Once upon a time, Halo was set to secure an MMO dubbed ‘Titan’, pieced together by Ensemble Studios, a company shut down in January 2009. In a scalding post on social media, Sandy Petersen, who had been with Ensemble since the 1990s, revealed that Don Mattrick, former overseer of the Xbox brand, killed the project to protect his corporate bonus.
This pulling back of the curtain is a fiery look back at the scrapping of a game that, on paper, sounded very interesting.
Titan Was a Prequel MMO in the Halo Universe
In a post on social media, Sandy Petersen, who was once a level designer working on Doom and Quake before joining Ensemble Studios, revealed why Halo’s ‘Titan’ MMO never saw the light of day:
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.
It was all brought to naught when Don Mattrick realized that his stock bonus was based on the income MS had from games in 3 years.
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 revealed that the would-be Halo MMO would have featured an expansive universe that allowed players to assume control of Forerunners or Covenant characters. The Flood also had a starring spot in the game, but wouldn’t have been playable, of course.
The quest lines were mapped out, the homeworlds were designed, and Microsoft estimated that the game would have made a whopping $1.1 billion.
Petersen went on to further slam Mattrick, settling on it being part of the executive’s nature in the industry:P
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 and the wider Ensemble Studios team were tasked with bringing to life this ancient Halo setting, and the game was seemingly deep in development when the plug was pulled, and the hand on the cable was Don Mattrick’s. It was once suggested that Titan would have taken unique concepts, such as time travel, and taken a deep dive into the lore of Halo.
Don Mattrick served as the President of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment arm, overseeing the strategy of Xbox until he departed from the firm in 2013 to instead serve as the CEO of Zynga.
Halo’s Titan isn’t to be confused with Blizzard’s Titan MMO, another canceled game that came to a head after an $80 million investment.
Do you wish we’d seen the Halo MMO that Ensemble Studios was working on? Let me know what you’re thinking about the project on the Insider Gaming Discord server.
For more Insider Gaming coverage, check out the news that a Harry Potter x Fortnite collaboration might be coming
Grant has been gaming for 30+ years and in the industry for 10+. You'll probably find him playing a post-apocalyptic game or an extraction shooter somewhere.
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