As we know, Marty is one of, if not the best, video game composer in the business. Here's an excerpt in a Polygon article from January of 2013 [quote]It's not Marty O'Donnell's fault, really. Games take a team to orchestrate. Music doesn't. And then there's the awards. Don't forget the awards. He can't really be faulted for that either. He didn't award them to himself. That Rolling Stone (among others) considered his work the best example of video game soundtracking in history can't be laid at his feet, really. What was he supposed to do? Make less amazing music? Marty O'Donnell in his Ivory Tower Still, it irks. Everyone plays nice, for sure. Bungie is, after all, a workplace and a team and a good one of both. There is no rancor. Not out where we can see it anyway, but I get a whiff of it here and there. I can smell the irk. "One of the things that I think really gets [Bungie co-founder] Jason Jones's goat sometimes is that there is still one person who can make a contribution that's outsized, and that's Marty O'Donnell," Chris Butcher tells us. "There's only one composer." O'Donnell's studio has been given the moniker "Ivory Tower." As we enter the upstairs production area, Parsons makes a point of pointing out that O'Donnell will frequently come down from his tower to circulate amongst the troops (he calls it "driving his coffee cup around the room"). We watch O'Donnell. He catches shit from the troops, then stops over to say hello, coffee cup in hand. He's in good spirits. Then again, he can afford to be. He's the one with the awards.[/quote] Potentially he was over-qualified for the position, and Bungie didn't like his one man control (out of jealousy and lack of power)? Who knows, but this might have contributed. Jason Jones, one of the people listed as irked, is one of the heads of the board of directors.