn completely apart—for the first year of Halo 2’s development, we couldn’t play it, which makes it impossible to make any real progress.

Joe Staten The cinematics and audio team was in a different part of the office to the core development team. So we just weren't privy to all the conversations that went on in those pods every day.

Marcus Lehto As with the first game, with Halo 2, Jason really burned out. Roles started to get a little bit blurred and there was a lot more tension among folks like myself and Joe, Paul, Jaime and Marty.

“I think if we just kept ourselves to the things we cut from Halo we would’ve been okay, but we didn't. We tripled everything. For the first year of Halo 2's development, we couldn't play it.” —Jaime Griesmer

Joe Staten I must've worn down enough people that we should absolutely tell the story of this other guy. Not many games of the time were doing dual perspectives. But I think what sold it was access to all the Covenant weapons, being allied with Grunts instead of marines—it's not just story, it's the entire sandbox you get.

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. It just isn’t. I could never convince them it wasn’t. It wasn’t a good reversal; it was just a mechanic that was unsatisfying.

Max Hoberman At one point the team said: “Okay, change of plans—we're cutting the big Warfare mode, there's no way we can do it. The party game is going to be our multiplayer, but it's going to be online and Max, you're in charge.”

Joe Staten Then we just plowed ahead, much like we’d done with Halo, with one notable exception. We ordered ourselves a giant sandwich, took a bite but didn't realize exactly how big it was before we started in. And we did that across the board, technically, artistically, and story wise. But of course, we didn't figure that out until way too late.

Also we implemented (the physics engine) Havok in Halo 2, so everything about how the vehicles worked changed, everything about projectiles worked changed, everything about how you built the environment changed. That was a huge technical hurdle.

Jaime Griesemer There was a lot of new lore and story stuff that had to get generated to show the Covenant from the other side. We committed to a bunch of content that the story required, but we couldn't produce enough of it while trying to make everything else look better.

Joe Staten One conversation I remember very specifically was when Marcus and I finally sat down to review the script. He was terrified of the scope it implied. His job in that meeting was to assess how many props are you asking for, how many effects does my team need to build, how many custom cinematic stats... You know, it was a big game at that point.

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 all these problems that Alex had been solving. A lot more politics started blooming at that point.

Paul Bertone Alex was the heart of Bungie. 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.

Alex Seropian I left Bungie at the end of 2002, once the team had been established and it was obviously going to be working on Halo for a long time. I wanted to sink my teeth into something new, and the choices that were presented to me at Bungie—the challenges, opportunity, growth, whatever—just weren’t necessarily the ones I could imagine doing forever.

Marty O’Donnell It was early 2003 and Jason said that the “Phoenix” team was demoralized. But he’d promised these guys that they would have a game, so he went over to be their creative director and project lead. There were probably 15 people on this team. Joe and I took him out to lunch and said, “Jason, you can’t do this. You cannot leave the Halo 2 team.”

I was also doing all the UI design, the really complex online stuff, like coming up with the party system and figuring out the ranking system and matchmaking and a million other things. It was crazy.

Max Hoberman Doing multiplayer was the most productive, intense period of my life up to that point. I was just a machine. I had one environment artist who doubled as a level designer and I eventually got permission to hire one additional environment artist, but I had to do the hands-on work outside of the other guys, helping on levels.

Jaime Griesemer I’d shipped one and a half games. I didn’t know what I was doing. 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 or directing progress. We were moving backwards for so long at the beginning of Halo 2.

If I remember, the leaders he left were Jaime, Marcus, and engineering leads Chris Butcher and Michael Evans. Because somebody had to be able to say, “Okay, we’ve talked about this long enough, and we’re going in this direction.”

Marty O’Donnell I said to Jason, “Look, if you’re going to put somebody in charge of a team you have to, like, formally bless them—you know, knight them with a sword, and say they’re now king of the empire and that they’re going to bring everything together.”

Marcus Lehto That wasn’t the first time the studio tried to have another pet project functioning in the background. But it was too hard.

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.

Then we had the famous Halo 2 demo at E3 2003 . The lighting model was just beautiful. But when we came back we realized: we can’t ship this. It wouldn’t run. There was no way we could do the whole game this way. It was a huge, horrible realization that the entire plan that had been worked on for two years was basically going to be thrown out.

Marty O’Donnell They had taken a gamble on what I think was called a stencil lighting model. And they thought they could do the whole engine this way, that they could do all the lighting this way, and it was going to be revolutionary.

Jaime Griesemer Engineering had read some cool SIGGRAPH papers and had this idea for completely dynamic lighting, like they were going to be the ones to make it work. Eventually we realized we could achieve that with just one or two characters on-screen, but it’d still occasionally reduce the frame rate to three per second.

Marty O’Donnell I think Jason took his eye off the ball working with the “Phoenix” team. And he didn’t see some fundamental flaws that were happening in the leadership of the team.

Jaime Griesemer When a big chunk of the design team went to “Phoenix,” we brought in some new blood, animators and environment artists. So while I was trying to feed this beast of an art team, I was also trying to teach them how to make a mission. And being young and sort of dumb, I thought, “Ah, that’s fine. I can totally take on all the responsibility and at the same time keep up this huge creative output, and sell the team on it.” It was a disorganized mess, at least for the year.

Jaime Griesemer I focused on what I really knew best, the combat and weapons and vehicles sandbox. So, I only did one mission on Halo 2. I still wanted to do the tutorial, because I was very involved in playtesting. But we rewrote the AI for Halo 2, and all this stuff worked fine, but apparently it wasn’t good enough for us. So I went from having my hands in almost all the pies on the first Halo to being much more focused on the combat and the moment-to-moment gameplay in the sequel, which would continue.

Paul Bertone I became mission design lead. We basically started a complete redesign of the campaign about a year and a half in, a very silly Herculean effort. A lot of people sacrificed themselves in ways that you should never have to for your job.

Marty O’Donnell Jason brought Paul over, and they went into a little room called the clubhouse with Joe Staten to come up with the new plan for what Halo 2 was going to be.

“We started a complete redesign of the campaign about a year and a half in. A lot of people sacrificed themselves in ways that you should never have to for your job.” —Paul Bertone

Marty O’Donnell So Jason came back and at that moment, all distractions were gone. There was no “Monster Hunter,” there was no Bungie West, there was no “Phoenix” team. All hands were on deck, and we were doing Halo 2 this new way.

Jaime Griesemer Basically we hit the fire alarm, cancelled the “Phoenix” team’s game and brought everybody back. But at that point we had dug ourselves such a huge hole that we weren’t really able to get out of it before it was time to ship the game. I mean, Halo 2 was a shell of a game in a lot of ways.

Paul Bertone After the E3 demo it was decided that Halo 2 was in too much trouble as it was, and the entire studio was folded into just the Halo team.

Paul Bertone It was all new missions, so we had whiteboards—I actually still have then in my garage right now. We’d have a top-down layout of the mission, it would have a list of the encounter beat moments from space to space, and a list of narrative beat moments: this is where a cinematic is, and this is where a mission dialogue is going to happen.

Marty O’Donnell Paul and Joe and Jason sequestered themselves away with whiteboards and the team was like, “Okay, what’s going to happen now? What are we going to be working on?”

Paul Bertone Jason and I would be working on this new campaign while people were still working on the old stuff. We weren’t ready, and they needed to work on something, so there was this whole situation where people knew we were changing things, but we weren’t ready to talk about it yet. That resulted in a whole lot of animosity.

Jaime Griesemer Jason’s process is kind of isolated—he tends to just go off in a room, come up with stuff and then come out. We hadn’t been working that way for a year, so it caused some friction with the rest of the team. In the end we just had to do the best we could.

Paul Bertone Looking back, was our retooling necessary? I don’t know if it was or wasn’t. It was definitely not well thought-out, not well planned and not well executed. I would never do the same things again, so late in a project.

Max Hoberman We went another year-plus without the campaign being playable. Meanwhile, we’re playing multiplayer every single day for two years while the campaign was in development. And the quality of the work was a direct result of just that constant hands-on playtesting and iteration.

Paul Bertone We got the first couple missions down as templates, with all the information that we needed to see. Then other people started trickling in, like Marcus and the other mission designers. It was so much work, so the other designers were brought in, and we all worked on it together.

Marty O’Donnell When we realized that what we were going to be able to ship was a mess, we just had to change it, and so drastically. It was unbelievable.

And it all lived on the boards. There was no paper, no digital documentation. Because we were working so fast we needed to be able to just stand in front of this essentially live document. If it got erased, it was gone forever. We took a lot of pictures on old-school digital cameras, because we didn't have picture phones at the time.

All the senior people who worked for Robbie voted to force the team to ship it. I walked out of the meeting, saying: “I'm going to quit right now if that's what we’re going to do.” So they went back on it and gave Bungie extra time, but I still quit six months later. That vote had showed the attitude of what was going on there.

I remember I was in a meeting about Halo 2, and the reality was that we needed to move it back a year to deliver the game that we wanted. (Former chief Xbox officer) Robbie Bach turned it into a vote. The choices were to force Bungie to ship Halo 2 a year before it's ready, or give them the extra year to get it done right.

Ed Fries I'm probably the only one who would tell you this, but after launch everyone embraced Halo to such an extent it was actually a problem. Once the whole success of a platform rests on one game, that game has to be there.

Joe Staten We had this great third act wrap-up of Master Chief and the Arbiter coming together and defeating the Prophets and discovering The Ark, and this deeper secret inside of it. But it was so above what we could possibly do from a production point of view that it fell apart. There was meant to be a mission where you were fighting on top of The Ark, like it was uncovered like it is in Halo 3. So you're fighting multiple Scarabs, going through a trench run to make your way into it. We had it all modeled out, we had it all massed out, this big structure with Scarabs sitting on top of it.

Joe Staten We ended up completely cutting Halo 2’s third act, which was brutal and horrible, and something nobody wanted to do.

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.

Marty O’Donnell I remember having a very vociferous discussion with Pete Parsons, who was then sort of Bungie’s manager as an internal Microsoft executive. He said, “Marty, it’s inconceivable for us to not be a launch title for Xbox Live,” which was coming in November 2002, just a year after the first Halo’s release. 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.”

Marty O’Donnell I was still confused when they came out of the clubhouse and presented it to the team. 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?”

Joe Staten We wanted to explore more about the Flood itself, which was a challenge because I couldn't quite wrap my brain around it. I couldn't quite figure out how to make them a race you cared enough about. And I think you can see that in the Flood sandbox being more of the same. I mean, no knock on Jaime, as he spilled tons of blood on the project. But I don't think we really ever got Halo 2’s Flood right in a way that anybody was satisfied with.

Marcus Lehto That was the thing that I take away from Halo 2 more than anything else. It was a tumultuous time in our history, when things got so bad between leaders not working well with one another that it threatened the existence of the project, the quality overall and the existence of the studio. And it’s somewhat evident in the fact that Halo 2 didn’t really wrap up right. It kind of left you dangling on a thread. It felt disjointed.

Marty O’Donnell All that stuff was going to culminate and end on Earth. And it was going to be the end of Halo. We had no plans to do another game after this. It was like: this is how Halo ends.

Marty O’Donnell The famous Halo 2 crunch was so bad. We had to renege on so many promises. And this is such a typical Bungie story, as it happens over and over again. We just couldn’t deliver.

Max Hoberman People are always shocked when they think about the impact multiplayer had on the quality of what we put out, and when I tell them all the hurdles that I faced. They think multiplayer must been what the majority of the studio was working on. Right? Uh, far from it.

Joe Staten We had all thought, and hoped, this is going to be like The Empire Strikes Back. That was a cliffhanger, and nobody freaked out when Luke was just on a hospital ship and nothing got resolved at the end. It'll be just like that. Well, no. Empire did a whole bunch of other little cool things that made that okay, which we didn’t do.

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. But we had gotten ourselves into this bind, and there was no way to change it.

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.

Jaime Griesemer Some of Halo 2 was great—the Xbox Live component was something nobody had ever done, the multiplayer was excellent. And a lot of really cool tech and story stuff happened. But we had to kill ourselves to get it done.

Paul Bertone It was basically a death march to the end. Nobody will say anything different, and if they do they’re just trying to sugarcoat it. Just a death march.

Joe Staten We were driven by the strong desire to outdo ourselves, but we didn’t fully understand our limitations. And it was a hard process to admit to ourselves that we couldn't do everything.

Marcus Lehto We were obsessed with detail and with quality overall, so whatever we were going to ship, we knew it was going to be something that played well. But we all knew what it could’ve been, had we actually had our shit together.

Paul Bertone I slept at the office some obscene amount of days in a row, like almost an entire month at the end. 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. A lot of relationships got fractured, and that felt irreparable, at the time.

Marcus Lehto I think Halo 2 has the darkest memories for me, personally. We struggled the most as a studio at that time, just to figure out what we wanted to make, how we were going to come off of that success of Halo and to ante it up. But we just didn’t have the right leadership at that time.

Jaime Griesemer What’s the phrase? Putting ten pounds of shit into a five-pound bag? We really tried to cram it too full, and we paid the price.

Paul Bertone I honestly thought that nobody was going to buy it, because the stuff we had to do at the end of the project felt so gut wrenching. But luckily, nobody saw how it was before, so for them it’s like all the stuff we took out just doesn’t exist.

Max Hoberman (several Halo series roles, including lead on Halo 3) The single-player game was such a mess up until the very end—Jaime and Jason (Jones, Bungie co-founder) were rebalancing all of the weapons in the campaign for the two weeks before it went gold. Unfortunately, the weapons were shared with multiplayer, and it broke the game.

Jaime Griesemer (Halo series mission design) Right after Halo 2’s launch we were scrambling because our multiplayer was totally messed up. We shipped it and everybody just slept for a week. But when we came back and played it we were like, “Oh, this isn’t the multiplayer game we wanted.”

Marcus Lehto (Halo prototype designer) I think we were excited about the idea of Halo 3. And we realized we had to make right for what we did with Halo 2. We had to put a cherry on this, really bringing the Master Chief’s story to a close from our standpoint, and build a great game to say goodbye.

Marty O’Donnell (Bungie’s in-house composer) 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. But after quite a number of months, and it became important for Halo 3 to get made.

Marty O’Donnell It was really hard to figure out who was going to lead Halo 3. Jason (Jones) had left. He said, “I can’t do this again, I almost killed myself.” He didn’t know if he wanted to make games anymore, and he just took off.

It was especially challenging because they gave me a mandate that drove me bonkers. 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, so I was kind of disappointed with that.

Max Hoberman Before we started planning Halo 3, Pete (Parsons, an internal Microsoft executive at Bungie) came to me and said, “While we figure out what we’re doing for Halo 3, we've got all these environment artists and a bunch of level designers, and we’d like them to do some DLC.” So I went from a team with two environment artists to a team with 30 environment artists, none of which had any experience with multiplayer.

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. That was immediately the sort of grenade that we all had to dive on, in dealing with it.

Jaime Griesemer There were whole weapon classes that were just not viable for multiplayer. And this was in the early days of Xbox Live—patching wasn’t really a thing on consoles, especially a day one patch. So we had to figure out the five changes that’d take the game from busted to playable.

Max Hoberman When Jason left he supposedly did so with me set up to be the lead, and then I immediately ran headfirst, for the first time, into politics at Bungie. And Pete had this challenge of how do you affect this change, how do you communicate this to the team, how do you make this happen.

Jaime Griesemer There was a lot of fallout from the game being late and hard, and a lot of relationships that needed to get mended.

Joe Staten Jason vaporized at the end of Halo 2. He went on his long sabbatical out of the blue, and it was left to us to figure out who was going to lead the Halo team. At that point Bungie as a group was really rudderless, if not quite leaderless, really.

Max Hoberman Going into Halo 3, I think Jason and Pete decided that there really wasn't anyone on the design side well equipped enough to be the. So at one point they came to me and said: “We want you to be the lead for all of Halo 3.” I talked it through with them, and agreed that we really had no alternative, and that it was the best thing for the project.

Jaime Griesemer With Halo we’d started all these different threads in the story, going different ways, and we opened this big can of worms with the multiplayer. Now, how were we going to bring all that to a close? Everybody at Bungie wanted Halo 3 to be the last Halo. It was going to be a complete set, and then we were going to move onto something else.

Marcus Lehto We all wanted to move on and do something different. We were getting sick of Halo at that time.

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.

Jaime Griesemer 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.

Marty O’Donnell Jason for the most part had very little to do with Halo 3, almost nothing to do with ODST and very little to do with Reach. He was starting work on Destiny because we convinced him to. He was thinking about what else he wanted to do, and travelling a lot. All the while, he was still a Bungie employee. Because, you know, we had convinced everybody that all the magic sauce came from Jason.

Jaime Griesemer We didn’t see Jason for a while after Halo 2 shipped. We had a cut-out of him printed out on cardboard, and we put it in the corner of the room.

Max Hoberman 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. Eventually I put my foot down and with Pete in the room, and said to the other guy who wanted to be lead, “I'm fine if you want to do single-player.” I was happy to do multiplayer—I'm very reliable and kick ass at it, so I'm fine with that, I don’t have any issues there.

Jaime Griesemer I was happy to stay out of it. But the missions had to keep going, right? We couldn’t sit around and wait.

So, there was a bunch of really creative, strong-minded individuals fighting. I wasn’t one of them, by the way, believe it or not. I was not fighting for control. But you know, Jaime, Paul (Bertone), Marcus, Joe—there was a bunch of finagling to try to get Halo 3 and up and running.

Marty O’Donnell It was a confusing time, because Jason had left, and once again he didn’t bless anybody. He didn’t say, “And here is the next leader of the crew. He has all of my blessing and power.”

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.

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 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.

Marty O’Donnell 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.

“Some of our pushback and fighting with Microsoft was warranted. It was just our default approach to put up a giant iron wall to protect ourselves.” —Marcus Lehto

Marty O’Donnell It was a clumsy start to Halo 3 in my opinion. 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.

Paul Bertone (design lead Halo 2 and 3, director ODST) Everybody had the things that they wanted to fix about the process. And I wouldn't say we ever really got to a consensus about exactly how we wanted to do things, as a team.

Max Hoberman What followed was a mountain of work, undoing everything we had done on Halo 2. Not only had the Microsoft rolled out a new Xbox, but they had redone all of the underlying Live systems, the backend, and had broken everything across the board.

Joe Staten I think Paul had aspirations to be the project lead, Jaime as well, probably. I realized that it wasn’t a fight I was going to win.

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?” That kept me even farther outside of it, so I was just like, “Whatever, I’m just going to finish Halo 3.”

Jaime Griesemer I was 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.

Paul Bertone There was a lot of politics, a lot of arguing and a lot of stuff that for me wasn't enjoyable. I wanted to work on a game, and I wanted to be with designers. So I left the meetings.

Marty O’Donnell I think we called this little group the Blue Crystals or something like that. We had a code name. The whole point of negotiating was either we’ll continue to make Halo or, basically since they owned Halo, it’d be on them to keep it all on track. “Good luck,” we’d have told them, “but we’re going to go try something new.” But they were like, “No, no, no, we want you to stay.”

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 you do with marketing?” Or on how we the handle the game, and whatever.

Marcus Lehto We still had a pretty significant chip on our shoulder about this Bungie culture, the idea that Microsoft was not playing real nice with us. That’s debatable in hindsight. They were probably struggling just as much with us as we were with them, because we were kind of assholes back then.

Marty O’Donnell I remember comparing it to The Lord of the Rings. We wanted to have an epic conclusion to a grand trilogy. But we were hoping that this would be it. This would be the end of the Halo story. It’s a trilogy, the story arc comes all the way through, and that’s the end of Master Chief and Cortana. Satisfying, and cool.

Jaime Griesemer We knew we weren’t going to ship another Halo on the original Xbox—Halo 3 was going to be a 360 game. For while we thought it might be a launch title, but after Halo 2 slipped it was pretty obvious that wasn’t going to happen. So began a lot of planning on how we were going to tie things up, and tempering the overreaction from Halo 2.

Things came to a head. We were advised that we could just tell them that we want Bungie back, and we’ll give you Halo 3 for it. But it got a little more complex than that, and we ended up doing three games. But basically we got Bungie back by continuing to give Halo to Microsoft, but only until an agreed end date where we’d stop making it.

Marty O’Donnell Halo 2 was so successful that we hit our profit cap for the initial deal we had worked out with Microsoft on