Destiny Engineering Team is the Largest They Could Imagine, Includes “Well North” of 100 People

With the launch of Destiny exactly one week, Bungie is busy preparing for what will be the beginning of a franchise both they and Activision hope will make over $1 billion, after spending over $500 million on the game.

Following a hugely successful beta of over 4.6 million participants, Bungie knows there will be lots of interest for Destiny right off the bat, so they bought a giant data centre in Las Vegas. Head of Production Jonty Barnes explained to The Guardian why they chose Las Vegas, and how many engineers are working on the infrastructure:

The interesting thing about Las Vegas is, you get a lot of natural disasters walking down up and down the strip, but you don’t get a lot of true natural disasters affecting the landscape. There are no earthquakes, no hurricanes, no floods – it’s perfect.

It is the largest engineering team we could imagine. It’s such a complex online infrastructure. We’re well north of 100 engineers.

Also in the interview, Barnes discussed the very beginning of Destiny, with production beginning in summer of 2009:

We started Destiny in the summer of 2009. It was a very small team, less than five people, talking about what we wanted to explore, the vision behind it all. We absolutely wanted to create a shared universe – things are better with your friends. Church groups used to play Halo together; families could play together on the sofa. We wanted to recapture that. So we started building an action game – it had to be a very hopeful place, a place people could go back to time and time again, we wanted to create many different activities and it had to be accessible.