Sandy Petersen, one of the designers of Halo Wars, Age of Empires, Quake, and Doom and the author of Call of Cthulu, revealed that Microsoft and Don Mattrick scrapped a Halo MMO that was in development by Ensemble Studios.
In a post to X, “Petersen shared, “In 2008, Ensemble Studios started planning a gigantic MMO set in the Halo universe. 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.”
“I was in charge of the universe-building - planet histories, alien species, etc,” he continued. “You could play either as Forerunners or their enemies, the Covenant. The Flood, of course, was in the game, but not playable. We had quest lines all worked out, homeworlds for all the species, etc. etc.”
The game was estimated to bring in revenue of $1.1 billion. However, Petersen revealed the project was scrapped “when Don Mattrick realized that his stock bonus was based on the income MS had from games in 3 years.”
Mattrick was the President of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business from February 2006 to June 2013. He previously worked at EA and was its President of its WorldWide Studios from June 1991 to February 2005.
Petersen continued, “You see, we estimated 3.5 years to finish Titan if we did it right. And that’s beyond Mattrick’s drop dead date.
“So by firing ALL of Ensemble, he didn’t have to pay for our expensive studio for 3 years and he didn’t care about Titan,” Petersen added. “All he lost was a game studio who never sold less than 3 million copies of everything we made. I don’t believe he did justice to MicroSoft stockholders but hey - Don started as an EA hatchet man so what would you expect?”
Petersen’s comments echo what Dust Monk, who also worked on Halo Wars and Age of Empires at Ensemble Studios told Kotaku back in 2010. He said, “We had all this incredible talent, we had the right people, the right passion, we had a phenomenally successful IP – the Halo IP.”
“[But Microsoft] were looking really hard at the Nintendo Wii and they were really excited by the numbers that the Wii was turning. So part of this changing of the guard at Microsoft came along with the changing of the attitude to this very expensive, very long and very protracted $90 million USD project we were working on. To cut a long story short, Titan was closed down,” he said.
Monk also informed Engadget, “It was absolutely going to compete against WoW. You have to remember that Ensemble came from a standpoint of being really good at competing against Blizzard Entertainment.”
He then reiterated his comments to Kotaku, “Microsoft, from its gaming division, was really changing directions. They were looking really hard at the Nintendo Wii and they were really excited by the numbers that the Wii was turning. This was about the time that Microsoft decided that its Xbox platform and XBLA really needed to go more in the direction of appealing to a more casual, broader audience.”
Dave Pottinger, Ensemble’s Director of Technology, also spoke about the game and Ensemble getting shut down with Shack News in 2008 . When asked if this was part of an overall strategy at Microsoft he answered, “They... they have a plan. We’re not in it the way that we used to be. It’s... they’re making the choice that they need to make to be profitable, and make the right choice for the shareholders and things like that. It’s hard to look at the stuff Ensemble’s done and equate those two things, and justify it in that sense, but...”
When asked about the MMO, he shared, “Ensemble has been wanting to make an MMO for a long time. That was in production for a long time. The Halo IP was a great IP to launch an MMO with. Microsoft... hasn’t had the best track record with those.
“And we worked on it for a long time--we had staffed up an almost-40 person team. And then there was some reorganization at Microsoft, and the new bosses thought it wasn’t the best idea anymore. It had actually been green-lit, and then it got cancelled after that.”
He additionally revealed, “The Covenant weren’t quite the Covenant yet. That idea of that sort of stylized approach to Halo was something that we were very interested in, in terms of the art. Some of the art that leaked out wasn’t art that was actually in the game, so people were a little more torqued than they needed to be.”
“But it felt very Halo--we had a combat demo that felt like a very action-oriented MMO, but still had that MMO depth. So it was very analogous to the RTS that we worked on,” he added.