The planning behind Halo 3's Legendary SKU!

Everyone now knows about the limited edition Legendary SKU that will go for $129.99 but how did they come up with this idea? and where and how is it produced?.

On Bungie.net, the 2 men in charge of planning and producing the Legendary SKU is interviewed by Bungie's own Sketch Factor.

The 2 men are:

• CC: I’m Craig Carlson, the global operations launch program manager for the Halo 3 launch. I’m responsible for all three editions from procurement through disc replication, final packaging and coordination, distribution and transportation out to retailers to support the games release date.

 

• JS : My name is Jeff Sanborn and I work in the Packaging and Engineering Management Group within Operations. In my current role I’m responsible for the structural packaging for Xbox and Windows platforms.

How do you typically approach a project of this nature?

CC : For the Legendary and Limited Editions, there are four phases to program managing Halo 3. First is feasibility and fact finding. Next is development – the actual tooling, injection molding, painting, assembly and packaging of the helmet and tin. During all this is a lot of planning followed lastly by execution – the actual launch once the game disc RTMs* (*“Releases to Manufacturing”). The key to this is global coordination of all procurement and launch activities for Operations. This includes orchestrating these activities through an International team of experts in each region.

JS : As we develop packaging strategies for clients we lock packaging in four phases – gather, design, test and execute. In short we look at the goals and objectives of our clients (in this case, MGS/Bungie) and balance them against manufacturing capabilities and technologies, retailer requirements, cost objectives, legal and regulatory compliance, environmental stewardship, branding objectives and the need to get the product from manufacturing the end consumer looking great.

I recommend you give the whole interview a read.  Also, check out the images of all the hard working Chinese folk busting their asses for crap pay so they can produce out mini chief helmets.