Phil Spencer, the head of Microsoft Gaming, recently shared that he passed up opportunities to acquire games like Destiny and Guitar Hero for Xbox.
During a chat at PAX West called “Story Time with Phil Spencer,” he talked about some of his top games over the years, including Destiny.
Spencer admitted that Destiny didn’t grab his interest at first, even though he had a close bond with Bungie, the game’s developer. He once worked near Bungie’s founders at Microsoft and learned a lot from them.
Bungie did pitch Destiny to Microsoft, but Xbox decided not to go for it. It wasn’t until the House of Wolves expansion that Spencer started to like the game.
“It’s a game that I’ll always love and a team I’ll always have a ton of affinity for,” Spencer said.
Another big game Spencer had doubts about was Guitar Hero.
“An interesting one is when this team came down to Redmond and Alex Rigopulos, who is great, he pitches a game where they’re actually going to make plastic guitars, and they’re going to plug into consoles, and then they’re going to sell tracks where you’re going to play Simon on this guitar and I’m like, ‘Really?” Spencer said. “Do we really think that’s going to work?”
Spencer joked, “A few people played Guitar Hero. I heard that turned into a pretty good game.”
He prefers to stay positive and focus on what Xbox is doing now instead of dwelling on missed opportunities.
“Maybe that’s a fault of mine, but I passed on so many games,” he said.
Fans often wonder about what could have been, but it’s more fun to think about what’s coming next.
This isn’t the first time people have talked about Microsoft almost getting Bungie again. Bungie left Xbox in 2007 but had to leave Halo behind. Bungie’s composer, Martin O’Donnell, mentioned that Bungie thought about rejoining Microsoft or even going to Sony (which they did in 2022). Bungie wanted to keep the Destiny IP, which made deals with both companies tough. They ended up working with Activision for Destiny and Destiny 2, a partnership O’Donnell called “bad from the start.” This deal ended in 2019.
