Halo Wars includes final farewell from Ensemble Studios

by Dustin Burg { Mar 3rd 2009 at 1:29PM }

With today's (North American) release of Halo Wars, we thought we'd share Ensemble Studios' heartfelt goodbye message included in the game's end credits. The video, which shares the same sentimental weight as Bruce Shelley's final remarks, starts with a message to all of Ensemble's fans and is followed by individual notes from everyone on the development team.

We wish the best of luck to everyone who was a part of the team at Ensemble Studios and hope success follows with their new ventures.

Tags: ensemble, ensemble-studios, halo, halo-wars, rts

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Boff @ Mar 3rd 2009 1:34PM

Sadpanda

Temidien @ Mar 3rd 2009 1:36PM

To all the crew at Ensemble, thanks for the memories!!

Kyle @ Mar 3rd 2009 1:39PM

"LIsa - you can smash your Zune now!"

Classic.

Temidien @ Mar 3rd 2009 1:49PM

Duncan Grimshaw - "So long, and thanks for all the fish." XD

Dirty @ Mar 3rd 2009 3:09PM

My freaking zune is goin to be smashed. They sent me a new one... broken out of the box.

Timerider @ Mar 3rd 2009 1:43PM

AoE II was awesome. I just wanted to say that.

If Halo Wars does well, why would they go out of business?

baby sea tuna @ Mar 3rd 2009 1:45PM

Because they made the first Xbox Halo game that's going to end up with a Metacritic score lower than 90.

HERESY!

Bloo @ Mar 3rd 2009 1:48PM

Because the studio doubled in size to do the Halo MMO and when that got canceled they didn't lay any employees off. Simply put, it was too big of a studio for RTS titles

SeriousKriss @ Mar 3rd 2009 3:25PM

They didn't go out of business, Microsoft closed them down.

baby sea tuna @ Mar 3rd 2009 1:43PM

I wish it was just a stop-motion video of them spelling out "F.U.M.S." with their poop.

So sad.

Mazrael @ Mar 3rd 2009 1:53PM

..and I only watched upto the end of the main credits..

CyberKnight @ Mar 3rd 2009 2:28PM

It's a Halo game -- you *always* watch through the whole credits!

Mazrael @ Mar 4th 2009 1:24PM

I usually do.. but on this one, I just didn't think there would be an extra cutscene. unless you need to beat it on legendary..

Anticrawl @ Mar 3rd 2009 2:00PM

Hopefully the key talent from Ensemble forms their own studio and buys back their old licenses. I hate to see the RTS developer that set the standard for the genre as I see it dissapear forever. Like FASA it was a hugely influencal developer that was underappreciated by the industry and dropped by Microsoft.

edtorious @ Mar 3rd 2009 2:00PM

They should have put spoiler alert on the title!

j/k... ;-D

capt_carl @ Mar 3rd 2009 2:07PM

My heart still aches for Ensemble. What a way to go out.

Jonman @ Mar 3rd 2009 2:21PM

What a grand idea for a game's credits though! Much more interesting than simply a list of names and job titles.

Snowblind @ Mar 3rd 2009 2:59PM

Gears of War 2 did something very similar (actually much better)
And I'm fairly sure Fable 2 and numerous other recent games have also. :P

The Baron @ Mar 3rd 2009 3:25PM

LBP and Flower's playable credits were pretty cool I thought.

Was it Half-Life 2 or the original MGS, or both, where the credits appeared as you played through the first few minutes?

Arashikou @ Mar 3rd 2009 6:14PM

MGS, HL, and HL2, as I recall, though for the latter two, the segment in question was fairly stuck-on-rails. (Literally, in 2's case.)

chefgon_ign @ Mar 3rd 2009 2:36PM

Ensemble Studios is probably my favorite developer ever. I can't even count the number of hours that I spent playing Age of Empires 2. I very rarely invest that kind of time into any single game. So rarely, in fact, that I think AoE2 is the only example from my entire lifetime of game playing.

Vash @ Mar 3rd 2009 2:51PM

Now that i've seen the credits all i need to do is go out and buy and beat the game -.-"

Blazur @ Mar 3rd 2009 2:56PM

Good luck to them, and thanks for the fun playing AoE and Age of Mythology. Truly amazing franchises.

skin.bintin @ Mar 4th 2009 12:42AM

I hardly ever heard people talking about how much they loved Ensemble, and their games, until Microsoft shut them down.

I wonder how many a genuine fans like myself, and how many didn't really give a shit until they got closed down? Wagon Jumpers perhaps?

All the same, it's a shame to see Ensemble go. They are the people behind some of my all time favourite PC games. And after spending some time on Halo Wars late last week, I feel I can safely say they may have gone out with their best.

Halo Wars just seems to work so well. I had my doubts how well the Halo world would translate over to an RTS game. An RTS game on a console to boot.... They really pulled it off though.

If you don't have Halo Wars yet, go and get it! :)

CyberKnight @ Mar 3rd 2009 3:19PM

Erm, not to sound callous or anything, but this doesn't seem that different than the closing credits to Halo 3, giving the people who worked on it a moment to give their "shout out" to whoever or whatever. Not *that* big of a deal.

Don't get me wrong; I think it's pretty cool that the people who put their hard work into it get their moment, as it were. It may not mean a lot to us (especially things like the corny "rock star" pictures in the Rock Band credits), but I'm sure it means a lot to them. It'd be nice to get that kind of recognition in my own job. (Then again, I program business applications; not much of what I do includes "closing credits." :/ )

Arashikou @ Mar 3rd 2009 6:18PM

It's important because Ensemble was shut down as they finished this game. These aren't just their shout-outs to their friends, family, or whoever, these are their final messages to their fans, their last words, their dying breaths. Sure, plenty of developers have given their employees a chance to personalize the credits, (I think it's a great trend, BTW!) but this one is newsworthy because of the context of the messages.

Dr Jeckyl and Mr ESC. @ Mar 3rd 2009 3:27PM

Those guys are awesome.

I bought Halo Wars LE,pretty standard stuff for their level of awesomeness but considering is a console RTS for the Halo community is pretty cool.again I'm not to deep in the game,I'm stillh oping to play as the flood for great justice.

My only complain is the H3 map pack but I guess I should be complaining with Bungie.

The mythic map pack is just Sandbox alone the other 2 maps are very meh.Assembly is a small and confusing clusterf*ck,imagine pit but round and purple and alot smaller.I swear it looked bigger in the HD video.The particle effect is just bad I mean it makes me sleepy for some reason

Orbital I must admit while it looks good,okay I think I saw some new textures too bad you can't see directly outside of the ship is a snake desing for team matches again very basic stuff.Stiil I can't find the damn skull.

Sandbox is a lot of fun but Forge being what it is the fun is limited but is the most versatile map of the whole game.

Still my favorite map pack is still Legendary (Again that’s not saying much) Ghost Town reminds me of COD4 and Avalanche is great for heavy team matches. Blackout well I manage to do some modifications in Forge to turn it into a shooting gallery but for matchmaking it sucks.

Heroic, the less I say about this one the better.