Xbox chief content officer Matt Booty made a LinkedIn post yesterday marking the 25th anniversary of Halo. Since then, though, a few former Halo lead developers caught wind of the post, and have responded to it by accusing Booty of laying off most of the game’s staff and enabling rampant mismanagement.
“Perhaps for Halo’s 25th anniversary you could articulate how and why you shielded Pierre Hintze as he unethically and unlawfully drove that franchise and studio into the ground,” Glenn Israel, Halo‘s former art director, said. “You’ve known for years about the multiple violations, the broken contracts, the collapsing morale—people were contacting you personally—and you did nothing.” Hintze was previously accused of being personally responsible for the downfall of Halo through his alleged “cruel” behavior toward developers at Halo Studios.
Israel has previously commented on Halo‘s alleged horrible mismanagement, saying he “witnessed firsthand or was personally subjected to numerous unethical and/or unlawful acts,” including “blacklisting, fraud regarding compensation, rampant favoritism, and multiple harassment campaigns.”
Former art director Justin Dinges wrote: “Didn’t you just lay off most of Halo Studios?” with Israel chiming in by pointing out “half of iD Software” and “the other soon-to-be six thousand families who’ll suffer the consequences of Xbox mismanagement this holiday season.”
Halo world art Josh Rife kept it simple, saying Booty was “nothin’ but a suit.”
Halo is probably at its lowest point since first gracing the gaming industry during the early 2000s and then going on to become one of the biggest first-person shooter franchises in history. Unfortunately, today it’s little more than a footnote, borne out of a sequence of bad, worse, horrible releases, alleged mismanagement, several studio changes, outsourcing, and so on, and on, and on.
