How Corporate Greed Killed the Halo MMO We Almost Got
It looks like we were this close to getting a full blown Halo MMO, and of course corporate greed came in and blew it to hell.
This bombshell comes straight from Sandy Petersen, a legendary designer behind Doom, Quake, Age of Empires, and a ton of other classics.
On X, he revealed that back in 2008, he and his team at Ensemble Studios (yep, a Microsoft owned studio) were building something massive
A “gigantic MMO set in the Halo universe.”
It was called “Titan.” The concept?
Set before the Halos were fired, long before humanity’s rise, where players could side with the Forerunners or the Covenant. The Flood were in it too, though not playable. Petersen says it was all meticulously mapped out: questlines, species homeworlds, the works.
Ensemble estimated it’d take about three and a half years to make “if done right” and expected at least $1.1 billion in revenue.
Sounds like a no brainer win, right?
Enter Don Mattrick.
According to Petersen, Mattrick, who was then Microsoft’s Senior VP of Interactive Entertainment, tanked the entire project for one reason… it wouldn’t pad his stock bonus.
Petersen claims Mattrick’s earnings were tied to Microsoft’s 3 year profit window, meaning anything that wouldn’t launch in that timeframe didn’t benefit him personally.
So what did he allegedly do?
He canceled Titan and shut down Ensemble Studios entirely, just to save himself the expense and boost his short term numbers.
That’s not just bad business that’s sabotaging an entire universe’s potential for personal gain.
Microsoft officially closed Ensemble in 2008, keeping only a small crew to finish Halo Wars before wiping the slate clean in 2009.
So, yeah, the timeline checks out.
Fans under Petersen’s post are rightfully furious. We could’ve had an expansive, story rich Halo MMO over a decade ago… a dream project killed not by creative failure, not by technical limits, but by one executive’s greed.
If Petersen’s account is true, then “Titan” isn’t just another canceled game. It’s a symbol of everything wrong with corporate gaming culture… where vision and passion get buried under bonuses and boardroom politics.
So, what do you think?
Would a Halo MMO have changed the course of gaming history?
Sound off and share this, because gamers deserve to know how close we were to something legendary!
