Halogen Member Clarifies RTS Shutdown Assumptions

You remember Team Halogen, right? They were working hard at creating Halogen, the RTS mod for the Halo series, until Bungie told them to stop. It’s not that they were surprised that it would happen, but they were surprised by how people were reacting to the news.

Adam Saltsman, one of the members of Team Halogen, offered to tackle some of the common questions asked of them after the shutdown of their mod was enforced, which included the difference between Halogen and machinima, why they didn’t ask for permission, and why they even bothered to try. It’s a sobering thing to think about, but it’s good to know they were kind enough to respond to the barrage of questions.

One of the reasons behind the creation of Halogen was to fill a void, which was the creation of an RTS based on the Halo universe. The creators of the mod loved the game and wanted to expand upon it, but alas, it was not to be. “We thought that if we approached it professionally and seriously that maybe they’d let it slide; obviously we were wrong,” said Saltsman. They could have aimed to try and be more like machinima, but while machinima is supported (or at least not enforced) by Microsoft and Bungie for the purposes of bringing hype to the game, a full-fledged game was not.

Of course, they do admit their own fault for the matter, but there’s nothing to be done at the moment. It’s only too bad they didn’t get the chance to show Bungie the fruits of three years of labor, because that could have been the stroke that changed everything.

You can read the entire excerpt of Saltsman’s responses to commenters after the jump. Don’t forget to offer a proper shoutout to Team Halogen for what they tried to do.

You remember Team Halogen, right? They were working hard at creating Halogen, the RTS mod for the Halo series, until Bungie told them to stop. It’s not that they were surprised that it would happen, but they were surprised by how people were reacting to the news.

Adam Saltsman, one of the members of Team Halogen, offered to tackle some of the common questions asked of them after the shutdown of their mod was enforced, which included the difference between Halogen and machinima, why they didn’t ask for permission, and why they even bothered to try. It’s a sobering thing to think about, but it’s good to know they were kind enough to respond to the barrage of questions.

One of the reasons behind the creation of Halogen was to fill a void, which was the creation of an RTS based on the Halo universe. The creators of the mod loved the game and wanted to expand upon it, but alas, it was not to be. “We thought that if we approached it professionally and seriously that maybe they’d let it slide; obviously we were wrong,” said Saltsman. They could have aimed to try and be more like machinima, but while machinima is supported (or at least not enforced) by Microsoft and Bungie for the purposes of bringing hype to the game, a full-fledged game was not.

Of course, they do admit their own fault for the matter, but there’s nothing to be done at the moment. It’s only too bad they didn’t get the chance to show Bungie the fruits of three years of labor, because that could have been the stroke that changed everything.

You can check out the entire excerpt of Saltsman’s responses to commenters below. Don’t forget to offer a proper shoutout to Team Halogen for what they tried to do.

• “Why did they even bother making a Halo mod?” A multitude of reasons. One, we are only about 5 guys. Who all work fulltime, and some of which were also attending school. It’s not like we had the time or ability to create a whole universe ourselves! While we did bring a lot of original content to the mod, it was all extended or heavily based on Bungie’s concepts. This was fun for us, because we really enjoyed the designs (despite not enjoying the games THAT much) and it was a HUGE time saver. Also, there were a LOT of people out there (in the tens of thousands) that wanted a Halo RTS, and Microsoft sure wasn’t filling that need. We thought that if we approached it professionally and seriously that maybe they’d let it slide; obviously we were wrong.

• “If they were going to make a halo mod, why didn’t they just ask for permission?” With our magical powers of hindsight, sure we would have done certain things differently. Basically our plan was something like this: just make it, and hope that we get it either finished or to a level of completion where people would be really impressed with what we’d managed to do with a 5yr old engine and some severely limited FPS IP. Also, in a lot of ways, we just wanted to play a Halo game that we felt was big and galactic and really felt huge like Halo should (rather than like a rail shooter, for example). We thought that if we asked MS Games that would just shoot us down without being able to see how great it could be. Our intent was never to sell this thing, but we still treated it like a very, very careful publishing pitch. Why on earth would MS ever grant dev rights to 5 people spread all over the world to develop something as resource intensive as an RTS? Just seemed far-fetched. However, if we showed them how good a game it could really be…

• “Well they should have kept this on the lowdown, so MS wouldn’t have noticed and canned them just to protect its IP from ravenous adoring fans.” Its not like no one knew about this mod; we were slashdotted a year ago, were on the front page of RvB, Bungie definitely had their eye on us, we got mentioned in a couple print mags…we were not shut down because we got “too big” or “just got noticed”. I think I know why MS Games canned us, just need to wait a couple of weeks to make sure, so I’m not really comfortable writing about it yet. But I’m 95% sure it had nothing to do with “spontaneous noticement”, and very little to do with “MS are the jerks and will do anything to stop their IP from being Xploited!!”

• “Microsoft lets Red vs Blue do their thing; if these guys had just asked for permission, then there would be no problem.” Erm, not exactly. MS Games is, not surprisingly, a game company. Therefore, they will happily and cheerfully support machinima ads for their own game made for free by other people. However, they are quite touchy (to an extent that we did not previously understand) about people making GAMES about their games. When the 2d sidescrolling halo fangame was released and apparently had no problems, we thought maybe they’d let our RTS do its thing too.

Via Slashdot