For a man who’s been revered in the games industry for over 20 years, Jason Jones has kept a remarkably low profile. He’s the co-founder of Bungie and the person most responsible for Halo’s unquantifiable “secret sauce,” but he’s also notoriously private. He’s so wary of the spotlight, apparently, that he’s practically a ghost even inside Bungie itself despite toiling daily on Destiny, his Next Big Thing since Halo 2 shipped. So perhaps it comes as less of a surprise to learn that he hasn’t allowed himself to be profiled in the media since he was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2005, and hasn’t given a proper interview since a Bungie website fan Q&A in 2001.
Bungie co-founder Jason Jones’ humility shows again as he considers the philosophy of design, and it’s clearly a passionate subject for him: “I can’t digest any simple change in design philosophy over the years. I think there are all kinds of mistakes that you can make as a designer building a game either for yourself as a player or for yourself as a designer – both of which are total mistakes.
Jason Jones has long since finished his oatmeal by this point. I keep waiting for one of his Bungie counterparts to tell me that my time is up. I’ve barely gotten through half of the questions I had prepared, but since he seems intrigued by my line of questioning so far and I seem to have earned a bit of his trust, I try to get deeper into Jones’ designer mind. I wonder what the creator of Halo thinks the series’ biggest failure is (speaking only of Bungie’s entries in the franchise; for the record, he says he played and finished 343 Industries’ Halo 4, calling it fun and “an interesting experience playing a Halo game that I didn’t have anything to do with”).