Halo co-creator launches Stone Kite transmedia studio

Jason Jones, the Bungie co-founder who helped create Halo and Destiny, has a new studio, and it is not leading with a game. Stone Kite was announced on 2 October as a Los Angeles-based “world-building studio”, with games writer Margaret Stohl as chief executive.

One world told many ways, all at once

The studio is deliberately sidestepping the usual transmedia ladder, in which a story starts in one medium and is adapted outwards. Stone Kite calls its method “fractal storytelling”: a single world told consistently whether you arrive through a comic, a piece of fiction or a podcast, “not multiple adaptations of one thing, but all the things, all at once”.

Its first universe is One Zero One, adapted from an original manuscript by Jones. The premise is a familiar one given the studio's pedigree: humanity teaches machines to think, fight and care for it, makes itself disposable in the process, and then faces extinction at the hands of its own worst creation. One Zero One will launch as a four-part comic series, with new issues released online for free from early 2027 and further media projects to follow.

A games-heavy founding team

Stohl worked as Destiny 2's narrative director, co-founded 7 Studios with Lewis Peterson, and is the author of the Beautiful Creatures series. Stone Kite's founding team also includes former media SVP Stephen Wacker, president Lewis Peterson, film and TV VP Matt Johnson and narrative creative director Jeanine Schaefer. The studio says it is collaborating with more than 250 creators, among them director Jay Roach, comic artist Christian Ward, illustrator Kyle Lambert, author Stephen Graham Jones and screenwriter Akela Cooper.

Stohl framed the studio as a reaction to how her own career worked: “I've spent my career creating books, games, comics, film and television, and I've seen how often the medium that tells the first story ends up defining everything that comes after it,” she said, adding that Stone Kite wants “the best global creators from different disciplines into the room from day one to shape the world together”. Jones, for his part, traced the project back to cycling to second-hand bookshops for science-fiction paperbacks, and credited Stohl as the first person to believe he could write a book of his own.

What it means for games

No game has been announced, and the first One Zero One release is a comic. Even so, the studio is a games story: Halo and Destiny are among the most heavily built-out universes the industry has produced, and the manuscript at the root of Stone Kite belongs to the person who co-created them. Whether One Zero One eventually becomes interactive is the question the founders will keep being asked, and their own wording leaves that door plainly open.

Our opinion

Transmedia has earned its bad name: too often it means a marketing ladder built after the fact, with a comic for the fans and a tie-in novel for the completists. Stone Kite is at least starting in an unusual place. A free four-part comic is cheap, fast and readable on a phone, which makes it a far better laboratory for world-building than a nine-figure game, and putting the story in front of readers before the merchandise exists is a braver sequence than most entertainment companies attempt.

The harder test is whether “fractal storytelling” survives contact with a release schedule. Shared universes usually fracture when a second team needs a new villain, and Stone Kite's answer is to keep the world in one room from day one, which is easier to promise than to enforce. The detail that lingers is Jones himself: one of the people who built Halo choosing a comic rather than a console as the opening move says something about where he thinks the interesting work now sits.