Matt's Halo Updates - Search results for fun
Friday, October 05, 2001
It's Halo Update Birthday Party time here at Bungie HQ. Bungie-blue balloons stamped with Halo logos carpet the ceiling. Strategically-placed strobes and disco balls spackle the room with light. In the portion of the office formerly known as "the Oni room," a band is playing. Liquor and laughter flow in equal measure. And here I sit at my desk, trying to think up what may very well be the last Halo Update.
Suddenly the music stops, as though someone has pulled the plug on the band - and indeed, someone has. A chillingly familiar voice, hoarse from years of whiskey, shouts "Play it, damn you! PLAY IT" Someone says, "Okay, okay, we'll play it." Power is restored, the band begins to play, and the gravelly voice begins to sing:
"Roll out the barrel...We'll have a barrel of fun..."
Marty walks briskly into the room shared by the Sin-O-MatiXXX and Online Teams, heading straight for the soundproof safety of his studio. "You might want to write that from home," he shouts to me. "The Webmaster's back." The studio door closes. Three deadbolts slam home.
I ponder this new development. We had often joked that the Webmaster could smell an open bottle or spiked punch bowl anywhere in whichever hemisphere he happened to occupy at the time, but this is one of those jokes that is only funny because it's true. Whenever the Bungie Webmaster departs on one of his extended "HTML research missions," inevitably stories and lawsuits make their way back to us through third parties. Last thing we heard, the Webmaster was trekking across Nepal, trying to track down the Abominable Snowman and strongarm him into signing the rights to the name "Yeti" to Bungie in perpetuity. There was also a rumor that he was locked up in Kansas, where a group of scientists thought he might fill a few gaps in the fossil record and get evolution back in the textbooks. There are a million Webmaster stories and it's always tough to know which ones actually happened. In any case, he has somehow learned of the enormous volume of free booze in the office and has returned in rare form.
Amidst the din, I think back to this time last year. I started writing weekly Halo Updates because everyone wanted to know what was happening with the game and nothing had been said in a long while. Cynical folks were inventing and dispensing rumors: Halo was done but Bill Gates was making us sit on it, Halo was cancelled, Halo was just nothing but pre-rendered CGI Bungie made to yank people's chains and attract well-heeled buyers. It struck me that I could say "That's all bogus" but I say that all the time and nobody believes me. The only chance I had to prevent the cynics and bullies from poisoning the minds of Bungie Fans was to strike back with as much factual data as I could. Tell people what we were doing; not just that we were working but what we were working on and why it was cool. Of course 99% of it was stuff that was too secret to talk about, but in the worst case I could at least allude to it. I became a Master of Allusion.
A thundering sound and a black-and-brown blur to my left. The Webmaster has discovered the pony ride in the parking lot and gotten the pony inside the building. Up to the second floor, no less. I didn't think the elevators here could handle that sort of weight. The Webmaster gallops down the hall, his giant yellow foam hat flapping in the breeze. The staccato clop of galloping hooves. Breaking glass. Terrified Microsoft employees running for their lives. "GIDDYUP LIL DOGGIES!" the Webmaster screams. The band keeps playing "Beer Barrel Polka," perhaps fearing what will happen if the Webmaster returns and doesn't hear it. The party rages on as if nothing unusual is happening. I think at this point everyone is too drunk to fear the Webmaster, or perhaps too drunk to even realize he's here.
Like many experiments, the Halo Update didn't always have positive or intended results. Certain magazines and websites complained that lowly fansites were getting more new Halo info than they were. Marketing thought Halo Updates gave away too much about the game (something I never could understand, especially in the early days when I couldn't say ANYTHING). There were days when few of the guys on the team were happy to see my smiling face or tell me what they'd been up to that week. And occasionally someone on a website or forum somewhere would take the "Halo Developer Diary" to task for not being more explicit. Those guys had it all wrong; it was never supposed to be a developer diary, just a weekly outburst from a guy who was lucky enough to see Halo every day and wanted to tell others how cool it was without breaking his NDA or spoiling any cool surprises. It wasn't a PR move to suck up to the media; it was a tiny porthole through which our fans could catch a glimpse of what we were up to and know that it was good.
I sip my drink and take a quick walk around the office. Out in the hall, the owner of the pony is trying to argue with The Man, who confounds him at every turn by laughing continuously. The Webmaster is at the other end of the hall, whispering sweet nothings into the pony's ear as they walk towards the men's room. The pony is wearing the Webmaster's hat. Tom stalks from room to room with a broken rum bottle, threatening to "cut" anyone who calls him Tommy Two-Gs. Obviously he's been playing too much of the new Pimps at Sea alpha. Paul Bertone stops pantsing the members of the band long enough to shout, "Hey Matt, when are you going to tell people I farted in the Halo Update?"
"This week, Paul."
"WHOOO!" he shouts, and tackles the bass player.
Diamond Dave Candland comes up the stairs with a piñata shaped like a dog's head. "What's in the dog's head?" someone asks. "Dog brains," replies Dave. The Man stops laughing long enough to say "Hey, if that's true, take it over by Chucky's desk."
In the hall I hear Peter say, "Hey, Tommy Two-Gs!" and then yelp. I head into the Halo room and ask Hambone to call another ambulance. Everyone sits quietly at their desks, playing Halo in twos and fours. They take their work too seriously to join in the party now; they'll wait until the game is done, at which point the rest of the world can sit enraptured in front of their TVs, and Bungie HQ will get REALLY crazy.
I head back to my desk and stare at the empty email message in front of me. What can I possibly write about this week?
Friday, September 14, 2001
I saw how bummed out people were this afternoon after MS launched and then retracted their Halo website. Peter suggested I could cheer you guys up with a new screenshot. As you already know, there's not a lot for me to talk about these days, so screenshots sounded good. Besides, other people had suggested back in the day that I include a screenshot with every update, and I never said I would, but I never said I wouldn't either. Peter happened to have several lying around, so we took a look at them. Some were not up to snuff, but several were great.Unfortunately they are all 50-megabyte TIFFs and converting them into something easily downloaded over the net is turning out to be a problem. Half the fun of a Halo screenshot is the ability to zoom in and see the ridiculous level of detail involved. So we won't be able to do anything this week, but we have an idea...keep your eyes on the sites where the Halo Updates appear.
In other news:
Friday, September 07, 2001
At nearly all times, several people in the office are playing the game. Co-op in particular is a lot of fun, but there's plenty of multiplayer action to be had. Bungie employees speak in awe of a certain 12-player CTF game that occurred a couple nights back. "It was just like a war," said Hardy. "Exactly like we hoped it would be."
Friday, August 31, 2001
We've changed the Ghost physics in a way that makes it much more fun for the player to fly and less easy for the AI to accidentally obliterate themselves.
Friday, August 17, 2001
Yesterday I met a cat named Brian who said he's among the growing number of people who enjoy the jokes at the beginning of each Halo Update. I'm glad they're not a total waste of space, although for my money you can't get much better than "A giraffe walks into a bar and says 'The highballs are on me'" and I've never been nearly that funny. But humor is a very subjective thing. A few days ago I was in a bar on the Sunset Strip, watching a man in a bathrobe conduct an imaginary orchestra on the sidewalk. It seemed funny until I remembered that Marty O'Donnell does the same thing, and he's a serious musician.
Anyway, I hope humor will suffice for content this week because today is the day of Bungie's company picnic and everyone is either out of the office or about to leave for this much-needed afternoon of rest and relaxation. I weaseled some tidbits out of a few people before they took off, but it ain't much - I hope it will tide you over for a week.
Friday, August 03, 2001
Jason Jones invited all of us over to his place tomorrow to watch the Blue Angels, but he also warned "if the Blue Angels crash they absolutely cannot miss my backyard and are guaranteed to kill everyone." So just in case we all die tomorrow, it's been fun doing these Halo Updates, and here's the latest:
Friday, June 22, 2001
Mat Noguchi did some more work on the HUD and put in a bunch of cheats for testing purposes. He claims the Bottomless Clip cheat is the most fun when using the rocket launcher, and if we have enough time we might be able to use it in the "Bob Soccer" multiplayer mode we've been thinking about.
Friday, June 22, 2001
The Swarthy Chucky got hovering vehicles back in the game after a protracted absence. AIs can drive them now as well. Chucky also fixed some broken math functions and wrote a bunch of new ones.
Friday, June 15, 2001
On the programming side, we've made obstacle-avoidance and time-scale fixes (I'll leave it to you to guess why time might speed up or slow down during gameplay), fixed a long-standing importer bug that was mangling our collision models, and fixed the collision functions that caused items like grenades to disappear or fall through two-sided surfaces.
Saturday, June 09, 2001
The Mighty Chris Butcher is giving Halo's AI the capacity know when it's in a battle it can't win (for example, when it's being fired upon by an enemy out of its range, or when you've mowed down thirty of its friends with a chain gun). As a result, encounters are more challenging, and much more fun.
Friday, May 25, 2001
The artists are playing with fog and silhouettes to maximize the creepiness of certain levels and encounters. Though as Marcus pointed out, the real fun comes when Marty starts adding sound to those levels.
Friday, May 11, 2001
There was a LOT of multiplayer testing this week. And it was a LOT of fun.
Friday, April 13, 2001
Multiplayer is getting better; post-game scoring is in this week, and various tweaks and adjustments make it more fun to play. One of our many rough multiplayer maps is currently titled "Beaver Creek" - not that you should read too much into that.
Friday, March 09, 2001
We've got melee attacks in for several weapons. It's quite fun to drive the jeep up to a building's front door and let Marcus distract the Covenant forces with the chain gun while you sneak in a side door, creep up behind them and slam the butt of your assault rifle into the back of their heads.
Friday, March 02, 2001
The Online Team met with Michael and Hardy to discuss multiplayer game types. It was a nice long meeting with a lot of good ideas thrown around. Hardy has more good ideas for multiplayer game types than any one man has a right to. We'll see how many of them we can make work. He's mocking up multiplayer levels right now and "it's really fun" says he. Michael has networking "up and limping" and is trying to fix the broken stuff.
Friday, October 27, 2000
We're nailing down the final elements of the game - lists of characters, weapons, net game types and options. The weapon list is pretty extensive; players should have fun finding their favorites. Things are still uncertain enough that giving out an actual number would be premature, but I think it's safe to say you'll have a nice friendly double-digit figure when you add them all up. And those are just the ones players can use.
Friday, October 13, 2000
Jason is splitting his time between AI work and story work with Jaime and John. The AI stuff is still in the planning stages, but it should be very cool. The aim is to make it the most fun AI to play against (or play with, if it's on your side).
Friday, October 06, 2000
The stuff that gets thrown around the lunch tables here is pretty exciting, especially when you're dining with Halo team folks and they talk about the story. So much is left to do, but it's like seeing da Vinci with an empty canvas or Nelson Algren with a fresh ream of blank typing paper: you know from what has come already that the work that is to come will be immensely satisfying. Unfortunately much of what we're doing these days is talking, conceptualizing, revising, figuring things out - all the intellectual grunt work that must come before we can get to the fun part of showing the results of that labor to the world. Although little bits of coolness may leak out from time to time. ;-)
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