The lobby at Bungie headquarters is filled with memorabilia from the company’s Halo series. Upstairs, in an area of the building off limits to visitors, the team is hard at work on Bungie’s next big game. Its latest installment, Destiny: Rise of Iron, was released Sept. 20, 2016.
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W. GARTH DOWLING (2); COURTESY OF THE WARD FAMILY (2); COURTESY OF BUNGIE (5)
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Ward will do pretty much anything to make Destiny compelling and beautiful — except one: He won’t wear a Spandex motion-capture outfit. “You’ll never catch me in one of those suits,” he says, laughing. Ward leaves that job to the professional stunt performers. To bring its fictional heroes — called Guardians — to life, Bungie squeezes actors into Spandex suits. Then they walk, climb and tumble in front of cameras tracking their every move. That data gets fed to a computer, and Bungie’s animators and artists take over from there. Ward’s ability to delegate — and play well with others — comes from his time making movies and observing the actions of Spielberg, Lucas and Zemeckis. “These guys are the ultimate leaders,” Ward says. “Artistic collaboration can be very difficult, but the more you do it, the more you see how to be successful at it. A better product always comes out of constant collaboration. Usually the best idea will win, and you’ll get something better out of it.” At Bungie, that begins with an
understanding that cinematic cutscenes are one piece of the larger puzzle. “Because of that, we have to collaborate with other teams — like our designers, our concept art team, our art department — to make sure everything we’re doing is the best experience for the person at home,” Ward says. Bungie also puts thought into the best experience for its employees at the office. Cubicles can mean game-over for collaboration, so Bungie eliminated them. The company uses an open-floor concept where face-to-face interaction trumps phone calls or emails. “It’s the only way we can work with the size of our company and a project as big as it is — to keep communication as open as possible,” Ward says.
IT STARTED IN SCOUTING
The cinematic cutscene about Ward’s life must include the time he completed his Eagle Scout service project with Troop 212
of Chesapeake, Va. To a teen, Ward says, an Eagle project can look like the big, ugly ogre at the end of the game. It’s only after you’ve slain the beast that you realize you had the skills to succeed all along. “Doing the Eagle Scout project was very much like a daunting task,” he says. “I look back on it now and I go, ‘Wow, you are just a big crybaby.’ ” For his project, Ward led a team of volunteers who built a children’s library. They gutted a room, built and painted shelves, and gathered donated books. Ward saw how several pieces combined to form something bigger. Sounds familiar. “Funny thing is, a game as big as Destiny has smaller projects inside that all stack together,” he says. “My team takes big, big chunks, and we work together and produce something beautiful out of it.” And Ward’s guiding hand? That’s a beautiful thing, too. Says Ward: “Scouting probably was the first experience I had in being a leader and being asked to be responsible for more than just myself.”
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