Bungie

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.

did you did you sort of notice in your time working at blockbuster studios which you know we'll get into all of that later but i'm interested you know how much were you swept up into that sense of trying to create something great you know the next ocarina of time or whatever it might be

right i think uh Especially early on, I started basically when I was 20 years old.

And when I got to places like Treyarch and Bungie, I very much was swept up into the feeling and attitude of like, we really need to make something that really blows people away and is the best thing that anyone has ever seen.

And all of the stuff that came with it, the crunch time and the kind of strange psychological places you can get to when there's when you feel like an enormous pressure on you to make the coolest thing ever I experienced that and came to me and it was because I was taking it so seriously and I didn't I feel like I didn't know any better I was in my 20s and I was like this is it this is the thing that I do and we're gonna do and uh at the time like Halo 3 for example the noise around it and the hype that was building around Halo 3 was just deafening and it was like the idea that it would come out and not be anything other than just the biggest thing that has ever happened was just unthinkable And so that kind of expectation and that kind of feeling of, I don't know, it was like a feeling of doom that was hanging over our heads.

And...

For all of PlayStation's misgivings, even they are letting Bungie have another crack at success right now.

Yet the makers of KOTOR and Mass Effect don't get that same shot.

That's crazy to me.

Pretty much, yeah.

I mean, unless PlayStation continues to struggle with their first-party output, and it just gets to the point where there's nothing but disasters coming out.

Bungie doesn't get it back together again, and Intergalactic doesn't pan out the way we thought it would, or things like that go down.

Or more live service nonsense keeps piling up than... there's more of a conversation to be had of like, okay, is this just a nice third-party box? You know? So I'm not saying that PlayStation is infallible here.

Their IP was worth way less.

They bought Bungie for $3.9 billion.

Yeah.

That's...

BioWare's not Bungie.

I understand that BioWare's not...

It comes to

Obviously, they fucked it real bad.

Oh, yeah, because that's what everyone loves.

Bungie even got linked to that earlier in the week, but it sounds like it's more of a respawn cross-dice collaboration.

They confirmed Star Wars Jedi 3, whatever that...

Jedi

one of my favorite book is Ghost of Onyx.

And I don't see a lot of like, I know like 343, Bungie, Halo Studio have never really touched that book.

little side thing that it is, side piece to Halo 2 or something.

And I really wanted to maybe bring it to the screen for the first time to a level close enough to what we've seen from the official media.

They ran a live service game for almost a decade, probably pretty, pretty well.

And so what, how did we end up with Final Fantasy Resonance then? They, if you think about the, one of the challenges with live service games is You know, we're seeing this with Destiny and with Bungie where we get real excited about the game.

We get attached to the music.

We get attached to the characters.

But someday you're like, well, what if private equity? What if Jared Kushner buys Bungie next and the Saudi Arabia private investment fund? We'll get to Bioware later.

It might go away.

And if it's a live service game, it might go away and then there's nothing for you.

It's one of those.

This is currently all just rumors, but the potential studios, the first one is obviously like EA because they did the remakes of the Battlefront games.

But the second studio that's potentially up for contention with this project is Bungie of all places.

Hmm.

Which I mean, I wouldn't be against Bungie gunplay in a Star Wars game.

I mean, hear me out, you're ready.

So I'm leaning towards Bungie because with EA, are they going to make everything into a DLC like they did with Sims 4? I

mean, the Sims is their DLC factory at this point.

Yeah, but the reason why I'm going to point this out is at least with Sims 3, you could get pools.

They were spending reportedly somewhere between $200 to $300 million on the game just for it to go on other consoles.

Sony are probably like what if we don't do that they can find a new publisher and the game will launch release on with us anyway and saves us 200 300 million that we can invest in our own first party exclusives or you know I feel like if it's the case where two things right now, that 200 to 300 million seats are going to Bungie to work on Marathon and Destiny, or it's going to be invested into the reinvesting of reviving old IP.

And I think that's where it's all gone towards is... there's a better investment for them because they, I feel like Sony kind of feel like isn't will come to PlayStation five.

I don't think it's kind of hard to say.