The Halo saga could have taken a real turn in the early 2010s. Ensemble Studios, which was also working on the Age of Empires franchise at the time, had begun to imagine a Halo MMORPG as early as 2006.
Of course, this « Titan » project never saw the light of day, and the company was shut down by Microsoft in January 2009. Sandy Petersen, who had been working for the developer since the 1990s, revealed the details of this cancellation. In a message on X, Petersen targets Don Mattrick, who was then CEO of Xbox.
It was Mattrick who was behind the decision to abandon the Halo MMO. He apparently wanted to protect his stock bonus, which was based on the revenue of Microsoft’s gaming division over the next three years.
*« In 2008, Ensemble Studios began development on a massive MMORPG set in the Halo universe. We called it Titan. The story was set tens of thousands of years in the past, before the Halos were activated and wiped out all intelligent life in the galaxy.”
All of that was wiped out when Don Mattrick realized that his stock bonus was based on the revenue Microsoft would generate from video games over the next three years.
You see, we estimated that it would take us three and a half years to complete Titan if everything went smoothly. And that went pass Mattrick’s deadline.
By firing EVERYONE at Ensemble, he didn’t have to pay for our expensive studio for three years, and he didn’t care about Titan. »
This MMO was extremely ambitious. Players could have played as Forerunners or Covenants. Sandy Petersen added that the quests were already planned and the worlds designed. The total cost of the project was estimated at around $1.1 billion.
Petersen ended his explanation with a sharp criticism of Mattrick.
« All he lost was a video game studio that never sold less than 3 million copies of anything we produced. I don’t think he did justice to Microsoft’s shareholders, but hey, Don started out as a henchman at EA, so what did we expect? »
Don Mattrick left Microsoft in 2013 after disastrous communication surrounding the Xbox One. He then became CEO of Zynga (a company specializing in mobile games), which he left barely two years later due to unsatisfactory results.
