Halo Studios

My guest today is an American writer, director, composer and game designer whose career has moved between some of the biggest studios in the games industry and much smaller, more personal experiments in interactive storytelling.

He worked as a producer at Treyarch, at Bungie and at 343 Industries on franchises such as Call of Duty and Halo before spending time at the University of Washington's Centre for Game Science, exploring how games might be used for research and scientific discovery.

He later joined Zachtronics, contributing writing and music to games such as Opus Magnum and Exopunks, while also creating his own interactive fiction.

In 2019, he created Eliza, a visual novel about an AI-assisted counselling service that explored automation and the boundaries between human empathy and technology years before those questions have become unavoidable.

Was that the idea from the get go?

No, it was, so to start off with, it was basically, it was Ed and then Jeff and Alex at Halo Studios.

They said, Tim, we want you to write a horror novel set in this timeline.

What do you think? And we spent a few, got a few meetings talking about it and going through it.

And I mean, the character on the front, you can see his name's Celior Andoli, and he becomes sort of main character in the book.

I'm trying to think of how much to say without giving too much away, but he's a Covenant warrior.

He's got hundreds of scores on his arm, you know, kills, marine kills, but he does, our team does come across him and don't kill him instantly let's just say that at least there's that it was quite interesting writing from his it was it was i found it fairly difficult writing from his point of view and this is where being able to work with as a team with uh ed gallery obviously and um jeff and alex uh formerly halo studios you know it was just wonderful being able to I'd frequently email them out of the blue saying, how would they say this? And what's the score with this sort of line? And they were instantly back with loads of info, you know, encyclopedic knowledge.

They sent me the encyclopedia, which is really useful.

It seems like...

I will say, I'm pretty hyped at the idea of a new team at Activision taking on Halo and basically taking it away from Halo Studios.

What if

it's...

team.

Okay, but the fate of Halo could also befall the fate of Raven.

where Halo Studios just becomes a support studio for Call of Duty.

Halo Studios is a support studio for Halo now.

Right.

But like, this is like core gears and like they delivered, uh, Whereas there's already some sentiment around 343 and Halo Studios that maybe it was time to blow it up.

Maybe it was time for somebody else to have a shot at Halo because the people working at that studio, or at least the management at that studio, didn't know what the fuck they were doing.

So maybe it was time for a change.

I mean, it's, they've got a lot of studios that are use them real and like Xbox and the industry in general, I guess to use contractors, right?

You know, a lot of the Xbox studios that were using unreal, no longer there.

And even something like halo studios, like is the Activision halo game going to use unreal? Are they going to use like the, uh, call the duty and call duty engine.

So Xbox went from suddenly almost all their studios using unreal to only like a handful.

It's just, again, why anybody would bring on those types of people onto your team, the ones that have their pronouns in the bio, their he, hims, the she, hers, the they, thems.

Well, and like recently, Halo Studios, which was formerly 343 Studios, which is the studio that took over Halo following Bungie's departure from Xbox, Halo Studios got closed down as well, and all future Halo projects got...

Xbox gave any future Halo projects to Activision.

If you looked at the team picture from the original Halo games versus the team picture from the most recent Halo game, it looked the same.