Back in 2005, rumors swirled of a Halo MMO in development with Age of Empires developer Ensemble Studios. The project came to an abrupt end in 2008 when Microsoft shuttered the studio, however one of the developers on the MMO has spilled the beans on the lost game–and why it was cancelled.
Sandy Peterson, known for his work on the Call of Cthulu TTRPG and Doom before he moved to Ensemble, has posted a thread on X with his recollections about the doomed Halo MMO, which was codenamed Titan. He says that he was in charge of the universe-building for the project, which was going to be set in the far past before the Halos destroyed all sentient life in the galaxy.
“The lowest estimate we & Microsoft had for the game’s total income was $1.1 billion,” Peterson claims. Earlier reports about the cancelled MMO backed up Microsoft’s early commitment to the ambitious project, saying that Titan had been allocated a massive $90 million budget.
According to Petersen, the problem arose when Don Mattrick, who was promoted to head of Xbox in 2007, “realized that his stock bonus was based on the income MS had from games in 3 years.” This timing was problematic for Titan, which Petersen said was estimated at the time to need 3.5 years to finish properly.
“And that’s beyond Mattrick’s drop dead date,” Petersen concludes. “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 doesn’t say whether he saw proof that this was the case, or if this is just his read on the situation, but earlier reports on Ensemble’s closure also noted office politics as one of the main factors in the studio’s demise.
Mattrick’s reign at Xbox was largely an unpopular one with fans, with the exec presiding over the Kinect, the much-maligned dashboard redesign, and the disastrous launch of the Xbox One. “All he lost was a game studio who never sold less than 3 million copies of everything we made,” Petersen added on the Ensemble closure. “I don’t believe he did justice to Microsoft stockholders but hey – Don started as an EA hatchet man so what would you expect?”
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