Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

by Jason Schreier

  Griesemer sat down with Chris Butcher, an engineering lead and top Bungie employee, who said he had some cool ideas for how the game could technically “matchmake” players and let them play together. It was all theoretical, but Griesemer was excited about the possibilities, mostly because it wasn’t Halo. “What is Halo? That was sci-fi. OK, Dragon Tavern is fantasy,” said Griesemer. “Halo was first-person? OK, Dragon Tavern is third-person. I was just like: I’ve gotta get as far away from Halo as I can in order to have new ideas.”

  At the same time, Bungie’s cofounder Jason Jones was planning his own vision for what the studio would do next. Jones, a reclusive but well-respected designer, wasn’t technically in charge of Bungie—that role went to the CEO, Harold Ryan—but it was generally understood that whatever he wanted to happen would happen. It was Jones who had pushed hardest for Bungie to leave Microsoft, telling people that he’d start his own new studio if Microsoft wouldn’t let them spin out. After years of hard work on another company’s intellectual property, Jones no longer wanted to make games that Bungie (and, as Bungie’s biggest shareholder, he) didn’t own.*

  Jones also wanted to move away from Halo, but for different reasons. One of his pet peeves had always been that the Halo games were too linear. Although the multiplayer modes remained fun no matter how much you played them, you had to play through a Halo game’s single-player campaign only once to see everything it had to offer. Jones hated that. “I think the great tragedy of Halo is that for years and years it provided wonderful single-player and co-op content,” he said in a 2013 interview, “and we provided people with almost no fun incentives or excuses, almost no reason besides their own enjoyment, to go back and replay it.”*

  For his next game—which he wanted to be a first-person shooter—Jones wanted to make something more open, with missions or quests that players could play, replay, and access in a nonlinear order. As with Griesemer’s Dragon Tavern, Jones’s ideas were also very theoretical. There was lots of Excel, lots of Vizio. “It was, ‘Here’s what I think the natural evolution of the first-person shooter’s going to be,’” said Griesemer.

  Jaime Griesemer had clout at Bungie, but not nearly as much as Jason Jones. And Bungie didn’t have the bandwidth to make both Dragon Tavern and Jones’s project. “At some point,” said Griesemer, “the studio leadership sat me down and said, ‘Look, we’re only going to make one game and it’s going to be Jason’s game, so you want to get in on that.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, but I really like this idea.’ And Jason liked a lot of the ideas too, so we decided to—I won’t say merge—it was more like Jason’s project acquired the good ideas out of Dragon Tavern.”

  With that, they’d planted the first seeds for what they’d eventually call Destiny. For months, Griesemer and Jones collaborated on the project, trying to sort out how it would look and feel to play. There was an immense amount of pressure. Financially, Bungie was doing just fine—the Halo 3: ODST and Halo: Reach contracts gave them plenty of security—but there was a looming feeling that Destiny had to be the greatest thing they’d ever done. Bungie’s staff needed to prove that, after all those years under Microsoft’s authority, they could do even better on their own.

  The good news was that unlike most video game studios, Bungie had plenty of time to iterate. In those early years, from 2007 until 2010, the game code-named Project Tiger took many different forms. At one point it looked like Blizzard’s Diablo. At another point it looked like Overwatch.* Bungie spent a great deal of time debating core structural questions, like whether Destiny should be a first-person game (one in which the player would see from their character’s eyes), or a third-person game (in which the player would control the character’s movements and actions from a camera above the world). This first- versus third-person debate would last for years.

  Bungie, like many large studios, dedicated a great deal of time to what could technically be called “preproduction” but what was really just the act of figuring out what their next game was going to be. That was one of the most challenging parts of making any game—narrowing the possibilities down from infinity to one. “I think that’s one of the things that plagued Destiny’s development,” said Jaime Griesemer. “We would work for a while, spend a lot of money in one direction, and then because there was this sort of impossible ideal of, ‘We’re following up the biggest game of all time, and this has to be the new biggest game of all time,’ there were several points in development where there was a total reset. And it wasn’t a graceful, ‘We go to prototype and that direction is wrong so we’re going to backtrack a little bit and go in a different direction.’ It was, I came back in from going on vacation for a week and everything I had worked on for a year was deleted. Unrecoverably, literally deleted. If I hadn’t had a copy on my laptop, it would’ve been gone forever. With no warning, no discussion, no nothing.”

  Heightening the stress for Griesemer was the fact that with every reboot, Destiny seemed to get closer and closer to Halo, as if Bungie’s iconic series was a gravity well that the studio just couldn’t escape. Once Halo 3: ODST shipped, that team moved to Destiny. Once Halo: Reach shipped, that team moved to Destiny. Soon they had hundreds of people working on their next big game, which forced Bungie into making quick decisions just so they’d all have stuff to do (they, like Naughty Dog once Bruce Straley and Neil Druckmann took over Uncharted 4, had to “feed the beast”). At first Griesemer and the other developers had wanted Destiny to be a fantasy game. Over time, however, the castles began to morph into spaceships, the axes and swords into space axes and space swords.

  “We have a huge team of production artists that mostly does sci-fi stuff, and they haven’t done an orc or a sword ever, so maybe we have to do sci-fi,” Griesemer said. “We want to do a third-person game, but we have a bunch of people who specialize in first-person game animations, and all of our code base is written assuming that the crosshair is in the center of the screen. And so now we’re first-person. . . . Before you know it, we’re basically making Halo.”

  Armed with ideas and presentations, Bungie’s leadership started pitching the biggest publishers out there: Sony, Microsoft, EA, and even, by one former manager’s recollection, Nintendo. Bungie didn’t know exactly what Destiny was going to be, but they knew they wanted it to be massive, and eventually they reached a whopping ten-year, $500 million, multigame deal with Activision, the publisher of Call of Duty. By all accounts it was the biggest development deal in video game history. And although Destiny’s basic concepts were still in flux, Activision’s executives signed the deal with the expectation that they’d get something like Halo. “The core [of Bungie’s pitch] was very much what shipped,” said one person involved in the contract negotiations. “It was a sci-fi space opera. Shooter meets MMO.”

  As part of the deal, Bungie would get to own the Destiny franchise, and Activision would give the studio creative freedom to develop Destiny games in whatever way it saw fit, so long as every milestone was met. Bungie’s schedule would have a very strict cadence. Activision expected the studio to release Destiny 1 in the fall of 2013, with an expansion called Comet following a year later. The next year would be Destiny 2, then Comet 2, and so on.

  Jaime Griesemer began to realize that, as hard as he had tried to resist the Halo gravity well, they’d all been sucked in. Worse, he realized that most of the studio was just fine with that. “When I joined Bungie, there were eight guys working on Halo,” Griesemer said. “When we shipped Halo 1 [in 2001] it was maybe fifty guys. By the time Reach and ODST had joined the Destiny team, we were probably three hundred people. And the huge majority of them had been hired after Halo 3 shipped. These are all people who love Halo. They wanted to work at Bungie because of Halo. So of course they wanted to work on something that was like Halo.”

  Frustrated at the direction Destiny was headed, Griesemer began picking fights with other Bungie staff. At one point, he e-mailed out a list of core design problems he thought Destiny was going to encounter. How were t
hey going to handle the transition to next-gen consoles, he asked, without sacrificing cool features just to fit their game on last-gen hardware? How were they going to make content that stayed fresh no matter how many times people replayed it? And, perhaps most pivotally, how would they marry the precise shooting of an action game, in which your proficiency is based on skill, with the treadmill progression of an MMO, in which your character’s strength is dependent mostly on levels and gear?

  Eventually, Bungie’s board of directors asked Griesemer to resign. “I kind of see it as a mark of honor,” he said, “because I made a conscious decision: I don’t like the way things are going, so I’m going to stand up and obstruct things to the point where they’re either going to have to change [the way] they’re going or get rid of me.”

  He wasn’t the only one. In the coming years, a large number of longtime employees, including Vic Deleon, a senior environment artist; Adrian Perez, an engineer; Marcus Lehto, creative director of Halo: Reach; and Paul Bertone, design director, would all either quit or be forced out. Later, that list would grow to include Bungie’s president, Harold Ryan.

  “There was something about Bungie’s trajectory from small and scrappy to king of the world to over-the-hill dinosaurs,” said Griesemer. “They accumulated the negative traits of all of those stages. So there was the immaturity of being young and scrappy, the arrogance of being on top of everything, and then there was the stubbornness and inability to change from the dinosaurs stage.”

  Just a few years after regaining their independence, Bungie was facing serious growing pains. As Shane Kim had thought back at that raucous meeting: Be careful what you wish for.

  In February 2013, Bungie invited journalists to its offices in Bellevue, Washington—where the studio had resided since leaving Kirkland in 2009—for the official unveiling of Destiny. A few details had trickled out in the previous months thanks to early leaks, but this was the big blowout—the event where Bungie would finally tell everyone what Destiny actually was. Speaking on a big stage, Bungie’s top developers made fulsome, ambitious promises. They described Destiny as “the first shared-world shooter,” a game where your character could seamlessly meet up with friends and strangers among the swamps of Chicago and the rings of Saturn. Jason Jones and other Bungie leads dissuaded members of the press from calling it an MMO, but the DNA was clear. Destiny was half Halo, half World of Warcraft. It was far less clear how those two halves would fit together.

  The gist was this: Destiny took place in a futuristic version of our universe, where humans had thrived across multiple planets until an inexplicable cataclysm killed most of them. The remaining survivors fled to what was called the Last City, a safe area guarded by an enigmatic white orb called the Traveler. Playing as mighty galaxy protectors called Guardians, Destiny players would travel across the solar system, fighting aliens and hunting for loot on Earth, Venus, and other planets. And the story, as the longtime Bungie writer Joe Staten described it, would unfold over a series of episodes. “One lesson that’s critical is that the most important stories we tell aren’t going to be told by us,” Jason Jones told the press. “They’re going to be told by players—their personal legends built from shared adventures.”

  Staten then described a scenario in which two Guardians would fly together to Mars to investigate a buried city. En route, a group of hulking Cabal aliens would ambush the pair. A third player-controlled Guardian, who happened to be in the area, would fly in and annihilate the Cabal, then signal to the group that she wanted to help out their investigation. “Every time you run into another player, it’s amazing,” Staten told journalists in attendance. “It just doesn’t happen in other shooters.” In an instant, this third player would be able to join the party for a dungeon crawl through the catacombs of Mars. It wasn’t clear just what Destiny’s “personal legends” would look like—Staten illustrated his story with concept art and videos rather than actual footage from the game—but in theory, they sounded wild. Plus, this was the company behind Halo. Everyone trusted that they knew what they were doing.

  As 2013 went on, Bungie and Activision worked hard to build hype for Destiny, releasing a series of trailers and sizzle reels that made even more promises. During Sony’s E3 press conference in June, Joe Staten and Jason Jones took the stage for a proper gameplay demo, grabbing controllers and awkwardly bantering as they shot their way through aliens in the hollowed-out walls of Destiny’s Old Russia. “There’s something really magical about running into another player, especially when you don’t expect it,” said one Bungie staffer in a subsequent Destiny video. “You hear shots ring out, and you look to the left and there’s your friend.”

  The most hyperbolic of hype came from Bungie’s COO Pete Parsons, who told the website GamesIndustry.biz that he expected Destiny to become a cultural touchstone. “We like to tell big stories and we want people to put the Destiny universe on the same shelf they put Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter or Star Wars,” Parsons said. “We were extremely proud of what we achieved with Halo. . . . I’m pretty convinced we are going to do it again with Destiny in a way that maybe even Halo never achieved before.”

  Behind the scenes, however, the weight of all this ambition was crushing Bungie. Since finishing Halo: Reach in 2010 and shifting full time to Destiny, the newly independent studio had been running into all sorts of problems. They still hadn’t answered many of the questions that Jaime Griesemer had raised before leaving. What would the progression system look like? What would players do after finishing the game? How could Destiny tell a story that was both emotionally meaningful and endlessly replayable? And what exactly would it mean to give each player his or her own “legend”?

  Sure, they’d done great things. Mouths were regularly left agape at Destiny’s stunning art direction: the rusted ruins of Old Russia; the pale swamps of Venus; the bloodred deserts circling Mars’s buried cities. Destiny’s shooting mechanics felt even better than Halo’s did, and few actions in a video game were more satisfying than popping a Cabal soldier’s head like bubble wrap. But those great individual pieces didn’t seem to be coalescing into a great video game. Even as Bungie hyped up Destiny with videos throughout 2013, most of the developers knew their project was in trouble. They were way behind schedule, and that flashy E3 2013 demo, a level code-named M10 that had impressed so many fans when Jones and Staten played through it on stage, was one of the only finished parts of the game.

  Perhaps the biggest problem was that Destiny still didn’t have much in the way of an identity among Bungie’s staff. “If you were to go to Bungie and ask people what they thought Destiny was,” said one former employee, “half the studio would probably say it’s a Halo shooter, and the other half would say it’s World of Warcraft.” The studio was growing rapidly, which made communication even more difficult. By 2013 there were hundreds of people working on Destiny in Bungie’s unreasonably dark Bellevue offices. Not everyone played the game every day, and few of them could visualize what Destiny would ultimately look like, which led to, as a different former employee described it, “a bunch of great ideas that are all siloed off, and none of them actually complementing each other.” Journalists had left the February event wondering exactly how Destiny would work. At Bungie, people were asking the same question.

  In game development, one of the most important pairs of buzzwords is also the one you’re most likely to see on a hacky marketing résumé: “unified direction.” In other words, everyone needs to be on the same page. Because video games have so many granular moving pieces—sounds, user interface, visual effects, and so on—every department needs to have a strong, consistent idea of where a game is headed. The larger a team gets, the more important this concept becomes.

  As with many video games, Destiny had pillars—mostly generic ideas like “a world players want to be in” and “a bunch of fun things to do”—but people who worked on the game said they found it difficult to visualize the final product, for several reasons. “The company grew f
aster than the management structure and leadership process,” said one person who worked on the game, “which left many departments mismanaged with no clear understanding of the game’s high-level vision.” It was like they were fifteenth-century explorers leaving Europe: they knew how to steer a ship, and they knew they wanted to go west; they just didn’t know where they were going to wind up. Destiny’s staff knew they were making a shooter—one that looked great, felt fantastic to play, and would let you team up with friends and strangers—but other areas of the game remained ambiguous, especially Joe Staten’s story.

  The project had gotten bigger than some at Bungie had ever imagined. The first Halo, which had been the work of around fifty people, felt like a lifetime ago. By mid-2013, Destiny was being developed by hundreds of staff. “When you played the Halo games, you really felt people’s fingerprints on it; you could look at it and know a human made this project,” said one former Bungie employee. “Because we had ballooned to such a large size, that just wasn’t part of the program anymore.”

  Another major challenge was that Bungie had decided to rebuild its internal engine alongside Destiny, which was a whole lot of fun for the engineers, but made life far more difficult for everyone else. (As the Dragon Age: Inquisition team learned the hard way, building a new engine alongside a game is always a recipe for extra work.) Although Bungie’s engineering team had devised impressive, cutting-edge technology to support Destiny’s matchmaking and other behind-the-scenes functions, the development tools that Bungie used to make the game were subpar, according to people who worked with them.