An article entitled [url=http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/482/how_halo_3_changed_game_.php]"How Halo 3 Changed Game Development"[/url] has recently drawn some (rather sceptical) attention [url=http://halo.bungie.org/news.html?item=21601]at HBO[/url] and here [url=http://rampancy.net/story/bungie/10/01/2008/Did_Halo_3_Change_Game_Devel... Rampancy[/url]. The author's enthusiasm for the Halo series is unquestionable, but the article's relevance to its title is definitely open to doubt.
Rather than pandering to my inner sadist by shooting the original article to pieces, I'm going to try something more constructive. As someone with relevant experience, what do I think Bungie has to teach the rest of the industry? I can't promise any stunning revelations, but even the obvious bears repeating from time to time.
The single largest problem in games development today (in my not-so-humble opinion) is that of effectively managing and co-ordinating the efforts of the huge teams required. I believe Bungie's in-studio team for Halo 3 numbered about 100. I used to think that it was simply impossible to maintain flexibility and creativity in a team of more than 20-30. My hat is very definitely off to those who have proved me wrong, but keeping a games development team as small as possible is still a very desirable goal. It's interesting to note that Wideload, Bungie's sibling, seem to have taken this approach.
Project management for ambitious games software is one of the most difficult and delicate jobs imaginable. To do this properly, everyone involved has to steer a course between two undesirable extremes:
A) Inflexible bureaucratic rigour - a design-by-committee, built straight from the spec. sheet with no deviation allowed, and probably still not delivered on time, not least because that spec. sheet has to be written - and re-written - in ever more mind-numbing detail, and everyone spends half their working day filling in timesheets and sitting through progress meetings.
B) Creative anarchy - lots of bright ideas, constant fundamental revisions, and a completion date forever receding into the future.
B probably used to be the more dominant pattern in the games industry, but these days it's very definitely A. Readers should be able to identify examples of both approaches. Observant readers may have noted that the one thing they have in common is late delivery - or on-time delivery of a badly flawed game. I said it was difficult.
Yet work simply has to be organised, and progress monitored. The people putting up all that money have every right to be kept informed of progress, and these days a publisher practically has to buy the retail shelf-space for a new game (and well in advance, at that), so shipping dates must be met. Every really good AAA game published represents a successful navigation between these two deadly whirlpools, while racing for the finish line. Bungie aren't by any means the only company who can do this, but the magnitude of their success with the Halo series means that they attract more attention.
It's easy to describe the problem - so what's the solution? Take a look at [url=http://www.bungie.net/Inside/jobs.aspx#job13146]Bungie's Jobs page[/url], and the list of qualities and qualifications they look for in prospective employees. Taken individually, most of these stipulations are fairly familiar, especially if you've read as many recruitment adverts as I have. The relative emphasis is more revealing. Personal qualities - self-motivation, love of games, dedication to quality, willingness and ability to work collectively and harmoniously - are heavily emphasised and non-negotiable. Technical and experience requirements are relatively less specific, and there's clearly a willingness to be flexible, and consider individual candidates on their individual merits. The average HR department or recruitment agency uses the exact opposite of this pattern, and never thinks twice about it.
There's an important part of the answer. You hire people who are driven by their own professional pride and their love of games to do the best job possible, and you trust them to get on with the job, with a minimum of supervision. You turn away incorrigible prima-donnas, control-freaks, egotists and office-politicians. Telling the difference isn't at all easy - I was once responsible for hiring a full-blown industrial psychopath - but the results are definitely worth it. You don't get these results by hiring people with paper qualifications and standing over them with a whip. Taking a hint from Bungie's tantalising (or mischievous) nautical references, you could call these the submarine-crew and the galley-slave models of team management.
Putting a largely self-organising team together isn't the whole of the story, of course. You still have to deliver a finished, polished game on time, and here Bungie's record is inevitably less than perfect. I'd go so far as to say that this problem is quite simply insoluble. You can either have a finished, polished game, or you can have a game delivered to s strict deadline, but not both. The fact that a team with Bungie's collective skill, talent and experience can't reliably solve this problem should tell us something important, but denying this long-established fact ("Everything always takes longer and costs more") is an article of faith for the people wielding the whips in the galley-slave model. Their standard technique for dealing with the problem when it can no longer be ignored is to speed up the drumbeat, cram more slaves onto the rowing-benches and flog everybody harder. You can imagine how well that works, and the state of the crew when it's all over.
If you accept that this problem can't be adequately solved by deploying more copies of Microsoft Project and bigger sticks, then the only remaining way to mitigate it is to find a way to loosen up the deadline. This requires a serious effort to rethink and reshape the distribution channels. Valve's Steam is a laudable effort in this direction, though clearly not a perfect solution.
The other really valuable thing Bungie can offer to the industry is hope. I can't recall another instance where a games development house swallowed by a publisher has been able to win free again - though I must be fair, and acknowledge that Microsoft's handling of Bungie seems to have been exceptionally wise and far-sighted, by industry standards. I've experienced the swallowing process myself, and seen it happen to ex-colleagues who had managed to set up their own company. Bungie's example - and Microsoft's example - offer at least the faint possibility of escape to developers currently languishing in the bellies of their various beasts.