Halo used to be Bungie's darling, and it sounds like they were never pleased with the prospect of it being turned into an RTS.
That's what Ensemble Studios founder Tony Goodman says, anyway. The game didn't start as a Halo game, but Microsoft decided it'd have a better chance with the Halo branding. This set development back a year. Goodman says Microsoft seemed to assume they could just "paint over" what they'd already made with Halo characters and settings.
They didn't get a lot of help from Bungie, either. "Another problem was that Bungie was never up for it... Bungie was kind of sore about the idea. What they called it was 'the whoring out of our franchise' or something. Yeah, that didn't create a great relationship between us and Bungie; they viewed us as someone infringing [on their franchise]," says Goodman.
Halo Wars turned out to be Ensemble's last game. Since then, Goodman has moved on to Orcs Must Die developer Robot Entertainment, and recently left there to form a new mobile studio called PeopleFun.
