Doom Designer Sandy Petersen Alleges Former Xbox Boss Don Mattrick...

Doom level designer Sandy Petersen has taken to X (formerly Twitter) to explain the closure of Ensemble Studios, where he worked in the 2000s. According to Petersen, Ensemble and its in-development Halo MMO were scuttled by Xbox boss Don Mattrick to protect a short-term, profit-based bonus he was elligible to receive.

"In 2008, Ensemble Studios started planning a gigantic MMO set in the Halo universe," said Petersen. "We code-named it Titan. It was to take place tens of thousands of years ago, before the Halos were set off & destroyed all sentient life in the Galaxy."

Petersen was in charge of sketching out the setting and lore of this primeval Halo galaxy, and he said that Titan was at an advance stage in development when it was canceled, which is corroborated by prior accounts of the game's development⁠—here's an album of screenshots and in-game models allegedly sourced from the project.

Petersen claims that the "lowest estimate we & Microsoft had for the game's total income was $1.1 billion," which is a staggering sum for any game to pull in. For context, Deadline reported in 2021 that the entire Halo franchise had reached 81 million copies sold at the time. Back of the napkin math at $60 a copy puts the series' revenue from game sales at around $5 billion after 20 years of existence.

While possibly a typo, Petersen's note that Titan started development in 2008 doesn't line up with prior accounts of the game's development which have the project starting in 2004 and getting canceled in mid-2007, around Don Mattrick's July, 2007 ascension as head of Xbox.

In 2008, Ensemble Studios started planning a gigantic MMO set in the Halo universe. We code-named it Titan. It was to take place tens of thousands of years ago, before the Halos were set off & destroyed all sentient life in the Galaxy. I was in charge of the universe-building -… pic.twitter.com/8eaSbEt81XOctober 28, 2025

Petersen said that Titan's Alliance and Horde would have been the human-like Forerunners and the Covenant. Some of the leaked art and screenshots of Titan look contemporaneous with the mainline series, while other designs have a more science fantasy look in line with what Petersen describes.

It's possible that Titan might have involved time travel of some kind, or else a consistency with the setting's supposed far future aesthetics like we saw in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. In a 2008 ShackNews interview, former Ensemble technology director Dave Pottinger said that "the

Source: PC Gamer