American video game developing company Bungie has revealed some much-awaited truth about the Xbox Live feature from Microsoft. Per reports, according to Bungie, Xbox Live would never have picked up if not for “Halo.”
Bungie studio manager, in the run up to the launch of “Halo 2” and now the company president, Harold Ryan stated that to make the premium service work Microsoft needed a convincing software and, apparently, Halo was that software.
“I think Xbox Live wouldn't have made it,” Ryan stated in an interview with GameIndustry. “I don't think the Xbox would be where it is today without Bungie and without Halo. As a group, we provided both technical and creative guidance and thought leadership that really pushed the limits. We weren't just a game developer using the service. We were integrated in the design of the service and how it worked. Systems for groups and matchmaking and skill ranking were all things that were pushed the furthest and the hardest by us.”
This, at one point may seem a bit too much to handle, but in a certain way it has turned out to be true as “Halo” has been used as a hook with which the American audience was attracted to Xbox Live. The game alone leveraged the Xbox Live service to a popularity that it still enjoys to this very day.
The discussion related to the impact of the Xbox Live service in the life of American audiences started after Kevin Bachus, one of the original Xbox co-creators, said that “the incredulity Microsoft encountered from outside observers skeptical of its ability to enter the console world helped shape much of what the company did, both in the creation of the Xbox and the creation of Live.”
Another co-creator and a former Microsoft employee Seamus Blackley shed more light on the development of the Live service. Per the GameIndustry interview, Blackley “described the creation of Xbox Live as a process beset by challenges. For one, he said it was unclear if the service would even function in the face of latency issues and differences in the way the Internet worked in different countries. The team even resorted to cold calling cable providers, trying to track down online specialists and engineers to ask about latency. Regardless of the technical obstacles, Microsoft never wavered in its commitment to Live.”
“Halo 4” was launched only recently exclusively for Xbox 360 owners.
