A BFG blast of a tweet.
Doom level designer Sandy Petersen has taken to X (formerly Twitter) to explain the closure of Ensemble Studios, where he worked in the 2000s. According to Petersen, Ensemble and its in-development Halo MMO were scuttled by Xbox boss Don Mattrick to protect a short-term, profit-based bonus he was elligible to receive.
„In 2008, Ensemble Studios started planning a gigantic MMO set in the Halo universe“, said Petersen. „We code-named it Titan. It was to take place tens of thousands of years ago, before the Halos were set off & destroyed all sentient life in the Galaxy.“
Petersen was in charge of sketching out the setting and lore of this primeval Halo galaxy, and he said that Titan was at an advance stage in development when it was canceled, which is corroborated by prior accounts of the game’s development—here’s an album of screenshots and in-game models allegedly sourced from the project.
Petersen claims that the „lowest estimate we & Microsoft had for the game’s total income was $1.1 billion“, which is a staggering sum for any game to pull in. For context, Deadline reported in 2021 that the entire Halo franchise had reached 81 million copies sold at the time. Back of the napkin math at $60 a copy puts the series‘ revenue from game sales at around $5 billion after 20 years of existence.
While possibly a typo, Petersen’s note that Titan started development in 2008 doesn’t line up with prior accounts of the game’s development which have the project starting in 2004 and getting canceled in mid-2007, around Don Mattrick’s July, 2007 ascension as head of Xbox.
