What's in Marcus Lehto's Gut?

You might have heard of Marcus Lehto. He's a big deal at Bungie and was one of the key drivers of their success in the Halo franchise. I once even wondered if he was the Steve Jobs of the Bungie Universe (but now when I think about it, that's possibly Jason Jones but I digress).

Marcus has his own blog and wrote this sweet post on game design and I thought this was an interesting response to a question he was asked about his own secret project that he's doing at Bungie*. The question is "what it’s like building something completely new rather than working on an established, “safe” intellectual property."

Marcus addresses the whole post on this question in the form of 'you have to go with your gut' . Here's a key bit:

To this, most of you will probably say, “Duh, that’s obvious. Tell us something we didn’t already know!” Sure, I understand that it’s obvious, but what may not be so obvious is that using your gut only works if you are familiar with all the working parts of how a game is built. You must be able to visualize how a part of the game, on which you are making a decision, fits into the whole of the project. This is so important, since without this understanding an objective opinion is nearly impossible to achieve.

For instance, we were just debating some beginning moments of the player experience the other day. Every decision we make for this first few moments of the game has profound implications to what the player might expect from the game overall. One small element in the world with which the player interacts will absolutely set the stage for gameplay expectations from that point forward.

-

I read this and I immeadiatley thought of the start to Halo 3. The Chief has just crash-landed back to Earth, met up with Avery and The Arbiter. To a first timer playing this game (and there were millions!) that must have been pretty strange. Who's this alien chap, why's that cigar smoking Sargeant so mad, what's really going on here? The scene is set and we're off - slowly we are introduced to a Brute who attacks us with some help from his Grunt mates. The trap on the player has been set, we're hooked right into the action.

I think a new player to the Halo franchise would have clearly had his expectations set and framed in the right way. There's trouble on Earth, you have to fix it, and by the way, here's a taste of the action that's about to come your way.

That's good game making and I wonder what role Marcus had in that...

Marcus also responded to a question in the post's comments of his which questioned aboutthings that oculd have gone into the Halo game at the request of publishers. Lehto's reply was most interesting:

"We’ve actually been really lucky over the years in that we negotiated publisher requests fairly well. It is usually the case that the publisher would like to put their mark on the game by requesting that we add something, usually for marketing purposes. There were requests to put a certain automotive logos on the Warthog years ago. We even had strong requests to place some popular soft drink logos somewhere in the world. There was also, and often, feedback on making some weapons more powerful – that seemed to be a favorite.

However, the strangest request I ever witnessed was way back near the beginning of Halo CE when we got some focus group feedback from Japan that the Masterchief should be a very young boy and that the Elite was too “cat-like” and thus both should be altered.

When it came down to differences of opinion with the publisher, it was our job to clearly illustrate why we landed on the decisions we had made and that changes due to outside requests would affect the integrity of the game. If we handled the latter well, the nogotiations usually ended up with both parties walking away happy.

-

Automotive logos on the Warthog? The Master Chief as a young boy? The mind boggles.

* It's an Xbox version of Marathon right??????