Michael Lloyd

Just said goodbye to the Cryo launch stream team and left Bungie HQ to get ready for my flight, and I am sitting here in the airport feeling so overwhelmed by the responses I've seen from you guys in the last couple of days. When I first started to get to know the Destiny community in February 2025, it was only ever planned to be a 1 week streaming marathon, where I'd play Sundered Doctrine on contest, and that would be that. That week turned into months, and the strangers I met that week have turned into great friends. Alongside that, I got to begin working relationships with Bungie and the wonderful devs there, and immediately felt incredibly warmly welcomed. It's wild to think all this then happened in the year which followed; the Marathon ARG, the blind raids, the Edge of Fate preview event, blind Salvation's Edge straight into World's Last Desert Perpetual, and GCX, and slowly but surely I felt less like an outsider with each new moment. It was pretty alien to me to be embraced and trusted by a game developer in the way that Bungie did over the course of all these events, and I never took any of it for granted. And then they invited me to host the launch of Cryo Archive. The map which I'd been patiently waiting for ever since those first teasers, where we got little hints that it'd be full of puzzles and secrets and easter eggs to solve. They were willing to take a chance on me to help bring that to the broader community. And it all started with @Ziegler_Dev giving me a locked box with no explanation whatsoever 😆 To be clear - even if I had just been casting from home, this would have been a huge honour, but Bungie then went completely above and beyond. They brought me out to the studio, worked absurdly hard to create a phenomenal set for us to stream from, allowed us to keep streaming way into the night on extra setups long after we should have been kicked out of the building by security, and did everything in their power to empower us to do the best job we possibly could. Cryo was always going to be tough to cover because there is so much going on at once, and with thousands of teams all making new discoveries, sorting through all of that was always going to be difficult. Bungie knew this would happen, and so they let me flex the muscles of my broader production team, with the gang all scouring different streams for clips, highlights to showcase on stream, and updates on puzzle progress. My team turned around two absolutely fantastic sizzle edits overnight on Friday for us to use in the day2 stream on Saturday, and we also did a huge comprehensive recap of the world first solve live on stream with no script, just pure passion and a goliath list of clips and highlights to pull up on the fly. It was absolutely magical that it all came together the way that it did, and I am so proud of everyone involved, both from my side and from Bungie's team. In particular, I want to call out @fresigfx's heroic omnipresence across seemingly every single stream to help us parse what was happening, and @MrUnleashed115's organising helping to keep it all perfectly on track. Fantastic work fellas; you and the rest of the team did such a brilliant job. I'm so proud of you all - there are too many of you to name but you've all genuinely been lifesavers across the board. A really special shoutout needs to also go to Bungie's own @malikshelp for his work on all of this. There were moments where in the frenzy of everything it felt like we were really stretching the capacities of what was possible to put together and run for a live event of this scale, but time and time again Malik smashed through whatever problems we were facing and actually made things happen. Absolutely none of this would have been possible without him doing this, and I mean that with no hyperbole. He is the unsung hero of this event and I'm mega grateful to him for putting his trust in me to deliver on what he told the wider Bungie team that he *knew* I could do given the opportunity. Thank you so much Malik. And @Skarrow9!! What a journey this has been brother. One which people will never know the true extent of haha - crazy to think we've only known each other for a short period but already been able to cook together the way that we have done. It's been awesome getting to work alongside you. Deimos is a perfectly valid moon though 💔 And then there's all of you lovely people reading this. Whether it was my first week in Destiny last year, or the Marathon ARG, or just my streams on the game since launch; whether you're a twitch viewer, a twitterer, or a creator friend who has been cheering me on from home; wherever we have connected, you'd been so uplifting and positive throughout this, in a world which is increasingly cynical, and that's something that has not gone unnoticed. I've had a massive number of comments, tweets, and responses since the stream saying that you enjoyed my casting which makes me SO happy, and most importantly saying that you felt like this helped make Cryo more entertaining on day 1 and more accessible to a broader audience, which really means the world to me (and is a huge relief haha!!!) I've lost so much sleep to try and do the best job I possibly could here, and all your responses have made me feel like it was absolutely worth it at every step. You'll never know how much it means to me. I'd do it all over again in a heartbeat. Thank you everyone. <3