Mike Bantick
Wednesday, 05 August 2009 11:13
Opinion and Analysis
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Creamer has been entrenched at Bungie now for nine years, in effect the entirety of the Microsoft era at the studio.
He was Test Lead on the original Halo for Xbox, moving into production for Halo 2 and Halo 3 and currently Lead Producer on ODST.
Back in the early days of Halo development, when the game was originally planned for Mac and PC and would have been a strategy game, the thought of it becoming a trilogy (and beyond ) of first person shooters on the home console platform must have been odd.
But the Halo-verse was always going to be large “It was always planned to be a big rich universe” says Creamer going on to mention Bungie creative director Joe Statton and co-founder Jason Jones in particular as having the vision for the Halo franchise
With the Microsoft purchase, and the retooling of Halo for a First Person Shooter showing on the new home console, Creamer remembers that “It gave Bungie a chance to be involved during the creation of the Xbox project: The right video chip to use, stuff about the kernel and all those sorts of things.”
And now Bungie, Microsoft and the Xbox 360 community prepare for a new Halo title.
“We wanted to approach the story for ODST a lot differently to the Halo trilogy. So in the trilogy, it is a very big story, this huge space opera that spans many locations, you are gallivanting across the universe, you are a super solder larger than life, it’s very grandiose.” Creamer muses.
As Lead Producer however, Creamer saw a different evolution of the Halo franchise this time around; “ So in ODST we were attracted to the notion of telling a much smaller, tighter story over a much smaller time-line, and then throw some twists into that, by mixing that up with playing as one of your ODST squad-mates and then back as the Rookie trying to piece together this mystery.”
“Another thing we were drawn to was the notion of telling a detective story, you are trying to figure out what happened to your squad-mates. We wanted to change it up with how we told the story” Creamer says.
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