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- "It was pretty cool. It was a bit of a bummer to stop it, because now we have games like the Arkham series and Shadow of Mordor and The Witcher 3—and that’s the sort of free-roam combat that we were doing back then, but nobody’s ever seen it."
- — Paul Bertone[1]
Gypsum was the codename of a cancelled video game project that was worked on by Bungie, from the start of 2003 until June of that year. It was to be a third-person action beat-em-up with a fantasy setting.[1] Gypsum was being developed using Bungie's in-house Blam engine.[2]
Gypsum was worked on by a small internal team within Bungie, who had previously worked on Phoenix, another internal project that had been cancelled in early 2003. However, Jason Jones had promised the Phoenix team that they would get to develop their own game. So, despite the cancellation, the team remained separate from the Halo 2 team and commenced work on a new project, Gypsum. Against the wishes of Joseph Staten and Max Hoberman, Jones joined the Gypsum team as creative director and project lead at some point in early 2003, while still moonlighting as project lead on Halo 2.[1]
However, this was short-lived, as after the famous Halo 2 E3 demo, it became evident within Bungie that they would not be able to ship Halo 2 in its current form on the Xbox, as the hardware was not powerful enough to handle the stencil lighting engine, given the scope of the game. This necessitated that the game be significantly overhauled, including a complete redesign of the campaign. Thus, all other ongoing projects at Bungie were cancelled in June 2003, including Gypsum, and all employees were folded into the Halo 2 team in order to complete the game.[1]
Among the former Gypsum team was game designer Paul Bertone. In a 2017 article on the history of Halo, Bertone compared Gypsum's gameplay to modern titles such as The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and the Batman: Arkham games, and expressed disappointment at having to cancel the project.[1]
Sources
- ^ a b c d e Vice, The Complete, Untold History of Halo (Retrieved on Sep 22, 2021) [archive]
- ^ GDC Vault, Lessons from the Core Engine Architecture of Destiny (Retrieved on Sep 22, 2021) [archive]