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
The co-creator of Halo pushes the sci-fi shooter in a thrilling new direction in Disintegration
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.”
Whether the kids were going easy on dad or not, the influence of both camps on the game they’ve been making is plain to see. Disintegration is shot through with Bungie DNA: not just in its visuals, which you’d expect from the artist behind the original Master Chief, but in how it plays and feels. But you can see the youthful perspective here too, in combat that is fast-paced and tactical, and also in a multiplayer mode built on hero moments that, as we scurry between ten workstations to try and keep track of the action, proves tremendously watchable. Between them they have come up with something that is at once familiar and fresh. They might just be onto something.
Disintegration is set on Earth around 150 years in the future, with humanity in the grip of a pandemic that threatens its extinction. To counter it, scientists have devised a method of transplanting the human brain into a robotic chassis – a procedure called integration – where it can live for up to 300 years. The idea is to outlast the virus, at which point the process can be reversed and humanity rebuilt. Almost immediately, a wedge was driven between integrated humans and the remaining ‘naturals’, resulting in a civil war. The integrated forces, by now known as the Rayonne, won at a canter, and as the game begins one of their commanding officers, Black Shuck, is dispatching his armies around the United States to mop up any remaining natural stragglers.
Not all of the integrated agree with the Rayonne’s post-humanist ideology, however. Many try to defect, and most are caught, destroyed and recycled – but one who does make good his escape is Romer Shoal, the game’s protagonist. Before the outbreak, Shoal was wellknown and respected, and was among the first to go through the integration process (early on, it was the preserve of the wealthy). He was the host of a Top Gear-style show about gravcycles, hovering search-and-rescue vehicles that, during the war, were retrofitted with weaponry. In the conflict’s aftermath, Black Shuck tasks Shoal with finding and repossessing gravcycles; since they can hover they’re ideal for rooting out naturals in hiding in awkward terrain. Shoal does as he’s told, but isn’t happy about it, and starts to sell some of the gravcycles on the black market, specifically to a rebel group calling itself the Human Liberation Coalition, or HLC. Black Shuck gets wind of it, and imprisons Shoal; he breaks out, and so begins his quest to assemble a ragtag band of integrated rebels to take the fight to the Rayonne, and eventually bring down Shuck.
“All these characters want, ultimately, to become human again,” Lehto explains, adding that there’s a strong suspicion that the pandemic was caused by someone high up within the Rayonne, to hasten the spread of integration. “That’s the carrot hanging out on the end of the
DISINTEGRATION IS SHOT THROUGH WITH BUNGIE DNA: NOT JUST IN ITS VISUALS, BUT IN HOW IT PLAYS AND FEELS