Someone on X complained that it is misleading when games are advertised as “from the makers of” older hits, saying companies should not claim credit for work done by people who are no longer around. They used Bungie’s new extraction shooter, Marathon, as an example and doubted that anyone who worked on Halo remains at the studio.
How a Bungie developer responded
Elliott Gray, a UI designer on Marathon, did not agree. He answered the post by naming a long list of people who worked on Halo titles and who still work at Bungie today. Gray said these names were the people he could remember off the top of his head, and he followed up with two additional replies that added even more names.
Names called out
Gray’s initial list included:
- Chris Butcher
- Jason Jones
- Tom Gioconda
- Dave Gasca
- Mat Noguchi
- Bob Glessner
- Lars Bakken
- Tyson Green
- Dan Miller
- Shi Kai Wang
- Eric Elton
- Steve Cotton
- Sam Jones
- Mark Uyeda
- James Haywood
Gray went on to add more names in later replies, saying his list was just the people he knew immediately who had worked on Halo and still work at Bungie.
Why this matters
Some of the people Gray named have clear ties to Bungie’s Halo era. Jason Jones, for example, is one of Bungie’s founders. Others, such as Lars Bakken and Tyson Green, worked on Halo before contributing to Destiny and other projects at the studio. That history is the reason Marathon’s marketing leans on the studio’s past with Halo and Destiny when positioning the new game.
So, the short answer to the online claim is this: the phrase “from the makers of” may feel like marketing shorthand, but in Bungie’s case there are real Halo veterans still at the company who helped shape those past games and now work on new projects.
