Highly Anticipated Halo Game Was Reportedly Canceled for the Worst Reason

A highly anticipated Halo game that was in the works roughly 20 years ago is said to have been canceled for the worst reason. While Halo has always been a first-person shooter series first and foremost, the franchise has also dabbled in other genres from time to time. At one point, Microsoft was even exploring making a Halo MMO at developer Ensemble Studios before its eventual closure. Unfortunately, this project is now said to have reached its demise for a reason that will likely upset plenty of Halo fans.

In a series of posts on social media, Sandy Petersen, a game designer who formerly worked at Ensemble Studios, opened up about what happened with the Halo MMO behind the scenes. Petersen explained that the game was internally codenamed “Titan” and was going to take place thousands of years before the mainline Halo games. In it, players would’ve been able to play as either the Forerunners or the Covenant, with the Flood also making an appearance, likely as an enemy faction. Petersen says that Titan was expected to bring in $1.1 billion on the low end, which is a staggering amount of money.

Despite this, Petersen asserts that the Halo MMO was killed off alongside all of Ensemble Studios in 2009 because of one person: Don Mattrick. The former head of Xbox, Mattrick was said to have scrapped Titan because of how it impacted his own personal bonus at Microsoft. Petersen claims that Mattrick’s stock bonus at Microsoft was tied to income earned from games over a three-year period. Because the Halo MMO was going to take longer than this to develop, Mattrick chose to simply cancel the project altogether.

“We estimated 3.5 years to finish Titan if we did it right,” Petersen said. “That’s beyond Mattrick’s drop dead date. So by firing all of Ensemble, he didn’t have to pay for our expensive studio for 3 years and he didn’t care about Titan. All he lost was a game studio [that] never sold less than 3 million copies of everything we made.”

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It’s obviously worth noting that Petersen’s retelling of events might not be completely accurate, as it only comes from a single source. Still, Mattrick’s tenure at Microsoft is one that many look back upon as the turning point for Xbox as a whole. Not only was Mattrick the driving force behind the failed Xbox Kinect, but he’s also seen as the one who made a litany of mistakes when it came to the Xbox One and its initial reveal. For him to have also been the one who caused the Halo MMO to fall apart doesn’t require much of a stretch to believe.

Perhaps one day, Microsoft will look to develop another MMO set within the Halo universe. In the near term, though, Xbox is simply trying to get the mainline Halo series back on track through a remake of the first game in the saga dubbed Halo: Campaign Evolved. Currently, this remake doesn’t have a release date, but it will come to Xbox Series X/S, PC, and, surprisingly, PS5 in 2026.

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