 Hey, this is Ross Miller with The Verge, and I basically wasted my entire weekend last week playing the Destiny beta. Destiny is the first game from Bungie after the whole Halo thing. We happen to have Chris Grant, the editor-in-chief of Polygon. What up? Hey. Hey. What is this timeline of Destiny? How long has this been going on to make? Whew. It's gonna come out this September, 2014. They announced a partnership with Activision in 2010, announced the game in 2013, but it's been in development for about five years. Okay, that's a lot. It's like most games, what, two, three year cycle? Yeah, every once in a while you'll have something a little bit longer, but that five-year number represents not only a huge investment on Bungie's part and on Activision's part, the numbers that they've released are $500 million for the game. This is a big game. This isn't a...this isn't your run-of-the-mill shooter. This isn't Halo. This is something closer to World of Warcraft. They don't ever use the word MMO, which is what World of Warcraft is. It's a dirty word. It is, essentially. It's a shooter where you level up, you do these kind of grinding, you raid a bunch of people. That's why Activision's making this investment. They've gone on the PC side, on the Blizzard side of the company, they have World of Warcraft. They've got these games that are, for a lot of people, very difficult, very impenetrable. Shooters own the console. How can we get some of that stickiness, some of that engagement, that really high engagement they have on the PC side, on World of Warcraft, on Diablo, on StarCraft? How do we get that on the consoles, and a shooter is kind of their Trojan horse to get that connected gameplay experience into people's living rooms? Right. Why couldn't they do this with Microsoft? Why isn't this part of the system for that? I think, you know, Bungie made the Halo series. The Halo series made the Xbox. They were wholly owned by Microsoft. They were moved from Chicago out to Washington state. And they saw, when the Xbox 360 launched and Halo 3 came out as a big hit, but they also saw Gears of War, made by an independent studio, Epic, sell. Make a lot of money, make a lot of its developers very rich. And these guys were owned outright by Microsoft. They got some bonuses, but they weren't getting rich. So they wanted to go independent, and I think the quid pro quo was, we'll make some more Halo games for you. If you let us go, if not, we're all gonna leave. Why do this beta? Why release a huge chunk of the game for free for people to play? They had an alpha, actually, before the beta. And the alpha gave us Peter Dinklage's now famous That Wizard is from the Moon. What the fuck is up with that voice? I'm sorry, just what is with that voice? It's the worst thing I've ever heard. The Hive haven't been on Earth in centuries. That Wizard came from the Moon. Dinklage's performance, not my favorite, personally. We'll see how it does. But I think what Bungie wanted to do with the alpha and the beta was to kind of, for them, technically validate a lot of these shared, server shared gameplay models they talked about, where you're playing and your friends are coming in and out of your experience very seamlessly. You're having these large events. They wanted to kind of validate all this stuff before they released it. If you don't validate your server infrastructure, you get Battlefield, right? Which just crashed. Yeah, it didn't work for three to six months. Bungie, to its credit, the game launched on PlayStation 4, and it worked awesome. They had six million users they announced. It was a huge beta, and I think that really proved the sort of scale of what they're looking to do. With a half a billion dollar price tag, the thing has to be a hit. Right. Thanks for hanging out with us. For more on Destiny, check out The Verge and Polygon, and thanks for watching.