Halo, Destiny Dev Was Working on a Minotaur-Starring Fantasy Game

Bungie, the developer behind Halo and Destiny, was working on a fantasy game in which you would have played as a Minotaur creature. Bungie veteran and composer Marty O'Donnell, who was fired from the studio in 2014, shared the details in a new interview, revealing the game was in development in between the launches of Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2.

That would have been in the 2001-2004 period. Another Bungie game that never saw the light of day, the Minecraft-like Project Phoenix, was also in development around this time.

O'Donnell told IGN that the game, codenamed Gypsum, was built on Bungie's proprietary Halo engine. The action game, which would have featured mythological elements, made it well beyond the planning stages. O'Donnell says Bungie had a playable version up and running that was a lot of fun.

"[Gypsum was] a game, very much mythical fantasy; there was a mythical creature that you played as in third-person--a Minotaur, believe it or not--and you ran around and smashed things with a hammer and magic stuff happened," he said. "It was...it went very, very far. There was a playable prototype that was a blast. I did music for it, sound effects, everything."

The game was ultimately shelved, as Bungie elected to instead make Halo 2 and apparently did not have the resources or an interest to work on two games at the same time. It's unknown if Bungie ever plans to return to Gypsum.

However, it looks like Bungie isn't putting all of its eggs in the basket of Destiny. Documents from the Bungie-Activision publishing agreement for Destiny showed that Bungie could devote up to 5 percent of its staff to work on an action shooter prototype for a reboot of the studio's Marathon franchise.

Whether or not Bungie is also working on other franchises outside of Destiny, in an exploratory fashion or otherwise, remains to be seen.

What do you make of Gypsum as O'Donnell describes it? Let us know in the comments below!