More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The lowest point for Sean Velasco was stopping at a gas station to buy coffee creamer one day toward the end of development. “I hand the guy my [debit] card and it’s like boop. ‘Oh sorry, your card is declined.’ I started reaching in my pocket and grabbed my credit card, handed them that. And he did the same thing, he said, ‘Sorry, this one’s declined too.’ So I had to walk out in shame, with no coffee creamer. That was the most desperate that it got.”
When Halo launched alongside the Xbox in November 2001, it became an immediate cash cow for Microsoft, selling millions and helping turn the publisher’s fledgling console into a device that could compete with products from the more-established Sony and Nintendo.
After months of negotiation, the two companies came to terms that everyone found satisfying. Bungie would finish Halo 3 and then make two more Halo games. Microsoft would retain the Halo IP, but Bungie could hang on to the technology they’d developed over the past seven years.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
“Every time you run into another player, it’s amazing,” Staten told journalists in attendance. “It just doesn’t happen in other shooters.”
Ron Howard voice: "It was not amazing."
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”?
Perhaps the biggest problem was that Destiny still didn’t have much in the way of an identity among Bungie’s staff.
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.
“The company grew faster 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.”
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.)
What that meant was that for Bungie’s artists and designers, basic tasks took way longer than expected, and the inefficiencies added up.
“The biggest differentiator between a studio that creates a really high-quality game and a studio that doesn’t isn’t the quality of the team,” said one person who worked on Destiny. “It’s their dev tools. If you can take fifty shots on goal, and you’re a pretty shitty hockey player, and I can only take three shots on goal and I’m Wayne fucking Gretzky, you’re probably going to do better. That’s what tools are. It’s how fast can you iterate, how stable are they, how robust are they, how easy is it as a nontechnical artist to move a thing.”
A third problem, on top of the incohesive vision and inefficient tools, was Bungie’s increasingly tense relationship with Activision. There’s always some level of tension between a game developer and its publisher—creative people and money people make for uncomfortable bedfellows—but with Destiny, the stakes were enormous.
Marty O’Donnell likes to say he saw the meltdown coming. It was the summer of 2013, and the longtime Bungie audio director had just become entangled in a public feud with Activision over a Destiny trailer they’d published during E3.
Said “supercut thing”—or, as it was more commonly called, the supercut—was a two-hour internal video that was meant to convey Destiny’s entire story. To most observers, it was a mess.
Opinions varied on this story’s quality, but almost everyone outside the writer’s room agreed that the supercut itself was a disaster.
Perhaps by putting out the supercut, Joe Staten had hoped to force the studio’s hand. Maybe he wanted to make Jason Jones and the rest of Bungie’s leadership commit to a singular vision for Destiny’s story and stick to it.
Shortly after the supercut circulated, Jason Jones gave the studio a new edict: They needed to reboot the story. It was time to start over. Staten’s story was too linear, Jones said, and too similar to Halo. Starting now, Jones told the studio, they were going to rewrite Destiny’s story from scratch. Joe Staten, Marty O’Donnell, and others at Bungie pushed back, telling Jones that there was no feasible way to reboot the story this late in production.
Every day for several weeks, Jones held extensive meetings with this Iron Bar group, trying to figure out a new outline for Destiny. Then Jones took those ideas to a larger group of leads, which he called Blacksmith, to get feedback. (Bungie always had a flair for dramatic nomenclature; the Blacksmith was meant to “hammer” the Iron Bar.)
As one former employee put it: “The writing team Joe put together was ostracized. The story was written without writers.”
And it shows.
It was like tearing up a quilt, then stitching back together all the old squares in a new pattern, no matter how improperly they fit. Said one person who worked on the game: “If you were going from point A to point Z in the course of [the original, pre-reboot story], they would take out section H through J because it was really tight encounter design, and they’d put it off to the side and say, ‘How do we get H to J in this other story line?’”
One line, unconvincingly uttered by a robot called the Stranger (a rebooted version of a character from Staten’s version of the story), summed up the plot rather definitively: “I don’t have time to explain why I don’t have time to explain.”
In Destiny, Dinklage voiced Ghost, a pocket-size robot who served as the player’s narrator and constant companion. Joe Staten and his team had planned for Ghost to supplement a large cast of characters who would talk to you during each mission. As you played, Ghost would interact with the environment and comment on your actions. But after the Iron Bar reboot, Ghost became Destiny’s main star, responsible for delivering the bulk of the game’s dialogue—a role that Dinklage hadn’t signed on for.
Peter Dinklage’s flat voice acting became the subject of memes and jokes across the Internet. One line, “That wizard came from the moon,” had been so widely mocked during Destiny’s public alpha test that Bungie removed it from the game, but the rest of the script wasn’t much better.
Bungie also made the remarkable, unprecedented move of wiping Destiny’s main star from the game. To play Ghost in The Taken King, they hired the energetic voice actor Nolan North, who lent his voice not just to new dialogue but to rerecordings of every single line in the original version of Destiny.
To some of those departed Bungie veterans, who had cheered so loudly back in 2007 when the studio announced that it was spinning out from Microsoft, going independent had been the company’s biggest mistake.
Until 1989, Poland was a Communist country, and even in the early 1990s, as the newly democratic Third Polish Republic began embracing the free market, there was nowhere in Warsaw to buy games legally. There were, however, “computer markets,” open-air bazaars where the city’s geeks would unite to buy, sell, and trade pirated software.
In 1994, when he was twenty, Iwiński started envisioning a business that would import and distribute computer games throughout the country. He and Kiciński teamed up to start a company called CD Projekt, named after the industry-changing CD-ROMs that had just popped up in Warsaw.
In addition to localizing Baldur’s Gate in Polish (complete with authentic Polish voice acting), they stuffed the game’s box with a map, a Dungeons & Dragons guide, and a CD soundtrack, gambling that Polish players would see the package’s value as a justification to buy Baldur’s Gate instead of pirating it.
By the mid-2000s, as the gaming industry became more globalized, role-playing games had formed their own sort of geographical divide. In the United States and Canada you’d find companies like Bethesda and BioWare, with big, critically acclaimed hits like The Elder Scrolls and Mass Effect, both of which sold gangbusters. Out of Japan came Square Enix’s Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, which weren’t quite as trendy as they had been during the Japan-dominated 1990s, but still held their own among millions of fans. And then there were the European RPG publishers, which never drew as much respect as
...more
With The Witcher 2, Iwiński and his studio had built a sizable audience outside Europe and even become a cultural icon in Poland, to the point where in 2011, when US president Barack Obama visited the country, prime minister Donald Tusk gifted him a copy of The Witcher 2.
Traditionally, an RPG studio would have separate writing and design departments, which collaborated to build all of a game’s quests (Kill ten dragons! Defeat the dark lord and save the princess!). At CD Projekt Red, however, the quest department was its own entity, with a team of people who were each responsible for designing, implementing, and improving their own chunks of the game.
During these early design sessions, Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz and other designers enacted a simple rule: don’t make boring quests.
People often wondered how CD Projekt Red sharpened the writing in Witcher games so well, especially when there was so much of it. The answer was simple. “I don’t think there is a single quest in The Witcher 3 which was written once, accepted, and then recorded,” Szamałek said. “Everything was rewritten dozens of times.”
Not long after announcing the game and showing their demo to Game Informer, CD Projekt Red’s engineers made a drastic overhaul to the rendering pipeline that changed the way graphics would appear on-screen. The good news was that it made everything look significantly sharper, from the wrinkles on a leather bag to the characters’ reflections in water. The bad news was that to make it work, the artists would have to change almost all the models they’d already developed. “This happens fairly often,” said Jose Teixeira, a visual effects artist.
All these unknowns added up to a game that nobody knew how to properly judge.
As The Witcher 3’s staff grew larger, this insistence on realism led to some complications. At one point, Tost’s team noticed a serious problem in Velen: there was too much to eat. “Velen was always supposed to be this famine-ridden land,” said Tost, “where people don’t really have a lot of food.” For some reason, though, an environment artist had stocked up many of Velen’s homes, filling the cabinets with sausages and vegetables.
“CD Projekt Red understands the position of writer very literally, because a writer is someone who writes,” said Jakub Szamałek. “We’re making sure that geese have ‘goose’ displayed over their heads and a piece of cheese is called a piece of cheese. And a ‘legendary griffon trousers’ diagram is called exactly that.” The writers went through the entire string database to ensure all the names made sense. “We had times where the cat was called ‘deer’ and the deer was called ‘cheese’ and whatnot,” Szamałek said. “After years of writing dialogue, that was actually very relaxing. We sat there and
...more
He spun up a subsidiary of his production company, Lucasfilm, calling the new studio Lucasfilm Games, and hired a squad of talented young designers like Ron Gilbert, Dave Grossman, and Tim Schafer. In the coming years, Lucasfilm Games found success not with movie tie-ins but with completely original “point and click” adventure games like Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey Island.
As George Lucas and his company doubled down on the much-derided Star Wars prequel films, LucasArts became entrenched in office politics and unstable leadership.
(After one particularly massive layoff in 2004, LucasArts essentially shut down and then spun back up again, which was surreal for those who remained. One former employee recalled rollerskating around half of the building, which he had all to himself.)
The show would take place between the two Star Wars film trilogies, and there would be no CGI puppets or hammy child actors this time around. Instead, Underworld would feature crime, violence, and brutal conflicts between mafia families. Both the game and TV show were meant for adult Star Wars fans.
This is the way to Disney+
Then they expanded their focus, knowing that George Lucas was fascinated by Grand Theft Auto (GTA). (His kids were into the games.)
It was a running theme at LucasArts. To get anything done, the studio’s management would need to go up the ladder to their bosses at Lucasfilm, who, for the most part, were old-school filmmakers with little interest in video games.
