Bungie Co-Founder on 'Halo's Greatest Tragedy'

Bungie co-founder and Halo and Destiny creator Jason Jones hadn't given an interview in over a decade. Until now

Jason Jones has long since finished his oatmeal by this point. I keep waiting for one of his Bungie counterparts to tell me that my time is up. I’ve barely gotten through half of the questions I had prepared, but since he seems intrigued by my line of questioning so far and I seem to have earned a bit of his trust, I try to get deeper into Jones’ designer mind. I wonder what the creator of Halo thinks the series’ biggest failure is (speaking only of Bungie’s entries in the franchise; for the record, he says he played and finished 343 Industries’ Halo 4, calling it fun and “an interesting experience playing a Halo game that I didn’t have anything to do with”).
“I think the great tragedy of Halo is that for years and years it provided wonderful single-player and co-op content, and we provided people with almost no fun incentives or excuses, almost no reason besides their own enjoyment, to go back and replay it. So Halo 1 built these 10 labor of love missions, and only if you decided to go back and replay them was there any incentive to do so.
I invite Jones to elaborate.
“If I would have done anything to Halo 1, it would have been to do something to draw people back into those experiences that they enjoyed the first time. Even in the smallest ways, just to give them an excuse to get together and do it again.”

Like the Skulls in later Halo games?
“Sure. And that was a shadow of an attempt to do that,” he says firmly. “The reason we’re doing [Destiny] is because I feel like, looking back on Halo… I described it over and over again to the team. It’s one of the great tragedies of Halo.”
Word in the industry had always been that Jones retreated from the core Bungie team after Halo 2 in order to start preliminary work on the project that would turn out to be Destiny. He clarifies, saying that this is mostly true other than having been heavily involved in the last three months of Halo 3 in order to button it up and get it out the door. Perhaps I’m just being ignorant to the realities of game development, but I wonder what exactly he’s been doing for all these years.
“A long time ago we built an RPG,” he reveals, “just to test out some ideas and learn things that we didn’t know and think about what disciplines on the design team we needed to hire for that we didn’t already have in the studio. We built a number of little games. They were pretty fun.”
He’s implying that they had no intention of ever releasing any of these games.
“Yeah, no, absolutely not. We built ridiculous little projects. They were sort of cool.”
Some of those years, he adds, were spent cashing in some accrued vacation time. “There was a lot of life to catch up on too,” Jones explains. “I got married. I did a bunch of traveling. I’d been working nonstop, really… Up to when Halo 2 finished, I’d been working pretty much nonstop for… I don’t know how long it was, but it was almost 15 years or something like that, spending whole years not really out in the world at all. A lot of that time was a break, too. Getting married, having kids, making a bunch of little games.”

His surprising answer about building games solely for the purpose of educating himself and his team is not only fascinating, but reminds me of another Bungie legend: Project Phoenix. So what was it?
“It was a project we were working on at the same time we were working on Halo 1,” he starts. “There was a lot that was really interesting about it, even back in Chicago, before the acquisition. It was a game that was based on a technology that was sort of Minecraft-like, in that it could render… You could build castles out of blocks, for example, and then knock them down. Ultimately the reason the game never saw the light of day was because of Halo. The [Project Phoenix] team got scavenged a number of times, both on Halo 1 and Halo 2, to finish Halo.”
So it was a Minecraft-style sandbox long before Minecraft existed?
“No, the rendering… It was able to render things like Minecraft, but it was… It was trying to find its place. Halo had a time in the desert as well,” he explains, meaning that it was trying to find its identity. “The best thing we can do is just look at the build… I don’t even know if we have one anymore. It was cool. There were big castles and you could knock them down with trebuchets. Knocking holes in the wall, and dudes would come out.”

He tries to explain more clearly. “This game was going between RTS and… It’s hard to even describe. It was trying to find out what it was, and it hadn’t. It made it very clear at several junctures, ‘Well, should we put all the resources on the team behind Halo, or should we keep working on this game?’ Eventually we made the decision that it was Halo. The team just went away, or the project went away. The people are still here.”

Sensing the end of the interview drawing near, I aim for the bigger picture. What does Jones hope players will take away from Destiny in 10 years?
“I hope it’s the same thing that’s happened with our previous games,” he laughs. “I hope that they enjoy it, that it was a part of their world for that decade, and that they had fun. We can get into the meta of why people play games, but I think it gives them something they want. I want Destiny to do that for a bunch of people for the next decade.”
With Destiny finally out of the bag and more concrete details coming into view, the time has come for players to begin imagining their adventures in Bungie’s new universe. I’m curious what Jones’ current favorite character class and weapon is in the game.
He smiles, laughs, considers the question, and replies, “Right now it’s Warlock and Scout Rifle. But I’m sure it’s going to change. The classes are going through so much evolution. But the warlock right now basically has the team buff and team res abilities, and so those are really fun and essential in team situations.”

Before my hour and 20-ish minutes with Jones was up, there is one question that’s always been on my mind, and I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t ask it: How was Halo 2 supposed to end?

Bungie as a whole dodged the subject for years, at various points calling it their Empire Strikes Back, before more recently owning up to the fact that Halo 2 doesn’t end so much as it just stops. I wasn’t sure how Jones might react to this line of inquiry. Would he take offense? Maybe get quiet? Say he’d rather not talk about it?
Instead, his face lights up in a way you simply cannot feign. It’s as if he’s been bottling up the story for years, eager for someone to finally ask him about it so that he could let it all out, perhaps cathartically. He wants to tell me everything, I can see it. But we’re out of time.
“It’s hard to think about,” he begins. “Did we record the pitch for that chapter?” he asks himself. “I don’t think we did…”
Considering it further, he continues. “Finishing Halo 2 was hard…We should [talk about] that at a separate time,” he says. “Turn it into its own story. That sounds fun to me. In all seriousness, it might actually be fun…”
He can’t help himself, though, and sneaks in one tidbit:
“We could even pull out the old Halo 2 [E3 2004] demo. Like seven days before we went to E3, it was running at a steady five, ten frames per second…”

 bit hilarious – perhaps even fitting – that, like Halo 2, Jason Jones’ first interview in over a decade ends on a cliffhanger.