It’s easy for us to gloss over the fact that video games, any video games, take an insane amount of work to create and maintain. And making one as massive and ambitious as what Bungie’s doing with Destiny? Well, that’s something else entirely.

As part of our visit up to Bungie HQ for IGN First, we got to take a peek behind the curtains. We dipped our toes into the waters that make a game like Destiny possible, and although a huge chunk of it coasted far over our heads, the ambition of the game became even more impressive.

The Destiny Operations Center is staffed by at least two people at all times.

If the creative work behind Destiny is the game’s heart, then Bungie’s “Destiny Operations Center,” or DOC, is the game’s brain. The cold, quiet, and dark room felt more like something at NORAD than a video game studio. The soft glow of the sea of monitors, each of which displayed crucial, yet indecipherable information, is what’s set in place to ensure that players get the best possible experience in Destiny. Just a few doors down was a room filled with shelves lined with hundreds, if not thousands of console development kits. PS4s, PS3s, Xbox 360s and Xbox Ones stretched in all directions. Bungie’s already testing to make sure that come September 9th, Destiny’s able to handle even the heaviest of player loads.

Just a few doors down was a room filled with shelves lined with hundreds, if not thousands of console development kits.

There are numerous fail safes in place to make sure that the always-online world of Destiny never crumbles. Bungie has multiple buildings and multiple internet service providers, so that when one inevitably go down, the others will be able to carry the torch without impacting the game. It’s obviously a huge endeavor, and an even bigger risk. But when we asked the team what they learned from their work on the Halo series, their answer was to, “...not to let the fears get the better of us and prevent us from making the game the best and truest experience it could be.”

NASA called. It wants its control room back.

The background of folks who worked the DOC range from former game testers, to AIDS researchers, to architects of Xbox Live, to folks who worked on the Large Hadron Collider. But they’re certainly not public figures, because as they put it, “The player experience is best when we stay behind the curtain."

The background of folks who worked the DOC range from former game testers, to AIDS researchers, to architects of Xbox Live, to folks who worked on the Large Hadron Collider.

One of Bungie co-founder Jason Jones’ big goals at the beginning of the project was making sure that unlike traditional MMOs, Destiny wouldn’t segment the audience on different servers. Jones, and Bungie as a whole, don’t want player to just become comfortable interacting with people they know, but rather grow to appreciate and look forward to playing cooperatively with complete strangers. They want Destiny to be able to create new relationships between people.

They wouldn’t be specific on the number of players they designed the Destiny infrastructure to handle, only saying that it was “very high” and “comparable with the biggest games out there.” In regards to the question of whether places like The Tower could become too crowded, they explained that much like multiplayer maps, public spaces also have behind-the-scenes match-making technology to make sure that players never feel like they’re stuck in a traffic jam.

Seems like this should be on a t-shirt. Eh, Bungie?

Destiny is an all-in bet for Bungie. While talking about the future of both the game as well as the company, they replied, “They’re very tightly intertwined. We’re focusing the entire company’s efforts on Destiny having a great launch and a great future that leads for a decade or more.” In their words, “There really is no difference between the success of Destiny and success of Bungie.” But the team remains realistic; in their words, “Things will go wrong. The real test of a team is how we deal with it.”

“Things will go wrong. The real test of a team is how we deal with it.”

The folks at Bungie also took a look at how many people continued to play a given Halo game in the time between its launch and the launch of the follow-up. The year over year retention rate for Halo games from 2004-2012 was nearly 75%, which Bungie proudly stated was well the industry average. “We know that people want to play our games for a very long time,” they told us. They foresee Destiny as carrying this torch.

The blue-background monitors on the wall are live looks into the data center, so Bungie can monitor reps who are in there performing maintenance.

Bungie views the MMO nature of Destiny as just a continued evolution of the studio as a whole.

The progressive nature of Destiny can be traced back to the studio’s work on the Halo franchise. Halo 2 brought forth Bungie’s insane insistence on making even the most minute of stats available to players, while Halo 3 introduced file-sharing to a lot of console gamers. Bungie views the MMO nature of Destiny as just a continued evolution of the studio as a whole.

Halo, without question, redefined the console shooter and paved the way for over a decade of games that followed. We asked Bungie if they felt like Destiny could have the same impact, to which they responded, “It’s a lofty goal, but it’s what we aspire to and dream of.”

No pressure, right?