Who was to blame for the cancellation of the Halo MMO game?

The MMO version of the Halo game fell victim to the greed of a Microsoft executive, leading to the closure of its development studio.

According to Insider Gaming, long ago, the Halo universe, one of the best Xbox games, was supposed to expand with a massive online game codenamed Titan. This project was being developed by Ensemble Studios, but the studio closed in January 2009. Now, Sandy Petersen, the legendary designer of games like Doom and Quake and a long-time member of Ensemble, has revealed in a scathing post that Don Mattrick, then head of the Xbox brand, destroyed Halo Titan simply to protect his stock bonus.

According to Petersen, Titan was meant to be an MMO set in the Halo universe, taking place tens of thousands of years before the rings fired and destroyed intelligent life in the galaxy. He wrote: “In 2008, we started designing a massive MMO in the Halo universe codenamed Titan. Players were supposed to play as Forerunners or Covenant members, and even the Flood was present in the story, though not playable.”

World design, missions, and storylines had begun, and Microsoft even predicted the game would generate over $1.1 billion in revenue. But everything fell apart when Don Mattrick realized his stock bonus was calculated based on Microsoft’s three-year revenue. “We estimated Titan would take about 3.5 years to build, which was beyond his three-year window. So, by completely shutting down the studio, he didn’t have to pay our costs for another three years, and he didn’t care at all if Titan was destroyed.”

Petersen went on to accuse Mattrick of “short-sighted and callous thinking”: “He only lost a game studio that sold at least three million copies of every game it made. I don’t think he served Microsoft shareholders well. But what could you expect? Don started his career at EA as an axe-man.”

According to former Ensemble members, Titan was supposed to combine novel concepts like time travel and exploring the mythical origins of the Forerunners within a massive MMO, something that could have fundamentally expanded Halo’s history. But all those ideas were buried with the dissolution of the studio. Don Mattrick later served as head of Microsoft’s entertainment division until 2013, and after leaving the company, he was appointed CEO of Zynga.