ORAL HISTORY
The Complete, Untold History of Halo
May 30 2017, 1:59pm
The story behind the Halo franchise as it's never been told—by the key individuals that made it.
The first Halo I ever finished was 2009’s real-time strategy affair Halo Wars. That has to be something you don’t often hear. Most players’ first brush with a series as monstrous as this is undoubtedly some core Halo spectacle viewed from behind the muzzle of an assault rifle, not highlighting a convoy of units in eagle eye as a stand-in, custodial god of war. It feels like a fitting way to measure my unusual relationship with Master Chief, the UNSC, Covenant and everything else that Halo is, so we’ll go with it.
Somewhat ironically, Halo began from a strategic position, rather than being mapped from the outset as a shooter. The project evolved spiritually as a kind of outcropping from the clotted battlefields of Bungie’s 1997 tactical game Myth, trading a Braveheart aesthetic for more of a Starship Troopers vibe, and then rendering everything in anthill 3D. Even as a primitive vehicular prototype, emphasizing the physicality of the terrain, there wasn’t really anything that looked quite like it.
Its rise would be inevitable. In my early teens, a friend once showed me a few screens of some rudimentary marines riding a now-iconic buggy over a sweeping plain, talking about how this, not yet outside of Mac exclusivity, was going to be the next big thing. At least, that’s how I remember it.
He wasn’t wrong. By the time Master Chief had come to prominence as the hero, the star, of the multiplayer console FPS—and the term “Halo-killer” was inadvertently coined—I was too busy sneaking through Metal Gear Solid 2’s Big Shell to pay that much attention.
Not that I wasn’t envious of a capable console shooter, with or without four-player deathmatch. The original Halo: Combat Evolved may not have been the first home attempt at the genre, but it was arguably the most important. As close as its inspirational competition could get, the likes of Medal of Honor, Quake II and GoldenEye, none which I was ever that great at, felt comparative years behind. Bungie followed the unlikely lead of Argonaut Games’ Alien Resurrection, which mapped moving and aiming onto separate analog sticks over a year before the Xbox launched. That precedent aside, though, the Bellevue-based studio set the standards for the modern shooter genre almost singlehandedly.
For me, any devotional attention paid to Halo Wars proved to be an accidental crash course in mythology. As I went deeper, an entire universe started leaking out at the seams, referencing just enough for me to later get absorbed by the overtly cerebral vignettes in the 343 Industries-funded Animatrix-like Halo Legends, 343 having taken over the Halo series when Bungie spilt from Microsoft after 2010’s Halo: Reach.
This was finally the back entrance I needed. Halo may have spawned a legion of fans on the back of its legendary shooting, but across a number of interviews I did with Bungie vets, I was told it isn’t how they see the series’ core. Instead, as former Microsoft Games Studio head Ed Fries puts it, the games at their best are “vista moments”—evocative and hard to pin down, and maybe best encapsulated by the camera slowly tracking out above the bluffs in Halo 3’s debut trailer, Master Chief diminishing in the weight of the moment. That there’s an emotional core entombed somewhere under the stratum of dropped bullet casings and alien corpses is no secret among many the series’ many architects.
Somewhat ironically, Halo began from a strategic position, rather than being mapped from the outset as a shooter. The project evolved spiritually as a kind of outcropping from the clotted battlefields of Bungie’s 1997 tactical game Myth, trading a Braveheart aesthetic for more of a Starship Troopers vibe, and then rendering everything in anthill 3D. Even as a primitive vehicular prototype, emphasizing the physicality of the terrain, there wasn’t really anything that looked quite like it.
Its rise would be inevitable. In my early teens, a friend once showed me a few screens of some rudimentary marines riding a now-iconic buggy over a sweeping plain, talking about how this, not yet outside of Mac exclusivity, was going to be the next big thing. At least, that’s how I remember it.
He wasn’t wrong. By the time Master Chief had come to prominence as the hero, the star, of the multiplayer console FPS—and the term “Halo-killer” was inadvertently coined—I was too busy sneaking through Metal Gear Solid 2’s Big Shell to pay that much attention.
Not that I wasn’t envious of a capable console shooter, with or without four-player deathmatch. The original Halo: Combat Evolved may not have been the first home attempt at the genre, but it was arguably the most important. As close as its inspirational competition could get, the likes of Medal of Honor, Quake II and GoldenEye, none which I was ever that great at, felt comparative years behind. Bungie followed the unlikely lead of Argonaut Games’ Alien Resurrection, which mapped moving and aiming onto separate analog sticks over a year before the Xbox launched. That precedent aside, though, the Bellevue-based studio set the standards for the modern shooter genre almost singlehandedly.
For me, any devotional attention paid to Halo Wars proved to be an accidental crash course in mythology. As I went deeper, an entire universe started leaking out at the seams, referencing just enough for me to later get absorbed by the overtly cerebral vignettes in the 343 Industries-funded Animatrix-like Halo Legends, 343 having taken over the Halo series when Bungie spilt from Microsoft after 2010’s Halo: Reach.
This was finally the back entrance I needed. Halo may have spawned a legion of fans on the back of its legendary shooting, but across a number of interviews I did with Bungie vets, I was told it isn’t how they see the series’ core. Instead, as former Microsoft Games Studio head Ed Fries puts it, the games at their best are “vista moments”—evocative and hard to pin down, and maybe best encapsulated by the camera slowly tracking out above the bluffs in Halo 3’s debut trailer, Master Chief diminishing in the weight of the moment. That there’s an emotional core entombed somewhere under the stratum of dropped bullet casings and alien corpses is no secret among many the series’ many architects.
Still, it all might have been left behind as an Iain Banksian footnote without a foundation in gameplay: tight, sophisticated, smart and unapologetically rapt in the romance of new frontiers. And if Halo’s campaign did things that were thought impossible for CRT play, its revolutionary, sticky multiplayer, germinating in university dorm tourneys, flourished to become a combat universe unto itself—a literal Halo Nation.
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Halo 3 debut trailer courtesy of Bungie
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For better or worse, Halo was a perfect storm. As its history has been told to me—a tangled knot of design, contracts, platforms, ideas, direction and incredible achievement—an ideal distillation is something that could realistically never be recreated. Perhaps the saga is saddled with an impossible legacy, its most fascinating points deviations from that mode, some left unseen.
Whether you prefer vistas or ordnance, where Halo may go from here feels at once predictable and expansive; think of these stories as a patchwork roadmap from a number of people who lived it, replete with detours and roughly sketched paths, all in pursuit of answering that question.
—Steve Haske
Whether you prefer vistas or ordnance, where Halo may go from here feels at once predictable and expansive; think of these stories as a patchwork roadmap from a number of people who lived it, replete with detours and roughly sketched paths, all in pursuit of answering that question.
—Steve Haske
Illustration by Erica Lahaie
What follows across the three parts of our exclusive oral history are direct accounts from the people who made Halo, in its many and varied guises, since the 2001 debut of Combat Evolved. You will be reading: |
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