Reaching for the Stars

Sure. We're all gamers, too. It's not always easy to find time to play stuff. But our artists and our engineers and our designers - everyone's always interested in what's happening in the industry.

I wouldn't go so far as to say we're always waiting and watching and trying to react, because by then we've already made our decisions and set down our cores.

To us graphics are more a means to an end. It's really just about the experience and immersing players and just delivering a great game.

We're not trying to hit, we have X number of polygons or we're pushing X resolution. Halo has always been about the aesthetic and the art style, generally speaking, more so than just pushing numbers.

With Reach we were able to find a balance and do both at a level we couldn't have achieved before.

10 million sounds awesome. I don't think we would complain about that.

Off the top of my head, I couldn't even tell you what Halo 3's lifetime numbers are. I certainly don't know what ODST has sold.

Obviously sales are important. We're an independent studio. We have a livelihood to maintain and a business to run and people to feed and a future to fulfil.

But I don't think it's something most of our team spends much time on or has any awareness of. It's just, do the best work you possibly can. You can't get caught up in that cycle of trying to second-guess yourself. "Oh, but if we add this maybe we're going to bump our sales up to X."

People say that. We haven't sold it yet.

There isn't that attitude in the studio at all, though. It's funny, as successful as the series has been, as great as every game has been prior to Reach, the general attitude of the team hasn't changed.

Every game is always about doing your best possible work. How can we improve on the last game we made? Even to this day, we're so critical of our work that some people don't realise that thing you think was terrible actually set a new industry standard and now everyone's trying to copy it.

I'm not going to give you any hints to the genre of our future projects. But, Bungie, even going back to Marathon, obviously there are a lot of us that enjoy playing these types of games and putting players up close and personal and being able to tell a story in that kind of way.

We enjoy that. But Myth was an innovative action-RTS at the time. Oni was a third-person game that had a lot of interesting hand-to-hand combat dynamics.

We like to pride ourselves on great technology, beautiful art, responsive, tight gameplay and deep integrated social and community systems. All of that in a rich deep universe that people want to spend time in. For us, those are hallmarks of our titles and themes we'll be carrying forward into our future work, for sure.

The only thing I'd say is absolutely critical that we do in our games is less genre-based and more an approach to games that says, "Hey, how fast can we get people in and playing and having fun?"

Halo, the first one, it prided itself on being a very simple console approach to the FPS. The important thing there we struck on at Bungie was presenting an experience to the player that is easy to get into and easy to have fun.

That is reflected in things like Forge. A lot of other games have editors. It takes practically a degree to figure out how to use them, right? Forge is just fun to use. Even if you never make something you can end up playing in a Slayer match, you can have fun just moving the pieces around. You can drop a tank on your friend's head because it's a co-op experience.

That is the critical approach we take to games: easy accessibility to the most amount of immediate fun.

It's really an exciting time in the industry. It goes back to our future. It's such a great time. We feel like we're still in the early years of videogame development and the really big things you can never expect and never see coming.

I'm very proud to be at Bungie. I feel we're going to have a huge impact in the future of games and some of the best, maybe the best stuff is still yet to come. I believe that.