When 35 gamers at Bungie, of which I was excited to be a part of, set out to create Halo, we did so with one mindset: let’s make a game that we would want to play. I thought Halo had the potential to be incredibly successful, which in my mind would mean we’d sell a million copies and people would still be playing the game a year after the release.
I never dreamed it would become such a phenomenon that we’d see it re-released in its original form 25 years later (or on PlayStation but that’s a topic for another day).
I believe the enthusiasm for the re-release of the original Halo is in large part due to the wokification of the gaming industry. After years of gamers fighting the infiltration of DEI in the industry, we are finally winning.
I saw firsthand the beginning of DEI in the industry. Instead of hiring people who played videogames, corporations began requiring “diversity” at the expense of the quality of games. The corporate demand of hiring quotas meant more and more employees in charge of creating games not only didn’t play games, they didn’t even like video games and they certainly didn’t understand the audience.
Bungie’s motto went from “We make games we want to play” to “We create worlds that inspire friendships.”
The results from forcing DEI on gaming companies were, predictably, disastrous.
The embrace of DEI led to a stoic hero such as Master Chief to becoming a weak, self-doubting shell of the character that made him, and Halo, so popular to begin with. And don’t get me started on that rainbow armor.
These crazy changes to games aren’t just limited to Halo, obviously. In Dragon Age: The Veilguard, you could have Rooks identify as trans or non-binary. Call of Duty introduced a non-binary character, as well.
It’s hard for gamers to immerse themselves in a game when they are required to choose a “body type” instead of gender and provide pronouns for their character at the start.
How did gamers react to having things forced on them by the non-gamers developing these characters in the studio? They revolted.
Concord, which Sony spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing for nearly a decade, lasted less than two weeks on the market before being pulled offline last year. The game felt like it was created to check DEI boxes instead of appeal to gamers. It was riddled with woke nonsense such as progressive characters and pronouns. It is estimated that less than 25,000 copies were sold during its brief time on the market.
Simply put, it was an utter failure.
I don’t think it is a coincidence that Concord crashed and burned two months before Donald Trump was re-elected to the White House. The downfall of DEI in gaming feels very similar to the 2024 elections. At the same time that gamers fought and took back the gaming industry from woke leftists, voters fought and took back our country from woke leftists.
I am happy and excited that the movement to bring fun back into our games while taking politics out of them is winning. But believe me, the cancer that infected the industry has not been fully removed.
We can’t just sit back and let woke policies rear their ugly head again. That’s why I’ve stepped up to run for Congress in my home state of Nevada. I hope you’ll go to www.MartyforCongress.com and sign up to join me on this journey. I love this country and anything worth loving is worth fighting for.
And that’s why gamers must continue to fight back. I hope you’ll keep speaking out until these companies replace their quota hires who hate video games with workers who love games and want to make games they want to play. We can, and will, return this industry we love to what it once was
