Office of Halo Intelligence: Part 8

[343iBot]

Office of Halo Intelligence, or OHI for short, is a semi-regular diary-type feature brought to you by various members of the Halo 4 development team. Frank O’Connor, Franchise Development Director, kindly agreed to write the eighth entry. We hope you enjoy an inside look at the making of our next title!

From the 5.25.12 edition of the Halo Bulletin:

I am such a hipster that I was at E3 before it was even E3. That’s literally true. I distinctly remember hassling Brad Dourif about the Dune movie outside the Nintendo booth at the Vegas CES where what became E3 used to be off in a tent in the corner.

E3 is a blessing and a curse. It’s a fantastic showcase for the industry, a truly magical experience where the best and brightest in gaming get to show off their impending wares, meet with the retailers who are tasked with selling those wares, and become inspired and excited for what the next months and years hold for the games industry. And of course as a spectacle, it has effectively become a consumer event, a bit like the Oscars, where the drive for all the George Clooney facemaking and fake clapping is really the audience watching at home.

And it‘s probably not a secret that while the business rationale for polishing content and creating presentations for E3 is really the retail business and the financial nuts and bolts it entails, the real pressure is reinforced by the need to create something magical for fans to get excited about.

Everyone in the studio, from artists to testers, from engineers to accountants, from animators to audio specialists, is driven by the pressure to create something amazing and impressive. And it’s tough. E3 often sidelines staff and resources, focused on creating “out of order” polish areas that break the logic of a schedule. Which is why we have talented producers and associate producers who create plans, years in advance to ensure that E3 stuff has no effect on the overall shipping schedule. They are unsung heroes, so consider this their song.

And the rest of the staff are knuckles down, heads down, spirits up, working 12, 15, even 24 hour shifts to make sure that the stuff we do show at E3, is worth your time and ours. We sometimes refer to it as a goat Rodeo, but it’s a lot more coordinated, often with laser-focused concentration on making sure that we’re not misusing human and technical resources that would be better used polishing and shipping the game. E3 should be an event that helps lift your game, and shine light on it, not hurt the main project. And so that’s where we are.

Can’t say too much about what we have to show in a couple of weeks, but I can say confidently that we’re looking forward to sharing more and more of our game, our ambition and our innovation with you guys over the coming months. And as fans, as gamers, we ourselves are looking forward to seeing what our colleagues and competitors are showing at E3, just from the same place of excitement and curiosity as you guys.

Of course, when we go to E3, we’re typically trapped at the Microsoft booth and only get to hear about stuff, rather than actually seeing it. Invariably someone will drop by whatever meeting room we’re trapped in, and tell us about how absolutely epic something looks in a distant corner of the show. That we can’t go see.

Frankie