Bungie on Halo 2: "We screwed up."

[unixronin]

Bungie engineer Chris Butcher was blunter in his assessment.  "We had about four to five weeks to polish Halo at the end...[but] we had none of that for Halo 2," he told the magazine.  "We miscalculated, we screwed up, we came down to the wire and we just lost all of that.  So Halo 2 is far less than it could and should be in many ways because of that.  It kills me to think of it."

I'm inclined to wonder, why is it that Halo 2 had to be finished up in such a rush?  Is it because Microsoft, not Bungie, was driving the schedule?

Butcher was even critical of Halo 2's multiplayer element.  "Even the multiplayer experience for Halo 2 is a pale shadow of what it could and should have been if we had gotten the timing of our schedule right," he said.  "I ****ing cannot play Halo 2 multiplayer.  I cannot do it."

Quite the admission.  Kudos to Bungie.  It takes a good company to voluntarily stand up and tell the world, "We screwed up this one."

Comments

[unix-jedi.livejournal.com]

I hear some stories... (my BiL is a Game Guy, and I think he's got a name inside that industry).

There's a lot of moving and shaking - a good Project Manager could do wonders for the game stuff. Targets move, depending on what the Jones are doing, too.

My BiL got hired to save a game with Mega$$$ attached, that was floundering badly. As they got close to Gold, they worked up their next project for when they were finished.

The week their project went Gold, another team for the same company had a go/nogo with what they had, the management shredded it, and shelved the project.

Then gave the failing team my BiL's team's next project - and laid (most of) them off as soon as the game went Gold.

(the ones who weren't given their papers were old timers - and the least productive and most troublesome, from what I understand).

So, they moved him to the HQ, paid for my sister and him to stay rent-free while they found a place, assisted with the realtor fees and all sorts of other goodies, and then laid him off 11 months after that. (He *did* get an incredible severance, too)..... Even after he saved a $$,$$$,$$$ project.