From last year's Polygon article... (Destiny)

by bluerunner , Music City, Wednesday, April 16, 2014, 04:54 (3883 days ago) @ Grizzlei

I've seen this being batted around this morning. No idea if it has anything to do with why he was let go (I'm still holding onto hope that it's an elaborate hoax).

http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/1/24/3908184/heart-of-bungie-destiny-jason-jones-marty-odonnell-halo

They try to slip it past us the way they try to slip it past themselves, but we notice and so do they. There's another person who gets an office. Actually, his whole team works apart, secluded down a corridor. Partly because of the nature of their work, it's true. But also in part because out of a team of semi-anonymous team players, he's the only famous one.

It's not Marty O'Donnell's fault, really. Games take a team to orchestrate. Music doesn't. And then there's the awards. Don't forget the awards. He can't really be faulted for that either. He didn't award them to himself. That Rolling Stone (among others) considered his work the best example of video game soundtracking in history can't be laid at his feet, really. What was he supposed to do? Make less amazing music?

Marty O'Donnell in his Ivory Tower Still, it irks. Everyone plays nice, for sure. Bungie is, after all, a workplace and a team and a good one of both. There is no rancor. Not out where we can see it anyway, but I get a whiff of it here and there. I can smell the irk.

"One of the things that I think really gets [Bungie co-founder] Jason Jones's goat sometimes is that there is still one person who can make a contribution that's outsized, and that's Marty O'Donnell," Chris Butcher tells us. "There's only one composer."

O'Donnell's studio has been given the moniker "Ivory Tower." As we enter the upstairs production area, Parsons makes a point of pointing out that O'Donnell will frequently come down from his tower to circulate amongst the troops (he calls it "driving his coffee cup around the room"). We watch O'Donnell. He catches shit from the troops, then stops over to say hello, coffee cup in hand. He's in good spirits. Then again, he can afford to be. He's the one with the awards.

Harold Ryan tries to put a damper on the irk. As studio manager, he's the peacemaker, and he explains that the music is simply easier to "see" than the other parts of the game.

"You can do this with movies and you can do it with games," Ryan says. "You can turn the audio off and play it, and then you can turn the audio on. It's the only thing you can turn on and off and actually compare what it's like with and without. It's something that stands out the easiest from a contrast point of view."