“Halo was incredibly hot at the time,” said Peter Moore. The first two games had sold millions of copies, and Halo 3, coming in 2007, was one of the most anticipated games ever. “We felt that [Halo] was IP that lent itself well to a real-time strategy game, given the way that the universe was constructed. Good guys versus bad guys. All the stuff you needed in an RTS. And I think that probably the data and the evidence lent towards a lower-risk opportunity in Halo than in new IP.”
This sort of move isn’t uncommon in the video game industry, where publishers tend to be conservative and risk averse, leaning toward established franchises and sequels whenever possible. Even the most ambitious game studios sometimes rejigger their games to incorporate familiar franchises. Yet for Devine and his development team, who had spent nearly a year working on this project, telling them to change it to a more marketable IP was like telling a new mother to go swap her infant for a better-looking one.
Over lengthy, heated discussions, Microsoft’s executives explained that if Ensemble wanted to make its console RTS, it would have to be based on Halo. End of story. “It was basically put as, either you make this Halo,” Devine said, “or you’re all going to get laid off.”
Devine was shattered. He’d spent months creating and cultivating Phoenix’s world and characters, and he thought they were just as important to the game as anything else they’d done. It wasn’t just “the console RTS”—it was his own unique creation. “When you’re knee deep in making your own IP, you love it,” Devine said. “You really do, you love it. It’s yours and it’s fantastic.”
He also realized that substituting Phoenix’s lore for Halo characters would have all sorts of logistical consequences. They’d have to scrap most of the work they’d done so far. “When you’re presented with making Halo, you try to explain it’s not just a matter of calling these aliens the ‘Covenant’ and these humans the ‘UNSC,’ it’s actually a huge change,” Devine said. “That I don’t think came across very loud and clear. I think Microsoft felt that it was just a color change, a graphical change.”
“I don’t remember being one hundred percent surprised,” said Chris Rippy. “I’m sure it was way more painful for Graeme, because he put blood, sweat, and tears into that design and he’s a passionate guy too, so I know it was more painful for him.”
Heartbroken, Devine considered quitting Ensemble. He sat at his computer and started up Google. What was this whole Halo thing about, anyway? It was huge, sure. But why did people care about it? Were they just into shooting aliens’ heads off? Or was there some sort of hidden depth that Devine didn’t know about? As he read more and more about Halo lore, from the superpowered hero Master Chief to the complex alien empire known as the Covenant, Devine started to realize it might be the latter. “My view of [Halo] Friday night was that it was a bunch of purple aliens that moved really fast in front of you and you shot them,” Devine said. “My view Monday morning was, ‘Boy, they put a lot of thought into this across a lot of years. Maybe there is something more to it than I thought.’”
With that, Devine and crew made their decision: Phoenix would become Halo Wars. Goodbye, Sway; hello, Master Chief. Except they weren’t allowed to use Master Chief. Bungie, the studio behind Halo, didn’t want this team of strangers in Texas messing around with their iconic lead character. Bungie and Ensemble were sister studios, but Bungie was the older, more popular sister—the one who got all of mom and dad’s attention. Age of Empires was big, but compared with Halo it had the cultural impact of a brunch photo on Instagram. In 2005, Bungie’s first-person shooter series was one of the biggest things on the planet.
A few days later, the Phoenix leads flew up to Seattle to visit Bungie. First they met with the studio’s top leaders. They sat down with Joe Staten, the longtime writer of Halo, to talk about the lore and story. They geeked out about control schemes with Jaime Griesemer, Halo’s design lead. Later they addressed the rest of Bungie’s staff in a conference room. As Chris Rippy and Graeme Devine stood in front of the makers of Halo and talked about their exciting new project, they were greeted by nothing but blank stares.
“We told them that we were going to be making a Halo RTS, and I don’t think any of them had any idea or any warning that this meeting was going to happen,” said Rippy. “And if you know the Bungie guys, they are very protective of their stuff. So I think we shocked them. I wouldn’t say it was hostile, but the reception was cold. And it’s not their fault. If somebody had come to us and said, ‘Hey we’re making this Age of Empires action game,’ we’d probably have the same reaction if we didn’t know what was going on.”
To mitigate the tension, Devine and Rippy did what they did best: they played video games. Just a few minutes after telling Bungie’s staff about Halo Wars, Devine set them all up with an early build of Phoenix, to prove that they’d made a console RTS that felt good to play. “By the time [Bungie] had processed a little of the shock, they were already in front of the game playing it,” said Rippy. “That helped a lot.” It also helped that Devine was eager to absorb as much Halo lore as humanly possible. Everything Joe Staten said, Devine gobbled up, no matter how esoteric or granular it got. By the end of the visit, Devine wanted to be able to explain, in detail, the difference between a San’Shyuum and a Sangheili. (The San’Shyuum, of course, are the prophetic leaders of the Covenant, while the Sangheili are a race of saurian warriors.)
When the Halo Wars team landed back in Dallas, they scrapped just about everything they’d done. They kept the control scheme and the user interface, but all the other ideas they’d put into the Phoenix project would be useless for a Halo game. The team began drawing up new design ideas, story beats, and concept art for Halo Wars, knowing that they were essentially starting from scratch.
Because Bungie maintained ownership over all things Halo, Ensemble would have to get Bungie’s approval on even the most basic story ideas, which could be a bureaucratic process. Ensemble decided that they wanted the game to revolve around a group of United Nations Space Command (UNSC) soldiers on a ship called the Spirit of Fire, and that the bulk of combat would take place on the planet Arcadia, which the team had invented just for Halo Wars. All these decisions had to go through Bungie.
Recognizing that it might help to be charming, Graeme Devine designed a fictional travel pamphlet for Arcadia and showed it to Joe Staten, who was responsible for the series’ lore at Bungie. “I said, ‘I’m adding a new planet. Please, can I add this? Here’s a travel brochure for it,’” Devine said. Staten was amused by Devine’s quirky pitches, and in the coming months, Devine would fly up to Seattle every few weeks to collaborate with Bungie on Halo Wars’ story. “I think in the beginning they were really worried,” said Devine, “but after a while they started to really trust me.”
Yet the Halo Wars team always felt like they were a couple of steps behind. It was difficult to tell a story in the Halo universe when the Halo universe existed mostly in the heads of a bunch of people who lived two thousand miles away. And besides, Bungie had its own project to deal with—the secretive Halo 3. “We ran into problems of what they were willing to show us and tell us on Halo 3, which made things difficult,” said Chris Rippy. “They were looking after their story and what they were doing. They were being pretty protective, so that led to some gaps in our knowledge that we would have to work around.”
The truth was, a large chunk of Bungie’s leadership was never really happy about Halo Wars, according to several people who used to work at both companies. Bungie tolerated Ensemble’s questions as cordially as they could. They got a kick out of the whimsical Graeme Devine, and Joe Staten was always classy. But in private, Bungie’s staffers would gripe that they didn’t want another studio touching Halo. When Ensemble sent over questions or asked for permission to use certain parts of the lore, Bungie would sometimes stonewall them. In a 2012 interview with the website GamesIndustry.biz, Ensemble’s boss, Tony Goodman, went public about their strained relationship. “Bungie was kind of
sore about the idea,” he told the site. “What they called it was ‘the whoring out of our franchise’ or something.”
Tension between the two studios only exacerbated Ensemble’s other problems. Development on Halo Wars was not going smoothly, and by some estimates, the switch to Halo had set the team’s progress back months. They were happy with their control scheme—designers at Ensemble were convinced they’d finally cracked the “console RTS” code—but conceptualizing and building the world of Halo Wars took far more time than they thought it would.
By the middle of 2006, Microsoft had officially green-lit Halo Wars, which meant that Ensemble’s management could staff up the project and start producing the art and code they’d need to get it out the door. Now they’d have to confront the problem that had popped up a few months earlier: outside of Graeme Devine, Chris Rippy, Angelo Laudon, and the rest of their small team, nobody else at Ensemble really wanted to work on Halo Wars. After a decade of nothing but Age of Empires and its spin-offs, the studio’s veterans were sick of RTS games. Given the choice, many of them had flocked to the nascent MMO project in hopes of channeling their World of Warcraft obsessions into a big hit of their own. Others had moved to Dave Pottinger’s “sci-fi Diablo,” Nova.
Nobody at Ensemble could agree on what to do next, so they all just did different things. Employees would joke that their studio’s name had become an ironic punchline; these days, they didn’t feel like much of a family at all. Theoretically, most of their resources should have been funneled into Halo Wars, because their parents at Microsoft hadn’t green-lit any of the other prototypes, but the studio had become fractured and cliquish. The Age of Empires III team didn’t want to move to Halo Wars, and, even as the Halo Wars team needed to staff up, some of them didn’t want the Age guys on their turf either.
“We were fine with it,” said Colt McAnlis, the Halo Wars engineer. “It was a lot of politics internal to Ensemble. We were like, ‘Fine, you guys move there and leave us alone.’” The Halo Wars team, which mostly consisted of younger, less experienced Ensemble staff, saw the veterans as arrogant and difficult to work with. “When they made a decision, they would put the hammer down,” said McAnlis. “There wasn’t a discussion. There wasn’t an evaluation. It was just like, ‘No, we’re doing it this way. If you don’t like it, get out.’”
Elsewhere at Ensemble, there was a perception that Halo Wars was just something they had to do to please Microsoft, like when a Hollywood actor shoots a superhero movie so he has the leverage to film his passion project about climate change. Most of Ensemble’s veterans wanted to make other games.
At one point, the studio’s leadership decided that the big MMO wouldn’t take place in a brand new sci-fi world, as had been originally planned. During an all-hands meeting, Ensemble’s management announced that actually, they were going to make it a Halo MMO. “[The designer] Ian Fischer got on stage and said, ‘We’ve chosen an IP and it’s going to be Halo,’” said Graeme Devine. What raised some eyebrows—and what portended bad news for Ensemble—was that they hadn’t gotten official approval from Microsoft to make this decision. “We realized that Microsoft wouldn’t plunk that kind of money down on an unproven IP,” said Dave Pottinger. “The idea to use the Halo IP was created as a way to get the game made. So, yeah, we didn’t exactly ask permission, though they knew. We knew it was going to be a risky choice.”
From the outside, this all might have seemed insane. Fewer than one hundred people worked at Ensemble, yet the studio was simultaneously trying to develop three different games including an MMO, which itself would require a staff in the dozens. (World of Warcraft, which set the bar that Ensemble aspired to reach, had a team of fifty to sixty when it launched in 2004, according to a Blizzard spokesperson.) The studio couldn’t expand without getting approval from Microsoft, and Microsoft seemed to have no interest in green-lighting any of Ensemble’s other prototypes, including the Halo MMO. But Ensemble kept working on all three games nonetheless. “At one point we had a sci-fi RTS on a console, we had a sci-fi MMO, and we had a sci-fi Diablo, all three of which were different,” said Dave Pottinger. “In the most negative view it was a testament to how much we weren’t getting along at that point.”
As a result, the Halo Wars team remained understaffed. “For the longest time,” said Rich Geldreich, “I would wonder why we only had roughly twenty-five-ish people total on the project, when it’s our next big major game, and there were all these prototypes going on.” What Halo Wars really needed was more programmers, especially ones who knew how to handle the trickier aspects of RTS development, like simulating artificial intelligence. In a real-time strategy game, the computer must make thousands of tiny decisions every second, quietly calculating when to construct buildings and move phalanxes of units around the map. For inexperienced programmers, this was a difficult task to handle.
“Imagine you’ve got a game world consisting of hundreds of entities, and they all have to pathfind and make decisions in real time, or seemingly in real time,” said Geldreich. “There’s AI involved with that. When you give them commands, they’re really high-level commands like ‘go here’ or ‘attack here’ or ‘stop’ or something. They have to figure out how to pathfind from A to B, and that can be very complex. Imagine if, as a unit is pathfinding from A to B, a building blows up, or a new route is created because a bunch of trees are cut down. It’s a very dynamic problem.” Add online multiplayer to the equation—where a laggy connection could desync two computers and throw all the simulations off—and you’ve got all sorts of potential for a broken video game. It didn’t help that, instead of using the technology they’d developed for the Age games, the Halo Wars team had started from scratch with a brand-new engine that could take advantage of the Xbox 360’s unique computing power. “Pathfinding was always a difficult problem in an RTS, but we had invested probably close to twenty man-years in pathing at that point,” said Dave Pottinger. “The Halo Wars team threw it all away and started over.”
Despite these hiccups, Microsoft was gung-ho about Ensemble’s game. On September 27, 2006, the publisher revealed Halo Wars to the world, showcasing the game with an intense CGI trailer that depicted a war between the human Spartans and their alien opponents. At one point, Ensemble had scheduled the game to be finished by the end of 2007, and perhaps that’s what Microsoft was expecting then, though scrutiny of the studio might have made it clear that wasn’t going to happen.
Graeme Devine and his “team of misfits” were enjoying themselves, but the Halo Wars team was shorthanded, and too far behind in key areas. One day, frustrated that the art team wasn’t properly capturing the Halo aesthetic, Rich Geldreich printed out four hundred full-color screenshots from Halo games to hang on all the walls. “I plastered them everywhere in the studio,” he said. “In the bathrooms, in the kitchen . . . the hallways, the meeting rooms. Because I was pissed off that this game didn’t look like a Halo game.”
Other teams weren’t faring much better. After nearly a year’s worth of work, Dave Pottinger’s Diablo prototype, Nova, got canceled. Microsoft chose to instead green-light a promising action-RPG from a different studio called Too Human.* For a few months Pottinger and a small team worked on another prototype—a “spy Zelda” game called Agent—but he couldn’t get the headcount he needed to finish it, and soon enough he had moved to Halo Wars. Pottinger’s team split up. Many of the artists went to the MMO, while the programmers joined him on Halo Wars, which desperately needed the coding help.
In early 2007, Graeme Devine and his crew started working on a Halo Wars demo for E3, where they hoped to quash fans’ skepticism that Halo would never work as a real-time strategy game. By the time the show came around, they’d created a slick ten-minute video, narrated by Devine, that demonstrated a series of battles between UNSC marines and the nasty alien Covenant. In the demo, the player built two Warthogs—Halo’s iconic armored pickup trucks—and had them leap over a crevasse near his base. “Warthogs can gain strategic c
ontrol of areas of the map that other vehicles can’t get to,” Devine explained in the video.
Fans were hyped, which energized the developers at Ensemble. “That was a really sexy demo and we came away from E3 that year really excited about the game,” said Dave Pottinger. “The reception was good. Graeme was the perfect showman and said all the right things about loving the IP. And he really did love the IP. We got people excited that somebody who was good at making RTSs and cared about Halo was going to go make the perfect marriage between the two.”
But as work on the project continued, it remained clear that Halo Wars was in trouble. In the months following E3 2007, two major problems emerged. One was that the Halo Wars team remained understaffed. Many of Ensemble’s veterans were still working on the Halo MMO, which still hadn’t been green-lit but was taking up a great deal of the studio’s resources. The second problem was that the design was constantly changing. As a result of Ensemble’s various prototype cancellations and internal politics, there were several experienced lead designers on the Halo Wars team by the end of 2007, including both Graeme Devine and Dave Pottinger. Devine, who had been leading design since the Phoenix days back in 2005, had a specific vision in mind for the game, while Pottinger, the senior Age designer who had just joined the project a few months earlier, had other ideas in mind.
But an orchestra needs only one conductor, and the Halo Wars team spent a great deal of time getting into fights. “Not yelling fights, but loud fights,” Devine said. “It’s funny, it’s always around game things. Should the economy be cheaper or should the economy be more expensive? Should bases be freestanding or bases all be connected together? It’s all good stuff—it’s not, ‘Oh my gosh your T-shirt is terrible.’ It’s all just awesome stuff that makes a game much better. But at the time it’s highly stressful.”
Blood, Sweat, and Pixels Page 13
