While Destiny was planned for a September 2013 release, the story was substantially revised in August 2013. That pushed the release date back to March 2014. O’Donnell returned to work after a vacation, but the audio team and his supervisor did not consider him to be fully engaged in his work. The release date of the game, meanwhile, pushed back to September 2014. Bungie set in motion a process to terminate O’Donnell.
Meanwhile, O’Donnell argued that the audio work could not be completed until the game was in a bug-free, playable state. He felt the treatment was unfair but said he would continue to work. Members of the team complained that O’Donnell wasn’t contributing as expected, and his presence was frustrating the completion of the audio work. Ryan proposed to the Bungie board that O’Donnell be terminated.
IIRC, Marty's development process for the Halo games was to work on themes during development, and then compose the final tracks and interactive components after the game was essentially done and in final testing/bug squashing mode. I recall from the updates from the Halo games that the music was one of the very last things to get done.
Given all the complexities with Destiny, it sounds like they wanted the music to come online earlier, probably wanting to lock down as much of the game as possible given how much it was in flux, and that conflicted with how Marty preferred to work. So I wonder if Marty was just doing his usual work flow, or whether he was really not pulling his weight as the staff and supervisor said. That was ostensibly the end reason for his firing (the kerfuffle over the E3 trailer seemed to put him on thin ice).
Really unfortunate affair all around, but it seems to me that the outcome was fair. (Bungie's office politics sound
really ugly from this, which I did not expect.)
Geez, how bad was Microsoft that Bungie decided Activision was a better option?
Worth noting that Activision does not own Bungie, or Destiny; Microsoft owned them and thus Halo. I imagine Bungie is happy about that.