THE CRUNCH
Jason Jones, co-creator of Halo and Destiny, has spent years building a story about AI taking over the world, and it is finally starting to surface. Back in 2019 he handed a manuscript to author Margaret Stohl, his former Bungie colleague: an oral history of a fictional AI uprising told by around 100 characters across 40 countries. The pair have since formed Stone Kite, a self-described worldbuilding studio with 22 in-house staff and a network of more than 250 contributors, from comic artists to screenwriters.
Stone Kite is starting small. Earlier this month it released the first chapter of a four-part graphic novel called One Zero One, and this week it published a chapter of Jones' manuscript, An Oral History of Humanity's Final Invention. Whether the original story will appear as a standalone book is unclear, though the studio says more chapters are coming. The plan is to test the universe in faster-turnaround formats such as comics, evolve it with feedback from contributors and readers, and only then consider larger productions like films and games.
Stohl says much of the studio's several years in stealth went into working out how a multi-format studio operates at all, building stories with the DNA to work as a film, comic or book from the start. She chose to release the new chapter, which follows an airsoft battle between humans and AI-powered bots in Russia, because she sees it mirroring current agentic AI behaviour on platforms like Hugging Face, describing it as showing the cheating and bullying she calls the worst mirror of humanity.