Bungie Co-Founder, Halo Creator Breaks 11-Year Silence

July 08, 2013

Part 1
Myth. Urban legend. Unicorn.
For a man who’s been revered in the games industry for over 20 years, Jason Jones has kept a remarkably low profile. He’s the co-founder of Bungie and the person most responsible for Halo’s unquantifiable “secret sauce,” but he’s also notoriously private. He’s so wary of the spotlight, apparently, that he’s practically a ghost even inside Bungie itself despite toiling daily on Destiny, his Next Big Thing since Halo 2 shipped. So perhaps it comes as less of a surprise to learn that he hasn’t allowed himself to be profiled in the media since he was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2005, and hasn’t given a proper interview since a Bungie website fan Q&A in 2001.
So as he sits down with me for breakfast at his hotel during E3, he seems awfully relaxed and, well, normal, for a guy that’s supposedly a recluse. He’s wearing a T-shirt and shorts – possibly having just returned from a morning jog – along with a welcoming smile. And aside from the hair on his head being grayer than it was in the old Halo 1-era photos, he looks youthful, fit, and energetic. No foot-long fingernails or other Howard Hughes characteristics his media-shy persona might have conjured.

“I don’t dislike this or anything,” Jones begins as I ask about his reluctance to do interviews. “What I like from the job I have is making these [video game] experiences. [But] life is not so long, and when I’m outside of work there’s all this other stuff I want to do.”
So is he this reserved in his free time as well? “I enjoy smaller venues, smaller conversations,” he says. “I’m not a go-out-and-tear-it-up kind of guy.”
I try to ask him about what a typical day for him is like, and the humility that I suspected might be feeding into his aversion to talking to the media begins to show through. “It’s funny. The thing about a huge team like this is, there are so many people doing so many things.”
I counter that he’s already slipping into quiet-guy humble mode and deflecting attention away from himself.
“I know, I know,” he says, laughing. “I think the ideal case, where everybody’s happy and we get the best outcome, is when everybody not just has a responsibility, but really feels that they have control and authority over what they’re working on.
“I have the job of making sure everybody’s doing something that’s going to fit together at the end. We have a number of design teams. A lot of times their pieces don’t even get plugged together for months and months at a time. So I’m doing my best to make sure that they meet up when they come together.”

So it’s his job to unify the vision that he lays out?
“My job is to take those things [people at Bungie are working on] and bend them in the right direction. Even if they’re not running in the game yet, even if they’re still on paper, even if it’s still an idea in somebody’s head…”
After spending a moment formulating how he wants to explain himself fully, he begins:
“So anyway, my typical day is to be thinking about that as soon as I wake up, and when I come in to work, start to figure out how to work with those people, whether it’s via email or in face to face conversations or getting ready for some meeting where I’m going to present my version of where we should go. But it’s all people, and it’s all ideas all day. There really isn’t any kind of structure, if that makes sense.”
No structure?
“My ideal thing is that the game would get built without me,” Jones continues. “No, seriously. I think that’s super important, because then what I’m able to do is be in a position where I can look at how it’s coming together and change the pieces that I believe need changing. Does that make sense? As soon as I’m on the hook for actually putting in the screws, actually making some system work, then I lose sight of that.”
This leads me to one of the most pressing questions on my list. Doesn’t this prove the legend of the Halo 1 pistol, which suggests that Jones personally – and secretly – upped its damage at the tail end of development in order be better at his own game?
“See, that’s almost mythology now,” Jones says with a wry grin. “You can’t set mythology straight.”
Double-checking that both my voice recorder and my backup voice recorder are working as I don’t want to miss what he’s about to say, I encourage him to share the real story.

“So,” he begins. “There was a moment towards the end of Halo 1 where we were very close to locking down. The balance on the pistol was such that both in the competitive game, but also in the solo game, it wasn’t where we wanted it to be. It was too late to change the… Well, we didn’t feel comfortable actually changing the data anymore. The game was so locked down that when you changed a piece of data, gigabytes of crap had to be reprocessed.
“What we did feel comfortable doing was changing the code, and so… I added code specifically, when the map was loaded, to change a single number on the pistol. Whether that was ‘ninja style’ or not,” he says with a laugh, “I’ll be happy to let you decide.”
Does that mean he’ll take the credit/blame for the most controversial weapon in Halo history?
“I will take the credit and blame for the pistol in Halo,” he says with a smile. “I’ll take the blame for everything in Halo. That answer, I mean… If it’s important to go micro on something, I’ll do that. I feel like design really is about the details. That’s a huge conversation we can have…”
I half-jokingly tell him that, E3 appointments be damned, I have all day if he wants to tell me more about his design philosophies.
“This is a cliché, but design isn’t how things look. Design is what they are and how they act. What’s the damage on the pistol or the friction on the wheels of a vehicle or something like that, those details make the experience. Where I can, I’ll stay high-level. Where I need to, I’ll go low-level. My engagement across the team is… ‘Where’s the place I can add more value at what level of detail?’ And then I’ll do it and get out as soon as I can.”

That sounds like he signs off on everything in the game.
“I don’t know. It’s interesting,” he starts. “That sounds like it would stifle people. But it is true that if I don’t believe a piece of work fits into the larger game, and it’s your responsibility, you and I are going to have a conversation. We’re going to figure that out. I’m happy that we don’t have an official signoff process on everything that parades in front of me.”
Now we’re getting somewhere.
“But it is really important that I be able to see everything and experience everything, because sometimes we’re talking about an experience that won’t actually come together for years. Somebody in the group needs to know where it’s going and be able to have that top-down view and say, ‘Even though you haven’t seen this experience in context yet, when it gets into the real game, it isn’t going to work, so we’re going to change it in these ways.’ But yeah, I forget the word you used – signoff or something like that? I don’t think of it in those terms, I guess. But I know that it’s my fault if we put this game together and people don’t want to play it. I take that really seriously.”
Obviously, the process of making video games has changed drastically since he started Bungie with Alex Seropian back in Chicago in the early 1990s, when the studio consisted of just a few people. I ask Jones If he and the same team sat down to make the original Halo today would it be the same game?
“I’m not sure how much different it would have been,” he starts. “I think it would have been better. We would have done things a little bit different. Certainly knowing what I do now from the experience, I would change a few things. I’d change the pistol.”

Funny how the pistol comes back up again – and this time it’s Jones who brings it up. Would he have toned down its potency?
“I was avoiding any kind of that…” he stumbles. “What I meant is, rather than do that change at the last minute, I would have made that change a lot earlier.”