Luke Smith and Mark Noseworthy have been confirmed to have left Bungie.
Luke Smith actually started out in the business as a video game journalist. Smith first made his name in Kotaku, but then became better known as 1Up.com’s news editor. In this capacity, Smith got known to write about Halo 2.
After deciding to leave journalism, he went into the company whose games he was critiquing itself. Smith was originally writing and working with the Bungie community, but made his way into working on their games too, and climbing that ladder. He is credited as a writer on Halo 3, was design lead for Destiny, and game director for Destiny 2.
Mark Noseworthy also made his way up Bungie’s developer ladder. He joined the company sometime between 2009 to 2010, and was credited as engineering producer for Halo: Reach, production lead for Destiny, executive producer for Destiny: The Taken King, and project lead for Destiny 2.
So, even if you weren’t an avid Bungie or Destiny fan for years, it’s clear that Smith and Noseworthy were two of the most important people in creative and production positions in the studio. If Bungie’s CEO Pete Parsons and other management executives were brokering deals with Sony and handling things on the business side, these were the bosses in the trenches with those developers who were actually making the games. But it seems that they may not have been 100 % focused on Destiny: The Final Shape.
As shared by Jeff Grubb in the latest episode of the Game Mess video podcast, the two were set to work on Payback, the game that we know was not Destiny 3, but was set to be the next game in the Destiny universe.
As we already reported, Payback had been cancelled a while back, and it’s possible that their exits were already planned before it happened. There is one last thing in this story that need clarification.
Addressing some misinterpretation of his statement, Grubb revealed on Twitter that Smith and Noseworthy “left due to the leadership restructuring.” The two were not laid off, and it’s possible that Bungie and Sony weren’t planning to include them in the layoffs as they are clearly valuable higher ups.
Tassi corroborated this claim from Grubb, stating that he heard that the two had “resigned” and lamenting that other Bungie employees were not able to negotiate their own exits this way. Depending on the terms of their exit, Smith and Noseworthy may or may not be at liberty to tell us what’s happened behind the scenes.
But for fans of the Destiny franchise, this marks a very serious end of an era for Bungie. Whether Bungie keeps supporting Destiny 2, or makes new Destiny games, whatever they’re called, different creative teams will be steering the ship from now on. We wish Smith and Noseworthy the best, and hope, if they want it, that they will return to making video games in the future.
