- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
wat do you guys think about the article on mtv.com?:
Secrecy is paramount to keeping a project moving along with minimal public interference, but offering the occasional morsel is key to ensure hard-core gamers are building a buzz. As a result, one of O'Connor's responsibilities is to master the art of the tease. Every week he drops in on members of the "Halo 3" development team, making sure features are confirmed for the final version of the game and that he can offer a hint on them. He picks a few words that will hint at a secret and then watches message boards to see who interprets the clues right. But he'll never confirm when — as so often happens — someone gets it right.
Not everyone likes the teases, so threats are common. Serious threats. "We get a lot of death threats in this job," O'Connor said. " 'You guys suck. Why don't you spend less time with these stupid updates and more time fixing this game? I hope you die. If I ever meet you, I will kill you.' The first couple of times you see it you're like, 'Wow!' The next few times you see it you're like, 'Whatever.' "
There's no formal training at Bungie for keeping secrets. It's just something an employee has to pick up on. That's a strategy fraught with pitfalls, of course. O'Connor said there was a serious breach in the "Halo 3" veil of secrecy just two weeks ago. "One of our guys was being interviewed by a very, very, very attractive woman and he blurted something out because he was confused by her attractiveness, apparently." It wasn't a little detail. "He blurted out one of the biggest ticket items in the entire game." The reporter agreed to cut the secret from her report.
O'Connor hasn't been culpable for a big breach yet. What made him good at keeping his mouth shut? "I don't remember ever keeping secrets as a kid," he said, although he does admit to having a good poker face.
At this point he'll need to use it. He is sitting on the mother lode of information he's just not going to release. "We're in a really, really secretive period right now. We don't want to give away any features. We don't want to give away any plot. We don't want to give away any locations. We don't want to give away any weapons. All that stuff is pretty much final. The funny thing is as secretive as we are now, everything is sort of carved into stone."
But he will keep playing this game with the fans. "The funny thing about this conversation is that if you ran the entire interview verbatim ... it would be transcribed on Halo.Bungie.org and dissected for secrets," he said. "They would go back and look at the Arbiter section of our conversation and say, 'What was he talking about? Wait a minute, I know,' and come up with sometimes cockamamie — and sometimes startlingly accurate — theories."
Just don't ask the Starbucks guy what's going on. He has no idea.