Halo 4 Lead Designer Jesse Snyder talks...... Halo 4

Sounds like Jessie Synder has simply been gagging AND busting his balls to talk about Halo 4. And now that he can talk about Halo rather than his latest 'project' he shares his feelings and excitement about being the lead designer for Halo 4 and The Reclaimer Trilogy.

A while back Halo 4 was announced. As you might have suspected, I’ve been pretty busy working on the game. It turns out the campaign for a Halo game requires a pretty intense amount of effort. Who would have thought. I guess people are pretty into Halo or something.

I was actually the first designer hired at 343 Industries, but at the time the studio didn’t have a name. It was called something generic like “Halo Internal.” Woooo. In any event, I was the first designer to take the plunge (there were other designers that had come and gone, but they were pulled from other parts of Microsoft).

I didn’t start as a lead either. I was just coming off a crazy amount of Treyarch crunch (which if you ask around, is some of the most legendary crunch known to mankind) and was looking to get down on some level building, scripting and prototyping. You know, hitting reset on the ol’ work life balance button. However, after working at 343 for a bit, they asked me to be a lead, and being a lead on a Halo title is not something you tend to turn down. Don’t worry, I like to stay pretty hands-on with the tools in addition to having an outlook calendar full of meetings.

Halo 4 has been pretty crazy as far as projects go. Sure, there’s all the regular game making stuff that goes on, but there’s been such a big veil of secrecy over this game which has been insane. For example, we hired lots of people (like myself!) who had no idea exactly what they were signing up for.

Yes we are 343 Industries. Yes we own the Halo IP. Yes we are part of Microsoft. A game? What is that? No, no. We are working on a project you see. An FPS? We can’t say. Sorry. Please work for us. By the way, if you were to work on an FPS…

Yep, for the longest time, we couldn’t even publicly say we were working on agame. I’m sure most of you figured that out, but for someone who is a professional game designer, it’s hard not be able say “I’m working on a game” out loud or publicly. My go-to joke was always “Oh, well I work on books and anime.” Oh books-and-anime joke, how I’ll miss you. This is especially funny if you know me well.

And then we announce “Oh, and by the way we’re making a trilogy!” Jeez, really? I go from working on projects to an entire trilogy publicly? Someone needs to take a burlesque class and learn the art of tease.

Check out the rest of the article here