A new book from Jason Schreier called Blood, Sweat, and Pixels talks about the development of the first Destiny game just in time for the release of the sequel. One of the things mentioned in his book, is that in the early stages of the title, Destiny closely resembled Overwatch, or rather what would eventually be the popular first-person shooter.

In the late 2000’s, Destiny, which was called Project Tiger at that time, was just starting to be tossed around and one of its early concepts was very much like Titan. Blizzard was developing Titan at the time, but they would go on to cancel that MMO and eventually take those ideas and use them to create our beloved Overwatch.

One of the designers from the first 3 Halo games, Jaime Griesemer, thought up the idea of Bungie making a shared-world shooter and he noticed that Destiny closely resembled Overwatch when he first tried Titan. He said that when he went to Blizzard to play the game that would eventually become Overwatch, he was like, “Holy s***, you guys are working on the same game, down to character classes.” Obviously Destiny went in a completely different direction, but it’s still crazy to think about!

According to Griesemer, Destiny changed direction multiple times because Bungie wanted something bigger than Halo. Unfortunately, it started to become more and more like Halo and Griesemer spoke out against it. He said that he was hoping to “obstruct things to the point where they’re either going to have to change [the way] they’re going or get rid of me.” Long story short, Bungie’s board of directors chose to get rid of him by asking Griesemer to resign.

Schreier’s book Blood, Sweat, and Pixels releases today and covers a lot more than Destiny. For someone like me, finding out that two titles were incredibly similar is like discovering Santa and Krampus were identical twins (Destiny is of course Krampus, duh). What do you think about it? Let us know in the comments section below and then make sure to follow DFTG on Twitter to stay updated on all the hottest gaming and entertainment news 24/7!