“For me it was less a game and more a political and technical puzzle to solve. In order to implement host migration, for instance - where a “host” player would drop from the game and a new host would be selected to replace them - Hoberman had to beg the Xbox Live team to modify their services. Initially, the 360 made certain Halo 2 features impossible to reproduce in Halo 3. When asked how he feels about Halo 3 having recently celebrated its 10th anniversary, he says: “It doesn’t feel like a game that I worked on.”īecause of high turnover within the Xbox Live team, and a number of changes made to the service for the launch of the Xbox 360, Bungie was forced to reinvent the wheel, so to speak. I consider them the two mentors I’ve had in my career - Alex in business and Jason in game development.” Hoberman took most of what he learned from them, he says, and applied it to Certain Affinity.Ĭontrary to the typical Bungie narrative circa 2004 - that Halo 2’s development was a waking nightmare from beginning to end - Hoberman looks back on his time with the game with far greater fondness than his time on its sequel. “So I basically joined Bungie’s publishing team, and for years was Alex Seropian’s right-hand man, which really taught me a lot about the business. At last, here was a real gig in the game world that he was qualified for. He checked the postings on Bungie’s website and saw an opening labeled “Graphic Designer / Webmaster.” It couldn’t have been more perfect he’d put himself through college doing part-time graphic design and trying his hand at making websites. He then remembered his love of Marathon - and a ’92 cult-hit dungeon crawler called Minotaur. He tried to get his foot in the door at Origin Systems, the studio behind his beloved Ultima 3, but it declined to grant him an interview. “I had four roommates, and we ran coaxial cable we all bought network cards, and we used that network exclusively to play multiplayer games, and 80 percent of the time we were playing Marathon.”Īfter graduation he turned down a job opportunity at Aspyr, which was in the business of porting games, because he wanted to make them on the developer side. He attended the University of Texas with no long-term career plan, and stumbled his way into a photography course that led him to consider a career as a photojournalist. “I consider them the two mentors I’ve had in my career - Alex in business and Jason in game development.” If you think about the impact that Doom had, and Doom multiplayer, Marathon was exactly the same thing for Mac users: LAN-party heaven.” “Bungie was absolutely the top game developer on the Mac, mostly because of Marathon. “But who was really big on the Mac, for at least multiplayer games - which was almost always what I enjoyed the most - was Bungie, actually,” he says. (“We still go backpacking every summer,” he says.) He fell in love with ports of classic games like Richard Garriott’s Ultima 3 he played several Blizzard titles, such as Warcraft 2, and quickly discovered the thrill of online multiplayer. “Gaming on the Mac was a pretty sorry experience,” he says, but fortunately his tight-knit group of friends all had Macs, as well. His first computer was a Mac Plus he didn’t touch a PC until the day he got hired at Bungie. Hoberman grew up playing games exclusively in the Apple ecosystem. Like Halo, Certain Affinity owes its existence to the 1994 shooter Marathon. Last Expedition isn’t trying to be the next Halo, but they share a common ancestry. “And it kind of grew on us, and eventually everyone thought it was a great name.” It’s funny, when we came up with ‘Halo’ way back when, almost everyone inside the studio thought it was a terrible name,” he says, laughing. Its working title, Hoberman says, is Last Expedition. Now, the Austin studio is hard at work on, among other things, its first original shooter - a four-player co-op game set on a hellish alien world. In June, the team relocated to its own 55,000-square-foot office building, and in October the company sold a 20 percent stake to Hong Kong-based Leyou Technologies, which also owns the free-to-play action game Warframe. Since its inception, Certain Affinity has contributed to more than a dozen triple-A releases, including the multiplayer for 2016’s acclaimed Doom reboot. What began with a small Xbox Live Arcade title and a Halo 2 multiplayer expansion has grown into a studio with over 125 full-time employees. Max Hoberman John Davidson for Certain AffinityĬertain Affinity, the company Hoberman founded when he left Halo developer Bungie in 2006, is undergoing the biggest evolution in its decade-plus history.
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