INTERVIEW: Bungie Talks Microsoft Split

October 7th, 2007, 20:46 Posted By: wraggster

Brian Jarrard, franchise and community director for Bungie explains how a phenomenally successful wholly-owned studio can up and walk away from its parent. Next-Gen's interview within...

* How exactly does this whole "split" work out? How does a studio that was acquired in 2000, a wholly-owned studio, just get up and take off with its name and studio intact?
* Well, it was an interesting set of discussions, as you can imagine. It's been going on for quite a while. Ultimately, it was something that we had to do as a group to creatively continue to expand and continue what we want to do. As [Bungie's Jason Jones] so aptly put it, we're a shark that just has to keep moving to stay alive, otherwise we felt that we'd start to stagnate and potentially lose interest, and maybe even lose some of our teams.
Fortunately for us, Microsoft realized that, and they've been very accommodating to help us work through this and come to an arrangement that ultimately is going to reinvigorate and empower Bungie to continue to do great games and make great games for Microsoft's platforms, as well as getting more Halo games to come from our studio as well.
At the same time, it gives us the freedom down the road to explore other opportunities and challenge ourselves and keep us engaged in what we do. It was about putting together a deal where both groups could get what they're after.

* This also means that Bungie can go multiplatform. We know that Bungie will be concentrating on the Xbox 360, but has Bungie been able to tinker around with other platforms? What do you think of PS3, Wii and the handhelds?
* To be honest, we haven't really put any serious thought into that at all right now. Typically speaking, that opportunity could exist for us down the road and possibly those prospects are exciting for some of our engineers, but on the other hand, we've only made one game for the 360 and that game happened to turn out very, very well. The platform's been really good to us, Microsoft has been really good to us. So for now we're just taking it all in stride. We've got our hands full with some 360 commitments and that's going to keep us occupied for quite a while.
Beyond that, anything's possible, but it's too early to say. We don't have any dev kits in the building for other platforms. There's nothing like that going on right now.

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