Bungie engineer Chris Butcher was blunter in his assessment. "We had about four to five weeks to polish Halo at the end...[but] we had none of that for Halo 2," he told the magazine. "We miscalculated, we screwed up, we came down to the wire and we just lost all of that. So Halo 2 is far less than it could and should be in many ways because of that. It kills me to think of it."

Butcher was even critical of Halo 2's multiplayer element. "Even the multiplayer experience for Halo 2 is a pale shadow of what it could and should have been if we had gotten the timing of our schedule right," he said "I ****ing cannot play Halo 2 multiplayer. I cannot do it."

"We now have a system for when I want to come in and do something crazy, for making it all work," he told the magazine. "Now I feel like we've got this incredible framework and we can just go nuts and do anything we want to with this really solid foundation."