Videogame companies will sometimes hand out custom gifts to key employees for major career milestones, and it turns out Bungie has decided to join in, most recently by gifting Destiny game director Christopher Barrett a 1:1 replica of the fearsome Lord of Wolves shotgun for his 20-year anniversary with the company.
Barrett posted photos of his Lord of Wolves to Twitter, thanking the company for “the amazing 20-year anniversary gift,” which he says will be mounted above his desk in the near future. It’s a magnificent piece of fabrication: there’s Lord of Wolves’ distinctive metallic and angular fanged choke with forward grip at the front, the snarling spikes on the top and between the barrels, and the distressed receiver that’s curved to almost look like a classic chopper body.
As a gift, it’s perhaps an amusing one: when Lord of Wolves made its debut in Destiny 2’s Forsaken expansion, our Rich called it “one of the most broken guns I’ve ever seen in Destiny (1 or 2).” Using its unique perk ‘Release the Wolves,’ players could effectively one-shot other guardians in the Crucible and lay waste to bosses in a fraction of the time they normally would take to kill.
Lord of Wolves has since been brought to heel, but Barrett will be able to think back to the heady early days of Forsaken every time he glances up at the piece from his desk from here on out.
Thank you @Bungie and @ratedeforeric for the amazing 20-Year Anniversary gift – Lord of Wolves. Will be mounted above my desk soonTM! #BungieDay pic.twitter.com/XRWp3IFM4S
— Christopher Barrett (@cgbarrett) July 7, 2020
The real-world version of Lord of Wolves (which probably can do without a nerf for now) was created by a fabrication artist who goes by RatedEforEric, and who has done various fabrication for the Bungie Store and Aurum Effects.
Barrett has been with Bungie since 1999, working on Myth II: Soulblighter and every Halo title Bungie made.
It’s cool to see these kinds of anniversary gifts from games companies – back in 2018, CD Projekt Red gave Cyberpunk 2077 quest director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz a custom-made Samurai jacket to celebrate his ten years with the company, and Activision-Blizzard has its own unique system for rewarding employees for important milestones.