Max Dyckhoff
Max Dyckhoff is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) engineer hired in 2006 as part of Bungie's Expansion. He worked with Damian Isla on making the AI, "so amazing that it will make you feel as if you are playing with or against human players all of the time... I will be implementing behaviors in characters that will really engage the player."—Max Dyckhoff
Before Max joined the Bungie team he worked at Free Radical Design in Nottingham, England for two years, as AI programmer for TimeSplitters Future Perfect. After TimeSplitters Future Perfect was released looking for something new he saw an opening for an AI engineer on Bungie.net. He did a phone interview with Damian Isla and managed to impress Bungie with his skills.
In December 2010, Max left Bungie to work with Blizzard Entertainment in California. From July 2010 to December 2010, he was working on Destiny. Between 2012 and 2021, he worked at Naughty Dog on AI for The Last of Us and Uncharted 4, before leaving in 2021 to take a role as Director of Engineering at videogame startup That's No Moon.
Bungie Interview[]
When he was hired by Bungie, Max did a little interview with Brian Jarrard where he talked about his history as a Bungie Fan:
"I like to think of myself as the stealth fanboy. There are a handful of people in the community that know me from back in the pre-Halo days, when the community was so much smaller. My history goes back to the original Marathon, which back then, was one of the few games for the Mac. I played it to death and then fell in love with the rest of the trilogy. I made maps for Marathon 2 with the third party map editor Pforte, and then more when Marathon Infinity came out with the official tools.
When Myth came out, I played furiously on bungie.net even taking part in various tournaments with little success. I then started to hang out on The Core (Hi Rex!) and discussed "Blam!"— which of course turned into Halo. I was watching, via the internet, when Halo was first announced at the 1999 Macworld Expo in New York. Around the time when The Core turned into Rampancy, I was one of the initial members of Pax Nimbus, the first ever Halo clan.
When Bungie was bought by Microsoft, Pax Nimbus largely fell apart. A group of us sought refuge by founding Subnova, lead by 3 of 9. Since then I left University and started work, so my participation in the community waned. I like to think I have been the community's #1 lurker, appearing occasionally on HBO to make some obnoxious comment and then disappearing into the ether.
I have met a lot of friends in the community, too many to list here, and indeed over the last couple of years I have started meeting up with them at various places in the United Kingdom and America."