TALKING TO MARTY O'DONNELL ABOUT HALO INFINITE, Activision, the Halo 2 crunch and MUCH MUCH MORE!

hey guys welcome back today is a daiva I can't even call it special because that doesn't that doesn't cut it right today is a day that is like right at the top of my bucket list today I am joined by a man who needs absolutely no introduction but he's gonna get one anyway I'm joined by Marty O'Donnell my ideale just introduce yourself for a second I'm Marty O'Donnell I'm a composer sound designer audio director I worked at Bungie for a bunch of years worked on myth and halo and also destiny and now I have a small game company about 30 of us called high wire games and we shipped a game in November called golem and we're working on something right now Oh hot off the presses nice nice yeah so before we start the questions cuz I've got a lot of questions from both me friends in real life and also a load of your questions I just I just want a fun boy for 30 seconds because I can't not okay like you are one of my biggest idols you have been since I was six years old and I first played halo 6 Wow I started young I got in there quite young and I'm proud to say that yeah I I have been one of your biggest fans my entire life I remember as early as like yeah being 6 or 7 years old listening to your soundtracks your halo soundtracks in the car on the way to elementary school I even did the day found a CD that I made in fourth grade I think it was a remixes of the halo 2 soundtrack that I'd made that were absolutely god-awful and should never see the light of day but yeah I just I just I just had to get that out of the way because you being here is an absolute honor and honestly I can't thank you enough man I really do appreciate it well once I heard that interview with the American guy yeah and I know your name is Luke I actually don't know your last name so it's it's actually great to be here it's an honor to be on your on your podcast I've enjoyed a lot of the videos you've made over the years I probably haven't seen all of them but you know it's the ones I have seen have always been really fun to watch so I appreciate you guys thank you so much I mean I'm not surprised you've not seen all of them I've made like seven hundred now so I mean honestly I'd hope that you haven't seen all of them but that means that means the world to me um I really Wow appreciate that but yeah let's let's get down to the real meat potatoes of today's video let's well before we do that before we do that you know that one of the main reasons I'm on here is to try to piggyback on all your subscribers and get them to give me the check I need a check on my youtube channel I'm still at 71 thousand subscribers that I I think I need to get to a hundred thousand mathy I am I I'm seven steps ahead of you because one of the first things I was going to mention it to this video is that you guys if you somehow haven't done so yet need to go and drop a subscriber Marty's channel he's uploading so much like cool behind-the-scenes stuff from the halo days early sketches of like for example the other day it related an early version of brothers-in-arms and this sort of evolution that track went under through he loved one two and three and loads of other cool behind-the-scenes videos from you had one with Steve I when Steve I was just in in the studio just shredding yeah oh yeah so cool to see that so if you haven't symptom arty yet the man there is not a single person on planet earth who deserves a checkmark on YouTube more than the person right here so please go and drop a serve on Marty's channel get this month of injury case herbs and you know like Ahmed said the possibilities of a Marty O'Donnell hundred K sub special I mean it could be social stuff I could who knows what I'll do if I get 200 so we'll see what happens as your incentive drop a sub right now right so the question is this one I'm going to ask is one that I think will kind of set the stage for this entire interview and it's well I've not actually many people ask you so could you sort of elaborate on your role at Bungie as a whole because obviously your main role was composer but if the viaducts are obviously to believe we believed he did a lot more than that you were your hand was in quite a lot of different projects and sort of teams at Bungie you helps out with a lot of other stuff besides music so could you just sort of elaborate on your overall role at Bungie outside of composing yeah sure I it's interesting that you say that it my main role was composer I never thought of my main role as composer I didn't want to just be a composer ever on video games I wanted to get into video games and be the audio director I wanted to be in charge of everything that came out of the speakers and that's what I did so and if you're in charge of everything that comes out of the speakers that means you're working on sound design dialogue mix music implementation the entire audio experience that the players have I would say for me I love playing games and I love what the audio experience is but I wanted I wanted to have a singular vision for the audio because I felt like I played a lot of games where the vision seemed to be all over the map and they would hire an outside composer to do some music and maybe a different composer to do some other music and maybe somebody directed the actors and somebody else worked on sound design and maybe somebody else programmed it or implemented it and I just felt like even even if my hands weren't physically on every one of those areas I wanted to direct all those areas from a creative direction standpoint so that there would be a unified vision that would come through to the player so that's and and so when you think about that that means I'm with the designers who are designing weapons because I'm saying well what's the rate of fire on this weapon and are you sure you want to do it with reload this way maybe the animation should be more this way and I could be involved with the writing of the script because I could sit at table reads because I knew I was gonna be directing the actors and then I would be the one casting the actress because I had experienced doing that so I worked with whoever the writers were and especially on the Halo series it was mostly Joe Staton for the ten years I've worked on halo so anyway that's how that that worked I ended up being just intimately involved in a whole bunch of different areas including design because especially once we get to the point where any level is being played and it's playable the emotional story that I think needs to come through is really told by how the music interacts with the player and so I'm playing the game I'm sitting with the designer I'm playing through that level and I'm saying well this is a significant spot right here right yeah it is and but what if I went left instead of right well then we do this and so I would work with the designer to figure out all the different ways music could help score that encounter or that moment or that level and then you know then you go into the UI and you go into the menu screens and you go into what happens when you're saving it's like I touched every part of the game experience not because I'm a control freak but because like that's the way people experience a game you know I I would always say what is the person's that what is the players experience from the moment they open the package and stick it in the box what what is the first thing they see in here and what is the last thing they see in here when they quit so I wanted to I wanted to make sure that that felt great all the way through yeah I like that because it feels like with the old Bungie games no part of development was really compartmentalized everything was developed with every other aspect of the game in mind so like you were saying the the narrative the story and sort of like even the flow of a level was designed with the music in mind or vice versa so you get to a certain point of the level and then an emotional piece of music starts playing or something and I think that's a really interesting idea having having all the teams sort of mix to each other in development and work alongside each other like that I feel like yeah that was definitely one of the many reasons why the original Halo games had such emotional emphasis to them everything floats in nicely together well that the word flow is is very important I used to use that word all the time I was like how are we flowing from this menu to in game how are we getting into the cinematic moment how are we getting into a scripted moment how are we getting out of a scripted moment I mean one of the decisions we made really early because we did this an Oni which is before hello is we did all of our you know what we call cinematics were essentially scripted in engine in game moments which meant that in the flow you're not you're not unloading the game engine and loading a pre-rendered movie and then going to a black screen and then going back into a game it all flows and sometimes we were pretty successful doing that and it was seamless and it was elegant sometimes we struggled with it but I still feel like that's for me as a game player that's the way I like the games I don't like having these moments that interrupt and may take me essentially out of the game and that was like that was something that that I don't understand I gotta say I mean as in terms of if you're gonna like remake something that has already been made I wish they would honor the decisions that we had made for the players experience from from menus to cinematics not doing pre-rendered cinematics I I it's just me that's my preference and that's why it's a little disappointing to me to see that remake and people maybe playing hallo that is not the way certainly the people who originally made hallo intended it to be experienced just the way that's that's very interesting because only a few days ago I watched quite an interesting comparison between the original Halo 2 cutscenes and the ones in the remastered version of Halo 2 I don't as nice as they look it's like really high fidelity as they are in halo 2 anniversary they do like a certain soul they're not entirely soulless not to say they are by any means but they do like a certain soul that the original in-game cutscenes had and that's quite interesting as well because that feed it's really nicely into another question that was going to ask you sure what are your thoughts and opinions on the remastered versions of your music from halo 1 and he no 2 in their remastered versions that's a slightly dangerous question but at my age I I don't necessarily care anymore fair enough everybody everybody who worked on the remastered music and I'm not talking about the game itself I'm just talking about the music for the game they're all friends of mine and I've known them for years Paul libsyn is a buddy I have huge respect for everybody Lenny Tom Salta these people are amazing and they especially for the halo 2 anniversary they they really went all out and got all sorts of musicians and stuff they got Steve by back into the studio and they went to Skywalker Ranch and did all this great stuff from the stand point of throwing everything at it and we're really trying to make the production value as high as possible like I give them giant praise the part that I am a little bit disappointed in is the fact that I wish they could have just talked to me while they were doing it did they not talk to you at all while doing it like didn't concern they believe it or not and and I'm telling you something that probably nobody knows but I don't care I don't understand it Microsoft said you're not allowed to talk to Marty O'Donnell about these remasters what they they were actually prevented from talking to me about remastering the music and after they did it I mean especially after halo one I called Paul and I'm like he wasn't actually a full-time employee at Microsoft at the time he was a contractor and so he had to do what they said he didn't understand what what the reason was none of those guys knew it they're like hey this is great we'll talk to Marty Thomas Alta you know is a good friend and he's a synth and sampling expert he knows equipment like there's no tomorrow and if he could have just gotten a little information for me he would have had they would have made his life so much easier Lenny did the orchestrations and he had to do them all by ear which is amazing but I mean there are inner voices you know in the second clarinet or the you know second viola that just didn't quite make it because you can't hear them that well and and I hear those I hear some of those differences and I just feel like wow if they had just I could have given them the scores and then they could have done what they wanted to with them they could have recorded them as I gave it to them they could have added to it they could have done whatever and you know Paul wanted me to come down to the sessions he wanted me to be at the session especially for the halo two sessions where when Steve I went to Skywalker Ranch I mean that would have been a great fun party time but apparently imagine there was enough legal sort of animus between Microsoft and Bungie now remember at the time they were doing those anniversary editions I was you know full-time audio director at destiny and I think there was still some I don't know some legal questions between Bungie and Microsoft and Microsoft just like no you can't talk to Marty and that's the rule if you want to do this Marty can't be involved and I just think it it that's a sort of decision that makes no sense to me it didn't make any sense to the guys who are working on it either so yeah that's quite baffling to me I mean I get that at the time Bungie had some exclusivity deals with Sony and with PlayStation 4 destiny so I could see this being like a little bit of animosity there but to remaster what many consider to be one of your many magnum opus and not have you consult on it is that just seems so backwards to me like it's not even the fact that the soundtrack that they made for the remastered version wasn't really good because it really was but it just could have been so much not better but it's more faithful I feel like if you were back and snorting like you like you were saying pointing out little subtle details that you can't hear when you listen to the soundtrack but if you look at the sheet music or whatever you can see I feel like that was a massive missed opportunity honestly and quite a bad idea myself art to be quite honest well Paul Lipson who directed both soundtrack remasters or remakes is has left Microsoft a few years ago and he and I have talked about this and he he that was actually a real frustration to him he never quite understood it it would have made their lives so much easier it probably would have cost less money because of the time spent trying to figure every note out just by listening and then it would have been I would have loved to have you know promoted it and said yeah I just wanted this session and hey everybody it's coming and it's really cool and but instead I was I felt kind of snubbed and then it made me kind of be you know okay whatever you're gonna snub me I'm not gonna be all excited about it yeah that's that's reasonable I can only imagine what the height would have been if like 3 for 3 came out and announced that you had been consulting on here to anniversary soundtrack that that alone would have increased savers I swear to God that would have got so many people excited I mean it maybe I'm jumping ahead and your questions but it happens even now well as they is they released trailers that continue to use themes that I wrote years ago mmm each one of them takes me by surprise I really don't when you find out yeah yeah as a matter of fact I probably find out later than you cuz I'm not waiting for the next trailer at five all day right so I when I finally see it I'm like oh they used that that theme they used that piano part they used that melody I wrote I remember where I was when I wrote it and so I basically I'll you know usually in the thread of the YouTube video or the trailer halo or whatever it is I'll just say nice music you know I get a lot of people responding to that as though I'm either being mean or I'm snarky and maybe there's a tiny bit of snark in there but I don't want to be snarky I've yeah I'd rather just say hey this is way too you guys here the next trailer there they're doing cool stuff with the music and I'm honored that they're still you know using some of my melodies that came out of my head but apparently that's not to be and I don't know if it seems to be as you know as you know my my lifetime career game experience with corporations has not always been the smoothest Road and that's why that's why my saying be nice to the goose is something I continue to say it's not that hard to be nice I I don't I just don't understand being mean and I don't I honestly don't think I've ever been mean I wasn't yeah I wasn't mean to Microsoft and I don't think I was mean to Bungie but anyway that's yeah my philosophy that feeds again very nicely into my next question and sort of generally speaking what are your thoughts on what little we've seen of Halo Infinite so far uh I don't have a lot of thoughts like I said I'm not I'm working on my own thing I was honored to see that they have brought back some of the themes whether those themes end up in the game itself I have no idea I sure as hell hope so I and you know people keep thinking that I'm putting out halo behind the scenes videos because I'm trying to give some sort of message about working on Halo it's not that at all as a matter of fact as I get older I look back fondly on stuff I did 20 years ago I mean now I mean we're past 20 years when I first wrote the first payload for Mac world that's fancy to me it's just a little bit like hey I'm sitting here in my house during kovat 19 and I'm slack working on this new game but you know I have a little time on my hands periodically and it's sort of fun to go through the old archives and sort of for people who are interested it's not like I'm setting the record straight I'm just giving some well this is interesting to me like finding all of John Mayer's extra takes which I had completely forgotten that I had and that's from 16 years ago and being able to share that is really fun so that's why I'm doing it some of those from the brothers in albums video was so chill to listen to from here at whose epilogue just is like a sitting bass guitar sound I feel like I could just fall asleep listening through it it's so peaceful and just like this era of lost alger about it I love it so much yeah yeah so well it I don't think I even literally I don't think I'd even listen to some of those takes facts 16 years ago I was too busy he had given me his preferred edit and his preferred mix and I'm like okay that's it he likes it I'm using it and I saw that over in the bin there's people who know Pro Tools know that there's an audio bin of all sorts of other audio and I saw all sorts of stuff in there but I I never bothered to listen to it I was always thinking I was going to get back and put the live string because I had given him the sampled strings I thought I would at some point I'll put the live strings under this stuff gave me and as you know hallo to crunch was horrible so I was i literally at the end of this little back behind the scenes video when i said it's better late than ever that it's because it's been something in the back of my mind it's like you know one of these days i should see if I can lift the solo from John Mayer and put it over the live strings so I it's like a little thing that I've gotten off my chest and I'm happy about nice-nice I'm happy to share it with it with the fans and I'm thrilled that people seem to appreciate it so I think that's great I'm gonna keep doing this I mean yeah if people want people people love to see that stuff I know personally I love to see projects or like games or movies that I love I love to see them in like alpha or beta or like early stages and hearing early versions of songs that I've listened listened to like thousands of times now honestly is it's always so interesting hearing how they evolved and how they change over time into what you eventually hearing him yeah good so again that segues very nicely into my next question okay so as you know there are quite a few horror stories about halo twos development at the crunch and just it wasn't a particularly nice time developing halo 2 as a person on the inside who was like in the in the thick of it you were really in the trenches of Halo 2 you know what two questions one was it really as insanely stressful as it seemed and the second question is how did its development different differ from Hillis ease development and also hilary's know it wasn't as insane as it seemed it was twice as insane geez I tried to think yeah it it was a you know everybody was very and you know there there's some misinformation sometimes Believe It or Not can you believe the Internet has misinformation the Internet misinformation no way yes no way sometimes people think that oh all Bungie wanted to do all the folks that worked on Halo one all we wanted to do was do something new and and Microsoft forced us to do halo two and three that's just not true at all we absolutely wanted to do halo two we absolutely wanted to do halo three and reach I mean we want we wanted to do all the halos we did we were hoping at some point to close off that chapter of development and move on but halo two was like there's no doubt we wanted to do it we had there were a series of circumstances during the development of halo 2 whereas some severe missteps were made especially technically okay that had to do with stencil shadows and the entire engine that was built in order for that to work okay which is what we showed at e3 is why that that show that show that we show it was amazing and tremendous and we worked like crazy to make that show great and that's oh that's always your first clue that you're doing something wrong and I've learned this from from day one and we continue to learn this through today is if you're working on the show and you're not working on the game you're gonna be in trouble because all that work you put into the show whatever that is the more of that work that's throwaway work the longer it's gonna take you to actually get caught up on the game and make the actual game yeah so shows are a double-edged sword because they they get the fans really riled up I remember thinking can we get the fans even more riled up for Halo 2 like everybody wanted halo 2 we don't we don't even have to do a show we got we had already done that the user trailer that was the Master Chief jumps out though I was gonna say that was enough that was all you needed obviously I just I was like let's just keep showing that why are we doing this live gameplay video it's like what we have to prove that we can do it it's not it's we're not rendering it out of the engine where we're doing it in real time and like all the goals were wonderful even the music was interactive in that demo the music changed depending on how Joe played or whoever it was planned which was very cool and was very it was hard to do and but we worked so hard on that demo and as you know the game yeah none of that demos in the game city it's not even using I don't think it's using it might be using some of the same geometry but like a whole bunch of stuff just had to get tossed yeah there were some seven years a year and a half or when you're a year and a half into development and you have to like throw everything out start over that is a severe cluster so that's what happened to us and it ended up me being it ended up making a horrible horrible crunch but the crunch was pretty much self-inflicted because we just didn't want to let the fence down we had we just didn't want to change our goals for the game as much as possible so we were the ones who worked like crazy J you know J my audio lead J Weinland you know brought in his cot and threw it in the voice vocal booth so he could sleep at night and his wife and kids would come visit him for breakfast to see daddy geez and bring him a change of clothes I mean it was it was bad it was just not the way you should ever do any yeah that's not true all that but we were yeah we wouldn't a ship halo 2 the way you remember it if we hadn't done that which is you know once again it's like okay that's how that works all next question right do you think it was worth it well I mean yeah is anything like it brought us all really closer together it taught us a bunch of lessons we're still proud of what we did it almost it it probably did sort of destroy some people at least for a while it probably broke some relationships personal and work relationships that needed healing and and I think most of those did get healing some of them didn't but it's it's it's probably egotistical of me to say that it's worth it it's really mean let me just put it this way nobody died that's good that's good stuff we we didn't you know cure cancer either so it's like it's just a game but I think everybody who worked on halo 2 is proud of the fact that they worked on it and proud of what we shipped yeah and is you know it's one of those things that's in the past we've learned from it the good thing was and this is the way it's been in every studio I've ever worked in is of course I'm the oldest guy by far and I look at these young guys and I'm like look if I can be here till 2:00 in the morning you can be you know it's like it was just probably horrible but like we leave I never I never forced I never forced anybody to do anything that I remember but we all it was this I've compared it to that scene and you probably don't know this but I would recommend everybody go out and rent Cool Hand Luke with Paul Newman and there's a scene where these chain gang prisoners have to shovel sand onto this road that's being freshly tarred and it's in the south someplace it's 120 degrees in the Sun and they're just they're just dying and they can't believe that their whole day is gonna be this and all of a sudden Paul Newman's character Luke they think yes start shoveling super fast and they're all Tom's she'll slow down Luke slow down you're gonna kill yourself and in stand eventually they like you say lead by example they all decide to just go nuts and just give it their all and they're done before lunch and they have the rest of the day off and it's just this sort of and of course they all fall down dead and they're just covered in sweat and but they're laughing and there was something about that exertion it's a great scene in that movie and that's the way I sort of look at the hello to some interesting allegory it was horrible it should never happen we were it felt like we were prisoners and we had no choice but we took it upon ourselves to do an amazing thing and we're proud and it was it built some camaraderie too yeah well for what it's worth I mean a large majority of Haemophilus myself included see halo 2 is the pinnacle of Halo is many of our favorite games so - literally millions of us like you guys pulled it off and then seven so for whatever it's worth that that came out of it it was many people's favorite Halo games so I mean like you said it's hard to judge whether the the crunch was like worth it overall but you made one of the best games in human history so that's gotta count for something well it does count and hearing the fans and hearing you say that actually does count for something and and this is one of the reasons why I love doing these interviews because the fact that it's these games still have legs and people still talk about how that influenced their childhoods and how much they appreciate the quality and that helps take some of the sting out at least for me okay that's that's good to hear that's good to hear yeah good so for the next question I want to go back a little bit before halo what was your favorite pre halo project that you worked on whether it be at Bungie or I Mary I think you worked you did one with acclaim I believe riffin was it I believe yeah that was actually not with acclaim I think a claim might have published some console version I'm not sure it was actually for brøderbund was the publisher and the developers I am okay missed oh yes Riven which was the sequel to Myst was was my first game project and in the middle of working on that I started working on myth one the fallen Lords yeah the the Riven project was I really it was a very very different kind of project and it was a it was a good one for me to sink my teeth into visit my first game I worked with Robin Miller getting his studio set up and showing him some sense and samplers and how to work with I think I got him studio vision which was a sequencer at the time anyway I was hoping to do more music on that and it sent him some music tracks but he ended up wanting to do all the music and of course he did all the music at the last minute which is pretty much the way I work yeah but I I was you know I worked on all the sound design and the cinematics and and the mix and a whole bunch of things so that was really an amazing project myth one was also I don't know there's something about myth one that I am very fond of because there were some things about the implementation of audio and music in that and dialogue that really opened up for me the possibilities of what how game development could be with audio with random lines skip fractions never knowing how things were gonna play back exactly there's very little scripted events like but you know I had my father be did the voice of the surly dwarf one and he did a whole bunch of improv and that was the first time I thought oh this is great I can have my I can have an actor do improvisation I can cut up all these little funny improv and give them different skip fractions and then when I would play the game I never knew what the dwarf was gonna say so it always cracked me up to hear my dad's voice coming back at me saying things that sometimes were rare and I was so that that development started there in myth one and carried all the way through to today so I think I have a lot of fondness for the myth series especially myth one okay interesting yeah I remember you saying in at Mom's video that it was myth one that really opened up the idea of video game music and audio being a huge thing that has like so much potential and I mean it's clear that since that has been proven right with countless games coming out with just spectacular soundtracks that like you said are dynamic like you can hit one point in the game and one piece of musical play and you hit it again and another piece of musical players it's really clever and it's so did after how music works in TV movies or or orchestras or anything else it's completely its own beast it really is right yeah and that's to me I wanted to work on something that was different than what I had worked on for decades so when I saw that game's had this other approach to audio and music this interactive adaptive way of working and thinking that was that was that I was all over that that's why I enjoy my career in games yeah so I love all the Halo games that you worked on and even the ones that you didn't which one was your favorite I think I've said this before and I'm not sure if it's necessarily the best of the Halo games but halo won the very first combat Evolved I think it's my favorite because there was so many innovative things that we did in that that were like proof-of-concept where were things nobody had really done before and we improved on many many of those things as we went along but there was something really exciting to me about it was the first we experimented there was you know much lower fan expectations we had some core Bungie fans who were expecting great things but it wasn't it wasn't millions and millions of people like there were for Halo 2 and 3 yeah and so to that extent I have the softest spot in my heart for Halo 1 combat Evolved yeah I'm the original you should play it only on the original Xbox sorry like even play it on the 360 is not the same experience playing it on the PC is not the same experience I didn't have from my part I didn't have my hands on any other version directly than halo 1 on the original Xbox so they keep it that way it's really hard to yeah it's really hard to play it that way now it's hard to find that you play it on Master Chief collection and it's like oh yeah that it's that's close yeah he's not quite there though there what it was its neck even when it was on the 360 when this 360 came out and it was backwards compatible this was for backwards compatible there was a bunch of fights over that because I'm like no no no you changed the physics engine you you change the mix you changed the way audio works do you change stuff that was back in 2000 whatever 2005 yeah yeah when ii thought win so way back then i was complaining what this isn't halo 1 you need to make it play on the 360 the way it played on the on the original xbox and they couldn't because they had changed the hardware enough that they had to do some things in software that emulated the hardware that was shipped in the xbox original xbox yeah and very few people know that but if you really do a side-by-side comparison it is not the exact same game and it's not the exact same game when you go to PC all night and then when they when they did the halo anniversary edition I think they used the code from halo 1 pcs yeah yeah no sense to me at all I don't know what they're using for Master Chief collection so that's halo 1 PC Jacob obviously this now you see why Microsoft doesn't call me too modest I don't think I've done I haven't been I don't think I've complained that much in public so you'll get the scoop of Marty crashes I I honestly just don't understand some of the decisions they've made I just feel like yeah you know to me if you you have the gold standard with all of its flaws which is halo 1 right yeah and if you're gonna if you're gonna bring halo 1 forward onto any other platform the thing you should compare everything to is halo 1 you should compare how does it play on the Xbox and you should try to get us as close as humanly possible and I think they could have my opinion is I think they could have done better but that's just me a lot of people agree and there's quite a few videos out there with a lot of views comparing the original Halo one on the original Xbox to like MCC to PC to the Xbox 360 and there are quite a few shoes there are none that are completely game-breaking but there are quite a few that really do tape the experience I'd love to get my old xbox out one day and just replay the campaign just as it was originally intended because there's a certain magic that it has on the original Xbox that I feel like the version sins have been missing and that is obviously due to the many changes that had to be made for whatever reason yeah there are some intangibles and I might be just remembering fuzzy rememberings so but one thing I can tell you that it's funny to me is and I'm I I know all the games that I worked on like like the back of my hand I know every single detail I still remember a lot of stuff but some things fade with memory but I I have to say if video games are unique in the sense that the hardware disappears and then suddenly the games themselves are unplayable this happens with Final Fantasy yeah Final Fantasy I played on the Super Nintendo doesn't play the right way on any other any other platform it's different so this happens all the time so I am happy that Microsoft spent the time and money to actually continue to bring these games forward I actually give them cool you know credit and kudos for that but I do know that like this is a slightly I think it's a funny story I was teaching a class at DigiPen which is a game development college here in Seattle area in the and I said well yeah I'd love to talk about halo halo 1 and the development but it would be great if I could use the original Xbox and surround sound speakers because I was teaching an audio class and and you know the whole whole getup and they were like yeah that'd be great and work to try to get it all going and when I came in to do it they're like we there was a cable that allows you to plug into the you know there's a special adapter in the original Xbox that gives you this multi media out cable I forget what it was called it allows you to do a surround sound and they couldn't find they didn't have a cave and there was no place to get it yeah and then even up even the TV it was like no no this it actually looks better on an NTSC monitor than it doesn't a hi-def flat-screen like it that the output isn't right yeah I thought this is funny even with that I'm and I'm using the Duke controller to I was really kind of fun but like there were other things about it that weren't quite right because we just didn't have the actual old 20 year old hardware the 20 year old TV with a you know a tube yeah yeah and you know and you know the right cable to get surround sound to discrete speakers and so we tried I'm telling you it's hard to do you can get your Xbox out all you want but making it work is gonna be tough it's gonna be hard then you'll find out how do I capture this I got you this for you too that's the next thing thinking about how to record it all for footage it's just that's gonna be an entire week about a set aside just to figure out the dealer it's gonna be an absolute nightmare I know what you mean though it isn't annoying expected I expected it to be the right answer the way I remember and you have to ship a surround sound I'll get talking to my contacts that you achieve I'm sure they'll help me out with that one okay so yes sort of moving on from that um if you could pick on one character from Halo that you that is your favorite who would who would that be the grant the critical just yes Joe Staton grant is perfect I had so much and I trust me I I loved working with the actress from Firefly that was just a huge huge thing Ron Perlman was a blast Keith David you can't you can't get a better I could keep David Robert Davi as SpecOps commander yeah and then of course my standbys I mean I'm still friends with Master Chief and Cortana Steve Downes and Jen Taylor I love all those people but in just in terms of the character that just brings a smile to my face and I still hear things I forgot about that is Joe state and stuff and I bet you in my archives I have stuff that I didn't use that Joe did you got a face you got a dig those out people would eat that up true hey maybe that'll be part of my 100th subscriber I'm just a special upload there you go right get this man 300k subs right now this is no longer an option go and subscribe yes okay so wonder might might ruffle a few feathers what is your most controversial hallo opinion well okay this is this is a opinion I still hold to this day and you will probably disagree with this so I hope to Russell ruff ruffle some feathers okay so in telling stories classic stories especially like the hero's journey kind of thing yeah which I believe Master Chief's story especially in Halo one is a classic sort of hero's journey I've always maintained that playing as Master Chief Master Chief in a game context as a protagonist but in a story context is really not the protagonist and as much as we try to make you feel like you're Master Chief you can't put as much you can't do things like irony dramatic irony yes Master Chief should always know everything you know and everything the Master Chief knows is everything you know like he should never have more knowledge than you okay and you should never have more knowledge than him which makes it really hard to tell sort of a classic story with dramatic irony but why don't just one of the one of the tools you can do in a story like that is and by the way this is why I always kind of felt like Cortana was actually more of the protagonist and in my mind than Master Chief yeah I can see that that's just a technical thing that I think it's so Master Chief is kind of the observer of Cortana's dramatic argh okay and there were a lot of dramatic arts in halo but I think Cortana to me Cortana was more interesting of all of them but the one thing that we did that I loved in Halo one was we did what's a classic reversal where everything you think is true everything Master Chief thinks is true everything that you think is true about the world and the situation and everything you've been doing at a one moment gets flipped and yeah world changes and so that was to me that was a wonderful moment when you discover the flood oh yeah kept that as a secret and it was a great reversal I thought dramatically it worked great I thought the way we built up to it was good I loved that reversal yeah so here's the controversial part I'm like hey that works let's do stuff like that in Halo 2 let's let's well we're working on the story for Halo 2 I thought that would be an important thing and there was other people and Joe was one of them I used to argue with Joe about this the whole time was that the the dervish which turned into the arbiter yeah it's like oh we're gonna have you play as that guy you're gonna play as the arbiter at some point you know level 3 or whatever it was you remember what level it was you want to say four or five it okay four so it's like it's so like and I and so when Joe said yeah and then we go to this level and you are the arbiter and and at first I was like wow that's cool and like no no that's bad so I was against it and I'm still his day and here's why cuz I think it broke some rules it broke the rule of the arbiter had a backstory that was much more complex he had a religion he he was disgraced he had all this stuff so when I was the arbiter I didn't feel like I was the arbiter I felt like I was Master Chief and I was now taking this side trip again to the skin of the arbiter I didn't really feel like I ever was the arbiter I wasn't mad at the same people the arbiter was mad at I I was confused about who was my enemy and who was I supposed to shoot and they kept saying that was the reversal and I'm like no that's not a reversal and no one ever agreed with me so I was pretty much alone at Bungie saying Wow in hindsight I mean I you know I know how many people love it and they love playing as the arbiter but I actually thought it was a mystery to this day I still think it's a mistake so do you think that mistake could have been rectified if instead of playing as the arbiter you played as like a generic 'only alongside him and the arbiter field is sort of like Cortana like role like you know how you were saying chief was the observer and Cortana was the protagonist do you think it would have worked better I think it would have worked better because then you could have had see one of the things about Master Chief we never wanted to do because of this rule of here's you here's the character you're playing right and you want them to overlap as much as possible and you can stretch that but when you break it it sends suddenly like oh I'm playing a game I don't understand this break and and that is a subtle area it's hard to - and by the way this this thing I'm doing now anybody from Bungie or high wire that sees this on video it's gonna say oh they're gonna turn it off right now because I've done that so many times but I'm always like wait guys we're breaking this thing and then shut up but I you're a captive audience so I can say what I want no III do think that's important and and I feel like I never really got into this for me I never really felt like I could get into the shoes of the arbiter when you're the master chief he doesn't have to say much because it's pretty much obvious things that he says that you already as the player of thinking yeah you say Wow geez I wish I had a weapon I wish I had and he goes I do need a weapon I damn right I need a weapon but win the arbiter he's like yes prophet of truth I believe bla bla bla bla and you're like supposed to be me saying these things like I never believed that that was me okay now that's just my own opinion yeah I obviously people love the game they love being the arbiter so I haven't been been proved right but I do agree with you I think it would have been interesting to have played as like his right hand elite yeah maybe even be the SpecOps commander although SpecOps commander had so many cool things he was we could have actually put more even more words into Keith's David's mouth because he would be able to say more expository things and more colorful things because it wasn't supposedly coming out of your characters mouth so that's believe it or not one of the reasons why halo 3 went back to arbiter being a non playable character okay you could especially in multiplayer in coop you could play as elites but you I don't think you ever you never played as the arbiter so that way we could control what the arbiter was doing yeah and then you were elites there along with him yeah so we sort of did that on Halo 3 and I actually think we could have done something like that for Halo 2 and it might have been a better game but who knows it might have been way worse so what you do with Halo 4 mu is and we will never know unless we somehow manage to enter that timeline then a 2020 is a weird year though so you never know yeah that's true you never know time travel sure you know what I wouldn't even rise it off at this point we've seen crazier things that the the murder wasps will have something yeah I'm starting to get a bit anxious because they sort of came and just vanished out of nowhere like number the motorists they're growing they're waiting for their moment the hive is expanding so it's quite interesting actually that you mentioned those two elites in the halo 3 co-op because since he no three those two elites have since become not fully fleshed out characters but they become named sort of red relatively important characters in the background law and sorry I didn't make us I didn't make a face I didn't know that okay okay interesting interesting and that leaves me nice into the next question because me and you is spoken about this brief before but since people took over said it could Claude time yes yes it was okay you were that you I'm into a clients okay yeah yeah I met you Accords I believe in 2018 I think it was all last year one of the two all right my memories my memories bad as well is gone now too young you're too young I'm 23 now get on 24 I'm it's nothing my clock's ticking yeah and we spoke about this then but Simmons people feel you've taken over Hilo they have put a really heavy emphasis on transmedia and on telling stories in the expanded universe in like books and comics and animation and stuff like that but not only do they tell stories in that medium more the stories that they tell they sort of weight them the same as game stories and in some cases they even continue and conclude a game story in a book or a comic or something what are your thoughts on that because I know Bungie had a very very different philosophy with transmedia and with books and stuff so what are your thoughts on that alright um I will tell you what the Bungie I worked with philosophy was okay and that is that there's nothing more important than the game so everything everything is subservient to the game and in my world the game was number one and supporting the game with audio and music was my job but I was everything was subservient to the game so and you know this because this has been talked about a bunch we honestly we weren't in charge of any of the novels we weren't in charge of the stories we weren't in charge of any of that and we also really didn't pay much attention to it yeah which is why on WE this is exactly why on reach when we decided we were going to tell a prequel story after Halo 3 and after ODST we know ODST was purposely made in between in the timeline between halo 2 and 3 so that we didn't have to like go forward yeah because we liked the ending of halo 3 and if you think about our bungees timeline of halo it ends with halo 3 reach is a prequel to everything yeah and so as we talked about what that prequel should be I remember even saying hey you know I read the fall of reach we're sort of you know we're going against some of the stuff that's in there and I remember Marcus going like yeah I don't care what's in there it's like we're gonna make the game we want to make and if we have to change if we have to do the story like the only canon for us was the game stories yeah which became pretty apparent to the fans but I don't necessarily think all the fans like that that much because the you know the ancillary products and the extra stories that came out of our stuff and it's not like we didn't like Kurt violent Niland Eric now Eric and some of the other writers we'd like those guys we and we loved what they did and we thought it added to the whole thing but it's almost like me saying hey I wrote this piece of music so that we should change the story of the game because of this music I wrote yeah they would have looked at me like yeah you're insane and like of course not so we that's that was our choice and that's what we decided so the reason I look sort of ask ants that all of these extra thing this is we considered all of that stuff you know to be really ancillary stories that were sort of part of marketing and helped expand the universe and that's all great but it that wasn't anything that we worked on we always felt the game came first and so you know it I we're not three for three we are not Microsoft we had a different attitude towards all these things and that's you know once the split happened you know they made their decisions to do the way they wanted to do it but yeah that's not the way bungees the Bungie I worked with now remember yeah damn it now kind of not there anymore so you know but that was our philosophy and that's how we did it okay yeah that's that's pretty much what you told me at the barbecue I assumed you were gonna say it's a tough phone really because I really get both sides of it like I'm obviously most the videos that I make about halos law and I've been reading halo books since 2003 and I love them but at the same time the game should always take precedent I wholeheartedly agree with that notion like for example the main antagonist in Halo 4 was essentially killed off in a comic book which is it rubs so many people the wrong way and yeah I just I just figured I'll ask you again because you're at your amma said to me that barbecue was really interesting and I wanted other people to hear it well you know it's it the thing I would say is in an ideal world the no doubt in my mind the game comes first and then all of the lore and all of the ancillary stuff conform to what the game is set up and they don't contradict anything yeah and it's but it's always a problem when I mean jeez look at the TV show Game of Thrones they stayed close to June's stories that he wrote and then yeah the TV show took off and now though there's a divergent I don't the divergence is not ideal but that's what happens in real life sometimes and that's what I think that's what's happened with with Halo and it's what I think is too bad is if the game then ends up having to conform to lore from a comic book or lore from a you know anime TV show or something it's like I don't think that's ever a good idea the game comes first yeah so I agree I think moving on to a question a few question is actually that a very very music orientated sure are there any individual either pieces or soundtracks as a whole that you've done whether it be pelo or Oni or anything else that you look back on and give you goosebumps like for example for me the path from music of the spheres or the halo theme or heavy price paid from hero to those three pieces in particular I've listened to them hundreds if not thousands of times and I I get goosebumps every single time are there any examples for you that give you goosebumps it's interesting let me just say this you have good taste thank you well actually I say that but that there's some of those songs were suggested by me some of them were also suggested by one of my friends in real life who it's been a fan of you for years as well but I let you I listened to those three songs again before before we got on this call okay and literally all three of them innocently like that goosebumps just straight away yeah well you know what's interesting is I love those three by the way yeah halo one for many reasons one was because it was the very first thing that you know that was composed to represent the Halo universe and it was we're free to go anywhere and you I mean people can watch me talking about the origins of that and singing that melody in the car coming up with the chugging melody I love this I love that bit I mean that that was all just loose and like we just got to get it done and here's a crazy idea let's go so I have a lot of millat of fond memories about how that came to be it's interesting both the path and heavy price paid were pieces that I started working on and I enjoyed them but I thought I don't think there's any place for either of these pieces like when I was doing the path I thought well this is getting me going but it's probably not really gonna end up anyplace cuz it I didn't I was it did it wasn't really representing destiny enough but I liked what I was doing with it so much that I just kept working on it so I'm glad to hear it's got some legs and the same thing with heavy price paid I remember it was a and I think you know I was able to bring that I should do a I might have to do a inception video on heavy price pays all people would absolutely love that I think you know if once again it started just on piano was very simple it was just like these two three note chords and just this progression and I thought well this is a beginning of something but I kept going back to it and liking the sort of simplicity of it and I kept thinking this will sound great in or you know with strings this was fun great in a choir and I was able to do a certain amount of stuff on it on Halo 2 and then I you know this emotional equity idea I wanted to bring it back in Halo 3 yeah so I really enjoy everything I did with that theme but even when I was first working at it I thought well this is just a skeleton for something else it there's probably no real place for it in the game so you just never know yeah so I'm glad to know that so in terms of other pieces like I really like the ecstasy from music of the spheres there's that's another one of those that hits me the way I like and I think i one thing I remember when I was playing you know after we shipped halo 1 I you know we were burned out we just all went home we all stopped and the game finally came out and there was some press about the game and then it was just like well I was thinking we shipped sort of a mess I just it's an unpolished mess there was so much that I thought we needed to do to it and that's because you're when you're working on something you get so close to you see every single flaw that's all you can see yeah so I was kind of surprised by how many people liked it I kind of knew who was good but I thought well it's still flawed and there's still a lot of problems so you know I finally put the commercial version in my xbox started playing and I'm like wow this seems more polished than I remember this is a pretty fun experience and I was able to play it a little bit more like a fan because I sort of wasn't looking so close up at it anymore and I got to this point hmm is it assault on the control room where you're where you're it's nighttime and you you fly a banshee in the snow two betrayals it's the same opposite yes the same ah bu get back I just flipped yeah yeah yeah what a cheat yeah that was on purpose by the way we were like we can't design another level let's flip it and make it night okay hey what is worth I ABS know I think it's a very cool day yeah we did it for emotional equity yeah there you go so anyway I was playing so I guess it was two betrayals and there was something about getting in this banshee and flying up into the night sky and seeing the snow coming at me and then believe it or not this string music came in I don't remember what piece it is but I actually got chills I got like wow this is this is really nice I and that's not me saying oh what a great piece of music it's just like the whole experience Plus that music coming in because I had forgotten what I had implemented and what was gonna happen and it and I was able to go okay this really works for me and I'm experiencing it like someone who's experienced it for the first time and and I I really enjoyed it and I got the little chills up my spine so I know I'm there exactly reach for it you mean it's when you get the first get the banshee and you have to fly to the top of that little like cliff side yeah I know exactly what you mean and I can I can picture flying up into the night sky with the snow coming down I yeah I know what you mean is this very quaint yeah I mean of course what I did as soon as I got that chill I'm like oh I'm gonna fly back down music playing let's see what this is like I wasn't mission oriented I was like experienced oriented I just wanted to have this cool experience and that's one of the things I loved about halo and and that series is that we really let you spend as much time as you want just sort of messing around and exploring and that was one of the things I really enjoyed a lot about ODST is the amount that you could do and just enjoying the environment in any way that I like a combination of all that stuff okay good good one question that I got asked a lot by viewers soldier seven recommended it better so many people asked there is what inspired you to compose a walk in the woods from halo ze the see my absolute fan favorite and there's a good reason okay that's there is a good wonderful question because you just everybody just picked one of the songs that would didn't come out of my head that's a mic some that's a mic Salvatori tune oh really yeah yeah and you remember that back at that point everything about Halo was completely on my shoulders I was in Seattle Mike was in Chicago he was doing work that he was doing and then at some point late in halos development I called him and I said Mike if I throw through some ideas at you could you work on him remotely and if I just said hey I still need some you know I need some walking around music I need some battle music I need some stuff like just throw me anything you come up with and so that's where that one came from that came that came right from Mike he sent me some early work on walk in the woods I at that point when he would send me stuff or I would send him stuff he would add stuff to mine and I would add stuff to his and then sometimes we come back together and combined and yeah that's how the collaboration worked but like yeah if that's one of the pieces that really originated with Mike so you'd have to ask Mike that question okay Mike Mike never I'm speaking for Mike now but Mike never had the burden of sitting inside of Bungie until recently yeah so he never was the assignments that I would give Mike were so loose because I knew he was just a creative person and I'm just like Mike if you've got anything you think is cool just send it to me and so he would just he was just free to do anything he wanted he didn't have to like oh this indicates this or it needs to be at this tempo or it needs to be in this key or this has to fit this encounter I just know that he would just do stuff that he thought was cool and most of the time whatever he did was cool Chen I could figure I could figure out a place to use it so that's walk in the woods interesting very interesting yeah a lot of people are gonna be happy to hear that I am NOT yeah yeah I don't think I've ever had so many requests to ask the same thing to anybody ever so you just made a lot of people happy well it's funny cuz I put it on a video just a couple like a month ago it was like part of the part of the walk I'm doing is a walk up the street in the woods yes yeah I just did a little video of me walking the woods and I thought oh I should share that video and put a walk in the woods on it so it's one of my favorites too so so quote one one seven asks what inspired your incredibly ethereal tone of music and then a sort of little extension to this question that one my friends tags that asked as well is where did you get the idea to use Gregorian chanting from okay well let's do Gregorian chant first that's an easy one it's the believe it or not I had used I was in an early music ensemble when I was getting my master's in composition I sang Gregorian chants all really live with a little group that we would do as part of an ensemble concert so I'm I was well aware of Gregorian chant I just love the way that sounds Gregorian chants always sound ancient yes as soon as Joe Staton said to me yeah we need music that makes you feel ancient epic and mysterious I'm like okay ancient Galleria chat yeah I mean it was like it was so fast I didn't even think twice about it I wasn't thinking about well will this be you know iconic too you know you know 20 years worth of halo well this it was just a very simple decision people want to feel the sense of ancientness Gregorian chant we'll give you that there are other things too but I went with that and then it was just a matter of coming up with a hooky melody that I thought could have lasting value which I would say I was right I kind of got just a little bit and then what was the other thing one what inspired your incredibly ethereal tone of music oh well you know ethereal is just part of us maybe just a style that I have or a preference that I have but not everything is a theory others yeah you know like I don't think drum run is ethereal or you know rockin save the world or Moeller mix but like I would there are times when ethereal music really works nicely it gives us certain mood so I just don't have any problem having you know sad happy you know heroic all the different emotions and all the different ethereal percussive rock-and-roll atonal like yeah whatever works I I'm gonna go through I'm gonna just take all of those buckets and use them and I think if some people tend to gravitate towards certain things that they like the most they sort of think that that's what I did for everything and it's like well yeah yeah not there's all sorts of styles in there to soundtrack I was I was just gonna say hallo to soundtrack felt like the amalgamation of what you were just saying how like you have reclaimer and unyielding and black blew me away in there and we own a mix and then you have like earth city and the songs are quite bombastic and heavy then heavy price paid and wage that really sad and like emotional and then like shallow streets whatever it was called with the guitar that played in new Mombasa ways and then really low guitar with the African chanting I used that song in every single video I adore that so so much that is that's why I walk in the woods well everyone okay everyone loves walk in the woods that is my walk in the woods I adore that so much hey yeah halo 2 really felt like you like you said you really just threw everything into the bucket like there was a type of music that for everybody and it again there's a reason so many people love Halo 2 soundtrack about I feel like that's it honestly oh good that's great so the next question comes from a good friend of mine Richard Simmons what are your most iconic and memorable moment when working on Halo iconic yeah why do you own that term oh it just seems like it's like a joke what is that so I'll give you this story short as possible so a few years ago okay when a few four three took over halo they changed the art style quite a lot they changed the way of a sort of aesthetic of things very staple designs that you guys kept consistent arroyo games were changed and quite a lot of people myself included weren't families of that we like what what people feel made for hill have fallen halo 5 looks really good but it doesn't look halo to a lot of us and the Bungie stuff did so me and a few of the youtubers started making videos talking about why the classic art style should come back and okay the first video that I made about that I wrote it in the middle of University exams I was under so much stress and I was like I need to make this video because this is like a really important deal so I wrote it I didn't even proofread it I just recorded it edited it and uploaded it and then all of a sudden I was getting like hundreds of comments saying take a drink every time this guy says iconic and then I went into the script controls iconic and there were like 72 different times I've said iconic in this and from there on out it was it was a tag line to my channel I guess some would say a meme either way it's a thing now that's the law behind iconic yes all right let me think so in terms of me working on the Halo series I'm not going I already I think I said this one too act man about 9/11 and working oh yeah in the middle of that that's that's a memory that sticks in my head if you want to hear about that memory go watch that interview but there's another one that I'm not sure it's been sort of hinted at in a couple of behind the scenes videos but this is actually true it was during Halo 3's early development when we were really working on the story and I was sort of I was in a leadership position and there was a team the story team was working on it and they kept coming up with different outlines for things and finally there was this outline of the story you know and the structure of how halo 3 was gonna go and I looked at this and I even think there's I'm on camera saying that there was like there was no structure there was no highs there were no lows there was no death and I knew that one of our goals was to make you think as a player that we killed Master Chief at the end I really wanted people to believe Master Chief has done the series is over he died he sacrificed himself to over and done and I looked at the outline that we had and I said this isn't gonna work no one will ever believe that we killed Master Chief because we didn't kill anybody else yeah so I came back with a very short description of plot points that I wanted to see happen in the game first one was Lord hood had to come back because we weren't using him as a character oh really I said I don't know why are we using this new guy let's just use lord hood he makes way more sense so lord hood came because I wanted to work with Ron Perlman again so that's number one has to be there and then the first one to bite it has to be Miranda because everybody's gonna expect us to kill Miranda like that's an easy one so we got to kill Miranda and oh by the way as an aside now I'm gonna I'm not sure if I've ever admitted this before I probably have some place in the Firefly movie which as you can tell we were fans yes surrendered yes I watched serenity and what happened in the movie serenity is this is gonna be spoilers but if you if you had all these characters kin that came from the TV show and these actors that you had fallen in love with and then you're watching this movie that is supposed to be the sort of the wrap-up of Sorento Firefly and the first character that gets reintroduced and then dies is Shepherd Brook and it's sort of like okay yeah he's the guy they're gonna kill it just like they have to kill somebody from the cast so Shepherds the one that killed okay got it and then they kill Alan Tudyk scare achter who was the pilot and they killed him in the middle of him telling a joke it came out of nowhere just like when we kill I'm just gonna say like yeah yeah that's one of the reasons oh wow we steal from everybody it's like there's something really amazing about you know if death can happen at any moment and it can happen in these you know completely like no one was anticipating this so when I saw Alan Tudyk character you know by it I was like what okay now I don't know who's safe like yeah all these characters I love Nathan Fillion yes I think gonna take Captain Mal and kill him then I was actually worried about him dying up until then I wasn't worried about him dying in this movie right yeah so I thought we got to do the same thing if we want people to be actually concerned that Master Chief might die we got to kill some major characters so Miranda first that's the easy one and then we have to kill sergeant Johnson oh I have a profit of trap profit of truth we have to kill him because we weren't even gonna kill profit of truth if you could believe that I said really up bring back the Lord hood well we have to kill Miranda prophet of truth and Sergeant Johnson which will make you want to kill 343 Guilty Spark because otherwise you'll have I mean all of a sudden Guilty Spark has a red laser coming out of his head where did that come from why isn't she so and we almost did that in a cutscene I was that was one of the things I'm like no you have to give the players some simple I don't care if it's just push a to kill Guilty Spark you have to give the player agency and killing guild Guilty Spark we didn't have time to do a good bad boss battle we've never been good at boss bad for what it is so what it's worth for what it's worth halo is never done boss bot was right no I'm his prophet of regret you beat an old man up in a wheelchair are you kidding me that was that was we laugh while we were doing it but we anyway so I knew we had we knew we had to kill Guilty Spark and then the last death had to be sorry Johnson and so when sergeant Johnson died then I said now everybody playing the game is gonna go okay is Cortana safe is Master Chief safe like I wanted everybody to just be sort of on edge anything could happen that didn't go over real well I mean Josie this day still is mad at me for insisting that we kill sergeant Johnson at the time he wasn't working directly on the halo 3 story he was working on the book he was contacting contact columnist yes a service so when he came back in to help write the final script for Halo 3 he was like wait what you're killing sergeant Johnson and he he tried so hard to make us not do it and I that's one of our arguments and to this day we'll argue about that he's still me and you know what maybe it is a mistake but that that was that little series of changes that I said this if this gets if these changes get in the story I think I can make an emotional rollercoaster happen for yeah well have I told her you didn't know this huh I I knew that sergeant Johnson originally wasn't it wasn't gonna get killed by I didn't know that you were the one who dictate why yeah and by the way working with I haven't mentioned David Scully I always forget nothing David Scully and Pete stack or Pete stacker is the guy who did sergeant stacker yeah and also captain Keyes his voice and David Scully did sergeant Johnson and he did the voice of elites and a bunch of other things but those two actors working with them are probably the most fun you can have in a studio both of those actors are so much fun they can do so many different voices they they can't go in and out of character so fast it makes your head spin and add the rule for both of those actors in the studio is record light is always on you don't want to ever lose anything that they might say off the cuff because it's so funny so I mean there's so many good queries that came out David is good he like I would have been in vineyard daddy but the dog beat me over the fence like no that's that stacker stacker either way that's a testament to how good the baby was yeah well we and that came out of nowhere and he said that I remember asking about it he goes yeah it's something we used to say they were when we were kids we would yell at each other as an insult and I love this line so we made it highly we made it this like one of the highest skip fractions you could have in Halo one so if you ever hear it in the original Halo one and there shouldn't be skulls in halo one right that we didn't ship with skulls so that gives fractions down if you hear it in the natural in the wild in halo one you you're really having a treat but that caused us because everybody at Bungie luck liked it so much that's why we made a skull called I would have been your daddy skull because oh lift all the skip fractions and it was even the reason that we we've made a level ISM isn't one of the little tag lines and one of the levels in Halo 1 I would have been your daddy I feel like it is yeah I definitely chose people didn't know why that was there but that's why it was there because we all thought that was a hilarious line I had no idea that was why the school was called that interesting see you you think all this lore comes from comic books and stuff they're real or the developmental law is a whole different ballgame it's a whole new ballgame so moving on a question for my good friend pixel flower what was your favorite non music / audio based thing that you contributed to hallo non music audio based thing nothing music yeah just but audio still oh no no nothing to do with music or audio Oh music or audio oh no no no I mean that I contributed well yeah I mean besides killing just sergeant Johnson's flak for that be interesting on this one so unfortunately this still has audio in it but what I really love that I was able to work on this but it felt more like programming stuff than audio and that's the the loading screens I just love the guy who did the Lord is too special he might have done it for Halo one two and three Adrian oh I can't remember his last name his nickname was Cuban because he's from Cuba anyway Adrian it worked on these loading screens and it just was so much fun to work with Adrian because the loading screens had to happen outside the game engine so it had to be its own little thing it had to be always in the most the smallest amount of bytes you could possibly do and he just did genius work too with the littlest amount of memory possible and he did beautifully elegant things that worked and I'm I'm just glad to have been even sitting with him while he working on some of these loading screens and helping out with those because I for some reason that's a weird thing to say but I love the way loading screens works oh that is not a weird thing to say that is one of the one of the things that I feel like people sleep on most for the original Halo games halo one two and three had the most calming comfy and just like relaxing loading screens halo one in particular I could watch that like blue light slowly pan across the screen for hours on end just listen to the channel background yeah it was so cool and what was great about it I'm like he showed me what he wanted to do and he says is there anything we can do in this tiny amount of space that I have left this audio and I thought wow I don't even know how that's possible so I asked them if he could do a couple of manipulations to a single sound file it's a teeny tiny single sound file that could loop and that he would pitch up and down and he would change where where how it came in and out depending on how long does the loading screen he goes who knows yeah you just if you just played you know Unreal Tournament or something or whatever all games were out at the time as Erick if you just played as Rick you're whole you know internal memory is wiped so when you play Halo it all has to get loaded in again and every level there's no remnant of what you had so the loading screens could take a long time so we have to do something that feels like it's always telling you where you are in the loading process without having numbers without being just a stupid red line I'm Jevon tidge and it we wanted everything to feel and remind you that you're not at home playing in your parents basement you're in the world of halo and everything is halo including the loading screen and I loved working on that yeah halo loading screens are an art form in and of themselves there Adrian my dude just Braavos a great guy brother on to the next one we've always talked about this a little bit but you've worked with some absolutely incredible names throughout your career so like Paul McCartney speed by Ron Perlman Nile Rodgers Breaking Benjamin Incubus and also actors like Nathan Fillion Alan Tudyk is there anyone else left out there whether it's an artist or a band or even a game director or an actor or a voice actor who in an ideal world you'd love to work on a project with oh well we were I'll tell you we were I didn't get to work with Peter Jackson but he came to the studio I have video of him in our studio walking around and you know me shaking his hand hundred K special education yeah that's right I should share that we were so excited when we thought we were going to work with Peter Jackson and two of our you know best a few of our folks went out to New Zealand and stayed with Peter and I remember Joe emailing me saying I'm sleeping in you know Frodo's because it's there yeah Peter Jackson actually has it and you can you can go there and if you're a guest of his you can sleep in the underground and so yeah Joe was there Paul Burton was there oh and you know Paul Burton it's working with high wire now right oh really no I didn't know that you guys you fans you need to do better answer jeez you'd look up Paula Burton's LinkedIn he's well you know me me me Jamie Gries Murr and Paul Burton are working together again I was big news Paul Burton was a big name in the original helix that he's okay Paul one of my favorite designers Jamie and Paul of course I'm gonna say this now but they were probably two of my favorite designers on halo yeah anyway yeah Joe and Paul got to go stay for a couple of weeks I think in New Zealand and work with Peter Jackson for a while and we were so close to doing something and it could have been big it could have been a game it could have been a you know movie there was so many different things that that was gonna turn into and it all fell apart and so I always go out that would have been fine yeah thing to get fulfilled but it will never be probably so I can say somebody should yeah dr. Joe I dude if I could get in touch with Joe I would be over the moon if Joe ever once go on this channel he has a place here he can when everyone I will wake up at 4 a.m. to fit a time oh whatever Joe can come on here whatever absolutely I have Joel can't contradict everything and you know what after that we'll have to get you back on then to contradict everything the perfect cycle it just never run there you go oh never ends feedback yeah yeah I I obviously grew up watching Lord of the Rings I'm a die-hard Lord of the Rings fan and I remember it was 2006 or 7 when we started hearing about the halo Peter Jackson movie I remember freaking out I was only like nine at the time even I remember freaking out hearing about that like the Lord of the Rings guy is gonna be working on a halo like oh and that it all through it all so sad but one day one day maybe you never know no you never know um well I mean that's where the South African movie what was it called London with Blomkamp no no no no well yeah Blomkamp did landfall which was actually really really cool that I was able to contribute to that you know music went into landfall and I helped Blomkamp with that series which was great and I would love to I would love still to work with Neill Blomkamp on whatever he's wants to work out I'm like hey Neil I'm available but what what's the name of that movie he made a district 9 district niya yeah I mean Joe I'm gonna speak for Joe now but Joe has trouble watching that movie because so many of the sort of underlying ideas for district 9 9 came from some of the brainstorming sessions that they had with Peter accent and even the weapons that they use as props in district 9 are just a halo props that we're gonna be part of the Halo series just spray painted white a few knobs taken off and spray painted white and then they use those weapons so Joe looks at that he's like ah what could have been so well Blom Kyle of district district that's a great movie by the way yeah I love this I watched it I remember actually when when it first came out I got a ton DVD cuz I'd heard rumors I'm like 2009 internet forums but it was made from like the skeleton of what was once the Halo movie and I was like I gotta see this and it did resemble it in in a few ways I could see the halo root shining through Neill Blomkamp did announced yesterday actually that he's making a movie again so I mean no really oh that's great I was wondering you never know because he did quite a few things with his own studio OD studios like little short that were really really cool you know he's back doing a proper movie now so I mean there's no time better than the present I look forward to it absolutely yeah there's a lot of great stuff coming out for I just saw that the foundation trilogy is coming to TV in 2021 which is one of my favorite book series so that's not the Isaac Asimov yeah yeah that was really interesting I'm looking forward to that so the next one if you have to swap your role as a game developer or participate in any other aspect of game design what would it be and why and that is the Med Peter yeah I think I'm not saying I'd be good at this but I wouldn't I mean I think anybody who's in game development and used to have a certain amount of design skill I would love to be a designer game designer could but because of to me those are the people who really that are at the top level of making game yeah I don't want to be a program or a programming is boring I I don't mind doing art I do some painting and I have some artistic skills but nothing compared to these artists that I've worked with over all these years who are just off the charts amazingly talented but I do have I think I do have a sort of a soft spot in my heart for certain design principles and design ideas I would need a lot of help though but I wouldn't mind spending you know a long time working on game design interesting interesting ok next one is question that I want to ask you what is your favorite game or franchise outside of the ones that you've worked on now I know that with ax man you spoke about games that you'd like to work on other franchises but you'd like to work on and obviously Zelda came up but this question is meant more so just a franchise or a game that you're just a fan of outside of Halo well I'm I think I probably said this too but I'm a fan of the people who made eco and share all the classes and whatever the latest whatever that other one was they finally made I love those games I think I love the sensibility and then I also I love the flow journey people I think they make really really interesting games yeah definitely so those are games I love I mean I still I mean I actually love actually playing Zelda yeah not only would I like to work in I love playing Zelda and there are other games that I enjoy you know I haven't played The Last of Us - but my understanding is that it's what have you played it oh no no no I've not played it and I still need to play the first one I've been mean to paid for somehow a long time the first one we don't finish the first one I didn't finish the first one which is making me suspicious of whether how much I'll actually like Last of Us - but everybody I respect tells me it's great so already ok ok what why didn't you why didn't you play the first one so I only I didn't own a Playstation at all until two years ago like so when I was younger I was a die-hard xboxone fanboy because of okay because of Halo and I always thought it'd be just wrong for me to get a Playstation and then finally I just I open my eyes my little eyes that's insane and bought a PlayStation a few years ago and I'm currently working through my massive backlog of PlayStation exclusives like I'm playing through God of War right now which is absolutely fantastic it's incredible it's quite ironic as well actually because I grew up alongside playing Halo I grew up playing Metal Gear Solid which was for a long time a PlayStation exclusive as well right but yeah I've not played The Last of Us yet cuz it's on my list it's on them in my backlog but I've heard the interesting things should we say about the Last of Us - I think from a technical standpoint it's a masterpiece from a narrative standpoint I've heard conflicting things let's leave that I I know there's some controversial things yeah some things but anyway I'm looking forward to it I love the fact that they're stretching in different ways I own you know the other game like there are David cage games and I I mean we call them David cage games because he's so involved in every aspect of the his games and I think some of them are genius and some of them fall short but I really enjoyed playing Detroit become human oh yeah it has some it has some of it has some okay I'm this is not a game criticism interview but like it there are some things about it I don't like but there were some some things about it that I thought really pushed some boundaries that I really really enjoyed and I really enjoyed replaying some levels and seeing the way things change in branch and they just did from a technical standpoint they just did some really amazingly beautiful things so I enjoyed it I thought it was an amazing experience okay good a question from literally god so apparently God is asking you a question interesting what is your personal favorite movie score and have you ever taken inspiration from a movie score when working on a game oh wow that is I don't know if I have a single favorite movie score I I feel like my favorite movie composer is probably Jerry Goldsmith I also James Horner I mean there's some just amazing amazing composers than the movie side but I would have to say Jerry Goldsmith and his score for example two alien the first alien is just a absolutely gorgeous score that might be one of the top top film scores of all time for me the other one is much much older it's the scored have been her by Nicholas Rosa that was hugely influential on me when I was a little kid because it it I heard it probably when I was six years old or five years old my dad brought home the double album of the score to Ben Hur so I didn't know what the movie was all I had was the music and I would listen to that music and try to imagine in my head what was going on and it was so evocative and it was so powerful that I think that's that's a definite influence for me too just to want to do that for a you know for my career yeah or you know for my life right jack oh yeah interesting um okay so this one is I imagine gonna get quite a spicy answer her Munster chav asks what were your thoughts when you heard that buns you were leaving Activision hmm feel free to be as well open or as close as you want part of me was well it's about time the other part of me was gee I hope they get bought so then I'll get bought out on my stock so by the way which didn't happen so yeah I still have I'm still holding a nice chunk of stock nice Bungie waiting waiting for them either to get bought or to go public nice or bankrupt if they go bankrupt then that's the end of my Bungie stock so I have there's a wide wide range of possibilities there yeah well because I was in leadership and I was on the board of directors when we went with Activision I mean if there's any blame for going to Activision I'm part of it okay there were seven other or said there were seven of us total I think of course seven goes through it anyway yeah that made that deal made that deal with Activision and it was we knew it was a risk right from the get-go and then it turned out to be exactly as bad as we now yeah I'm the only one who's gonna say that except anybody who no longer works for bungie and then everybody who no longer works for pleasure she's gonna say yeah it was bad from the start if you still work for Bungie you're gonna be political and you're gonna say all sorts of things about oh we had a good partnership and blah blah blah you know at the time came for us to go our separate ways because we each had different goals and but we were happy and we love each other and yeah that's the scripted I myself that's BS there's so many scripted answers out there that I hear and I'm just like yeah that's just just not right this just didn't happen yet so yeah basically it's like well that's about time there's that was not a marriage made in heaven at all nah not particularly and and you know the thing and I remember this to this day like the reason why we went with Activision was not just the money but it was because as part of the contract they didn't own the IP now remember Microsoft owns the halo IP and we wanted to make sure whoever we were going to work with next would not own the IP we would own the IP and that was a non-negotiable for me personally I just kept saying we should we need to be able to own and control the IP and Activision agreed to that and the all the other big players during that period would not agree to do that including Microsoft who was very close to making out of serious we almost went back to Microsoft if you can believe it wow that's crazy after yeah cuz obviously he sold halo to Microsoft in 2007 I think and then gave him back to them with destiny would have been I would have an interesting I wonder how things would have work saying well you you you've been too young through this whole thing didn't sell halo to Microsoft in 2007 we sold it to Microsoft in 2000 we sold we sold Bungie and halo the whole ball of wax was sold to Microsoft in 2000 which is the thing that it's like okay well we don't Bungie no longer exists it's a fiction yeah it's a business division inside of Microsoft they could have said you can't call yourself Bungie any more and we then we wouldn't and they owned halo so it was like okay they own halo they own Bungie great if 2007 our deal was we will do will give you halo 3 but you got to give us Bungie okay so we never it was never gonna be possible for us to take Halo with us so it was like whatever IP we do we're gonna own and we're gonna own Bungie and for that we will give you halo 3 and it turned out we had to give him halo 3 ODST and rich but that was ok with us too because we actually were able to participate in the profits on all three of those games yeah and it helped launch Bungie and work on destiny so anyway in 2007 we got our independence but we didn't sell halo we never we sold halo in 2004 mm okay that's interesting I think I finally watched Ian to realize that I always thought that you hold the IP until 2007 but yeah obviously no and which is one of the reasons why I said look whatever new deal we make with the new publisher it can't be the same kind of deal we made with Microsoft we have to hold on we hold on to ownership of ourselves Bungie and we should own the IP and that was the agreement that Activision gave us which was like an Activision it's like and we won't mess with the IP okay interesting right so moving on we have a question but by the way I'm just gonna tell you this here's the spicy Oh whole Activision not only didn't have the legal right to mess with the IP but the only way they would be prevented from messing with the IP is if all the leadership at Bungie said you can't mess with the IP and that's not what happened and that's when it's better yeah that's not exactly what - is it not not even close no and I was like that was probably my biggest disappointment was like yeah we we worked for a decade to make sure we could be in a position where we could stand up to the publisher saying no we own the IP you can't mess with it and I was overruled and then eventually let go some real shame because Activision Activision getting a hold of Bungie in that way was like they had the Golden Goose and they've managed to just the mother should ruin it I don't know if that whole situation is okay right now oh I'm sitting at a dinner with the head folks from Activision this is before we signed the contract was just before we signed it and I'm sitting at dinner with them you know Bobby Kotick is there some yeah you know see is a chief financial officer guy from Vienna School of Economics is there a bunch of us from the seven leadership of Bungie is there and I'm sitting next to this Austrian guy and he said hey Marty I hear that I probably told this story before but I'm gonna tell it for you I hear that you have this saying be nice to the goose and I'm like yeah see nice to the goose because well tell me what that means and I told them you know it's like you know it's important to be nice to the goose because the goose is the-- is where they the golden egg comes from and so the goose is the team that made it and sometimes it's hard to identify but if you're nice to them you'll get more golden eggs you know but if you if you're not nice to them you won't get golden eggs and he goes yeah I like that story golden eggs the goose you know but sometimes there's nothing like a good foie gras oh no surely that was a big red flag hey you know I told you about this chill on the back of my neck well I guess I'll I get a chill even telling that story I did the red flag went off you know I'm in the middle of sipping some wine and he says that and I'm like oh my god I felt like I was in a Twilight Zone episode like what I should have done is stood up flipped the table and told all the other Bungie guys we have to get away from here now run but that only happens in my dreams yeah a good foie gras and by the way if the glasses this is right at the same exact moment that they were eviscerating the guys have made call of duty yeah and it's Jason yeah yeah yeah Infinity Ward mm-hmm yeah cuz it was just off the motor well Betty came out yeah and so you know they were they were doing that they were eating the liver of Infinity Ward right while I was sitting at that table and it's like oh my gosh I thought we were protected from them doing that and I was wrong and I should have taken my my gut instinct was this is bad we shouldn't do this yeah that's hindsight though yeah hindsight's 20/20 I mean like you said it sounded like a really good deal from the get-go that I'm not ruining the IP and also giving you all the benefits that the other publishers publishers would give you that seems like a good deal but yeah yeah it is what it is hindsight's 20/20 it's in the past now it is removing forward yeah and in that fashion let's move forward to the next question so this question comes from Kitty rules and they asked how did transitioning from a massive studio like Bungie to a smaller indie studio like high-wire feel was there like a sort of relief that you could finally do things that you're in peace without a publisher bearing down on you yeah it's a relief and then it has its own individual problems so you realize why there's some you know having big teams and huge piles of publisher money protect you from lots of things yeah so there's there's good and bad about them but overall it's it's such a relief to be able to be in a small team and when we make the decision that's what we do and we're only limited by our capability you know there's at this point now there's like just around 30 of us so there's still only so much you can do 30 is a nice sized team but I mean we weren't that much bigger when we made halo 1 so but the technology has changed and the expectations have changed but we you know it's it's really nice to be able to go to a meeting and make a decision and that's the decision there isn't like 20 more meetings with 20 more teams that are 50 people each and every ass changed no BS what ended up happening in the size size of a studio like Bungie towards the end of my time there and Jamie felt the same way Jamie had left Bungie earlier and then gone to do its to sucker-punch to do in infinite second son oh yeah I remember that game yeah and you know he he also felt the same still focus he was frustrated at Bungie because the team's got so big and then he was he got somewhat frustrated at soccer points too because they kept getting bigger and the decisions were harder to make yeah we'll stick with but a bad high wire it's just like this is it it's just us we decide this then we better go do it because that's hard yeah and it feels better I wish we could get I wish were able to turn things around a little bit faster it's not like you can just give an assignment to a team now we are the team yeah and like I'm like on Gollum there was we had difficulties with publisher we were essentially the publisher but the funding came from Sony and and there were some difficulties during the development of that which meant that we've shipped a lot later than we wanted to and that that we missed I think a window of opportunity but anyway yeah there's it's it's a relief I'd rather work with a small team that a giant corporation yeah all teams now are just getting even bigger I read you the dare Jennifer what game it was but it was quite a big triple-a game had a team of like eleven hundred people and surely like I'm no game developer by any means but surely not the amount of bureaucracy with that with like and I like Chinese whispers with sending messages along from team to team to team must be insane like I don't know how you could you know collaborate accurately with eleven hundred people it's just it's insane then again I don't think you you can't say that you really can't I mean you certainly probably can't do anything very innovative most likely and you will find a sort of watering down of any edgy vision because it just goes through too many committees yeah so you know I mean this is what I'm looking forward to last of us to because that I know is a big team and it's super high quality and I mean it was like the it's like the last god of war that was that had a real sense of a singular vision to it which I hand it to is Cory Barlow I think yeah Cory bog with the director burn along yeah and I you know I I don't know how they do that that's an amazing feat it really is yeah and the last question for the day again to the end now is a question from Owen Spencer I'm pretty sure you spoken to you before yeah Owens good guy and and he sent me a bunch of questions but I I had to know how to just pick one and I this is one but I couldn't skip on because I went back to your channel and I realized that there were a few videos that I'd missed and one of them was about this so Marty can you tell us a bit more about your Christmas album deal of promise to make it I I know for one personally I would buy a Marty O'Donnell Christmas album yeah that came out of nowhere I was doing this thing as part of sort of promotion for Gollum which was around the Christmas season it was for purp games and they pretty much let me do whatever I want and I thought well I'll put some you know I'll talk to the people but it's Christmas time so it was a you know it was the 12 days of Christmas or whatever it was an advent calendar yeah and I was I was the last one to open I thought well I need to be Christmassy right so I'll have the Christmas tree and I'll have a red sweater and I'll be drinking eggnog smoking a pipe I'd you know I had all these little ideas in my head then I thought well you know I should put I should put some I'm looking to make sure I still have hard to space left we've been going for so long so yeah I thought I should put some I should do some Christmas music so once again I just I put my hands on the keyboard and I started playing silent night and I came up with this little interesting way of doing silent night and I kept working on it and I worked you know all Sunday afternoon on this version of silent night and I played it for my wife she goes wow I really like that give that to me so I did so I dedicated it to my wife Marcy who's the pianist and you know put it on the video and then I I did it as a separate video to just so people could just hear silent night yeah during Christmas time and then I said gee maybe I should do a Christmas album sometime so it's just it's a thought that's in the back of my head I'm sorry Owen I haven't spent another second working on a Christmas album but that doesn't mean I'm not going to I would like to I think it would be fun people seem like they would like it I mean there's it's impossible to make a living writing and doing music anymore unless you're part of a team like making a game yeah or on a movie so just doing albums I don't know how to make money doing that but that doesn't mean I wouldn't make a Christmas album just for the joy of doing that so that might happen I mean I can say for sure it's something that people would definitely want to listen to you say I mean the audience is there that's all I'm saying okay I'll get back to working on that right so I think that about wraps it up for today Marty this has been a long a long video so thank you so much for coming and doing it with me I honestly appreciate it so much this has been a blast I've enjoyed this so much yeah I again for the 3 billion of time thank you very much well you're welcome Luke it's great hearing your voice and talk any more and I will never refer to you as the British guy but you know what I noticed I noticed you still haven't told me your last name so obviously you don't want that to go out in public which is fine it's classified Luke Luke is your Luke is your first name right yeah yeah yeah leak it's a weird French spelling yeah yeah I was like sure Luke I was named after a cyclist or something they sell it like that there you go that's the law behind my name yeah thanks stuffing by degree time absolutely absolutely thanks stuffing by mine I appreciate it bye everybody poof that was that's quite the video massive thank you once again to Marty for coming on to say that it was an honor is the understatement of the century quite honestly I just really hope that you guys enjoyed it this video was a long time coming Marty actually hit me up the morning after he did that video with the American guy forgotten he forgot his name and it was it was amazing to just finally be able to sit down and talk with the legend himself for an hour or two he's truly the greatest of honors and so I want to give a massive thank you to our two newest primordial x' Matthew rattling thunder and rye and also our two newest iconic ones the Carson and and Rudy for the support over on patreon and of course everyone else as well the support over there at the moment is absolutely crazy I can't quite believe it honestly um so yeah I I really appreciate you guys and thank you all so much for watching as well I really appreciate every single one of you and I'll catch you all in the next one oh wait a minute this wasn't this was on pause

Channel: HiddenXperia

Views: 434,923

Rating: 4.9524102 out of 5

Keywords: halo, marty o'donnell, halo infinite, microsoft, bungie, activision, destiny, destiny 2, marty o'donnell halo, halo music, hiddenxperia, xbox, destiny 2 dlc, bungie halo, halo 2 development, infinity ward, halo 2 soundtrack, halo 3 soundtrack, halo ce soundtrack, the act man, 343 industries, halo lore, halo 2 anniversary, halo mcc pc, halo 3 pc, xbox july event, halo interview, halo soundtrack, soundtrack, composer, interview, podcast, MCC, destiny soundtrack, ign, PC Gamer, Gamepost

Id: 0zG18XfsnvI

Length: 116min 18sec (6978 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 06 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/DJ_R3ACH]

I love how much Marty is willing to talk to fans. He’s a national treasure.

[u/JordanW20]

This is a really good interview. My biggest takeaway was the story about how he wasn't allowed to be contacted/consulted about remastered music. Seems like the guys who worked on it went through a lot of unnecessary hell because of this.

[u/convicted_loser]

His story about Activision was horrifying! He told them his moto was "be nice to the goose" (the goose being the game developers) becuase it's the one making the golden eggs. Only for the rep. to respond with the idea that a cooked goose is good too now and then.

[u/hotshot117]

Omgg it's the legend

[u/HaloCrysisKIA88]

Wow yea bungie was way better off sticking with Microsoft

[u/Metatermin8r]

Fantastic interview, though I do dissagree with Marty's take on H2:A's blur cutscenes. Is the transition kinda jarring? Eh, I guess, but with the remastered designs matching the cutscenes so well its not bad. Blur's work really comes off as how Bungie envisioned Halo 2 looking instead of how it ended up looking (which was obviously impressive and next generation stuff at the time).

[u/TheOutSpokenGamer]

I really like Marty's old school philosophy of game design even if i don't 100% agree with everything.

I find it really interesting he was one of the only people at Bungie to disagree with Arbiter being a playable character and i wonder how the games would have played out if they used what HiddenXperia suggested where you play as a generic elite who witnesses Arbiter's story. Certainly, 16 years later we know you can play as the character of a game and feel the emotional connection to them but it would have been neat to see how Halo 2 played out had they made Arbiter a non-playable character but tried to tell his story using another 'blank' shell character such as the Chief.

I also like his stance on the transmedia situation regarding 343's storytelling methods, which by no means may be a popular opinion here but I've always viewed the games as the 'primary' vessel of storytelling much like Marty. The novels and comics were just methods to expand my knowledge of the Halo universe and the more 'irrelevant' details aside from the main story.

I always love hearing Marty talk about Halo and i really like his channel so this was a great interview and a great 'behind the scenes' look into the industry and the Halo franchise.

[u/RedditIsTotalitarian]

Major highlight: Marty explains that Activision legally could not interfere in the IP of Destiny without a unanimous decision from the board of 7 Bungie executives agreeing to allow them to. Marty opposed all interference from Activision, and this is why he was fired.

Not only did Microsoft totally screw Marty and doctor his creative property without consultation, modern Bungie kicked him out of his own company for $$$...

Justice for Marty!!!