Halo Creator Launches Stone Kite, a New World-Building Studio

Stone Kite is a new world-building studio from the man who created Halo and Destiny. Jason Jones, the Bungie co-founder behind both franchises, launched the Los Angeles company on October 1 alongside New York Times bestselling author Margaret Stohl, according to the studio's announcement. Its first release is One Zero One, a four-part comic series adapted from an original manuscript Jones wrote himself. The story follows a coming worldwide conflict between humanity and a rogue army of robotic soldiers driven by artificial intelligence. Stohl, a former Bungie executive who has written for Marvel Comics and video games, is running the company as chief executive.

The structure is the point. Most entertainment companies start with one product and license the rest afterward, which usually means the first medium dictates how the world looks everywhere else. the studio says it will do the reverse, bringing creators from books, comics, film, television, and games into the same room from day one so each new universe is built for every format at the same time. Stone Kite says more than 250 creators are already contributing to that effort, including director Jay Roach, comic book artist Christian Ward, illustrator Kyle Lambert, author Stephen Graham Jones, and screenwriter Akela Cooper. Its founding team also includes former Marvel executive Stephen Wacker, president Lewis Peterson, film and television VP Matt Johnson, and narrative creative director Jeanine Schaefer, as reported by GamesIndustry.biz.

A comic first, but never a comic only

The debut issue is already available to read digitally, and readers can preorder the print edition from the studio's store. The remaining issues will be released online for free through early 2027, according to Stone Kite's launch announcement, with additional projects in other media planned after that. That rollout order is deliberate. Jones has said he spent his life making games but always wanted to write, and this series starts from prose he drafted on his own before any artist or producer touched it. By opening with a comic and releasing the text excerpts alongside it, the studio is treating the written word as the foundation and letting games, film, and television grow out of the same manuscript instead of adapting a finished hit.

Why the games world is watching

Jones is one of the few developers whose name alone can carry a launch. He co-created two of the best-known franchises in video games, and Destiny in particular showed how a studio can turn a single shooter into a decade-long shared world. That history is exactly what Stone Kite is selling: not another game, but a way of making universes that can live for decades across whatever formats audiences pick up. Stohl put it plainly in the announcement: she has spent her career working across books, games, comics, film, and television, and she has watched the medium that tells the first story define everything that comes after. "Instead of starting in one medium and adapting outward, we bring the best global creators from different disciplines into the room from day one to shape the world together," she said.

The timing is hard to miss. Artificial intelligence is the story's villain, and real-world AI agents are the industry's biggest obsession this year. A comic about rogue machine soldiers arriving free online, from the creator of the franchise that defined console shooters, lands squarely in a moment when studios are racing to figure out what AI means for how stories get made and who makes them. Whether Stone Kite's collaborative model can actually ship games, films, and books from one shared blueprint is still unproven, and the studio has not announced a release date for anything beyond the comic series. If the model works, Stone Kite could become a template for how big franchises are born: with the comic readers, the players, and the viewers all present at the creation. For now, the bet is that worlds built by hundreds of people at once will feel richer than worlds built by one studio and licensed to everyone else.