Ensemble Claims Bungie Tension Over Halo Wars

Via IGN:

Bungie was kind of sore about the idea. What they called it was 'the whoring out of our franchise'.

by Luke Karmali

SEPTEMBER 27, 2012

Halo creators Bungie apparently disapproved of 2009's Halo Wars as it was essentially "the whoring out of [its] franchise", according to the founder of Ensemble Studios.

In an interview with Games Industry, Tony Goodman revealed some of the stresses and tensions that accompanied Ensemble making its final game.

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Bungie was kind of sore about the idea. What they called it was 'the whoring out of our franchise' or something.

Apparently the game was never meant to be linked with Halo in any way, but Microsoft forced Master Chief on the project late into the development cycle amid fears that the game wouldn't sell well otherwise.

"Microsoft was pretty risk averse," He said. "They said, 'I don't know if we want to take the risk of creating strategy games on a console. We'd feel better if Halo were attached to it.' The difficult part of that was it took the game back about a year in development, and I think it never quite turned out the same. They just said, 'Why don't you just paint over what you have with Halo stuff?' But things aren't quite that simple."

What was more complicated, however, was the fact that this created a great deal of tension between Bungie, who created the Halo franchise, and Ensemble, who had already put an immense amount of time into the game. Apparently Bungie didn't have the manpower to take on the game itself, but was deeply unhappy with its IP being used by another company and on another genre.

According to Goodman, "Another problem was that Bungie was never up for it... Bungie was kind of sore about the idea. What they called it was 'the whoring out of our franchise' or something. Yeah, that didn't create a great relationship between us and Bungie; they viewed us as someone infringing [on their franchise]."

Ensemble Studios was established in 1995 and created the Age of Empires series of games before being acquired by Microsoft in 2001. It was then used as an internal studio before being closed down after the release of Halo Wars in 2009 and all its upcoming titles were cancelled.