A never-used logo for the Phoenix project. Courtesy of phoenix.bungie.org
The Phoenix Project, also known as Breach or TTFKAM2, was the working title of an abandoned project by Bungie Software. The game was speculated to be a strategy game in a fantasy setting.
History[]
Fans first suspected the project's existence in 1999, when Bungie made a reference to "the team formerly known as Myth II", implying that the team still existed and therefore still had a project to work on. This comment was the source of the fan nickname "TTFKAM2".
In 2002, Hardy LeBel, then-Monster Hunter's lead, was moved to the Phoenix team. Alex Seropian and Jason Jones asked LeBel to work on the project, get the team up and running, and report back on whether it should be killed or not. After the team made a playable build, LeBel told Seropian and Jones to kill it, so they did. This was announced to Bungie.org at some point, as they created posthumous artwork in October 2002. However, Jones wanted to keep the Phoenix team alive, so they restarted the project.[1]
In early 2003, Jones told Marty O'Donnell that the team was demoralized, so he became their creative director and project lead, believing that he would run the team once a week and then check back in on Halo 2. [1]
At one point, half of Bungie was working on Phoenix while also working on Halo 2.
In mid-2003, the project was killed as a result of the team being absorbed into the Halo 2 team when Bungie realized that the game was in trouble after their E3 demo and they needed all available people working on the game to make the launch date.[1]
External links[]
- Mystery Project, a set of eight paintings by Craig Mullins. Based on the subject matter and the use of the name "Breach" in the filenames, some fans have speculated that the paintings may have originally been part of the Phoenix project.
- Roll the Dice, an editorial by John Tynes that talks briefly about Phoenix.