Countdown to Launch: Designing Halo, Part 1
Chapter 16
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Countdown to Launch: Designing Halo, Part 1

8

IMITATION IS MORE THAN THE sincerest form of flattery. For aspiring game programmers, cloning a known game lets them focus on learning the ropes of development--language, syntax, logic, structuring a game loop--without the pressure of coming up with their own design. Alex Seropian started small, coding a clone of Atari's Pong called Gnop! for the Macintosh. Instead of charging for the game, he gave the program away for free but charged $15 to anyone who wanted his source code.

Seropian took a similarly roundabout alternative to receiving a formal education. The University of Chicago's Department of Computer Science, where he wanted to attend, offered no undergrad program. It did, however, offer a bachelor's degree in mathematics with a concentration in computer science. Seropian continued writing small games but felt conflicted over how to begin his career after graduating. Spending most of his time on his dad's couch, he deliberated over whether to apply to game studios or found one to sell his games. When he asked his dad what he thought Seropian should do, his dad recommended working at a company to get experience.

Once again, Seropian paved his own path. In 1991, he founded Bungie and published Operation Desert Storm, his first commercial title. When sales rolled in, Seropian converted his bedroom into a production center: mass-producing the game on diskettes, constructing boxes, and shipping product to his customers.

Bungie's next game was a team effort. Jason Jones, a friend from the University of Chicago, was writing his own game, Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete, a roleplaying game for the Mac in which players connected over Apple's AppleTalk networking protocols to explore a maze.

Jones and Seropian made the perfect team. Like Seropian, Jones had been writing games for years, cutting his teeth on BASIC and assembly language. He took a year off between graduating high school and starting college to write code in C for a computer company. After work, he began converting Minotaur, a game he'd written in 6502 assembly language on the Apple II, to his Macintosh. The game was still taking shape when he met Seropian during his sophomore year at the University of Chicago. He was impressed with Seropian's Operation Desert Storm game, and when Seropian mentioned he was looking for a second game for his company to publish, Jones suggested Minotaur.

In December 1991, Jones hunkered down to finish the AppleTalk portions of Minotaur's code while Seropian designed packaging. The two friends were uncertain whether the game would take off. Few games required a modem for play. After Minotaur went on sale in April '92, Bungie sold through 2500 copies, giving the two friends their first hit. The two formalized their partnership, with each owning half of Bungie and opening an office in Chicago.

Seropian and Jones built up slowly, hiring a small staff and releasing games for the Macintosh when developers such as id Software, Apogee, and Sierra On-Line favored the PC. While players on PCs running MS-DOS immersed themselves in Doom, owners of the Macintosh explored the richer mythology and futuristic shooting of Marathon, Bungie's series of first-person shooters.

Doom outsold Marathon thanks to the prolificacy of DOS, but Marathon distinguished itself in several ways. Famously, id Software's developers wrote a 2.5D engine for Doom, establishing a world that felt three-dimensional but took place on flat grid. Doom levels could not, for instance, place rooms directly atop or below one another. Enemies appeared to stand above or below players, but since the game's engine was based on a two-dimensional grid, actors (player-characters, enemies, projectiles, and other objects) could not pass directly over or under one another.

Released in December 1994, over 12 months after Doom and Doom II, Marathon also took place in 2.5D settings, but was the first first-person shooter to let players aim freely using their mouse. Players could also drop grenades at their feet and ride the explosive force of grenades to boost themselves to out-of-reach locations--tied with Apogee's Rise of the Triad, released on the same day for MS-DOS, as the earliest form of the rocket jump that id's Quake would popularize two years later.

Bungie's Myth: The Fallen Lords.
Bungie's Myth: The Fallen Lords.

Bungie's next project was Myth, a more tactical take on the booming real-time strategy genre. Whereas games like Microsoft's Age of Empires and Blizzard's WarCraft II asked players to manage an economy while building bases and training armies, Myth stripped away resources and bases. Set in a medieval 3D world, the game provided players with a set amount of warriors in each level. Pressing keys arranged them in configurations, with some more suited to certain encounters than others. Except for maps where players got reinforcements, the fighters they were given at the outset of the mission were all they received as it unfolded.

Myth and its sequel sold well across both Mac and Windows-based PCs. Bungie continued to grow and opened an offshoot studio, Bungie West, to create Oni, an action game predicated on gunplay and martial arts. Meanwhile, Jason Jones and two other developers set up camp in one of the Chicago branch's back offices and planned out a new game given the codename Armor, later changed to Blam! and Munkey Nutz to force themselves to come up with a more creative title since Marathon and Myth had been working titles that had stuck when Bungie ran out of time to come up with something better.

Armor started as a sandbox for experimentation. Jones and his small team wrote a prototype that displayed a squad of marines dressed in bulky, futuristic armor, from high overhead, thinking they might have the beginnings of another strategy game. They added hilly terrain, a couple of vehicles their soldiers could drive around, and just enough physics to make their vehicles, most of which were tanks, bounce as they rolled up and slalomed down hills. One afternoon, programmer Charlie Gough hooked up controls to a single marine and loaded the prototype. This, he realized right away, was fun. He could run around on foot or hop in one of the vehicles. Jones and the rest of the team agreed, and pivoted from real-time strategy to a third-person action game.

The story centered on a vast ring that orbited a planet. Most characters believed it was a religious artifact, so Bungie brainstormed ideas for a title. They ran through The Crystal Place, Solipsis, The Santa Machine, and Hard Vacuum before arriving at Halo.

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs knew Bungie's value. Although the studio had broadened its customer base by bringing their games to Windows-based PCs and consoles such as Sony's PlayStation 2, Oni's intended home, Jobs got an early look at Halo and knew it could change the industry's impression of the Mac as a computer more suited to graphic design and video editing than video games. In July 1999, Jobs invited Jason Jones on-stage at Apple's annual MacWorld show to give attendees the exclusive first look at Halo.

MacWorld attendees greeted Halo's announcement with cheers and applause. Players would control a lone soldier able to wield weaponry from swords to earth-based firearms to alien technology. The crowd's enthusiasm grew as Jones rattled off features: play over networks, sprawling outdoor environments, and vehicles that expedited combat and exploration across land, air, and sea.

Jobs promised that Halo would come to Mac alongside a PC release. With news of Halo out in the wild, Jason Jones grew the development team, rolling programmers, designers, and artists who had finished work on Myth II. Downloading custom maps for games like Doom had grown popular on PC, so Bungie set out a game that players could change easily. "You'd be able to make these pieces that could snap together so you could create worlds," says Michael Evans, a programmer on Oni. "It was a big focus, but once Bungie got bought, it didn't make sense. If you're going to be an Xbox title, modding wouldn't be a big thing."


EVEN BEFORE CAPTAINING Microsoft Game Studio, Ed Fries made a habit of keeping in touch with game developers. In the spring of 2000, Fries got a call from Peter Tamte, head of business development over at Bungie. As Tamte talked, Fries sat up straighter. Bungie, Tamte confided, was in trouble. Their projects were draining resources, and Take-Two, publisher of Oni, owned 19.9 percent of the company. Unless Take-Two or another publisher acquired the rest, Bungie would run out of funding.

"Bungie was making a game called Oni for them, and I'm sure he mentioned they had this game called Halo they were working on, but really, the call was about the financial situation of the company," explains Fries. "It sounded like they had a path where they could go forward, working with Take-Two, but he wanted to see if there was an alternative."

Tamte asked Fries if there was a possibility of Microsoft being that alternative. Fries was very interested. "I had played some Bungie games and had a lot of respect for what they had done. And I was desperate for content. Xbox had been approved by then, and we were trying to throw together a first-party lineup. That was the start of the negotiation with them."

One of Bungie's problems, Tamte said, was that it was shorthanded. Teams were small at both studios, and they needed more developers to finish Oni and make real progress on Halo. Microsoft could fill out those spots. "We would morph our team on the Microsoft side to match what a developer needed," explains Ed Ventura, product manager. "We were able to find resources a developer could never afford. In addition to funding salaries, we could provide help they didn't have like artists, writers, all of those roles that are crucial."

Fries began due diligence on Bungie. Tamte sent him footage of Halo, and Fries saw potential. The game's premise reminded him of Ringworld, a sci-fi novel by Larry Niven in which intrepid explorer Louis Wu takes a job to visit the Ringworld, an alien construct 186 million miles in diameter. Critics and authors considered it a classic, and Fries knew that if Halo's story was even half as good, Bungie had an engrossing campaign on its hands.

Oni, too, seemed promising. However, Bungie's games were not the deciding factor in Fries's decision to pursue the studio. "My philosophy all along was to find the best game developers in the world, and to team up with them and really trust them to build whatever it was they were excited about making," he says. "I didn't dictate to developers what kinds of games they should build. I had played their real-time strategy game, Myth, and I think I also played a bit of Myth II, on the PC. That was the main way I was familiar with their work."

"Ed was a developer," Ventura adds. "He's personable and enthusiastic about demos. Ed was like them."

Acquiring Bungie was not as simple as snapping up the remaining two-thirds of the studio. Fries got on the phone with Ryan Brant, head of Take-Two, and entered negotiations. Brant had the advantage: As one-third owner of Bungie, Brant's studio had first dibs on the rest. However, Fries saw what Brant did not. Bungie's developers, not Bungie's games, comprised the secret sauce. They reached an agreement where Take-Two would claim Bungie's back catalog of intellectual property up to and including Oni, while Microsoft took ownership of Halo.

"We also agreed we would finish Oni for him. That was being developed by a separate team in California. All I wanted was Halo and the development team," Fries clarifies.

That June, Microsoft announced that it had purchased Bungie. A press release issued by Microsoft said it expected Bungie to "play a key role in the development of content for the Xbox platform" and would continue developing Halo, which had moved beyond its hush-hush premiere at the 1999 MacWorld Expo and garnered praise at E3, taking home multiple Best of Show awards and being praised by GameSpot.com as the "first truly amazing game of the next millennium."

Per the terms of the acquisition, Take-Two sold its 19.9 percent stake in Bungie to Microsoft. Brant and Fries gave quotes to the press, reassuring fans and critics that Microsoft, Take-Two, and Bungie were excited about the deal and optimistic about the future of the Chicago-based Halo studio.

Only one party was less than thrilled with the news. One afternoon shortly after the news went public, Fries refreshed his inbox and found an email from Microsoft president Steve Ballmer. Jobs had phoned Ballmer and exploded over what he viewed as a coup to wreck Apple's chances of establishing the Mac as a premiere gaming platform. Ballmer told Fries to call Jobs and do whatever was necessary to calm him down.

Fries called Jobs and let him rant. Afterwards, he assured Jobs that Apple would be taken care of, and offered his games group's help in porting several of Microsoft's PC titles to the Mac. Jobs accepted and required Fries to join him on-stage at the next MacWorld to announce the partnership.

With Apple's volatile co-founder placated, the next step was to transplant Bungie from Chicago to Microsoft in Bellevue.


BEFORE FINALIZING THE acquisition, Fries flew Bungie's team to Bellevue to give them a tour of the campus and show them around the city. Over drinks, Fries showed them he wasn't just a suit. He was a gamer, like them. He loved their games and was excited to work with them.

Fries took them to a new building on Microsoft's Millennium campus and showed them the wing reserved for their team. This building and a second, he explained, housed the PC games group, hardware and software developers for the Xbox, and Robbie Bach, the chief Xbox officer. Like a proud parent, Fries showed off the long hallways lined with private offices the guys could leave open to invite visitors or closed when they needed to work in peace.

"Well," Fries concluded, beaming at them, "what do you think?"

"We hate it," Jones said flatly.

"What?" Fries asked, sure he'd misheard.

"We want to have an open area."

That took a moment for Fries to process. "You want to have cubes? You want to live in cubicles?" He was stunned. Cubes were considered the lowest-status work area at Microsoft. Accountants worked in cubes. Developers got offices of their very own.

"We need a big, open area," Jones repeated.

Fries called Microsoft's facilities department and had them rip out the walls to convert the hallways and private offices into a bullpen. "They wanted really low cubicles so they could see over the tops of them to facilitate communication. Later on, several other teams imitated Bungie's style after they saw how successful they were," Fries remembers.

Oni shipped for PlayStation 2 and Windows in 2001. Once the game was completed and before its release, however, Microsoft drew from Bungie's second studio. "We originally were going to work on a title that was going to be called Monster Hunter," says Michael Evans. "I don't know if we would have run into a name conflict as we got further along."

Evans and a few others were reassigned to creating outdoor environments for Halo. Dave Dunn, one of Bungie West's best artists, was among the first to switch gears to Bungie HQ's third-person action title. One by one, more artists followed. "It got to where my entire team from Oni had gotten sucked into Halo," Evans recalls.

Inevitably, Evans joined the Halo team in the summer of 2000. Dave Dunn, the first to make the jump from Oni to Halo, greeted him with a smile. "Welcome to hell," he said.

Evans' stomach sank as he absorbed what was happening. Halo was morphing from a third-person action game into a first-person shooter for the Xbox. Modding was no longer an option since consoles lacked the infrastructure for users to create and share custom content.

The rub: Everything had to be finished in one year to ensure Halo shipped alongside Xbox. "There was a lot of pressure to get things done on a schedule," recalls Evans. "It was a pretty serious crunch for that whole year to get it out the door. Even before I joined, that team was crunching. As each person joined, they crunched."

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