Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

by Jason Schreier

  Whereas on Halo it might have taken ten to fifteen seconds for a design change to show up in the game, on Destiny it could take upward of half an hour. “Our content iteration times are pretty bad,” Bungie’s engineering director, Chris Butcher, admitted during a talk at the Game Developers Conference in 2015. “You can be looking at minutes for small changes and tens of minutes for big changes.” 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.”

  Anyone who’s ever screamed at a sluggish piece of computer software knows how frustrating it can be to have slow tools, whether it’s Microsoft Word or a graphics renderer. “It’s the least sexy part of development, yet it’s the single most important factor there ever is,” said the person. “Good tools equals better game, always.”

  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. It was the biggest gamble Activision had ever made, which was why some of the publisher’s executives had gotten jittery when Bungie’s “first playable” build turned out to be subpar. “They delivered a level that was playable but not to the standard we’d talked about,” said one person who worked for Activision. (It was, that person said, repetitive and not very fun.)

  So even as they hyped up Destiny to fans and journalists, Bungie was struggling. The size of the team had become unwieldy, the vision for the game was unclear, and the engine was a mess. Everyone knew something was going to give. They just didn’t know when.

  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. Much to O’Donnell’s dismay, Activision had scored the trailer with its own booming music rather than the epic, sweeping choral suite that O’Donnell had composed for Destiny with his partner Michael Salvatori and the former Beatle Paul McCartney. Fuming about what he referred to internally as a “counterfeit trailer,” O’Donnell sent out a series of tweets on E3’s first day:

  June 11, 2013, 12:33am: “I’m so proud of everything the Bungie team has created and produced. The trailer was made by Activision marketing, not Bungie.”

  June 11, 2013, 9:02pm: “To be clear, the ‘Official Destiny E3 Gameplay Trailer’ 2:47 was not made by @Bungie, it was made by the company that brought you CoD.” [That’d be Call of Duty, Activision’s popular series of military shooter games.]

  June 11, 2013, 9:05pm: “@Bungie made the rest of all the other Destiny stuff at E3.”

  Activision’s executives were infuriated at the breach of protocol. In the NDA-heavy video game industry, there’s an understanding that creative conflicts should be handled privately, not on Twitter. Almost immediately, Activision’s CEO, Eric Hirshberg, e-mailed Bungie’s CEO, Harold Ryan, imploring him to “please put a stop to this as soon as possible before more damage is done.” O’Donnell, who at fifty-eight was one of Bungie’s oldest employees, now found himself at odds with people who had been his co-workers for over a decade.

  Drama aside, Bungie had bigger problems than trailers and tweets. For the past few years, much of the Destiny team had wondered what the game’s story would ultimately look like. They’d heard bits and pieces, sure. They’d recorded dialogue, directed cut scenes, and created character models based on the partial scripts that Joe Staten and his team were delivering. But few people at Bungie outside of Jason Jones and the writers had seen the entire story, and many at the studio, including Marty O’Donnell, were stressing about the fact that it wasn’t finished yet. Plus, there was that lingering question: How would Destiny have both a grand, epic story and the “personal legends” that Bungie had been touting?

  Back in the Halo days, O’Donnell would spend a lot of time talking about game stories with Staten and Jones. As audio director, O’Donnell was responsible not just for composing music but for directing and recording all the voice acting, so it was helpful for him to have an early grasp on what the overall plot would look like. On Destiny, things were different. Maybe it was the size of the studio, or the fact that Jason Jones was being pulled in multiple simultaneous directions and didn’t have enough time to give the story his undivided attention—whatever it was, O’Donnell wasn’t happy.

  “Every time I worked with Joe [Staten], I said, ‘Joe, I’m really out in the dark here on where the story’s going—I don’t understand what’s happening with the story,’” O’Donnell said. “And he would say that he was frustrated too. And at least what he told me was that he was frustrated with the lack of commitment from Jason. Jason would say, ‘Yes this is good,’ then a month later say, ‘No, we shouldn’t do this.’ So there was a lot of what looked like indecision coming from Jason.”

  In the summer of 2013, months after Jones and Staten had hyped up the story of Destiny to press and weeks after O’Donnell had feuded with Activision, O’Donnell went to the hospital to get sinus surgery. Just a few days after he got home, catastrophe began.

  “I got a sort of panicked e-mail from [Bungie’s production director] Jonty Barnes saying, ‘Oh my gosh, Joe released this supercut thing, and everybody’s up in arms and worried about the story,’” O’Donnell said. “And I was lying on the couch, in a drug haze from recovering, and I was just sort of like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. This is horrible.’”

  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. Staten had compiled and edited the supercut almost entirely on his own, peppering it with incomplete dialogue, half-finished voice acting, and rough animation. People at Bungie, many of whom were already nervous about the state of the game’s story, found it impossible to understand.

  In the supercut’s version of Destiny’s story, the player’s main goal was to hunt down an artificially intelligent war machine named Rasputin, who had been kidnapped by the swarming, undead alien Hive. On the journey, the player would head to Earth, Venus, Mars, the Moon, Saturn, and a mystical temple on Mercury, where an Obi-Wan Kenobi-like wizard named Osiris would offer advice and words of wisdom. Along the way, the player would befriend and team up with characters like “The Crow,” a suave alien with pale blue skin and slick hair.

  Opinions varied on this story’s quality, but almost everyone outside the writer’s room agreed that the supercut itself was a disaster. “Joe’s vision probably made tons of sense in his own mind,” said Marty O’Donnell. “And Joe was just [thinking], ‘Come on, everybody, we’ve all got to go in the same direction. We’ve got to start now. Here it is. This isn’t perfect but we can fix it. . . .’ Instead it backfired completely. . . . Just about everybody in the studio thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this is a train wreck.’”

  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. One former Bungie employee said Jones had actually requested that Staten make a presentation so they could all assess the state of the story. (Staten declined to be interviewed for this book.) Few people at Bungie anticipated what would
happen next.

  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. They’d already delayed Destiny once, bumping the game from fall 2013 to spring 2014, and this past year had already been terrible for their relationship with Activision. Overhauling the story now, less than a year before the game was supposed to come out, would either lead to a delay, a mediocre story, or both. Bungie had vowed that Destiny’s story could live up to Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. Suddenly they were going to throw it all away and start over?

  Yes, Jones told his team. This wasn’t up for debate. They were rebooting the story.

  Over the following months, Jones put together a small group of people that he called Iron Bar. In this group were some of the lieutenants whom Jones trusted most, like the art director Chris Barrett and the designer Luke Smith, a former journalist who had started at Bungie as a community manager in 2007, then rose meteorically to the top of the company.* Also on board was Eric Raab, a longtime book editor whom Bungie had hired to help come up with Destiny’s lore.

  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.) Outside of Raab, few of Bungie’s writers were involved in this process. As one former employee put it: “The writing team Joe put together was ostracized. The story was written without writers.”

  To some people at Bungie, this felt like a necessary Hail Mary, the type of last-minute drastic play that was oh so common in game development just as a project was nearing completion. To others, including Joe Staten, it felt like suicide. “[Joe] made a big push for sanity and rationality,” said one former Bungie employee. “He basically said, ‘People, the supercut can be saved, [but] if we try to re-create the game in six months, it’s going to make a lot of people miserable.’” Staten’s efforts failed, though, and by the end of the summer, he was gone.*

  Marty O’Donnell also saw the writing—or the lack of writing—on the wall. “I saw that was the decision [Jason Jones] made, that’s what he was proposing, and I said, ‘OK, well, good luck with that, because you already know I completely believe that’s impossible, and it’s going to cause a death march, and it’s not going to cause quality to happen,” said O’Donnell. “Jason still wanted me to be part of Blacksmith, and I said, ‘I think that’s a mistake—I’m not on board with you on this. I don’t believe in this plan.’” O’Donnell, who found the whole process miserable, wound up “the naysayer in the room,” as he recalled it, shooting down many of the ideas that Jones and crew brought to the table. But he continued attending Blacksmith meetings nonetheless.

  In the late summer of 2013, as gamers across the world eagerly waited for Destiny, Bungie’s top developers spent marathon sessions locked in conference rooms, trying to piece together a new story. First they reduced the scope of the game, cutting out chunks like Mercury and Saturn (which they’d later use in downloadable content) and centering Destiny on four planets: Earth, the Moon, Venus, and Mars. (Sure, the moon isn’t technically a planet, but in the parlance of Destiny, the two are interchangeable.) Rather than have players visit all four of those planets within the first few missions of the game, as had been laid out in the supercut, Bungie decided to treat each planet as a separate act, ramping up the difficulty as players progressed from area to area. On the Moon you’d meet the swarming Hive; on Venus, the ancient mechanical Vex. In the deserts of Mars you’d have to defeat hordes of militaristic Cabal.

  Next, the Iron Bar and Blacksmith groups ripped into each mission of the game that Bungie had already created, splicing together old ideas and encounters to form the chimera that was Destiny’s new campaign. One old mission might get a brand-new premise; another might be split into three chunks and spread throughout three new missions. 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?’”

  “It was literally like making Franken-story,” that person said.

  At the end of the Iron Bar meetings, Destiny had a new story, one that, coincidentally, seemed as if it’d been crafted by a committee of designers and producers. There were none of the “personal legends” that Bungie had promised. The plot of each mission would vacillate between vague and incoherent, strung together by meaningless proper nouns and baffling dialogue. 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.”

  Nowhere was Destiny’s rocky development more apparent than in the work of Peter Dinklage, the Emmy Award–winning actor best known for his role as the savvy dwarf Tyrion Lannister on Game of Thrones. 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.

  “He was not supposed to be the exposition guy and he certainly was never supposed to be the only voice you heard while you played the game,” said Marty O’Donnell. Bungie had dished out big money for other celebrity voice actors like Bill Nighy, Nathan Fillion, and Gina Torres, but the story reboot had overhauled and minimized all those characters, leaving Dinklage and Ghost to shoulder the load.

  As O’Donnell worked with the actors to record dialogue throughout the rest of 2013 and then 2014, the scripts kept changing. The studio was rewriting them constantly, sometimes up until the very last minute. Bungie had persuaded Activision to let them delay Destiny again, this time to September 2014, but the process hadn’t gotten any more efficient. “I wouldn’t have a script until just before walking into the session, so I didn’t even know what it was,” said O’Donnell. “Instead of having three hundred lines of dialogue to do in four hours, I was given one thousand. I’m like, ‘OK this is just going to be like reading the phone book, this is bad, but I’ll get it done.’ It could sound like I was sabotaging, but I wasn’t. I really was trying to make everything as good as I possibly could, but my spidey sense was telling me that this wasn’t good. The story wasn’t there. The characters weren’t there.” Combine an overworked voice actor with a disgruntled audio director and you had the formula for atrocious performances, particularly when Destiny’s dialogue included lines like: “The sword is close. I can feel its power . . . Careful! Its power is dark.”

  In April 2014, Bungie fired Marty O’Donnell, a move that felt both shocking and inevitable.* One of his first reactions, of course, was to tweet about it. (April 16, 2014, 1:28am: “I’m saddened to say that Bungie’s board of directors terminated me without cause on April 11, 2014.”) It was the end of an era, both for O’Donnell and for the company he’d helped build.

  Like many video game publishers, Activision tended to stick review score bonuses into contracts, offering extra payouts to developers whose games hit a c
ertain threshold on video game aggregation sites like Metacritic or GameRankings. Destiny was no exception. Thanks to an early version of the Destiny contract that had leaked in 2012, it became public knowledge that Bungie would get a $2.5 million bonus if Destiny’s aggregated review score hit 90 or above.

  In the weeks leading up to the launch, Bungie’s employees would hang out in the kitchen and take guesses at Destiny’s Metacritic score. Some suggested they’d get a 90 or 95; other, more conservative staffers thought it might wind up in the high 80s, just below their bonus target. Their five Halo games had an average score of 92 on Metacritic, so they had good reason to be optimistic.

  Destiny came out on September 9, 2014. A week later, once most of the reviews had hit, the Metacritic score landed at 77. Needless to say, Bungie missed its bonus.

  Reviews called out Destiny’s frustrating, grindy mechanics and its repetitive mission structure. Critics slammed the stingy loot drop rates, the tedious endgame, and the lack of explanations for basic features. And most of all, people panned the story. The characters didn’t make sense, key plot points were left unexplained, and the dialogue was hilariously clunky. 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.

  What was particularly frustrating was that Destiny’s lore was full of chewy, delicious sci-fi morsels. Many of the game’s characters and weapons had compelling, intricate backstories; they were just hidden behind what Destiny called “grimoire cards,” short stories penned by Staten’s old writing team that were accessible only on Bungie’s website. Destiny established tons of promising concepts, like the Black Garden, an area on Mars that had been “locked out of time” by the robotic Vex, but never quite delivered on their potential. Pete Parsons’s old quote became a running joke. Destiny, sitting in the pantheon of great stories alongside Star Wars and Lord of the Rings? It could barely sit next to Twilight.