Come Together

The co-creator of Halo assembles a team of youth and experience to push the sci-fi shooter in a thrilling new direction

- Nathan Brown

Lunchtime, and V1 Interactive’s president and creative director, Marcus Lehto, has just dropped a bomb on a group of his young staff with ruthless efficiency. Not figuratively, you understand: he speaks fondly, even paternally, of the more youthful members of the 30-person team making Disintegration. We’re watching a match of the game’s multiplayer component – a Capture The Flagstyle mode called Retrieval – that began with Lehto apologising in advance for what he assumed would be a poor performance on his part. Then he wipes out most of the opposing team with a perfectly placed, and timed, bomb. Minutes later, he does it again. “I usually don’t do that well, honestly – I’m pretty sure they were just letting me nuke them,” he admits afterwards. “The kids were being nice to dad today.”

They’re also a vital part of the game that ‘dad’ and his crew are making. Lehto spent almost two decades at Bungie and, as is often the case when grizzled vets of bigbudget development strike out on their own, there are plenty of former members of his Halo team on the V1 payroll. Yet there’s youth here too, thanks in part to his time, after leaving Bungie, as a volunteer student mentor at the DigiPen Institute Of Technology, a renowned game-development school just down the road in Redmond, Washington. When V1 was properly established, he brought on some of the brightest students he’d encountered; as the studio has grown, more have come on board. “It’s critical for us,” Lehto says. “And I say that in every way: it’s critical for our health, for the vibrancy of the studio, and for bringing in a perspective of the game industry that is new and fresh, that maybe some of us older folks aren’t in such deep touch with anymore. It’s fantastic.”