Halo: A Space Opera from Bungie
Author: Loïc Ralet
Date: 2022-08-16T07:00:00+00:00
Publisher: Éditions Third
Rights: © Éditions Third, 2022

Couverture

Page de titre

For Yann, Fabien, Teddy, Neal and Lucas,
my Spartan brothers at whose sides
I’ve fought many a battle.

FOREWORD

hALO WAS CONCEIVED in a drafty old building that used to be a school, so cold in the winter that mice nested in our computer cases to stay warm. I joined Jason Jones, co-founder of Bungie, in the gritty south Chicago office to lay the foundation for a new sci fi game. We didn’t have a master plan. In fact, we called the game Monkey Nuts, a code name that remained for several years into production.

I was hired to help build the vision for a bold new game Jason had floating around in his head. To my delight and surprise, that vision was less defined than I thought. That put a lot more pressure on me to help him build that vision before we brought on other members to the team.

While creating a world which the player would get to inhabit, as well as the characters, vehicles, and weapons we would play, the development of Halo took a few massive turns that nobody on our team expected. From real-time strategy to third-person action to a full-on first-person shooter, we often struggled to find exactly what it was we were building.

It really wasn’t until the final year of development that we finally understood Halo’s transformation. But this realization came so late that completing the game for its debut at the launch of the brand-new Xbox console presented some significant challenges for the team.

Along the way, the journey of developing Halo was filled with so many moments of joy and celebration, along with extreme difficulties and times when the very existence of Bungie was in jeopardy. After Halo CE launched to great success, our young team was still trying to figure out how to handle the pressure of continuing the franchise with another hit. We needed to grow, which was directly at odds with keeping our small-team culture. We needed to follow a more corporate structure, which bucked against our brash origins within that old schoolhouse in Chicago. And, as much as we knew Microsoft owned our studio, we remained fiercely independent all along the way. I think the pride in what we created, and our spirit of independence is one part of what held us all together. But the other massive part was the community that had grown along with us and supported us through thick and thin.

In this book, my hope is that you’ll appreciate the amazing stories of how Halo was created. I hope you get an in-depth look at the missions and lore of the universe and get a rare behind-the-scenes glimpse at what it was like building the franchise. Most importantly, I also hope you’ll come to know the many talented people who poured all their creativity, love, and care into building this universe that so many fans have come to adore now for decades.

Marcus Lehto

Art Director – Halo 1, 2 & 3

PREFACE

ON NOVEMBER 9, 2004, after a long and arduous three-year development process, Xbox and Bungie finally released the hotly anticipated Halo 2, forever changing the destiny of many gamers. And not necessarily in the way that some of Bungie’s staff had expected, despite the fact that they fully believed in the potential of their new baby. You see, the collector’s edition of Halo 2 came with a second DVD containing the making-of the game. A filming team had been following most of Halo 2’s development, and the resulting film, with a run-time of over 50 minutes, covered the key stages of the game’s development, like the E3 2003 presentation and the ensuing crunch, before reaching its conclusion, so full of hope, a few days before the game’s release. For many gamers out there, this was an opportunity to get to know the men and women that had made Halo possible, to put faces to the names featured in the end credits of Halo: Combat Evolved. The video also provided a heartwarming view of the relationships between the studio’s staff, who could be seen joking and pranking each other, as if they were a group of friends still together at college. It was more than enough to make many teenage boys and girls dream of a career in video games.

Because that was exactly what the making-of achieved: it gave people a vocation. At Bungie and elsewhere, many developers that are now busy working on the games of the future are there thanks to the image of the industry they saw in this making-of. Because Halo had lighted a fire inside them. That’s exactly what happened to me. In 2004, video games were my passion and I liked to think that one day, I would be one of the chosen few who were paid to test video games. But it was only when I got my hands on Halo 2, and watched the making-of for the very first time that I realized just how many opportunities existed out there. Including shining the spotlight on the men and women who made video games. In general, gamers are only familiar with a few big names. People like John Romero, Shigeru Miyamoto, Warren Spector, Hideo Kojima and Michel Ancel are well known to gamers, but they are just the tip of the iceberg–of the ice floe–that is the video game industry and the hundreds of studios it contains all around the world. Every day, these offices are filled with a huge variety of highly talented individuals, people who each have their own story that deserves to be known. With every press of a button or click on the mouse, every time we look at the screen, we are discovering their creations and putting them to the test. These are men and women who, sometimes for decades, have kept us entertained and nourished our dreams. I always thought it was a shame that they remained faceless. So I decided to do something about it. It was the dream of a somewhat naive teenager who had no idea of just how much work it would take, but I started my own little blog.

I soon realised this. Then, from 2006, I decided to focus on Bungie, my favorite studio, and while I was waiting for the release of Halo 3 alongside millions of other gamers, I started collecting press cuttings, videos, and interviews, and anything else I could find about Bungie and Halo. I spent my evenings collating this information in a database that I kept under lock and key on the family computer. This implausible collection was not meant to be shared, and in truth it was of only limited interest. One thing I can say about it, though, is that it helped me understand the industry I was so passionate about. From a game’s development to the moment it hits the shelves, including the relationships between the studio and the publisher and the vying for influence within a single company, I thought I had it all pinned down.

In 2013, then, when I joined the team at Jeuxvideo.com (the leading video game news website in Europe), I thought I was ready. But I had another think coming. The truth is that nobody can truly know and understand such a unique industry until they’re on the inside. Until they’re part of it. Journalists like me are at best privileged spectators. Privileged because their job brings them into regular contact with studios and publishers, to whom they can speak and ask questions. And, sometimes, see how video games are made from the inside. Their next task is a relatively straightforward one: to share what they have learned with their audience, in an easily digestible way. For six years, that was precisely what I tried to do for the readers of Jeuxvideo.com. But being a journalist is a constant race against the clock, and we all too rarely have time to work free from any constraints. We learn to make do. Some excel at it, and have written and continue to write high-end journalism. For me, though… I needed more time, more space. So, when Third Éditions contacted me in the summer of 2017 to suggest I write a book about Halo, I didn’t even have to think about it. What they were giving me was an opportunity to open a window onto the studio’s private life, one that all fans of Halo and Bungie could look through. To tell the full story of these men and women who, sometimes without getting any credit, had left their mark on video-gaming history. And with it our lives.

This book, entitled Halo: A Space Opera From Bungie, was published in the original French in December 2018, and since then my life has never been the same. A few months after the book came out, Bungie got in touch to offer me a role with the company. The circle was complete. Fifteen years after watching the making of Halo 2 for the very first time, I was suddenly working alongside the same faces I’d seen on the screen. In the credits for Destiny 2, my name features just below that of Lorraine McLees, the woman we have to thank, among other things, for the design of the Pillar of Autumn, the iconic human ship in Halo: Combat Evolved. I welled up the first time I saw it. As I write this preface, it has been six months since I left Bungie, and I still find it hard to believe that the past two short years spent at the studio are anything more than a dream. And the craziest thing is to think that none of this would have happened if I hadn’t watched that video back when I had just turned 16.

If this book serves to pique your interest, to teach you something, and to help you see your calling, just like the making of Halo 2 did for many of us, then all of my hard work will have paid off. Because that’s all we hope for when we start working on a project like this.

The time has come for me to shut up, to stop talking about myself and start talking about far more interesting people, so all I’ll say is enjoy the read! Welcome to the Halo universe.

THE AUTHOR: LOÏC RALET

A former History student, he joined Jeuxvideo.com, the main french video game outlet in 2013, and as a journalist, he became their Xbox expert. While covering and reporting on everything related to Xbox, he also set himself appart in the french video game medias as a specialist of Bungie, 343 Industries, Halo and Destiny. In 2019, he was hired by Bungie and joined its Community team, working on Destiny 2, most specifically on two expansions (Beyond Light, The Witch Queen) and six seasons, among other things. He left the studio in 2021 and he is now enjoying some much needed rest with his wife and newborn son.

PART I
THE ORIGINS OF HALO

Chapter 1 – Bungie: a Two-Man

While it’s true that today, 343 Industries are the loving custodians of the Halo franchise, that hasn’t always been the case. Indeed, the history of the Master Chief saga is intimately linked to the history of Bungie, its original creator. This is true to the extent that it’s impossible to disentangle one from the other, despite the fact that Bungie has turned a page on Halo for good, and is now busy telling different stories, in different universes. If we are to understand Halo’s history, we’ll need to go back to when Bungie was first founded and further, to explore the backgrounds of Alexander Seropian and Jason Jones. Because as is often the case in video games, it all began with an everyday encounter.

THE FOUNDING FATHER

For as long as he can remember, Alexander Seropian had always wanted to be a businessman. It was an unusual dream for a young boy, perhaps, but one that never left him. When he was aged just ten years old, he took part in a fundraiser for the hospital where his father worked, selling popsicles door-to-door in the Chicago suburbs. The act of exchanging these little icy treats for money brought him an intense feeling of satisfaction. But the young Alexander Seropian had other passions, too, and one in particular was occupying an increasingly large place in his life: video games. He discovered this new hobby in the mid-1970s when his parents returned from Sears department store having bought him a Telegames Personal Arcade, a cheaper version of the Atari 2600. He was spellbound by Pong. No sooner had he arrived at college, than he was visiting the computer room at every opportunity. It had just been equipped with eight brand new Commodore PET computers, which he used to learn the basics of computer programming. At home, meanwhile, his parents decided to invest in his new passion and bought one of the first Macintosh computers, at which he would spend lots of his free time after class. He learned Pascal1 and began programming his very first games. One of his first creations was an American football game that he designed from scratch to test how well he had mastered C,2 a programming language. Even more than video games, programming was Seropian’s first true love. He liked putting together lines of code and seeing the result come to life on the screen. Better still, he knew that if he made something people were interested in, then he could sell it, which was a step towards founding his own company. This was an idea that he never really gave up on.

While he was growing into a talented programmer, Seropian also completed his education without a hitch. A popular pupil among both teachers and his peers, he was a young man who bore no resemblance to the stereotypical geek, lonely and bullied by the high school jocks. He secured a place at the University of Chicago where he quickly earned a reputation–and not always for the right reasons. Born with a keen eye for business opportunities, Seropian decided to sell his notes from class, especially the ones he took in chemistry. “Half the freshman class at UC took chemistry, and it was an 8am lecture, a 90-minute lecture. Half the class never showed up. I had a Mac and I knew how to use Quark Xpress or whatever at the time. I would take notes, or actually my girlfriend would take notes, and then I would type them up, format them and sell them.” Seropian generated some publicity by putting up posters around campus mocking the chemistry professor, and in particular his accent. “The professor had a very thick accent. One of my taglines was, ‘If you can’t understand the accent, just buy my notes.’” It certainly rubbed the chemistry department at the University of Chicago up the wrong way, and they tried to shut his little business venture down.

Seropian’s computing talents didn’t go unnoticed for long, and he was invited to a series of interviews at different Chicago-based IT companies while he was still a student. One of them was Microsoft, which has offices in the Illinois state capital. Seropian ultimately began his career there as an intern, where he joined a team responsible for making programming tools. When they offered him a full-time job, he was faced with a dilemma: should he complete his college education, accept the job offer from Microsoft, or even start his own company, which had been his secret ambition for years now? One day in May 1991, he decided to see what his father thought about it. “His advice was to take a job and learn some stuff and then, once I knew some stuff, I could go start the company,” Seropian explained in 2013. But our young programmer wasn’t really listening. He’d already made his decision. What he was really looking for when he asked his dad for advice was validation and encouragement. He saw his dad’s advice as a challenge, and a few days later on May 19th, he founded his own company, which he named Bungie Software Products Corporation.

To get Bungie up and running, Seropian borrowed some money from his parents and a few family friends. He built his own disk duplication machine, and started making games. Before his internship at Microsoft ended, Seropian had pilfered a not-at-all insignificant number of blank disks, which he used to distribute his first games. Gnop, the best-known of these early games, was a copy of Pong, the first video game Seropian owned. With his floppy disks in hand, he hit the streets giving out free copies of Gnop, and later other games that he would try to sell. The venture would ultimately prove to be in vain, and before long he had lost the money he had borrowed. But Seropian was undeterred, and kept trying again and again until he managed to make a bit of money. Then he came to a realization: if he really got behind it, Bungie could one day grow into a flourishing company. This was when he set about making Bungie’s first real game, Operation: Desert Storm, which was released in October 1991. As its name implies, the game was inspired by the Gulf War, which had ended a few months earlier. It was a top-down game in which players controlled a tank as they battled their way across 20 levels before facing the final boss: Saddam Hussein’s giant head. Developed on Macintosh, Seropian’s computer platform of choice, the game managed to sell around 2500 copies. Not bad for a game made by a student, but still not enough for the young entrepreneur whose plans were bigger than these modest sales figures. However, it was too big a job to take on alone, and he decided to start looking for a business partner, someone who could help him develop better quality games so that Bungie could finally take off. Seropian had someone in mind straight away: one of his classmates from college.

STRENGTH IN NUMBERS

This classmate was none other than Jason Jones, who Seropian had met through Pete Hallenberg, a mutual friend. The two classmates had known each other to say hello to for a while now, having both signed up to the same artificial intelligence class. Seropian was very quickly impressed by Jones, or at least by his computer. Seropian recalls that, “He had a machine with 8 MB of ram–which for 1990 was insane!” At college, Jones lived in a small dorm and his clean, pristine, and tidy dorm room contained only a bed, a desk, and, most importantly, his computer, with an equally oversized screen. Artificial intelligence wasn’t the only interest shared by Seropian and Jones: they were both also fans of Apple computers. Like Seropian, Jones had taught himself the basics of IT and programming at an early age. At high school, he started to learn a number of programming languages, particularly Applesoft Basic and 6502 Assembly, and later Microsoft Basic 1.0 when his parents bought him a Macintosh 128k. Eventually he discovered C on an Apple II, but he also learned to use it within a PC environment. These skills enabled him to get a job for a small computer-aided manufacturing company before he even started college. Jones spent a full year designing programs for the company’s machines, and used the money he earned to develop his knowledge and skills. For example, he bought himself a copy of the Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop (MPW) software development environment, and quickly learned to use it. This meant that he could write the code for several Mac games, as well as converting the code of one of his old Apple II games so that it would run on a Macintosh. This game was Minotaur, and while it might not look it, it was way ahead of its time as a dungeon-crawler with procedurally generated levels. Thoroughly playtested by Jones and his friends, Minotaur had been refined again and again over the years, while Jones was still programming on the Apple II, with improvements that included a LAN mode. At a time when the internet barely existed, this demonstrated some real technical prowess, but made the game’s conversion a more complex matter. It was when he had almost finished the Macintosh port of the game that he met Alex Seropian. The two students got on well enough, despite their very different personalities. They did have one thing very much in common, though: the desire to make video games and to earn a living from it. Thoroughly convinced by both Jones’ skills and his plans, Seropian offered to help him finish Minotaur and then to publish it through Bungie. At first Jones was reluctant, mainly because he had never intended on selling his creation, which he didn’t think was sufficiently polished. But Seropian managed to persuade him, and Bungie had its second game.

While Jones finished work on Minotaur, Seropian took care of the marketing side of things, and designed the box in which the game would be sold. Called Minotaur: The Labyrinth of Crete (so there were no misunderstandings), the game didn’t fare much better than Operation: Desert Storm, also selling around 2500 copies. While the game encountered a certain popularity in the dorms of the University of Chicago, where Jones was living, its success was confined to a circle made up of a few geeks who grasped the subtleties of network gaming. We are talking about back in 1992, and Minotaur needed AppleTalk or a modem to work. This was without any doubt an outstanding technical innovation, but the general public were completely ignorant of online gaming, and even gamers would not necessarily have the right equipment. The game did, however, pique the curiosity of the Mac gamer community. Admittedly, there was hardly a large selection of games to choose from for the Apple computer, and as Jones himself would state a few years later, there was only limited competition between developers. So despite its faults, Minotaur attracted attention nevertheless, as did Bungie.

1 A programming language created in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth, primarily for educational purposes.

2 A programming language created in 1972 by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, fathers of the UNIX operating system. It influenced later languages, like C++, Java and PHP. It’s one of the best-known programming languages.

Chapter 2 – The Rising Stars of

Their first attempt may not have been the hit they had hoped for, but Seropian and Jones soon found that they had a lot in common and decided to become more than one-off business partners. Jones officially joined Bungie and Seropian split the company with him 50/50, as equal shareholders. They both felt that great things were possible and that together they could make a living from their passion. That said, they would spend several months bouncing ideas around without any concrete results.

PATHWAYS INTO DARKNESS

Jason Jones wasn’t short on ideas. Nor on talent. He was keen to exploit the latest technology in the video game industry and began working on different graphic rendering solutions. Indeed, Jones wanted the next Bungie game to be in 3D. Like others in the industry at the time, he had seen and played id Software’s Wolfenstein 3D, and was immediately interested in the technical challenge the game posed. He spent months designing a game engine and development tools that would ultimately enable him to begin work developing a new game. Bungie didn’t yet know what their next game would be, but they did know that they now possessed extremely robust technology with which to build it. After sounding out a long series of ideas, the duo began working on a 3D version of Minotaur, before abandoning the project. In an interview with Inside Mac Games a few months later, Jones revealed how, “We pretty quickly decided that Minotaur was not well suited to a 3D environment since so much of the game relied on the top-down point-of-view.”

The top-down view was dropped, and Bungie began working on its first FPS. While Jones laid the foundations of the game, he and Seropian set out to enlist the services of a few friends to give them a hand. It would be one of Jones’ friends, Colin Brent, who came to their aid, offering his talents as an artist. In Minotaur, Jones had drawn the characters, monsters, and objects found in the labyrinth himself. While this did give the game a certain charm, it also clearly revealed it to be an amateurish effort. Their new game, Pathways Into Darkness, needed to do better. Brent’s job was to bring the very detailed world imagined by Jones to life. At that time, shooters didn’t have much in the way of plot, and Jones believed that they could serve as a vehicle for a good storyline as much as any RPG did. While he was working on the code for the game, he came up with a number of different storylines. One was about an archaeologist whose sister had been kidnapped by the game’s antagonist, who held her to ransom in exchange for an ancient artifact that the hero must find and return. However, this script was too obviously similar to Indiana Jones, and it was back to the drawing board. Jones wanted something that was richer, deeper, and more complex, so he wrote the story of a secret community hidden from the world among the peaks of the Swiss Alps. The community was made up of old Roman soldiers who had found the secret to eternal life thanks to a magical spring discovered on the fringes of the Empire. Water from the spring extended the lifespan of all who drank from it. The soldiers came to loathe death and clung to life for centuries. Every seven years, the leader of their community had to return to the spring to fetch more water so that the soldiers would never die. It was a dangerous journey for one man alone, and if the man failed to return, the immortal soldiers would elect another of their number to bring the water back to their village. And it was this unwilling “volunteer,” sent to meet certain death, that Jones wanted players to control. He liked the idea that the main character was more of a victim than a real hero, a man who was not allowed to choose his own destiny. On top of that, his mission wasn’t a worthy one: it was to carry out the orders of a community that had been desperately clinging to life for far too long. “I think it would have been burdensome,” Jones would admit a few months later. This idea was also scrapped, but Jones was undeterred: he wanted to tell stories. A fan of sci-fi and fantasy, the young developer would eventually come up with Pathways Into Darkness, a lighter pitch that was still Lovecraftian in many ways, in which an American soldier explores a Mayan pyramid. Players were tasked with travelling into the bowels of the pyramid to activate a nuclear bomb and stop a powerful, godlike being from awakening.

The game took the form of an FPS and contained plenty of action scenes, as well as several RPG elements that brought greater depth to the gameplay experience. While multiplayer mode was once again included, Jones and Seropian had learned from their mistakes, and it was possible to play Pathways Into Darkness without AppleTalk or a modem. And they distributed their roles more effectively. While Jones was writing the final lines of code needed to enable network gaming, Seropian contacted the press and gave presentations at a number of American trade shows, such as MacWorld in August 1993. July was a stressful month for the two friends, as they worked flat out to finish Pathways so that it would be presentable for MacWorld. But they did it. When the game was finally released a few weeks after MacWorld, it very quickly sold several thousand copies, and eventually recorded sales in excess of 20,000 units. Jones and Seropian weren’t expecting it, but Pathways Into Darkness was a genuine success and quickly picked up a number of awards, like adventure game of the year from the Inside Mac Games website. Better yet, the small community of Bungie fans suddenly expanded, becoming a real asset for the studio as word of mouth drove sales. After only a few years of work and with three games under its belt, Bungie was now the standard-bearer of Mac gaming, or at least its rising star.

It was a role that Jason Jones really loved, and he wasn’t shy about letting people know. Generally a discreet and reserved individual, Jones revealed himself to be a lot more self-assured when asked about Macintosh gaming: not only did he state that the studio would remain loyal to the Apple brand for the foreseeable future, but he also predicted, in words spoken into an Inside Mac Games mic, that the day was soon coming when Mac gamers would no longer need to envy PC gamers. “We still haven’t caught up with the PC, but I think we will, and I think we will soon. And if nobody else does it, I’m going to do it.” In confirmation, Jones teased the studio’s next games, code-named Mosaic and Marathon. Both to be released on the Mac, of course.

MARATHON: DOOM, MAC-STYLE

The modest success that was Pathways Into Darkness did Bungie a lot of good. The company’s financial resources grew to the point that Seropian could consider himself a real businessman. While Jones got to work on Bungie’s next two titles, his partner took care of the rest. Bungie then hired several people who would join the studio over the course of the development process for Marathon and Mosaic. The latter was quickly abandoned after being presented at MacWorld in San Francisco in January 1994. Jones nevertheless retained some of the game’s concepts and incorporated them into Marathon, beginning with a comprehensive AI system that enabled the various enemies encountered by players to react to their actions. Marathon was now the only project in development at Bungie, which continued to hire new staff. Jones brought in a Duke graduate, Ryan Martell, who took a break from his studies to help Jones write the code for the game. He also called in another friend, Greg Kirkpatrick, who he worked with on the storyline for Marathon. Both men were passionate about sci-fi, so they wrote a story about a space station, the UESC Marathon, that orbited a human colony in a faraway galaxy. At the start of the game, Marathon station is attacked by a gargantuan alien spaceship belonging to the Pfhor, who commence hostilities with an electromagnetic attack that damages the station’s three artificial intelligences. Tycho was destroyed, Durandal lost its mind, and only Leela remained in any condition to help the player on their quest. The player’s job was to hinder the enemy advance through Marathon, before discovering that Durandal had formed an alliance with the S’pht, a race of alien cyborgs held prisoner on the Pfhor ship. Together, they repel the Pfhor assault, and Durandal even takes control of their ship, before leaving the sector. A happy ending, after all. Players also had to seek out all the terminals that Jones had dotted around the levels, which were the only way to understand the events unfolding aboard the Marathon during the game. This method of delivering the game’s narrative would win over a lot of fans when the game came out.

But before it did, Bungie would need to hire again. It was impossible to finish work on Marathon within an acceptable time-frame with the current staff numbers. And so Bungie’s first real employee was a certain Doug Zartman. When Colin Brent, the artist to whom Pathways Into Darkness owes its bestiary, decided to return to college, Seropian posted a classified ad in one of Chicago’s free newspapers. “Help us making kick-ass games for the Mac,” it read. As a fan of both video games and Mac computers, it immediately caught the attention of Doug Zartman. He already knew of Bungie and applied without a moment’s hesitation. Zartman didn’t really have the skills required for the role, but he turned up for the interview anyway and showed Seropian some of his drawings and design ideas for a strategy game. Seropian politely informed him that he wasn’t suitable for the advertised role, but he did offer him another job. And so Zartman found himself providing a bit of tech support for the studio alongside his main role taking care of PR for Bungie, which was eating up too much of Seropian’s time. But Bungie still hadn’t found a replacement for Brent, until, that is, they met a Frenchman by the name of Reginald Dujour to take his place. A graduate of the French National School of Fine Art and a veteran of the French Foreign Legion, Dujour was studying in Chicago when he answered the Bungie ad. He drew the game world for Marathon and was also involved in designing a number of the game’s levels.

This significant enlargement of the team meant that Bungie had a desperate need to find some new premises ASAP, because up until now Jones and Seropian had been working in Seropian’s apartment. But money was tight: Bungie moved into 1945 South Halsted Street, in Pilsen, a neighborhood on the south side of Chicago. It wasn’t a particularly appealing place: the offices were in what had been a Catholic school for girls, and were in a sorry state of repair and infested with rats. Marcus Lehto, who would go on to become Bungie’s artistic director, recalls how, “In the winter time, it was so cold that mice lived in our PCs just to keep warm. They would often poke their heads out of the desk cord holes and look at what we were doing.” To make matters worse, the building next door was used by crack addicts on a daily basis as a place to buy and sell drugs and to get high, a situation that caused quite a few problems over Bungie’s time there. But the team were in fine spirits when they moved in and pushed on with their work on Marathon, which was beginning to take shape. Much to the displeasure of the fans who loved its game world, Marathon wasn’t a sequel to Pathways Into Darkness. Jason Jones was unequivocal on the matter: he didn’t like making sequels and preferred to create new game worlds and design new game systems. Nor was he afraid of a challenge. Then Doom was released in late 1993, and it had a real effect on the development of Marathon, whose level design suddenly seemed dated. The new shooter from id Software, which would soon become the ultimate benchmark for the genre, used more curves and fewer right angles, and applied a range of mind-blowing graphical effects. Jones didn’t let it get him down, and got back to work improving his own game engine and tools. He added a major new feature, and gave players the ability to look up and down. Unlike most of its contemporary FPS, Marathon demanded more accurate aiming from players. It was also a good way for Jones to show off his game engine, which had the ability to display textures on the ground and the ceiling (a rarity in 1994), which helped make Marathon a game that was as unique as it was gripping.

In order to accelerate work on Marathon and make more short demos to generate a buzz around the game, Bungie hired Alain Roy, a developer who had been noticed a few months earlier when he bypassed the copy protection for Pathways Into Darkness. Impressed by Roy’s talent, Alex Seropian offered him a fixed-term contract. Roy accepted the offer and spent the summer of 1994 working at Bungie. He quickly struck up a friendship with Jason Jones (they were almost neighbors) and worked on shading for the game. He optimized Jones’ code and helped Marathon run more smoothly. He also worked with Jones on the game’s multiplayer mode, which Jones saw as one of the game’s key features, as he explained during Marathon’s development: “The first time you play a game it might surprise you, but in the long run it’s not very difficult to figure out how the computer will react in different situations. That’s why I like playing network games, because human opponents are completely unpredictable.” It was with this in mind that he demanded PvP mode, where players could face off against each other. With Roy, he spent many a long day working to improve Marathon’s netcode, taking just a few short breaks in the middle of the day. While the neighborhood around the Bungie offices was far from a tourist destination, it did conceal a few pleasant surprises, like the burritos from La Cocina, where the whole staff at Bungie ate almost every day, and a peaceful little park filled with greenery. While Roy basked in the sun, Jones kept working on a little laptop, making sure that the latest changes to the code worked as they were supposed to.

With the game almost finished, in August Bungie’s little team traveled to MacWorld in Boston for Marathon’s public unveiling. It wasn’t quite finished, but Jones and Seropian were feeling confident. And the trade show vindicated their confidence: Marathon was a hit with the gaming public, and Bungie proudly announced that the game would be ready in two weeks. Seropian also used it as an opportunity to launch pre-orders. But this was a schoolboy error: in the end, Marathon wouldn’t actually be ready until mid-December. As soon as they got back to Chicago, the Bungie team decided to launch the game and test the single-player campaign one more time. When they did, they found little bugs dotted throughout the game. Maybe they only noticed them due to Jones’ near-pathological perfectionism, or because they were feeling under pressure after excellent player feedback in Boston, or maybe they were just seeing the game with fresh eyes after a few days away from the studio. Whatever the case, Jones and his team began to rework some parts of the game. And then some more. And then another, and another, and another, working 14-hour days to rebuild the game’s 21 levels. The whole team gave their all. Seropian, for example, reworked some levels while he was also busy designing the music and sound effects for Marathon, with assistance from Zartman whose voice was used for some of the game’s characters. And Seropian didn’t stop there, also designing the game’s packaging. It took the form of a weird pyramid-shaped box that wasn’t exactly suited to being stacked on shelves, but was immediately recognizable. Seropian and Jones also hired another new member of staff to help them in their work, Jonas Eneroth. A graduate from Georgetown University which he left with two degrees–one in finance, and the other in IT–Jonas earned his stripes over the course of years spent making mods for PC games. A talented game designer, he caught the eye of Jones and Seropian who got in touch to offer him a job. Eneroth took them up on the offer and immediately started work on redesigning Marathon’s levels. The game was finally finished and ready to be released on December 14.

Marathon was a huge success from its very first day on the shelves. It sold 100,000 copies in six months, unprecedented figures for the Mac world in general, let alone Bungie itself. The problem was that the studio was in no way ready to handle such success. Fans pillaged their stock at MacWorld in January, not even flinching at the $70 price tag applied by the staff at Bungie, who were blown away by their game’s success. The studio was inundated with calls from all over the world, mainly from potential buyers or customers who were having technical issues when installing or running the game. Seropian placed a new classified ad in the Chicago Reader: “Tech support. Must know Mac. Games a plus.” One Matt Soell responded to the ad. At the time, Soell was just a student who had played Marathon during the Christmas vacation. When he saw the ad, he guessed that it was from Bungie and decided to try his luck. The phone lines at Bungie were saturated with calls, but he eventually got through. The voice on the other end of the phone was none other than Alex Seropian. Delighted to be speaking to someone who knew of Bungie and loved Marathon, Seropian immediately offered Soell the role, and he joined the studio without delay. When he arrived at 1945 South Halsted Street, Soell discovered a studio in a state of absolute panic, struggling to handle the thousands of requests they were receiving every day. No sooner had they got back from MacWorld than the studio was filled with all kinds of boxes and trash. But things would soon get better, partly down to Soell’s hard work. Soell had already completed Marathon multiple times, and knew the game almost by heart, so he could answer calls from stuck players. He eventually persuaded Alex Seropian to relaunch Bungie’s AOL page, which had been inactive for months, and he used it to answer the deluge of queries the studio was receiving. One year earlier, Alain Roy had already suggested that Bungie launch its own website, but he was unable to convince Seropian that it would be useful.

A FULL TRILOGY

Marathon’s success gave Jones, who had never had any interest in making sequels, food for thought. Some of his ideas for the first game hadn’t made it into the game, and given the public’s enthusiasm for the Marathon game world and all the mysteries in its storyline, Bungie decided to begin early work on Marathon 2. And yet, something was bugging Jones. Until very recently, Bungie was made up of just two people: himself and Seropian. Bungie was their decision, their baby. They had been able to count on a few people for outside help, people like Colin Brent and Alain Roy, who had worked on Pathways Into Darkness and Marathon, but they weren’t official Bungie employees. But Bungie was now a genuine small business, and one that was hiring. This worried Jones. In a 2013 interview with Ryan McCaffrey from IGN, he explained his state of mind: “I think it was after Marathon, where I realized, ‘My God, we’re going to make another game. People are going to want it. There’s this company and people come to work here and they have wives and children and they depend on that. We’re paying for their insurance.’” It was a particularly pressing concern as the studio continued to grow, hiring a new artist, Robert McLees in 1995, followed by Mark Bernal, another, two months later. The rest of the team remained the same. Jones supervised the project and worked on the story with Kirkpatrick, while also giving Martell a hand, and Alain Roy now worked remotely as a consultant. The three artists had a real challenge ahead of them, as the sequel to Marathon, which quickly became known as Marathon 2: Durandal, was no longer set on a space station, but on the surface of an alien planet. This meant that the game environments were bigger and needed to be filled with content. Jones used it as an opportunity to rework his game engine so that it could display a larger number of objects. He also added some new features, like being able to use two weapons at once and to swim. Still obsessed with multiplayer games, he added several different multiplayer modes, particularly the option to play the Marathon campaign in co-op mode. This was the beginning of a long tradition at Bungie.

The team quickly laid the foundations for the game’s story: the player was a security officer with a duty to obey orders from the AI, Durandal, who had kidnapped the player to help it continue the fight against the Pfhor. On Lh’owon, the S’pht homeworld, the player is tasked with finding a powerful artifact to use in the battle against the aliens. As players progressed through the game, they discovered that the Tycho AI had been recreated by the Pfhor. Tycho then reveals to the player that it was in fact Durandal who enabled the Pfhor to discover Marathon’s location: the AI had long forgotten its primary purpose and was no longer concerned with protecting humans or the S’pht destiny. Indeed, the AI wanted to uncover the history of the Jjaro, an ancient alien race with advanced knowledge, that the S’pht worshiped as gods. Durandal was hoping to get its hands on their technology and achieve godlike status itself. After being captured by the Pfhor, the player is rescued by a human commando. Their next job is to reactivate an ancient S’pht AI known as Thoth. With Thoth’s help, the player can ensure that the last humans in the system can return to Earth. They then come into contact with the S’pht’Kr, a tribe that had left Lh’owon before the Pfhor invasion, and who had been plotting their revenge for millennia. Together, they destroy the last Pfhor forces remaining on Lh’owon before they are able to destroy the planet’s sun. The humans and the S’pht’Kr then raid the Pfhor homeworld. The game ends with a short encrypted sequence in which Durandal returns to Earth on board a gigantic Jjaro spaceship. In this way, Bungie left the door open for a sequel, one which would make Marathon a complete trilogy.

Upon its release on November 24, 1995, Marathon 2: Durandal was a huge success. This time, though, the studio was ready. What they could not have foreseen, however, was the reaction of the fan community when it uncovered that Bungie was working on a Windows 95 port of Marathon 2. Seropian and Jones wanted to branch out beyond the Macintosh world, and to reach more gamers. And so they launched the PC port of Durandal and also began work designing a compilation entitled Super Marathon that contained the first two games, to be released on Apple and Bandai’s small home console, the Pippin. The studio’s fans accused it of selling out, mailing in swathes of enraged letters. The situation was made even more bitter by the fact that the PC release of Durandal didn’t go as well as expected. The port had taken a long time to develop, and by the time Marathon 2 was released it had to compete with Quake and Duke Nukem 3D, two games that were far more technically advanced. To make matters worse, the specialist PC press took a dim view of Bungie’s efforts and panned the game, often without ever even playing it. Bungie was now typecast as a “Mac studio” by many observers, and it wasn’t a flattering reputation to have, especially in an industry characterized by wars between consoles and platforms.

But despite all of this, the mood down in Pilsen remained relaxed. Bungie had become like a little family, a fact actively encouraged by Seropian, who many describe as doting father. He ran the studio with an ambience of open camaraderie, where every member was happy to contribute their own expertise and to learn from the others. Proud of its independence, the studio was founded on a unique mentality in which everyone learned by experimenting and then sharing their discoveries and advances with the other members of the studio. The relatively low average age naturally facilitated close relationships between the employees, to the point that everyone forgot all about the less-than-ideal conditions they were working in. The team preferred to just laugh it off. Bungie was certainly selling lots of games, but Seropian had his eye on its expenses and a move into new premises wasn’t yet feasible. And strangely, the staff at Bungie had grown fond of their premises, despite their being no shortage of shady goings on. Like the time, one fine morning, that the staff arrived at work to find out that someone had broken into the building and stolen a laptop. Another night, while Jonas Eneroth was smoking a cigarette outside the entrance to the studio, he was threatened by an unknown assailant armed with a revolver. And the picture wasn’t much rosier inside the premises. One morning, Bungie’s phone line was suddenly cut off, and with it the studio’s internet connection, which was hardly a sustainable situation. The telephone operator, AT&T, sent a technician to investigate, but he was unable to find where the line entered the building. In the end, Jones took him down to the basement where they discovered row upon row of old desks and benches. Furniture from the old school had been left beside what must one day have been a swimming pool, and whose bottom was now covered in some kind of stinking mud. The swimming pool would go down in Bungie legend as the “pool of death,” providing plenty of banter for the studio.

When the time came to start work on Marathon Infinity, the studio was in sound condition. While the atmosphere remained similar to what you’d find inside a college dorm, the team had expanded and grown more professional, especially since the arrival of Eric Klein, a former Apple employee. Klein joined Bungie not long after the release of Durandal, and offered Seropian his experience in managing the business side of Bungie. This was a boon because although Bungie was home to plenty of talented developers, nobody had any training in business and management. Seropian was learning on the job and received valuable guidance from Klein and Eneroth, whose knowledge came in very handy in growing Bungie and helping the studio to reach players all over the world.

Better armed and better prepared, Bungie began development work on the last Marathon game in total peace of mind. The only fly in the ointment was the departure of Greg Kirkpatrick, a writer on the first two games in the trilogy, who left Bungie because he hated living in Chicago. He moved to Brooklyn where he founded Double Aught, his own studio. However, Kirkpatrick wasn’t done with Marathon, having signed a contract with Bungie that meant Double Aught would lend a helping hand to Jason Jones and Alex Seropian’s staff as they developed Marathon Infinity. Help that came in handy, because Jones wanted to put on a real show for the final game in the trilogy. Marathon is the series that propelled Bungie into the big time and enabled it to become a bona fide video game studio, one that was independent, stable, and with a bright future. Knowing that the fans were passionate about the Marathon universe, and that they’d spent the past two years analyzing every line of the game, Bungie wanted to give them a treat and came up with a complex, winding story filled with twists and references to the first two games. Better yet, Jones decided to offer fans the ultimate gift, by giving away the in-house development tools, Anvil and Forge, with the game. The former was used to edit graphics and physics, while the latter was a complete level editor with a wide range of options. The aim was to enable fans of Marathon to make their own levels and enjoy playing in the game universe for as long as they liked beyond the base game. This was, however, no mean feat. The studio’s development tools were complex, and the aim was to make Forge and Anvil accessible to gamers with no coding experience. Deniz and Eneroth set about this delicate task and took the time to draft a user guide. They were assisted by Jason Rieger, one of the studio’s latest recruits, who joined the studio in March 1996. The former Qualcomm engineer immediately began specializing in the more technical tasks, and while he was working with Deniz and Eneroth, he also took charge of the Super Marathon project. And he wasn’t the only one with multiple responsibilities: Jason Jones locked himself in an office and started thinking about the studio’s next game, which he wanted to be something radically different from Marathon.

Marathon Infinity was another successful launch for Bungie when it was released on October 15, 1996. Fans praised the new multiplayer modes, but more than anything else they loved the plot of the final instalment in the trilogy with its more varied narrative components and the joy it seemingly took in leading players in one direction only to find a twist in the plot. But Bungie never really had time to celebrate this new success, because 1997 got off to a very busy start.

Chapter 3 – A Studio in Metamorphosis

For Bungie, the time had come to leave the Marathon era behind. Jason Jones had lots of ideas for Bungie’s next game as the studio prepared to embark upon what would be one of the most pivotal chapters in its history. This was due to the fact that in addition to developing a new game, Bungie was about to go on a hiring spree that would shape the years to come.

MYTH: AN UNEXPECTED RTS

While the small team working on Marathon Infinity was forging ahead, Jason Jones kept his thinking cap on. At this point, he’d been working on FPS for five years, and while he enjoyed turning Marathon into a trilogy, he wanted to make something different. And most importantly, no more sci-fi. At least, not for the time being. Because Jones had another passion: history and the Middle Ages. He began dreaming up a game in which players could control hundreds of units at once and play against other players with their own armies, all set in a 3D environment that would have a real impact on which strategies were effective. After getting a few ideas down on paper and looking at what technical solutions were possible, he presented his idea to the studio, where it was received with much excitement. A number of Warcraft fans worked at Bungie and they fell in love with the idea of developing a more dynamic, more technically accomplished game. And so Jones handpicked a small team that worked in isolation from the rest of the studio to begin the development of Myth. The rest of the staff would have to wait months to see the first fruits of their labors.

The first technical demos they saw were particularly impressive: the team had created a huge playing area in three dimensions, all governed by a physics engine more advanced than the one used in Marathon. The camera could be controlled freely, to zoom in or out depending on where the combat was taking place. Technically speaking, this was a real coup. This was, after all, mid-1996, and most strategy games were still in 2D. With Myth, Bungie had an opportunity to revolutionize the genre, and the team knew they’d struck gold. More good news: for the first time in the studio’s history, a game was being developed for both Mac and PC from the outset. This meant that on the day of its release, Myth would be able to reach a larger audience than any other Bungie game thus far.

Work resumed with renewed intensity. Jones, McLees and Zartman worked together to write the story, dreaming up a medieval fantasy world filled with betrayals and brutal wars. As was their custom, Bungie put a lot of effort into crafting the game world, and with the specific aim of making this new creation an even more beautiful experience, the studio decided to work with a real composer to create tracks to accompany the loading screens. Up until now, writing what little music featured in Bungie’s games had generally been Alex Seropian’s job, and while his work was certainly up to scratch, Bungie could do better. They just needed the right resources. By chance, a Chicago-based composer who was also a fan of video games took the initiative of contacting Bungie himself. This mysterious musician was one Martin O’Donnell.

MARTY

One day, with the development of Myth in full swing, Tuncer Deniz received an email from someone he had never met. The email was straight to the point: “Look, I’m local, I’m working on the sequel to Myst, you guys should hire me to do whatever you’re working on.” The email came with kind regards from Martin O’Donnell. Deniz’ attitude was “say no more,” and he immediately sent a reply inviting O’Donnell to come to the studio. Bungie hoped that Myth would launch them to the next level, so they needed to have all their bases covered. In this light, a real composer was manna from heaven. Although he didn’t know it at the time, Deniz had changed Bungie’s future forever.

Because O’Donnell was no ordinary composer. Born in 1955 to a movie director father and a piano teacher mother, Martin grew up in comfort in Westchester, Pennsylvania. There was, of course, a piano at home, and as a child he could never resist tinkling the ivories whenever he passed by. His mother gave him his first lessons at a very young age, just when his father introduced him to the soundtrack to Ben Hur, which he fell in love with. Music quickly became O’Donnell’s greatest passion, and he dreamed of becoming a movie soundtrack composer. His mother introduced him to classical music, but also pushed him to explore other genres, something that allowed him to stand out from his peers. So it was that, at just ten years old, he was playing the hit Blue Boogie on the piano at the school festival, making the audience go wild. In just a few years, Martin O’Donnell had mastered the major classics by Beethoven, Bach and Debussy. After high school, he was immediately offered a place at Wheaton College Conservatory and quickly established himself as the most gifted student in his year group. And yet, from his very first year at Wheaton, O’Donnell was never really happy. Something was missing, he just didn’t know what. It was on the day of an exam that he finally realized what that thing was: even though he was still a freshman, O’Donnell got up on stage to perform two particularly technical pieces of music. He earned the top grade, as usual, but while his girlfriend and other students were busy congratulating him, he realized that he just didn’t like performing. He started thinking about changing direction, but which one should he take? It would ultimately be the drummer in a little rock band he joined that suggested looking into composing. “Oh, I never thought about writing (music),” O’Donnell would admit many years later. And so, despite the warnings from his professors, who explained that changing course in the middle of the year was not without risk, O’Donnell changed fields and left performance behind to focus on composing.

Compared to when he first arrived at Wheaton, O’Donnell had greatly expanded his horizons by playing with his little band that combined rock, jazz, and fusion, and he had also made a lot of friends. One of them was a guitarist by the name of Michael Salvatori. It was Gail, Salvatori’s girlfriend, who introduced the two men: she and O’Donnell were classmates and she was convinced that the two young men would get along like a house on fire. And as it would turn out, she was right! O’Donnell and Salvatori became great friends, but they also developed a little rivalry, due to playing in different bands. But that was never enough to wreck their blossoming friendship: Salvatori was only too happy for O’Donnell to borrow his personal cassette recorder, and when the latter discovered a small recording studio in the Wheaton suburbs, he immediately shared his discovery with Salvatori, who could then hire it for a few dollars.

O’Donnell also had a new dream. No longer did he want to work on movies: he wanted to be a rock star. To that end, once he had completed his college degree, he decided to stack the odds in his favor by moving to California. Together with Marcie, who he had married one year earlier, he moved to Los Angeles in the fall of 1978 to study his masters in composing. He enrolled at the University of Southern California and joined the medieval music ensemble, where he developed a new interest in Gregorian chant. He also learned how to play the Renaissance flute and studied Bartók’s string quartets. After completing his masters, O’Donnell stayed another year in California, having decided to consolidate his computer skills. “I had a feeling that the world was moving in the direction of software technology and I didn’t want to be left behind,” he explained. Ultimately, in 1982 the couple left the California sun behind and returned to Illinois. They moved to Chicago, where O’Donnell planned to join the conservatory and teach music. By this time, the young man had long abandoned the dreams of his youth: he no longer wanted to be a movie composer or even a rock star. He didn’t want to monetize his art, but the move and the birth of his first child meant that that would have to change. Now a young father, he worked on a series of small jobs in the movie industry, which he got through the connections of his father, Robert. He worked on one shoot after another as a stagehand: a physical, tiring job, but one that enabled him to feed his family. He missed music, though. And so, when the director of the film he was working on stopped by to suggest he compose the music he needed, O’Donnell didn’t think twice. “At first I told him, ‘Well, I don’t wanna prostitute my art,’” recounts the musician. “So, I actually said that, I actually meant it. Thankfully, the very next day the director came to me and said ‘Hey I have got 500 dollars, if you score this film we’re working on’. I’m like ‘Yeah absolutely!’” The only hitch was that when he accepted the job, O’Donnell was completely lacking the technical resources to make good on his commitment. What he did have, though, was a plan. He knew that his old friend Michael had opened his own studio in Chicago after leaving Wheaton. He called Salvatori and proposed the following deal: if he helped write and record the music he’d been asked to compose, he’d split the $500 with him 50/50. Salvatori agreed immediately.

Once they’d been paid, the two friends decided to team up. Thus, they founded Total Audio Studios and soon began picking up small contracts for the movie industry, naturally, but mainly for TV. The duo that was O’Donnell/Salvatori proved to be an extremely effective one. O’Donnell was everything that Salvatori was not, and vice-versa: O’Donnell wore his heart on his sleeve and was always on the lookout for new opportunities, while Salvatori was more retiring and preferred to stick to what Total Audio did best. Musically, O’Donnell had extensive technical credentials, while Salvatori adopted a more free-flowing approach. This chemistry enabled Total Audio to grow into a genuine small business that came up with a series of jingles for TV ads. In 1985, they won the contract for the famous Flintstones vitamin ads, which were very popular in the United States. O’Donnell and Salvatori bounced ideas around, and a tune by O’Donnell came out on top. They decided to enlist the talents of Salvatori’s daughters, who sung the lyrics for O’Donnell’s composition. Once the jingle aired, it became a rapid success in the USA, getting stuck in the heads of millions of young Americans. It has been reworked several times since then, but remains in use to this day. Following this first national success, Total Audio picked up another juicy contract, this time for the Mr. Clean brand of household cleaning products.

In the early 1990s, O’Donnell started to think about Total Audio’s future. The studio couldn’t just compose ad jingles forever, and it was purely by chance that he developed an interest in video games. Although he owned Nintendo consoles and was a fan of video games, he had never thought about making it his job. And then one day, as a favor to a friend, he gave a young Josh Staub a tour of the Total Audio studios. The teenager had a lively interest in music, which was why his father had persuaded O’Donnell to let him drop by the studio. When Staub immediately noticed the video game boxes on O’Donnell’s shelves, the conversation naturally switched to video games. Josh told him that he had some friends who were working on a video game, and that he’d like to show it to O’Donnell. “He was 18, he lives in Spokane, Washington. It seemed cute to me. He had friends that make computer games.” It would turn out that O’Donnell was wrong to scoff at Josh, but he didn’t yet know it. Josh Staub’s friends may indeed live in the sleepy city of Spokane, but they were working for a studio that would soon be causing a buzz: Cyan Inc. The little team was busy working on Myst, an adventure game of the kind gamers had never before seen. This included O’Donnell, who was blown away when Staub showed him the beta version of the game. The composer did, though, say that the music, as good as it was, was not up to the same standard as the rest of the game. He started thinking about whether Total Audio could make an entry into this field. O’Donnell would explain how, “I loved the soundtrack in Myst and it inspired me to get into the industry. I knew that it could get even better in terms of fidelity and professional production. Live musicians, actors, and film quality sound design was finally able to be used because of vastly improving processor speed and memory.” With Myst, O’Donnell had glimpsed a bright future. He wondered if he could invest and buy shares in Cyan, but Staub said it was impossible. Then O’Donnell stayed up all night playing Myst.

He knew that he had to get in touch with Cyan one way or another. O’Donnell wanted to work with the studio, and to that end, between 1993 and 1996 he did all he could to attract the attention of Robyn and Rand Miller, the two founders of Cyan and the creators of Myst. It went so far as to become a running joke at Cyan, who decided to name the venomous frogs in Riven “Ytram,” which was Martin’s nickname “Marty” spelled backwards. O’Donnell nevertheless got his way in the end, ultimately receiving a contract to compose some of the music and sound effects in Myst II: Riven. As had been expected, Myst was a resounding critical and commercial success, and Cyan began work on a very promising sequel. O’Donnell was over the moon, but Salvatori less so. He told his friend that he would rather focus on Total Audio’s traditional business. So it was that, while continuing to manage the studio’s business, O’Donnell became increasingly interested in the video game industry. But he didn’t know much about it at all. To remedy this lack of knowledge, he headed to the Computer Game Developers Conference3 in Santa Clara, California, held from March 30 to April 2. There, he met George Sanger, Scott Gershin and Tommy Tallarico. Over the following months, O’Donnell would make contact with swathes of developers, including Michael Land, Peter McConnell, and Clint Bajakian, who was then working at LucasArts. Over the course of a year, O’Donnell went from one meeting to another, accumulating knowledge and building up an idea of what video game music needed to be like in order to evolve.

In parallel, O’Donnell was still working on Riven, the sequel to Myst. As part of this job, he travelled to the other side of the country to visit Cyan. On his first visit, O’Donnell was witness to a bizarre ritual that began every day at 2pm: an alarm sounded in the studio offices and all the developers stopped working. Were they downing tools for lunch? That was a possibility, but in actual fact the Cyan development team were all meeting in the game testing room to play a game that they were all crazy about. That game was Marathon. O’Donnell had never heard of it, but he was soon intrigued. No sooner had he returned to Chicago than he logged on to a developer chatroom he had been using for a while, and stumbled upon the fact that Bungie’s offices were located in Chicago. Yet again, O’Donnell was completely in the dark. But as soon as he found out, he was single-minded in his intent: to find them, and offer to work with them. This was how he got hold of an email address and contacted the studio, without really knowing who would read his message. When Tuncer Deniz replied the very next day and invited him to drop by the studio, O’Donnell couldn’t be happier.

Nor would his first encounter with Bungie curb his enthusiasm. Up until that point, the only studio that O’Donnell had seen was Cyan. Myst’s global success had earned a lot of money for the company, enabling the team to enjoy all the comforts of the biggest companies. “They had a beautiful new space in the north woods surrounded by huge pine trees and waterfalls,” the musician explains. “Their interior working space was spectacular and filled with cutting-edge computers and workstations. Then I visited Bungie on the south side of Chicago. If you saw the movie, Animal House, you’ll be able to picture what it was like.” Despite that first impression, O’Donnell quickly came to like the little family of developers, each of whom was as passionate and unique as the next. Take, for example, Matt Soell, who was proud to display a dog’s head on his desk, pickled in a jar; or Jason Jones, the head of the studio, who was always walking around in torn jeans with a bandanna tied to his head.

Jones and Seropian suggested that he start off by taking over the sound design for Myth, and to compose a bit of music for the game’s few cinematic cutscenes. O’Donnell completed the task with gusto and quickly returned the initial samples. The studio liked his work so much that they amended the contract between Total Audio and Bungie: O’Donnell was now tasked with composing a more comprehensive soundtrack that could accompany storytelling sequences and the game’s different menus. Salvatori, meanwhile, preferred to keep his distance, and while he decided to focus on the studio’s usual sources of work, he nevertheless encouraged O’Donnell to pursue this new path. And so the composer got to work, all while continuing to canvas other studios, because after all, Bungie was just another everyday client… for the time being. This was how he came to sign another contract with Valkyrie Studios, for whom he composed and produced the music for their RPG Septerra Core: Legacy of the Creator. The composer almost failed to make it into the end credits when, in 1999, the Total Audio studios caught fire while O’Donnell was still working on the game’s soundtrack. Fortunately, picking through the still smoking ruins of their former studio, O’Donnell and Salvatori managed to find a few saved copies of O’Donnell’s different recordings that could still be used.

THE NEW HEROES OF PC GAMING

Meanwhile, the developers at Bungie were still making progress on Myth: The Fallen Lords. The game was growing more impressive with each passing day, thanks in no small part to its physics engine. In the latest version of the game, rain and snow reduced, or outright nullified, the effects of explosives. Archers had to be positioned with care, because the range of their bows changed depending on whether they were on top of a hill or at the bottom. The game did away with some of the traditional aspects of strategy games, like resource management, freeing players to focus on pure tactics. The studio had the utmost confidence in its work. And yet, despite initial demos that were very promising, the press seemed to ignore Myth, hardly mentioning it at all. Even though the game was supposed to be released for PC, the specialist press still had Bungie pigeonholed as “just” a Mac studio whose games weren’t really worth noticing. This sometimes gave rise to situations that were surprising, to say the least, like the time that the editor of the highly respected Computer Gaming World discovered Myth for the very first time at a small American trade show. He was amazed that he’d never heard of it, or ever received any beta versions of the game. The small group of employees who had attended the trade show were embarrassed. “I was prevented from telling him the truth,” Soell says, “which is that he would have seen it months ago if his writers would return our phone calls.”

While the studio was struggling to garner any media attention, Seropian and his closest advisors were diversifying their business, and founded Bungie Publishing. The first game that the company backed was Weekend Warrior, developed by Pangea Software, which it published for Mac in December 1996. Bungie next published the Mac port of Abuse, a game developed by Crack dot Com and released in February 1996. This 2D shooter had caught the eye of some staff members at Bungie, and the company offered to publish and distribute it for Mac. It was released a few months later, on March 5, 1997. On October 31, Myth: The Fallen Lords hit the shelves. Much to the studio’s disappointment, the initial reviews were somewhat lukewarm: the interface didn’t always work, and given how hard the game was (a Bungie specialty) this fell afoul of several reviewers. The result was that the team had no time to sit back and rest, and immediately got back to work to speedily develop a corrective patch that was released a few weeks later. Bungie’s fast action won it no shortage of praise and better yet, it enabled Myth to make a name for itself with the same speed. The game was a real hit. It soon sold several hundred thousand copies and won a series of awards, winning the accolade of game of the year from MacWorld, Computer Gaming World and Computer Games Strategy Plus. At PC Gamer, which before this point had never been kind to Bungie, Myth was named strategy game of the year. The gaming community agreed, and 100,000 of them signed up to play online. To that end, Bungie launched bungie.net, a community website where players could access online servers for PvP gaming. At Bungie, it was time to pop the cork on the champagne. They were celebrating the acclaim and the satisfaction of having cracked the PC market, of course, but most of all they were celebrating the profits. Myth’s excellent sales figures opened up new possibilities for Seropian and Jones.

Almost automatically, they began work on a sequel, and began thinking about the studio’s future. Seropian had long been planning to sell Bungie to one of the big names in gaming, because life as an independent studio was becoming increasingly difficult. Indeed, with just 25 employees, payroll wasn’t astronomical, but they had to do everything in-house and the slightest error could prove fatal. But now, thanks to the success of Myth, Bungie was in a far healthier financial position. So instead of selling to the highest bidder, Bungie now had plans to grow. Indeed, for months now Jones and Seropian had been receiving applications from young developers, only to see them have a change of heart once they realized that they would need to move to Chicago. Bungie then decided to open a second studio in San Jose, California, named simply Bungie West. At E3 in 1998, Bungie announced that it was currently working on two titles: one a sequel to Myth, which was being developed in Chicago, and a new game called Oni, which was primarily being developed by Bungie West.

Change was also afoot in Chicago. The company’s new cash flow situation meant that it could change premises, and the team moved into the seventh floor at 350 West Ontario Street, further north in the city. The move proved to be a particularly epic one, because even though Bungie had paid a removal company to move the old premises into the new one, the staff also pitched in and used their own cars to move certain boxes. The new premises weren’t brand new, but they were certainly nicer than the old ones, with a fitted kitchen and break room with a few futons. They also offered the advantage of being close to O’Donnell’s and Salvatori’s studio, and the developers regularly visited Total Audio to enjoy the studio’s hospitality and comfort.

MYTH II: A COSTLY BUG

Unfortunately, though, the staff didn’t really have time for a break. Although for the first few weeks Jason Rieger had been working on Myth II alone, he was soon joined by the rest of the studio, including a few new hires. These new faces included one Jaime Griesemer. This diehard fan of the first Myth stood out thanks to The Myth Grimoire, a little website he set up while the game was in development, where he posted a stream of short articles containing the latest Myth news. A theoretical physics student, Griesemer never planned on pursuing a career in video games, but he was such a big fan of Myth that when Bungie offered him a job working on Myth II, he accepted it without a moment’s hesitation, all the more so as he was already living in Chicago. He started out as just a beta tester before discovering that he had some talent as a level designer, and after spending some time playing around with the level design tools, he was given the opportunity to make the multiplayer maps for Myth II. The game’s development was particularly exhausting because the studio execs had planned a release date of November 1998, giving the development team just one year in which to produce a quality sequel. Those futons in the new offices would get some serious use, especially by people like Rieger who didn’t always have time to go home to sleep. Because when it came to Myth II, there was no question of just churning out a bog-standard sequel: Bungie had standards when it came to quality, and the studio wanted to wow its fans. The team worked tirelessly and came up with a whole range of new features, like a drawbridge system that could be activated when an allied unit managed to infiltrate an enemy fortress. The AI was given a full overhaul, and there was even an option to replace the spouting blood with streams of stars, so that younger gamers could play the game. In summer 1998, the team was burnt out and eased up on the pace. November 1st wouldn’t happen. The game would be released when it was ready. But everyone was aware that they couldn’t drag their heels: the studio was in better financial shape, but eventually it would need fresh income. Bungie couldn’t afford too big a delay: contracts had already been signed and the studio would have to pay fines if it failed to meet its deadlines, especially with certain retailers. As part of a vague attempt to keep spirits up, Seropian himself went out to buy food and bring it back to the office to feed the team that was working almost day and night without break. At long last, on December 28, Myth II: Soulblighter, to give it its full name, was finally ready. The studio quickly shipped the first copies of the game, sending them on their way to stores all over the country.

Everything seemed to be going to plan: the developers had managed to make exactly the game they had in mind, and they couldn’t wait to hear what players thought. To help it on its way, the studio had even made Myth II more accessible than earlier Bungie games, which all had a reputation for being very hard. “It’s not about making it easy,” Jones would explain. “It’s about not making it discouraging.” But at this point the studio was blissfully unaware that in Tokyo, on the other side of the world, the person responsible for localizing the game had discovered that it contained a major bug. Or at least its uninstall program did. When users tried to uninstall the game, it completely wiped everything on their hard drive. Everything was deleted, with no possibility of being recovered. When word reached Bungie, very early in the morning, Jones and Seropian were not yet in the office. 200,000 copies were all ready to go, packaged and about to be shipped. 150,000 of them already had an owner, thanks to pre-orders. The situation was critical, but Bungie still had time to find a solution. When Martin O’Donnell found out, he headed straight to the studio and found it in a state of complete panic. In the time it took the two bosses to get to the office, the few employees already at work had begun looking into the bug and trying to figure out where it came from. There was still time to react, but under no circumstances could the game be delivered to players in its current state: the future of the studio itself was at stake, because a scandal of this magnitude could easily force it to close down. When Jones and Seropian finally reached the office, the bug had been found and a patch already prepared. The two bosses then needed to decide on a plan of action. “I very much remember discussing what we should do once we discovered the bug,” Seropian recounts. We put ourselves in our players’ position and also thought about how we would want to look back on this in 10 years. We certainly didn’t want to be responsible for deleting people’s hard drives.” So Bungie did something very brave for a company of its size: it recalled all of the boxes that had already been shipped, and replaced the faulty CDs with newly printed ones. The studio’s staff would head out and track down all of the games that had already been shipped and which, fortunately, had not yet reached the stores. Without a doubt, this course of action saved Bungie’s reputation, but it was a very, very expensive one: the cost came in at around $800,000, eating up most of the profits from Myth II.

The game was well-received by critics and fans voted with their wallets, but even though the game was selling more and selling faster than its predecessor, it wasn’t enough. Bungie had lost a lot of money, placing the studio in a difficult financial position. But Jason Jones had more than one ace up his sleeve: while everyone at Bungie was still busy working on the first Myth game, the company’s co-founder had shut himself away to lay the foundations for a new game. When Myth II was finally released, his secret side project had grown considerably. It would come to be known as Blam!, and it would shape the future of Bungie.

3 The Computer Game Developers Conference (CGDC) became the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in 1999.

Chapter 4 – Halo Is Born

While most of Bungie’s staff were working on Myth II, Jason Jones settled down in a corner of the studio and began thinking about the next big project. Bungie West would henceforth be working on Oni, a third-person action game that combined shooting sequences with hand-to-hand combat. While some staff from Chicago would join them in working on that project, the entire workforce of Bungie East and West couldn’t all be kept occupied working on the one same game. A new project was needed to keep the majority of the troops in Chicago occupied. Although Jones had enjoyed working on Myth–a brand new world inhabited by knights, dwarfs, and fortresses–his first love was sci-fi, and its siren song was too powerful to resist. And so he began work on a new game, this time set in a futuristic world. It was an RTS in appearance only, because Jones still didn’t have a clear picture of exactly what the game that was currently code-named Armor would become. But in the beginning, he used an improved version of the Myth engine to try out his ideas. On September 24, 1997, Bungie trademarked the name of its new game. It was just a code name for the time being, but Jones liked to hit the ground running: Marathon and Myth were also both just code names, and were never intended to become the permanent names of each series. So given Bungie’s track record with code names for games, it was worthwhile registering Armor from the outset, even if the name might be dropped at a later date. But the name, like the game itself, would go through a lot of changes over the coming months.

THE FANTASTIC FOUR

To pave the way for Armor, Bungie was hiring. In particular, the studio hired two new artists, Marcus Lehto and Shi Kai Wang, who would soon be responsible for creating Bungie’s unique visual identity. Lehto wasn’t really a new face, having already worked for Bungie in 1996 when the studio began working on Myth. The son of a pastor from Ohio, he discovered a real passion for art and sci-fi when he was just eight years old, when his sister and her boyfriend dragged him along to the movies one night in 1977, where he was introduced to Star Wars. It was this passion that led him to enroll at Kent State University in 1987, where he studied industrial design. After earning his degree, Lehto spent two years working in industrial design at Karen Skunta & Co., which is where he heard Bungie mentioned for the very first time. As a longstanding fan of video games, he suddenly began thinking of a possible career in that field. “We played Marathon constantly since it was the only good game on the Mac at that time,” Lehto recalls. “I reached out to Bungie in 1996 and started freelancing with them at night, sending UI and other content to them for Myth: The Fallen Lords. Lehto joined Bungie full-time in fall 1998, where he would work on Armor. Shi Kai Wang, who joined the project shortly after Lehto, had a completely different background altogether. Having just graduated from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he also earned a degree in industrial design, Wang was applying to work at both FASA Corporation (Battletech, Shadowrun, etc.) and Bungie. He presented both with a thick portfolio that he had been able to flesh out while he studied by working for a small studio named Mobeus Design, recently founded by one of his friends. Bungie liked the work of this young concept artist, and wasted no time offering him a position. He then joined the trio made up of Jones, Lehto and Robert McLees, who had already laid the foundations of Armor.

In early 1998, Armor was looking like a real spiritual sequel to Myth, and the foursome were busy using and trying out loads of different ideas. Jones really liked Starcraft, but just like with Myth, he preferred to steer clear of some of the genre’s clichés, like resource management. Like Myth, Armor was based primarily upon an extremely powerful physics engine, comprehensive management of 3D graphics, and the tactical positioning of different units. While the team was busy experimenting, the artists were at work modeling the game’s first units. At this point, the Armor universe was remarkably generic: it had tanks and 4x4 with decidedly modern designs, a few aliens, Marines and, notably, special armored soldiers. It was Lehto’s very first contribution to Armor, and although he didn’t know it at the time, this character would soon become something of the game’s icon: Lehto recalls how, “The very first asset I designed, built in 3D and animated was a very simple ‘super soldier’ character. I still remember how excited we were to see six of these characters running alongside a basic tank in a blank world for the first time. It was at that moment that the potential for what we were making started to unlock in my head. As time went on, I continued to rebuild and rethink that character design, which ultimately became the Mjolnir armor for the Master Chief.” But at that point in the design process for Armor, nobody knew they would one day become Master Chief, and in actual fact, nobody knew what the game itself would be like. Jones didn’t have any concrete ideas. He tried out a few ideas with the studio’s latest tools, and listened attentively to input from Lehto, McLees, and Wang. One day, they invited Martin O’Donnell to come and have a look at the prototype, which was still in its very early stages: the little team really wanted to hear what he thought, and Jones wanted O’Donnell to compose the beginnings of a soundtrack. “It looked a lot like Myth,” the musician explained. “They were using its engine and it had that isometric camera, except it was sci-fi.” Perhaps because O’Donnell didn’t seem overly impressed, Lehto decided to show him some storyboards he’d been working on for the past few days. One of the things he’d drawn was a Marine facing off against a massive, armored alien that looked like a giant lizard. The alien creature was the work of Shi Kai Wang, who had been entrusted with creating the different aliens that the players would face. O’Donnell didn’t know it, but he was one of the first people outside the small development team to encounter the Sangheilis, more commonly known as the Elites in the Halo universe. What did make an impression, though, was the point of view used in the storyboards. Here, there was no more isometric camera, but a point of view that was much closer to the characters, like a third person camera. “I remember thinking that looks a lot cooler, but too bad the final game won’t be that.”

A 4X4 CHANGES EVERYTHING

While Jones was trying to get a good picture of what Armor would really look like, Wang, Lehto and McLees kept crafting its world. Wang had made a lot of progress in conceptualizing different alien races. He thought that his time at Mobeus Design served as a good warm-up. The game he had worked on, entitled Esoteria, was also set in a futuristic world populated by aliens and armored super soldiers. When trying to breathe life into the aliens that would become the Covenant, he drew on his own personal influences in Japanese comic books and animation (Katsuhiro Otomo, Masamune Shirow, Akira Toriyama, etc.), while also drawing on his observations of nature. For example, it was when studying the anatomy of different birds that he came up with the Jackals: fragile but annoying creatures, especially when they were protected behind their imposing energy shields. As for the more-amusing-than-dangerous Unggoy, or Grunts as they are also known, they were a deft blend of monkey, crab, and tortoise. When it came to designing the first alien vehicles, he spent a lot of time researching how the shells of beetles, as well as some forms of aquatic life, worked. It was an idea that he got straight from Marcus Lehto: “When I was a kid, my family took a vacation to Cape May, NJ,” the project’s artistic director recounts. “While playing on the beach, this strange alien looking animal crawled up from the ocean near me. I was alarmed by this thing but also amazed at how cool it looked. It was a horseshoe crab, a prehistoric arthropod whose sleek but brutish design was burned into my brain forever. When it came to designing our enemy ships for the game, I drew from that experience and made a large tank that closely resembled a horseshoe crab in shape, blended with the iridescent shell of a beetle.” Based on these initial concepts, Wang conjured up a whole series of vehicles, one of which was the Banshee, a small flying vehicle whose appearance owed as much to sharks as it did to certain insects. Everything about the Covenant had to imply technology that was leaps ahead of our own; it needed to evoke fear and otherness, so that players felt that what they were seeing had emerged from the imagination of another civilization, whose aesthetic norms and concepts were light-years removed from our own. McLees loaned a hand, creating a unique alien race nicknamed the “Flood.” These creatures with their disgusting appearance were initially intended to serve as a bioweapon wielded by the Covenant. McLees dreamed them up one day while examining his cousin’s thumb after he had hit it with a hammer and it had developed a nasty infection. His thumb’s rather repugnant appearance inspired the artist who, after making a drawing of his cousin’s thumb, used it as the basis for an entire bestiary of repellent creatures. They all had different names, shapes, and roles, but they all shared this strikingly unique visual identity. But out of all the monstrous creatures created by McLees, one is more complex than all the rest. Its name? The Librarian. This non-combatant Flood was then intended to archive its victims’ memories so that it could extract all kinds of information from them, which it would then transmit to the Flood soldiers. Keen fans might here spot the origins of the Gravemind, the Flood’s ultimate hivemind, which would pop up years later in the plot of Halo 2. Before that, though, this idea would be reworked and used in the “Truth and Reconciliation” level of Halo, in the form of the Proto-Gravemind that had absorbed a number of Elites and, more importantly, Captain Keyes, from whom it was trying to extract information. But that would not be until two years later. As for the name “The Librarian,” it would be repurposed even later, this time for a major Forerunner character. “Forerunner” was a term that didn’t yet exist at this stage in the creative process, but would become increasingly important to the game universe as the series progressed.

At the same time, Lehto was also responsible for a task that appeared to be more straightforward, but which was just as technical a challenge: designing the initial human vehicles which were gradually replacing the old, extremely generic 3D models that were used in the first iterations of Armor. He dreamed up a new kind of helicopter, as well as a new 4x4, whose beefy suspension system made fantastic use of the game’s physics engine. Armor was a strategy game, but just like Myth, it relied heavily on managing three dimensions and an extremely accomplished physics engine. The 4x4, baptized the Warthog, could travel at breakneck speed, and its suspension meant that it could absorb any shocks along the way without it ever being a cause for concern. The team, which had now amassed a few new members, found its ultra-bouncy handling funny, and the developers decided to conduct a little experiment: they moved the aerial camera and pinned it to a Warthog. Once that was done, the team spent a bit of time driving the Warthog around the vast map designed to test out the different concepts in Armor. As it turned out, driving the Warthog proved to be a whole lot of fun. A few years later, Jones would even affirm that “Our physics are better than a lot of racing games.”

At that time, Jones was still deep in the thinking process for Armor, and still wasn’t really sure of the direction in which to take the game. True, the initial idea started off using the Myth II engine, but making another RTS wasn’t on the table. In any case, Jones had no idea what the game would become; he just wanted to try a few things out. In the end, the light-bulb moment came when the team discovered just how much fun it was controlling a single unit in third person. Armor was not now destined to become an RTS game, but rather a third person action game. However, there was no way that the tactical and strategic component that gave rise to the idea would be abandoned: Jones saw Armor as a game in which players would cooperate, to beat either the AI or another team of humans. Online and co-op gaming were now part of Bungie’s DNA, and as a game designer, it was also what Jason Jones got really excited about. But despite the studio’s persistent advances in artificial intelligence, Jones thought that it would be impossible to create AI-controlled enemies that were as unpredictable as other people. This last point would prove to be absolutely decisive for Jones.

BLAM!

So that was that: Armor would be a third person shooter. In early 1999, Myth II was delivered at long last and the new game, no longer a mere side-project for a handful of developers, became the focus of the entire studio. This was also when they decided to give it a new name, since Armor was neither catchy nor really representative of what the game was about. But Bungie still had the same problem: they were having a really hard time finding a name that they genuinely liked, and whenever they gave a project a code name, it always ended up being the game’s permanent name. In an effort to stop that from happening again, Bungie went with Munkey Nutz, but was soon forced to change it again: however funny the new name was, it was also really embarrassing, especially when Jones was trying to tell his parents about the new project he was working on. It would ultimately be Robert McLees who suggested Blam!, a very popular bit of onomatopœia often heard around the studio when the devs were playing against each other, and even on the Bungie forums, a few years later, where “blam!” would automatically replace any curse words. There’s also a real story behind the name: Bungie’s new premises were located on a very busy Chicago Street, where there was generally a lot of traffic, and the staff would regularly hear near-collisions out on the street. “You’d hear the screech of tires and then nothing. So I’d yell ‘Blam!’ Just so there was some sense of completion.” This time, the studio had definitely found a code name that was zany enough to never be chosen as the game’s official name.

It would not be long before fans learned of the project’s existence, and on February 15, the fansite marathon.bungie.org received a mysterious email from an unfamiliar address at Bungie: mailto:cortana@bungie.com. The content of the message was even more mysterious, taking the form of a strange poem evocative of the AI in Marathon.

I have walked the edge of the Abyss.

I have governed the unwilling.

I have witnessed countless empires break before me.

I have seen the most courageous soldiers fall away in fear.

[I was there with the Angel at the tomb.]

I have seen your future. And I have learned.

There will be no more Sadness. No more Anger. No more Envy.

I HAVE WON.

Oh, and your poet Eliot had it all wrong:

THIS is the way the world ends.

The poem was signed, “A friend of a friend.” In total, marathon.bungie.org would receive five emails, and the website admins naturally shared the content with the community. A sixth and final letter would be discovered in September that same year, hidden on the CD of an updated version of Myth. Bungie’s fans were immediately obsessed with these cryptic messages, known as the “Cortana Letters,” and tried their hardest to find out more. They were eventually convinced that Bungie was teasing a new Marathon: indeed, Cortana was the name of Ogier the Dane’s sword, Ogier being a legendary knight who featured in many epic poems in 13th century France. As these poems would have it, Ogier was one of Charlemagne’s loyal paladins. Some fans quickly spotted the connection: the famous Roland de Ronceveau was, according to legend, Charlemagne’s nephew, and he owned a sword called Durandal. The same name as the AI in Marathon. Bungie had fun with their insight, and offered perfectly enigmatic answers to the community’s questions. Little by little, Bungie was generating a bit of hype. At least it was among its fans: despite Myth and Myth II being given simultaneous Mac and PC releases, Bungie was still perceived as a Mac studio. In-house, though, there’d been some changes: while a Mac version was certainly on the cards, Blam!, the game that would become Halo, was developed first for PC. A first for the studio.

While Bungie was having fun with its fans, work on the game was progressing at a steady pace. Now that Jones knew what kind of game Blam! would be, the team was wasting less time on conceptualization and instead developing ever more content. Ideas weren’t short on the ground, but they needed to be made into reality. Blam! would be set on an artificial world in a very distant star system, where Humans would encounter an alliance of hitherto unknown alien races with whom they would need to do battle to assert their domination of the strange planet. Jones had a very specific idea in mind: he wanted his new baby to abandon the usual action game structure, often being composed of different levels that players need to complete one by one, in a linear fashion. He wanted to offer something more organic, where players were free to take whichever course of action they thought best: “There won’t be any occasions when the gameplay stops and a dialog box pops up to say, ‘you have now finished X level, now you must go do Y mission,’” Jones explained. “Instead, the player will have a great deal of discretion as to where they go in this world and how they choose to wage war against the aliens.” At that point, Bungie had its heart set on giving players free rein, and the developers had created a series of tools to deliver on this promise. Weapons, in particular. Robert McLees was in charge of designing the game’s many weapons. A keen survivalist, McLees was also passionate about physics and firearms. As he was particularly fussy when it came to weapons, he worked flat out to make sure that each of the human weapons was realistic. Functional, not flashy. To that end, he made one of the first versions of the famous MA5B assault rifle, which would quickly become one of the series’ iconic weapons. He also designed a pump-action shotgun, sniper rifle, and revolvers… All very traditional weapons, truth be told, but Bungie wanted players to intuitively understand how the human weapons worked, and then invent more exotic weapons for the aliens. While most of McLees’ concepts were retained for the final game, a number of them weren’t, including a long machete (the human equivalent of the aliens’ energy sword), and even flamethrowers. McLees was particularly proud of the flamethrower, but it was no good, the developers couldn’t get it to work properly: the flames didn’t spread in the way they wanted them to, and they soon abandoned the idea of being able to turn anything you could see into a blazing inferno. The weapon was useless for the time being, but it would make an appearance in the PC version of the first Halo game, before being officially added to Halo 3 eight years later. The design would barely change in those intervening years.

With a view to enhancing the game’s tactical and cooperative aspects, Bungie tested a number of features, such as a “super jump” that could be triggered by holding and releasing the jump button. The longer the player held the button, the more powerful the jump. The idea was dropped, but not completely, with the team planning for a while to add a jetpack to the game that would let players fly for short distances. This, too, was put to the side. However, they did keep one of the ideas they came up with, and that proved very popular with the staff at Bungie: the game contained a number of different rocket launchers, and one of them, a particularly powerful one, required players to use a laser marker to target enemies so that the rockets found their target.

Blam! would also need a plot, and a few people put their heads together, beginning with Jason Jones, Robert McLees and Jaime Griesemer. But the team couldn’t come to an agreement on the story: some on the team thought that the most important thing was to make a game that was fun to play, and couldn’t understand why anyone would want to waste so much time on the story. The year was 1999 and while some games, like Marathon in particular, endeavored to do it, very few shooting games really tried to tell a story. But it was what Jason Jones had wanted to do ever since he teamed up with Seropian to form Bungie. In the meantime, the success of Half-Life, proved that a shooter could be more than just a series of rooms and maze-like corridors to spray down with a machine gun. And so it would be that Blam!, like its predecessors, would tell a story. Several potential storylines would be sounded out. The first was set on a strange planet far from Earth, where players assumed the role of an Empire soldier who encounters a group of indigenous people: humans, but less technologically advanced. They decide to train them to prepare for the next Covenant attack on their homeworld.

Jaime Griesemer, meanwhile, suggested an alternative story that was heavily focused on the Flood. He also came up with the term, “Gravemind.” In his plot, the humans that the Empire discovers were used by the Flood in a rite of passage: as soon as they reached adult age, young males were thrown into a vast forest, filled with Flood. Any that made it out of the forest emerged with enhanced intelligence, but also more aggressive.

But the studio couldn’t come to an agreement. And so they kept thrashing it out. They did all agree on one thing, though: the mysterious planet would be home to traces of a long since disappeared alien civilization. The world needed to be populated with buildings and ruins to make players think that this race was once prosperous, and highly evolved. Marcus Lehto was the man tasked with designing the many structures that would dot the game map, and when the time came to start making the initial sketches of this alien architecture, he found inspiration in his past: “I tapped into my childhood as a preacher’s son and delved into the mythology and reverence of ancient religions to create something that felt awe inspiring to explore,” Lehto explained. “I always wanted what we saw of the iconic Forerunner architecture to feel like just the tip of an iceberg. The rest of the massive structure lived far below the surface in the structure of the Halo ring itself. I was lucky to find an artist, Paul Russel, who totally understood the approach I was taking with the Forerunners, and he ran with the design aesthetic and built some of the best stuff I’d ever seen.” And together, Russel and Lehto laid the foundations of what would soon be known as the Forerunner civilization.

The artists kept up their work and populated the planet with a whole taxonomy of living creatures. Gradually, a new ecosystem came to occupy the space. Players were even supposed to be able to ride some of the wildlife as a faster means of transport, or for more effective attacks on Covenant troops. But the engineers tasked with coding the AI were going round in circles: it was impossible to make these creatures behave in a convincing way. They were trying to give them a group mentality, the docile behavior seen in animals who live in herds. But it was to no avail. On the other hand, people like Jones thought that the planet would be more mysterious if it was completely devoid of both inhabitants and wildlife. Primarily, though, they were giving a lot of thought to how the Flood would affect the story as it unfolded. Jones wanted the new enemy’s entry into the game to come as a surprise. The Flood’s appearance would be all the more surprising if it were the only other form of life on the planet, apart from the humans and the Covenant. That was the decision that won the day: while Halo’s definitive plot was still far from being written, Jones already had a few ideas about what kind of story he would like to tell, and how.

With E3 1999 rapidly approaching, the studio decided to start work on a demo to show to journalists at the expo. The game engine for Blam! no longer bore any relation to the one that had powered the first prototypes imagined by Jones, Lehto, McLees and Wang. Although the game was still very far from complete, in technical terms it was already highly impressive. The game world was gigantic, but was nevertheless filled with detail: the sky was filled with clouds that moved overhead, which in turn had a dynamic effect on light levels; the particle effects were breathtaking; the effects of the game’s physics engine could be felt absolutely everywhere, from rocket trajectories to the way their smoke trails dissipated; but most impressive was the fact that the main character, a cybernetic soldier in green armor, could move from indoor areas to vast outdoor spaces without any loading times. For its first PC game, Bungie hadn’t pulled any punches when it came to resources poured into the game, and the developers put their whole hearts into it. In its current state, though, it was impossible to play, and more than anything else, Blam! resembled a souped-up technical demo.

Still a bit distrustful of the press, Bungie decided to make the trip to E3 to unveil its new game, but only “behind closed doors,” meaning in a private space to which only those who had received an invitation would be granted access. Journalists even needed to sign a non-disclosure agreement barring them from talking about what they had seen. However, despite the gag order, a rumor began to circulate around the Los Angeles Convention Center: on its stand in a room that was closed to the public, Bungie was showing an absolutely amazing game. Those who had seen it couldn’t get over it, and regretted that it had to be kept secret, and for some, it was the best game on show at E3 1999. To be clear, this meant that Bungie had made a big impression indeed, because that was a year that the press also had access to Black and White and Freelancer, and the latest projects from Peter Molyneux (Populous, Syndicate) and Chris Roberts (Wing Commander). Doubtless giddy on the reactions from journalists seeing Blam! for the very first time, the Bungie staff present at E3 answered a few questions and presented very confidently. They assured the journalists that, for example, the game wouldn’t be built around levels, and so there’d be only one huge world to explore. This was indeed one of Jones’ very first ideas, but tests conducted at the studio found that exploration perhaps wasn’t as much fun as it was made out to be, and Blam! would place a greater focus on action.

MACWORLD 1999

When they returned from Los Angeles, Bungie met with some representatives of a small company that specialized in brand strategy. Because historically the studio had struggled to find names for their games, Jones and Seropian and the rest thought that a helping hand might be in order. The staff all got together in a meeting room to hear the first round of possible names. But none caught on. There was a second meeting, with the same result. They ultimately suggested Covenant,4 which was barely any more popular, but without anything better, they decided to go with it. While in the meeting, one person decided to say out loud what many of them were thinking: the name didn’t really work. That person was Paul Russel. He was then invited to suggest a few names of his own. Some of his suggestions were quite interesting, like Age of Aquarius, Solipsis or even The Crystal Palace, while others were dismissed immediately, like Hard Vacuum and The Santa Machine. Eventually, Russel suggested Halo. While the naming process was trundling on, the world on which the game was set had completely changed shape: it was no longer set on a planet, but on a ringworld, an idea borrowed from Larry Niven who had published a novel entitled Ringworld in 1970. Bungie had been playing around with this concept for a while already, and the world imagined for Blam! was changed as a result. The name Halo, then, made a lot more sense, but it wasn’t popular with everyone. Top of the list of its detractors was Jason Jones, who opposed the name mainly because of its religious connotations. But it also had some fans, including Martin O’Donnell. After a lengthy discussion, the whole studio finally came round to the idea of Halo as the name for their game. Bungie could now start teasing and marketing its game, a process that began a few days later on May 20, just a few days after E3 1999 closed. An old fansite, mythII. com, that had posted no new content for months, was suddenly updated: its homepage displayed a mysterious illustration, accompanied by the following words: “Halo. Or was it Blam!?” The fans went wild, and made the connection with some of Cortana’s poems that had mentioned angels.

Soon they would discover the whole truth. For months now, the studio had been discussing whether to unveil Halo at a MacWorld event. This time, however, Bungie wanted a higher profile. Jones and Seropian were not going to be satisfied with just an everyday stand: they wanted Halo to be revealed at the trade show’s opening conference, a conference hosted by Steve Jobs, the big boss at Apple. This was no mean feat, because Jobs had never shown much of an interest in video games. It was a fact well-known in the industry. Trip Hawkins had left Apple and founded Electronic Arts precisely because the head honcho at Apple had no desire to waste his time with video games. Bungie, however, had a card up its sleeve, and it happened to be an ace: in early 1999, they had persuaded Peter Tamte to join the studio as executive vice-president. Tamte knew Jobs well, because Jobs had headhunted him while he was still director of MacSoft, the leading video games developer and publisher on Mac. Tamte worked at Apple for a year as marketing director, but he soon got bored. He missed video games and, like any gamer, he was familiar with Bungie and their games. Seropian hardly had to twist his arm to persuade him to join the company. And so, with MacWorld approaching in July 1999, the studio execs turned to Tamte: he had to persuade Jobs to give Halo a spot at the opening conference. Tamte obtained an appointment for a private presentation at Apple’s head office in Cupertino.

Jones set off with a Halo demo, but before he’d even left Chicago, he had a feeling that things wouldn’t go as well as he hoped: for the moment, Halo only worked on PC. This meant that he would have to present the game on a computer that was a competitor to one of Apple’s flagship products. Jones took a flight to California, taking one of the studio’s young recruits with him: one Joseph Staten.

Staten started working for Bungie in 1998. His career had been unconventional, to say the least: he graduated from college in 1994 with one degree in drama, and another in international relations. He spent two years working for a non-profit, living in Japan where he taught English. When he made it back to the United States, he earned a master’s in international relations and started looking for a job. He initially applied to join the CIA, without success, before going to work on a California vineyard for a year. When he started work at Bungie, he worked on a series of smaller jobs: he had a spell at Bungie Publishing, where he took care of PR and designed the studio’s stands when he travelled to present games at trade shows. But his situation soon changed when, in 1999, he was asked to focus on Oni. The game, which was still in development at Bungie West, was having some problems. The project had stalled, so Bungie decided to hire its way through the impasse. The studio hired Hardy LeBel, a designer at Namco, and offered a contract to Lorraine Reyes, an artist whose graphical Japanese style was the perfect match for Oni’s artistic direction. Oni was a third person action game that combined shooting sequences with hand-to-hand combat, and featured a cyberpunk visual styling reminiscent of Ghost in the Shell. There was no shortage of good ideas for the project, but Bungie West couldn’t get it going. Staten would be tasked with writing the game’s different missions. It was no coincidence that he’d been given this role: he loved to write, and regularly did so in his spare time as a way to unwind. Jason Jones got on really well with Staten, who was hilarious, highly intelligent, and full of ideas.

And so the two compadres set off together for California, accompanied by Peter Tamte. When they got there, there was no hanging around: Jobs was a very busy man. Jones and Staten found themselves alone in a room with the big boss at Apple, who wanted to know what they had come to show him, and quick. Tamte stayed outside: “I was not there for the actual presentation with Jason and Joe. Because that’s not how you did it with Steve. Steve always wanted to deal with the creator.” Staten sat down, stayed quiet, and let his boss give a presentation about Halo. Jones finished off preparing the PC they’d brought with them and launched the demo. He then began his presentations, explaining the game’s concept, and describing some of the technical particularities. He spent a lot of time on the transitions between indoor and outdoor environments, which demanded zero loading time. Technologically speaking, it was a real achievement, and he wanted to be sure that Jobs fully grasped these subtleties. But while he was moving the character around the screen to showcase the different light effects generated by the presence of a sun, Jobs interrupted the presentation: “Yeah, but you know, at Pixar,5 we can render dozens of suns.” As reserved and laconic as Jones was, the boss from Bungie was no wallflower, nor the type to let himself be intimidated. “Yeah, but can you do it in real time?” came his retort. That question and everything that it implied left Jobs speechless for a few seconds. He rose and, walking towards the door that led out of the room where the presentation had taken place, replied simply: “Okay, you’re in.” Despite the fact that Jobs had no real interest in video games, this decision came as no surprise to Peter Tamte who, a few years later, would explain that the head of Apple “… was always the type who could recognize something that had the potential to change the world.”

Bungie, of course, were jubilant at having had such an opportunity, because the MacWorld opening conference was a hotly anticipated event, and not many video games had managed to secure such a prestigious spot alongside Steve Jobs. This summer, then, it would be Halo’s turn. There was just one snag: the event was just two weeks away and the game still didn’t run on a Mac. And so Bungie began a long race against the clock, adapting Halo for OpenGL. Three days before they would set off for New York, Joe Staten met with Martin O’Donnell, and informed him that Bungie would need some music to accompany its presentation. The composer, though, was faced with two problems. The first was that the Total Audio studios had been ravaged by a fire a few months earlier, and O’Donnell and Salvatori had a lot on their plates. Bungie wasn’t Total Audio’s only client, O’Donnell had hardly done any work on Halo, and he wasn’t really familiar with its world, which gave him very little room for maneuver. The second issue was that the game engine converted to run on OpenGL still couldn’t produce any sound. Instead, Bungie would have to play O’Donnell’s track using a CD player, and press play exactly when the presentation began. It was a bit of a MacGyver move, but it would work. With that settled, O’Donnell went to see Seropian, and told him about his plan. He planned on hiring a small orchestra and some vocalists, so that he could make a soundtrack worthy of the event. Seropian, however, was still keeping a close eye on the studio’s finances, and wasn’t too pleased at the idea. Bungie was still paying for the bug in Myth II, and its income streams were drying up. To make it easier to swallow, O’Donnell made a proposal: Bungie would only need to pay to cover the recording for the composition. In exchange, Total Audio would retain all rights to the piece of music, licensing them to Bungie for the Halo presentation. Seropian consented and O’Donnell left with $3500 in his pocket to pay a few musicians and cover the recording expenses. But Halo was still unfamiliar to him. He knew that it was a shooter set in a sci-fi universe, and that it had armored soldiers and aliens, but that was pretty much it! O’Donnell liked to understand the work for which he was composing, so he turned to Joe Staten, who gave him three adjectives to work with: ancient, mysterious, epic. That was what the music accompanying the demo had to provoke.

O’Donnell had just a few days to compose and record the track that would accompany Halo’s first public presentation, subjecting O’Donnell to far more pressure than he was used to when working with Bungie. He got in his car and sped to Salvatori’s home, where the partners had been forced to work ever since the fire. On the way, O’Donnell gave some thought to Staten’s instructions and analyzed each of the adjectives he’d provided. “Okay, ancient… Monks are ancient, so I’m gonna start with some sort of monks’ chant.” O’Donnell had studied medieval music while in Los Angeles, and it was one of his favorite genres. But, just like a jingle, the music for the presentation also had to be effective and get stuck in the heads of those who heard it at MacWorld. While he was a huge aficionado of classical music, O’Donnell also liked rock. One of his favorite bands was the Beatles, and there was one song in particular by the British rockers that he had long admired for its melodic structure: Yesterday. Composed of a sequence of high and low notes, the melody of Yesterday’s couplets inspired O’Donnell, who applied this style of composing to the Gregorian chants he had in mind. He finally found something that worked really well, and sang it in a loop while in his car so that he didn’t forget it before he got to Salvatori’s place. He arrived and found Salvatori in his basement, where he’d set up his personal studio that the duo had been using since Total Audio had been reduced to ashes. O’Donnell already had the melody, but there remained a lot of work ahead. With Salvatori, he wrote and composed the rest of the track, incorporating violin and percussion. Work was progressing quickly, and they wrote and recorded everything over the weekend, thanks to help from some musicians O’Donnell had hired for the job. O’Donnell then got in touch with three vocalists who had already worked with Total Audio in the past. O’Donnell and Salvatori joined them and together they sang the melody they had composed on Friday. Because Bungie was leaving for New York the very next day, O’Donnell and Salvatori had very little time left to polish their creation. O’Donnell was determined to add new lines of vocals to the composition, but sung in a very different style. Indeed, for the past few days, he’d had something very specific in mind: Qawwali, a form of devotional singing originating on the Indian subcontinent. It was a genre that he liked, but couldn’t really perform. Fortunately, one of the singers he’d recruited for the Gregorian chant knew someone who could help him out. When that person showed up at the studio, O’Donnell warned them straight away: he had absolutely nothing written down, just a few ideas in his head, so they were going to improvise. O’Donnell gave him a few examples, until the visitor told him that it sounded really good. Why didn’t O’Donnell just record the chant himself? O’Donnell felt awkward, but he got down to work. Many years later, he would explain how, “I was always embarrassed about that, because I thought I’m probably making fun of somebody by accident. I don’t know what’s legit and what isn’t. I’m just using my ears and I’m improvising nonsense syllables.” Despite O’Donnell’s doubts, the track was finished, and that Tuesday he delivered the CD containing the latest version to Bungie, and they all set off for New York.

On July 21, the day the conference began, panic reigned behind the scenes. Jason Jones was particularly nervous, and with good reason: the demo contained a bug that made it crash upon launch. Bungie knew about the bug, but nobody had managed to find the cause. With a few hours to go, the team that had traveled to the conference got a big fright when the CD containing the track composed by O’Donnell got snapped when someone stood on it. Fortunately, O’Donnell had thought to make a copy that he had kept on his person, just in case: crisis averted! All that was left to do was to start the music and the demo at the same time, and hope that they were in sync. Up on stage, Jobs was blazing through the announcements. After unveiling Quick Time TV and making a few announcements about Mac OS 9, at long last he introduced Halo, explaining that it was the coolest game he’d ever seen. He was then joined on stage by Jason Jones, who made his entrance to a round of applause. The two men shook hands and Jones, visibly stressed, spoke a few words about what he had come to present, and moved towards the right of the stage, where a table and several computers were to be found. He hunched down over one of them, grabbed the mouse, and immediately clicked and launched the demo. Behind the scenes, there was a sigh of relief: the demo hadn’t crashed. As Jones was heading back towards center stage, a Gregorian chant filled the auditorium. The Bungie logo appeared on the giant screen, before disappearing to show some kind of control room filled with holograms. The camera panned down to focus on a soldier in green armor, typing away on a virtual keyboard. What we were seeing was design from the mind of Shi Kai Wang who had, at Marcus Lehto’s request, reworked his boss’ efforts to create a character with a more streamlined silhouette. The soldier then runs out of the room, weapon in hand. After passing through a few corridors, he reaches a large hall in which floats a number of strange vehicles. In the middle of the room, two large aliens armed with energy swords appear. The Gregorian chant gives way to percussion, which is soon joined by a number of violins. The music builds towards a crescendo, while the soldier calls to the two aliens and then takes flight. He finally makes his way out of the strange building, and those watching were treated to an amazing, verdant world, bathed in light. The human eye is always drawn towards the sky, and here it found a long, broad strip of land and water stretching up towards the clouds: the action wasn’t taking place on Earth, but on an unknown world shaped like a ring. The violins surge as the soldier is reunited with two of his comrades. They climb aboard a huge 4x4 and escape at maximum speed before being caught by two more aliens, whose flying vehicles make the 4x4 easy prey. A high-speed chase then ensues. In the back of the human 4x4, one of the soldiers activates the turret and machine guns the pursuers, who respond with shots of bluish plasma fire. Through it all, the 4x4 keeps moving, bouncing around the narrow earthen track. The music becomes less dramatic when the three soldiers find a small alien flyer. The Gregorian chant returns while the flyer is evading enemy fire, and the camera pans over to another armored soldier who waves a flag bearing the Bungie logo. The demo ended to rousing applause from the audience. Many of those present found it hard to believe that it was “just” a video game. Most of those present had never seen anything so realistic, so impressive. And it was as big a feast for ears as it was for the eyes. Behind the scenes, the Bungie developers were ecstatic: the presentation was a success and they knew that MacWorld would guarantee Halo unrivalled exposure. MacWorld was covered by both the specialist and mainstream press, and Apple did not unveil any truly memorable new products that year in New York. This meant that there was nothing to eclipse Halo, as the unveiling of the Macintosh G3 may have done, had it not fortuitously been revealed at the San Francisco MacWorld a few months earlier. Just after the presentation, Bungie issued its first press release about Halo. It provided a bit more context and offered a glimpse of what the Halo world, which was rapidly taking shape, held in store: “The player is a military recon unit of the human race’s fledgling planetary empire. Pursued by alien warships to a massive and ancient ring construct deep in the void, the player must single-handedly improvise a guerrilla war over land, sea and air, using the arsenals and vehicles of three distinct cultures. Using everything from composite swords to orbital bombardment, driving everything from giant tanks to agile combat aircraft, players wage intense warfare over and under the surface of this world.”

The armored character shown in the demo still had no name and, truth be told, wasn’t really the story’s protagonist. Over the days that followed, the studio would be answering plenty of questions, and it became apparent that there were many things yet to be finalized. In-house, the soldier was known simply as “Chief,” which was merely a remnant of the time when Halo was still an RTS game: these armored soldiers were the most powerful human units, and had been given a name that reflected this status. But at this stage in the game’s development, he was just one character among so many more.

TAKE-TWO: AN UNEXPECTED ALLY

One month later, on August 12, a press release from publisher Take-Two Interactive announced that it had acquired a 19.9 % stake in Bungie. Bungie’s management thought that the sale was a necessary one, with Bungie now employing more than 40 staff members working in two separate studios. That all cost money–a lot of money–especially given that work on Halo and Oni was far from complete. Indeed, the studio would have a long wait before its next major cash injection. Take-Two, meanwhile, was growing slowly but surely, and more importantly yet, had made a series of sound decisions. In March 1998 they had acquired BMG Interactive, a subsidiary of BMG Entertainment, thereby picking up its games catalog, which included none other than a certain Grand Theft Auto, developed by DMA Design Limited. Soon-to-be renamed Rockstar North, the studio was incorporated into Rockstar Games, a new subsidiary formed by Take-Two, where it continued working on its increasingly popular GTA series under its new publisher. Bungie was another brick in the edifice that Take-Two was patiently erecting. The contract binding Bungie to Take-Two was extremely simple: in exchange for a certain sum of money, Take-Two obtained the publication and distribution rights for upcoming Bungie games, which included Oni and Halo. Much of Take-Two’s burgeoning success, however, was based on the home console market, and this was rapidly evolving. Nintendo and SEGA were fading into the background, and although SEGA had recently released an extremely promising new console, the Dreamcast, Sony had already announced the PlayStation 2, an ultra-powerful new console with an added ace up its sleeve in the form of a DVD player. Having entered the console market five years earlier, the Japanese manufacturer quickly established a solid position and now dwarfed its competitors, all while attracting an ever-wider audience. For Take-Two, it made no sense at all to miss out on such a booming market. But Bungie didn’t have the resources to undertake the development of Halo and Oni for PC and consoles both, so Take-Two added another clause to the contract: the publisher would make the ports of the games, which it would entrust to Rockstar. Bungie had, of course, given a lot of thought to releasing the game on the PlayStation 2, but as of yet no functional demos had been developed. Take-Two was more confident, even daring to imagine a release on both the PlayStation 2 and the Dreamcast.

The partnership with Take-Two came in quite handy to Bungie, as the publisher gave the studio the resources it needed to match its ambitions, most notably through the kind of high profile that Bungie had never really had as a small independent developer. This included arranging press tours, and American journalists were being invited to see Halo from late 1999 onwards. When Take-Two revealed its catalog of upcoming games, Bungie’s game featured prominently, raising its profile further still. Halo was soon front-page news: Next Generation, PC Gamer and the rest all published interviews with the developers, who seemed confident in their game. In-house, however, it was a different story: despite the not-at-all insignificant financial support from Take-Two, the game was still far from finished. But the arrival of another video-gaming giant would soon put that right.

4 A biblical word for “alliance.”

5  Steve Jobs acquired Pixar from Lucasfilm in 1986. Despite Jobs’ difficult relationship with Michael Esner, CEO of the Walt Disney Company, Pixar and Disney worked hand-in-hand until Jobs agreed to sell the studio in 2006.

Chapter 5 – Bungie: A Microsoft Studio

While Bungie pushed on with work to develop Halo, at Microsoft head office in Redmond, four men were getting together and plotting the future. Ted Hase, Otto Berkes, Kevin Bachus and Seamus Blackley had, for just over a year, been wanting to get Microsoft into the video game industry. It was a plan that Blackley took particularly seriously as it was his idea, and he was a former game designer to boot. He was all too familiar with the problems that games development studios encountered when developing a game, and he thought that a gargantuan company like Microsoft had the resources to provide them with a machine that would let them give free rein to their creative genius. It was a plan that would enable Microsoft to become a major player in video games, carving out a space where everyone could flourish: Microsoft, of course, but also gamers and developers. These four men possessed a drive that would prove decisive for Halo.

XBOX, THE FIRST MICROSOFT CONSOLE

Back in 1999, the idea that Microsoft could manufacture a home console and make games on a par with Nintendo and Sony still seemed far-fetched. Microsoft was interested in video games, but wasn’t making any major moves in the sector. And yet, the signs were there if you knew where to look: the company from Redmond had just successfully launched DirectX, its API6 designed to facilitate making games for Windows computers, and in 1999 it acquired FASA Studio. Microsoft had also signed a contract with Ensemble Studios and published Age of Empires, which was encountering spectacular success on PC. But that wasn’t enough to make Microsoft a credible player in the video game industry, especially because the company was still making schoolboy errors. This is what the developers at FASA found out to their expense: no sooner had the studio been acquired than the staff was moved to Redmond and split up across different departments in Microsoft Studios. FASA itself was then broken up. It was a way of doing business that made sense at Microsoft, which was first and foremost a software designer, but which ran contrary to the way that most video game studios worked.

However, the success encountered by DirectX would encourage some people to see the bigger picture. Those included Jonathan “Seamus” Blackley. This giant among men, with his pierced ears, certainly stood out in the corridors of Microsoft. Passionate about jazz and physics, Blackley’s odyssey in the video game industry began in the early ’90s when he was hired by Blue Sky Productions, which merged with Lerner Research to become Looking Glass Studios shortly thereafter. He worked with Warren Spector on Ultima Underworld and System Shock, before designing the physics engine for Flight Unlimited. When he fell out with the studio management, Blackley left Looking Glass and was headhunted by Steven Spielberg. The famous director who brought the world E.T. and Schindler’s List, among others, had taken an interest in the video game industry and wanted Blackley to develop a game based on Jurassic Park. This was how Jurassic Park: Trespasser came about, a first-person action and adventure game. Blackley and his team developed an incredibly powerful physics engine that amazed anyone who saw it in action. The gaming press added to the buzz, of course, as did figures like Jerry Sanders, the CEO at AMD, who would waste no time in using Trespasser to promote his microprocessors; or Bill Gates, who would send his personal congratulations to the team after seeing a demo that he found absolutely brilliant. Alas, upon its release Trespasser was a total flop. The game was filled with bugs, but more than that, its intense realism got very boring, very quickly. Industry magazines had no mercy for the game, sometimes awarding it the dubious honor of worst game of the year. That made the situation untenable for Blackley, who already had an extremely fraught relationship with his superiors. And so he decided to resign from DreamWorks Interactive, convinced that he would never set foot in the video game industry again. “I figured no one would trust me to make a game again because I fucked up,” he recalls. “I was an emotional disaster.” He then set off on a self-imposed exile and traveled all over Europe, where he visited the castles of France and Great Britain, and toured a number of major Second World War sites. Belied by his imposing frame and keen intelligence, Blackley was actually a very sensitive person and had a very hard time hearing the criticism of his game, which he took personally. Worse still, he hated how Steven Spielberg, with whom he had grown close, was being criticized and mocked following the failure of Jurassic Park: Trespasser. It left him feeling hurt. Eventually, in early 1999, Microsoft offered him a role on the DirectX team. He accepted the offer, and with a heavy heart he moved into his new office–a small, windowless room–where he would spend many a long month. Blackley was chatty by nature and never short on witty remarks, but he kept a low profile at Microsoft. At least he did until the day that Sony released the first details about the PlayStation 2. It piqued his interest and reminded him of the years he spent at Looking Glass and DreamWorks Interactive. But he wasn’t the only one with an eye on Sony’s announcements. The Japanese brand wanted to find a way into even more homes, and its strategy revolved around the PlayStation 2’s built-in DVD player, which would make the console the home’s main entertainment device. These were plans which would ultimately place Sony in direct competition with Microsoft, which had been harboring the same ambitions for years now. Microsoft had floated on the stock market just three years earlier, quickly becoming one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful companies. The campus it had erected in Redmond was growing from one month to the next, attracting ever more IT workers and businessmen. It also attracted a lot of geeks, many of whom worshiped the company’s founder, one Bill Gates. Himself a visionary businessman and computer genius, Gates had revolutionized the software industry and picked up a lot of followers in the process. Many of them were staunchly loyal to Microsoft, and worked to make sure the company was always growing and becoming more powerful. Despite this positive dynamic, in those days Microsoft had a bad reputation, particularly among the general public and especially in the wake of an antitrust case brought by the American government. Indeed, Microsoft had been nicknamed “the Borg,” an empire whose scale and malevolence was matched only by its ridiculousness and stupidity. Holders of this opinion would cite the various bugs found in Windows, or accuse the company of stealing other people’s ideas while fearing its intrusion into everyday life.

This strange dynamic was mostly like water off a duck’s back to Blackley, who still harbored his video game dreams. Revitalized, he made a lot of friends at Microsoft, people like Otto Berkes, with whom he worked with on DirectX. Blackley specialized more particularly in graphics, and was quick to understand that with DirectX, Microsoft boasted a weapon that was unrivalled in the industry. “We could smoke the PlayStation 2,” he would state, one day. He then began thinking about how to get the most out of DirectX, and quickly came to a conclusion: by designing a machine that was easy to use, like home consoles, but whose casing contained the best PC technology available at the time. Others had been entertaining the same ideas in secret, and when Blackley began talking about it, he quickly found three willing companions: Otto Berkes, Ted Hase and Kevin Bachus. All of them were from the DirectX team. Back then, Hase’s role was to promote DirectX to developers, and Bachus was a marketing project manager. Between the four of them, they possessed the full set of skills needed to design and market a games console, at least in theory. They bounced a few ideas around and exchanged a few emails, agreeing on what steps to take next. The project was in no way official, but what the foursome didn’t know was that the Microsoft execs were growing increasingly interested in video games, especially since Sony had revealed its intentions for the PlayStation 2. The highly enthusiastic Ken Kutaragi, father of the PlayStation, had stated his intent to kill PC gaming with his new console. This was a threat that could not be dismissed, because although Microsoft was not a major player in the video game industry, most PC gamers used Windows. There was no question of Microsoft letting itself be muscled out of the equation. In addition to Blackley’s small team, a number of other people at Microsoft were thinking about how to enter the video game market and take on Sony at its own game.

In March 1999, the Microsoft execs got together for a conference. In attendance were Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. The meeting was particularly important because, on this occasion, the two head honchos at Microsoft intended to redefine the company’s strategy for years to come. Sony’s recent announcements had certainly piqued the curiosity of some execs, like Robbie Bach, the future head of the Xbox division, as well as Rick Thompson, vice-president of Microsoft’s hardware division (which was then making computer keyboards, mice, and joysticks) and Jon DeVaan, the man in charge of WebTV’s operations, a company that Microsoft acquired in April 1997. WebTV had designed a kind of multimedia decoder that let people surf the internet on their TVs. The concept caught the eye of several executives at Microsoft, including Bill Gates, who saw in it a new way to sell Microsoft products. None of the three men were aware of the plans being hatched by Blackley and his colleagues, but they had all decided to make a serious incursion into the video game industry as a whole. Indeed, it was a maturing industry and Microsoft expected it to become even more important in years to come. And so Bill Gates issued his first instruction to start looking at the design of a games console, or at least a machine that could compete with Sony’s PlayStation 2. The timing couldn’t be better for The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, as some people at Microsoft had come to call them. Despite this, however, Blackley’s team were particularly mistrustful: victory was not yet within their grasp. A lot of Microsoft executives disliked their ideas, preferring those proposed by WebTV which they thought would be easier to pull off. Buoyed by this support, WebTV asked for Blackley, Bachus, Berkes and Hase’s project to be terminated, in favor of their own. Bill Gates responded immediately: he asked that a meeting be scheduled where both teams could present and defend their ideas. The first such meeting took place on March 31, 1999 and was chaired by Craig Mundie. Bad luck for the DirectX team: Mundie was the man from Microsoft who had first approached Steve Perlman, the WebTV founder, and it was he who had started negotiations to acquire the company. Blackley’s team naturally saw him as an adversary, but they refused to let it dampen their spirits. And so Bachus launched into an extremely detailed presentation of their plans, and the other camp issued a scathing response that deemed the project unrealistic, especially because the machine that the DirectX team would create had to contain a hard drive, a particularly costly component. For Blackley and his team, though, it was vital, because it would enable the console to run a modified version of Windows 98. Here, again, they came in for fierce criticism, with several members of the WebTV team believing that it would be impossible to develop a customized operating system in the time available. Mundie soon picked his winners, a decision made all the easier since the DirectX team had not really taken the different costs engendered by the design of their machine into account. They did, though, have one argument that was hard to ignore: the console would be DirectX compatible, which would guarantee the support of the great many developers who had already learned and mastered the language. That was a claim the WebTV could not make. In the end, the result of the meeting was a decision to hold another, this time attended by Bill Gates himself. But this first face-off had been so heated that many of the execs present at the meeting decided to arrange another one with all those present, ahead of the meeting with Gates. Its purpose was to establish a series of good conduct rules to avoid another bust-up in front of the big boss. Still filled with distrust, Blackley’s team decided to use Bachus’ email address to send an email directly to Gates himself. They wanted to make sure that nobody was twisting their words or misrepresenting their ideas. Unlike the WebTV machine, the console conceived by Blackley was basically a small PC designed exclusively for gaming. It was a perfect way to get ever more Microsoft products into homes all over the world. Naturally, this intrigued Gates, who told them to keep pursuing this direction. Bingo!

The meeting with Bill Gates would go ahead on May 5, 1999. The spokesperson for the DirectX team was Nat Brown, supported by Blackley and Bachus. Brown was a renowned engineer at Microsoft, and joined the foursome after he got wind of their plans. He was highly respected by Gates and therefore constituted a heavyweight ally for the team. Brown meticulously described their plans, especially the hardware aspect. And because during the previous meeting they had been caught out by their lack of precision regarding the costs incurred in manufacturing their machine, this time Brown showed up with an extremely detailed PowerPoint presentation. They estimated the cost of manufacturing the console at $303 per unit, and yet again, the hard drive was the most expensive component, with Brown estimating the cost at $55. He was, though, able to reassure the audience that the cost of these components would fall over time, according to Moore’s law. The WebTV team immediately called this point into question, arguing that neither Sony nor Nintendo’s next console would feature internal hard drives, so why should Microsoft bother with one? Fortunately, this was when the DirectX team found a new ally in the form of Ed Fries. A model Microsoft employee since 1986, the young Ed Fries had been an avid gamer for as long as he could remember, and had even designed a few games as a teen, a feat that also landed him his first job. A gifted programmer, Fries quickly established himself at Microsoft after working on the Windows 2.0 version of Excel. He then climbed the ranks and after a role leading a technical team tasked with developing Excel, he was appointed to the head of the team tasked with creating Word, Microsoft’s own word processing program. In 1995, he took over the helm of the games division, and so he had been following the discussions about a Microsoft games console very closely. When he finally spoke up, it was to contradict the WebTV team: Fries thought that the hard drive was absolutely essential, especially for online gaming. The internet was not yet in every home, but in his opinion one day it would be, and Microsoft had to be a pioneer in that sector. The hard drive could be used to store updates, reduce in-game loading times to an absolute minimum, or even do away with memory cards. Gates had a lot of respect for Fries, which meant he gave a lot of weight to his words. But he was wondering… Could PC games easily be converted to a format that could be played on the console? Blackley was only too happy to reply that yes, they could. Thanks to DirectX, which both PCs and their planned console used, games could be ported very easily, providing an easy way to pad out the console’s catalog of games at minimal cost. After the WebTV team had presented their project, it was clear that Gates had already made up his mind: he gave his approval for the DirectX project.

But the little civil war between the two teams wasn’t over yet, with a new meeting scheduled for 17 June. Blackley and his team had time to form a small group of engineers around them, and they designed an initial prototype for the console. The idea was to show that the console, as they conceived it, was ultimately an easy-to-use PC that could load a game within just a few seconds of being powered on. It was a success: at the meeting Blackley launched the machine and, in a few seconds flat, he had stood up and was playing Tomb Raider on the meeting room TV in front of all those present. It was a hard blow to take for the WebTV team, who had still thought they had one major advantage over their rivals: before then, they had been the only team to have already designed a working product. They had wisely thought that hands-on experience would prove them right in good time. But the very next day, their presentation failed to impress anyone. Gates gave his blessing to the DirectX team and its console, which was then known as the DirectXbox.

They soon got to work, and a hierarchy began to take shape. The project was supervised by Robbie Bach, head of Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices Division. Then, a new project manager was appointed in the form of Jay Allard. Jay had an excellent reputation at Microsoft earned through his work to prepare the company for the rise of the internet, which was becoming increasingly present in everyday life. Finding this new world fascinating, Allard had himself designed Microsoft’s first internet server, enabling it to become a major player in the nascent internet industry. It was Nat Brown who told him about the DirectXbox: Brown was preparing to leave Microsoft, but he didn’t want to leave Blackley, Berkes, Bachus, and Hase out there all alone, as they still had plenty of enemies inside the company. He knew that Allard was well-liked and well-respected by Gates and Ballmer, making him a serious asset for the console. While the team was growing and knuckling down to designing the console, Blackley and Bachus began canvassing developers. The console would need games if it was going to sell, but they still needed to persuade games studios and publishers to take it into consideration. And so they set off on a long series of business trips that would last several months. Their main problem was that they didn’t actually have much to show during these first meetings. And even later, with the year 2000 rapidly approaching, the prototypes they were unveiling were still light years away from anything that would resemble the final console. But they had a strategy and, most importantly, they had a way with words. Blackley was gradually becoming a true-believer evangelist for what would become the Xbox. A former developer himself, he knew how to talk to artists and understood what they needed. He had a way of whispering the right words, especially to those who were beginning to resent Sony’s stranglehold on the industry over the past few years. The PlayStation dominated the video game industry to such an extent that the brand had become absolutely vital, a fact that Sony was only all too aware of, and leveraged accordingly. Many developers, and Western ones especially, were growing increasingly fed up with the attitude of the Japanese console manufacturer, which they saw as smug and pretentious. But they still had their doubts: could Microsoft really carve out a space in the games console market? Many didn’t think they could. Including in the press. Although Microsoft had not yet made any announcements, some information had leaked–as information has a tendency to do– and rumors spread rapidly. The question being asked was this: how could a company specialized in software, and with so little experience in video games and hardware, establish a foothold in such a competitive industry, and one in which even SEGA and Nintendo were showing signs of fatigue?

But Microsoft was a fast learner. The company was contacting a wide range of component manufacturers, beginning with Nvidia. Nvidia was a small company specializing in the design of graphics cards, and one that had managed to make a name for itself in a particularly competitive market over these past few years. Microsoft wanted to provide developers with the best possible tools. The more powerful the console would be, the more freedom developers would have to bring their ideas to life. And the more sensational the games, the bigger appeal the Xbox would have. It was while Microsoft and Nvidia were holding a series of calls and meetings to discuss the chip’s design and how much it would cost, that the team first began thinking about how the console would look.

This job was assigned to Horace Luke, a young designer who had recently been hired by Microsoft after working with the company as a subcontractor for several years. When he was settling down to draw his first sketches, Luke realized that most of his pencils had been stolen. The only one left was green, which nobody seemed to want. It wasn’t really a big deal, so he started to draw. He had read a few consumer surveys and their results were unequivocal: in people’s minds, the color green was associated with technology. These findings were all the more true given that a few months earlier, the whole world had encountered The Matrix, which was a blockbuster in cinemas all over the world. Part thriller/part sci-fi, the movie’s themes included hacking, virtual reality, and intelligent machines. It was also filled with the color green. Blackley wanted his console’s design to really stand out, the complete opposite to most other products produced by Microsoft which, in his opinion, focused primarily on making joysticks, mice, and keyboards at as low as cost as possible. Design was never an important criteria. When Luke presented his initial ideas, the color green was adopted immediately. The console had been known as the DirectXbox up until now, but was increasingly being referred to by its nickname: the Xbox. This was actually very timely, because Allard and his engineers had quickly come to see that the console would never really be able to run Windows irrespective of what form it took. The system would be too power-hungry and the machine wouldn’t be able to perform to its full capabilities. This went against the whole philosophy of home consoles, which were specifically designed for gaming and which could produce highly satisfying results using components that were less advanced than those used in gaming PCs. Sidelining Windows, though, also meant kissing goodbye to DirectX, and Allard knew it. But therein lied the rub: while Gates had opted for the DirectX team’s project, it was precisely because the machine could run Windows and DirectX. “Too bad,” Allard thought to himself, convinced that what really mattered was making a good games console, and that was something Microsoft could do without having recourse to Windows.

At 4pm on February 14, 2000, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer held a final meeting to take stock of all the work so far, and approve a final schedule for the next steps. As it happened, Gates wanted Microsoft to reveal the Xbox at the Game Developers Conference in March of the next year, so it was important to him that everything went without the slightest hitch. And yet, what was supposed to be a routine meeting would soon become something else entirely when Gates and Ballmer found out about the latest developments on the Xbox. It’s worth noting at this point that the two top men at Microsoft weren’t known for their level-headedness and easy-going natures. Generally friendly and quick to smile, Gates revealed a completely different side to his character when he was angry, and because he knew he had a tendency to fly off the handle, he never hesitated to say exactly what he was thinking, even providing a play-by-play explanation of why he thought what he had just heard was a bad idea. It was a long and painful process for any staff on the receiving end. But Ballmer was probably even worse. His thundering voice could frequently be heard booming down the corridors at Redmond, which he liked to stalk with a baseball bat in hand. Angry and hot-headed, the CEO of Microsoft was a figure feared by many of his employees. But the two men were also highly intelligent, and knew a good idea when they saw one. Bachus, Fries and Allard, then, hoped to convince them, even though the project no longer bore much resemblance to the one that Gates had approved. Inevitably, when Gates learned that the Xbox wouldn’t run on Windows, he exploded. And so began what Fries, Blackley, and others would later call the Valentine’s Day Massacre: the meeting was supposed to last an hour or two, max, but it went on, and on, and on. It was getting to 7pm or 8pm, and the discussion still wasn’t over. Allard, Fries and Bachus had to call their wives and tell them that they would be home late. This was no evening with friends, though. Instead, Gates and Ballmer continued to rant and rave, going back over everything that had been done and every decision that had been made over the past few months. Eventually, the three men did manage to cool the situation and calm their bosses down. The Xbox would no longer be a PC in disguise, but a games console in its own right. Gates and Ballmer knew that they were going to spend billions of dollars over the next few years, and that it was unlikely that this console would make any money for Microsoft. Their plans, then, needed to be bolder, more prescient. This is why the console came with a hard drive and an Ethernet port so that the Xbox could connect to the internet. Fries and Allard had the firm conviction that these components would give the console a considerable advantage and make the Xbox brand a pioneer in video-gaming history. As improbable as it may have seemed, Gates and Ballmer ultimately gave their blessing to the Xbox team, who left the meeting feeling shaken. There was some good news among it all, though: the WebTV team was now out of the game for good, and Ed Fries had his boss’ approval to release the funds needed to compile a fleshed-out games catalog. This was an extremely fortunate development because, just a few days after the Valentine’s Day Massacre, he received an unexpected call. On the other end of the line, he recognized the voice of Peter Tamte, vice-president of Bungie.

SAVING PRIVATE BUNGIE

While Microsoft was working on its first games console, things had grown complicated for Bungie as they gradually realized that the development of Halo was going to get very expensive. This was all the more true given that it wasn’t the studio’s only project, with Bungie West still working on Oni out in San Jose. Take-Two’s contribution had given the company some temporary financial relief, but it wouldn’t last. So Seropian and Jones started giving very serious thought to selling the studio. They had already rejected quite a few offers they had received when they were in a more solid financial position. Interested companies included Activision, as well as scores of less prestigious companies. Later, Alex Seropian would explain that Bungie had no reason to partner up with publishers who had nothing to offer apart from money. “They weren’t doing anything interesting and they didn’t have much of a future. They didn’t have an idea for what could be successful […] We didn’t have that sort of conceited viewpoint of, ‘We’re doing something interesting and you’re not doing anything. Why should we partner with you?’ But it felt that way.” Nevertheless when Bungie’s bank balance started to look a bit hollow, Seropian and Jones found themselves forced to reconsider their options. Their first thought was Apple, and indeed why not? Bungie had been Mac gaming’s flagship studio for nearly ten years, and Steve Jobs had anointed Halo himself when he invited it onto his stage at MacWorld in July 1999. Once again, Tamte leveraged his contacts and called Phil Schiller, Apple’s VP for marketing. He got straight to the point: Would Apple like to buy Bungie? Schiller couldn’t answer that question himself: he would have to discuss it with Steve Jobs. He did, and Jobs gave it some thought before turning down the opportunity. To tell the truth, while Halo had certainly impressed Jobs, he still wasn’t much interested in video games. So that made for a very short conversation between Bungie and Apple.

While this was happening, Seamus Blackley and Kevin Bachus were making the rounds of games studios. Blackley had plenty of friends all over the world and managed to persuade a lot of people to work with Xbox. This was how they got through to Lorne Lanning, whose teams were working on a new Oddworld game for Xbox, as well as Tomonobu Itagaki, the creator of Dead or Alive, who took a real liking to Blackley. There were some more difficult encounters, too, like when the duo met with Shinji Mikami and a number of Capcom execs in Japan. The discussion was particularly frustrating for Blackley and Bachus, who needed to use interpreters to communicate with the mind that brought us Resident Evil. Mikami pushed to hear Microsoft’s vision for video games, but nobody was able to give him a real answer, not even Microsoft’s Japanese representatives. Bachus understood that something wasn’t right, and at the end of the meeting he asked one of the interpreters directly what it was that Mikami wanted to know. As soon as he understood, Bachus lit up. It was actually a very easy question to answer for the Xbox, because it was the same thing they’d been saying to all of the Western developers since the very beginning of their trip: Microsoft saw video games as an artform. This went down very well, all the more so due to Nintendo and Sony adopting positions that were far less gratifying for artists. For Nintendo, video games were first and foremost a toy, while for Sony they were a form of entertainment. But the meeting was over and despite Microsoft following up on the encounter, Capcom never got back to them. As it would turn out, soon after the meeting, Nintendo signed a major contract with Capcom that would see the GameCube get some nice exclusives, like Resident Evil 4, while Sony and its PlayStation 2 would get Devil May Cry.

But it wasn’t exactly plain sailing with Western developers, either. In 2000, Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin, the co-founders of Naughty Dog, had reached a threshold, and they knew it. The studio was famous for Crash Bandicoot, released on the PlayStation, but they felt that something was missing. Like many in the industry, the developers at Naughty Dog had heard about the Xbox and it had piqued their interest. Could they change sides? Well, why not? As long as Microsoft made a persuasive proposal. And so the duo decided to call Ed Fries and invite him to their studio in Santa Monica, on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Fries, of course, accepted the invitation, but the meeting was over quickly: the partners at Naughty Dog doubted that Microsoft could keep its promises and didn’t think for a second that the console would be as powerful as Fries was promising. As for Fries, he didn’t push the matter either. At that time, the Microsoft staff visiting games developers had to make do with console prototypes that were too early-stage to convince any sceptics.

Other developers, though, showed more of an interest, beginning with Bungie, who had learned of the console at a Microsoft and Take-Two event in New York in January 2000. Take-Two had invited some of its flagship studios, which included Bungie, to come get a look at the first Xbox prototypes. Tamte and Seropian travelled to New York where they met with Blackley and Bachus, but more importantly where they saw a prototype of the console and a series of technical demos. What Seropian saw was that the Xbox was ultimately very similar to the PC and developing for a console like that would be a piece of cake. As for Microsoft, they were also very familiar with Bungie, because several people on the Xbox team had been fans of the studio for years now. Top of the list was Ed Fries, who was a big fan of Myth. The two parties, then, found some common ground, and when Seropian told them that he would like to publish games for the Xbox the Microsoft team was immediately enthusiastic. After all, their console needed games. By any means necessary.

Seropian returned to Chicago and discussed what he’d seen with Jason Jones, who listened attentively. He liked what he was hearing. What the Xbox was offering was something that was genuinely new for a games console, and something more similar to what was possible with PC gaming. The console promised to be particularly powerful and, more than that, Xbox planned to develop a bona fide online gaming service. This made it a perfect fit for Jones and his passion for multiplayer gaming. Jones and Seropian didn’t want to just sell to the highest bidder, they wanted the sale to make sense and to be a good thing for Bungie, a good thing for their future games. Microsoft could offer them precisely that, and they knew it. Why stop at a contract for a few games, when they could offer Microsoft the opportunity to buy the studio? This would put an end to Bungie’s financial woes, and they would develop games exclusively for the Xbox. Seropian liked the idea as much as Jones. The former because he knew that Microsoft had bottomless financial resources, and the latter because it was an opportunity to play a role, no matter how small, in the design of a new console… And to make games for it that would enjoy huge visibility as standard. Discussions between the two parties would take on a markedly different character: what was supposed to become a straightforward publishing agreement would gradually transition into a full buy-out of Bungie. Tamte knew Ed Fries well, as they had worked together on several occasions when Tamte was still at Apple and Microsoft was porting some of its games over to Mac. After discussing the matter at length with Jones and Seropian, he finally picked up the phone, called Fries, and explained the situation: Bungie was strapped for cash and wanted to work with Microsoft. Better yet, Jones and Seropian were willing to sell. For Fries, the opportunity was too good to miss: Halo would be an excellent launch title for the Xbox. The game showcased everything the console was able to offer, from its power to its accessibility for developers and its online gaming. In short, the perfect partnership: the alliance would be just as good for Xbox as it would for Halo.

What’s more, the Xbox was made official by Bill Gates himself at the Game Developers Conference on March 10, 2000. There, he got up on stage and unveiled a mock-up console, a giant silver “X” with a translucent green gem at its center. The console’s design was yet to be finalized, but Gates wanted to reassure consumers and developers: it would be available soon and, most importantly, it would be the most accomplished console in the history of gaming, delivering next-level power and features. Bungie reacted to the announcement six days later, in a press release written by Seropian himself: “Xbox is a prime example of a console entering the market at the leading edge of technology, which is where we want our games to be.” The press release would be cited by Microsoft, which would use this and other quotes to promote its console on the new Xbox official website. And it wouldn’t go unnoticed, especially by fans of Bungie, who had eyes everywhere. Nobody, though, suspected what was about to happen.

Because following the conversation between Fries and Tamte, Microsoft and Bungie would hold a series of meetings, mainly in the offices of Bungie West in San Jose. Seeing the top Microsoft execs in the Chicago studio would pique the curiosity of the staff. Indeed, most of them knew that Bungie was in trouble. And yet, there had been no redundancies; on the contrary, the company was still hiring. But Jones and Seropian were very close to their staff, and the little Bungie family had no secrets from each other. No secrets apart from Jones and Seropian’s decision to keep the fact the Bungie was currently in discussions with Microsoft quiet. That said, the deal was still far from struck: Bungie was contractually bound to Take-Two, which meant that there were three parties in the negotiations. Ed Fries was the man in charge of discussions with Take-Two, and he got exactly what he wanted. In the end, Take-Two would retain the rights to Bungie’s earlier games, including Oni, the game in development at Bungie West which it would publish as it saw fit. Microsoft meanwhile, would acquire Bungie and the license to Halo, which would become an Xbox exclusive. The acquisition also meant that Bungie’s staff was now employed by Microsoft, and they would all need to move to the campus in Redmond.

THE END OF AN ERA AT E3

With E3 looming, Seropian and Jones decided to keep their lips sealed about the Microsoft deal, so that Bungie could focus on what was most important: making a new demo to reveal at the show. While Jones and Seropian were in negotiations with Microsoft, work on the game was making excellent progress, especially following the arrival of some new hires. The art team was bolstered with the hiring of Lorraine Reyes, who had been working for Bungie as a freelancer since October 1998. A talented illustrator, she had been approached by a member of Bungie staff who had attended the same school, but initially turned down the offer she received. At that time, Bungie was looking for artists to bring the work on its new game–code name Blam! –to life. She turned the offer down, then reconsidered when she heard about a second Bungie project, Oni, whose Japanese anime aesthetic struck more of a chord with her. She returned to Chicago and met with Bungie, and when she showed them what she could do, she was hired on the spot.

In parallel, Bungie hired two fans of Myth in Paul Bertone and Christopher Barrett; the first was a game designer, the second a specialist in game environments. They were both avid consumers of fantasy and began working together on a project that Jason Jones had been mulling over for a while now, and that they called Phoenix. The game was a blend of strategy and action in which players could build their castles and ramparts stone by stone, and then face off against other each other and destroy enemy fortifications. It was a construction game that would later earn its fair share of comparisons to Minecraft, a game that would only be released a decade later.

Martin O’Donnell, too, had now become a Bungie employee. Total Audio was still in business, but O’Donnell had fallen in love with Halo and wanted to join the rest of the Bungie team on their adventure. Ironically, although he was one of the last to join the company, he was one of the first to learn that Bungie had been acquired by Microsoft and that the studio would soon have to move. It was Seropian who brought him the news when they met at the Los Angeles Convention Center. The show hadn’t yet opened, but Bungie had completed its first tests in the little “Halo” theater they had built for the occasion. “The first showing the next morning was for some VIPs and after it was over Alex pulled me aside and told me that Microsoft had just made an offer he couldn’t refuse,” O’Donnell recalls. “I had just joined Bungie as an employee ten days earlier and was pretty shocked to learn that we were all going to become Microsoft employees and be moved en masse to Redmond Washington.”

It was a secret that O’Donnell would keep for the duration of E3 2000. The event proved particularly successful for Bungie who, once again, had impressed the press with Halo. The demo was also longer and more fleshed out than what the studio had shown at MacWorld the previous year. The action was no longer focused on the armored supersoldier but followed a number of different characters, including Marines in a variety of very different roles. Bungie didn’t want Halo to restrict each soldier to a particular class and therefore a specific role; it was the players themselves who would determine their roles depending on their own skills and playstyles. Some would be excellent pilots, while others would be decorated snipers. In actual fact, the game didn’t really have any characters. It already had the alien enemies, and the name “Covenant” was already in use, as was a phrase that would clearly state their intentions: “Your destruction is the will of the gods, and we are their instrument.” It was a phrase that would be cast aside, only to be uttered by the Prophet of Truth seven years later in Halo 3. Only the supersoldier would make it into the final game, whose look was very similar to Master Chief, as players would discover one year later. Marcus Lehto himself was behind the design of this new armor, which was thicker and very different from that imagined by Shi Kai Wang and shown at MacWorld 1999. “I liked this design, but felt it was too slimmed down to fit the character that had fictionally evolved, so I rebuilt the Master Chief again, this time as a highly capable soldier blended with the armor of a tank.” Up until that point, the soldier in his bulky armor had always been accompanied by others like him; this time he was alone and, most strikingly, appeared as more of a cyborg than anything human, no matter how powerful a soldier. When he spoke in the demo, he had a robotic voice and used the syntax of a computer program. It was apparent, however, that this soldier more than any other featured in the demo was an elite warrior, the one the human army sent in to resolve the prickliest situations. After taking out two Elites with a sniper rifle, he gives way to the more expressive, more human Marines. Halo was still a third-person shooter, but the studio now seemed to have a more focused vision for the game. Bungie had streamlined its gameplay and some vehicles had been removed, like the helicopter–deemed too futuristic–and the Doozy, a small boat that would let players take the fight out on to the ringworld’s oceans. One interesting tidbit is that before it was removed from the game, taking control of the Doozy forced the camera into a first-person view. This was something that Jason Jones had been wrestling with for a while now, and he began asking himself the following question: would Halo not be more fun in first person? While nothing had been decided, the developers had added in a first-person perspective here and there when using different weapons of gadgets. It wasn’t just added in at random, of course; it all depended on comfort and usability. When taking aim with a sniper rifle, for example, the camera switched to first person for more accurate shots. But the more time passed, the better the first-person view seemed in relation to the rest of the game. Nevertheless, Halo remained what was basically a TPS, as can be seen from the E3 demo. But when Microsoft acquired Bungie, Jones started giving the matter more serious thought. Halo would soon become a console game, and Jones had doubts about the third-person view being the most suitable for playing a shooting game with a controller. He wanted players to find his game as immersive as possible, and he came to think that a first-person view with the controller’s trigger acting as an extension of the gun shown on the screen would deliver a much greater sense of immersion. But for the time being, the boss at Bungie had other things on his mind: his studio had been bought out, and drastic change was coming to the lives of many people whose daily bread he had been providing for years now. And he knew it wouldn’t be easy to persuade them all to relocate to Redmond.

A ROCKY MOVE

Bungie and Microsoft may have been discreet, but rumors of the acquisition had been spreading like wildfire since June 9, 2000, especially online and on the Bungie forums. It would be June 19 before Microsoft officially announced its acquisition of Bungie, and because Bungie was neither very big nor very prestigious, Ed Fries snapped it up at a very reasonable $30m. The acquisition meant that all of Bungie’s staff now worked for Microsoft, and would have to move to Redmond. Bungie, though, hadn’t waited for the official announcement before discussing it with their staff. Not long after E3, Seropian and Jones got them all together in one room and broke the news. It came as a real shock for the developers at Bungie, who were very proud of their independence. For many of them, Microsoft symbolized evil incarnate, and represented the polar opposite of everything Bungie stood for. The thought of becoming Microsoft employees shook this little group to its core. Some of the staff, like Marcus Lehto and Max Hoberman, had suspected that something big was going on, but it was still a huge leap from feeling like something was up to imagining that in the very near future they would all be working for Microsoft. “Everybody in the office was pissed off because we liked being independent,” Shi Kai Wang explains. While some of the staff seemed genuinely enthusiastic at the idea of starting a new life, others were devastated. Then Martin O’Donnell took the initiative to get them out of the studio and head out for something to eat: “There were a couple hold-outs who just couldn’t stomach working for Microsoft.” Their reaction didn’t really come as a big surprise to Seropian who, like any good dad, tried to reassure his kids. He sent out a group email containing details of the agreement signed with Microsoft. He wanted to give them as much information as possible to reassure them about the studio’s future. Microsoft, meanwhile, was determined to do things right this time. Ed Fries had heard about the failure with FASA, and Jordan Weisman, the studio’s former boss, was at hand to advise him. For a while there was even a discussion about whether Bungie, like FASA a few years earlier, would have to move or not. Weisman argued in favor of Bungie. He knew the studio and knew how its teams worked, but more than anything else, he knew their mentality. Bungie wouldn’t last three months if it faced the same fate as FASA. Weisman may have been unable to convince Microsoft to let Bungie stay in Chicago, but he had more success in making them understand the importance of keeping the team together, in a space reserved only for them. And there was no shortage of buildings on the Redmond campus.

But when a few members of staff at Bungie traveled to Redmond to visit their new premises, what they found there left them nonplussed. Microsoft had set them up on the Millennium Campus, in a small building typical of the software giant in that era. The studio was made up of lots of little private offices, sealed off and isolated from each other. That was the culture at Microsoft, where every employee had the right to a certain level of comfort, and the ability to shut themselves away when they needed to work in peace and quiet. The exact opposite of Bungie, then, where people were used to working in open-plan offices and liked being all together, if only so that they could bounce ideas around out loud. Seropian explains how, “We’d always worked in an open environment. Over there, people would turn around and say, ‘Hey, this shit’s broken, can you fix it?’ ‘Oh, what’s going on?’ ‘Oh, you’re trying to use it like that, OK. Let me turn this thing around.’ You don’t get that with everybody working in their own office.” It was the lifeblood of the studio: irrespective of their roles and responsibilities, the developers talked to each other, debated, and analyzed, and in order to do that, they needed to be together as much as possible. And so Bungie asked Microsoft to remove the walls in the space they would be working in. Ed Fries understood their request and work began immediately: the studio was expected to move in on July 17, which didn’t leave much time.

In Chicago, things had been going a bit better since Microsoft representatives had visited the developers and answered their questions. These representatives included Ed Fries, of course, as well as Stuart Moulder and Jon Kimmich, all of whom had been involved in the negotiations. Interesting fact, Kimmich already knew Seropian well from when the latter had been an intern at Microsoft. Moulder and Fries tried to placate the staff at Bungie, who were particularly distrustful. Moulder organized a Q&A session to reassure everyone, with mixed results. Fries wanted to be sure that nobody would resign from Bungie before the move. Indeed, while he was delighted to have acquired Halo, the thing that he was most interested in was the talent found within the company. It wouldn’t be possible to finish the game without the people who designed it. But he didn’t want to force anyone. “What Alex [Seropian] did was super smart,” Moulder recalls. “He said, ‘I’m not going to try and persuade anyone. Everybody should be able to make their own decision.’ It was absolutely the right thing to do. I think most would follow Alex and Jason, but for some key people I think it was really important that they had a chance to talk directly and hear what our plans were.” Seropian and Jones presented a very confident face, and it wasn’t just a front to reassure their staff.

Because Microsoft was in desperate need of games for its new console, and because Halo was already looking very promising, Bungie had a strong hand in the negotiations and Seropian and Jones knew how to play their cards right. This meant that Seropian would retain a strong role as a decision-maker, one which on paper would allow him to stand up to Microsoft when necessary, and therefore protect the interests of not just Bungie, but also his projects. In the real world, though, things are never that simple: a lesson that Seropian would learn a little while later. At Bungie, though, nobody was fooled: Microsoft would always be a very large company, and sooner or later there would be constraints on their freedom. But when the small delegation set off again for Redmond, Moulder felt like he’d managed to reassure staff at the studio, if only a little: “I don’t think anyone felt like, ‘Okay, I believe everything we just heard.’ I think it was, ‘Well, this guy doesn’t seem to be an asshole, he seems to actually like games, and will probably try to do the right thing.’” It would ultimately be Jason Jones who managed to rally his troops, with some well-chosen words. Chris Butcher remembers how, “He said that Microsoft is building the biggest canon in the world, and they’re pointing it right at Sony, and we can be the bullet in that canon. And we can make a very big impact on the course of the game industry.” Because even more important than saving Bungie from bankruptcy, it was the opportunity presented by Microsoft that motivated Jones and Seropian. By giving the Xbox one of its best exclusives, Bungie could become one of the highest-profile studios around. This was what Alex Seropian admitted as far back as June 2000, when asked to explain why he had sold Bungie: “If I were to look at the different platforms out there, I’d say the company I want to be making PC games is Blizzard, the company I’d want to be making PlayStation games is Square Enix, and the company I’d want to be making Nintendo games is Rare. If we get to be the company making Xbox games, that kind of opportunity just doesn’t come along too often.” In the end, all but two or three members of staff at Bungie would agree to the move. For most of them, there was never any question of walking away from Halo: the game had already demanded so much work, and the developers were passionate about what they were doing. Most of them knew they were working on something that was one-of-a-kind, something that if it was made well, would make video-gaming history. Martin O’Donnell was front of the line. Now a Bungie–and therefore Microsoft–employee, the composer never gave a moment’s thought to leaving Halo before it was finished. The way he saw things, the studio had grasped an amazing opportunity: to give a new and ambitious console one of its main launch titles. Meanwhile, he and his wife had been looking into the area around Redmond: “I didn’t mind moving to Redmond because we had good friends who had recently moved to Seattle and we knew we’d be welcome there.” And yet, the musician couldn’t see himself settling permanently in the State of Washington. Once Halo was finished, he would move back to Chicago with his family. That was his plan, in any case. It was the same story for Marcus Lehto: “My wife and I never thought we’d move too far from our family in Ohio, but the idea of moving out to the Seattle area was intriguing. Many of us at Bungie thought we’d give it a couple years, then move back. But, for those like myself, we were struck by the intense natural beauty of this area and just fell in love and rooted in for good.”

Ultimately, the move would go ahead as planned. The staff moved into the Millennium Campus, where they found a wing of a building waiting only for them. Contrary to what some of them had feared, they weren’t split up and spread around the different studios within Microsoft. It was a situation that would give Bungie something of a special status, and pique the curiosity of existing Microsoft staff. So while work on Halo recommenced smoothly, Microsoft employees, not really familiar with the way a games development studio worked, took advantage of the opportunity to take a stroll through Bungie’s open-plan office, sometimes even bringing their kids with them. “Like it was a zoo,” Jaime Griesemer would say many years later. Before long, tensions appeared. The developers were working long hours, and they were regularly interrupted by Microsoft “colleagues” who had a totally different way of seeing their work. “They had an internal process [at Microsoft] where you could set up an interview with any other team to talk about joining them, and within a month we were getting a request every day. A guy in database software said, ‘Hey, I want to work on a game, can we go out to lunch?’” At Microsoft, moving between roles was an everyday occurrence, and depending on their skills and goals, employees could move from one department to another, with the only requirement being to contribute their expertise and help a project achieve completion. This was how Ed Fries and even Phil Spencer ended up on the Xbox team. But for Bungie, it was a non-starter. To begin with, the staff at Bungie would stop Microsoft employees from using their parking lot, before making it so that only people who worked for Bungie could access the studio. Not even Ed Fries’ pass would open the doors to Bungie. The studio may no longer be independent, but the developers had retained the same mentality, and niggling issues with Microsoft would become more commonplace over the months ahead. But it was never too much to handle. According to Martin O’Donnell: “It’s funny that right from the get-go we had so many weird, rubbed-the-wrong-way problems with Microsoft. But they were never that big of a deal. Ed Fries was a really good guy. I’m not saying he got us 100 % right away, but he did by the end. He totally understood who we were and appreciated what we were bringing.”

6 A programming interface.

Chapter 6 – Halo: The Path of Game Development Never Runs Smooth

No sooner had Bungie moved into the Microsoft campus in Redmond than it recommenced work on Halo. The software giant’s acquisition of the studio was a game changer for Bungie. No longer were they developing a PC game, or even a Mac one; now, they were developing a console exclusive. And not just any console: the Xbox. Microsoft had officially confirmed the console’s existence a few months earlier, but it still didn’t exist in any tangible way. Bungie had to take a significant proportion of their work so far back to the drawing board, adapting their tools to a console that nobody was really familiar with. Fortunately, the Xbox team regularly discussed the Xbox project with Jason Jones and a number of the engineers, because the console was first and foremost designed for developers after all. Seamus Blackley and his team were unshakeable in their belief that the Xbox would be a better console if they sought out input from the people who actually made games. And yet, Bungie had no time to waste, because Microsoft wanted Halo to be ready for the Xbox’s release. While no final date had yet been announced, Jason Jones and Alex Seropian knew that they had around a year to finish their game. Ahead of them lay a grueling marathon effort.

AN FPS CRAFTED FOR CONSOLES

Jason Jones had been trying out different points of view for Halo for a few months now. He was losing ever more interest in the third-person point of view, and the acquisition by Microsoft brought a whole new perspective: Halo would be an Xbox game, which meant it would be played with a controller. Running contrary to popular opinion at a time when there were not many FPS games on consoles, and when those that did exist tended to be lambasted by the gaming press and players alike, Jones thought that the point of view used in the game needed to be changed: Halo had to become a first-person shooter. He decided to pitch the idea to a few members of the team, like Marcus Lehto. The game’s artistic director recounts how, “Obviously, we played around with it functioning in third person but it was pretty clear to us that it needed to transform into first-person.” Especially because Jones was steadfast in his belief: the best way for players to feel a connection with what was happening in the game was if it was happening around them. But that hadn’t always been his opinion, as Paul Russel wryly recalls: “Jason was the one that was dead set against first-person for a long time. Then he’s like ‘Wait, we can’t make third person work, let’s change it back.’ That’s what happens when your lead is a crack addict.” A series of meetings later, and a decision had been made: Halo would be an FPS. The next task was to create controls that were worthy of such a game, otherwise Bungie’s baby would soon be condemned to the discount bin. This job was entrusted to Jaime Griesemer, who had been skeptical about it from the outset. Griesemer loved video games consoles and working on the Xbox was an exciting project for him, but he also knew the constraints he faced, and that console FPS had never been a hit with players. “Even playing GoldenEye felt like garbage next to PC shooters. It’s fine given the constraints, but I would play against my friends and destroy them since I was the only one playing it like you would on PC. Everybody else felt handicapped by that controller.” Despite his reservations, Griesemer got to work and it would be his research that gave rise to some key gameplay features that are so characteristic of Halo. Unlike Rare, who had brought the world GoldenEye 007 on the Nintendo 64, Bungie was lucky in that it was developing a game for a console whose controller had two analog joysticks. This offered a major advantage, because it let players aim and move with a certain degree of precision. Jones wanted the main character’s movement to be on the slow side, the opposite of PC shooters like Quake and Unreal: in his view, this speed was unnatural, and he wanted players to feel like they were controlling a real human being, and there’s not a man or woman alive who can move at that speed while firing a weapon. Bungie saw Halo as a tactical shooter in which players had to make lots of decisions and take action in line with what the environment and their equipment dictated. Slower movement was part of this approach, and this decision, made even before Halo joined the Microsoft family, was a significant advantage for Griesemer, making his work easier: slower movements would only make aiming easier. Working with a few of the engineers, Griesemer wrote several pages of code that the game would use to interpret the player’s actions. “How fast did you move there, what are you looking at? If it’s an enemy, we can assume that when you slow down, you’re trying to aim,” he explains. “So there are pages and pages that interpret the input that comes in, in a way that isn’t blatant and in your face. We tried to conceal how much help we’re giving the player.” According to Stuart Moulder, this feature hidden deep inside the game basically served to improve player movement, so that players were performing “the movement you wanted, not necessarily the one you were making.” But they needed to strike a fine balance, because Bungie had no intention of providing players with what amounted to auto-aim. Indeed, the studio had built a solid reputation while developing games for Mac: the games it made were fun, challenging, and featured excellent graphics. Halo needed to be true to this heritage and wouldn’t be making things easy for players.

While the game’s development was progressing at a steady pace, Griesemer spent several months refining his controls. Refining its gameplay. Bungie–and Griesemer in particular–wanted to change the way people saw FPS gaming on consoles. “Everyone–developers, gamers, reviewers, everyone involved in the gaming industry–knows that FPS controls on a console are doomed to be awkward and clumsy,” he would say in 2002. “It’s a universally accepted fact. However, we knew that if we were going to do Halo on Xbox, we were going to have to change people’s minds about that. We weren’t going to do extreme auto-aim, we weren’t going to have everyone running around in slow motion or only allow to fight two enemies at once. We knew that would make designing the controls much tougher.” Griesemer’s experiments gradually led the studio to dream up a new way of playing shooting games. The main character is an armored space marine, so he should be strong and able to absorb a lot of damage. Despite the game’s tactical dimension, on many occasions the main character would be surrounded by several enemies at once, and players would have to eliminate them quickly or face the game over screen. It was just that, since moving and aiming would be less responsive than on a PC, they needed to find a way to make players hardy enough so that they weren’t forced to constantly be looking for health packs, which would ruin the pace of the game, not to mention any enjoyment. The team then came up with a new health system: the soldier’s armor generated an energy shield which was displayed on the screen in the form of a bar that diminished when players took damage. Once the shield bar had been emptied, the player would start losing life points. But players could get the shields back up by taking brief shelter from the action so that the energy shield had time to recharge and refill. It was an ingenious system that offered many advantages. The first was that it was gentle on newbies, giving them a bit of leeway by not punishing them too severely for any mistakes. The second was that it enabled the very best players, those who could aim swift and true, to dive right into the action and come out victorious. This last point, of course, is what gives players that sense of power and endurance found in no other game. When they were designing what would become Master Chief, Marcus Lehto and Shi Kai Wang wanted him to look like a tank, and while Master Chief’s appearance certainly evolved between the initial concept art and the game’s release, this idea of “tank-ness” even made it into the gameplay: indeed, Master Chief is extremely enduring and can absorb many hits from the enemy before he falls. This, too, was a question of balance, as Griesemer explained in 2003: “It was really clear that our encounters were going to be set up in a way that you would be able to play like you were extremely tough, but at the same time you would be vulnerable if you got overextended.” Unlike other developers, Bungie understood that it was impossible to mimic PC FPS games, and that a game like Halo meant adopting a completely new approach. It wasn’t a matter of innovating just to do something new, but rather finding the best way to live with a series of constraints. And doing so with as much ingenuity as possible, so that Halo would be something genuinely unique and fun to play.

JUST PLAYER ONE

Bungie always followed the same process when developing its games. They began with designing the technology underpinning the game, such as the game engine, for example. Next, they began looking at different gameplay concepts and possible features, and began testing them in multiplayer sessions. Once multiplayer mode had shown it could work and all of the different ideas had been tested, refined and approved, work began on designing the single-player game. This was how both Marathon and Myth were developed. Halo’s development was no different, with the exception that it had undergone a few major transformations as the process went on. Initially an RTS before becoming a TPS, Halo was now an FPS, which in some ways was just as well, as the studio boasted some real expertise in FPS games. Up until now, Halo had been presented mainly as a multiplayer, co-op game, but little by little it was evolving into a single-player action game. That was how Bungie liked to work, but it was also the procedure imposed by developing a game for the Xbox. We were now in late 2000, and the latest news from Microsoft was somewhat underwhelming for Bungie: in the end, the console’s performance would be lower than had been hoped. This was particularly true of the RAM, with the console ultimately having less than Bungie had counted in its minimum requirements when Halo was still a PC game. That concept of a game without levels and featuring vast battlefields, the tactical and co-op aspect to the game… Almost all of that had to be dropped. For much of the project, it was back to the drawing board. Halo would now be a predominantly single-player game, and this meant that it needed an entertaining campaign. Jason Jones still thought that FPS could tell real stories. Marathon had made a tentative effort, and then Half-Life had truly shown the way. Halo would have to follow that same path, drawing inspiration from movies and books. Jones would entrust Joseph Staten with writing the game’s storyline and directing the cinematic cutscenes that would regularly punctuate the adventure. Staten used a number of ideas that were already floating around, like the conflict between humans and aliens, the ringworld, and, of course, the soldier in green armor. That soldier had hitherto been just one unit among a whole army of others, but he would marinate in Staten’s creative juices to become the game’s main character. And he was no cyborg, but a man who science and human technology had transformed into an elite warrior. The Spartan-117 was stronger, faster, and smarter than other soldiers, and he was also the last of his kind. The artists at Bungie had put a lot of work into his design, stretching back to the early days when Halo was still known as Armor and then Blam! He first came to life on the sketchpads of Shi Kai Wang, but once his drawings were modelled in three dimensions, the team thought that it looked too effeminate; Lehto wanted this unit to look like a modern-day tank, so it needed a brawnier outline. Lehto would take Wang’s drawings and add his own touches, and in the process become the father of Master Chief, as we know him today. Wang’s drawing wouldn’t go to waste, though: Bungie would hold on to it for years and it would eventually be used to design the Spartan-III SPI armor. Another sketch also appeared in Catherine Halsey’s journal that came with the limited and collector’s editions of Halo: Reach. Now, Halo had a real hero of its own. He just needed a name. In the meantime, a nickname would do: something that was clear and easy to use. The first thought was to simply refer to him by his rank, but then you’d need to find him one that was fitting of his role. Captain, sergeant, commander… It was Robert McLees who found the sweet spot: because he served in the Navy, he could be ranked Master Chief Petty Officer. It was a rank that gave him a certain authority while also ensuring him a combat posting, rather than a command role. So while the team were looking for a real name for the character, he would be known simply as Master Chief, a nickname that would come to stick. Just like with the code names of their games, Bungie never really took the time to find a definitive name for Master Chief, and the temporary nickname became permanent.

And as with Master Chief, who had existed for a long time before being given a much more prominent role, when crafting the Halo universe Staten leaned heavily on what had already been designed, especially by Marcus Lehto and his team. He came up with new names and new roles, and molded a new story from old ideas. The story would be set in 2552; the human empire was now ruled by the UEG (Unified Earth Government, or United Earth Government), or rather its armed forces, the UNSC (United Nations Space Command). For centuries now, humanity had been colonizing the galaxy and had a presence throughout the Milky Way. Its expansion, though, would bring it into contact with the Covenant Alliance, a group of several alien races that then declared a merciless war on humanity. A war that the UNSC was on its way to losing, outnumbered and outgunned by an enemy with a major technological advantage. Now Staten just needed to find a cause for the Covenant to be fighting for. They weren’t just another enemy faction in yet another intergalactic conflict: they were on a crusade, a holy war against humanity. “These guys just can’t be random aliens,” the writer explains. “There has to be some compelling reason why they’re unified to keep this Halo ring safe, some sort of religious significance.” With this, the game’s title, which up until now had referred primarily to the ringworld on which it was set, took on a whole new meaning. It was also important to note that when the foundations were being laid for Halo’s storyline, Al-Qaida had not yet attacked the Twin Towers in New York, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had not yet begun. It was a creative decision that would have real repercussions in later years.

In any case, Staten would continue to draw heavily on the Bungie artists’ concept art to bring the Covenant Alliance to life. He came up with a name for the Elites, the armored alien soldiers: the Sangheili. These creatures had emerged very early in the creative process of Bungie’s artists. Designed by Shi Kai Wang, in Halo the Elites were the main source of trouble for Master Chief, as they were equipped with a rechargeable energy shield that had to be taken down before a fatal strike could hit home. Big, fast, and intelligent, the Elites were often armed with a mysterious energy sword, made up of two blades connected by a handle which was used to turn the blades on and off. In designing Covenant weapons and vehicles, Wang looked to aquatic life for his inspiration, which explains the rounded lines–almost like a drop of water–of the sword that would soon become an icon. Jason Jones, meanwhile, for a long time insisted that the Elites have a tail, to make them more menacing. Wang didn’t agree: “I felt it made the alien look too much animalistic, rather than a sentient, technologically enhanced creature.” The debate between the two points of view would rage on for quite a while. All the more so as Wang knew all too well the problems that this appendage could cause. Wang wasn’t just a concept artist, he was also responsible for modelling these characters in 3D. He knew that the tail would be a nuisance when the Elites boarded vehicles. Where would they put it? There was even an idea of shortening the tail and placing it on the front of their pelvis… but this idea was quickly dropped, for obvious reasons. Jason Jones had to accept it: the Sangheili couldn’t have a tail.

There was one point, however, on which he would not concede: the aliens had to be colorful. Very colorful. Much to Wang’s consternation: “I probably wouldn’t have made the Covenant guys so colorful, but that was a request from Jason. ‘Shinier, brighter! More colors!’ And I’m like ‘Dude you’re fucking nuts man, these things are like rainbows, it’s horrible.’” If Wang eventually did do as he was told, it was because his boss had a good reason for making these demands, and Wang eventually came to understand that these exaggerated colors played a role in improving the gameplay. The Elites’ armor was colorcoded: the blue ones were the least fearsome, while the red ones were generally tougher and better equipped. Elites in golden armor were commanders and ferocious enemies for Master Chief. These colors, then, enabled players to easily spot enemies on the screen and assess the danger level, prioritizing which enemy to kill first, for example. This would be all the more relevant due to the fact that gamers would now be playing on a TV rather than a computer screen: they would be a fair distance from the display, making these colors a real advantage in terms of seeing what was going on, especially at a time when consumer televisions offered only limited image resolution. It is also interesting to note how Halo’s garish colors gradually disappeared over the years and as TV image quality improved.

And these flashy colors didn’t just apply to the Elites, but to every enemy encountered in the game. Wang also designed the Unggoy (the little Grunts) and the Kig-Yar (the Jackals). The Grunts are small infantry units that are easy to dispatch individually but who, in large numbers, can be very troublesome for the player. The Jackals are harder to kill because they hide behind an imposing energy shield worn on their wrist that protects them from incoming fire. Neither the Grunts nor the Jackals wore armor, but Bungie nevertheless found many ways to make them visible on-screen. These included the color of their uniforms and also of the Jackals’ shields, which came in neon orange or blue. Their weapons fire fluorescent green or pink projectiles, making it easy to spot the source of incoming fire. These cues are extremely valuable to players due to the large number of enemies on screen at once, and Bungie needed to strike the perfect balance between the person holding the controller feeling like they were controlling a real supersoldier, while also ensuring that the enemies posed enough of a threat to regularly place players under enough pressure to produce intense, and therefore satisfying, gunfights. The design of the different alien races would also play a role in this.

2001 came round, and work was moving along nicely. The studio was growing, as staff from Bungie West gradually made the move to Redmond to join work on Halo. When Microsoft acquired Bungie, they agreed with Take-Two that the San Jose studio would finish work on Oni before becoming permanent staff at Microsoft, and as the game was entering the final stages of production the developers began joining the main team in what proved to be a significant wave of reinforcements that would enable Halo to become a richer, more complex game. This was the point at which the Flood, designed by Robert McLees, entered the game’s storyline. While McLees had imagined the Flood as a kind of bioweapon the Covenant used against planets that they were invading, Staten gave it another role, with Jason Jones’ consent. Under Staten, the Flood would now become a faction in its own right and enter the fray at a critical point in the game, turning the traditional conflict between humans and aliens into a war with three belligerents. This new role also provided Staten with an opportunity to add context to the game, especially with regard to the origins of the ring world and the many strange ruins found upon it. He then began writing the history of a galactic empire, an extremely advanced alien civilization known as the Forerunners, who reigned over the galaxy for millions of years. Despite their power and all of their knowledge, the Forerunners were powerless to stand against the Flood, who they engaged in a desperate war. Following years of combat, the Forerunners began building several weapons of mass destruction–the Halos–that were capable of wiping out all forms of life, not with the aim of permanently eradicating the Flood, but rather to deprive it of its sustenance: the life forms that it corrupted and fed upon. Finding themselves cornered and their civilization already doomed, the Forerunners chose to sacrifice themselves and activated the rings, thereby cleansing the galaxy of the Flood. But placing the Flood at the core of the game’s storyline would not be without problems for Halo: when the game was assessed by the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), it would get a Mature rating in the USA, meaning that it was not recommended for players aged under 17. “That was without them seeing that the Flood could be chopped apart and disassembled,” a highly amused Robert McLees would reveal in 2010. It had to be said, though, that the different creatures that made up the Flood were particularly repugnant. When McLees had first designed them back in the days of Blam! these deformed monsters were colored white and pink. McLees, though, was color-blind, and when he was adding the finishing touches to his design for the Flood he colored them in brown and greenish tones that were more fitting for the image that Jones had in mind for this new enemy. Jones wanted the Flood to be terrifying, and indeed, he already had an idea for the exact moment that the Flood’s existence would be revealed to the player. Its entrance into the Halo storyline, and the manner in which its discovery was portrayed, would be key to the reception the game received from players and the press a few months later.

2001: LOST IN SPACE

Although Halo’s storyline was slowly coming together and steady progress was being made on the development side of things, Bungie was still under a lot of pressure due to the rapidly approaching release of the Xbox, scheduled for November 2001. As if juggling all the usual priorities involved in designing a video game were not enough, Bungie also had to work on Xbox prototypes that bore no relation to the console that would ultimately be released. Microsoft’s console had also been officially unveiled in January at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Up on stage before the press were Seamus Blackley and Bill Gates, who unveiled an imposing black console decorated with a gleaming green circle. Gates delivered a carefully crafted speech and focused on the group’s technological prowess as much as the “human story” of designing the Xbox in an era when Microsoft’s popularity was at a low point. “A few years ago, we started talking about it at Microsoft. We asked ourselves: ‘What about us? What will be our contribution to the evolution of video games?’ And the most passionate gamers working for us replied: ‘Well, let’s do it, and we’ll see.’ At the time, it seemed like a crazy idea, but they never let it drop.” After a short conversation with Blackley, who called him “dude,” Gates found himself face to face with none other than Dwayne Johnson, The Rock himself, who was then a World Wrestling Federation star and hugely popular with gamers in the USA, who couldn’t get enough of THQ’s wrestling games. But Halo would be a no-show at the CES, and with good reason: Bungie was working flat out to design a demo that could be presented at in March at Gamestock, a trade show that Microsoft had been organizing for a few years now. The developers were faced with a real challenge: Nvidia had informed the team that its graphics card would turn out to be less powerful than billed. It was a hard blow to take because when the studio left PC development behind to work on the console, it had already been forced to make a number of compromises. However, when Jason Jones and Joe Staten went on stage at Gamestock 2001, held in the brand new Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle,7 they had had their confidence topped up. This was because they didn’t show up empty-handed, and what they were about to show was incredibly impressive. And they knew it. They were about to reveal to the public one of Halo’s most memorable levels, one that truly showcased a series of the game’s qualities. As a result, the announcement had been meticulously prepared.

Let’s go back a few months, here: on the Millennium campus, Marcus Lehto was working alone in one of Bungie’s meeting rooms. In front of him was a gigantic whiteboard to which he’d taped 25 pieces of paper. These sheets represented the 25 levels planned for Halo, and each was named according to their location on the board: A10, A20, A30, A40, and so on. Each sheet was packed with a whole range of details, from the level’s narrative structure to its level design, including the different combat sequences and their layouts. “There’s no way in hell we’re going to build all of this,” he was thinking to himself. And he was right. The majority of these levels were still at the concept stage. A gargantuan effort still remained. Perhaps even too much. Some levels had already been discarded, because the studio execs knew that they would never be able to finish it. Not enough time, not enough money, not enough everything. Bungie had had big plans for its game, but the buyout, the switch to first-person, and Microsoft’s toing and froing with the design of its console had turned an already ambitiously complex project into an impossible one. Up on the board, however, there was one level that shone more than the rest thanks to the size of its environments and the variety of set pieces it contained. The level had gone unnamed ever since Lehto first set up the board, and was known only by its number: B30. B30 had been around for a while, because when Halo became a first-person shooter for the Xbox, it was the level that most of Bungie’s designers and engineers used as a playground where they could try things out. Jaime Griesemer used it to refine the controls for the joypad, Chris Butcher still used it on a daily basis to test AI reactions, and even Joe Staten used it to check that the dialog of computer-controlled allied soldiers was triggered properly. This expansive sandbox provided a fine demonstration of what Halo would become, because it could be used to show different vehicles in action: the Warthog, of course, but also a Banshee, the Covenant’s small combat flyers. You could move from an indoor to an outdoor environment–and vice versa–with no loading times, and show off the full power of Bungie’s game engine, be that through the superb graphics or the consistency of its physics engine. And yet, the level itself was pretty straightforward: it was a little island lost in the middle of one of the oceans found on the Halo–a Halo that you could see streaming into the sky as soon as you land on the beach.

The staff at Bungie soon came to love B30, and it was quickly added to the game where it was baptized The Silent Cartographer. In this level, Master Chief is tasked with finding the Halo’s map room to help UNSC troops ascertain their location, before eliminating a Prophet, one of the Covenant’s political and spiritual leaders. The studio, however, couldn’t come to an agreement on the appearance of the Prophets, and the one from The Silent Cartographer was removed from the game; it would not be until Halo 2 that players would set eyes on the brains behind the Covenant. Fortunately, this removal–one of many made throughout the long process of creating the game–had no bearing on the quality of B30 as a level, nor its appeal. In fact, the level was already varied and well-crafted enough for Jones to decide to showcase it in a non-definitive version at Gamestock.

And so, on March 13, a squad from the studio set off for Seattle. Jason Jones was there, of course, as was Staten, who would accompany Jones on stage to present the game, as well as Matt Soell and John Howard, the game’s lead designer. All four of them knew that they were in for a long day: Microsoft had invited 170 journalists from all over the world to discover the games that would accompany the Xbox on the day of its release and over the following months. This meant that it wasn’t an event to be taken lightly by anyone, and certainly not by Bungie. It had been almost a year since Halo had last made a public appearance, and this would be the first time that it had been on show as an Xbox game, and especially as a console FPS. There could be no mistakes.

To make things easier, Microsoft had formulated a straightforward schedule: in the morning, the developers would go on stage to present their games, and in the afternoon the journalists could try them out and interview the devs. Ed Fries, who was both the organizer and host of this year’s Gamestock, fired the starting pistol with a short speech before inviting Lorne Lanning, the boss at Oddworld Inhabitant, to join him and comment on a technical demo of his game. This was followed by Amped, Project Gotham Racing, Dead or Alive 3, Fusion Frenzy and Azurik. The audience was enraptured, but there still hadn’t been a peep from Halo. Fries then pretended to draw the proceedings to a close, before remembering that he’d forgotten the game they were all waiting for. The act wasn’t very convincing, but it did get a laugh from the room, before calming down when Jones came on stage and introduced Staten, who grabbed a controller and launched the demo. And Staten had put together a little show of his own. For the past two years, he had been the one writing the demo videos for Halo, and he had become a master in the art of showcasing the game’s various qualities, whether that be through a judicious camera angle or a well-thought-out script. For this year’s Gamestock, Bungie wanted to show that just because Halo had moved to a new platform, that didn’t mean that it was any less impressive, and that the world it offered was as vast as it was mysterious. So Staten had planned his presentation carefully, from the very first second of his demo. The cutscenes hadn’t been recorded yet, which is why the Gamestock 2001 version of The Silent Cartographer doesn’t open with the famous Pelican landing scene, featuring Halo’s troop transport vehicle. There was no fighting on the beaches, either. Instead, Staten began the level on board a Banshee, the small Covenant flyer. He flew carefree through the skies of an unknown planet, accompanied by the first notes of a soundtrack Martin O’Donnell had made for the occasion. A small blue planet could be seen in the sky, before Staten made a sharp turn right and the broad strip of the Halo was shown soaring upwards from the horizon. It was a huge structure, but not big enough to conceal the outline of a second planet that was even bigger. The Banshee kept turning, and a small island appeared in the middle of the ocean; viewers were treated to some lens-flare effects, and the waves in the ocean reflected the light from the sun… The game hadn’t really started and Halo was already blowing people’s minds: visually, it was spectacular and demonstrated that the Xbox was able to create graphics that were a feast for the eyes. This was all the more true when you realize that the development kits that studios like Bungie were using provided barely 50 % of the power that the Xbox would be able to deliver upon release. A lot of work had gone into the different lighting effects, as Jason Jones would reveal ten years later: “We were so proud of these lens flares, the little volumetric flashlights. I think that Bernie (Freidin, an engineer at Bungie) and I spent like six hours one night, just running around watching the Marines. From like midnight to 6 in the morning.” After gracefully soaring around the island, Staten finished by landing gently on a beach next to a Warthog. When he got out of the aircraft, the camera strangely remained in third person: this was when you saw the main character, Master Chief, running towards the Warthog, whose gun emplacement was already occupied by a Marine. When the camera settled behind Master Chief, Staten started to explain the Halo storyline, and it became apparent that the main themes of the final game were already in place. The Covenant have been at war with humanity for a long time already, and following an attack on yet another human colony they set off in hot pursuit of a UNSC warship. To stop the aliens from discovering the location of Earth, the warship plotted a random series of coordinates and took flight at warp speed. This is how the humans came to discover this strange ringworld on which they were forced to execute an emergency landing. Fortunately for them, the warship was carrying an elite soldier, the last of his kind. This was the character that players would control, and who would help the warship’s survivors to defeat the Covenant troops that had followed the humans down onto Halo. While Staten was finishing presenting a general outline of the game’s storyline, he climbed aboard a Warthog and drove off along the beach, just as the first few notes of a tune that’s now well known to fans of the series began to play. Percussion, violins, a marching rhythm: indeed it was the track O’Donnell had composed for the MacWorld 1999 presentation. Back when O’Donnell had composed it, it was never intended to become the game’s main theme: after all, he had composed and recorded it in a rush, with just three days to go before MacWorld. But that didn’t stop the tune from being a hit with the press and, for that matter, with almost everyone who heard it. Including the people at Microsoft, who wasted no time in offering O’Donnell and Salvatori tidy sum in exchange for the rights to the track. After negotiating the terms, the two musicians also got Microsoft to agree to giving them a share of the income for any secondary uses of their track, such as if the game’s soundtrack ever went on sale to the public. This would prove to be some penetrating foresight, because when the contract was signed Microsoft had zero intention of doing so. “But who knows,” O’Donnell said to himself, “Maybe one day it might pay off?” Staten continued his Warthog joyride and used it as an opportunity to showcase the allied AI dialog system: when the Warthog hit a bump and caught some airtime, the Marine in the back of the vehicle let rip an unconvincing “Yeeeeeaaaah!” Truth be told, that was pretty much all that the AI was able to do at this stage in the game’s development, and all we can say is that the shout didn’t go down as well as hoped. In the shadows, Jones took the blow without flinching. Yet. Staten, meanwhile, had finally reached his destination: an alien building where a number of Covenant troops were waiting for him. The Marine powered up the gun emplacement and answered the enemy fire that was ricocheting from the Warthog’s chassis. In a surprising turn of events for the time, many of the aliens then decided to flee or take cover behind different parts of the scenery. Staten then reversed and drove towards another entrance, higher up. After parking the 4x4 in a strategic position from which the gunner could mow down the enemies found there, Staten dismounted and the camera changed perspective. Now, the time had come and the public were seeing Halo as it would be on release day for the very first time: in first person. Master Chief opened fire on the enemy with an intimidating assault rifle, a weapon that would soon become an iconic part of the game. Most fans simply referred to it as an “assault rifle,” but its official designation was the MA5B Individual Combat Weapon System, or the MA5B for short. Rob McLees had invented the MA5B back when Halo was still known as Armor and was just a prototype for Bungie’s next RTS. It originally came with a grenade launcher, an idea that would later be dropped. But that didn’t stop McLees from refining his pet project. A keen firearms aficionado, he gave the MA5B a digital ammo meter, as well as a working compass, a feature that gave rise to several unexpected complications. In order for it to work, McLees had to get to grips with a series of tricky calculations, because on a world like Halo, magnetic coordinates weren’t aligned with its rotational axes. In the conference room, the audience wasn’t paying special attention to the weapon being used. Instead, they were gripped by the reactions of the aliens, who demonstrated a surprising level of intelligence. The AI would attempt to flank, regroup, flee, or rally around a more powerful ally. This had never been seen in an FPS. But this intelligence wasn’t enough to stop Staten defeating them with no real problems, as the difficulty level had been tailored to his purposes. Indeed, Staten wasn’t yet fully used to the gamepad controls and sometimes struggled to aim properly, but that didn’t have any adverse effect on the demo that was steaming ahead. Nor did he neglect to show another of the game’s unique features: hand-to-hand combat. Unlike many games, Halo didn’t force players to switch weapons to inflict physical attacks like punches or butt strokes, because Bungie had allocated a specific button to this particular action. Grenades were given the same treatment, as John Howard would explain to journalists the following month: “We like the frag grenades so much they have their own button so you don’t have to switch weapons to backpedal into cover.” Grenades had a special place in Halo, showcasing as they did one of the game’s major assets: its physics engine. As the guests invited to play Halo for the very first time would discover just after the press conference, the physics engine was particularly consistent, which could produce situations that were as surprising as they were amusing. It was possible, for example, to throw a few grenades under a Warthog so that the explosion blew it up into the air, perhaps to fall on a group of enemies.

When Staten brought his demonstration to a close, the audience was ecstatic. The move from the PC to the Xbox had certainly had an impact, and it’s true that Halo was a very different game now compared to what it was supposed to be in the beginning, but there was no contesting the end result: the game was breathtaking. Halo was a beautiful game, but more than that, it wasn’t satisfied with being just another linear FPS in which players progressed through wide corridors filled with enemies. The level shown at Gamestock that year was quite extensive, and invited players to experiment to find the best way to complete their mission, meaning that each player could play the game in their own favorite style. One of the game’s features proved very popular, even though it was a result of switching the development to the Xbox: the limited weapons. Indeed, players could only carry two weapons at once, unlike on most FPS where the main character’s pockets could be stuffed with pistols, pump-action shotguns, grenade launchers, machine guns, sniper rifles and assorted rocket launchers without ever seeming to get weighed down. Bungie meanwhile, planned to offer something a little bit different and wanted Halo to mark a break with how things were done in Doom-like games, where players could amass a collection of increasingly powerful weapons, rendering those used at the start of the game useless. Jason Jones, in particular, wanted every weapon in Halo to have its own strengths and weaknesses, so that players would carry the right equipment for the different situations they encountered. At the same time, this system provided a bit of leeway and let players develop their own playstyle. “We wanted to give the player a good reason to pick up those weapons. Only carrying two seemed like the best way to do that,” Jamie Griesemer reveals. “One of the other reasons we did it was that a lot of times you would just always have the perfect weapon for the situation at hand. We wanted to make it so the player didn’t always have the perfect tools for the job and had to improvise and attack things in different ways.” And yet, the reasoning behind this game design choice lies in the technical limitations of the Xbox, including its low RAM that made it impossible to change weapons smoothly without harming the graphics. Indeed, when Bungie conducted its initial games testing, weapon changes were smooth enough, but the weapons’ textures took a while to load. The reason was simple: Halo was extremely resource-hungry, and although the developers were optimizing their code as much as they could, they were short on time. So while they hadn’t made the gameplay decision to limit the number of weapons carried up until then, the technical constraints made up their minds for them.

Back on the Redmond campus, Bungie, as well as all the staff at Microsoft Studios, were invited to attend a small party organized by Seamus Blackley and Jay Allard. The two men wanted to thank Ed Fries and all his staff for their hard work so far. Gamestock 2001 was a resounding success, and they wanted to give recognition where it was due. The way they chose to do so, however, was somewhat controversial. When the Bungie staff made their way into the room where the party was taking place, their jaws hit the floor. “We walk in, and the Xbox team has decorated the whole place to look like this crazy neon green nightclub,” Hardy LeBel, the designer behind Halo’s multiplayer mode, recalls. “They had these nurses who must have been strippers, walking around in these incredibly tiny micro-skirts, like nurse costumes micro-skirts, handing out these neon-green-glow-in-the-dark jello shots to everybody. And we were just a bunch of software nerds, like we walk in there, we’re looking around like ‘Wooooow’.” Blackley, though, had a very different reaction. While he was one of the organizers, he hadn’t arranged the scantily clad women, and he knew that this wouldn’t go down well with Microsoft. For a moment he even thought he might get fired. We know that he wasn’t dismissed from his job, but Microsoft’s reaction wasn’t long coming. “And then maybe twenty minutes after we left the party, we started to get e-mail after e-mail from every level of our hierarchy at Microsoft basically saying: ‘This is inappropriate, this is not how we do business, this is not how we portray…’” But it wasn’t enough to dampen the spirits of the young team, who got back to work with renewed confidence.

The presentation at Gamestock had gone perfectly, and feedback from the press had been more than positive. Except, perhaps, for Staten, who was given a dressing down by Jason Jones: he had not forgotten the Marine’s ridiculous shouting during the demo. Staten was under pressure from different directions, because while he was writing the storyline for the game, he was also responsible for making Halo’s various cutscenes. The issue was that the studio lacked the right equipment to make them, and especially that many of the levels had been removed from the game. When a level was scrapped, it meant that entire sequences of the storyline ended up in the trash along with it, and to avoid inconsistencies Staten had to redo certain cutscenes and dialog to make sure players received the missing information. “Which is why you get a crummy cinematic of Captain Keyes saying, ‘I was hanging out in my prison cell and I happened to overhear these aliens talk about this place we’re on, called Halo.’ There was a whole level there where you actually figured that out.” Able to see the funny side of things, Staten would soon give himself an extra job title: Duct Tape Guy. The further the game’s development progressed, the more levels Bungie was forced to remove, and the more ideas it had to scrap. Staten patched up the storyline to the best of his ability, but all of this work fixing up holes in the storyline left him with little time for the cutscenes, which he failed to get done on time. He made most of them himself, using extremely basic tools. He moved characters around and triggered the animations that had been created especially for the occasion. When he had everything where he wanted it, he started recording, positioned his “camera” in the right spot, and then used the resulting videos to create a montage that would become a cutscene. Staten, then, was a real movie director; it’s just that his actors were made from pixels and polygons. It was no mean feat, because he needed to position characters in the right place–to the nearest inch! –for them to interact properly with each other. This is the case in the introduction to the game, when Master Chief meets Captain Keyes and shakes his hand. “[The animations]… were authored separately, so getting them to actually shake involved slightly nudging their spawning points closer and closer, until it actually worked.” And when patience and meticulous attention to detail failed him, Staten was forced to use sleight of hand. This is particularly true when making cutscenes featuring the Pillar of Autumn, the human warship that appears in the opening seconds of the game. Designed by Lorraine Reyes, the Pillar is one of the stars of the game, but it has a major weakness: it can’t move. To simulate its movement, Staten had to place cameras around the ship which was actually just hanging in space at a full stop.

The cutscenes were also used to define or redefine the roles of different characters. On paper, Halo only had a few characters: Master Chief, Cortana, Captain Keyes, and 343 Guilty Spark, a Forerunner AI encountered later in the game. For quite some time, Keyes was known simply as “Captain Exposition” at Bungie, because he tended to be the character doing the talking during the exposition cutscenes, which grew in number as levels were removed from the game. Sergeant Johnson, meanwhile, was known as “Sniper Sergeant”; he wasn’t a major character and was never intended to become one, because in Bungie’s eyes he was just a very deliberate caricature of Gunnery Sergeant Apone, Al Matthews’ character in Aliens. But that was before he garnered huge popularity with fans thanks to his many lines of dialog improvised by his voice actor, David Scully. The role of the AI evolved dramatically, too. The AI that joins Master Chief throughout the game by being uploaded into his armor was imagined very early in the game’s creative process, because its name had been used since the very earliest days of Halo, when Bungie was sending out its famous “Cortana Letters.” Up until now, Cortana’s role was simply to assist Master Chief in combat, but she ended up being uploaded into his armor and becoming something more akin to a friend, or even a mother. She hadn’t always had such a benevolent role, though. Indeed, for a while Staten and Jones were considering making her the game’s main antagonist. In that storyline, Cortana had been separated from Master Chief, and when he finally found her, she had lost her mind and was trying to take control of the Halo in order to dominate the universe. This storyline wasn’t pursued, doubtless because it had too many similarities to the plot in Marathon. It would, however, be used by Microsoft and 343 Industries as the basis for Halo 5: Guardians in 2015.

Staten’s missed deadlines and the many issues he encountered had a knock-on effect on someone else’s work: Martin O’Donnell. The composer liked to know the game he was writing music for, and the constant changes of direction meant that he was making only slow progress on the different tracks that would accompany the player. O’Donnell was a fan of dynamic music that changed according to what was happening in the game. This meant that he needed to understand each level and what occurred in it, which was not easy to do when the structure or the levels were changing week to week. And when Bungie finally made up its mind and decided that Halo would have 10 levels rather than the 25 that had at one point been planned, it was Staten’s delays that slowed down O’Donnell: he had to deliver various compositions to accompany the cutscenes, but because they weren’t finished it was impossible for him to make any progress. Notwithstanding these delays, Staten and O’Donnell worked together well, and despite their obvious differences in personality, they liked working together and were inspired by each other’s ideas. They were in perfect agreement about how to pace the game with the music and cutscenes. They wanted to be sure that the game would contain moments of tranquility and calm, even silence, from time to time that wouldn’t be ruined by the game’s music. “It gives you a sense of where you were,” Staten explains. “Good context with not a lot of overhead. The rest of the time, you’re just inside your own head.” The two pals also worked together on a lot of the voice acting. Each of them delved deep into their address books to find the right actors. The gig was to play Master Chief’s voice, so O’Donnell was looking for an actor with a deep voice, and he knew someone who might be just right: Steve Downes, an actor he’d already worked with on Septerra Core: Legacy of the Creator, the RPG from Valkyrie Studios. To play Cortana, Staten found the ideal candidate when he called Jennifer Taylor. Taylor had been in the same theater class as Staten at college, so he knew that she had the voice Cortana needed, and more importantly still: he knew that she’d recently moved to Seattle. For a while, Taylor was asked to put on a slight British accent, which landed her the role. O’Donnell, however, would change his mind after seeing Taylor’s work on No One Lives Forever where she played a British woman; the two voices were too similar, so there would be no British accent for Cortana. In the end, Cortana would ultimately retain just a few typically British colloquial expressions. O’Donnell and Staten would record a great many lines of dialog (sometimes just a few pieces of onomatopœia), because they wanted each character to have their own identity, no matter how minor their part. Special care was taken with the Marines. “Marty and I both felt like if we were going to create these characters, even the little guys that run around with you, it’s important they have distinct personalities, a sense of humor–that they feel real,” Staten recalls. “If they did, the world would feel real, too.” But these soldiers, who would prove to be an immediate hit with fans, almost failed to make it into the final game. This was despite the fact that they were one of the game’s main strengths, including in the eyes of Chris Butcher, the Bungie engineer who made the AI for the first Halo game. He explains how, “In Halo, we weren’t really sure what role the Marines were gonna play. As soon as we had an AI that could fight meaningfully, we decided to put friendly AI in there, along with the enemy AI, because from Oni, I had really enjoyed making the little TCTF troopers that were running around with you in there. So we decided that the friendly AI was gonna be pretty important because it was one way of making the player feel committed to humanity. For the part of Halo where you’re off by yourself, you’re just the Master Chief and Cortana. Or maybe for some of these levels, you’re just Master Chief and Cortana isn’t with you. It’s a very isolated kind of experience. And so, we wanted to make sure that we grounded the player at the start of the game, by making them feel as if they’re really part of this larger story of these humans, who crashed on this ringworld, and nobody makes it out alive of course.” O’Donnell agreed with Butcher: he believed that players would grow attached to the Marines. Not everyone in the studio agreed, though, with some not understanding why there was any need to expend so many resources on what many saw as mere cannon fodder. What’s more, most of the Marines were modelled on the faces of different devs at Bungie, but that didn’t stop Staten and O’Donnell putting a lot of effort into the cutscenes they were developing. There was one in particular that they found hilarious: the cutscene where Master Chief is watching a recording obtained from the helmet of a missing Marine. Players would see several scenes from the Marine’s life, in which they would hear the soldiers chatting and joking around together. In one of them, the Marines are on board a Pelican on the way to their next mission. For this particular moment, O’Donnell wanted the Pelican’s speakers to be playing Paint It Black by the Rolling Stones, but Bungie wasn’t able to obtain the rights. In the end, O’Donnell had to quickly compose a short rock track and make do.

Despite the sense of urgency and the many sacrifices that the developers were forced to make, Halo was making good progress, and surprisingly everything seemed to be coming together, much to the relief of studio management. Jason Jones, meanwhile, was working overtime. Earlier in the development process, he had to roll up his sleeves and get his hands dirty writing code, but now his role had evolved into more of a project manager. He made decisions, guided the staff, and tried to direct them according to his vision. But that wasn’t necessarily where his talents were most useful, as O’Donnell would explain a few years later: “Jason understands all the different aspects of how a game gets put together, and on a small team he’s in there working on whatever needs doing. But it’s hard to say that he’s a visionary leader, because he doesn’t cast a vision and convince people to get in line or put their best efforts behind it. And whatever he’s focused on at the time, that’s all he’s focused on.” After all, Jones was a developer and a creative before being a leader, a member of management. This was something that could be seen in the studio’s organization chart, and even in the credits of Bungie games: he left the role of studio director to people like Alex Seropian and later Pete Parsons, and worked on Halo and Halo 2 as a project lead, never director or executive producer. A game designer more than anything else, he liked to throw himself right into his projects, with a small team alongside him. Like with Project Phoenix, which in 2001 was still on the backburner.

But the studio’s co-founder was forced to stick to his role as a leader when time was of the essence. With the Xbox’s release date looming and E3 only a few weeks away, Halo was still far from finished. And so the studio started hiring extra staff and moved all of its existing teams over to work on Halo. Secondary projects, like Project Phoenix, were put on hold. Paul Bertone, a game designer and former employee of Bungie West, was one of those affected. A few months from the release date, he was reassigned to work on Halo even though he wasn’t really that interested in the project. A fan of fantasy, Bertone didn’t really like sci-fi, and when he began working with the team he planned to leave as soon as the game was finished, and go back to working on Phoenix. Bertone wasn’t the only one who suddenly found himself working on a game he knew almost nothing about: around a dozen developers gradually joined the Halo team, which Martin O’Donnell found hilarious to watch. “Scchhluupp. That sucking sound. Marty used to walk around the office all the time, just driving his coffee cup around, making that sound as different people got sucked into the Halo team. He loved doing that,” Bertone recalls.

The most pressing emergency was E3. Microsoft planned to announce the price of their console, and to give away a bit more info about its upcoming developments. While Bungie was struggling to finish Halo to schedule, the Xbox division was facing the same kind of problems, and in-house it was common knowledge that not everything would be ready for the console’s release. This was the case for online gaming, for example, and what would become Xbox Live would have to wait. But Microsoft also had some good news to announce, like its partnership with SEGA, which had recently withdrawn from the video games console market. Destroyed by Sony, SEGA had watched its market share melt like a snowman in July, and was forced to cease production of the Dreamcast. From now on, SEGA would go on as a games developer and publisher. In an effort to make the transition to this “new” activity go a bit smoother, the Japanese publisher signed a juicy contract with Microsoft and Xbox, with whom it maintained close relations. Indeed, for almost two years now, Microsoft had wanted to acquire SEGA and the two parties had been in lengthy discussions about a possible buyout. It never came to pass, but it meant that the staff at the two companies had forged very close links. At the Xbox conference at E3 2001, nobody was really surprised to see Peter Moore, president of SEGA of America, go on stage to reveal which games would soon be available on the Microsoft console. They included the next two games in the NFL 2K and NBA 2K series, both sports games that harness the Xbox’s online gaming service. This was a big announcement, because SEGA’s sports sims were very popular, especially in America. A fine announcement that came in stark contrast to the Halo presentation, that was disappointing for Microsoft and the journalists in attendance in equal measure. For the first time since it was unveiled, Bungie’s baby fell flat. The studio hadn’t really had time to work on a new demo, and Joe Staten was back on stage to present a more polished version of The Silent Cartographer. The demo contained nothing that was really new, and as those who got their hands on the demo would later attest, there was still a lot of work to do. The game was filled with placeholder content and the frame rate was very low, even for a console game. The journalists found the same technical issues in the new The Silent Cartographer demo, just as they did in the multiplayer mode on show on the Microsoft stand. That’s right: for the past few months, a small group of developers had been working on this part of the game, which was shown for the first time at E3 and in which two teams of eight players competed in “Capture the Flag” mode. This was made possible thanks to the Xbox’s network gaming features, which enabled four consoles to be networked together. As Halo’s multiplayer mode could accommodate up to four players in split-screen mode, that meant up to 16 players could join a game on a LAN network, which had never before been seen on consoles. Bungie wasn’t aware of it at the time, but Halo’s multiplayer mode would prove pivotal to the game’s success.

A DYNAMIC DUO SAVES MULTIPLAYER

It’s already been said, but it’s worth repeating: Bungie’s usual process when starting work designing a game was to begin with its multiplayer mode, in which they would play against each other to try out their ideas. They would test gameplay concepts and then use feedback to improve them, turn them into something else, or do away with them entirely. It was this process that brought us Minotaur: Labyrinth of Crete, Pathways Into Darkness, Marathon and Myth.

But when it came to Halo, Bungie was faced with a real problem: the game had indeed began life as a multiplayer game–first as an RTS and then a TPS– but it had evolved since then into an FPS. What that meant in practice was that between the initial concepts of 1998 and the game as it was in early 2001, there was a huge gulf. Entire oceans, in fact.

While it was still in TPS format, Halo looked a lot like what Battlefield would one day be: battles between 10 and 20 players on large maps. Players were supposed to do battle by shooting at each other, of course, but also by meeting a series of objectives. The game featured vehicles, which were used either to travel around the map more quickly or support the advance of allied troops. Several game modes were designed, with gameplay that was very different depending on the makeup of the player’s squad. In one example, one team attacked a stronghold occupied by the opposing team. The game played out over several rounds: the attackers had to close in on the base, while the defenders tried to repel their assault. The attackers then had to blow down the door to the fortress, or infiltrate it by stealth via a hidden doorway, or destroy the stronghold’s anti-aircraft artillery. The idea was for the attackers to penetrate deeper into the fortress with every successive round. These were the kinds of games that Jason Jones and his staff had in mind when they were laying the foundations for what Halo’s multiplayer mode would be like when the game was released. The hitch was that in the meantime, the game had switched to a console FPS, whose game design focused on its story and single-player campaign. True, the campaign could be played by two players in split screen mode, but that wasn’t enough for Bungie and certainly not for Jones, for whom multiplayer was absolutely vital. The entire studio, though, was working at full capacity to finish Halo on time. If a multiplayer mode was going to be designed, then it would be by a miniscule team with derisory resources at their disposal. Fortunately, Bungie’s staff included two men who were experts in emergency rescues.

In August 1999, a new hire walked through the doors at Bungie West. His name was Hardy LeBel. Headhunted by Bungie while he was still working at Namco, LeBel was in good spirits when he joined the team in San Jose because he knew the studio and was aware that the team had been working on a project called Oni for a while. He had been offered a role as lead designer and tasked with getting Oni’s development back on track after three long years bogged down without much progress. “It had been a disaster,” LeBel recounts. “I mean I think it’s probably safe to say that the project was stalled for years, the team was really split in terms of what kind of project they wanted to make.” With support from Michael Evans, Bungie West’s lead programmer, LeBel managed to save the game, which was released on PC on January 26, 2001. Take-Two, the game’s new owners, entrusted the PS2 port of the game to Rockstar Canada, with results that LeBel would describe as “awful.” With Oni delivered, LeBel and Evans waved goodbye to California and set off to join Bungie in its new home on the Microsoft campus in Redmond. They were some of the last members of Bungie West to make the move. Chris Butcher, David Dunn and Hamilton Chu, the three pillars of Bungie West, had already been assigned to the teams working on Halo. LeBel realized that he would imminently be facing the same fate: there was less than a year left to finish the game, and Halo was still looking far from presentable. Until recently, there had still been the possibility that LeBel and Evans would start working on what was supposed to be Bungie West’s second game, but it was clear that Halo could not risk any delays. While they were awaiting to learn their fate, LeBel and Evans received a visit from Jason Jones and Alexander Seropian, who congratulated them for their fine work on Oni. LeBel recalls, “They said, ‘Look, you guys did some good work on Oni, how would you like to put multiplayer back into Halo?’” He couldn’t believe his ears. While Bungie West was still based in San Jose, the team had taken part in many a Halo playtesting session back when the game was still a multiplayer game that looked very much like what Battlefield would become, as we’ve already mentioned. LeBel, then, knew what the multiplayer mode would be like, and he loved it. Indeed, he still couldn’t quite believe that it had been scrapped. “I nearly lost my mind,” he would remember, many years later. I’m like ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘Yeah we’ve got to cut multiplayer’ cause there isn’t time and resources to put it in the game.’ And I’m losing my mind, I’m like ‘It’s the most important part!’” As it happens, this was precisely the reaction that Jones and Seropian had been hoping for, because they didn’t want to entrust such important development work to just any old tech guy. Determined to save Halo’s multiplayer mode, LeBel and Evans went right back to the drawing board to design a new game mode.

As surprising as it may seem, when LeBel was getting to work putting his initial ideas down on paper, his own approach to Halo’s multiplayer mode was more along the lines of a party game than a competitive FPS. While he openly admitted that Unreal was one of his primary sources of inspiration, LeBel’s mind regularly wandered to a particular Japanese brand. “I wanted to make a party game with shooter mechanics. I wanted to make a game that Nintendo could ship but it was using shooter mechanics,” he explains. “And that affected the game types that we chose, it affected the sound effects that we designed, the visual effects that we designed.” This meant that LeBel was moving diametrically away from the original concept for Halo’s multiplayer mode, which some had always seen as a kind of military combat simulation. But this part of the game had to be accessible, fun, and, more than anything else, balanced. Balance. This was the watchword of multiplayer gaming in Halo, where players all had to have access to the same weapons and be able to do the same things on the game’s various maps. This drove LeBel to request some additional coding: up until that point, he had mainly been using what had already been created for the single-player campaign, but he needed something new. This was especially true when it came to encouraging movement across the maps, to give players a reason to focus their attention on particular areas. To facilitate this he designed a power-up system, something that would need the green light from Jason Jones. The brains behind Halo had never for one moment thought that his game might include power-ups. LeBel and Jones held lengthy discussions, and the game designer ultimately persuaded his boss, who gave his assent, and two power-ups were developed on the fly. The first enabled the player-controlled character to become temporarily invisible, while the second gave the player an overshield that could soak up even more damage. The team designing Halo’s single-player campaign loved the idea so much that they decided to scatter a few of these power-ups throughout the game’s different levels.

Indeed, the work to develop Halo’s multiplayer mode had a number of positive consequences for the rest of the game, especially when it came to the variety of weapons available. The pump action shotgun and sniper rifle both made it into the game, when for a long time the developers had been leaning towards keeping one and scrapping the other. This was much to the relief of Jason Jones, who loved the sniper rifle: “Snipers are like bacon, they make anything better,” he would happily exclaim one day. This also explains why Master Chief starts the Truth and Reconciliation mission with a sniper rifle in hand… Other weapons were also given a total overhaul, like the Covenant plasma pistol. Before then, its overcharge shot fired a swarm of little green balls of plasma, which inflicted heavy damage on whoever they touched. It was an effective feature, but didn’t really make the plasma pistol stand out from the rest of the weapons in the game. Bungie wanted the human weapons to be instantly recognizable to players, to make it easy to put them to proper use. For the Covenant weapons, though, the designers wanted to create otherworldly weapons with surprising effects. And so the plasma pistol was modified: its overcharge shot now fired a swollen ball of plasma that generated an EMP effect when it struck its target. This could paralyze vehicles and, even better, shut down the shields of Elites in campaign mode, or enemy Spartans in multiplayer games. This major modification gave rise to what many players would come to call the “noob combo”: an overcharge shot from the plasma pistol followed by a headshot from a precision weapon. It was a highly effective way to take out most Elites in the game, as well as opposing Spartans in player vs. player matches. In multiplayer mode, this made the plasma pistol a formidable–and feared–weapon, with players even developing strategies to get their hands on one before the enemy team.

But despite Joseph Staten and John Howard being proud to announce to IGN in April 2001 that Halo’s multiplayer mode was in the final stages of development and would definitely be part of the game upon launch, the reality wasn’t quite so cut and dry. LeBel was still learning to use the development tools at his disposal, but more than that, this was his first time designing multiplayer maps himself. He had plenty of ideas, though. LeBel had planned to ship Oni with a game mode of his own design, but his ideas were dropped due to a lack of time. Heartbreaking for a game designer. “We just never had the resources to do a single-player game with multiplayer,” LeBel confesses. “And there was just no way I was gonna go and have no multiplayer again.” That was an attitude that would see LeBel and Michael Evans pull a series of all-nighters. At first, Evans worked to convert a selection of tools designed for multiplayer mode in Oni, before incorporating them into Gorilla, the suite of development tools used at Bungie. It was no easy task, but it had to be done and dusted in record time, before they started looking at the issue of network gaming. Elsewhere in the studio, some people were even wondering if online gaming should be dropped from the finished game. Harold Ryan, then a test manager for Halo and who would go on to become CEO of Bungie, was party to these discussions: “We were having arguments about how many people can actually connect the boxes together. We were like “Hmm, maybe in college dorms, people are doing it, but who’s gonna bring a TV to their friend’s house?” But network gaming was close to Bungie’s heart, and if there was to be a multiplayer mode, then it had to be online. But there was a snag: while these discussions were being had, Microsoft had announced that online gaming on the Xbox wouldn’t be available at launch. Halo would be, though, as part of the studio’s launch day line-up. This news was met with some frustration at Bungie, but it did make their job much easier: Evans now just had to find a way to make LAN gaming work. So while Evans was off looking for a solution, LeBel kept learning. The former lead designer found himself forced to wear lots of different hats and learn several new skill-sets on the job. The first new job he had to learn was how to draw and model game maps in 3D. With none of the studio’s artists available to help, he powered on his computer and launched 3D Studio Max, a 3D modelling program. Fortunately for him, it had a reasonably comprehensive tutorial and allowed users to test some of the more advanced features on a step-by-step basis. With this, LeBel made his first map and started playing around with what he could do. After a few hours, he had obtained a pretty convincing result and decided that it was good enough for the final game: this map would make it into the game as Rat Race, a small map made up of a maze of corridors containing a number of teleporters. It was also a map completely free from vehicles. But LeBel hadn’t forgotten that vehicle combat was one of Halo’s specialties, and that its multiplayer mode should showcase them, too. And he still remembered what the game was supposed to be like before it was moved onto the Xbox. He designed a large map, playing around with its scale, and placed a base and two Warthogs at each end of the map. In just a few hours he had created Blood Gulch, the map that players would see on Microsoft’s stand at E3 2001. Despite its simplicity, Blood Gulch would quickly establish itself as a player favorite, even featuring in most subsequent games in the series, sometimes under another name. Beyond its layout, the map was also particularly well-suited to experimentation. Because in addition to the game modes he had himself designed, LeBel also wanted to give players the freedom to make up their own kinds of game, and a vast sandbox like Blood Gulch was probably the ideal place to put the wildest ideas to the test. And this wasn’t a design feature he had plucked out of thin air. LeBel was a big fan of shooting games and while he hoped to create a Nintendo-style party game, he looked to two of his favorite FPS for inspiration: Counter-Strike and Unreal. It was the latter that taught him just how important it was to give players the ability to customize the game as they see fit. Maybe they’d want to play a game where everyone spawned with a sniper rifle and rocket launcher, and moved at four times normal speed. This was the kind of whimsy that LeBel made possible when he created an extremely comprehensive match editor that players would have loads of fun with upon the game’s release. Inside Bungie, however, there was one person in particular who had no time for LeBel’s little experiments. And that person was Robert McLees. “One day I was sitting at my desk, and Rob McLees showed up at my desk, and he is a very intense guy, just super intense,” LeBel recounts with an air of mockery. “And he’s like ‘Hardy, are you trying to piss me off?’ and I’m looking at him and I’m like ‘Lord no, I’m definitely not trying to do that, what’s the problem?’. And he said ‘Do you realize that the magnetic coordinates for every single multiplayer map are incorrect?!’ And I’m like ‘What are you talking about Rob?’” A latecomer to Halo’s development process, LeBel didn’t know that the assault rifle’s compass was fully functional, and so he hadn’t taken this into account when creating his maps. The result was that the weapon’s compass just didn’t work, a fact that enraged McLees’ inner firearms fanatic. Simultaneously amused and frightened by McLees’ over-the-top reaction, LeBel promised to fix his mistake as soon as possible, a promise that he was sure to keep. “That’s the level of passion that the people at Bungie, the longtime Bungie people really have. Had,” LeBel explains. “It’s just, like, nobody cares about the end product anymore.”

In addition to questions of game design, LeBel also had to painstakingly go over the tiniest of details in the multiplayer mode, right down to the color of the armor worn by competing teams of Spartans. “I really wanted players to be able to set their own colors for their teams in multiplayer. And that was just something that we had to cut ’cause we didn’t have enough time. He [Michael Evans] said ‘We can only have two colors, what should they be?’ I didn’t hesitate. I just said ‘Red and blue.’ Why? Because those are the colors in Unreal. I mean, that’s what I grew up playing. I know those colors work.” This decision made on the fly would leave a lasting mark on the imagery of the entire Halo series, because even today in Halo 5: Guardians, the battle between reds and blues rages on. As would the multiplayer soundtrack, much of which was composed by LeBel himself. “I’m the only uncredited audio designer on Halo,” he likes to remind people, with a smile. In the final few months of development, LeBel and Evans would be bolstered by reinforcements to their team, especially on the programming side of things where Adrian Perez and Stefan Sinclair would lend a hand, along with a few artists like Chris Carney who would work to embellish the maps created by LeBel. There was one aspect of multiplayer, though, where LeBel was going to have to make do with what he had: the sound design. Officially, it was Martin O’Donnell, composer of the game’s soundtrack, who was responsible for the various sound effects. The task was entrusted to Jay Weinland, but both he and O’Donnell were working at full capacity and neither had time to help out LeBel, who could regularly be found loitering outside the composer’s office. “Marty was super busy doing single-player, and doing all the voice-over stuff, and things like that,” LeBel explains. “And so I kept saying to Marty ‘I need sounds for multiplayer.’ And he’s like ‘Hey I will get to it soon.’” But O’Donnell would never have the time to get to it, soon or otherwise: the various changes to Halo’s single-player campaign kept causing delays to his work due to regularly having to change the music and re-record dialogue. He just never had time to work on the sounds LeBel needed. The next time LeBel went to see O’Donnell to ask for help, O’Donnell finally cracked: “He walked up to my desk, he literally put his hands in front of my face, and he’s like ‘Don’t even say the word multiplayer to me, I’ve got no time for that right now, don’t even bother me, ‘and I’m like’ Marty, it’s got to be today or never.’ So he grabs his headphone off his desk, and he hands them to me. He hands me his headphone and he hands me the key to the music library. Which is his collection of sound effects, which are all on DVDs, CDs, and shit like that. And he’s like ‘Look, if you need sounds, you get the sounds. No one here has time to help you.’” And so LeBel picked up the headphones and the key, and got to work rifling through O’Donnell’s gargantuan music library alone. There, he discovered that O’Donnell hadn’t been entirely straight with him: O’Donnell and Weinland had already completed a series of recording sessions for multiplayer, using a voice actor called Jeff Steitzer. Bungie had been in contact with Steitzer for a long time, and he had initially been selected to voice Master Chief, but the studio ultimately panicked at the idea of giving such an important role to such an unknown quantity. That was how O’Donnell came to offer the role to Steve Downes, with whom he’d been working for several years already. In compensation, Bungie offered Steitzer another role: the multiplayer announcer. The voice that would later become known as the “Voice of God” could be heard quite regularly throughout each match, giving a line of commentary for any action that saw players earn a medal. The announcer’s voice and implausible expressions would prove a hit with many players, making Steitzer one of the stars of the game.

Despite these hurdles, Evans and LeBel managed to get multiplayer finished to deadline. It was nothing like what had been envisaged two years back, and truth be told it didn’t serve up anything really revolutionary, with LeBel preferring to stick with the safe options. There were no outlandish game modes, just tried and tested features proven to work through years of experience and use: the designer ultimately wanted everything to be “bulletproof,” as they say. Along with a few members of the studio, they tested every map and every game mode tirelessly, for hours on end. LeBel gathered feedback and took criticism on board, making some changes as a result. As such, one game mode was scrapped: for a while known as “Ogre,” it would see one overpowered player equipped with the best weapons on the game face off against a group of players who had to work together to vanquish their foe. The player who made the killing shot would become the Ogre in the next round. It was an interesting idea, but LeBel couldn’t get the balance quite right, forcing him to leave it by the wayside. So that was how, in just a few months, he would conjure up a multiplayer mode that would revolutionize FPS gaming, and ultimately the entire video game industry.

DOUBTS SETTLE IN

We’re now a few months out from the game’s release and LeBel, like any other member of staff at Bungie, had no idea of the impact Halo would have upon its release. Indeed, their thoughts were running in the other direction. Many at the studio had had niggling doubts for months now. The game had drastically changed since its first demos were revealed, and some still had doubts about making a shooting game where story was such a prominent feature. Microsoft had also been late getting the final Xbox development kits to the developers, forcing them to work to a punishing schedule in order to make up the delays. As it stood, and with just a few months to go before its release, Halo was struggling to run at more than ten frames per second. The press had seen it with their own eyes at E3 2001. Up until this point, Bungie’s new game had been the stuff of dreams for many game journalists. But switching Halo from the PC to the Xbox had caused doubts to take root. When Next Generation magazine wrote about the game in May 2001, it was to report that it had tried out a level of the game that was only just playable, and that contained only two different kinds of enemies. Jason Jones may well have explained that developing for Xbox was really straightforward and took much less time, but it didn’t quite ring true: Next Generation, and many others, had doubts that the game would be ready for the Xbox’s release.

At Microsoft, too, people began asking questions. While Ed Fries trusted the studio, others started to think that Halo might not be the jewel in the crown it had been made out to be these past few months. Microsoft executives regularly came to visit the staff at Bungie to give them an earful. Other games were in development that would be absolutely amazing, they said. Hardy LeBel recalls Azurik: Rise of Perathia in particular, developed by Adrenium Games which Microsoft was putting a lot of faith in. “We had Microsoft guys show up in the studio and say, ‘Okay Bungie, you’re working on this game, but wait ’til you see Azurik. Azurik is developed by the R&D department at Microsoft, and they’re going to rock your world.’” Bungie also heard talk of other games, like Splinter Cell, developed by Ubisoft, and Blinx the Time Sweeper from Artoon, two other games that Microsoft was really pushing. So while some execs tried to put pressure on Bungie, the tactic never really worked, serving only as a fresh source of motivation for the developers to perfect their gameplay loops and optimize their code. More than anything else, these conversations with Microsoft revealed the very special relationship the studio had with its employer. Bungie may belong to Microsoft, but it had been making it clear that they weren’t like the rest of the company from the very first day it was acquired. But Bungie’s way of doing things and its independent culture didn’t go down well with everyone at Microsoft. That’s just not how things were done at the software giant. Bungie was being given preferential treatment which rankled no small number of people at Microsoft, people who hoped that Bungie would at last fall into line if Halo failed to do as well as predicted. That’s not to say that anybody wanted the game to be a failure, of course, and Microsoft did all in its power to support the studio, especially in terms of marketing. Because there was one thing Microsoft didn’t really like about Halo: its name. Martin O’Donnell was one of the first to find out: “We had been living with that name for over a year and had made quite a number of promotional trailers with Halo as the name and the monks singing over the title screen. Once we arrived in Redmond and had settled in to work on the Xbox version we got a call from the PR folks to have a meeting. The only ones from Bungie to show up at the MS PR meeting were Jaime Griesemer and I. They made the pitch to us about how to market the game and how excited they were that it was going to do well with the fans. The only thing they insisted on changing, based on their research, was the name Halo. We asked to see what they were using for testing with the sample demographic and it was a horribly cut together montage of action shooting scenes accompanied by speed metal music. They told us the test subjects were confused by the name because it didn’t seem like a war game name. We said thanks but no thanks and left the room. Eventually we had to compromise with the PR/Marketing folks at MS and let them add the extra ‘Combat Evolved’ name. We didn’t want it, but it turned out ok. It’s the name printed on the box, but it doesn’t show up in the game itself.” At Microsoft, the prevailing opinion was that the name Halo all by itself didn’t tell players that they were going to be playing as a supersoldier. Worse yet, in some languages the word Halo sounded too feminine. This was something that must be avoided at all costs, back in a time when most gamers were young men. AAA productions, and action games in particular, never shied away from playing on macho clichés in their communication materials in order to appeal to this demographic. In the end, Bungie agreed to add a sub-title, which didn’t go down too well in-house: at the time, very few games had sub-titles, and the one suggested by Microsoft wasn’t exactly catchy. Griesemer recalls, “We thought that was the stupidest thing ever. It doesn’t mean anything, it’s not really informational, and it’s not even good grammar.” And indeed, even today the sub-title Combat Evolved is rarely–if ever–used by former members of Bungie staff to talk about the game, which they instead refer to as Halo, or Halo 1.

This slight change in the game’s name, however, did nothing to assuage the many doubts that were being aired, even in-house. On paper, the game was no longer as revolutionary as it was one year ago. For Hardy LeBel, Halo represented only a slight evolution in the FPS genre: “My thinking, at the time, was ’Okay, we’ve taken a very successful formula for first person shooters, and we added vehicles. And that’s a great innovation, it’s a great step forward. But it’s not like something the world has never seen before. […] I looked at it as kind of like a very reasonable step forward. I think what I wasn’t necessarily taking into account was the fact that it was so well-adapted to work on consoles. And that was really two innovations in one.” LeBel wasn’t the only one questioning the game. Within Bungie, the most optimistic voices were expecting at best a modest success similar to what they had achieved with Myth and Myth II, for example. But what did they know?

7 Now the Museum of Pop Culture.

Chapter 7 – The Xbox Hit Game

Bungie was now on the home straight, and getting ready to introduce gamers all over the world to Halo: Combat Evolved. The developers didn’t know it at the time, but they were about to pass through a decisive moment in their history, the kind that changes the lives of a studio and its staff forever. Because Halo wouldn’t just be the best game to accompany the launch of Microsoft’s Xbox, but also one of the biggest commercial phenomena in the history of video games. This success was made possible by its epic story, its enthralling universe and, most of all, its totally unexpected multiplayer mode.

THE HOME STRAIGHT

On October 10, 2001, Bungie’s big day had come: Halo: Combat Evolved was finished. Jason Jones was up at the studio until dawn to make sure that his new baby was as ready as possible. The game had to be delivered to Microsoft without delay, so that copies could be sent out to the various different classification bodies, like the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) in the USA. Once the classification phase was complete, production could begin! And indeed it would… barely three weeks before the Xbox was released in November 15. The deadline was particularly tight, even for the video game industry. Of course, there was a valid reason… In this case, it was an event that was as unforeseen as it was unprecedented. The kind of delay that Microsoft could never have predicted. To get to the bottom of this delay, we need to go back to August 2001, just over a month before Jason Jones signed off on the long and convoluted development of Halo: Combat Evolved.

Summer was drawing to a close, and Bungie was working flat out to finish Halo. The levels were all ready, multiplayer mode was working. The only thing still to come was the cutscenes that Joseph Staten was finishing off, and a long list of bugs to put right. Thousands of bugs, in fact. Seropian and Jones knew that the game wasn’t deliverable in its current state, and so the entire month of August was spent fixing bugs. It was a task that was as complex as it was painstaking, because bugs had to be identified before they could be fixed, and finding them could be a real headache. And yet, there was no time to spare, because Microsoft was imposing a deadline on the various studios working on Xbox launch titles: September 11, and no later. That was the day that a long process would begin for Halo and other Microsoft Studios games. They needed to obtain their classification before Microsoft’s factories could start the production process. The next step would be to send hundreds of thousands of copies of the game all over the world, where they would patiently wait in warehouses before being shipped to their points of sale a few days before the official Xbox release date. This left Microsoft with just over two months. The software giant liked to give itself plenty of time to avoid any delays, but that wasn’t how things worked at Bungie: in a games studio, you run down the clock. And truth be told, the team was anticipating delivering their work at the last minute. Joseph Staten recorded the game’s last cutscene on September 8, three days before deadline. But there was a problem: in their current condition, none of Staten’s videos had audio. This meant that it was vital that they be forwarded to Martin O’Donnell who would add the music, dialogue, and various sound effects he had created with Jay Weinland, Bungie’s sound designer. The math was simple: they had three days before Halo was sent off for classification, and 33 cutscenes to edit. If they did 11 per day, the game would be ready for the evening of September 11, and Bungie would meet the deadline set by Microsoft. So O’Donnell got to work. On September 10, he had finished 22 cutscenes: he was on schedule and he could just make out the finish line. When he went home that day he could relax, because he knew that tomorrow his work would be done. Halo would be ready, and after that it was out of the studio’s hands. The developers all knew that between the classification phases and the game going into production, they would have a few extra days to iron out any stubborn bugs. This would be needed for multiplayer, in particular. O’Donnell was going to hit the hay and try to forget about the game he’d spent three years working on for just a few hours. The next day, it would all be over.

Sadly, the universe had other plans. On September 11, 2001, O’Donnell got out of bed and went to have breakfast with his family. When he found his wife and daughters, they were in front of the TV, rendered completely speechless. Terrorists had attacked New York and two airliners had crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre complex in the heart of Manhattan. “My wife and my daughters are freaking out, and I see what’s happening,” O’Donnell remembers. “While we’re watching this thing, I realize I don’t know if the world is ending. I called Jay [Weinland] and he was already at the studio. I said, ‘What are you doing? Go home. Who else is there?’ He said that everybody was. I’m like, are you kidding me? We had all gotten to such a fever pitch that we thought we couldn’t even lose a day. It was really kind of insane. I went over and made everyone go home.” The world stood still, but this meant that Bungie could keep working without such a pressing deadline. For weeks, the country and its economy were working in slow motion, the result of the trauma inflicted by the attacks and the emotional shock, which was very raw. Large companies weren’t immune from the effects, not even Microsoft, which asked its staff to follow President Bush’s advice and avoid long journeys. Unfortunately, some staff were already away on business when the attacks occurred. This was the case for several members of the Xbox division, in particular, who had been touring the country on a series of meetings ahead of the console’s release. The group included Robbie Bach, the director of Xbox, and Seamus Blackley. In a twist of fate, Blackley was in New York on September 11, or rather, above New York. From the plane, he watched the thick plumes of smoke darken the Manhattan skies, and his flight was diverted to Buffalo as a safety precaution. Bach, too, was in New York that day, but unlike his colleague, he was still in the city when the first plane struck. American airspace was quickly locked down, and his flight to Seattle, like so many others, was cancelled. The big boss at Microsoft and the few colleagues he was with then decided to hire a car and get back to their families on the other side of the country as soon as possible. It would take them around 50 hours to travel the 2850 miles to Seattle.

It goes without saying that the schedule initially set by the Xbox team had been turned completely on its head, but there was a silver lining: Bungie now had a few more weeks to refine its game. Or more specifically, the multiplayer mode in Halo: Combat Evolved. When played on the same console everything worked, but the LAN mode was packed with bugs that made it difficult to play. Bungie faced a dilemma, and even made plans to remove that particular feature. Within the studio, some wondered whether it wouldn’t be better to just remove multiplayer mode altogether, rather than shipping an incomplete game mode. In the end a few developers, accompanied by Jason Jones, pulled a series of all-nighters to fix the remaining bugs. So it came to pass that, over the night of October 9-10, 2001, they had done it: Halo: Combat Evolved was finished. A few bugs remained, but Jones wasn’t worried about them. They were almost unnoticeable. There was one last thing he wanted to do, though. In secret. Finding himself alone at last, he added one last line of code to his game. He made one value bigger: the damage inflicted by the magnum, the handgun used by Master Chief in the single-player campaign, as well as by the Spartans in multiplayer mode. To avoid the appearance of any new bugs, Jones thought it best to write a separate line of code rather than edit what had already been written, and the game would process his change during its loading screens, like the ones between two levels. Behind this unusual addition lay a carefully considered decision in game design: the magnum, like the sniper rifle, was one of the only weapons in the game that could pull off a headshot, which caused more damage than a standard shot. The most skillful players could use the magnum and its scope to make short work of the toughest enemies like the Elites. In multiplayer, it would produce matches that were more interesting than assault rifle battles, because players would soon learn how many bullets, and therefore how much time, it took to kill an enemy. In a duel, though, the winner would be the one who shot with the most accuracy, or who was able to move around cleverly to dodge bullets. It would generate a bit of tension and give matches a bit of pace. With his line of code added to the game, Jason Jones turned off his computer. This time, it really was all over.

When he got home, Jones was relieved, of course, but he couldn’t help feeling a bit frustrated. It was the first time in Bungie’s history that it had been forced to work to a deadline set in stone by an inflexible boss. And he didn’t like it. Halo was developed in a rush and that wasn’t the way things were usually done at Bungie. As an independent studio, Bungie could afford the luxury of pushing back the release of one of its new products by a few weeks or even months. But those days were over, and he knew it. Bungie now belonged to Microsoft, and while Seropian and Jones’ bosses seemed to care about the studio’s different needs, the company had already spent billions of dollars on their Xbox launch. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer were all too conscious of the fact that the console would earn zilch for Microsoft. But the two men had a long-term vision: this first console was just a seed, planted with a view to growing into a mighty oak. The Xbox should enable Microsoft to become a major player in the games console market, and they needed Halo and the other games if they were to get there. When they sold Bungie to Microsoft, Seropian and Jones were fully aware of this, and it was even part of what made their decision. Jones knew what it might mean, then, especially in terms of freedom. But that didn’t stop him from expressing his annoyance, most notably in an interview published on December 18, 2001, just a month following the release of Halo and the Xbox. When he was asked to name something that he didn’t like in Halo’s development, his answer was clear and straight to the point: “[The] Lack of time; Xbox launch as an inflexible deadline.” That would also be the first and only time that a Halo game accompanied the launch of an Xbox console.

However, despite his frustration, Jones was the first to admit that the development of Halo: Combat Evolved had gone amazingly well, despite its ups and downs. Because one thing was still true: while work on the game may have begun in 1998, the acquisition by Microsoft in 2000, and then the game’s port over to the Xbox meant that Bungie had to redo almost all of the development from scratch. Managing to make a game of such scale in such a short time frame was nothing short of a minor miracle, and the studio execs all knew it. “In the midst of those last days, I told a friend that Halo was like a cathedral self-assembling out of a hurricane,” Jones tells us. “The speed at which new bits of art and sound and design were smacking into just the right place and being mortared into the whole was astonishing. We all sort of sat around in the after days, collectively wondering how the hell it had all come together and having a nervous laugh at the whole thing because it seemed kind of supernatural.” Jones had an even harder time realizing that, for the first time in Bungie’s history, he had played the role of a supervisor, a guide. The studio had grown, and while he had been used to rolling up his sleeves and getting stuck in, Bungie’s co-founder now needed to take a step back and learn how to delegate. “I didn’t get to script a single level, wrote none of the dialogue, and only did a small amount of coding. Everyone else got to do the glorious work,” he would explain a few weeks after Halo’s release.

A RESOUNDING CRITICAL AND COMMERCIAL SUCCESS

That glorious work was soon earning accolades from the press. On October 23, Microsoft began sending out the first copies of its new console to the big video game magazines. Of course, each Xbox came with a few games, one of which was Halo: Combat Evolved. The critics were unanimous, and perfect reviews started to stream in. The reviewers lauded the writing, the level design, the music, the artificial intelligence that blew everyone’s minds, and then the game’s amazing playability. For the very first time, a console FPS felt perfectly playable. It took a few minutes to get used to, but the controller’s two analog sticks and the precision controls made Halo the first FPS that was comfortable to play with a joypad. Prior to Halo, GoldenEye 007 on the Nintendo 64 had delivered a generally acceptable experience, but the end result was far less convincing than in Halo. After months of hard work and experimentation, Jaime Griesemer had found the perfect balance: players did get some help, but at very low levels (the permissible margin of error was around 5 %), so that players felt like they had achieved something when they landed a shot, especially one to the head. The program for interpreting player input from the controller’s two analog sticks worked perfectly, delivering impressive precision. It was a bit of a revolution, in fact: indirectly, Halo had paved the way for many future FPS that would draw on Bungie’s work to make the move over to consoles in the coming years.

On November 15, 2001, the Xbox was at long last available in stores around the world. The Xbox team, accompanied by Bill Gates, met at Toys “R” Us in Times Square in New York. It was there, at 00: 01, that the first consoles were sold. The first ever Xbox owner was a young man named Eduardo Glucksman. He had waited in line for 12 hours to be the first one through the doors at midnight. The icing on the cake was Bill Gates himself handing him his Xbox, after playing him at Fuzion Frenzy, a game developed by Blitz Games for the Xbox launch. As soon as he had his console, journalists descended on Glucksman to ask him about the Xbox and his passion for video games. The press had convened on the event en masse, mainly special correspondents from major dailies and national TV networks. Microsoft may not yet have convinced the specialist press, but the “generalist” press was watching the software giant’s entry into the video games industry very closely. This meant that it got a lot of press coverage. Gamers also quickly took to the console, especially in the United States, where the Xbox proved popular with an older, more tech-savvy demographic. The console was noticeably more powerful than the PlayStation 2, and featured some headline technical innovations like the built-in hard drive and the Ethernet port that would soon enable the Xbox to connect to the internet. Both of these components would become musts for the next generation of consoles. And yet, when the Xbox hit the shelves, specialists in the field thought that these two gadgets wouldn’t count for much when weighed up against what they saw as the Microsoft console’s biggest weakness: the lack of a mascot, an iconic figure who could represent the brand with the green X. The Xbox had no Mario, no Sonic… not even a Crash Bandicoot. How could it march to battle against its competitors without a standard-bearer of its own? This was a question that Microsoft’s representatives were asked repeatedly, and one they could never really answer: “What a character game gives you is it makes it much easier for you to brand (your console),” said John O’Rourke, at the time senior director of Xbox marketing. “We don’t have to have it to be successful. But we’d like to have it.” This strange statement, and the simple fact that the press was asking about which character represented the Xbox, demonstrates how when Microsoft’s new console arrived in stores, Halo had not yet established itself as the console-seller8 it would become. Critics in the video-gaming press were enraptured by the game, but the gaming public had not yet made Master Chief’s acquaintance. But that day was coming soon.

The Xbox launch proved to be a resounding success. Preorders placed nationwide were all fulfilled, and several hundred thousand consoles quickly found a forever home. At Microsoft, the celebrations were in full swing. But not quite so much in the Bungie offices. The staff were exhausted, and the prevailing emotions were happiness and relief at having delivered their game at long last. Low key drinks were organized, and then they all went home for a well-earned rest. “It was beautiful,” Jones says. “I went home and finally got to see what my house looked like. I had never really moved in. I still had my license plates from Chicago.”

But exhaustion soon gave way to an amazing feeling of accomplishment in Bungie’s two co-founders. Halo was a smash hit and the sales figures were growing day by day. “People forget that Halo wasn’t a chart-burner right off the bat,” Jaime Griesemer recalls. “I’m not even sure it was the best-selling launch title. But it had this insanely long tail, where every week the Xbox would sell a certain number of units and something like 50 % of those sales would convert into Halo sales. So it just kept selling. Two years after it came out, it was still in the top 10 sellers on the console. That’s almost unheard of now.” That appraisal is an accurate one, because in the first few days following the Xbox’s release, players turned mainly to the games that they were most familiar with, but thanks to word of mouth and articles in the gaming press, within a few weeks Halo had built an excellent reputation. Its success was undeniable: Bungie’s game was carrying the Microsoft console, just like Ed Fries thought it would when he bought the studio two years earlier. On April 8, 2002, the software company in Redmond was proud to announce that its shooter had crossed the threshold of one million copies sold. In those days, that was an outstanding achievement. Players embraced Master Chief, to the extent that he became the Xbox’s unofficial mascot. He was that iconic character that Microsoft was thought to be lacking. Players were enthralled by Halo’s gameplay, by its characters, by its mysterious universe, and its music. But there was something else that got them hooked on Halo. A powerful vector for transmission that enabled Bungie’s game to reach an ever-larger audience. And it was something that Bungie had never seen coming for even a split second.

REVOLUTIONARY MULTIPLAYER

“Everybody was pushing to keep multiplayer in, but none of us knew just what it would mean,” Pete Parsons would reveal in 2013. Parsons was part of the Xbox marketing team when the console was launched. An avid gamer and already familiar with Bungie’s work, he started working for them as a studio manager in 2002. When he got there, he found a team that was still being blown away by Halo’s success: almost a year had passed since the game was released and sales were continuing to grow. The game was being picked up by people of all ages, races, and backgrounds. Celebrities regularly dropped by the studio to meet the people behind their new favorite hobby. Justin Timberlake, Hayden Christensen, and Linkin Park–to name but a few–all visited the studio when they were staying in Seattle. But despite this, in-house Bungie was yet to fully grasp the scale of Halo’s success and the impact it was having on all those gamers. “It wasn’t until later when I’d be visiting someplace like Vegas and come across the Master Chief standing on the boulevard alongside some Transformers and Spiderman that it hit me how iconic a character he had really become,” Marcus Lehto tells us. “I’d take pictures with the poor guys in these suits under the intense sun knowing full well they had no idea I had designed the suit they were wearing.”

In Halo: Combat Evolved, there was one feature in particular that Bungie and Microsoft had certainly underestimated: its multiplayer mode. Playable by up to four players in split-screen mode, it meant that Xbox owners could invite their friends over for a game. Halo’s controls and the depth of its multiplayer mode won over a lot of gamers, who decided to buy the console and a copy of the game for themselves. In the United States, where Bungie’s latest game was encountering the most success, Halo was becoming a real social phenomenon: people were getting together and hosting huge LAN parties in their homes, and Bungie staff would sometimes drop by. Despite the game’s success, the studio retained this special connection with players, and was in contact with them on a daily basis on its forums or by email. At every LAN party they visited, they noticed the same thing: people who were happy to get together and play, even though some of them were meeting for the very first time. Bungie had always boasted an extremely engaged community, but with Halo it took on a hitherto unknown dimension. In the USA and many other countries around the world, Halo quickly came to set the gold standard for console FPS games. GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark, two shooters released on the Nintendo 64 and known for their multiplayer modes, soon became ancient history: Halo had more variety, more depth, and it was more fun to play. It had become the new benchmark for multiplayer FPS on consoles, and would inspire many new games to come, like Time Splitters 2 and the Call of Duty series.

The multiplayer mode in Halo: Combat Evolved would also see the emergence of parody videos posted online and made entirely by fans of the game. These included a mini-series entitled Red Vs. Blue, whose first episodes appeared online in early 2003. Michael Burns and a few of his friends made use of a bug known to players that caused the Spartans to lower their weapons, with the effect that on screen, they appeared more relaxed than if they were constantly taking aim. They then wrote a series of scripts that they recorded themselves, and then used Halo: Combat Evolved’s multiplayer mode to play out their scenes. A satire of shooting games and military life, Red Vs. Blue quickly secured an audience and enabled Burns and his friends to start their own company, Rooster Teeth. Their web series would win swathes of awards and now spans around 15 seasons, with Red Vs. Blue and Halo serving as a launchpad for Rooster Teeth, which today delivers daily entertainment to nine million subscribers.

A SOUNDTRACK SETS THE SCORE

Another thing about Halo: Combat Evolved that gained rapid popularity among its players was the soundtrack. Martin O’Donnell’s compositions had been lauded by the press, and the gaming public could only agree. It was rare for so many iconic tracks to be found in an FPS, with their percussion and soaring violins–sounds that were not usually heard in sci-fi games. Before long, players were demanding that the soundtrack be released on CD, just as O’Donnell thought might happen. In the past, Bungie had made its games’ soundtracks available for download, and O’Donnell had expected the same thing to happen with Halo. In the meantime, though, circumstances had changed: Bungie now belonged to Microsoft, which owned the intellectual property rights to Halo… and therefore its soundtracks. At first, O’Donnell came up against a brick wall. “What happened was we finished Halo 1, and I went to Bungie or to Microsoft, and I said ‘Hey, there’s enough music in here, and the fans expect this, we should release a soundtrack for Halo 1.’ And Microsoft goes like, ‘Well, you know, we don’t normally do that, we need to think about it, we need to get people in a room and talk.’ And they just dragged their feet for a couple of months at least. I would keep going back to them, saying ‘Please, would you ship the Halo 1 soundtrack? I’ve got it ready to go, I can just make a CD and go.’ And that’s just not the way Microsoft did things, they had to analyze the business and stuff.” But a few months later, O’Donnell would find an unexpected ally in the form of Nile Rodgers. The guitarist and producer who’d worked with many international artists (including names like Madonna and David Bowie) was then in a New York studio recording Maroon 5’s first album. But something was distracting the band, and work on Songs About Jane was taking longer than Rodgers had planned. He eventually had to ask Maroon 5 why the recording sessions were going so slowly. Adam Levine and the rest of the band then told him about a new console and game that they’d been completely obsessed with for a few weeks now. They invited the producer to join them and check out Halo: Combat Evolved for himself. Rodgers wasn’t really a gamer, but he was intrigued. He sat down with them and watched them play a few games, before finding his ear drawn to the title music. He was immediately smitten with Halo’s compositions, and started trying to find out who was behind them.

A few weeks later, Martin O’Donnell was invited to a meeting, but nobody would tell him what was on the agenda. As it turned out, the meeting was about the Halo soundtrack, but as there’d already been five meetings about it with absolutely zero results, O’Donnell wasn’t expecting this meeting to be a fruitful one, either. But then he opened the door and came face to face with Nile Rodgers, so perhaps this time would be different. Rodgers was delighted to be meeting the composer at last, and it was slowly dawning on O’Donnell what was actually happening there in that room. The producer had won Microsoft round in record time, and his production company, Sumthing Distribution, would release and distribute Halo’s soundtrack. It was a first for both Rodgers and the games industry, as no video game soundtrack had ever enjoyed such a high profile. Indeed, the soundtrack’s commercial success would encourage plenty of other studios and publishers to release the soundtracks to their own games.

HALO GOES CROSS-MEDIA

Jason Jones had always wanted to tell stories, wanted his games to be set in complex, internally consistent universes. With Halo, he knew that this dream could become a reality, if only because of Microsoft’s deep pockets. Of course, Jones was right: the software giant was home to people whose job it was to flesh out the universes of the studio’s various games. They wrote extensive background, collated all the information available about these virtual worlds, took part in the marketing campaigns, and even wrote storylines for the games in question. And of course, when Microsoft acquired Bungie and Halo, the idea of publishing a novel was floated quite early on. Joseph Staten was in on these conversations, and it was decided to tell the story of how the war between the Covenant and Earth began, as well as the origins of the Spartan-II supersoldiers, of whom Master Chief was the last of their number in Halo: Combat Evolved. The book, then, would tell the story of Halo before Halo. The idea didn’t go down too well with some staff at Bungie, who would rather keep Master Chief as a blank canvas so that he was easier for players to identify with. But after lengthy negotiations, the project was given the go-ahead. The actual writing of the novel was entrusted to Eric Nylund, one of the authors at Microsoft Game Studios, but he would have to curb his enthusiasm for a little while yet. His work was delayed for a while due to a number of legal constraints, but this at least meant that by the time he started the writing process Bungie had all but finished the game’s story. Nylund was also able to watch the full development process for Halo, meaning that he was now very familiar with the game universe. He also had at his disposal a powerful tool: the lore book first compiled by Robert McLees and fleshed out by Joseph Staten over a period of almost two years. This weighty tome contained all there was to know about the game universe: how the ringworld worked, human technology, the finer points of Covenant society… Now, Nylund worked with Bungie to add some lore of his own. He invented the origin story for the Spartans, and for Master Chief in particular, which was when the person behind the visor was given a name: John. But before he could put pen to paper, Nylund had to get every last one of his ideas approved by Bungie. With that done, it would take him seven weeks to write Halo: The Fall of Reach. The name was a little bit misleading because the novel didn’t just describe what happened at the Battle of Reach, but also covered the thirty years leading up to the events in the game. It recounted the origins of the Spartan-II project, the children kidnapped to join the program and their indoctrination, the biochemical enhancement procedures that turned them into superhuman creatures… But also humanity’s first encounter with the Covenant Empire and the first battles between the UNSC and their alien foes. The novel ended with the Battle of Reach, and the Pillar of Autumn fleeing towards an unknown destination. This made it the perfect introduction to the Halo universe, which is precisely why Halo: The Fall of Reach was released on October 30, 2001, two weeks before the game. It didn’t exactly fly off the shelves when it was first published, but following the release of Halo: Combat Evolved its sales exploded. In early 2003, one hundred thousand copies had been sold in the USA and United Kingdom, but it would be a few years yet before The Fall of Reach was translated into other languages. Its success enabled Microsoft to sign a contract with Del Rio, the novel’s publisher, for another series of publications, including two new novels. The first, Halo: The Flood, is a novelization of Halo: Combat Evolved, while the second, Halo: First Strike, recounts the events that took place before Halo 2.

It marked the beginning of a long cross-media adventure for the franchise which would go on to release a series of traditional and graphic novels over the following years.

With Halo: Combat Evolved now on sale, the staff at Bungie were enjoying some well-earned rest. They were thoroughly exhausted, and while the game’s development had gone well overall, the sustained pace of work imposed by the need to release the game at the same time as the Xbox had taken its toll on the health of some at studio. This was particularly true of Jason Jones who, shortly after delivering Halo, took a long leave of absence and was not heard from for several weeks. This absence was understood and forgiven by all at Bungie. At the time, Bungie was a team of some 30 staff, who all worked in the same friendly, family atmosphere they brought with them from Chicago. Big boss he may be, but Jones was part of this family where management hierarchies didn’t really exist. “Jason had a difficult time separating work from external life during the making of Halo,” Marcus Lehto would explain in 2017, long after he’d left Bungie. “It consumed him in a way that ultimately hurt him physically. He internalizes a lot and bears a lot of responsibility and burden on his own shoulders, for the team and the well-being of any project.”

But the completion of Halo: Combat Evolved’s also ushered in a few happier events, like the wedding of Robert McLees and Lorraine Reyes, two artists who had been working together more often since Microsoft acquired Bungie and dissolved its marketing department, where Reyes was working as artistic director. The wedding did much to lift the spirits of the studio which, after a few weeks off, started getting ready for Jones’ return, and with him news of Bungie’s next adventure.

HALO 1.5 OR HALO 2?

It was a reinvigorated Jason Jones who returned to work. He had spent a lot of time thinking: Halo was a very good game, but it was rushed, and he’d had to discard a number of interesting ideas. This was frustrating for the designer in Jones, who had been unable to fulfil his vision. But he knew that given Halo: Combat Evolved’s runaway success, it was unlikely that Microsoft would be against Bungie developing a sequel. Jones’ first approach would be to gauge the appetite among a few key members of the Bungie team, like Martin O’Donnell. The old hand was shocked when Jones told him he wanted to make a sequel. “I remember Jason Jones coming over and saying ‘Yeah, I wanna start working on the sequel,’” the musician recalls. “And I’m like ‘Jason, you don’t do sequels, you don’t like to do sequels.’ The true story is he doesn’t like doing the sequels. He likes doing the first one. Myth II was a struggle for him personally. So he was trying to give the project lead over to Tuncer [Deniz]. But I knew Jason just was not a fan… Personally, he just sort of loses his interest in sequels. That’s my experience with Jason.” It was true: Bungie had already developed a number of sequels, but Jones played a smaller role in each new instalment. Marathon 2 was without a doubt the least painful for him because he still had a lot of ideas and was enthusiastic about trying them out and implementing them in the Marathon universe. The same could be true of Halo 2. But more than anything else, Bungie’s co-founder was worried about the fate of his team, as O’Donnell recalls: “I said ‘Wow Jason, that’s not what you like doing,’ and he says ‘Yeah, but… We brought all these people out here,’ And I said ‘You don’t owe anything to anybody, what you owe is to do your best work, and we all made a decision to move here and to do Halo 1, and that’s enough. That’s a great ride.” But Jones was adamant: “He says ‘No, there’s still stuff that hasn’t been done that I wanna do,’ so I said ‘Okay if you really wanna do Halo 2, let’s all get behind you and do it.’” The idea spread around the studio, where it was met with a lot of support. A number of developers were just as frustrated as Jones with having to develop Halo: Combat Evolved in a rush and being forced to take out so much content at the last minute because it wasn’t quite finished. “Everybody wanted to do a sequel,” recalls Jaime Griesemer, “Because there was so much cut out of Halo that we basically had enough ideas and concepts to make another game.” The studio’s engineers felt the same, knowing that they hadn’t been able to showcase what the Xbox was really capable of: “We had learned so much about the console and how we could take advantage of it,” says Chris Butcher. “We had so many new directions we knew we could go in.”

When it came to the Xbox team, however, they weren’t quite on the same track. Everyone was eager to see Halo 2, of course, but the schedule and financial imperatives imposed a few constraints of their own. Jay Allard, Xbox hardware manager, and Ed Fries, the software manager, regularly crossed swords. Allard knew that it would take Bungie time to develop Halo 2, but he was in need of big releases to fill the Xbox calendar for late 2002. He wanted Fries to put pressure on Bungie and get them to quickly churn out Halo “1.5,” which would be compatible with Xbox Live. The online gaming service was due to launch on November 15, 2002, and the Xbox needed games to help promote it. With the global success encountered by Halo: Combat Evolved’s multiplayer mode, Halo 1.5 would be destined for great things. At least, that was Allard’s thinking. But Fries couldn’t bring himself to force Bungie to rush out a new product, especially if it was one they didn’t have much enthusiasm for. By this time, Fries was very familiar with the studio and he knew that when Bungie began working on a new game, it had to be a genuine progression, a real step up from the previous game. Within Bungie, the initial discussions about Halo 2 were going well and the teams were raring to go: the game would be spectacular. Nobody envisioned for a moment revisiting Halo: Combat Evolved to deliver a version compatible with Xbox Live. Allard then suggested a downloadable extension that could give Halo a second wind and simultaneously generate Xbox Live subscriptions and console sales. But Halo had no need of a second wind: while Allard and Fries were talking about it, the game was still riding the top of the Xbox charts. What’s more, this extension would push back the release of Halo 2, which was unthinkable. Allard and Fries could find no common ground. Allard enjoyed a certain prestige at Microsoft because he had always managed to deliver his projects to deadline, and never late. These were mainly software programs and server technology. He was convinced that video game production could be managed in the same way. “J’s position was, this is Bungie’s job. Go do your job. This is the single most important thing,” an anonymous source explains in Dean Takahashi’s book, The Xbox 360 Uncloaked. “When we tried to explain it to him, he couldn’t rationalize it.” Allard wanted the video game studios working for Microsoft Studios to operate like those working for Electronic Arts, another American publisher that had built a solid reputation by releasing a new FIFA game every year, and every year encountering the same success. But for many games, like Halo, this way of working just wasn’t appropriate.

WHAT ABOUT THE PC?

Fries eventually managed to find a way to keep Allard happy: he would start work on a PC port of Halo: Combat Evolved. Microsoft had made a series of promises to PC gamers who wasted no time in voicing their anger when Halo became an Xbox exclusive. But there was no question of Bungie wasting its time on such a project. This meant that Fries would offer the opportunity to develop the port on behalf of Microsoft to Gearbox Software. Founded in 1999 by a number of industry veterans, Gearbox was still a small studio, and in 2002 it was primarily known for making extensions for Half-Life, as well as the PlayStation 2 port of Valve’s game. It was hardly an illustrious resumé, but that wouldn’t stop Fries from giving them Halo: Combat Evolved. But PC gamers would have to wait until September 30, 2003 to get their version of Bungie’s FPS. Upon its release, however, the PC port missed its mark, being lambasted by critics and players for its poor optimization. Despite its dated graphics, the game required a high-end gaming rig to be playable. And as if that were not enough, the co-op mode was missing, despite being one of the game’s major strengths. While the whole experience wasn’t really profitable for Microsoft, it was for Gearbox, which learned a lot through working on Halo: Combat Evolved, with the influence of Bungie’s game being particularly noticeable in Borderlands, released in 2009.

8 A term used to describe a game that was popular enough to encourage people to buy a console.

Chapter 8 – Halo 2: The Most Eagerly Anticipated Game of Its Generation

At last, it was official: Bungie would start work on Halo 2. Now fully rested, the staff returned to work motivated to do a better job than with the first game. They were under fewer time constraints and, most importantly, they had lots of unused ideas that were oven-ready for the new game. What the studio could not know when they started work was that Bungie was about to go through the most challenging period in its history.

RARING TO GO

In the beginning, Bungie had no intention of making Halo a trilogy. But when they got down to work on the sequel in mid-2002, there was an explosion of ideas. After locking himself away in a corner of the studio, Jason Jones came back to his colleagues and held a series of meetings, the first of which focused on the story for Halo 2. At top of the list were a few ideas that were set in stone: at least part of the game had to take place on Earth, and Master Chief had to meet Captain Keyes’ daughter, who blamed him for her father’s death. Keyes’ daughter then struck a deal with the Prophets, the Covenant’s leaders, to consign Master Chief to a fate of certain death. Joe Staten, who attended these meetings, recalls how, “She’s really mad at the Master Chief, so she puts a bomb on his back and throws him into a hole. I was like, ‘Hold on a sec, you want to make the daughter of Captain Keyes one of the villains?’ ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘it’s going to be great!’ I’m just like, ‘Dude, I don’t see it.’ I think the longest conversations that we had about Halo 2 were wrestling about that one scene.” Jones was particularly keen to focus on scenes that showcased Master Chief. In one of them, the Spartan would find himself in orbit above Earth, and while looking down on a planet that had been ravaged by the Covenant, he would pronounce: “Only blood can pay for this.” A bit too corny, this particular scene was scrapped, but its spirit can be seen in the description of the Uprising mission in the release version of the game: “This is certain. The Brutes shall pay for the blood they have spilled.”

And so was sketched the initial outline of the plot: following his victory on Halo in the first game, Master Chief returns to Earth only to see it attacked by a Covenant fleet. The battle was a short one because the aliens decide to flee, with the humans in hot pursuit. After a series of twists (the details had not yet been worked out), the Covenant and the USNC do battle on Earth in the final showdown. The final levels were a race against the clock to find a Forerunner weapon hidden on the planet. Of course, Master Chief would foil the Covenant’s plans, thereby putting an end to the war. But for this, the second instalment, Bungie wanted to make things a bit more nuanced. The first game’s plot was ultimately pretty straightforward, and there weren’t many reversals of fortune. With Halo 2, Bungie wanted to do better. “I don’t know if we are crazy or stupid, or if we just like good stories or what,” Jones would relate in the game’s making-of. “But we certainly worry about that a lot more than what you might think we’d have to in a game that’s mostly just about action and about not thinking.” And Joseph Staten had an interesting idea for a way to bring greater depth to the plot in Halo 2: give players the opportunity to see the conflict from another angle, that of the enemy. In this idea, on some levels players would control a Covenant soldier instead of Master Chief. He began imagining a Sangheili general stripped of his rank after failing to protect Halo. Rather than sentencing him to death, the Prophets gave him a chance to redeem himself through a series of suicide missions. He would then become the Dervish: the hand of the prophets. This name, taken from Persian, would later be changed at the suggestion of Microsoft’s marketing department, and Bungie would opt for a more neutral name: the Arbiter. This change didn’t go down too well with Martin O’Donnell, who had already finished recording most of the voice acting. Staten shared his idea with Jaime Griesemer, before telling anyone else about it. The idea wasn’t received as well as he had imagined. Marcus Lehto recalls how, “Playing the Arbiter worked fine in the end, but it was something that I didn’t like. I wasn’t excited about it, and I felt like it was going way off the rails from where we started.” An opinion that was shared by Martin O’Donnell: “We had a great plot twist in Halo when you discover the Flood. We kept that secret from everybody–it was a wonderful moment and a great reversal, as everything you thought you knew was now different. I told Joe that I didn’t see that in Halo 2. He replied, ‘It’s when you realize that you’re playing as the Arbiter.’ But no, that’s not a plot twist. Not at all. I could never convince them it wasn’t. It wasn’t a good reversal; it was just a mechanic that was unsatisfying.” While Lehto and O’Donnell harbored some serious doubts, Staten found a lot of support elsewhere in the studio and his idea was approved. This meant that he would have to bring the Covenant Empire to life, to shed light on its society, and so the artists got to work. The first job was to finish off the concepts dating from Halo, beginning with the Prophets. This task fell to Shi Kai Wang and Eric Arroyo, who picked up Wang’s old drawings: these aliens needed to appear physically weak, and as sinister as they were intelligent. These weren’t warriors, but rather politicians, philosophers, thinkers. Wang hit on the right look by designing a creature that looked vaguely human in shape, but with giant eyeballs and long fingers. It wasn’t standing, but seated comfortably on a chair floating a few feet off the ground. Its garments implied a certain nobility while also accentuating the religious nature of their social standing. The Prophets now had a face.

Bungie’s artists kept up their momentum by padding out the Covenant bestiary and building their world, and from an old concept for the Prophets, Wang created the Drones: flying insect-like creatures. Bungie wanted Halo 2 to contain a wider variety of enemies and developed a series of new concepts. These included the Drinol, a gigantic monster. The studio saw it as a wild beast kept in captivity and starved by the Covenant, only ever to be released on the battlefield. For a while it was conceived as a possibility for a boss, but this was discarded because Jason Jones wasn’t very keen on the whole boss fight concept. Jones had for a long time been trying to distance his games from the clichés of the genre, especially those created by id Software’s Doom and the first wave of FPS that imitated it. These special battles needed to be meaningful and serve a narrative purpose rather than just an arbitrary test to access the next level.

In parallel, Eddie Smith, a concept artist recently hired by Marcus Lehto, was beginning a far more important task: the design of a whole new alien race, the Brutes, who would play a central role in Halo 2’s plot. Something like a cross between a bear and a gorilla, these extremely tough but not always very smart creatures were destined to replace the Elites in the Covenant hierarchy. Staten wanted Master Chief and the Arbiter to join forces and do battle against the remnants of the Alliance. To make that possible, he needed a reversal, an event that was significant enough to cause the Elite to betray his leaders. This reversal would take place over a number of phases. Firstly, the Arbiter would be tasked with assassinating another Sangheili, the leader of a heretic faction. This heretic leader was in contact with 343 Guilty Spark, Halo’s protective AI in the first game, who revealed the truth about the ringworlds: The Great Journey that the Prophets spoke of did not exist; the Halos were weapons of mass destruction and the Forerunners weren’t gods. The heretic leader planned to make this revelation known to as many in his society as possible, before being robbed of the opportunity by the Arbiter’s successful completion of his mission. Growing suspicious, the Prophets decided to give command of their armies to the Brutes, who suddenly replaced the Sangheili. By the time the Arbiter realized that the heretic leader was speaking the truth it was too late: the Brutes were massacring Elites all over the galaxy. This triggered the Great Schism, when the Sangheili left the Covenant alliance and for a while fought alongside the UNSC against the Prophets. The Brutes, or the Jiralhanae as they were known in the Halo universe, were given a very special treatment indeed, as it was Shi Kai Wang himself who eventually settled on the right look: his concept was approved and his creatures were ready for 3D modelling. Along the way, he used the opportunity to create a unique Jiralhanae character: Tartarus, the Brute chieftain. Unlike the soldiers under his command, Tartarus had silver fur that made him easy to tell apart. This wasn’t enough for Wang, though, who was looking for another way to make his special status clearly visible on-screen. In the end, he found inspiration in an unexpected place: “We were trying to think of a way to distinguish the Tartarus from the rest of the pack. And the main bad guy in Gremlins 2 had a giant white mohawk, and that worked extremely well. Everybody realized who’s the boss.” Tartarus would also get to star in his own boss fight, despite Jones’ thoughts on the matter. “I really enjoyed the chair, jumping on the chair and beating the snot out of Regret,” he explained in 2007. “That was cool. But it was risky. We really didn’t know how those [the boss fights] were going to turn out. They’re so different from all the rest of the gameplay. You play for an hour and a half, and then you got something completely different. And it’s, yeah, not all that satisfying. But there was a lot of fun in them. […] but this was definitely my least favorite of the three boss battles.”

The Brutes weren’t the only ones to be given some extra attention. The UNSC was also given a thorough overhaul: a lot of Halo 2 would be set on Earth, and unlike in the first game, Master Chief and his allies would not be cut off from the rest of humanity. Human society, then, would be much more visible. Unisex uniforms were designed for officers, Cortana’s look was updated, and Master Chief’s armor was completely redesigned. The new look was explained very simply right at the start of the game: he had exchanged his old Mjolnir Mk. V armor for a newer model, the Mjolnir Mk. VI armor. Thanks to the progress the engineers had made with the new game engine, the artists working on the game could have a field day and create armor that was more detailed, more complex. Within reason, at least, because Lehto adhered to a principle of his own: “Good design lives in saying something in the simplest way possible to convey an idea and function,” his philosophy goes. “It also must inspire the viewer with something that just feels good to look at, with proper proportions, areas where the eye can rest and just soak in the composition and the other adjacent details. It’s a fine balance that I see ignored far too often these days where complexity seems to be the driving force.” To perfect the armor’s design and make Master Chief look less stiff and rigid than in Halo: Combat Evolved, Lehto asked Eddie Smith to work with the studio’s animators when designing it. After producing a series of different concepts, Smith worked with Lehto to complete what would become Master Chief’s most iconic look. The design proved so popular with players that at E3 2018, Microsoft announced that a modernized version of the armor would be making its big comeback in Halo Infinite, replacing the armor worn by Master Chief in Halo 4 and Halo 5: Guardians. Said armor was extremely detailed, but Halo fandom had mixed feelings about it.

In terms of gameplay, Halo’s designers also had plenty to keep them busy. One of the big new features was the dual wielding mode that would enable players to hold two weapons at once. Not any weapons they liked, though: it would primarily apply to small handguns. This new feature called into question the game’s golden triangle–the firearm/grenade/melee triptych–and meant that the weapons arsenal needed to be updated, at least in part. Robert McLees had a number of ideas already: he wanted to scrap the assault rifle from the first game and replace it with a new weapon whose name would better describe its abilities. The result was the Battle Rifle, more commonly known to players as the BR55 Service Rifle, or the BR for short. “If you’re like me, it’ll be the weapon that you fall back on throughout the entire game. Because it’s the go-to gun,” McLees claimed. “It’ll hopefully actually behave more like a rifle than the assault rifle did from Halo, which was more of a submachine gun. It suffered from the same things that all video game weapons suffer from, and that is they do not behave like their real-world counterparts.” A firearms fanatic, McLees had read and taken on board the criticism some players aimed at his different weapons, and this time there was no way he was going to give them anymore cause. “We had a smaller team, right, and we had a very short time to make the game,” he explains. Fortunately, while all of this was going on, Halo: Combat Evolved’s success meant that Bungie could hire new developers, and with the team suitably bolstered it was easier to get some details dialed in. When it came to the gunplay, McLees and Nathan Walpole immediately looked to the military veterans on the team, who gave them a demo of their combat training: how to shoot, how to move, how to communicate… Halo 2 would need to show large-scale battles, not just small-scale guerrilla assaults like in the first game, and in an effort to ensure maximum immersion, they did a lot of research and trying things out.

The BR wasn’t the game’s only new weapon. When it was added to the game, it had an effect on the gameplay itself, because in practical terms it replaced the magnum in Halo: Combat Evolved. Like the magnum, it was a semi-automatic weapon with great range and a scope for enhanced accuracy. As a result, the magnum had to undergo some changes, getting a new name and a new look: it was now the M6C Personal Defense System, and as its name implied it was primarily a defensive weapon whose reduced range and stopping power made it a weapon of last resort. While the magnum was rebalanced and given a makeover, the assault rifle was scrapped altogether, not even saved by its iconic reputation. It was replaced by another gun with similar capabilities, the SMG: a sub-machine gun that was small enough to enable Master Chief to carry one in each hand.

As for the Covenant, they got a sniper rifle, a carbine to serve as the alien equipment of the BR, and players could now get their hands on the famous Elite energy sword, which was already featured in Halo: Combat Evolved, but which Master Chief was unable to pick up. It was the same story with the Fuel Rod Cannon, the Covenant equivalent of the rocket-launcher. The arrival of the Brutes meant that the developers had to create weapons of their own, which is how we got the Brute Shot grenade launcher with that ferocious bayonet on its underside for use in melee combat, and the Brute Plasma Rifle, which was less powerful than the plasma rifle featured in the first Halo game, but with a greater rate of fire. To make it easier to tell the two apart, Bungie’s artists gave the Brute Plasma Rifle a red metallic coloring.

In September 2002, work was progressing and the studio was feeling confident. Halo 2 would probably be ready for release in one year’s time. In agreement with Microsoft and the Xbox team, the first trailer was aired worldwide. In it, we saw Master Chief in his new armor, marching towards what looked like a space station orbiting Earth. As for the planet itself, it was clearly under Covenant attack. The Spartan grabs a BR, strides over to an airlock, opens the armored door and launches himself into space, falling towards one of the alien vessels. The trailer was unusual in that it wasn’t made using CGI, like most video game trailers of the time. In fact, it used the game engine itself, which offered a nice look at the work done on the graphics engine. Truth be told, the Bungie engineers had been working on a new version of the Halo engine for months now, and they had made significant progress. Halo 2 now looked like it would be one of the most impressive games of its generation, and that’s without really seeing much at all. Satisfied with how its trailer was received, Bungie got back to work… just in time for someone to throw a spanner in the works of what had previously been a well-oiled machine.

ALEX SEROPIAN SAYS GOODBYE

The shocking news came in September 2002: Alexander Seropian had resigned and was leaving Bungie. The studio’s co-founder, the man who began it all, had different life goals now, most important of which was his desire to start a family in Chicago where his and his wife’s parents still lived. It came as a hard blow for everyone. Seropian was one of the pillars of the studio, and his absence would ultimately have negative consequences for the team. “Alex was the heart of Bungie,” Paul Bertone explains. “He’s a family man, and he brought that atmosphere to Bungie. There were all these other personalities bubbling underneath the surface, and they all trusted Alex without question. He’s the one that kept everybody at bay. Things just changed after he left. All of a sudden you had this whole group of people who had to figure out how to work together and deal with all these problems that Alex had been solving. A lot more politics started blooming at that point.”

For Seropian it was clear that Bungie, which now belonged to Microsoft, would be working on Halo for a long time yet. Halo 2 would never be the last game for the franchise, even if that was what the studio had planned. A lot of work lay ahead on the sequel, and he didn’t want to repeat the same experience as last time. A development timetable that was too tight for a game of that scale, there was pressure to meet deadlines, complicated relationships with his superiors… It was all too much for Seropian, who would rather return to Chicago and start a new studio. A studio where he and his staff could work in peace. Because Seropian was sure that the crunch to make Halo: Combat Evolved wouldn’t be the last time that would happen. And he didn’t think that was a healthy way to work. Some at Bungie speculated that Microsoft had too tight a grasp on Bungie, and that Seropian didn’t like that he had been stripped of some responsibilities. This was a theory that Seropian himself shot down, stating that he had only the utmost respect for his managers, people like Ed Fries and Robbie Bach: “Great guys,” was how he described them to us. And indeed, in all the years following his resignation and all the way up to today, Seropian has never had a bad word to say about the people he worked with at Microsoft; the way he tells it, he enjoyed the experience. On July 31, 2013, in a long interview with Polygon, Seropian compared Microsoft to Disney, where he worked from 2009 to 2012: “If you gotta work for a big company, I would recommend either. For different reasons, too. Microsoft very much cares about the people that work there. […] The thing I found most interesting about Disney is that if you were to ask a hundred people which is the more creative company–Microsoft or Disney–most people would say Disney. The vast majority. I found the decision-making there to be less product-focused and more financial-focused. Microsoft, granted, that might have just been a factor of the point in time and the point in the organization where I was operating. Microsoft was launching a new console. It was a new division. They weren’t expected to make any money. The bottom line on the P&L was not necessarily the most relevant factor. Things may be different now. But in terms of my experience, it was interesting ending up at a creative company that was more financially oriented than the giant business software company that was solely focused on product.”

After returning to Chicago and taking a few months off, in 2003 Seropian founded a new studio: Wideload Games. He was joined by six of his old employees, including Mark Bernal, Matt Soel, Doug Zartman, and Alex Okita. All of them came from Bungie, and had been with the studio ever since the 1945 South Halsted Street days. In 2009, with a few successful games under its belt, like Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse, Seropian would sell Wideload Games to Disney.

JASON JONES CHECKS OUT

Martin O’Donnell called it: there would come a time when Jason Jones would get bored with Halo 2 and stop working on the game. And that’s exactly what happened in 2003, when work on Halo 2 was at a very advanced stage. The studio was working on a playable demo that would be ready for the press at E3 on May 13-15. Jones was filled with confidence: his team had put in a huge amount of work, and the initial results were already very promising. “This group of people is great,” he would later say. “I’m sometimes pretty awestruck by how smart these people really are, and by the good decisions that they’re making. Yeah, I’m really proud of these guys.” Indeed, he thought that the Halo 2 team were doing such a fine job that they no longer needed him, and so he left to offer a helping hand to another team working on a completely different project. After all, Halo 2 wasn’t the only game in development at Bungie: smaller teams were working on three other projects.

The first was Gypsum, a mythical fantasy adventure game being developed under Paul Bertone. A fantasy fanatic, when work was done on Halo he had sworn that never again would he be moved to work on a sci-fi game. Gypsum was his baby and he was very proud of it, and the first playable prototypes were promising, especially the combat system that he and his team developed from scratch.

Another small team was working on Monster Hunter, the new project belonging to Hardy Lebel and Michael Evans, which made good on the promise that they could work on whatever they liked after doing such a good job with the Halo multiplayer.

The final project was Phoenix, which Jones had launched back before Halo. It had been put on the backburner for a good long while, but with Halo: Combat Evolved delivered and more developers available at the studio, Jones wasted no time resuming work on the game in 2002. And Phoenix was the game that stole his attention in early 2003. The small team working on his old prototypes had gotten a bit lost. They were going round in circles and starting to lose hope. This was when Jones made it known that he was leaving the Halo 2 team to lend a hand to the Phoenix team.

Seropian had moved on and Jones was working on another project: the managers of the Halo 2 team immediately recognized the danger. They were missing a project lead, and none of the existing staff were able to assume that role. Then one lunchtime O’Donnell and Staten levelled with their boss: “Joe and I took him out to lunch and said, ‘Jason, you can’t do this. You cannot leave the Halo 2 team.’ I told him: ‘This is the most important project Bungie has. I told you that you were going to get bored working on a sequel, but you convinced me you were going to hang in there, and put all your energy behind this.’ He’s like, ‘Oh, I can do both!’ Like he could run the Phoenix team and once a week check back in on Halo 2. Joe and I begged him, told him that wouldn’t work. And he did it anyway.”

O’Donnell and Staten gave up: Jones wasn’t for changing his mind. He enjoyed working on new ideas, experimenting with new gameplay mechanics, and that was something Halo 2 was unable to offer him. O’Donnell nevertheless made one final request of Jones: that he appoint his replacement. In the end, a small group of people would, at the boss’ request, take over the reins of Halo 2: Jaime Griesemer and Marcus Lehto, along with Chris Butcher and Michael Evans for anything that touched on engineering. But these appointments were not unanimously well-received, even among the new project leads: “I’d shipped one and a half games. I didn’t know what I was doing,” Griesemer explains. “Suddenly I was the only designer working on planning all the missions and all the enemies and everything, kind of in a vacuum. And I didn’t know anything about leading people.” Despite these doubts, the team put on a united front and pushed ahead with Halo 2. E3 was approaching and the demo was still not finished, but it did look likely to deliver a minor revolution in the video game industry.

THE WORST CRUNCH IN GAME DEVELOPMENT HISTORY

It’s a word that’s all too familiar to anyone working in video game development, whether they’re freelancers or in-house staff working for a major publisher. That word is crunch. In the video game industry, the crunch refers to a period in which the development team will have to clock many hours of sustained overtime if they are to deliver their project on time. The crunch is part of video game industry culture, with everyone in the industry being roped into it sooner or later, to the extent that it is now seen as a normal part of the development process. In 2017, Luke Timmins, director of engineering at Bungie, gave a talk on the matter, in which he explained that there’s a difference between a good crunch, and a bad crunch: “There’s the crunch you want to do, and there’s the crunch you have to do. The one you want to do can be awesome, because you have passionate people who are excited and have cool stuff to work on. That can be really good, but you’ve got to be careful. People can be super excited and before you know it they’re working a ton and getting burned out.” Timmins knows what he is talking about, because in 2003 he and Chris Butcher were two of the main engineers working on Halo 2. And 2003 was the year in which Bungie would experience the most trying period in its history, with one of the longest, most painful crunches in the history of video games. So painful, that 13 years later Timmins would reflect how, “The Halo 2 crunch almost killed Bungie as a company.” It all began with an E3 presentation that appeared to be a success on all fronts.

The date was May 12, 2003 and Bungie was at the Los Angeles Convention Center getting its demo ready for the show. The studio had spent three long months working on this short gameplay sequence, and had managed to stick to its schedule. Bungie had learned a lot from E3 2001: they needed to surprise journalists and show them something genuinely new. But most importantly: you couldn’t lie to them. Being liberal with the truth had become something of a tradition at E3, where publishers never shied from presenting pre-recorded gaming sessions filled with effects and details that no real console could ever run. The aim, of course, was to blow the gaming community away, even if the end product would never turn out quite as billed. Microsoft, however, decided to trust Bungie to deliver the goods and the studio had developed a demo that was indicative of how Halo 2 would be upon its release. It showcased impressive urban combat scenes, set in a city on Earth during a Covenant invasion. “We wanted to have as little impact on our overall schedule as possible,” Jaime Griesemer recounts. “We wanted to use a level that was already in production. Of those levels, ‘Earth City’ had the largest range of gameplay options since it had infantry and vehicle combat. It was early in the game, so it wouldn’t reveal any major story secrets, and it had most of the vehicles and characters we wanted.” It was the perfect opportunity to reveal new gameplay mechanics, like dual wielding and hijacking vehicles. But not all the new features were 100 % complete, in particular dual wielding: in the demo, for example, you certainly could carry two SMGs and then switch to the BR Master Chief carried on his back before switching back to the two SMGs. This process would not make it into the final version of the game where, instead, when players switched weapons out of dual wielding mode they would automatically drop one of the dual weapons. But these were game design concepts, and a lot of things would ultimately evolve before Halo 2 was released. These would include the BR, which up until now had fired a single bullet with each press of the trigger, but had been reconfigured to fire bursts of three rounds. The vehicle hijacking mechanic, which enabled the player to clamber upon a Ghost and dislodge its owner, had not yet been incorporated into the game engine, but the developers found a workaround to get it into the demo.

Just like for the gameplay demo for Halo: Combat Evolved at Gamestock 2001, Joseph Staten was chosen to present Halo 2 to the press. Here, too, the difficulty level had been tailored so that he didn’t have to spend too long defeating the enemies he encountered. On the eve of the first presentation, the Bungie staff that had travelled to LA were doing some final checks on the demo, fixing a few bugs so that they could be sure the demo would run seamlessly the next day. As a trial run, the team decided to present Halo 2 to their colleagues from Rare. Microsoft had recently acquired the British studio, and this was the first time that Rare and Bungie had been at E3 together. They all met in the little theatre Microsoft had erected on the Xbox stand, launched the demo, and Staten began to play. It was all going swimmingly, until the console switched itself off. Reflexively, the developers set about looking for the bug that could have caused the crash, but everything seemed to be working just as it should. Staten relaunched the demo, only for it to crash after a few minutes. Bungie was in a state of panic, with no idea of how this was happening. E3 opened the very next day, and nobody was able to find the source of the problem. Eventually they discovered why the console had kept crashing during the dry run: the Xbox that was running the demo had spent the entire day on top of a huge speaker, and the magnet inside the speaker had damaged the console to the point that it was no longer working properly. They quickly got their hands on another Xbox and set it up in a safer location. This time, it worked: the Halo 2 demo was ready. Tomorrow, the first journalists would be arriving at the Convention Center, and the presentations would begin in earnest. But for now, everyone headed to bed confident that all was well.

On May 13, E3 opened its doors to the international press. Halo 2 was one of the most hotly anticipated titles that year, and the first glimpse of its gameplay had many a journalist drooling on their way to the Bungie auditorium. The first arrivals found their seats in a darkened room where they were welcomed by Joseph Staten. He chatted with the journalists in the front row while the auditorium filled up and when all the seats were taken, he climbed up on stage and welcomed them all. After a bit of small-talk, Staten was abruptly interrupted by a voice that seemed to come out of nowhere: it was Sergeant Johnson, who appeared on the cinema screen before the audience. Bungie had put a lot of effort into its presentation, and taken the time to record a few lines of dialogue with David Scully, Sgt. Johnson’s voice actor. Johnson was there to brief the assembled journalists, and to explain how they were about to witness a real-time demo. There’d be no smoke and mirrors here, just unadulterated gameplay. This news was received enthusiastically by the journalists, who appreciated this jibe directed at some studios with publishers that had no qualms about embellishing their presentations. With the introduction done, Staten grabbed a controller and launched the demo.

And so the press got to see the progress Bungie had made with its graphics engine. And this progress was plain to see from the opening seconds of the video: it was clearly one of the most technically impressive games ever made for a console. Aboard a Pelican, Master Chief and a squad of soldiers close in on a teeming human city. With buildings layered atop each other as they scrambled skywards, and glittering with a thousand lights, the city is beautiful to behold, but it is also under attack by the Covenant. The aliens’ anti-aircraft defenses force the Pelicans to land, and this is when the gameplay truly begins. Staten takes control of Master Chief, equipped with a BR. He moves towards a makeshift shelter where a soldier points him towards the action. After walking for a few seconds, he reaches a long balcony overlooking the battlefield: the streets have been overrun by the Covenant and the soldiers are on the high ground, trying to stop them getting any closer. Staten uses his weapon’s scope to take aim and fire off a few shots, earning a reaction from a number of journalists in the room. Another soldier tells Master Chief that they desperately need to destroy the huge Covenant AA emplacement that is holding things up. Already impressive in the first Halo game, the AI and the soldier’s dialogue demonstrates surprising responsiveness. The Spartan opens fire, before heading over to a machine gun emplacement set up nearby on a tripod. When he took control of the gun, the audience gasped: here was another interesting new feature. Staten rains hell down on the few Grunts below, quickly taking them out of the battle. Just then, two human bombers zone in on the alien AA emplacement and blow it to smithereens. What we were seeing unfold on the screen was real urban warfare, and never before had it seemed so dynamic, so visceral. Staten jumps over the balcony, stows his BR, and unholsters not one, but two SMGs, thereby revealing another new feature. By this point, the journalists are applauding in a state of rapture. Staten rides their enthusiasm as he empties his two SMGs into the Jackals he encounters. He makes his way through the level, revealing just how big the game is, or at least this section of it. Eventually he finds a dark tunnel that he enters, emerging in a different part of the city. This area has also been overrun by Covenant forces: Jackals aim their weapons at Master Chief and let loose several volleys of fire. The Spartan dodges their shots, jumps, and lands by a Warthog. While he takes control of the gun emplacement on the back of the vehicle, two allied soldiers climb in the front, and together they set off in pursuit of an alien vehicle. This was an opportunity to show that the allied AI had learned to drive, as well as a chance to take in a bit more of this futuristic city that seemed incredibly large for a shooting game. But every street, every road, and every square has fallen to the Covenant, and not a second passes that the screen isn’t dotted with explosions and plasma sparks. And the tour doesn’t go on for very long; all of a sudden a Phantom flies over the three humans and, before Master Chief can react, an alien lands on the Warthog’s hood. In a rapid movement, it grabs the driver and flings him through the air. This was the first time that players outside of Bungie had seen the strength and brutality of the Jiralhanae, who were making their first appearance here. After dispatching the attacker, Staten turns his BR on more Brutes, before receiving a warning from Cortana that a Ghost is closing in on him from the right. This was a delicate moment for Staten, who now had to reveal another new feature: hijacking vehicles. He misses the first Ghost, but manages to grab on to the second. The animation elicits “Oooohs” and “Ahhhs” from the audience, who applauds when the Spartan ejects the pilot and takes its place in the cockpit. But Staten doesn’t have time to celebrate: as he opens fire on a few aliens, two Phantoms lock him in their sights. He is forced to beat a retreat, which has the effect of triggering a short cutscene: chased down a highway by a number of ghosts and the two Phantoms, Master Chief speeds into a long tunnel, shaking off the Covenant troop transports. At the other end of the tunnel, he is forced to leap out of his Ghost to nip through the armored doors that are closing before him, making it just in time. His pursuers aren’t so lucky, and crash into the door in a powerful bluish explosion. The Spartan gets to his feet, and looking up sees a huge Covenant cruiser flying over the city, raining down landing capsules. Before long, he finds himself surrounded by a dozen or so Elites with their energy swords activated. The Spartan drops one of his SMGs and grabs a plasma grenade before falling upon his foes. And here, the demo ended, the Halo 2 logo appeared on the screen, and the crowd went wild, still not quite believing what they had seen.

In actual fact, these eight minutes or so of gameplay looked so amazing that many journalists questioned Bungie’s sincerity. That was real, live gameplay? Some didn’t believe it was. To find out, they revisited the presentation several times, to check whether each session actually was any different. It was a strategy that Staten found really funny: while some key parts of the demo were scripted, like the part where he pulled out the two SMGs or when he hijacked a Ghost, the rest was pure improvisation. The journalists couldn’t get over it. It was too big, too beautiful, too well-paced to be true. Halo 2 was up there with some of the most visually impressive PC FPS of the moment, including Doom 3 and Half-Life 2, which were starting to generate a bit of hype of their own. And yet, the journalists had to believe their eyes. The demo was no fake, just as Sgt. Johnson had promised. Doubts would nevertheless persist all week, much to the annoyance of the specialist video gaming press, which traditionally gave awards to the best games at E3. Back then, most magazines and websites had a rule to only give awards to games that they had been able to play or that had been played in front of them. This ruled out trailers, as well as the fake demos that were a widespread practice. Aware of this issue, Bungie decided to host a last minute session just when E3 was about to close, intended for the most important media outlets. This time, Staten would play the game while asking the journalists in attendance what they wanted him to do. It was the best way to prove that the demo was no fake. He agreed to any request, even the craziest, like throwing a grenade into an improvised field hospital. After watching Staten play for over half an hour, they all left feeling reassured: it was definitely a real-time demo. E3 was now over for Bungie, and it had been a great success. The game would soon grace the covers of most video game magazines, and the demo was unanimously lauded by critics who still couldn’t get over it. The buzz that had been fizzing away since the first trailer was released took on a whole new dimension after E3. Halo 2 was now the most eagerly anticipated game for this generation of consoles and, in light of the first game’s success, the press was predicting record sales for this sequel that would also be compatible with Xbox Live. Everything seemed to be falling into place to make Halo 2 one of the biggest hits in video-gaming history.

You might think, then, that the studio would be popping open the champagne on the Millennium campus and celebrating its success. But you’d be wrong. In fact, the opposite was true. And for one very good reason: the demo was in no way representative of the actual progress made with the game. The developers had spent three months getting a playable sequence ready to go, but even then, Staten had to stay within particular areas and couldn’t stray too far from predefined routes without risking crashing the game or falling out of the level. A lot of features, like dual wielding and vehicle hijacking, were shoehorned in and were not yet compatible with the game engine. Worse still, the engineers were as yet unable to get the graphics engine running on the Xbox, for the simple reason that Microsoft’s console wasn’t powerful enough. In short, this meant that although the game was supposed to be coming out in six months, almost nothing was actually finished. Halo 2’s success at E3 2003 was a wake-up call for the studio, who were now contemplating their situation in horror. “The New Mombasa E3 trailer was such a hack that we felt horrible after we came back from the show,” Shi Kai Wang would state a few years later. “It just showed us that we had nothing, and the amount of work that we had to make ahead of us was astounding.” Suddenly, the studio found itself in a state of panic, realizing that they had reached an impasse. Unless they started most of the work again from scratch: they needed to create a new graphics engine and scale down some of their ambitions, especially the size and complexity of the game’s different levels. A Herculean task, to put it bluntly. O’Donnell and Staten had seen this debacle coming when Jason Jones announced that he was abandoning the development of Halo 2 to lend his support to the Phoenix team, and the absence of Seropian and Jones was making itself keenly felt. The role of project lead had never really been filled, and the Halo 2 orchestra was missing a conductor. The team spirit and common purpose that had enabled Halo: Combat Evolved to be in a fit state for release despite the deadlines imposed by Microsoft had withered away. “Sadly, a lot of discussions at the beginning of Halo 2’s development happened in insular little groups that didn’t talk well with one another,” Marcus Lehto ruefully recalls. “And that was the crux of much of the conflict that would occur, because we didn’t have clear leadership.” Because Lehto, like the other people Jones had appointed to replace him, had no real management experience. This posed a problem that became a bigger issue with each passing day and as Bungie hired new staff. When Microsoft had moved Bungie onto its campus, the studio numbered some 30 staff working on Halo, but that number had now doubled. Bungie had grown too fast, and the old hands lacked the skills they needed to manage so many people. But that’s not to say it dampened the general mood. Giddy when they commenced work on Halo 2, the teams had lost direction, constantly wanting to make things bigger, to make them more beautiful. This situation would cause Chris Butcher to make the following reflection a few years later: “The story of Halo 2 is kind of like a three part tragedy. The first act where we are all optimistic, and naive, we are all sitting down and saying ‘This game is about to be 72 times more fun than Halo 1, because we got all these great weapons and vehicles, and environments. We’re just gonna jam as much stuff as we can in!’” So everyone got to work and forgot that all these pieces of the puzzle would eventually have to fit together to make the whole picture. Everyone was working on their own contribution, beginning with the engineers themselves who spent months working on a particularly impressive game engine. Referred to in-house as the Stencil Engine, it used both stencil shadows, from where it took its name, and normal mapping. This could produce dynamic shadows that were more realistic, as well as use light effects to create the illusion of depth on most of the textures used in the game. But stencil shadows are extremely resource-hungry, or at least far too ravenous for a game like Halo 2. Unlike most games that were starting to use this technique, Halo 2 was made up of vast levels, and the Xbox was simply unable to manage so many dynamic shadows at once. These circumstances were only aggravated by the level designers who had also gone big with their own plans. The levels they had designed thus far were gigantic, which only served to make using Stencil Engine even more problematic, if not outright impossible. It was while making the demo for E3 2003 that they started to join the dots: they had to put all their different pieces together for the first time, and something wasn’t working. “Even that whole environment, the Earth City, was way too big for the engine at the time,” Chris Carney explains. “We ended up cutting out huge parts of geometry from that level, so you never actually saw that.” But the pressing need to be ready for E3 deprived Bungie of the time to give things a thorough overhaul. The developers worked flat out for three months to make a demo that was held together with pieces of string. When they got back from Los Angeles, they needed to face facts: things couldn’t go on like this. The only way the engine would work was if Bungie made major concessions on the size of their levels. And this was absolutely off the table. Bungie then made the only viable decision open to them, and scrapped the engine altogether. It was back to the drawing board, and a real tight spot. Firstly, because it would take time to create a new game engine, time during which the other teams would be unable to test their work. Levels, gameplay features, AI… nothing could be checked to see if it actually worked. “We were building stuff that just couldn’t be played, in any engine,” says Butcher. “We built, and detailed, and went a huge way down the path with a whole bunch of environments and levels for the game that just totally didn’t make it. If you look at the level with the Flood, inside the quarantine area, that is the remaining 20 percent of a gargantuan, sprawling level that was meticulously built and hand-constructed, but that could never, ever have shipped in any engine.” And then there was Microsoft to deal with. Then began a long wrangling session between the Xbox division and Bungie, because it was now clear that Halo 2 would not be ready for release in late 2003. The Xbox execs were already working on their next console, code named Xenon, and they were dead set on the new console being released with a new Halo game. If Bungie was behind schedule on Halo 2, then it followed that they would be starting out behind schedule on Halo 3, and that was something that some people, like Jay Allard, could not allow to happen. This meant that Bungie now found itself in a situation similar to the one it was in three years ago: a game to deliver as soon as possible, and a graphics engine to start again from scratch. The difference was that Halo 2 was far more complex a game than its predecessor, and the stakes were much higher, too. Bungie was no longer just another independent studio, and Halo was now a household name with a rep’ to protect. Fans had lofty expectations. As did Microsoft. Up until now, the software giant had acquiesced to Bungie’s many demands, generally showing itself to be obliging. But the relationship could soon sour if Halo 2 failed to come off as planned. That was a fact that Bungie was all too aware of, and Jason Jones in particular: “It was very clear at the time that the future of the studio was in Halo 2. And if Halo 2 failed, that the studio was gonna be a very different and less fun place to be in.” Of course this meant that Jones was forced to get involved. And so the co-founder launched a series of meetings to determine the immediate future and the fate of their current projects. Saving and finishing Halo 2 was the studio’s top priority, so all of its staff would be working to get it done. The decision was made to halt work on Paul Bertone’s Gypsum, as well as Monster Hunter from LeBel and Evans. “It was a bit of a bummer to stop it,” Bertone recalls of Gypsum. “Because now we have games like the Arkham series and Shadow of Mordor and The Witcher 3, and that’s the sort of free-roam combat that we were doing back then, but nobody’s ever seen it. Gypsum was my second-favorite time at Bungie. It was a small team, we all sat with each other. We were doing something that I absolutely wanted to do, and I still want to do in my career.” Martin O’Donnell had seen the blow coming, and had warned his friend that, sooner or later, he would be forced to drop Gypsum, just like he’d been forced to stop working on Phoenix, to come and work on Halo: Combat Evolved. The same was true for the old Oni team, represented by Evans and LeBel. With Monster Hunter abandoned, the former joined the Halo 2 team full-time, while the latter would, at Jones’ request, take his place supporting the Phoenix team. The project had been stagnating for a few years already, by this point, and not even Jones really knew what to do with the same few gameplay concepts they’d been playing around with for a good while now. Confident in LeBel’s ability as a game designer, Jones asked him to go and work on Phoenix for a while and ensure its viability. So it was that after putting together a playable demo, LeBel gave his verdict: it would be better use of the studio’s resources to abandon Phoenix and send its developers to work on Halo 2. It was with a heavy heart that Jones decided to take LeBel’s advice, and from that moment on, everyone at Bungie was working towards a single objective: to finish Halo 2.

The engineers soon got to work, using some of what they had learned in developing the Stencil Engine to create a new graphics engine, and picking up some techniques that had been used in the first Halo. Normal mapping was retained. All of that work would take almost a whole year, though, which meant that a lot of the developers had to work blind, and wouldn’t have much time to test their work. In an effort to save time, the studio was going to have to agree to a few sacrifices. Jones summoned a few team members to join him in a room in the Bungie studio known as the Clubhouse. With Paul Bertone, Joseph Staten and Jaime Griesemer, he took stock of the situation: the initial plans would have to be abandoned and the single player campaign scaled down. These were the only conditions under which Bungie would ever be able to get its new game delivered within a reasonable time frame. And it would be the later stages of Halo 2 that would bear the brunt of the cuts. “We had a game that was nine levels. Started at Earth and brought us out into the galaxy, and then brought us back to Earth for this grand conclusion,” Staten reveals. “Well, right about at that moment, Pandora’s box was opened, and decisions which were engraved in stone were rethought.” These included the idea to make a sequel to Halo 2, which would be the final instalment in what would be a trilogy. A decision was made to scrap the last three levels, which were going to be set on Earth. The humans and the Covenant were supposed to do battle to control the Ark, an immense Forerunner installation found near New Mombasa, where the whole game began. This idea was dropped, and the installation in question would re-emerge a few years later in Halo 3 as the gateway leading to the real Ark. This meant that Halo 2 would end on a cliffhanger, with Master Chief travelling to Earth aboard a Covenant-controlled spacecraft, having left Cortana behind on High Charity, the Covenant’s Holy City. While the initial plan had been for Master Chief and his AI to be split up at the end of Halo 2, nobody had dreamed that players would complete the game without completing the full story arc. But it would have to be enough as it was, even if that meant leaving the story open for a sequel, just as Halo: Combat Evolved had done. Work was already at too advanced a stage and there was too much left to do, to take the time to give the story and the levels that had already been designed a complete overhaul. The decision to end Halo 2 on a cliffhanger didn’t go down well with anyone. “I was still confused when they came out of the clubhouse and presented it to the team,” O’Donnell recalls. “Joe said, ‘Okay, here’s how the ending’s going to go. We’re going to do this and this and this and…’ And I’m like, ‘Wait, Joe, are you saying that the last person you play in Halo 2 is the Dervish? And when you get to the end it shows a cutscene with Master Chief going back to Earth saying, “I want to finish this fight,” and we run end credits? ‘He said, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll work!’ I said no, it wouldn’t. People will be throwing their controllers at their TVs. We’re going to make it look like you’re about to be Master Chief going to Earth to finish this fight. And then you want me to climax the music, go to black and run credits? I couldn’t imagine a more horrifying ending. If you search for ‘worst endings in the history of video games,’ you’ll see Halo 2 right up there. It was like, this is worse than the ending to Back to the Future Part II. I could not believe what we were doing.”

Staten, meanwhile, hoped that this ending would have the same effect as the one in The Empire Strikes Back, episode V of the Star Wars saga. It ends with the hero, Luke Skywalker, in hospital, and Han Solo abducted by Boba Fett the bounty hunter, who plans to deliver Solo’s frozen body to Jabba the Hutt. Skywalker had lost one of his hands in a duel with Darth Vader, who revealed that he was Luke’s father. No story arcs are resolved in The Empire Strikes Back, and viewers end the film with more questions than at the start. “It’ll be just like that,” Staten thought at the time. “Well, no. The Empire Strikes Back did a whole bunch of other little cool things that made that okay, which we didn’t do.”

Staten’s confidence was based on the fact that the Dervish character–the Arbiter in the final game–had been carefully refined. He and Jones wanted him to be a protagonist that was interesting enough so that players weren’t disappointed to not always be playing as Master Chief. Halo 2 actually told two stories: that of a hero who is celebrated at the very start of the game, and in parallel the story of a defeated foe, condemned to a suicide mission. The former wanted to save his people, the latter to save his soul. The Arbiter’s story arc is interesting in that as the missions progress, he learns that he has been lied to his whole life. His reactions are full of nuance, and ultimately very human. “Arbiter is a real challenge to the story because he’s not the Chief. He’s not human,” Jason Jones would explain in the making of Halo 2. “People identify with humans. People care about humans more. So we really have to put the Arbiter in a position in the story where he matters and where the player cares about him.” This meant that some sequences of the game had to be rewritten, like the Arbiter’s very first mission. Sent to a Forerunner gas mine located not far from the first Halo, where he had failed in his duties, the Sangheili was tasked with tracking down and killing the leader of a group of dissident heretics. It was originally planned that the heretic leader would be a Hunter, one of those enormous, armored creatures encountered in the first game. In fact, most of the heretics were supposed to be Hunters, who had gathered on a small moon visible from the first game’s Halo. The idea was quickly dropped. Firstly, because the Hunters were far too ferocious to feature in large numbers in a single level, and secondly because making the heretic leader an Elite facilitated the Arbiter’s character development: indeed, he would more readily doubt his beliefs when called into question by one of his own kind than by a gigantic armored monster with whom he had almost nothing in common. What’s more, by playing as the Arbiter, players could, for the very first time, wield a Covenant energy sword and use the stealth shield that rendered Elites invisible. Bungie did all it could to make the Arbiter attractive to players, whether through his personality or his gameplay.

The studio needed to make this new character cool and interesting, especially because as work in the game progressed the studio was forced to scrap a number of levels, most of which were played as Master Chief. The level set on Cairo Station was scaled back, having initially tasked players with loading the bomb the Covenant had placed on the station onto a trailer. Master Chief would then have to tow the bomb through an entire section of the station before launching it out into space. “The original plan was to have a level after this one called Covenant Ship,” Staten tells us. “And the Master Chief, much like he did in that announcement trailer for Halo 2, there was no bomb, he would man-up, pop the airlock, land on the Covenant Ship, tear it apart from the inside.” So that was a whole level that was removed from the game: Master Chief was going to hijack a Wraith (a Covenant tank) and make his way through the cruiser to find the engine room and blow its drive. But Covenant Ship wasn’t the only vehiclebased level not to make the final cut: shortly thereafter, Bungie also decided to cut a level called Forerunner Tank, which came just after Master Chief killed the Prophet of Regret. Under fire from the main canon of a Covenant destroyer, Master Chief would have to mount a new vehicle, a Forerunner tank, which he would use to travel across an entire level, dodging the Gravemind’s huge tentacles while making his way up to the caves inhabited by the Flood’s core intelligence. Designed in haste by Robert McLees, who saw the Gravemind as a sock puppet, the monster was supposed to have a much greater role in the game’s plot, but both its role and its screen-time would be limited to a few cutscenes. As for the Forerunner tank, it would disappear from the game completely. According to Jason Jones, the man behind the Forerunner tank, it was supposed to “be awesome, blow things up, glow a lot from little windows, move real fast.” Sounds like it would have been fun!

Jason Jones’ return and the arrival of reinforcements from the Phoenix, Monster Hunter and Gypsum teams got the development of Halo 2 back on track, but the amount of work left to do was no less gargantuan. The studio was working almost round the clock for almost an entire year. And then what had to happen, happened: after a few months of crunch, the first signs of burn-out reared their ugly heads. It affected everyone, beginning with Jones himself. Sam Charchian, one of the Xbox Live team at Microsoft, recalls how, “It was just insane. I remember Jason Jones… I was walking over to visit those guys, and Jason Jones was walking out. He could barely walk. He was staggering like someone who was drunk, running into the walls. He hadn’t slept in like two days or something.” The engineers weren’t faring any better, still hard at work developing a new engine for Halo 2. There were putting in unlimited overtime, because a lot of things depended on their work. “I had a log that I kept, of the times I went into work and the times I left work,” Chris Butcher remembers. “Day after day after day, seven days a week, getting in reasonably early and then not leaving before 11 at night. Seven days a week, for months and months…” More than any other team, Bungie’s engineers were under incredible pressure, because all progress made by the studio’s other departments depended on their own advances. That’s not to say that the other teams could take it easy: they needed to be ready for when the game engine was playable to test out the gameplay, levels, and features. Paul Bertone was now the lead missions designer, meaning that he was now responsible for designing all of the game’s missions. He needed to consider the gameplay as well as working with the studio’s different artists, especially those who were working on the environments in which his missions were set. When the game engine was changed, it meant that a lot of levels had to be redone, and as we’ve seen some were scrapped completely. Most of them, however, were scaled back or redesigned to fit the various changes to Halo 2’s plot. For Bertone, who had been pulled off his dream project, the Halo 2 crunch was particularly hard to swallow. But he wasn’t ready to quit just yet. “I slept at the office some obscene amount of days in a row, like almost an entire month at the end,” he recalls. “I kenneled my dog for almost two months. There would be mornings I’d wake up at home and not remember how I got there, and many others where I’d wake up at my desk, or somebody else’s. It was that way for a lot of people.” And this punishing pace didn’t only have an effect on the health of a few developers, it also started to affect the relationships between members of the studio, especially the old hands. Bertone now acknowledges that, “A lot of relationships got fractured, and that felt irreparable, at the time.” Martin O’Donnell could only agree: “The Halo 2 crunch was bad and damaged a lot of people’s personal lives. It hurt the team and broke some relationships inside the studio. Some of those broken relationships reverberate to this day.” The big problem, though, was that while some conflicts were brewing in-house, outside it was already open warfare.

WRANGLING WITH MICROSOFT

When Bungie found itself with no other option than to start work on its game engine again from scratch in summer 2003, it meant that Jason Jones would have to take it up the ladder. Before that, though, he turned to Pete Parsons, who had been Bungie’s new studio manager since Alex Seropian’s departure. Parsons wasn’t one of Bungie’s new staff: he was part of the Xbox division where he had been part of the marketing team that launched the console. A video game fanatic, Parsons was delighted to be working in such close proximity to a studio as special as Bungie, and he soon developed a solid relationship with its staff. However, he still had to play the boss, which led to some tense discussions. When Jones told him that they’d need to push back the release date for Halo 2, Parsons panicked. Indeed, the Xbox division had never thought it would have to wait so long, and had already been putting pressure on Bungie to make an announcement about Halo 2 at E3 2002. But this was something that Jones and his team were in no position to do, especially because, in early 2002, Bungie was busy overseeing the international release of Halo: Combat Evolved, which included the localization process, for example. So while an announcement was indeed made in late September 2002, that wasn’t really in sync with Microsoft’s plans. A fact that some Xbox execs were not shy about airing in public. In The Xbox 360 Uncloaked, a book by journalist Dean Takahashi, there’s a quote from a Bungie employee who preferred to remain anonymous: “There was a lot of pressure. Some of it was dumb pressure.” Parsons, therefore, was well aware that a delay wouldn’t go down well with Microsoft, and the conversation ended up in Ed Fries’ office. Thankfully, Bungie had a special place in Ed Fries’ heart: he liked their games, he liked their philosophy and, most importantly, he wanted to inculcate a new mentality at Microsoft. Fries saw video game developers as artists, and as such they couldn’t be expected to work like other developers at the company. They weren’t making word processing software, nor network infrastructure; they were creating works of art out of the ether. But this vision wasn’t one shared by everyone at Microsoft, or even in some sections of the video game industry itself. Fries, Parsons, and Jones carried on their conversation over a number of days, and word of it reached other personalities within Bungie, like Martin O’Donnell. The musician ended up having a heated argument with Pete Parsons when he tried to defend one of Microsoft’s main points: the need to get the game out before the end of the current financial year. That meant before the summer of 2004. “He said, ‘Marty, it’s inconceivable for us [Halo 2] to not be a launch title for Xbox Live,’ which was coming in November 2002, just a year after the first Halo’s release,” O’Donnell recalls. “And I said, ‘Yeah, and I want to have a baby in four months. There are just things that cannot happen.’ He told me, ‘You’ve got to understand that Microsoft has already planned their fiscal year.’ I said, ‘Fuck the fiscal year!’ Which became sort of a statement that everybody knew at the studio. I wasn’t saying screw Microsoft–I explained the only way you truly motivate a game development team, and especially Bungie, is by saying we have to get this done for E3, or get it finished for Christmas. If you say, ‘Oh, we need to get this done for the fiscal year,’ they just won’t. They will not do it. “Jones couldn’t agree more with O’Donnell. He told Fries that the studio could get the game out by spring 2004, but then most of the developers would hand in their resignation once it was done. Indeed, a motto had held sway over Bungie since its very earliest days: “‘Good enough’ sucks,” which reflected the mindset of the studio’s staff who refused to release a game that merely ticked all the boxes. Bungie liked to go all out with its games and give players a game that they could be proud of. Settling for less from Halo 2 to cater to Microsoft’s purely financial considerations was something that Bungie could never agree to. Fries, for one, took Jones’ warning very seriously. Back when Microsoft was in the process of acquiring Bungie, Fries was worried that some of the staff would choose to resign, but Fries and Stuart Moulder, accompanied by Seropian and Jones, had managed to persuade most of the developers to join them in Seattle. And here, again, Fries understood that Bungie had reached a pivotal moment. The kind that could kill the studio for good.

As it happened, the big shots in the Xbox division were meeting in July 2003 to come to a decision. Fries already knew that he wouldn’t be leaving victorious. For Robbie Bach, the head honcho at Xbox, and Jay Allard, the division’s hardware director, the needs of the platform took precedence over those of any individual game, including Halo. Of course, Fries disagreed with this standpoint, and a lengthy debate ensued. At the meeting, there was one man who was yet to make up his mind. That man was Peter Moore, the new Xbox marketing director. A colorful character, he had started working for Microsoft at the beginning of the year. He had never previously been a gamer, but he quickly grew passionate about this industry with a character all of its own. Originally from the United Kingdom, he had moved to the USA with his girlfriend when he was just 20 years old. He finished his college education, earned a masters from California State University Long Beach, before getting a job at Patrick USA, the American subsidiary of the French parts manufacturer. Passionate about sport and with a real gift for showcasing his products, Moore was headhunted by Reebok, where he worked until the late 1990s. It would be SEGA’s American division that gave him his start in the video game industry. In preparation for the launch of its new console, the Dreamcast, SEGA was looking for someone who could craft a new message and generate a tangible shift in how the brand was perceived outside of Japan. Moore worked at SEGA for 18 months, becoming the main face of the brand in the United States, which saw him pop up on most major publishers’ radars. A number of them soon began courting him, but it was Microsoft that ultimately persuaded him to join the Xbox division.

When he sat down in the meeting with Bach, Fries, Allard, and a few others, he had been doing a lot of thinking: Xbox had been working on its new console for months now, and everyone was hoping that Bungie would be able to deliver a new instalment in the Halo series in time for the Xbox 360 launch. But while he was listening to Fries, Moore realized that if Halo 2’s release was postponed, then the next Halo game would also be pushed back, and wouldn’t be ready for the Xbox 360 launch line-up. This was a red line for Microsoft. The software giant had accepted that it would lose billions of dollars on the first Xbox as the price of entry into the highly competitive games console market. But its next console would need to reverse this trend and make the Xbox the new industry leader. In the end, when Bach suggested a show of hands to decide whether Bungie should deliver Halo 2 before the end of that financial year, the result was compelling, with only Fries voting against the motion. Which isn’t to say he took it well. A model Microsoft employee for almost 20 years, Fries had led an exemplary career at Microsoft, quickly becoming one of the most respected figures in the company. But when he joined the Xbox division, he never thought he would have to fight so hard to see that the creatives were given their due respect. The months following the release of Halo: Combat Evolved were hard for Fries, who had unfortunately received little in return for the trust he had placed in certain studios.

Take Tim Schafer’s new game, for example. Psychonauts had been in development for almost four years, but the game was still not ready despite Microsoft spending millions of dollars. Despite Fries’ support, Schafer was denied any further funding and was forced to walk out. As for Lorne Lanning, the brain behind Oddworld, when he saw that Xbox was losing the console wars against Sony, he negotiated his departure and set sail for brighter horizons. That left Freelancer, the new game from Chris Roberts. The creator of the successful Wing Commander series had opened a new studio named Digital Anvil in the second half of the 1990s. Its aim? To create the ultimate space sim, the one Roberts had always dreamed of. Wing Commander was a kind of sketch, a rough draft, and his new game Freelancer should blow it out of the water. But it was an expensive endeavor. The project attracted the interest of Ed Fries, who signed a contract with Roberts. Unfortunately, Freelancer’s development would be weighed down by a series or poor decisions, beginning with those made by Roberts himself who, after a few months at work, packed his bags and headed for Hollywood to work on a Wing Commander movie. The movie was a total flop, but Freelancer was still leeching money from Microsoft. Microsoft would eventually buy the studio, which caused Roberts to resign, despite being the main director of Freelancer. In spite of these difficult conditions, it would be Erin Roberts, Chris’ brother and erstwhile partner, who would finish the job and deliver the game in early 2003. Unfortunately for Fries, his investment failed to pay off yet again, and Freelancer recorded very poor sales.

All of which meant that when the time came to determine the destiny of Halo 2, Fries did not find himself in a strong bargaining position. Yes, he had been behind a few fine successes, but his portfolio also included some costly failures. But more than that, he was tired of having to fight to protect the games he believed in. He’d seen it play out again and again: imposing a schedule on artists didn’t work. In fact, the effect was often detrimental. Fries refused to let Bungie suffer the same fate, and when Bach and the others voted in favor of a spring 2004 release date for Halo 2, he tendered his resignation. If he wasn’t going to get enough time to see Halo 2 developed within a time frame that Bungie deemed acceptable, then he would be walking out the door. This was a “road to Damascus” moment for Bach and Moore, who were completely blindsided. Fries was very popular at Microsoft; they liked him and didn’t want to fall out with him, and so the fact that he was willing to resign over this ultimately made them listen to reason. Following negotiations with Pete Parsons, Jason Jones and Hamilton Chu, the game’s lead producer, it was agreed that Halo 2 would be ready for November 2004. It was in this atmosphere of tension that would begin the long crunch of Halo 2, a crunch that would demolish morale among Bungie employees, and foster Bungie’s feelings of defiance against its owner.

Bungie’s tribulations during Halo 2’s development are now common knowledge, but some of those involved have a different take on this challenging period. One such person is Jaime Griesemer who, in 2017, expressed a very different opinion on the events of that time. In particular, he criticized the edit of Halo 2’s making-of video that shipped with the limited-edition version of the game. In his eyes, things had been made to seem more melodramatic than they were. “If you watch the documentary we made for Halo 2, man, there’s a lot of whining. Instead of looking at how can we learn and move forward, the narrative became poor us, pity party, we all have PTSD, we can never let this happen again. That was a real changing point in the attitude of how we made Halo games, where we just stopped kind of pulling out all the stops and really going for it. Before, it used to be part of the culture to challenge people to do more. And all of a sudden it was: stop asking people to do more, don’t you remember what happened last time? It became really hard to break any new ground. I think that was when the turn-the-crank mentality started.”

HALO 2 AND XBOX LIVE: LIKE PEAS AND CARROTS

In November 2002, Xbox launched Xbox Live, its online gaming service. Following a lengthy development process, Xbox Live ended up going live later than planned after encountering the same kind of design complications that plagued the Xbox itself. The first presentations of Microsoft’s new service certainly generated plenty of feedback, it’s just that most of it was negative. Some major publishers, such as Electronic Arts, could not understand why Microsoft should generate more income from their games, giving rise to a series of disputes. And the press was no kinder to Xbox Live; just like among the gaming community, still fresh in their memories was the fate of SEGA’s final console, the Dreamcast. The Dreamcast already boasted a working online gaming system as far back as 1998, but that wasn’t enough to stop the console’s speedy demise. In the early 2000s, the internet was still seen as just another gadget, and online gaming was a pastime for wealthy, technophile gamers. The question on everyone’s lips, then, was why was Xbox pushing so hard for it? Ed Fries’ face lights up at the memory: “The console world kind of pushed back and said ‘those are not console-y things to do, you guys don’t get it.’ But we really did get it because we have already seen it be successful on the PC. We had seen that multiplayer play is the future.” Despite these warnings, a number of figures within the Xbox team were ready to bet the farm on online gaming. Jay Allard, in particular. An internet fanatic since the technology was still in its infancy in the 1990s, the Xbox hardware director had a dream of his own: to enable Microsoft’s first console to bring gamers from around the world together. It would be a major selling proposition, representing a technological and social quantum leap like very few others in the history of video games. He was the main voice agitating for Microsoft’s first console to come with an Ethernet port. But it was a long battle to get there, against others on his team as well as elsewhere in the company. The most skeptical included Bill Gates himself, who Allard thought he would be able to win over. He was so confident that he made a bet with Cam Ferroni, one of the execs on the freshly formed Xbox team: he wagered one thousand dollars that he could get Gates to change his mind before the end of 1999, a date that gave him three months to pull it off. It was Ferroni who would end up $1,000 richer. But that wasn’t enough for Allard to walk away with his tail between his legs, and he continued to launch meetings, research, and projects so that the Xbox could offer an online gaming service that was more comprehensive, more polished than that of the Dreamcast. To that end, he visited Boyd Multerer in August 2000 and asked him to find the best way to make use of the Ethernet port. Multerer then formed the first full-time team dedicated to developing Xbox Live, which was then known simply as Xbox Online. This did not go unnoticed within the Xbox team, where many thought that forming a team for that purpose was a waste of resources more than anything else, a distraction that the Xbox could little afford, especially now that the console was behind schedule. And nobody shared Allard’s belief in the mass uptake of broadband internet. Allard, though, was convinced that as soon as broadband became available, large numbers of households would have the equipment needed for online gaming to make a breakthrough. Allard was basing his predictions on his experience, but not just that, because he had sent members of his team traveling across the United States to meet with internet service providers (ISP) and get a picture of what the American internet network would look like over the years to come. This series of meetings held in the early 2000s only served to encourage Allard, because every single ISP demonstrated real enthusiasm for Microsoft’s plans: just as Allard had thought, in the next two or three years the number of broadband connections would have skyrocketed, and the advent of console-based online gaming could encourage even more households to take out contracts for ADSL broadband.

Over time, Allard was gradually able to establish the idea that Xbox Live would soon become one of the Xbox’s key features, and better yet, that it would make Microsoft a pioneer and give it a considerable head start on the next generation of games consoles. He won the support of Bill Gates and all the other Xbox execs, and all they needed to do was to market the service. And so the full force of Microsoft’s marketing apparatus was brought to bear on Xbox Live. Xbox enlisted two NFL stars, Payton Manning and Matt Hasselbeck, and had them play each other on NFL Fever 2002. The two players were physically located on different continents, and filmed by the Microsoft teams so that every second of this historic match could be recorded for posterity. Hasselbeck won, much to the consternation of the Indianapolis Colts’ quarterback. For the launch of Xbox Live on November 14, 2002, a launch party was held, during which Samuel L. Jackson would stand off against Freddie Prinze Jr on NBA 2K. The game would be played online, of course, even if they were both in the same room. Back on the Microsoft campus, Allard got his team together in the canteen, where they settled down with an Xbox and a few controllers. Allard and Ferroni launched MechAssault, one of the first Xbox One compatible games, and waited for a player to join them. When a stranger joined their game in the middle of a match, Allard and Ferroni turned on their mics and greeted the newcomer, explaining that they were part of the Xbox team and that he was one of the very first people to log in to Xbox Live. The young man couldn’t believe his ears. He was overjoyed and played a few games with the Xbox team before they had to go.

And yet, Microsoft wasn’t entirely satisfied: yes, Xbox Live was now online, and it was proving somewhat successful thanks to games like Ubisoft’s Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow. But it was still far from realizing its full potential. To get there, it needed Halo. The first game had proven a runaway success after its release, but it had no online gaming compatibility. And because Bungie wouldn’t let Microsoft hand its baby over to another studio to make a Halo 1.5 that was compatible with Xbox Live, the software giant was champing at the bit. Bungie was working on Halo 2 and fully intended to make it the spearhead of Xbox Live. Perhaps even the best multiplayer game ever released. Online gaming had been part of Bungie’s DNA since the studio was first founded, or near enough. Jason Jones was fascinated with it, and he’d invented a series of highly impressive solutions to play games on the internet at a time when resources were more than limited. It was natural, then, that Jones and some of his oldest colleagues saw in Xbox Live a way to make their wildest dreams a reality, dreams that they had themselves been chasing for years. Halo 2 would not be just another online FPS of the kind that were ten-a-penny on PC: it had to represent a real step forward for the whole video game industry. This was why Bungie and Microsoft would be working very closely together from 2003 to 2004. Because the studio had lots of ideas already, and was waiting for Xbox Live to evolve into something that could truly showcase Halo 2. The good news for the Xbox team was that Bungie had already been working on various concepts for its game, and some of them could be used in any game compatible with Xbox Live. Thanks to Bungie, Xbox Live would gradually incorporate the features that would build its reputation, and that are still in use today. And not just on Microsoft consoles. “The Xbox Team, we could develop with them or help them design and develop what they called the Tsunami Features Set,” Harold Ryan recounts. “Which was a lot of the new Live matchmaking features. We built our own friends list, with which you can now do friends and friends parties in the Xbox Live dash. But we built it in Halo 2 first.” Bungie planned to create a real “virtual sofa,” where players could sit down and play together. The idea was simple: give gamers all the features they need to forget that they are miles apart, so that they can play together as easily as if they were sitting next to each other in the same room. In the early 2000s, it was perfectly possible to play and chat over voice in real time, especially on PC. However, the chatting part generally required a separate voice chat program, like TeamSpeak, and players needed to swap IP addresses so that they could connect to the same servers. It was functional, if not always practical, but it didn’t always run smoothly and could be annoying. For Halo 2, Bungie wanted players to be able to press a single button to be able to play and chat together, so the solution had to be simple and fast. It would be made possible via two major innovations in the video game industry: the friends party system, and a brand new kind of matchmaking. The former enabled two or more players to connect together, and then because they were in the same chat, they could then play with or against each other more easily. As for the matchmaking, it automatically looked for opponents at a similar level to the player’s own team, using a ranking system designed by Bungie. This was absolutely vital for Jones. “It’s hard to play with people that are a lower skill level than you, even if you really like them,” he explains. “Because you’re probably gonna lose more often, and you’re not gonna have as much fun. If I play with Chris, the two of us are ranked together as a team, and if he’s not as good as me, then that’s gonna take down my rank. The point is, Chris sucks.” To this Bungie added a new idea–playlists–which would allow players to choose what kind of games they wanted to play. Deathmatch, capture the flag… It was the person holding the controller who called the shots. This was a genuine revolution for the video-gaming world, and Bungie knew it. Even while the studio was in turmoil and the Halo 2 crunch was consuming the team, Chris Butcher remained optimistic: “If we do this right, if we are able to really pull off the engine and Xbox Live, in the social community… It’s gonna destroy everything else that’s out here.” Bungie’s ideas were met with real interest from the Xbox Live team, who would immediately incorporate them into basic features of both the service and the console. The interface was redesigned to accommodate these new features, and to make it easier for players to access them. The Bungie executives were delighted, of course, since it would be hugely beneficial for Halo 2. After a few playtests, Jones was over the moon: “It was really amazing to get online for the first time when there were a bunch of people online, and just press the button and say, ‘I want to play,’ ‘Go find me some other people that want to play and choose a game type that’s pretty cool, and just stick me in it as fast as you can.’ And to have that process happen in like, five seconds was really incredible.”

While the Xbox Live features of Bungie’s design were soon ready to go, the same could not be said of Halo 2’s actual multiplayer mode. It was the same story as for the single player campaign, with the first game engine’s shortcomings and its total overhaul. When they started out, the teams led by Max Hoberman envisaged a multiplayer mode that was very different to that found in the first Halo game. They intended games based around objectives, played on huge maps; basically, a return to what Halo was supposed to be like before it became an Xbox game. This time, they had a bigger team, more resources, and much better knowledge of what the console could do. And so they got to work on an initial prototype, which looked a lot like a game mode that is very familiar to fans of Halo today: the Warzone that was introduced in Halo 5: Guardians. It worked quite well, but would take an insane amount of work and mean putting multiplayer on the backburner once again, just like with Halo: Combat Evolved. This didn’t go down too well with Max Hoberman, who had been entrusted with overseeing the development of Halo 2’s multiplayer mode. He remembers, “All the stuff that had been such a huge hit in Halo was just being thrown out the window. I argued that we had to support people that wanted to play locally–through split-screen and LAN play. And that people loved the Halo multiplayer, so even if it wasn’t what we originally planned we needed to have it in there, and it would be a huge mistake not to.” Hoberman took his arguments to Alex Seropian (this was before Seropian resigned) as well as to Jason Jones. The two co-founders agreed with him: Halo 2 must not have fewer features than the first game. Jones and Seropian then asked him to form a small team that would be tasked with developing a multiplayer mode similar to the one in Halo: Combat Evolved in parallel to the new mode, named Warfare. The team made such blistering progress that when the first issues arose in 2003 and Bungie decided to create a new game engine, Hoberman’s multiplayer mode was the only part of the game that was far enough along. Warfare, however, was at a standstill. Levels had been designed and the artists had created a number of environments, but the game designers weren’t able to come up with anything that was both different and fun. The concept was ultimately abandoned, and all of Hoberman’s team returned to work on the standard multiplayer, but he could still see the funny side: “The rest of the team called small-scale multiplayer the party game, which I thought was a little derisive.” But whatever their opinion, these reinforcements would prove vital, because it meant that Halo 2’s multiplayer now had a larger workforce behind it. A handful of developers had worked on multiplayer mode in Halo: Combat Evolved; Halo 2’s version could count on almost 20. It was on a completely different scale, and to a completely different budget. This time, nobody had to learn how to knock up a few levels on the job and in record time: Halo 2 had Chris Carney and Steve Cotton, two level designers assigned to building the different maps. A decision was made to use the environments designed for the single-player campaign as the inspiration, to link the two sections of the game and generate some internal consistency: it wasn’t about just making multiplayer maps, but also places that the player wasn’t able to go in the singleplayer mode. These maps help to flesh out the Halo universe, so they needed to fuel the fans’ imaginations. But the substance was just as important as the form, which was why Halo 2’s maps underwent extensive playtesting, one after another, by almost everyone at the studio. It was a job that the staff were only too happy to do, sometimes for hours every day. While Halo 2’s development was coming along well and the studio was making up lost time, the multiplayer playtesting sessions also served as a teambuilding exercise, and a good way to take their minds off their work. Some used the sessions to settle old scores with a smile. But it was also a chance to check whether particular ideas actually worked. Ideas like offering players asymmetrical maps: “On almost every Halo 1 map, we had two bases that were pretty identical,” Chris Carney explains. “And at the beginning of Halo 2, we were trying to think of different ways where we could make our maps more asymmetrical. It’s fun to play as the attacker and it’s fun to play as the defender.” In Halo 2, one map expresses this idea particularly well, and it was a huge hit inside the studio. That map was Zanzibar. The attackers spawned on a sandy beach where there was a Warthog (equipped with a Gauss canon) and a Ghost. As for the defenders, they spawned on the other side of the map in a fortified building with a number of entrances, some of which led to machine gun emplacements up above. At the exit from the base, there was also a standard Warthog and another Ghost. Zanzibar was split across the middle by a gargantuan turbine, which forced the attackers in their vehicles to approach the base from a single direction. The map contained several different sections and lots of ways to interact with the environment, which meant that players could try out different tactics every time. Bungie had hit the nail on the head, and knew it had created a memorable map. For E3 2004, Bungie preferred not to show a new demo of the single-player campaign, instead deciding to showcase its new multiplayer engine. The map it chose to showcase was, of course, Zanzibar. New weapons, new vehicles (the Warthog with Gauss cannon), and most importantly new gameplay possibilities thanks to vehicle hijacking and dual wielding: the map was a great way to show what the game’s main new features could do, in just a few matches. At E3, it soon became apparent to anyone who was able to try out Halo 2 that the game would be a huge boon for the Xbox and Xbox Live, even more so than the first game.

A STAR-STUDDED SOUNDTRACK

While the whole team was plowing ahead with the development of Halo 2, one man in particular was less concerned by the project’s almost total reboot. It was true that Martin O’Donnell needed the plot to be finalized and the levels finished before he could put them to music, and it was all the more true that he needed the game engine to be finished before he could add the various sound effects for which he was responsible, but that said, he didn’t need a game engine to try out his creations. This meant that he was able to get to work on the soundtrack at a very early stage, and begin the composing process. One day, the phone rang: it was Nile Rodgers telling him that he knew a lot of people who would like to work with him on the soundtrack. He also said that if he liked, he could send him anyone he liked. Rodgers wasn’t one to brag, nor to tell tall tales: he was a world-renowned musician and producer and he had a huge list of contacts. O’Donnell’s curiosity was well and truly piqued, and he asked Rodgers who might want to work on Halo 2. He was very surprised to hear Rodgers name Steve Vai, one of the greatest rock guitarists of all time. “Here was somebody who could bring something truly unique to Halo 2,” O’Donnell thought. O’Donnell was familiar with Vai and really liked his work, so out of all the musicians that Rodgers suggested, Vai was the one he chose. A few months later, and O’Donnell received another call from his producer friend: he should book a recording studio because Vai was going to be in Seattle for a gig. They thought it would “Be a chance to record a few bits and pieces.” The session would actually last over three hours. After letting Vai listen to what he had already composed, O’Donnell guided the guitarist and let him improvise over certain sections. This was how Steve Vai came to perform, in his unique way, the main Halo theme. “I said ‘It would be great if you could play these melodies, and then play again and play some rhythms under it,’” O’Donnell recalls. “He and I went through a bunch of the pieces, and put it together that way. But of course, he came up with his own way of doing it.” That night, O’Donnell and Marcie, his wife, were guests at Vai’s concert, who met with them after the show. And the rock star was delighted: before going on stage, Vai had called his two sons to tell them that he’d been working on the Halo 2 soundtrack. The two kids were fans of Halo and greeted the news with unbridled enthusiasm. “He says, ‘Thank you, now I’m a cool dad.’ And I’m like ‘How is that even possible, you’re Steve Vai, how much cooler can you be?’” O’Donnell regales us, laughing.

Even though he had enjoyed playing for O’Donnell and showed a real interest in the work of Bungie’s in-house composer, Vai didn’t play Halo and he’d gotten involved because he’d been asked. Other musicians, though, were far more eager. Aware that Nile Rodgers was in contact with Bungie and O’Donnell, a series of artists contacted the producer hoping to get a small gig on the soundtrack. Artists like Incubus and Breaking Benjamin, who would meet with O’Donnell while they were passing through Seattle and let him listen to what they had made for the game. Breaking Benjamin’s track, named Blow Me Away, was problematic because it featured lyrics, and the singing didn’t really blend in with the rest of the music, and in any case, it overloaded the player’s soundscape. Breaking Benjamin sent O’Donnell a new version of their track without the lyrics, which would go on to be included in the last part of Halo 2. As for Incubus, they spared no expense and recorded an entire suite, Odyssey, composed of four movements. The first was a progressive rock track called Follow, and it’s what can be heard when the Arbiter confronts the heretic leader’s troops aboard a Banshee. The track didn’t go down too well with Jason Jones, and he said so. In truth, the boss at Bungie didn’t like any of the outside contributions to the game’s soundtrack, preferring the work of the studio’s own composer, for whom he had a lot of admiration. “Marty’s pretty amazing,” he would say. “Marty makes pretty much everything we do twice as good, and that makes me really angry, ‘cause he’s just about the only individual who has that level of contribution to the team. But I would never say that to him.” So while he might not personally like these new tracks, he gave free rein to his composer, who was working with a series of different artists, including bands like Hoobastank and artists like John Mayer, who was not credited in the game… at least not under his real name. Mayer preferred to keep his agents out of it, and to keep things relatively straightforward: “He said ‘Don’t credit me or I’ll get into trouble.’ He said ‘But just put my Gamertag in the special thanks, and then I could show all my friends.’” O’Donnell tells us, also sharing his surprise at learning that Mayer wasn’t just a successful pop act, but also an excellent guitarist. These regular visits by big-name musicians, as well as the casting of more famous actors–like Ron Perlman and Michelle Rodriguez– tickled the staff at Bungie, who gently poked fun at O’Donnell. They wondered if he didn’t have delusions of grandeur. But the composer kept a clear head and never hesitated to ditch anything that didn’t work for him or the game: it wasn’t a matter of getting more and more stars on board just to attract more players. This is why Maroon 5 don’t appear on the game’s soundtrack, despite being some of the first to express an interest in getting involved.

ILOVEBEES: AN XXL MARKETING CAMPAIGN

At the other side of the Millennium campus, Microsoft was also keeping itself busy. We were now well into 2004 and they needed to plan for the release of Halo 2. At E3 2004, Peter Moore put on a show: on stage, he promised that the game would suffer no further delays, and announced the official release date. To prove that his word was his bond, he rolled up his sleeve to reveal a huge tattoo of the Halo 2 logo accompanied by the date “November 9.” It was a carefully prepared piece of showmanship from the Xbox marketing director, who had tried to keep his colleagues guessing while getting ready for the event: “During the dress rehearsal day, the day before, he walked around all day with his arm exposed, and a bloody patch on his arm,” O’Donnell recalls with a glint of amusement in his eye. “He was doing that just to mess with everybody. But we knew that something was gonna happen.” Even today, when it seems obvious that the tattoo was a fake, Moore maintains that it was real, a joke he has kept going for 15 years and that still makes him burst out laughing. In fact, he found it so funny that in 2007, when he announced the release date for GTA IV at the Xbox’s E3 press conference, he unveiled a new tattoo, this time on his left arm. Unfortunately for him, the date on the tattoo (October 16th, 2007) was not the date that Rockstar’s game would ultimately be released, because GTA IV would not hit the shelves until April 29, 2008.

But that was all just an appetizer for Moore, who wanted bigger things for Halo 2. It was one of the most eagerly anticipated games of that generation of consoles, and the marketing campaign had to be worthy of the game. That was when Moore decided to contact Jordan Weisman, the former boss of FASA Interactive. Weisman had left Microsoft in early 2002, shortly after the first Halo game was released. He had then set up a new company, Whiz Kids, which made children’s toys, before selling it on and founding 42 Entertainment. That was where he used his skills as a game designer to create a new kind of marketing campaign, known as ARG, for Alternate Reality Games. These generally took the form of paper chases or treasure hunts based on the universe of the product in question. The aim, naturally, was to get participants ever more interested in the product, interest that converted into purchases when the product was released. This kind of campaign was of interest for a number of reasons, especially its ability to reach people that initially have zero interest in the product in question. Because if they were done well, alternate reality games could win over fans of puzzles of any kind, gradually reaching ever more curious consumers. Weisman already had a few fine successes under his belt, like the The Beast ARG that accompanied the launch of Steven Spielberg’s film, AI, in the summer of the year 2000. In the United States, The Beast was played by some three million people before being applauded in the national press that was surprised at how innovative the campaign was. And all of that at a low cost, because alternate reality games were relatively cheap to produce. Chris Di Cesare, one of the members of Moore’s team, remembered The Beast, and he was the one who put the idea to Peter Moore, who gave his approval for a Halo ARG. With a team of a dozen or so staff, Di Cesare and Weisman would come up with a story about the UNSC Apocalypso, which one day finds a relic of unknown origin floating out in space. When the crew attempts to examine the relic, there’s a massive explosion. The explosion splits the ship’s AI, Melissa, into a several different fragments, one of which is sent back to the past, to 2004. The campaign was launched in July 2004, at the same time as the Halo 2 release trailer was being shown in American cinemas. At the end of the trailer, the Xbox logo faded out and the name of a website appeared: www.ilovebees.com. But that was not all, because at the same time well-known figures within the ARG fan community were receiving mysterious honey pots from someone named Margaret Efendi. It was at this moment that the game began in earnest, because each of the honey pots contained a letter. When all the letters were combined, they spelled Ilovebees. That’s when they knew something was happening. The players quickly found the website belonging to Efendi, who appeared to be a beekeeper just like any other in the USA. But by digging around in the website’s code, they found a countdown timer, set to end on August 24. More similarly strange things were found, such as links to a blog by Efendi’s niece, who begged players to help her aunt repair her blog. It only took them a few days to find terrifying calls for help from an entity named The Operator. What followed was a complex series of events, but to keep it simple, players teamed up in their thousands all over the country to track down phone boxes where they could find more clues. Almost five hours of dialog had been recorded which, when played end-to-end, revealed that the Covenant had discovered the location of Earth. Ilovebees went viral in the USA in just a few weeks, on a scale that Microsoft had never dared dream. The company estimates that the campaign reached around three hundred million people, with 1.5 million people getting involved to some extent. During a TV debate between presidential candidates George W. Bush and John Kerry, a sign saying “I love bees” was spotted; in Canada, an American player taking part in the investigation was arrested by the border police, because he had entered Canada without permission; another defied a stay-at-home order from the authorities and left to find a phone box while a tornado ravaged the county. Ilovebees was a resounding success and received a number of awards, much to the delight of Jordan Weisman and Microsoft. As for Bungie, while it had been consulted and had approved the storyline used in the campaign, the studio played only a very minor role in its design. Ilovebees ran for almost four months, ending just a few days before the release of Halo 2, and by then, the studio had far more pressing concerns.

A RECORD-BREAKING LAUNCH

The final months of Halo 2’s development were an all-out effort. Despite the long hours, and despite the amount of work left to do, the studio could see light at the end of the tunnel, and what had been a desperate crunch became a more sustainable one. In the final moments of the development process, all the parts designed by different teams started coming together to make a full game, a real game, and one that worked. Jaime Griesemer probably says it best when describing this singular moment in the Halo 2 development process: “I like to think of it as jumping out of an airplane, with some silkworms and a needle, and having to make your parachute on the way down.” This feeling of exhilaration could be felt by everyone in the studio, because even though work was continuing at a blistering pace, the end was near, and Bungie knew that Halo 2 would be a great game. Paul Bertone, who had pulled a series of all-nighters and had only rarely been sleeping at home, shared Griesemer’s sentiment: “It feels to me like the excitement is coming back. Getting the missions together is pretty huge, it’s something that people haven’t seen for three years.” As surprising as it may seem, despite this marathon crunch, the studio found an explosive second wind when it reached the home straight. The staff weren’t getting any more rest, but they managed to find the energy for a final push so that they could together finish making the game they started working on more than two years ago. “Every day, I see something brand-new that blows me away,” Marcus Lehto recounts. I’m like ‘Gosh, how did you guys do that? It’s really neat stuff.’ It excites me, it makes me do better work. It makes all these other guys do better work.”

Bungie used the end of the development process to refine the gameplay. It was perhaps the vehicles that were given the most attention, receiving new features, some of which were a bit dumb, like the Warthog’s horn. But because they were designed and developed in half an hour, according to Jaime Griesemer, they didn’t take up much of the developers’ time, who already had a lot of work to do on the Ghost and Banshee. These two vehicles now boasted enhanced handling, including the Banshee’s ability to do barrel rolls and the Ghost’s speed boost. These decisions were made in order to serve up more exciting battles, especially in multiplayer: “The main reason we added the Ghost boost was to add more complexity to vehicle combat,” Griesemer explains. “In Halo, two vehicles would essentially just pound on each other until one of them died. The boost allows one player to try to escape from a losing fight, or enter combat suddenly from an unexpected direction. The Warthog is actually faster than the Ghost, but a boosting Ghost is faster than the Warthog, leading to interesting chases and fights.” The same logic applied to the Banshee’s stunts: “Instead of just circling around and around, dogfighting is much more dynamic and takes a lot more piloting skill.” Jason Jones, meanwhile, insisted that the Ghost’s weapons be reworked. He thought that they were correctly balanced, but not enough fun to use. “The guns on the [Halo 1] Ghost were balanced by making them really inaccurate. If you aim at something in Halo 1 with the Ghost and shoot at it, your shots are going all over the place. That balances the weapon, because it’s not overpowered. But it wasn’t balanced in a way that was empowering for the player. […] It wasn’t that fun. It didn’t make you feel awesome.” Jones thought that Bungie would need to find another way to balance the Ghost, such as a cool down system that forced players to ease off the trigger, just like with the Covenant plasma rifle. Nothing would come of it, though: the cannons would come with perfectly steady accuracy, and nothing would be added to make them less efficient. Indeed, because it was easy for enemies to hijack the Ghost, it already had enough of a weakness. Especially because for Halo 2, Griesemer and his teams had tried to create a genuine dynamic damage system: vehicles would change their appearance as they took damage, before eventually exploding. For the Ghost, even its chassis could explode, depending on how it was destroyed. Halo 2 was programmed with highly refined physics, and the developers were very proud of their work. It wasn’t easy, though, because in redesigning the Halo 2 engine, Bungie had incorporated Havok, a particularly powerful physics engine. But it needed to be integrated properly and given that special Bungie magic that had made the first game such a hit.

The final stages of this task took time, which meant that some last-minute decisions had to be made, and some ideas scrapped. This was how the Huragoks, also known as the Engineers, were dropped from the game. Initially designed for Halo: Combat Evolved, the Engineers didn’t quite fit, and Bungie decided to remove them from the game even though a full 3D model had been developed. In Halo 2, they were supposed to serve as mere Easter eggs when players started a campaign on Legendary difficulty, but this idea, too, was abandoned. Out of the vehicles, it was the Mongoose that was scrapped. A small quad that could seat a driver and a passenger, in its initial design it was equipped with two small rear-mounted cannons. However, the team couldn’t find the right way to fit it into the game, because it didn’t work well with the Warthog and the Ghost, and broke the game’s balance. After trying out the Mongoose stripped of all weapons, the studio still couldn’t make it work and decided to take it out of the game. That didn’t stop it from making it into Halo 3, initially without weapons, but players would need to wait for Halo 2: Anniversary, ten years after the release of the original Halo 2, to be able to ride a Mongoose equipped with two front-mounted cannons.

But after all these trials and tribulations, on November 9, 2004, Halo 2 had arrived. The launch was a major event: the game was released in 27 countries on the same day, in eight different languages. Microsoft spared no expense on the marketing, and late in the evening of November 8, players started gathering in front of toy and video game stores which planned to open their doors at midnight. The most impressive scenes were filmed by American TV in New York, in front of the Toys “R” Us in Times Square. Hundreds of people lined up in front of the huge store, which was decked out in the colors of Halo 2 to mark the occasion. The game encountered a colossal success. A total of 2,380,000 copies were sold in just 24 hours, bringing in $25m for Microsoft. That was more than Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the other big-name release of 2004, which had only just recorded 2m copies sold despite being available since October 26. San Andreas would go on to sell more copies than Halo 2, but it’s worth noting that Rockstar’s game was released on a console that was in far more homes than the Xbox. Upon the release of Halo 2, there were 9,800,000 Xbox owners, certainly a respectable figure. But it was still light years away from the 24,900,000 PlayStation 2 owners out there. But that didn’t make Halo 2’s release any less significant, because in addition to the millions of dollars the game brought straight to Microsoft, the entire Xbox ecosystem also benefited. Indeed, it benefited to the extent that the Home & Entertainment Division (home to the Xbox division) turned a profit for the first time in its history, earning around $55m in the final quarter of 2004. Sales of its console would grow by 27 %, and the number of Xbox Live subscriptions would go through the roof. Before this point, Microsoft’s online gaming service had been a success, albeit a modest one, with the record for the number of players online at any one time standing at 40,000 players. Within 24 hours of the release of Halo 2, this figure had multiplied four-fold. Millions of players were soon rushing to do battle online, paving the way for many future games, and not just FPS. With Halo 2, Microsoft proved that online gaming was possible on consoles, and that it could be just as successful as online gaming was on the PC. The release of Halo 2, then, had an unprecedented impact on the video game industry. Its huge popular success, and especially that of its online multiplayer mode, would set the new standard for future generations of consoles, as well as for most video game production across all platforms. The next generation of consoles would all offer their own version of an online gaming service, and many new games would come with an online multiplayer mode over the months and years that followed. The games that have most benefited from the advances made with Halo 2 include the Call of Duty series, which makes use of certain Halo gameplay mechanisms as well as most of Halo 2’s online features. This was what would enable Activision to reach unheard of heights in 2007 with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, a game which, doubtless more than Halo 2 and Halo 3 combined, brought online gaming on consoles to the masses.

Chapter 9 – Xbox and Bungie Evolve

While the release of Halo 2 was a huge success, it came during the twilight moments of the Xbox’s life cycle. At that time, Microsoft had already been working on its next console for two years, hoping to release it before Sony did its PlayStation 3. This meant that Bungie had no time to waste in getting back to work on a launch title for the Xbox 360’s release. But with Bungie, nothing ever goes exactly according to plan.

BUNGIE LIMPS ON

With Halo 2 delivered, Bungie could finally stop to lick its wounds. The crunch had left the staff all but wiped out, and their offices stood empty for weeks. Many team members preferred to keep their distance, at least initially. They needed to rest, spend time with their families, and get a change of scenery. For some, the development of Halo 2 was the final straw. The one that broke the back of the camel whose knees were already starting to buckle. The studio had gotten a glimpse of things to come when Hamilton Chu, the game’s executive producer, chose to resign rather than enduring the last few weeks of the game’s development. Then, in early 2005, Michael Evans followed suit. Evans was Bungie’s lead engineer, and his health had suffered during the development of Halo 2 and, having already experienced trying times while working on the multiplayer mode for Halo: Combat Evolved, he decided that twice was quite enough. Because Bungie was all too aware that work needed to begin on Halo 3. Indeed, before a troubled development process had forced Bungie to plan a third instalment, Microsoft already had plans for the franchise: at E3 2003, while Steve Ballmer himself was giving a presentation on the new Xbox, he made an unscheduled announcement that Halo 3 might be on the way. That was back before Bungie had been forced to cut the Halo 2 storyline in half, and the second game was still supposed to be Master Chief’s final outing. Ballmer’s announcement did not go unnoticed, and some started to wonder whether Bungie was now condemned to make Halo games for Microsoft forever more. When Pete Parsons told the press, in October 2004, that Bungie would never be a one-game studio, nobody was convinced, especially in-house.

Because in Bungie’s open plan offices, not many of the staff wanted to hear another word about the franchise. Nobody was happy with the ending of Halo 2, and much of the staff were frustrated at being forced to deliver a game that many of them considered to be unfinished. The direct result was that it became obvious that Bungie would have to start work on another sequel to give players a conclusion to the adventures of Master Chief. For some, it was a hard pill to swallow. The Halo 2 crunch caused untold damage to the private lives of many of the game’s developers. The studio’s team spirit was crumbling bit by bit, and the relationships between some executives were growing strained. Martin O’Donnell recalls how, “The end of Halo 2 was so horrible, I wasn’t sure if the team could stay together, it’d been such a grind. Relationships went, divorces happened. It was incredible.” One man in particular was now making himself and his family his number one priority: Jason Jones. Left exhausted after years of constant work, and in increasingly frail health, Jones took a step back and distanced himself from the company with no word of when he would return. He used this time away to marry his girlfriend, have kids, and to travel extensively. But while he was staying away from Bungie for now, he knew that one day he would need to return, and he was keeping himself busy working on little prototypes for games he had dreamed up himself. The benefit of this was that it kept his foot in the door to the video game world while also letting him plan the studio’s future, and think about what kind of new hires would be needed for future projects. Jones knew that Bungie would need to make a sequel to Halo 2, but that was something he had little interest in doing himself, if any. But once again, he would fail to appoint any real project lead for Halo 3. All he did was entrust Max Hoberman with his role of project manager for Halo 2, which made Hoberman responsible for tracking work on the game. And there was plenty of work to do. After the game’s launch, not a soul could be found at Bungie for at least a week. When they did go back to the office, it was to find that there were major issues with the balance in multiplayer mode. Thankfully though, no players had picked up on it. “The single-player game was such a mess up until the very end–Jaime and Jason were rebalancing all of the weapons in the campaign for the two weeks before it went gold,” Hoberman recalls. “Unfortunately, the weapons were shared with multiplayer, and it broke the game.” Griesemer adds: “We caught that it was broken a lot faster than most of players, so we were able to sneak out a patch. People remember Halo 2 as being a great multiplayer game, and it was–but it wasn’t when we shipped it.”

But no sooner were these issues fixed than Pete Parsons brought more bad news to Max Hoberman: while waiting for work on Halo 3 to begin in earnest, a lot of the studio’s staff–mostly artists–were left twiddling their thumbs. Microsoft wanted to occupy them with designing new multiplayer maps that could be shipped via Xbox Live, or as released as a hard copy. Hoberman was not a fan of this idea in the slightest: “The team had such a painful experience on Halo 2 that the priority was that everyone has fun and enjoys themselves, not that we put out a quality product. The DLC wasn’t great because of it.” However, Hoberman’s team would nevertheless deliver a total of nine new maps. The first two were given to players for free through a Microsoft marketing campaign in partnership with Mountain Dew, and the Killtacular and Maptacular packs shipped a few months later on June 5, 2005. The full selection of maps were included in Halo 2: Multiplayer Map Pack, a hard copy released in stores so that players without an internet connection could get their hands on the nine new maps, as well as the game’s latest updates.

NEW CONSOLE, NEW AMBITION?

While Bungie was slowly recovering from the Halo 2 crunch, at Microsoft it was all sunshine and rainbows. It may be true that the Xbox wasn’t making Microsoft any money, but the release of Halo 2 had shown that with the right games and the right technology, anything was possible. And as early as mid-2002, the Xbox division had started planning for the future. Robbie Bach was still part of the project. Around him he built a team of Xbox veterans, fresh faces at Microsoft, and seasoned video game industry players. The software giant had got the lay of the land through its first console, but the next generation had to cement Microsoft’s green X as a permanent feature on the video-gaming landscape. Or better yet, enable Microsoft to go head-to-head with Sony. A code name was adopted for the project: Xenon. Determined to correct the mistakes it had made with is first console, Microsoft went on a hiring spree and commissioned a series of surveys and polls. In-house, they set a list of targets: attract more publishers and developers, especially Japanese studios; release the new console before Sony’s PlayStation 3, to gain market share more easily; deliver a console that was powerful enough to make full use of the first wave of HD TV, which should soon flood the market; and, most importantly, create a more elegant design than for the first console. A lot of research went into the console’s design: the Xbox was somewhat blocky, which had made it the brunt of jokes and criticism. And of course, that had a knock-on effect on the console’s image. Bach and Jay Allard were determined not to repeat the same mistake. There was a growing body of research that smooth, rounded shapes in white would have a greater chance of winning over the public once the console was released, scheduled for 2005. With its iPod, Apple had set new standards and new tastes in terms of industrial design. Black and angular devices now seemed severely dated, so Microsoft naturally decided to heed the advice of the design experts its representatives had met with.

And experts… Microsoft met with heaps of them, and not just specialists in industrial design. The engineers working on the Xenon would meet with developers at various Microsoft studios, including those at Bungie. Then fully occupied with Halo 2, Chris Butcher took the time to have a look at the different suggestions. And there were already some details that he didn’t like. In the configuration he was shown, the new Xbox would only have a single chip controlling its memory, meaning that the processor would have to go and find the resources it needed for some of its calculations itself. This was a decision that was probably dictated by Microsoft’s economic restraints, because this architecture meant that it could go without a dedicated graphics chipset. This idea didn’t go down well with Butcher, who would much rather see the next Xbox ship with lots of memory. Microsoft’s planned architecture was reminiscent of the first console, and that had worked really well, within certain limits. Limits that Bungie had unceremoniously stumbled upon during the development of Halo 2, when the game engine needed to be completely redesigned. But Butcher thought that just wouldn’t cut it for a next-gen console. Xenon would be supporting HD games and needed to send a huge amount of data through its circuits.

But the Xbox division was so obsessed with what the new console would look like that it had forgotten the most important thing: what it would contain. It’s true that negotiations between Microsoft and IBM, ATI and Nvidia wasted a lot of the Xbox engineers’ time, and when the console’s external design was approved, they still didn’t know what components it would contain. When the partnerships with IBM and ATI were eventually signed, there were some challenges actually getting all the components inside the console’s casing. The engineers got the job done in the end, but not without discovering a few shortcomings, especially with regard to the internal cooling system. The components were all tightly packed in, making it hard for air to circulate inside the console, which got very hot as a result. Nothing to be concerned about, they thought: Xenon, which would become the Xbox 360, was an extremely powerful machine that could run HD games. It was normal that such a powerful console would produce heat. But what the engineers did not yet know was that this slight manufacturing defect would lead to others. In compliance with European standards, Microsoft was using a guaranteed lead-free solder alloy, but the alloy in question was low quality. As a result, the heat the console generated would eat away at the soldering inside the Xbox 360, causing swathes of bugs and, very often, hardware failure in the affected consoles. Microsoft was aware of the problem because an engineer monitoring the console production process had noticed that a large number of Xbox 360s were defective as soon as they left the production line. Overheating consoles, underexploited RAM, DVD players that just refused to work… It was turning into a major problem for Microsoft because, in the summer of 2005, 68 % of the consoles made in the Chinese factories belonging to Flextronics and Wistron, Microsoft’s partners, were affected. But back in Redmond, nobody was really that worried. Indeed, it was quite the opposite. Steve Ballmer and the Xbox team had learned that Sony was having problems designing the PlayStation 3’s microprocessor, named Cell, that boasted incredible abilities. This made it highly likely that the console’s release would be pushed back, leaving the field wide open for the Xbox 360. Microsoft’s eagerness would end up costing it more than $1bn when Robbie Bach and Peter Moore came to understand the scale of the problem in 2006. There was one word in particular that was soon on everyone’s lips: RROD, of the Red Ring of Death.9 When three quarters of the red circle surrounding the console’s power button was lit up, it meant that the Xbox 360 was suffering hardware failure. Peter Moore and Robbie Bach alerted Steve Ballmer who, in a decision that would prove lifesaving for the Xbox 360 and the entire Xbox brand, decided to cover the cost of replacing every console that was affected.

But despite these issues, the Xbox 360 quickly became a hit upon its release. These production issues did, however, make it more difficult to get products in stores, with defective consoles being set aside to be individually repaired. That naturally slowed down the delivery process all over the world, and the console was for a while sold out, especially in the USA where it soon raced past all initial estimates. In summer 2007, a few months before the hotly anticipated release of Halo 3, 12 million Xbox 360s had already been sold.

BUNGIE GROWS

Just as the first Halo game’s success had enabled Bungie to hire new developers, Halo 2’s would enable the studio to expand its workforce even further. Their next game was going to be released on the Xbox 360, a next-gen console capable of displaying HD graphics, a fact that was not without repercussions for the developers! The game would necessarily be more complex and demand the work of a larger team. This significant increase in the number of people employed by the studio was starting to become a problem, because the offices were no longer big enough to accommodate so many people. And so, Bungie was forced to move, and the company left the Millennium campus. The studio ended up in Kirkland, a few miles west of Redmond. Nestled between a forest and Lake Washington, Kirkland was a quiet city with a population of just under 50,000, lying halfway between Redmond, Seattle, and Bellevue. It was a convenient location that made it easier for the staff to get to the studio. The new offices were freshly built and had not yet been allocated a street number, a fact which encouraged the studio execs to contact Kirkland city hall and see if they could nab number 343 in tribute to Guilty Spark, the Forerunner AI. That wouldn’t be possible, said city hall, before offering them number 434 instead. Bungie took it, and the studio’s address was now 434 Kirkland Way. The staff soon renamed the new premises Bungie Towers, which was in itself a joke: the building was as flat as they come, with only two floors. It was, however, brand new and had every imaginable modern comfort, beginning with a large kitchen and lounge area. Out of all the offices that Bungie had inhabited since it was founded, Bungie Towers was by far the most comfortable. Especially because they were a fair distance from the Microsoft campus.

9 The term made reference to the Blue Screen of Death, which was all too familiar to users of Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

Chapter 10 – Halo 3: the Game That Made the Xbox 360

A short rest, and Bungie’s staff had to head back to the grindstone. It may well be true that nobody had conceived Halo as a trilogy, but the parts of the story that had been cut from Halo 2 meant that there was still enough of a story to tell to fill a third game. There was only one problem: when the studio first got down to work, it was not as healthy as it had been in the past.

A TEAM MORE CONFLICTED THAN EVER BEFORE

Halo 3 needed to be out in the third quarter of 2007, which gave Bungie around two-and-a-half years to develop the game. So that it didn’t repeat the errors of the past–and especially those of Halo 2–Bungie launched a long pre-production phase that would last around one year. That gave the developers time to test out their ideas, get used to the Xbox 360 and, most importantly, come up with the best way of giving the trilogy a satisfactory ending. A fair number of Bungie employees had had enough Halo to last a lifetime, but they had such strong ties to the series that there was never any question of just rushing out a game so that it was over and done with once and for all. Everyone wanted the ending to be spectacular. “We knew that we had to do better than we did on Halo 2,” Chris Creamer recalls, “So it was going to be focused, concerted throughout, to make sure that Halo 3 was the jewel on the crown.” Having already been involved in the development of Oni, Creamer had slowly climbed the ranks to become a producer on Halo 2, thereby also becoming one of the studio’s executives. It was a promotion that had given him a front row seat to watch the execs rip into each other for almost an entire year. And the effects were starting to make themselves felt. Halo 3 was still without a leader, and while Max Hoberman, to whom Jason Jones had passed the reins upon his departure, was supposed to be in charge, the reality wasn’t quite as straightforward, and several people started having regular arguments. In Martin O’Donnell’s view, “It was a clumsy start to Halo 3. We didn’t really have a clear vision for what it was going to be, or a clear leader. It eventually worked itself out, but it was very, very messy. In my opinion, Pete never had the balls to just say, ‘This is it, this is the way it must be, this is what Jason and I decided.’ He was trying to take a very soft approach and it didn’t work.” With Jason Jones missing in action, many of the studio’s big guns began battling for supremacy to see who would lead the development of Halo 3: Joseph Staten, Paul Bertone, Marcus Lehto and Jaime Griesemer. As for Martin O’Donnell, he preferred to keep a safe distance. The composer was no fan of all this infighting, and besides, he was busy enough with his own contribution. Out of the four pretenders to the throne, Joseph Staten was the first to blink. After yet another argument, Marcus Lehto said he didn’t want to work with Staten anymore, and the writer replied that the feeling was mutual. Exhausted, Staten took a step back from Bungie and took a long sabbatical that would keep him out of Halo 3’s development for a good long while. But his absence left Bungie in a pickle, because Staten was the main writer for Halo, and the director of all its cutscenes. To fill his role, a decision was made to form a small committee made up of staff at the studio. Their number included Rob Strokes and Peter O’Brien, who were tasked with using the committee’s ideas to form the general outline for the plot. This approach was a limited success, because there were also personality clashes inside the committee, as a somewhat bitter Jaime Griesemer told us: “The Halo 3 story was written by a bunch of guys in the middle ground saying: ‘I want to do it this way but I can’t explain why, and I’m not sure my idea’s better than yours so I’m just going to defend it loudly.’” Griesemer increasingly found himself at loggerheads with Paul Bertone, who also ended up walking away. Like Staten, he temporarily left the studio to take a step back and, most importantly, to get a good rest. The problem here was that out of all the people fighting to be the Halo 3 project lead, Bertone was perhaps the best qualified, and his departure raised a few hackles: Bertone himself now admits, “I’m sure that pissed off a lot of people. I didn’t really talk to anybody from Bungie about it. I just went to Pete and said, ‘I need to take some time off,’ and just disappeared. I felt like I had nothing in the tank at that point, and the best thing for me was to recharge my batteries and then be able to come back, get my head down and do what I did during Halo that made it successful.” Staten and Bertone were soon followed by Hoberman, who also decided he’d like to take a step back from Bungie. The engineer even left Washington State altogether, returning to his home state of Texas and settling in Austin. At first he worked on Halo 3 remotely, but in late 2006 Hoberman resigned from Bungie for good. He then founded his own studio, Certain Affinity, and signed a contract with Microsoft. His first assignment? A new pack of multiplayer maps for Halo 2, the Blastacular Map Pack released on April 17, 2007. Certain Affinity would go on to make regular contributions to the Halo universe, as it was Hoberman’s company that made the DLC maps for Halo: Reach, and worked on the multiplayer mode for Halo 4 and Halo: The Master Chief Collection.

The situation at Bungie was starting to raise a few red flags for Microsoft, who also lost their first representative within the studio when Peter Parsons decided to leave the company. The game changer came when Harold Ryan was appointed as studio manager. Having worked as a simple test manager up until that point, Ryan was suddenly propelled to the top spot at Bungie, where he would prove able to get the staff back on track. Not everyone was happy with his appointment, however, as we learned from a number of former Bungie employees we interviewed for this book. “There’s a long story behind how Harold became studio manager and I’d rather not go into it. Bungie tends to trust the people that are there, and promotes from within.” Despite the absence of some of the studio’s key figures, work on Halo 3 was coming along nicely. The one area that was still causing issues, though, was the plot. While the general outline had been laid out, some details were still the cause of lively debate within the studio. Some thought that Earth should be completely destroyed at the end of the game, while others thought that players should finally see the face of Master Chief. The fate of the Spartan himself, as well as Cortana, was also being bounced around the studio, and nobody could really come to an agreement. In the end, it was Martin O’Donnell who spoke up and pointed out the main problem with the first drafts of Halo 3’s story. CJ Cowan, the man who replaced Joseph Staten, tells it like this: “He’s like ‘I think it needs more punch.’ What it really needs is some death.” The way O’Donnell tells it, “I didn’t see any shape to the story. Nothing happy, nothing sad, nothing intense. You actually want to get to the point where the player goes ‘Oh wait a minute, I’d been this character for three games, they can’t possibly kill me.’ There is no sense of heroic action if there are no real consequences.” O’Donnell then offered a few suggestions: “I came up with a few moments that I thought would be important to the story, like making sure Lord Hood (Ron Perlman) came back, Miranda Keyes gets killed, Sgt. Johnson is killed by Guilty Spark, Master Chief kills Guilty Spark, and the Arbiter kills the Prophet of Truth. These were all moments that the story team had at some point suggested but somehow couldn’t agree on having in the final story. It didn’t take a lot of convincing but after I spoke with each member of the story team we agreed on all of those points.” One person, however, was very unhappy with these choices: Joseph Staten. When he returned to the office to work on the final script for Halo 3, he had to work with everything that had been decided and written in his absence, some of which he found very hard to swallow. “He never forgave me for having Johnson killed,” O’Donnell recalls with a laugh. “But we laugh about it now.”

Inside the studio, a sense of order was gradually returning, with the staff settling into their roles. Jaime Griesemer took on the job of lead designer, while Marcus Lehto returned to his role of artistic director. Paul Bertone, back at long last, oversaw the design of the different campaign missions. The studio execs all simmered down and managed to work together. “I think a lot of the competition between me and Jaime [Griesemer] was coming from my side,” Bertone now admits. “I wanted to work on systems and AI, and we butted heads a couple times. But once I came back we cleared all that air, got on the same page and really started to trust each other. That felt really good.” Joseph Staten took longer to return to the fold, but he was busy working on other projects for Microsoft and for Bungie. When he got back, he took on the role of writing director for Halo 3 and enriched the franchise universe with a few new ideas of his own, which were then incorporated into the game while it was still in development. Within Bungie, some of the staff wanted to expand the Halo universe, with Staten at the front of the pack. He worked with Robert McLees, and also a newbie to the company by the name of Luke Smith.

A former freelance journalist at Kotaku, Smith earned a reputation while working at 1UP.com, where he wrote the News section. A gifted journalist with razor sharp penmanship, Smith aimed regular criticism at big names in the video game industry, and had caught Bungie’s eye after writing a long article about Halo 2 in which he pointed out some of its shortcomings. Having grown bored of how the American video-gaming press operated, and already a fan of Bungie’s work, it didn’t take Smith long to take the studio up on its job offer. For a few years now, Bungie had been trying to maintain the powerful connection that bound its community together. But Bungie was no longer a small independent studio. It now worked on gargantuan productions, its workforce had expanded, its fan community had grown from thousands of gamers to millions of players who were all as impatient as they were passionate about the game, and Microsoft was keeping an eye on them. This meant that the studio no longer had the same freedom it once had, or the same ability to speak to its fans, a situation that it had been trying to remedy for a few years already. This was why in 2003, Bungie hired its first community manager, in one Brian Jarrard. A few months later, in early 2004, a former journalist named Frank O’Connor joined Jarrard, and quickly became Bungie’s main spokesperson online. And now, with Smith, that made three of them who were interacting with fans on a daily basis and hosting a series of Q&A sessions. Jarrard and Smith even presented a podcast where they regularly hosted guests from the studio, thereby shining a spotlight on some of Bungie’s longstanding personalities. But despite this close relationship, Smith kept his cards close to his chest when it came to what was currently in production, much to fans’ excitement. Because unlike at many other video game studios, Bungie’s community managers played an active role in developing the studio’s games. This meant that they had in-depth knowledge of what was going on, and were constantly being bombarded with questions from the community. This was particularly true of O’Connor, who soon became a living encyclopedia of the Halo universe. A successor to McLees and Staten, the man who fans came to know affectionately as “Frankie” was the heir to the series’ lore, to which he also made his own contribution. Indeed, he was the one who wrote most of the little story told by the Forerunner terminals hidden throughout Halo 3’s levels. These terminals contained old files and recounted the war between the Forerunner Empire and the Flood, enabling players to learn more about the ancient alien race.

Following a similar trajectory to O’Connor’s growing importance within Bungie, the tension between some of the Grizzled Ancients, as the pillars of the studio were known, was enabling the next generation to make its name within the team. Mostly hired after the studio was bought out by Microsoft, they were Bungie’s new lifeblood, and while some of the executives had taken a leave of absence, they picked up the baton and made it possible for the development of Halo 3 to move forward without too many snags. And without ever forgetting their spiritual leader, Jason Jones. Still on leave from Bungie, the studio’s co-founder was nevertheless present at every meeting in the form of a life-sized cardboard cutout to which the studio team had stuck a photo of their boss. This fake Jason Jones was moved between different rooms so that he was always watching over his flock. Despite his long absence, his status within Bungie, and even Microsoft Studios as a whole, was never called into question by management: “He was thinking about what else he wanted to do, and travelling a lot,” O’Donnell recalls. “All the while, he was still a Bungie employee. Because, you know, we had convinced everybody that all the magic sauce came from Jason.”

IN WITH THE NEW!

Bungie had no intention of resting on its laurels when making the third game in the series, and just as it had done for Halo 2, the studio eagerly turned to the list of things it had not been able to do or get finished on time for the earlier games. And there was no shortage of ideas, be that in terms of new gameplay features or new game modes in general. When it came to weapons, Halo 3 was going all-out, with an arsenal of more than 20 different weapons. These included some interesting new additions, like the M6 Grindell/Galilean Nonlinear Rifle, or the Spartan Laser, as it was more commonly known. It had to be charged before firing a powerful laser beam that made short work of armored vehicles and slow-moving or stationary enemy. The assault rifle made its big comeback, but not without going through a design overhaul so that it didn’t unbalance the game, or become too similar to the BR or SMG. Most of the UNSC and Covenant weapons had been given a slight makeover, and it was actually among the Brutes that most new additions were to be found. Because the Brutes had replaced the Elites in the Covenant hierarchy, they were now the player’s main enemies, and Bungie had to revise these intimidating creatures, in terms of both aesthetics and gameplay. In Halo 2, the Brutes were “bullet sponges,” in the words of Paul Bertone, which made them neither fun nor rewarding to encounter. “The design of the Brutes was not consistent about reinforcing that they’re meant to be worthy adversaries for the player,” Chris Butcher explains, and so the artists got down to work and quickly produced new Brute models with more polished equipment and an appearance that also communicated their violent, merciless natures. Their uniforms were covered in sharp metal and leather, in an aesthetic that was also repeated for their vehicles. Halo 3 didn’t do away with the Ghosts and Banshees, but it did add some typically Brutish war machines, like the Chopper, a kind of futuristic motorbike that could crush anything that stood in its path. It was Eric Arroyo who designed the Chopper, and the process hadn’t been a straightforward one. The structure of the Chopper, with two large front wheels, meant that its pilot enjoyed too much cover from enemy fire. That made the job of players under attack unnecessarily complicated, while also providing too much of an advantage after hijacking the vehicle. Arroyo tried out several ideas, and with help from Griesemer they managed to come to an agreement on a definitive model. It retained the advantage afforded by the two wheels to the front, but left the rider’s back completely exposed. This meant that players needed to dodge the Chopper’s attack before trying to take the ride out from behind. That also contributed to the greater variety in Halo 3’s combats, as well as making them that little bit more challenging. The Xbox 360 was a far more powerful console than the Xbox, a fact that the developers initially found intimidating, as Shi Kai Wang explains: “Developing for the 360 has been awesome, great support and great hardware. The downside to the switch is the amount of content we’re trying to fill. The amount of time it takes to create content has more than doubled and has created pipelines that are much more complicated and unforgiving. It forced us to set priorities on what we considered important and necessary vs. plain aesthetics.” Indeed, the Xbox 360 was the console that ushered in the era of HD gaming for home consoles, an evolution that was not without consequences for games studios, who had to launch mass recruitment drives. Of course, it also meant that more ideas could be made real… In Halo 3 this is particularly evident in the battlefields: the series of sandboxes10 that formed levels in the Halo games gained in amplitude and detail in Halo 3. They were bigger, more complex, and contained more enemies and more vehicles. It was an opportunity for Bungie to improve a sequence that was featured in Halo 2 but that the developers weren’t happy with: the fight against the Scarab, the giant Covenant assault platform that Master Chief boarded and destroyed at the heart of New Mombasa. Bungie planned on bringing it back for Halo 3. “The Scarab was in Halo 2, but it was very scripted,” Jaime Griesemer tells us. For Halo 3, Bungie planned on using the Xbox 360’s processing power to add Scarab to the list of vehicles that the AI managed in real time. Players would need to figure out the best way to destroy it for themselves, either by taking advantage of its weak points or boarding it to destroy it from the inside. For a while, the designers played around with a Scarab whose legs could be scaled by Master Chief: the idea was that once he had climbed to a certain height, he would be able to rip off the platform’s armor plating and slide a grenade inside its joints. Once the Scarab was off balance, the player would then just need to jump up onto the lowest platforms and make their way along to the reactor to blow it up. This idea was ultimately dropped, but the idea of placing weak points on the legs was retained.

Thankfully, the UNSC had not been overlooked, with the designers coming up with new human vehicles like the Mongoose, which made it into the series at last, and the Hornet, a small helicopter equipped with a heavy machine gun and rocket launcher. Still with a view to giving players more tools to use during major battles, Halo 3 also introduced a new weapons category–heavy weapons–which caused the camera to switch to third person when used by Master Chief. When using heavy weapons, the Spartan moved more slowly and was no longer able to use grenades or his melee attack. On the bright side, though, he boasted some formidable firepower. So it was that heavy machine guns and rocket launchers were added to the Halo 3 arsenal, along with one of Robert McLees old flames–quite literally–in the form of the flamethrower. Initially designed for Halo back when it was still known as Blam!, it had been left out of the final version of the game due to the studio thinking that the physics engine would not be able to properly manage the flames spewed out by the weapon, or how they spread around the game environment. The weapon had even been spotted in the code for the PC port of Halo: Combat Evolved, but it would again be absent from Halo 2 and it would not be until Halo 3 that it officially saw any action, with a design not too far removed from McLees’ initial sketches. In parallel, the designers were working on a new class of items, modestly known as Equipment, which would bring a touch more variety to combat. Flashbang grenades, antipersonnel mines, the power drain, antigravity packs, bubble shields… They would allow players to tailor their strategies or come up with new ones, or let them invent new ways of getting around obstacles. Halo 3’s guiding principle? Abundance. For the trilogy’s final instalment, Bungie wanted to give fans as comprehensive an experience as possible. Even the multiplayer mode was enhanced, with the addition of new Spartan armor. In Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2, players could only select the color of their character’s armor, which was otherwise the same as Master Chief’s. In Halo 3, not only could players don Mjolnir Mk. VI armor, but also a whole host of different versions breastplates, shoulder pads, helmets… they could all be unlocked by playing the game and getting particular achievements, which was also a way for the most hardcore players to show off their skills and commitment.

But these new features, respectable as they were, ultimately paled in comparison to what one team of developers had been cooking up: a level editor known as Forge. It would allow players to edit the existing multiplayer maps, for example by moving particular weapons or adding more vehicles. It wasn’t the first time that Bungie had tried to do this, because the Marathon series had already boasted a map editor, also named Forge. The same was true of Myth and Myth II. Halo, too, was supposed to have one, back before the studio was acquired by Microsoft. The idea had been shelved, but now it was being dusted off for Halo 3. In the beginning, though, Forge was intended for the developers to use, and for Tyson Green’s team in particular, who were working on Halo 3’s multiplayer mode. Indeed, Chris Butcher told us how, “The Forge for Halo 3 started as Tyson and the other multiplayer designers saying, ‘I really don’t know if this is the right place for the Battle Rifle to be, so I want the ability to move it.’ Because in Halo 2 it was really painful that they couldn’t change where all the weapons were placed in the environment. So he built that system for Halo 3, and the stated design goal of that was ‘let the designers move where the weapons are on the map.’” Forge, combined with the new Theater mode that let players view their games from any angle, would provide players with unlimited ways to customize their games, and also to share and showcase their own creativity. They were also fantastic tools for video editors, who had a greater online presence following the success of Red Vs. Blue. Their number included a young Canadian creator by the name of Jon CJ Graham. Going by the username DigitalPh33r, he had been successfully creating content since 2007 with one of his first videos, Master Chief Sucks at Halo, which starred a Master Chief figurine. The figurine came to life when its owner wasn’t around, just like in the Disney Pixar film, Toy Story. The only difference was that unlike Woody, Buzz Lightyear and the rest of the gang, this Master Chief was extremely obnoxious with a vulgar, homophobic, sexist, and racist attitude. Of course, he also sucked at Halo. The success of this first video would encourage Graham to keep going, and after making two more episodes of Master Chief Sucks at Halo, he launched a mini-series called Arby ‘n’ The Chief, where the Spartan’s vices are counterbalanced by the calm, intelligent, and cultured personality exuded by an Arbiter figurine. Bungie soon spotted Graham’s videos, and gifted him some recon armor, which had previously been the exclusive reserve of studio staff, and which enabled them to identify each other when playing online. Arby ‘n’ The Chief would run for eight full seasons, and currently boasts tens of millions of views.

Despite a complicated start, Halo 3’s development moved forwards without any snags, in what was a first for Bungie since its move to Seattle. The arrival of Jonty Barnes, an experienced executive producer, in September 2006 may well have had something to do with it. Barnes was an industry veteran who had made a name for himself in 1989 when he joined Bullfrog to work on the level design for Peter Molyneux’s second game, Populous. Barnes was well-liked by Molyneux, and went on to play a role on most of Bullfrog’s projects, contributing his expertise as a programmer to Theme Hospital and Dungeon Keeper. When Molyneux left Bullfrog to found Lionhead Studios, Barnes was one of the first developers that the talented game designer reached out to and hired. At Lionhead, he led the programming team for Black & White, before being appointed director of Black & White Studios in 2002; this satellite studio was tasked with making a sequel to Fable, and it was Barnes who served as executive producer. When Microsoft acquired Lionhead in April 2006, Jonty Barnes became one of Bungie’s colleagues, joining the studio himself in September of that same year. In Barnes, Bungie had acquired not only a talented developer, but also an experienced manager with the skills needed to oversee every aspect of producing a AAA title.

But that’s not to say that the team managed to avoid the end-of-development crunch. It was an easier, more tolerable crunch, of the kind experienced by most video game studios around the world, but it still forced Bungie to make certain choices. Bungie’s staff had a very idiosyncratic way of illustrating the situation: on a huge whiteboard, they had drawn a giant aircraft flying very close to the ground. To enable them to gain altitude, the passengers were jettisoning weight and throwing anything that wasn’t strictly essential out of the window. On boxes hurtling to the ground could be read: “Downward-aiming Banshees,” “personal hygiene,” “Harold’s lungs.” Even Paul Bertone himself had to rework a few missions so that they could definitely make it into the final game. He remembers how, “I took the Cortana mission, completely gutted it and rebuilt it in about three weeks–that mission where Gravemind is talking to you and Cortana is in distress. We didn’t have a lot of resources for that. It was a lot cooler on paper. And it had the transforming Flood, but I don’t think we did great there. It’s a kind of half-baked mission that needed to be there for the story, so we sort of threw it together, but I would’ve preferred not to do that.” Then one thing in particular had forced Bertone to work in a rush: Rob Stokes, with whom Bertone was sharing the role of lead designer for the game’s campaign mode, left the studio just a few months before the game was released. The MIT graduate, who had been working for Bungie since December 2002, had played a major role in designing Halo 2’s missions, single-handedly designing The Arbiter, The Oracle, Delta Halo, and Regret. He belonged to the second generation of developers and had gradually taken on an increasingly important role in the studio, until he had become one of the most influential figures in Halo 3’s development. For Halo 3, Stokes’ role encompassed more than just the lead designer for the single-player campaign missions, because he had also led the initial pre-production teams and written many of the game’s cutscenes. His departure struck a heavy blow, and Bertone was forced to carry the extra workload. Cortana was not the only level to face this unfortunate fate, Tsavo Highway was also shortened, and one entire level was removed from the game. Known for a while as Guardian Forest, the level took place on a Forerunner compound in a verdant jungle. In it, Master Chief was supposed to do battle with a Forerunner creature known as the Guardian. These Sentinels were responsible for building the Ark, the Forerunner world where most of Halo 3’s action takes place. They were relatively large and equipped with a huge red eye that could fire powerful lasers. In the original plans made by Bungie’s designers, Master Chief was supposed to confront the Guardian and rip out its eye to use as a weapon. The level was ultimately removed from the game, but the concept art caught the eye of Steve Cotton, who changed the feel of the level by removing the mysterious mist that enveloped the jungle and changing the layout of the buildings. After a few weeks of work, he had turned it into a multiplayer map, today known as Guardian. When Halo 3 was released, the word Guardian would immediately intrigue the player community, especially those who were avid consumers of Halo lore, because it was a name mentioned several times in the game universe. In Halo 3’s multiplayer mode, players who strayed too far past the invisible edge of the map would mysteriously perish, with the only explanation provided being a short message displayed on the screen: “Killed by the Guardians.” A theory soon emerged in which Guardian referred to a highly evolved Forerunner Sentinel, and it garnered a lot of support when Halo Legends was released in November 2009. In one of the short films that made up Legends, a long Forerunner creature could be seen, and some people thought it was a Guardian. Bungie never offered a response to this riddle, and it would not be until 2015 and the release of Halo 5: Guardians that the creatures made their first official appearance in the series.

BELIEVE

Halo 3 was the first Halo game to be an Xbox 360 exclusive, but more than that, it was the final chapter in one of the greatest video-gaming adventures in the 2000s. Naturally, then, Microsoft pulled out all the stops and began work on an XXL marketing campaign in 2006. It all began at E3 2006, when Bungie and Microsoft unveiled the first trailer for the game. The trailer was relatively understated: it showed a ruined landscape, probably located close to New Mombasa, as the remains of the city’s space elevator can be seen. Viewers then heard Cortana’s voice, and her image began flashing up on the screen. She makes the following statements:

I have defied Gods and Demons.

I am your shield… I am your sword…

I know you… Your past… Your future…

This is the way the world ends.

The last sentence was taken from Cortana’s very first letter sent in February 1999 to Hamish Sinclair, one of the members of marathon.bungie.org when Bungie launched its Halo communications campaign. It was itself copied from the poem, The Hollow Men, by T.S. Eliot. When Cortana disappeared, Master Chief appeared on the screen carrying the new version of the assault rifle, a decision that got the desired reaction from the fans. Indeed, nothing was a coincidence when Bungie was communicating about its games. The camera then panned out and rose to reveal what the Spartan was heading towards: a vast crater in which could be seen a mysterious Forerunner structure. Above, the sky is filled with Covenant ships, clouds and flashes of lightning. Then, the alien relic emits a light and opens up. The trailer ended on a big white flash, before the Halo 3 logo appeared on the screen, followed by that of the studio. One last sentence then appeared to conclude the trailer: “Finish the fight,”11 followed by a date: 2007. The soundtrack, composed for the occasion by the ever-stalwart Martin O’Donnell, marked a return to the soundscape of the first game. As it happened, this model would be applied to the entire Halo 3 soundtrack; the rock notes of Halo 2 had not proven popular with everyone, and O’Donnell had a very specific structure in mind when he began work on the music for Halo 3. “I had to make a decision,” he told IGN in March 2016. “All of a sudden, there were a lot of themes that became so iconic for Halo, that to a certain extent I was kind of… I had to do something with those themes, to make sure that not only the fans were happy, but it actually made sense. And by the time we got to Halo 3, our plan was that it would be the ending of this grand and glorious space trilogy. That was gonna be the end of Halo. So in the most general way, I thought: ‘Well Halo 1 had this kind of score, Halo 2 kind of was…’ It was related to the Halo 1 stuff but it had a lot of new stuff, and a lot of guitars and rock’n’roll… I thought: ‘Well, on Halo 3, let’s go back to sort of what we did on Halo 1.’ So the big plan was A, B, A. Which is a form that I like for music. Halo 3 was just sort of a return to some of the classic Halo stuff. But this time I’m gonna try to use a big orchestra, and less samples and synth. So we revisited some of the pieces from Halo 1, but orchestrated them up and recorded them with big stuff. That’s how Halo 3’s music came about.”

And of course, the soundtrack he created was a hit. In 16: 9 and in HD, the trailer was a clear statement that Halo was getting ready to join the next generation of consoles, a statement that came much to the fans’ delight. Ever since its conception, the franchise had been a showcase for Xbox technology, and Halo 3 could well become the most beautiful game ever seen on a games console. And the media’s enthusiasm was ratcheted up another notch when it was announced that a new trailer would be shown during the Super Bowl on December 4th, 2006. The final of the American football championship is the most-watched TV event in the United States, and provided unrivalled visibility to the different products advertised during and around the game. Brands were more than willing to spend several million dollars for advertising spots ranging from 30 seconds to over one minute. Some of the Super Bowl ads are etched into popular memory forever, such as the McDonald’s commercial in which Michael Jordan and Larry Bird face off in an improbable shoot-out. More recently, Volkswagen made a big impression with its “Baby Darth Vader” commercial, where a young boy in fancy dress tries to use the Force to interact with his environment. For the 2006 Super Bowl, Microsoft planned to make a big impression of its own and entrusted production of its video to Digital Domain, a Californian company specializing in digital special effects, and whose name could be seen in the credits of many a Hollywood blockbuster: Titanic, Apollo 13, Armageddon, Transformers 3, Fast & Furious 7, X-Men Apocalypse… Directed by Joseph Kosinski (Tron: Legacy, Oblivion…), the commercial, entitled Starry Night, begins with two children lying on the grass, looking up at the stars. They wonder if there were other living beings out there in space, and if one day they might meet them. While they are chatting, the camera leaves them and focuses on a helmet hidden among the high grass. Before viewers have time to figure out that the helmet belongs to Master Chief, the scene undergoes a radical change: the helmet is still there, but the grass disappears to be replaced by arid, dusty soil. Now in first person, a scream is heard while the Spartan picks up and puts on his helmet. The camera switches back to third person, rotates around Master Chief and takes stock of his assault rifle. Master Chief’s hearing gradually recovers, and on the radio he hears soldiers worrying about his fate. “I think we lost him,” the viewer hears. “Not yet,” the hero responds, looking up at the sky to see Covenant plasma artillery zeroing in on his position. He grabs a strange object and, at the last minute, throws it at the ground and crouches down. All of a sudden, a shield is deployed around him, keeping him safe from a shell landing right in front of him. No sooner has it exploded than the Spartan rushes forward. He holsters his magnum and readies his assault rifle before throwing himself into a battle against Brutes and Apparitions. Against a black background, the Halo 3 logo appears, then “Finish the fight” and that same date of 2007, and that’s it. The scene’s intensity and the striking realism of the graphics would be burned into players’ memory, who had a lot to say about the strange shield Master Chief deployed: Frank O’Connor was soon inundated with questions from members of halo.bungie.org, and just like everyone else, they thought that the shield was in fact a new kind of grenade, because Bungie had not yet revealed anything about the game’s gameplay. As always, O’Connor deployed humor to dodge their questions, providing only enigmatic answers that players would then attempt to dissect, without much success.

Meanwhile, Microsoft announced that a beta version would be released in the spring to test the game’s multiplayer servers. This was a major first in the history of the series, and as a result one that would generate a lot of noise, especially because the registration instructions provided by Microsoft were lacking in clarity. Microsoft initially invited players to log on to Halo3.com, while they were waiting for a raffle to be held. But protests from players would lead Microsoft and Bungie, in February 2007, to offer new ways to access the beta. Play three hours of Halo 2 and be one of the first 13,333 people to say so on Halo3.com, or join Bungie’s Friends & Family program, reserved for an elite band of studio associates and the most die-hard players. In the end most players, and especially those outside the USA, would go for the final option: buying the game Crackdown, which came with access to the Halo 3 beta. Developed by Realtime Worlds, this was a new title published by Microsoft, and the company wanted to leverage Halo 3 to boost sales of its new intellectual property. It was a tactic that worked extremely well, because as soon as it was released on February 20, Crackdown drew in a great many players: in just a week, 427,000 copies had been sold in the Unites States, and at the end of 2007 Microsoft would reveal that 1.5 million copies of Crackdown had been sold worldwide. On May 15, Microsoft at long last announced the release date for the final chapter in Master Chief’s adventure: September 25. It was perfect timing, because the game’s beta testing was starting the very next day, where players would discover Halo 3’s multiplayer mode through a number of playlists and three maps: Valhalla, Blizzard and Altitude. The latter was a fine example of what the two men responsible for designing the multiplayer maps in Halo 3–Chris Carney and Steve Cotton–had been trying to do. Just like Zanzibar in Halo 2, it was a scenario map upon which there would be an attacking team and a defending team. For a while, Carney and Cotton had explored other avenues to make things even more exciting: “We stuck some towers in, and we put AI gunners on all the towers. So as you’re running up the hill, you just get tagged by all these AI guys. That’s a direction that we went and we were like ‘Wow it’s way too hard.’” So Carney and Cotton decided to wind things down a notch and make do without the AI. It all had to be played out between human players, but there nevertheless had to be an obstacle that the attackers had to breach: “Some of the specific things that we tried out were having a wall that you have to get past, that sort of define whether you won or lost the game.” When the beta closed, it had been a resounding success: around 800,000 players had done battle online, for a total playtime of 816 game years. Thanks to this beta, Xbox Live created a new record for the most players online.

2007 was a particularly good year for Microsoft and its communications, with the software giant able to keep up a sustained pace of marketing events. That year, even E3 seemed to be smiling on Xbox and Bungie, because the event changed format and was pushed back to July. Held in a much less ostentatious venue in Santa Monica, E3 2007 was a chance for Bungie to unveil a new trailer, this time using images taken from the actual game. After a short musical introduction from Corporeal, the trailer started to roll: viewers heard the voice of the Prophet of Truth as dramatic images passed over the screen. Sergeant Johnson being attacked by a Brute, Covenant ships glassing a planet, cities lying in ruin, consumed by flames. Then Master Chief appeared, and began a montage of action scenes taken from the game’s campaign. The reaction to the trailer was doubtless more lukewarm than Bungie and Xbox had hoped. It has to be said that it showed the new graphics engine to be decent, but not at all outstanding, and the writing for the trailer failed to elicit the same epic emotions that had come to characterize every Halo reveal so far. This meant that everyone duly noted the date of September 25, and hoped to be pleasantly surprised.

Especially because Microsoft was by no means done with its marketing campaign. A few hours before E3, on July 10, Bungie posted a video on its website, entitled Halo: Arms Race. This short film was the first in a series of three shorts that together made up Halo: Landfall. Arms Race, the first, showed UNSC weapons factories working flat out to make weapons and vehicles to equip its soldiers as quickly as possible. The second, Combat, showed two ODST12 soldiers fighting against several Brutes, before a Pelican dropped a Warthog and enabled them to make their escape. Unfortunately, one of the two ODST has been seriously injured to the lower abdomen. The final video, Last One Standing, is a direct sequel to Combat, and provides something of an explanation for the start of Halo 3 and how the UNSC was able to find Master Chief so quickly. At the end of Halo 2, Master Chief dramatically boarded The Keyship, a Forerunner ship used by the Prophet of Truth’s Covenant forces to reach Earth. What then happened was that, when approaching Earth’s atmosphere, Master Chief chose to jump out into the vacuum of space. Then, in an effort to retrieve him as quickly as possible, the UNSC dispatched two ODST troops to use a laser guiding system to calculate Master Chief’s trajectory and ascertain where he would come to Earth. They managed it, but not without some difficulty, as most of the soldiers had been savagely killed by the Brutes. Last One Standing was broadcast on the Discovery Channel on September 24, just a few hours before Halo 3 was released. The short films were directed by Neill Blomkamp in partnership with Bungie and Weta, filmmaker Peter Jackson’s studio. Weta provided most of the special effects, and also made the replica costumes, weapons, and vehicles that appeared in the three films. Weta’s quality workmanship actually caused some problems for Bungie: in 2009, five officers from Kirkland Police Department pulled up in the studio’s car park. A resident had warned them that someone was walking along Kirkland Way armed with an AK-47 assault rifle. After searching for the suspect for about 10 minutes, one of the officers suddenly thought to drop by Bungie’s offices, as the company was now well-known in the city. The officer’s hunch was proven right: the armed man in question was nothing more than a Bungie employee bringing one of the replica sniper rifles designed by Weta back to the studio. Just a scare, then. No harm done. Halo: Landfall was the stuff of dreams for the fan community, because rumors had been circulating for a few months now that Microsoft, Bungie, and Peter Jackson were in discussion about making a Halo movie. What they didn’t know, was that this was more than just a rumor, and that the three parties had done more than just talk, as you’ll see in the following chapter of this book.

As exciting as it was, Halo: Landfall was just a little taste of what Microsoft had planned for the release of Halo 3. In June 2007, a new ARG was launched, and while it wasn’t as successful as Ilovebees, it enabled fans to learn more about the end of the war between the Forerunner Empire and the Flood. In parallel, the Believe campaign was also kicking off. It focused on Master Chief and his apparent sacrifice to help humanity win the war against the Covenant. Bungie and Microsoft would build an imposing diorama depicting a battle scene containing dozens of characters, both UNSC troops and alien forces. At its center, a Brute captain was carrying the body of Master Chief, who held in his hand a Covenant plasma grenade. This diorama, known as the John-117 Monument, was exhibited on many occasions in a new series of short films. Museum, the first, revealed to viewers that decades had passed since the end of the war, and that the survivors had built the Museum of Humanity, where a variety of pieces recounting the history of the Human-Covenant War were on display. The John-117 Monument occupies the museum’s main hall, where the narrator is interviewing a veteran. The diorama was also the focus of a second film, a mockumentary about how it was made. Other interviews with veterans were also recorded, all hailing the bravery of Master Chief. They pulled out all the stops to make the Human-Covenant War seem more real, more definite, and therefore more dramatic. Master Chief was portrayed as a hero, an outstanding human who inspired hope in those who fought alongside him. The tone was deliberately dramatic, without being maudlin. Microsoft would even install commemorative plaques here and there across the United States, celebrating the Spartan’s exploits.

On September 25, when Halo 3 finally hit the shelves, the fan community was at fever pitch. How did the war end? Was Master Chief really going to die? Microsoft’s marketing campaign had done its job. On the first day of its release, Halo 3 sold 2.5 million copies: around 200,000 more than Halo 2 in the same time period. By the end of the month, it had crossed the 3.3 million mark. And, just as Microsoft had hoped, the entire Xbox ecosystem benefitted because the release of Halo 3 saw Xbox 360 sales explode, especially in the USA: they almost doubled in the month of September 2007, rising from 277,000 to 528,000 consoles sold. That figure beat the 501,000 Wii sold by Nintendo, as well as the 119,000 PlayStation 3 sold by Sony, whose sales figures actually fell slightly that September. According to Microsoft, 14.5 million copies of Halo 3 were sold in 2018, clocking up a total of 650 million hours of online gaming. It was a colossal success.

And yet, the game was not spared criticism when being reviewed. While the abundant depth of its multiplayer mode was universally applauded, some reviewers pointed out the many holes in the campaign mode’s story, not to mention the graphics that were nowhere near as good as it would have been reasonable to hope. Without being ugly, Halo 3 was far from the graphical breakthrough that Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2 had been in their day. Especially because in the meantime, a game had been released that set the new standard. Developed by Epic Games and released as an Xbox 360 exclusive on November 7, 2006, that game was Gears of War, and it gave Halo 3 a run for the title of the console’s best game.

STIFF COMPETITION

While Halo 2 was without a doubt the biggest game released for the Xbox, the story of how Halo 3 came to dominate the Xbox 360 is less clear-cut. Bungie’s new game was faced with fierce competition from the moment it was released, something that the studio was not used to. Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2 were the two best FPS available on consoles–that much was beyond any doubt–and both were regularly lauded for their technical prowess as well as for the depth of their multiplayer modes, factors which placed them in a class of their own. However, the first Halo game’s success would spur on many other developers, some of whom would find Sony waiting with open arms. The Japanese manufacturer was desperately seeking its own FPS that could stand up against Bungie’s game, and they settled on a small Dutch studio by the name of Guerrilla Games who, in the early 2000s, was working on an FPS called Killzone. Like Halo, Killzone was originally intended for release on PC, but it caught the eye of the PlayStation execs, who signed a contract with Guerrilla Games: Killzone would be a PlayStation 2 exclusive. Porting the game over from the PC to Sony’s console proved to be a more complex operation than initially thought, but the game would finally be released on November 2, 2004, just a few days before Halo 2. While Guerrilla Games had insisted at great length that its game shouldn’t be compared to Bungie’s, some sections of the press, as well as PlayStation fans themselves, almost immediately began referring to Killzone as the “Halo-killer.” Killzone was beautiful to look at; Killzone was mature; and, most importantly, it offered lots of different game modes, and even an online gaming feature. Despite its obvious strengths, though, Guerrilla Games’ title would never really establish enough market share to dethrone Halo.

But in 2005, another FPS series would come along to outshine Halo. Developed by California’s Infinity Ward, Call of Duty 2 was released a few days after the Xbox 360, and quickly started scoring points. The first game in the series, released two years earlier, had already proven a hit with PC and Mac gamers, but it was with the fourth instalment in the series, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, that it exploded onto a whole new level. Leaving the battlefields of the Second World War behind, Modern Warfare gave players a taste of more recent conflicts, from Eastern Europe to the Middle East. Its online mode was based on the general principles laid out in Halo 2, and the results were sensational. With its more accessible, faster-paced gameplay, it won over a huge gaming community, especially among players who had never played Halo. Halo 3 and Modern Warfare came out in the same year, just a few weeks apart, and they would soon become the most-played games on Microsoft’s console. But while Activision would keep banging out Call of Duty games, Halo 3 would remain the only Halo game on the Xbox 360 for years, a fact that enabled Bungie to build its community around one single game. The result was that shortly before the release of Halo: Reach, Halo 3 was still the most popular game on the X360, played more than Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Call of Duty: World at War, and Gears of War 2. It’s worth noting that in addition to its passionate fan community, Halo 3 could also count on still-growing sales. In 2017, Ars Technica revealed that it was the top-selling game on the Xbox 360: of the 486,000 Xbox Live accounts used as a sample, 53.3 % of them had Halo 3 in their game library.

While Halo 3 was knocked somewhat off balance by the ever-growing popularity of Call of Duty, it also lost its status as the technical showcase for the Xbox brand, being overtaken by Gears of War from Epic Games. Released in 2006 as an Xbox 360 exclusive, the latest brainchild from Cliff Bleszinski (who also brought us Unreal Tournament) could draw on Epic Games’ expertise in developing game engines. Gears of War was the studio’s first game to use Unreal Engine 3, the brand-spanking new version of the company’s game engine, which enabled it to display strikingly realistic graphics. Inspired by the TV series Band of Brothers, Bleszinski wanted to tell the story of a group of friends swept up in the horrors of war. While going through some personally challenging times himself, the game designer invented a fictional world in which humanity is suddenly faced with an invasion of humanoid monsters that emerge from the bowels of the planet. Both the gaming press and gaming community were immediately enraptured with the dark and extremely violent Gears of War, due to both the intensity of its action and its good gameplay design ideas. Bleszinski made no secret of the fact that he had spent a long time watching how games like Resident Evil 4, Kill Switch and Bionic Commando did things, in order to develop a third-person shooter based on an ingenious cover system. Featuring a solid multiplayer mode, Gears of War gave a lot of gamers something to do while they were impatiently awaiting the release of Halo 3, and gradually carved out a space of its own in the video-gaming landscape. Its sequel, Gears of War 2, won over even more fans thanks to its Horde mode where one or more players could stave off increasingly powerful waves of enemies. It was in part thanks to Horde mode that Gears of War 2 became one of the most popular games on the Xbox 360. Its success would also serve as inspiration for Bungie.

BEING AN MLG-PLAYER: THE HALO ESPORTS CRAZE

The success of Halo 3’s multiplayer mode would bring many gamers into contact with a world that they had never before been part of: esports. Halo as an esport is almost as old as the franchise itself, with the unexpected success of multiplayer in Halo: Combat Evolved inspiring Microsoft to launch tournaments as far back as 2002. The first official competition, the Halo National Championship, attracted its own commercial sponsors, and the final between the eight best American players was filmed in full. It’s interesting to note that competitors in this first tournament included two future big names in Halo esports: Doug Fabrizio and Aaron Martin. At the time, most competitions were played in Free For All mode, but that was enough for the scene to grow. Combat Evolved was featured in the World Cyber Games 2003 and was the only console game to be included alongside the regular fixtures of Starcraft, Warcraft III and Counter-Strike. The ultimate winner, Matt Leto, had travelled all the way to Seoul, but the journey was worthwhile as he came home $20,000 richer, and now famous under his username, Zyos. In 2004, before the release of Halo 2, Zyos competed in a series of tournaments, mainly in the USA, where competitions were organized by Major League Gaming. This organization, formed in 2002, had the aim of making esports a professional sport, enhancing its visibility, and giving it the resources it needed to get there. It put its money on Halo: Combat Evolved almost from the outset. The game had become a real society phenomenon in the United States, enabling a large number of players to emerge onto the scene. And Leto wasn’t alone: a team of players also made a name for itself in 2003. Under the name of Shoot To Kill, or StK, its members were Doug “Stranglepurple” Fabrizio, Aaron “BigSauce” Martin, Jack “Cyrax” Ratigan, and John “Brese” Calabrese. StK began gradually climbing the rankings and regularly crossed swords with Leto, but one event in particular would cement their success: in early 2003, two brothers would join Shoot To Kill and create a buzz. They were Daniel and Tom Ryan, but many people knew them by their usernames: OGRE1 and OGRE2. The Ryan brothers had been playing with Shoot To Kill for months already on Xbox Connect, a program developed by a small group of fans so that they could play Halo: Combat Evolved. They began playing on the platform in 2003, turning StK into an outrageously dominant force on the Halo esports scene.

Halo 2’s release would further boost the visibility of esports, in part because the title made good use of Microsoft’s Xbox Live, and showcased team gaming. In 2005 StK, then made up of the Ryan brothers as well as Dave “Walshy” Walsh and Ryan “Saiyan” Danford, was recruited by Team 3D, soon to be renamed Final Boss after a change of sponsors. The talent of this new generation of gamers enabled MLG to hold increasingly large events. In 2006, one esports competition was broadcast on national TV in America: Halo 2 Pro Series from MLG. The success of this initial foray into the world of television would encourage some major American TV stations–with ESPN at the front of the pack–to regularly broadcast competition highlights and compilations of the best battles. For the very best players, the rewards for their talents really began to take off: MLG Las Vegas 2007 had a cash prize of $280,000 up for grabs, a larger sum than Counter-Strike had ever been able to offer at that point in time. Naturally, then, when Halo 3 was launched, Bungie and Microsoft had esports in mind, and they introduced a Team Hardcore playlist–soon replaced by an MLG playlist– featuring the rules and maps used in Major League Gaming tournaments. The term “MLG-player” became popular, with many gamers adding the acronym to their gamertag, partly as a boast, and partly to inspire fear in their online opponents. Being an MLG player came with kudos, and for some players it was a source of pride… Even if they were only faking it. There were plenty of imposters, but many gamers dreamed of one day traveling the world and earning millions of dollars thanks to their gaming talents.

At the highest levels of the sport, teams were forming and disbanding. Final Boss, for example, played in lots of different line-ups over the years, welcoming into its ranks a whole series of top-level players like Michael “StrongSide” Cavanaugh, and Justin “iGotUrPistola” Deese. For some, esports would serve as a career launchpad, with a number of former Halo pro-players now employed by 343 Industries, who took over the Halo license in the early 2010s. Most notably, this was the case for Andy “Bravo” Dudynsky, the former Final Boss coach, who was hired as a community manager in 2013. That same year, 343 Industries also hired Eric “GH057ayame” Hewitt, to harness his expertise when developing the multiplayer mode for Halo 5: Guardians. Other players branched out from the Halo scene to specialize in other games, with varying degrees of success. The best known among them is without any doubt Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, a former member of Final Boss, Renegades, and Team Liquid who, in 2017, exploded onto a whole new level thanks to Fortnite, the off-the-wall Battle Royale from Epic Games.

The success of Halo esports, and Halo 3’s iteration in particular, owed a lot to the work carried out by the various designers of the multiplayer mode. The work of the map designers deserves recognition first and foremost, with Chris Carney’s team that included Steve Cotton, Justin Hayward and Mike Buelterman; as well as Tyson Green and Lars Bakken, who tweaked the game and its balance right down to the finest details. Halo 3’s maps quickly became popular with players for their artistic direction and the level of detail in the environments: every player had their own favorites depending on different game modes and also for far more subjective reasons. Epitaph, for example, won over many more aesthetically minded players. They loved its unique design and came to call it the “Forerunner cathedral”. They weren’t actually far from the truth, because to design it Chris Carney drew inspiration from the layout of Chartres cathedral, in France. It included a nave, framed between two side aisles separated by small columns; a transept with crossing; a choir… Despite its tumultuous past, Guardian soon became one of the game’s most iconic maps due to it featuring in the most popular playlists like Team Slayer (4 vs. 4 deathmatches) and Free For All. This map, designed by Cotton, was the butt of some jokes within Bungie because during the testing phase, the map was nicknamed “Jub Jub” in reference to the Ewoks in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi due to it being set high in the treetops. Cotton wasn’t offended, because he knew that he had also created a map that was as successful as Lockout, which was hugely popular with players of Halo 2. “I wanted to take a lot of things that were working well in Lockout, but I didn’t want it to be Lockout,” Cotton clarified for us. “Scale-wise it’s very close. That’s intentional because the scale in Lockout worked well for the amount of players, but I think a lot of the connections, the circuits around the map, and the added lifts make it [Guardian] ultimately very different from Lockout.” The same forensic attention was given to the larger maps which were dedicated to Big Team Battle mode, in which two teams of eight players did battle in deathmatches or objective-based games.

One of Cotton’s first maps was called Sandtrap, and it would soon come to be emblematic of Halo 3. It had it all: interesting artistic direction, a large game area, lots of vehicles, and an almost infinite range of winning strategies. It was the environment that initially intrigued players: Sandtrap was set within the confines of a gigantic Forerunner defensive wall that completely encircled the game area. The most inquisitive fans struck out to reach the wall, finding there only death, killed by the infamous Guardians. But as big as it was, Sandtrap ended up being half the size Cotton had originally intended. At the time, he was working with Chris Carney on scenario maps–like Altitude–and together they were looking for ways to offer new gameplay experiences by adding AI elements. For Sandtrap, the concept was as follows: attackers started the match on the other side of the encircling wall, in another area of just as large a scale, where they would have to assault an access door to get inside the wall. But Cotton and Carney had a surprise in store for them: according to Cotton, “There was an initial opening into an area where attackers would fight up a sort of beachhead like a D-Day kind of assault. Once they made it through that, we had some pretty fun prototypes of massive guns aiming down on them.” But just like with Altitude, it made the map too hard and the idea was scrapped. Sandtrap was limited to the space inside the walls, a fact that made it no less interesting a map, because Cotton had a very specific idea of what he wanted: “I really wanted to make the ultimate Warthog map. And make it both vehicle- and infantry-friendly, which is pretty problematic in Halo 3 at times. The Warthog is my favorite vehicle in any game ever and I feel like maybe half of the levels we’ve had Warthogs in have been successful.” And Cotton pulled it off, because when Halo 3 was released, Sandtrap became the favorite map for Warthog drivers and fans of Big Team Battle mode.

10 Sandbox is a term traditionally used to refer to an open-world game. In the Halo franchise, however, a sandbox is a section of a level that’s more open than others, a bubble of freedom where players can try out their own strategy and move more freely than in the rest of the game. We will take a closer look at this later on.

11 A reference to the last words spoken by Master Chief in the ending of Halo 2.

12 Orbital DropShock Trooper, UNSC Special forces.

Chapter 11 – Microsoft and Bungie Part Ways

It can be said that the relationship between Microsoft and Bungie had been, at the very least, a complex one ever since Microsoft acquired the studio. Periods of peaceful coexistence and cooperation were interspersed with far more polarizing moments, and the two companies were probably destined to part ways sooner or later. But nobody suspected that the first cracks had appeared so soon along the way, many years before the official split.

A LONG DIVORCE

On October 5, 2007, while Halo 3 was proving a hit all around the globe, it was surprising to learn that Microsoft and Bungie had reached a gentleman’s agreement that would allow Bungie to regain its independence in the not-too-distant future. Microsoft would keep producing Halo games, initially with Bungie’s input, and then under its own steam. The news was surprising, because Bungie was Microsoft Studio’s figurehead and had given the Xbox, and later the Xbox 360, three of the biggest games in the history of the brand. The press and fans alike were surprised, but they would be even more astounded if they knew how long the divorce had been brewing behind closed doors. Indeed, Bungie and Microsoft had started discussing the matter long before 2007. To understand the roots of the matter we have to go all the way back to 2003, as Martin O’Donnell explains: “About a year into Halo 2’s development, I remember talking to Pete Parsons. The Halo team had gotten some sort of bonus check for you know, $12 or something, for the success of Halo. And it was like, wow, yeah. I’m exaggerating slightly, but whatever the amount was, it wasn’t commensurate with the success. I thought: this is what happens when you sell intellectual property and you’re just working for a company, and how I’d love to ‘go pirate’ and start our own. So we and a small crew of people started talking about what we’d need to do to either do that, or convince Microsoft that they should share more.” At first, then, it was a financial dispute that set Bungie at odds with its employer. The studio still retained a defensive attitude towards Microsoft, and in Marcus Lehto’s view, while cooperation between the two companies had seen better days, that was also largely due to the studio’s idiosyncratic mentality: “They [Microsoft] were probably struggling just as much with us as we were with them, because we were kind of assholes back then. And looking from the outside, trying to figure out how to work with Bungie, well, Bungie is really hard to work with. It’s not a very collaborative studio when it comes to external forces coming in and saying, ‘Hey, can we give you some suggestions on what to do with marketing?’” And so an initial group began to form to discuss the studio’s future. Its members included Jason Jones, of course, as well as Joe Staten, Paul Bertone, Chris Butcher, Marcus Lehto and Martin O’Donnell. Following a series of meetings, they reached an agreement: Microsoft would have to increase the profit-sharing on income generated by Halo 2 upon its release. Microsoft agreed to the request and signed an agreement without much fuss. Things seemed to be getting better, they thought at the time. Except that meanwhile, the relationship between Microsoft and Bungie would start to become strained, in part because Xbox division execs–with the exception of Ed Fries–were pushing Bungie to get Halo 2 ready for release as soon as possible, and ideally before the end of Microsoft’s current accounting year, meaning by July 2003. Fries managed to win them a bit of extra time, and the studio was plunged into the heinous crunch covered in an earlier chapter. The success of the game wouldn’t really change things, which was unfortunate for Microsoft. Because at Bungie, dissent was brewing. “Halo 2 was so successful that we hit our profit cap for the initial deal we had worked out with Microsoft on day one,” O’Donnell explained. Once again, Bungie was left with the feeling that all the hard work it had put into Halo 2 just wasn’t paying off. Anger was simmering away within the studio, to the extent that it became obvious to their employer. “The profit-sharing didn’t seem like it was as good a deal as we were expecting,” O’Donnell recalls. “So we told Microsoft that we were going to split off and start an independent game company.” It was a threat that the Xbox executives failed to take seriously, instead blaming it on the fatigue caused by a long, complicated development process. Especially because at that time, the studio was itself divided: Jason Jones was away, as was Joe Staten, and the small group of people making decisions was changing. They even gave themselves a nickname: The Blue Crystals. Butcher, Lehto and O’Donnell were joined by Harold Ryan, Max Hoberman and Ben Wallace, one of the lead engineers at Bungie. This small group met regularly and organized in the shadows, preferring to keep their distance from some members of the studio, as Jaime Griesemer recalls: “I was a little bit of a wild card, so they didn’t really want me in the meetings. And it was all sort of backroom stuff, and that’s just not my style. But as soon as I heard about it I was like, ‘Why aren’t we just talking about this in the open? Why is this random sampling of seven guys or whatever negotiating this deal?’” Griesemer’s comments did nothing to stop them. On the contrary, they left him even more excluded from the group. In 2005, the relationships between some of the studio’s executive were at their lowest ebb, and Paul Bertone and Jaime Griesemer regularly found themselves at loggerheads. These “backroom discussions,” as the lead designer called them, served only to fuel tension and mistrust among the Grizzled Ancients. Staten, who opted to take sabbatical leave after a long argument with Marcus Lehto, was also shut out of the discussion. “I was really not privy to any of those negotiations,” Staten would reveal in 2017. “Partially because I don’t think they wanted me to be part of the group, and partially because I had no interest in being part of it.”

Harold Ryan and Martin O’Donnell ultimately decided to get in touch with some experts who could give them solid advice. They got the same answer every time: there was nothing stopping Bungie certainly negotiating a split with Microsoft. With their confidence boosted, the pair decided to hire a negotiator by the name of Don Leeds, who helped get the Xbox execs and the Blue Crystals to sit at the same table to discuss the terms of Bungie’s departure. The first meetings were heated affairs. Microsoft owned the Halo license and had every intention of keeping it. Bungie, meanwhile, wanted to turn the page, to work on new games, rediscover its freedom and–most importantly–own the games it made. This was Jason Jones’ dearest wish, and he was very insistent. This made it hard for the two camps to find common ground, especially because Microsoft had no other studio that would be able to take over the license if Bungie ever jumped ship. And in actual fact, there was nothing stopping them from doing so. The 100 + developers that currently made up the Bungie team could just choose to up and resign, and then go off and set up their own company. In the end, then, Microsoft would yield, albeit with a few conditions: Bungie had to finish making Halo 3, and then deliver two additional games. The time it would take to make these two new games should allow Microsoft to prepare for the transition, and to set up a team that could replace Bungie in making new Halo games. The studio would regain its independence, but it would stay tied to Microsoft until 2010. Microsoft’s proposed conditions suited the Blue Crystals, who were remaining pragmatic: independence wasn’t cheap, and Bungie would need the funds to cover its overheads while working up to the release of its first game as an independent studio. After months of discussions and negotiations, the two parties came to an agreement. Bungie would regain its independence and could start work on a brand new game, one that would be Bungie’s and Bungie’s alone. It would also retain all the technology it had developed in-house since the buyout. Microsoft, meanwhile, got to keep the Halo intellectual property, and would publish three new games set in the franchise universe: Halo 3, Halo 4 and another minor title that could be released between Halo 3 and Halo 4. Bungie’s declaration of independence was signed on July 7, 2007, but they still needed to announce it to the staff. And for a number of purely legal reasons, the news could not be made public until October 5, and a decision was made to wait until then. A few days before Microsoft and Bungie issued their press releases, the studio execs gathered all the employees together in their conference room. When they entered the room, they were surprised to see, up on the stage seated alongside a few Bungie veterans, a number of members of the Xbox team, and especially their big boss, Shane Kim. After a short preamble, they heard the news: Bungie was independent once again. The conference room erupted, people were shouting and clapping: it was a reaction that took Kim completely by surprise, as he would relate a few years later: “Everybody was cheering, and my first thought was, ‘Jeez, what did we do to you guys?’ Because I actually think we were pretty good. But I got it, too. At a real visceral level, I got it. They wanted to be independent.”

And so it came to pass that Bungie Studio gave way to Bungie, LLC. The new Bungie was founded by Jason Jones and a few of his historic managers, and together they sat on the company’s new board. Harold Ryan was appointed the CEO. In late 2010, Bungie LLC became Bungie, Inc. once it had fulfilled all the contractual obligations binding it to Microsoft. At the same time, the collective bargaining agreement was amended, entitling all studio employees to own shares in the company.

DESTINY CALLING

That was that, then: Bungie would be independent once again. While Microsoft would be rushing to find a solution and form a studio to make the next Halo game from scratch, Bungie had to follow suit and plan for the future. The good news was that Jason Jones’ long absence had come to an end: the studio’s co-founder was back, and he brought with him a few ideas for the studio’s next big game. In-house, they had great expectations… perhaps too great, in the mind of Jaime Griesemer: “The expectation was he was coming up with the next big thing that we all were going to work on. I think he kind of felt that pressure whenever he was around the rest of the team. He was expected to come up with the next Halo. Which is ridiculous, because no one person made Halo, and no one person can roll the dice and come up with Halo again. That’s just not going to happen. But that was sort of how the set-up was.” But when it came to the man himself, Jason Jones was not in the least bit worried. Not because he was convinced that the studio’s next game would be a hit, but simply because Bungie would always find a way to bounce back. As he honestly told IGN in 2013, “I was never worried that that’s what I would have to do, personally. I believe that there are always going to be people who are really excited to work on Halo, so that was never an issue. I don’t think anybody who gets their primary satisfaction by creating wants to create the same thing over and over again. But I was never worried about that.” Especially because Jones already had some ideas ready to go. As much as he adored Halo, the game as it was released in 2001 bore no relation to what he had originally dreamed up in 1997 and 1998, when he and a handful of developers were working on prototypes. He wanted to make something bigger, something less linear, something that was designed to make players want to keep coming back, again and again, and not just for the multiplayer mode. “The great tragedy of Halo,” he would reveal, “Is that for years and years it provided wonderful single-player and co-op content, and we provided people with almost no fun incentives or excuses, almost no reason besides their own enjoyment, to go back and replay it.” Jones had a few good ideas, but they were all still relatively vague. Within the studio, however, someone else had been working on the prototype for a possible new game for a while already. Jaime Griesemer was sick and tired of Halo, and he had made his feelings known to the Bungie board of directors on several occasions. He obtained their permission to start working on a brand new project. After all, the studio now had to plan for its future so why not let Griesemer do his own thing? Because who knows? The designer may well hit on something that they could use. Working alone at his computer, he would lay the general outlines of his new game, under the working title of Dragon Tavern. For him, the objective was clear: Dragon Tavern had to be everything that Halo wasn’t. It would be a third-person game in a fantasy setting. Players would have their own property–a tavern–that they could decorate and furnish just as they liked. This private area of the game world would be accessible only to friends that the player invited over. But together, they could all set off on adventures in a shared game world filled with all kinds of battles and quests. It looked like an MMORPG, similar to World of Warcraft, but that wasn’t really what it was. Here, too, the rough draft was somewhat vague, but it was already more fleshed out than Jason Jones’ ideas. This was because Griesemer had already been in discussion with Chris Butcher to check that his ideas for an online co-op game were actually feasible. Butcher was quite enthusiastic about the idea and Griesemer got back to work, filled with new hope. But his spirits would soon be dampened. Summoned before the Bungie board of directors, he found out that the studio was not in a position to develop two different games at the same time. Only one project could continue, and, of course, it would be Jason Jones’. Griesemer attempted to argue the case for Dragon Tavern, and found support in Jones himself, who loved his colleague’s ideas. This meant that rather than consigning Griesemer’s idea to the trash, they would use concepts from it to enrich Jones’ game. Together, the two game designers would begin work on Bungie’s first post-Halo game. Named Project Tiger, it would keep Griesemer and Jones busy for years while the rest of the studio worked to honor Bungie’s contract with Microsoft.

Project Tiger would undergo some radical changes over the course of the design process. For a while, it looked a bit like Diablo; a few months later, more like Titan, a project in development at Blizzard and that would ultimately produce Overwatch after a series of reversals. “I went to Blizzard for a while, and played Titan,” Griesemer told Jason Schreier in 2016. “And I was like, ‘Holy shit, you guys are working on the same game, down to character classes.’” Project Tiger’s pre-production process was particularly complicated, and the concept underwent a series of overhauls. And much to the chagrin of Griesemer, the more time went on, the more the game started to look like Halo. Because little by little, a few new members of staff had been lending a hand on designing the game, and it seemed like old habits died hard. “The studio was being constructed in order to turn out Halo games,” Griesemer explains. “And so anything that was too far outside of what had already been done in Halo, we just weren’t culturally suited to do.” Especially because Bungie had been engaged on a massive recruitment drive for years now. And the new hires had applied for the job for one reason. “We were probably three hundred people,” he adds. And the huge majority of them had been hired after Halo 3 shipped. There were still quite a few members of staff at Bungie who had been around during the days of Myth and who had a soft spot for fantasy settings, people like Paul Bertone and Christopher Barrett, and it was the latter who would become the artistic director of Tiger. But more recently, the vast majority of developers had joined the studio because they were fans of Halo, and they were recruited with a view to making more Halo games. The artists were specialists in science fiction; the animators had spent years working on FPS; even the technologies Bungie had created over the years were all designed for first-person games. Little by little, the game imagined by Griesemer would morph into an FPS enriched with MMORPG mechanics, set in a sci-fi world with fantasy elements. Armored soldiers with magic powers, doing battle against alien and demonic invasions to protect the last human city. You, dear reader, have no doubt realized that this game was the one that would be released as Destiny. But that’s a story for another day. Here, we must return to the adventures of Master Chief and his comrades in arms.

AN UNEXPECTED RTS

In late 2005, Bungie received an unexpected visitor: a few developers from Ensemble Studios, the people behind Age of Empires, were in Seattle and had dropped by to say hello. Acquired by Microsoft in 2001, Ensemble had something of a special status, as the company was still based in Dallas, Texas. Unlike with Bungie, Microsoft hadn’t tried to move them onto its campus, and Ensemble’s hundred or so employees were free to live their lives uninterrupted, far from Redmond. Among those who had made the trip up to Seattle were Graeme Devine. A talented game designer and programmer, he was highly respected within Ensemble because, while the staff was generally on the younger side, he already boasted a long and illustrious career behind him. With stints at Atari, Lucasfilm Games (which would become LucasArts) and Activision, he had built his own studio and released the successful The 7th Guest before taking over the helm at id Software. Very close with John Carmack, one of the co-founders of id, he worked with him on Quake III and Doom 3 before being recruited by Ensemble in early 2003. On the day he visited Kirkland, Devine didn’t really know much about Halo. He took advantage of the visit to have a chat with Jaime Griesemer, as well as with Joseph Staten. The two groups got on swimmingly, encouraging Ensemble to reveal to Griesemer and Staten that they had an announcement to make. The staff all got together in the same room, and much to the surprise of Bungie’s staff, Devine told them that in Dallas, as they spoke, Ensemble Studio was working on a new project: a real-time strategy (RTS) game set in the Halo universe. When Bungie’s developers heard the news, their faces froze and their eyes hardened. An outside studio working on a Halo game? Unthinkable. Bungie was particularly protective of its creations, and of Halo in particular. Even though the studio was just emerging from the Halo 2 crunch and large numbers of the employees had no desire to hear one more word about the franchise, it was still Bungie’s baby, its very own. And it showed. Their behavior towards their visitors underwent a sudden and radical change. A change that Devine did not fail to notice. “I think we shocked them. I wouldn’t say it was hostile, but the reception was cold. And it’s not their fault. If somebody had come to us and said, ‘Hey we’re making this Age of Empires action game,’ we’d probably have the same reaction if we didn’t know what was going on.” To understand how this could come to pass, we have to go all the way back to 2004. Back then, Ensemble’s executives were attending a conference in Chicago, far away from the studio. While they were there, they experienced something of an existential crisis: known for Age of Empires, the studio wanted to break out of the RTS pigeonhole, and was looking to diversify. But nobody was really that enthusiastic about the few projects that it currently had in pre-production, neither within the studio nor at Microsoft. The only concrete project in development at this point was Age of Empires III, which left some of the longer-serving employees feeling jaded. And low morale was infectious. One unusual thing about Ensemble was that the studio was mainly made up of young men for whom this was their first job. They liked working together and they liked spending time together. After a long day at the office, they hung out in each other’s homes, and some of them were even roommates. Basically, the atmosphere in the studio was brotherly and good-natured, and that would be all well and good in everyday life. In a games studio, it meant that when some people began to have had enough, others soon joined them, and this was exactly what happened at Ensemble in 2004. It was to remedy this situation that Tony Goodman, Chris Rippy, Dave Pottinger, Angelo Laudon and other execs all met in Chicago: they wanted to lift the mood of their staff with new projects, projects that weren’t another RTS if at all possible. After careful consideration, they left Illinois with three potential games. The first was an action-RPG; the second an MMORPG, since Goodman, the studio’s CEO, was a big fan of the beta version of World of Warcraft and wanted to make a game in its image; and the third, more unusual game was an RTS for the Xbox 360. This was an idea that came from Angelo Laudon, who had long been flirting with the idea of successfully crossing the genre over to the games console market. Many developers considered it to be an impossible task, because RTS games needed lots of controls, for which a mouse and keyboard were far better suited. But Laudon was sure he could pull it off. He also knew that Microsoft would be needing lots of new games ready for its Xbox 360, slated for release at the end of the year. Microsoft Studios had started moving away from PC games, and Laudon knew that with a console game, Ensemble would have a better chance of bringing Peter Moore as well as Phil Spencer, the director of Microsoft’s in-house studios, round to the idea. Before Microsoft gave Ensemble the green light to develop the whole project, the studio decided to entrust Graeme Devine, Chris Rippy, and Angelo Laudon with making a prototype, with a few more members of staff assigned to lend a hand. Graeme Devine quickly came up with an idea for a fast-paced strategy game that was easy to pick up and play, set in a sci-fi world, similar to Starcraft, the RTS from Blizzard. But the hardest job would be designing the controls from the ground up. He and his colleagues spent a while studying Pikmin, a GameCube game designed by Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator behind Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda. At that time, it was the one console game that most resembled a strategy game. And it contained a treasure trove of good ideas. Devine and his team got to work studying lots of different games, picking up ideas here and there and then coming up with their own. This led them to developing “area of effect” unit selection: by pressing and holding the A button on the controller, players created an expanding circle that selected any units lying within its area of effect. In late 2005, the project–known as Phoenix–was brought before Microsoft, who really liked the concept they saw. But there was a roadblock: it was a risky endeavor because nobody had ever tried to make a console RTS before. Xbox had nothing against the idea, quite the opposite, but its executives would like to have some guarantees. Something that would attract players without fail. They soon found a solution: Ensemble would scrap the universe dreamed up by Devine and make a strategy game set in the Halo universe. This decision was a very painful one for Devine, who saw Phoenix as his baby. He deferred to Microsoft’s decision, but not without letting Phil Spencer and Peter Moore know that the job would be more difficult than they had thought. “When you’re presented with making Halo, you try to explain it’s not just a matter of calling these aliens the ‘Covenant’ and these humans the ‘UNSC,’ it’s actually a huge change. That, I don’t think came across very loud and clear. I think Microsoft felt that it was just a color change, a graphical change.”

Phoenix, then, got a new name, and became Halo Wars, but someone still needed to get Bungie in on the plan. If Bungie wasn’t on board, Ensemble would never be able to make the game a reality. Bungie could teach them a lot about the Halo universe, its planets and its characters. This was what led Ensemble to make that trip up to Seattle at the end of the year. When he saw Bungie’s reaction, Devine came up with a solution: he had brought one of the Phoenix prototypes along with him and suggested those present give it a try. He then spent many hours with Joseph Staten, who told him all there was to know about the Halo universe. When the team returned to Dallas, Devine felt like the hardest job had already been done: Bungie’s staff had played his prototype and given positive feedback, and Staten had answered all his questions with his characteristic passion. However, what lay ahead would be far more challenging. While Staten was delighted to be able to step away from Marcus Lehto and the development of Halo 3, he was soon the only person responding to Ensemble’s requests. Inside Bungie, anger was simmering away. And all the time getting closer to boiling point. Microsoft had given Halo to another studio, and Bungie wasn’t happy about it. Not one bit, in fact, and especially among the highest echelons. It was a state of play that served only to fuel the conflict between Bungie and Microsoft, and gave more ammunition to figures like Jason Jones and Martin O’Donnell, who wanted Bungie to own its own creations. Instead, they had been robbed of Halo, and that just would not do. Some staff even talked about whoring out the franchise, strong words that were aimed more at Microsoft than at Ensemble. While Bungie’s staff initially kept things in perspective and didn’t apportion blame to Ensemble, they soon made their displeasure known by ignoring most of Devine’s requests, who ended up speaking only to Staten. It was true that Halo Wars wasn’t being developed by Bungie, but the studio still had a right to oversee how the Halo universe was used. This meant that every time Devine needed to create a planet or a new character, he had to consult Staten. He even produced mock holiday brochures so that he could present the planets that Ensemble wanted to feature in the game in detail. Staten liked his attitude, and understood that Devine respected Halo and was trying to do right by the series. He offered guidance to Ensemble on the story, in particular advising them to set the new game long before the events in Halo: Combat Evolved. Better yet, Devine was one of the first people to read Halo: Contact Harvest, Staten’s first novel. Devine then decided that Halo Wars would take place a few years after Contact Harvest, initially on the planet Harvest, before shifting the action to another planet called Arcadia. Of course, they added in a few Spartans, and wove the Covenant, the Flood, and the Forerunners into the story.

On paper, Halo Wars had almost everything going for it to become a successful game, but in reality the situation was a little more complex. Devine was having major trouble with his art team, who couldn’t manage to recreate the world concocted by Bungie. In a fit of rage Rich Geldreich, one of the engineers working on the game, printed out 400 screenshots taken from Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2, and stuck them up on every wall around the studio. A few years later, he would reveal how, “I was pissed off that this game didn’t look like a Halo game.” And Bungie was of no help either, refusing to show Ensemble their work on Halo 3, which was currently in production. This meant that tensions arose between the two studios, but also within Ensemble itself, whose staff grew more divided with each passing day. The Halo Wars team, made up of around 25 staff, was understaffed, and despite their regular requests for help, none was forthcoming. Worse still, most of the studio’s resources were allocated to Tony Goodman’s MMORPG project, despite it not having received any approval from Microsoft. Goodman had also decided that his MMORPG would also be set in the Halo universe, hoping that this would persuade Microsoft to approve the project. The result was that most of Ensemble’s teams were working on a game that might very well be canceled overnight, while the Halo Wars team was struggling to make any progress. First announced at the Xbox Show 2006, the game was still very far from finished by the time of E3 2007, to the extent that the demo on show was in no way representative of the actual game. The designers were still engaged in a lot of reflection and were yet to finalize their decisions, but the presentation was nevertheless well received by fans of the franchise. But within the studio it was open warfare, and Graeme Devine eventually threw in the towel. Having grown weary of constantly arguing with his colleagues, he decided to step back and hand the reins of the project over to Dave Pottinger. Over the following months, Devine would work only on the story for the game’s single-player campaign, no longer involved in the ongoing discussions about the game design itself.

Unfortunately for Ensemble, things took a turn for the worse when, in late 2007, the execs at Microsoft Studios learned that a Halo MMORPG was in development without their go-ahead. Worse still, most of the workforce assigned to the MMORPG and to Halo Wars were obviously short-staffed, slowing the production process. Despite the fact that according to Jason Schreier, author of Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made, some former members of Ensemble disputed this version of events and assured him that Microsoft was aware of the situation, the software giant’s reaction would not be long coming. It had already been years since the studio delivered a new game, and it was obvious that the way the teams were being managed was counterproductive. One morning in September 2008, the staff were in for a big surprise when they got to the office and found a number of major Microsoft figures waiting for them, including Shane Kim. It was down to Tony Goodman to deliver the bad news: Microsoft had decided to close Ensemble down. But that didn’t mean that it had any intention of abandoning Halo Wars. The staff were offered the opportunity to stay on for four months in order to finish the game. Those who agreed would receive handsome compensation. Goodman, meanwhile, had plans to open an independent studio, and had negotiated a contract with Microsoft: the new company, named Robot Entertainment, would make Microsoft an online version of Age of Empires. The problem was that the funding offered to make the game meant that Goodman would be unable to keep all his staff. Half of them would have to go. This meant that for four months, the staff would keep working on Halo Wars, all the while knowing that once it was done, half of them would be out of a job. The atmosphere at Ensemble soon became unbearable, forcing Goodman to make his decision earlier than planned. Nevertheless, and despite the prevailing conditions, the development of Halo Wars was going extremely well. It was to be the last game made by Ensemble Studios, and the staff wanted to be proud of their work. When it hit the shelves on February 26, 2009, Halo Wars received positive reviews and recorded decent sales, with one million copies sold by March 19. At the time of writing, Microsoft’s figures reveal that just over 2,600,000 copies of Halo Wars have been sold.

HALO 3: ODST: MOVIE, EXPANSION, THEN FULL GAME

When Joseph Staten decided to take a temporary step back from Bungie in 2005, the writer treated himself to a few vacations before getting back to work. Not to play an active role in the development of Halo 3, though. Instead, it was to work with filmmaker Peter Jackson. An avid fan of video games, Jackson wanted to put together his own games studio, but because he had no experience in this area, he began to approach video game publishers and industry figures who he knew and respected. These included Microsoft and Bungie, and the three parties came to an agreement: Bungie would help Jackson to launch Wingnut Interactive, which would then make a new game set in the Halo universe. In the meantime, the filmmaker would begin making a film under the franchise. Seeing it as an ideal opportunity to keep away from Bungie Towers, Staten threw himself into this brand new kind of assignment. He then embarked on a series of trips between Seattle and New Zealand, sometimes taking Paul Bertone along with him. With Wingnut Interactive, they began sketching the outline of a new game, entitled Halo: Chronicles. Chronicles told the story of a normal human soldier who, over the course of the war, discovers an amazing Forerunner technology that gradually transforms him into a fearsome war machine. “Joe came up with the concept of ‘be the bullet,’” Bertone recalls. “We wanted to take the player on this emotional and gameplay journey from just being human to being a modified human. You were able to switch into this completely different combat mode, where the only way you could do damage was through a powerful melee attack. And you had two hand weapons. One would push enemies away from you, and the other stunned them where they were. You also had a double jump and an auto-aimed long-distance dash that you could do from the air.” With help from Damian Isla, one of the designers from Halo 3, Bertone and Staten got a few prototypes up and running and put this new gameplay to the test on the first few levels of Halo 3, which was then beginning to take shape. But the player character’s unique abilities meant that the team needed to revise a few things, and even create whole new game systems. One of them was known as Kung Fu, after the films of the same genre: under this system, the AI would encircle the player, but only one or two enemies would engage them in combat, with the others waiting their turn to attack by staying hidden, for example. This system was needed because the player could take nowhere near as much damage as Master Chief due to the fact that they had no energy shield. “It’s funny, because the player was eventually going to become a Promethean, which is a concept they later used on Halo 4 and Halo 5 for the Guardians, and some other bad guys,” Paul Bertone reveals.

While Bertone and Staten were working with Wingnut Interactive on Halo: Chronicles, Peter Jackson started work on a Halo film. He managed to persuade Guillermo del Toro to direct it, while Jackson would serve as the producer. At the last minute, del Toro was forced to pull out of the project and Jackson entrusted the role to his new protege, Neill Blomkamp. As it would happen, Blomkamp was a fan of the series, and was over the moon at being able to direct a movie adaptation of Master Chief’s adventures. Together with Jackson and Weta Workshop, they launched the initial pre-production phase of the project, which included manufacturing a few accessories. Weapons, costumes… but that’s not all, as Bertone tells us: “We were sitting in his big conference room, Peter talking away, and I look out the window and all of a sudden the Warthog drives by. They had built the fucker… and I was just like, ‘I’m sorry, the Warthog just drove by.’ Peter was just as excited. He was like, ‘Oh yeah, we should go check that out now.’” The small group of Bungie employees who were there simply couldn’t believe their eyes. For the first time, their creations in the virtual world had been made into real-live objects that they could touch. The Warthog was fully functional: it drove, had 4-wheel drive, and had plenty of power under the hood. Naturally, the developers couldn’t resist taking it for a spin. But their enthusiasm got the better of them and Curtis Creamer managed to crash it by sending the Warthog into a skid and causing slight damage to a building. No real harm was done to driver or vehicle, but it did give them a bit of a scare. But all the excitement about these impressive replicas did nothing to relieve Joe Staten’s stress, as he had his mind firmly on the job. “I don’t know how to make a movie,” he explains. “I never worked in Hollywood. But we were dealing with some pretty high-powered Hollywood people to try to get this movie done. The Halo movie went through all kinds of different writing and directing partners.” And yet, far from Bungie, Staten was in his element. He met a lot of people and had regular exchanges with Jackson. He would visit New Zealand three or four times every year, making shorter or longer trips. The director was particularly interested in what Staten had to say and liked his various suggestions, and he never hesitated to amend the script when Staten thought something didn’t work. But despite all the best will in the world, the film was still not in production. It had a potential producer, that’s true, and even a director. But it still hadn’t received a green light from the Hollywood studios. Bungie wasn’t really familiar with how quickly the giant cogs of the movie industry turned, but they were starting to have their doubts. And Staten was the first: “Harold Ryan and I had to fly into Auckland, rent a car and drive to Peter’s. On that ride, we talked very honestly, and reasoned: ‘This movie’s probably not going to fly.’ Video game movies then, and I think still now, are unproven–can you be successful at any budget? Are you sure you’re going to be successful at $150 million? That’s a huge leap of faith for any studio to take. I’m not a Hollywood lawyer or an agent, but I could look at the deal and go, ‘You know, it’s going to be really hard for everybody to get comfortable enough to green-light this thing.’” Staten and Ryan would turn out to be right. “It literally happened within 24 hours,” Peter Jackson would explain in July 2009. I mean, we woke up one morning thinking we were making Halo. That day we got the news that the studios, Fox and Universal, didn’t want to make the film anymore.” According to the director, the project was ultimately canned because Fox, Universal and Microsoft couldn’t reach an agreement. Jackson and Blomkamp, therefore, found themselves robbed of a project they’d been dreaming of for years. It was this turn of events that led them to work together on a new science-fiction film, this time set in an original universe with an original story. That film was District 9, which told the story of an alien community living in South Africa, where it was confined to ghettos, and victim to xenophobia and ill-treatment. Some of the replicas Weta had designed for Halo were repurposed and can be seen on several occasions during the film. A Halo fan, Blomkamp nevertheless earned a consolation prize when he was contracted to make the three shorts that form Halo: Landfall, part of the marketing campaign for Halo 3.

With the film dead in the water, the relationship between Bungie and Weta Interactive would gradually run out of steam and Halo: Chronicles sunk with it. The concern, though, was that unlike the film, Microsoft had already publicized the game widely. Its existence was officially confirmed at the Xbox Show 2006, and in March 2007 Shane Kim in person gave more details about the game, like the fact that it would be released in episodes. In 2008, job ads posted by Microsoft implied that the project was still on the cards, with the software giant looking for engineers, producers, and creative directors to work on the project in partnership with a Hollywood figure. The name Halo: Chronicles was also leaked, forcing Microsoft to issue clearer details about the game. So when the game was canceled for good, Microsoft and Bungie alike found themselves in a difficult position. Microsoft because they had spent a long time talking up a Halo game that would never be made, and Bungie because they still needed to honor their contract with Microsoft and deliver a smaller Halo game while waiting for Halo 4 to be made. The latter was still scheduled for 2010, which left just over a year to produce a new game. It was all the more bothersome given that the studio was undergoing a major transitional period: Marcus Lehto had launched work on Halo 4, soon to be renamed Halo: Reach, while Jason Jones and Jaime Griesemer got down to work on Destiny. As it was structured at that time, the studio found itself in no position to get a new team up and running to release a game in late 2009. Chronicles was canned, Staten, Bertone and the team working on the game found themselves left to their own devices. Fortunately, as Staten explains, this team had no shortage of motivation, nor of talent: “When that project [Halo: Chronicles] fell apart we were left with this really experienced core team of guys, all of whom had been around since Halo 1. All the more so given that Microsoft was willing to make a compromise: rather than making a whole new game, Bungie could just deliver an expansion to Halo 3, which would give sales a pick-me-up. Bungie liked the idea, but the Chronicles team put a little fly in the ointment: “Joe and I were interested in doing that, but less so in taking existing Halo 3 campaign content and reusing that in any way, shape or form,” Paul Bertone explains. “It’d have felt cheap to us, and we’d have gotten killed in the press. We wouldn’t have been happy working on it.” So while the team was refusing to reuse existing Halo 3 content, this left them exposed to new complications: if they needed to make new levels, new characters and new animations, more developers would need to join the team. And that was something nobody at Bungie really wanted to do. Back then, staff earned bonuses according to the projects they were working on: this meant that a small game like the one the Chronicles team was working on was less financially appealing than Halo: Reach, because it would generate less financial reward. The team, therefore, had fewer resources with which to deliver the game to deadline. But that wouldn’t stop them from making a game that was truly unique in the history of Halo.

It was Joseph Staten who put forward the initial ideas for what would become Halo 3: Recon. The writer wanted to tell a more human story, and began rummaging through the Halo universe to find a suitable protagonist. For a while Staten even planned to create a brand new character, an Elite belonging to a special forces team. But the levels dedicated to the Arbiter in Halo 2 had been controversial, and Staten was forced to discount this idea. Fortunately for him, the Halo universe was a vast one, and there was no shortage of possibilities. “We talked seriously about a game starring Sergeant Johnson,” Staten reveals. “Being a young Avery Johnson early in the war. We talked about just being a marine, maybe palling around with Spartans: what’s it like to be on the battlefield surrounded by Spartans? But then we hit the ODSTs and, for us, they’ve always been really interesting. We put them in missions when we need really tough marines. They have different combat capabilities than normal marines in Halo games, but they were always kind of mysterious characters… and we knew our fans liked them a lot.” The ODST, or Orbital DropShock Troopers, were indeed very popular among players of Halo. These soldiers, who wore armor similar to the Spartans, were highly trained Marines who were sent on the most dangerous missions. They were, in a way, the airborne infantry of the Halo universe, right down to the fact that they were deployed from space in landing capsules. This maneuver was a risky one, and a Marine had to have at least a bit of a death wish to accept such a posting. But their imagery was popular, and the ODST had a lot of fans, even though in Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2 and Halo 3 the spotlight shone firmly on the Spartans, through the character of John-117.

Staten then had an idea: why not go back to New Mombasa, just after the Prophet of Regret and Master Chief had left the city? This would enable them to reuse some of the existing content from Halo 3, and therefore avoid monopolizing the time of too many artists. He dreamed up a story of a group of ODST that was above the city when the Covenant ship jumped into slipstream space, creating major electromagnetic disturbances. Their capsules went off course and the group was split up and scattered around the city. Players would control Blue, an ODST Marine on his first mission. It was Staten who imagined the story as a kind of noir novel, with the player on an investigation to track down their teammates. The idea was immediately popular, especially with Martin O’Donnell, who agreed to lend a hand to the team working on the game and compose its soundtrack. “Once again I’m gonna give Joe Staten a lot of credit for just conceptually inspiring me to do something different,” the composer explains. “He wanted a film noir, a detective story, a day and a night in the city, and what would that be like, with this group of troopers, and a rookie, trying to find his buddies. And it was this sort of cool mystery of solving where did they go, what did they do, and all that. And so Joe said ‘Let’s make it like a film noir, with like a smokey atmosphere, Miles Davis and jazz, and stuff’, and I’m like ‘Wow, ok, jazz, who would have thought jazzy stuff for a Halo game?’ But I thought ‘That’s a really cool concept. It’s gonna feel totally different, everybody will know immediately they’re not playing the old Halo.’” The idea was also a hit with Paul Bertone, who wanted to work on an open-world game. He’d already played around with it on Gypsum, and now he had the chance to do it for real, because Staten’s ideas would work a lot better with that kind of level design. All the more so because Bertone was fed up with the linear progression of the Halo games. “I was just really interested in doing open-world. I was super fatigued on building the linear missions, with no excitement to make another Halo game. So I really pushed for the basic structure of ODST, just to be able to explore ideas in what felt like was kind of a safe project, because back then Destiny was going to be a fully open-world game, like Fallout and The Elder Scrolls series and stuff like that. And that was something I was super excited about.” And Halo 3: Recon would certainly be something different. Players started the game in a part of New Mombasa, with a series of objectives. It was the player who would choose where to start, and who needed to get their bearings and make their way through the city, always on the lookout for the Covenant patrols roaming the area. They no longer played as a Spartan, but as a smaller soldier without armor or a shield. To heal, they would have to find health kits or pharmacies. With 2008 coming to a close, the team had almost finished their game. The debugging phase was still left to do, but the game could be in stores as soon as it had received Microsoft’s approval. The only hold-up was that the game’s name would be changed. Known as Halo 3: Recon up until that point, Bungie was forced to change it to Halo 3: ODST after Microsoft’s discussions with Ubisoft, who made the Ghost Recon series. The name had already been trademarked, and Microsoft had every legal right to use it, but because it wanted to maintain good relations with the French publisher, the company from Redmond stood down. For Bungie, it didn’t matter. There were more important things to deal with. Halo 3: ODST was a small game and it had to be introduced as such. That meant selling it at a price that reflected its status, while also leaving players pleasantly surprised. “People would think, ‘Wow, for a $30 expansion pack, this is almost as good as a full-fledged release!’” Martin O’Donnell explains. We had Halo 3 in the title so everybody knew it was an expansion pack, and for an entire year of talking about it to the press we’d say, ‘Yeah, this is a campaign expansion.’” But when Microsoft discovered Halo 3: ODST, the Xbox execs saw things differently to Bungie: in their view, the game was substantial enough to merit release as a full game, and therefore at a price commensurate with that kind of product, meaning $60. All the more so because the calendar for late 2009 was looking sparse for the Xbox 360, and Microsoft would make it more appealing by marketing Halo 3: ODST as that year’s big Halo release. The news threw Bungie into a panic, and they begged the Xbox execs to reverse their decision. “We were over-promising, with the threat of under-delivering,” O’Donnell ruefully recalls. “It was the opposite of what we wanted. It’d be a gem at $30. But as a major release, it was going to get dinged. And it was.” The composer may be exaggerating a bit here.

Upon its release, the game received generally positive reviews, even if they were less enthusiastic than for the earlier games in the series. The game’s different structure, its atmosphere, and its music were a hit, and despite having no genuinely new environments and an aging game engine, Halo 3: ODST managed to win over fans, who particularly liked the new Firefight game mode. Similar to the Horde mode in Gears of War, it was packed with customization options and was just as playable in local multiplayer as online. It was the brainchild of Paul Bertone, and an idea that he’d been mulling over for a very long time. “Firefight really came from the idea of the gravity room in Halo 1, it’s where you go up in Truth and Reconciliation, into the ship. That room has multiple entrances in, and these Elites start coming to attack you and they come out of different doors. What is it like to be trapped in a place and have to defend it from never-ending enemies, that continually get harder? We knew it was gonna be big, but we didn’t know like that fans would react to it the way they did.” Bertone hadn’t initially planned Firefight as a game mode in its own right. He had included it in the campaign in a number of sequences where players were forced to defend a position. Meanwhile, he designed a scoring system so that the best players could brag about their talents. “Just the idea that there’s this different mode where you can turn on scoring based on your skill, headshots, grenade sticks, all that, and you get more points or multipliers depending on difficulty. That ultimately led to ODST’s Firefight mode.” Firefight worked so well that it would also feature in Halo: Reach, that Bungie wanted to be perfect in every way. And indeed, as this was the studio’s last Halo game, Bungie wanted to go out on a high.

343 INDUSTRIES, A NEW STUDIO FOR HALO

When Microsoft and Bungie came to an agreement about the studio’s independent future in July 2007, the software giant almost automatically began the process of finding a replacement. Of course, there was never any question of entrusting Halo to a partner studio: Microsoft would need to get its own team up and running in-house. That job fell to Bonnie Ross, a Microsoft old-timer. After starting work for Microsoft in 1994, Ross gradually climbed the ranks of Microsoft Game Studios to become General Manager in 2005. In 2007, she left this role behind to start work on the launch of a brand new entity within Microsoft Studios. She was soon joined by Kiki Wolfkill, who had been working as an artistic director at Microsoft for ten years, and Frank O’Connor, who left Bungie so that he could keep working on Halo. Before long, they were joined by other faces, people like Josh Holmes, the former boss of Propaganda Games, and Kenneth Scott, who left his role as artistic director at id Software to join the venture. Together, they laid the foundations of a new studio that they named 343 Industries, in reference to 343 Guilty Spark. The name was trademarked in 2009, and the existence of “343i” was made official. Contrary to popular belief, very few Bungie employees left the company to join 343 Industries. Besides O’Connor, only a few people made the move: Chad “Shishka” Armstrong, a former member of the Bungie.net community and volunteer moderator of the forums, who had been hired by Bungie in 2004; Vic DeLeon, an artist specializing in game environments; and Seth Gibson, who had produced the character animations for Halo 3: ODST and Halo: Reach.

343 Industries was formed behind the scenes, because while Ross was recruiting O’Connor, Wolfkill, and the rest of the team, Bungie was still working on Halo 3: ODST, and would soon be starting work on Halo 4, which would become Halo: Reach. But 343 Industries would gradually start getting involved in anything and everything that fell under the Halo brand. In Halo: Reach, in particular, but also Halo: Legends, a compilation of short films, and Halo: Waypoint, which would come to replace Bungie.net by hosting all the stats for online games, among other things. When the Halo: Fall of Reach novel was republished, it was 343 Industries that oversaw the process and updated the book’s original cover. Little by little, the destinies of Bungie and Halo began to diverge. But the story wouldn’t be over without one last hurrah.

Chapiter 12– Halo: Reach, Bungie’s Farewell to Halo

While Joseph Staten and Paul Bertone were managing the development of Halo 3: ODST, another team of developers led by Marcus Lehto began the pre-production process for Halo 4. Halo 4 was supposed to be the last game in the series made by Bungie, and the studio wanted to give fans of the series the send-off they deserved. So it was that the developers would spend three years working to create the ultimate game, one that would bring all their most audacious ideas together on a single disk.

A PREQUEL AS A SEND-OFF

While Bungie’s last Halo game went by the name of Halo 4 for a good long while, that was mostly out of habit. In reality, the studio had absolutely no intention of making a sequel to Halo 3. It would mean too much responsibility and too many complications, because they would need to cooperate with Microsoft and the fledgling 343 Industries so that they were all on the same page going forward. But they still didn’t know when the new game would be set, and the debate was in full swing inside Bungie Towers. “I don’t know how the decision was made, but conceptually I remember talking about not continuing the Master Chief story,” Martin O’Donnell recalls. “It would be a prequel to Halo. So we were going to finish our Halo run without any need to figure out the Chief’s future. And we already knew there was a story about (the human colony of) Reach, and Reach is like Titanic, where everybody dies. So I remember saying, ‘Okay, everyone who plays this game knows that everybody dies.’ But Titanic was still a really compelling movie, even though you know the boat sinks, you’re hoping it won’t sink. So that was sort of the philosophy around Reach.” And so it was settled: Bungie’s last Halo game would recount the events that took place at the Battle of Reach. Reach was a planet found a long way from Earth, but it had soon become the most important human colony. It was the bastion of the Spartan-II program, because that was where the supersoldiers were trained. Players had known the fate of Reach since 2001, because the story was told in detail in Halo: The Fall of Reach, the novel by Eric Nylund. After being discovered by Covenant scouts, the planet was immediately invaded by the biggest armada the aliens had ever assembled. After putting up heroic resistance for several days, the UNSC was wiped out and almost all the Spartans perished defending the last key objectives on Reach. Only a few of them would escape that fate, including John-117, who boarded the Pillar of Autumn at the last moment. But the game would not simply rehash the same familiar story: Halo: Reach would serve up another story, and shine the spotlight on other battles not involving Master Chief and his team. The game would focus on an elite unit, known as Noble Team, made up of six new Spartan characters. Spartans that were not like all the rest. They were not Spartan-IIs, but rather Spartan-IIIs, a new generation of supersoldiers. Bungie had to put some serious thought into these new warriors, inventing their backgrounds and lives before the game. But most of all, they wanted to humanize them, something which had not really been possible with the Spartan-IIs, and with Master Chief in particular. Marcus Lehto’s first decision would be a huge first for the series: to show the Spartans with their faces uncovered from time to time. He explains how, “We wanted to pull the helmets off of the Spartans, and we wanted to get to know each one of these Spartans up close and personal, they needed to be human.” The idea proved popular with most of the executives working on the project, who saw in it the opportunity to tell a different, more personal kind of story. Bungie wanted to tell a story reminiscent of The Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa’s film, or John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven. Saving Private Ryan, by Steven Spielberg, was also used as inspiration. Each individual member of Noble Team had their own distinct personality: Carter-A259 was the team leader, and the archetypical charismatic leader who cared for the troops under his command. Catherine-B320, known as Kat, was both mischievous and highly intelligent. Due to his specialism as a sniper, Jun-A266 was often separated from the rest of the team, but his long moments of solitude were counterbalanced by an almost annoying penchant for boasting, a trait that was rare among the Spartans. He was the polar opposite of Emile-A239, who didn’t talk much but unleashed terrible violence on the battlefield, where he tended to fight at close quarters, be that with a shotgun or his favored weapon, a kukri machete that never left his side. Then there was Jorge-052, the team’s only Spartan-II. Older and more experienced than the rest of his teammates, he was also unusually sociable for a Spartan, especially a Spartan-II. The team was made complete by the player, who controlled Noble Six, serial number B312. Having served as a lone-wolf assassin and then a fighter pilot in a secret UNSC program, the opening of the game is where he takes his first action with Noble Team. He replaces Thom-A293, deceased a few months earlier. It was the first time that Bungie had developed so many characters who would always be with the player, something that Martin O’Donnell would later think was a bit of a shame. “I would hear Marcus [Lehto] and some of the other designers talking about The Magnificent Seven and Saving Private Ryan, and Peter [O’Brien, one of the writers on Halo 3] and I talked about story a lot,” O’Donnell recalls. “We both agreed those are two different models. You don’t care about anyone in Saving Private Ryan through the combat. It was the down times when they sat around the fire, and one guy talks about being a teacher and this guy talks about his home life, that was its classic way of getting to know the characters. I said: if we’re going to use that model, we need dramatic moments where you get to know these characters without their helmets on, and you learn about them in some personal way. The other way is like The Magnificent Seven, where each individual has their own skills and what’s important is getting why they decide to try to protect the peasants. We either had to have those personal relationships with the characters; or we had to have moments where you care about the inhabitants of Reach by seeing how they’re sacrificing themselves. I don’t think we did either of those things.” O’Donnell and O’Brien weren’t the only people working on the game’s storyline, of course, because Robert McLees was still busy enriching the Halo universe with new ideas; Joseph Staten was back in the role of writing director, but his problematic relationship with Marcus Lehto seemed to limit him to a supervisory role. That’s not to say he didn’t rewrite some dialogue and improve the scripts for some of the cutscenes in the final version of the game. In parallel, the rest of the staff were back at work and putting in the hours to give the Halo 3 engine a thorough overhaul. Since the plot of Halo: Reach had to be more human, more emotional, Bungie needed to add scenes made using motion capture to the game: within Bungie, and despite the talent of its animators, the prevailing opinion was that the studio’s animations were its weak point. So, in an effort to generate more realism, the studio bought the gear it needed and started recording sessions with real actors who, wearing a special suit, acted out the movements that the developers wanted to see in the game.

Halo: Reach’s pre-production phase ran for an entire year, enabling Bungie to lay down solid foundations that would make it easier for them to make the complex game that Lehto and the rest wanted to see. There was, though, one problem: for the first time in its history, Bungie had two major projects in the pipeline at once, and while development was starting on Halo: Reach, Jason Jones and Jaime Griesemer were working on Project Tiger, which would become Destiny. And the more time went on, the more they would be joined by other developers. Some of the studio’s longstanding executives would spend very little time working on Halo: Reach, a fact that some of them would come to regret. In 2017, O’Donnell would reveal how, “I wasn’t super excited that some of the real stakeholders in the history of Bungie and Halo weren’t working on Reach. And there was a point where I was trying to convince them to bring Paul [Bertone] down and have him polish up the final design, and get [Joe Staten] down to help me get the dialogue for the mission script better than it was. I think I was rejected, so that was tough, because we knew that the future of Bungie was with Destiny and Reach was our final chapter of Halo. It’s always important to make the thing you’re going to ship next be the best possible, and I felt like we were not doing that.” Indeed, most of the Grizzled Ancients were now working on Destiny, and some of the studio’s biggest names were only involved in the development of Halo: Reach. They generally got involved in the final stages of work on the game, giving feedback on particular aspects of gameplay or level design. This was the case for people like Shi Kai Wang, Chris Butcher, Paul Bertone, Jaime Griesemer and Christopher Barrett. That’s not to say that Bungie had completely abandoned Reach, which still had a lot of input from names players were familiar with, people like Paul Russel, Chad Armstrong, Lars Bekken, Steve Cotton, Vic DeLeon, CJ Cowan, Dave Dunn, Chris Carney and Curtis Creamer. Because while Halo: Reach was first and foremost being made to fulfill an order from Microsoft, and while some developers like Jaime Griesemer had had enough of Halo, there were still plenty who didn’t see working on Halo: Reach as a death sentence. This is a point that, years later, Martin O’Donnell was keen to emphasize: “I wanna make sure that the fans know that we did Halo because we wanted to do Halo. And we did ODST because we wanted to do ODST. And we did Reach because we wanted to do Reach.”

So that the absence of some of Bungie’s longest-serving execs wouldn’t be too keenly felt, a few new hires were given intensive training to bring them up to speed. This is particularly true of Sage Merrill, a game designer who joined Bungie in 2008. After working on the development of Halo 3: ODST, he was entrusted with filling the very big shoes of Jaime Griesemer as the lead designer of the Halo: Reach. At Bungie, the term “sandbox” referred to all the objects with which players could interact, and all of the tools they could use. The term covered weapons as much as it did enemies, as well as the various vehicles players could control. It was here that Jaime Griesemer truly shone, because he knew how to balance every component so that the end result was a game that was fun. This ability is both an innate talent and a fine science, something learned with time and experience. Replacing Griesemer was not something that just anyone could do, which is why he would come to assist his young protégé. And he was sure Sage would be able to get the job done. “I was really happy with the handover to Sage. I told him, ‘Look, you’re basically like the only guy I can see taking over the Halo sandbox and doing a good job. And I want it to continue to be done well.’ So I felt good about where I left them.” This may be due to the fact that Griesemer was never far away, and he regularly made himself available. He helped to design the Warthog, for example, earning the jokey title of lead Warthog designer, but that’s not all, because just like on Halo 3: ODST, he would regularly come to help designers incorporate new characters without breaking the game’s delicate balance. “I helped out on ODST and Reach in a kind of consulting role,” Griesemer explains. “Mostly because they would be like, ‘Okay, we’re going to add a new character. But wait, nobody here understands how characters work. Call Jaime in here, and have him explain what all these fields do to somebody.’ Which was fine, I was happy to help in that way. And I helped a little bit at the end doing a little tuning and tweaking, because that stuff’s always really finicky.”

Griesemer had good reason to be confident, because the team working on Halo: Reach was motivated, competent, and extremely meticulous, qualities that are apparent in all of the game’s levels. In a desire to go back to what Halo may have been if Microsoft had never bought Bungie, the developers created larger levels that were packed with more detail, inviting players to explore. Reach was a planet that fans had never before been able to visit, and the artists did all they could to make it a living, breathing place. They began crafting a story in which most of the planet’s first colonists were from Eastern Europe, and Hungary in particular, something that could be seen in the architecture of particular villages, the names of several cities and locations, and the language spoken by the first non-player characters encountered by the player. The planet may well have been colonized for almost two centuries, but it was still home to many wilderness areas where very strange-looking animals could be found. While Halo: Combat Evolved had been forced to pass up on local wildlife, Halo: Reach generally had free rein. The local wildlife was also the subject of many debates among the team, some of whom wanted the Covenant to use certain animals in battle. Top of the list was the Gùta, a huge biped with razor-sharp claws, and one that Bungie had a lot of fun with. To begin with, it had just two Jackal riders, and then a few Grunts or Elites. They would even be encountered carrying two cannons strapped to its shoulders. To defeat them, players had to hijack them just like any other vehicle, and shove a grenade down its throat. “It was really goofy at one point,” Marcus Lehto remembers with a grin.

But goofy wasn’t really the effect that Bungie was going for in developing Halo: Reach. The studio wanted the game to have a more mature tone: it was the story of a terrifying alien invasion, a battle lost before it had even begun, and the Covenant forces had to elicit fear. One choice was made that reflects this: in Halo: Reach, players are unable to understand what the enemy is saying, as they are speaking in their own language rather than in English, like in earlier games. “What if the Spartans and the soldiers don’t actually understand what the aliens are saying?” O’Donnell wondered. “What’s that gonna feel like? What if we can get back to having an alien feel really alien, and threatening?” The idea was approved and the Grunts’ funny comments and the Elites’ challenges disappeared from the game. One of the game’s producers, Dave Lieber, developed a tool to translate sentences written in English into Sangheili, the Elites’ language. “He actually programmed it himself,” O’Donnell reveals. “He was the only one who knows how to pronounce all the syllables.” The return of the Elites, who were replaced by the Brutes in Halo 3, made lots of the studio’s staff happy, and not just those who had joined the company after the third game. The newcomers to the team were delighted to be able to work on the Spartans’ iconic foes, but even older members of the team like Marcus Lehto were happy to be bringing them back to the fore: “Bringing the Elites back was something that was really a true joy for us, because they’re such an awesome character to fight.” The Sangheili were the perfect adversaries for the Spartans, because they were intelligent, vicious, and often armed with formidable weapons. The camouflage they regularly used, as well as their energy swords and their ability to dodge shots made them very interesting enemies for mission designers, who could use them to design lots of varied scenarios.

Because Halo: Reach was set before the events of Halo: Combat Evolved, the developers also used it as an opportunity to overhaul the arsenal of weapons available to players. Sage Merrill oversaw their design. The BR was replaced by a new rifle, the M392 DMR, which was semi-automatic, just like the BR featured in the E3 2003 demo of Halo 2. The assault rifle was completely redesigned: it was given a new name and became the MA37. This redesign was possible thanks to the game engine’s new abilities, which encouraged the studio’s artists to keep coming up with new ideas: “We looked at the Halo 3 assault rifle and it really does feel like kind of dated,” reports Scott Shepherd, the lead 3D artist working on the game. “It fit the tech then, but now we have all these new polygons to play with.” On Halo: Reach, artists had up to four times as many polygons to use on both characters and weapons. This meant that a lot of weapons could be refined, like the trusty old sniper rifle and shotgun. But it wasn’t about just giving the fans’ favorite weapons a cosmetic makeover: new weapons were also required. And they all had to adhere to Jaime Griesemer’s principle: every weapon must have its role; there could be no duplicates. This was how the focus rifle came to be designed, a new Covenant weapon that replaced the alien sniper rifle. It worked differently to its UNSC counterpart: players didn’t have to just hit an enemy to kill them, they needed to hold the trigger down so that the beam the weapon produced focused on the target. This meant that players needed to maintain contact for almost one and a half seconds. Covenant forces gained a counterpart to the DMR, in the form of the needle rifle. The principle was similar to the Needler, in that when three needles hit an unshielded enemy, the result was a particularly lethal “supercombine” explosion. The needles were also faster, but no longer had any homing ability. The Covenant arsenal also received the equivalent to the human assault rifle in the form of the plasma repeater, and an alternative to the Spartan laser, with the plasma launcher. For the UNSC forces, meanwhile, not much changed in the end. They got a new grenade launcher that could cause an electromagnetic pulse (EMP), as well as another weapon for use only in the campaign or player versus environment modes. Going by the unassuming name of the target indicator, this small module was used to paint an area that would then be hammered by a small-scale orbital bombardment. It was a fun idea, but one that when it was first introduced nevertheless raised a few hackles among the various engineers working on Halo: Reach. “This was kind of a later inclusion into the sandbox,” recalls Steve Scott, then head of Bungie’s special effects division. “The designers came to me and said, ‘Hey, we want a device that launches artillery from space, and just continually pounds an area.’ And generally, one explosion is pretty expensive, when there are six explosions all happening within a short amount of time… It can be really tricky so… We spent a little bit of time tuning that just to make it right.”

REMEMBER REACH

In parallel, Microsoft had launched the marketing campaign for Halo: Reach. It got off to a somewhat strange start, because the game was announced at E3 2008 not during, but after the Microsoft press conference. According to Don Mattrick, president of the Xbox division, the press was too busy to fully focus on the announcement of a new Halo game. It was a surprising decision, insofar that the Xbox conference was far from compelling, with the only big announcement being the upcoming release of Final Fantasy XIII on the Xbox 360, in a major first for the franchise that had up until then been tied to Sony. Especially because in Mattrick’s presentation, he only mentioned that Bungie was making a new Halo game and left it at that, not even mentioning its working title. The journalists writing about the news wondered whether Bungie was working on Halo 4, laying the groundwork for their successor to pick up the baton. Late August 2008 then saw an extraordinary series of twists and turns. First of all, the Official Xbox magazine in the United States published two rumors; first, that the next Halo game wouldn’t be released on Xbox 360, but on Microsoft’s next console; and more extraordinary yet, that the game wouldn’t be made by Bungie nor even 343 Industries, but rather Gearbox Software, the studio responsible for the PC ports of Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2. Gearbox itself did nothing to calm the fervent reactions among players and the gaming press. The studio’s boss, Randy Pitchford, said of the top-secret project the studio was currently working on: “When you find out what this is, you’ll likely agree that I can’t oversell this one.” And when journalists contacted Gearbox in search of clarification, the studio opted for doublespeak: “We’ve been hearing from a lot of people regarding that rumor, as you can probably guess!” the studio responded on the Destructoid website. “We haven’t made any official announcements regarding any work with the Halo franchise–if we haven’t put out a press release announcing a title, it is just a rumor.” But neither the press nor the player community bought it: when a studio or publisher isn’t willing to issue a straightforward denial, it means something is cooking behind the scenes.

While this was happening, the website Kotaku learned that Corrinne Yu, director of technology at Gearbox, had recently been approached by Microsoft and accepted a job that would lead her to work on the Halo franchise. What that job was, under what conditions, and with whom all remained perfectly vague. What was certain was that Yu was a highly respected figure. Often referred to as the “John Carmack of female programmers,” she had worked at both Ion Storm and 3D Realms, where she designed game engines, like the one used in Prey. At Gearbox, she oversaw development of the game engines for Brothers in Arms, Alien: Colonial Marines and, most importantly, Borderlands, the studio’s breakthrough title. But within the press, and even more so among fans, the situation involving Bungie, 343 Industries, and Microsoft was still unclear, and nobody then knew that Bungie was contractually bound to make one last Halo game for its publisher. 343 Industries was known to exist, but nobody really knew what its exact role was to be.

This meant that on August 30, 2008, when the Halo Waypoint Twitter account dismissed the rumor and revealed that Gearbox was not working on any Halo game, the press didn’t know who to believe. Even IGN, the leading website for video game news in the United States, had to contact Microsoft to make sure that the Twitter account in question really belonged to them. Corrinne Yu, meanwhile, would join 343 Industries a few months later, joining the team tasked with developing the engine for Halo 4, which would be released on the Xbox 360 on November 6, 2012. As for Gearbox, they would reveal their mysterious project on September 3, 2010: they would be developing the hotly anticipated title, Duke Nukem Forever.

It would ultimately be at E3 2009 that Halo: Reach was officially announced to the public. Following a presentation of Halo 3: ODST, which was due for release in just a few months, Reach was revealed via a short and particularly intriguing trailer. In it, the planet Reach was shown from space, gradually being overrun by Covenant forces, its continents exploding into flames one after the other under the alien plasma cannon bombardment. The soundtrack was somewhat sparse, taking the form of a series of radio communications between UNSC troops, which made it immediately clear that the Spartans were down there fighting on the surface. The announcement unleashed a tsunami of enthusiasm from the fan community, for whom the Battle of Reach had achieved an almost legendary status: the game would depict the actions that took place before Halo: Combat Evolved, and should feature a whole host of Spartans. But the news was also tinged with sadness among the players, who soon learned that Halo: Reach would be the last Halo game made by Bungie.

The game also caused a buzz at the Spike Video Game Awards, which were held in Los Angeles on December 12. It wasn’t rare for some games to be announced at the event, which publishers used to screen new trailers. The ceremony was where the gaming public learned of Batman: Arkham City for the very first time, and got to see a new series of videos for previously announced projects like Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, Spec Ops: The Line and, of course, Halo: Reach. The sequence presented by Microsoft was a slightly reworked version of the game’s intro, in which Noble Six, the Spartan-III controlled by the player, joins the other members of Noble Team. No sooner has he arrived at his posting than he meets the rest of the squad, and while Carter tells him that he doesn’t want his lone-wolf attitude on the team, the Falcons they are riding in take off and fly into the distance, where the battle can be seen raging. A flash lights up the sky, hinting at the presence of a Covenant cruiser on the other side of the clouds. The differences with the final game’s intro are worth noting: Jun-A266 wears his helmet from start to finish; Carter, whose face is very different, doesn’t have a conversation with Colonel Holland, and he doesn’t brief the team. This is no routine mission: they are clearly setting off to war with the Covenant. All over the internet, fans were coming together to talk about the images they’d seen. Everyone was delighted with the presence of a group of Spartans, and while everyone noted the real progress made with the graphics since Halo 3 and Halo 3: ODST, some were quick to point out the lack of detail, and therefore expressiveness, on Carter’s and Kat’s faces.

But that was just a tiny detail and did nothing to put players off. Quite the contrary. On February 12, 2010, Bungie and Microsoft announced the date that the beta version of Halo: Reach would become available: May 3. Signing up to the beta was extremely straightforward, with the only criteria being owning a copy of Halo 3: ODST. However, in the weeks and months following the announcement, Microsoft and Bungie would regularly give out extra keys, either to reward the loyalty of certain players, or just to make as many people as possible happy. Here once again, the beta focused on the game’s multiplayer mode, and enabled guests to discover new playlists like Headhunter, Stockpile, Generator Defense, and Invasion. Invasion proved to be hugely popular because it saw a team of Spartans face off against a team of Elites, each with very different objectives. These game modes were the subject of much debate within Bungie, because some developers wanted to serve up objectives playlists only, notably by picking up where Steve Cotton’s and Chris Carney’s (unsuccessful) work on Halo 3 had left off. Others, though, refused to do away with classic Halo playlists, including Paul Bertone who, while he played a less active role in the development of Halo: Reach than he had in Halo 3 and Halo 3: ODST nevertheless made sure his opinion was heard. “I was all for adding the objective modes, but wasn’t keen on that being the only multiplayer experience in there,” he told us. “Because, honestly, we tried to build that into every single Halo game, and we never pulled it off. When you get down to requiring communication and coordination by people who don’t know each other, and don’t give a fuck about each other, it’s just really hard.” The new game modes that resulted from this process were designed so that players didn’t need to be in constant communication in order to win: that would be reserved only for the top players. Especially because players would already have to focus on new gameplay mechanics! This beta was an opportunity to get to grips with the new weapons that Bungie had designed, as well as new mechanics like assassination, a short, animated third-person sequence in which players could stab an opponent when approaching from behind, and which required them to press and hold the melee attack button. The biggest new feature was without a doubt the introduction of loadouts: at the start of every match, players could choose a loadout made up of two weapons and an armor power-up. Known as Armor abilities, these were created by Sage Merrill and other designers as the natural evolution of Halo 3’s equipment, with the exception that they no longer had to be picked up from the ground in order to use them: they were part of the Spartan’s armor and could be used regularly in return for running down a meter that automatically recharged after a certain time period. In 2010, Merrill told GameInformer to “Think about loadouts as kind of a ‘dynamic class system.’ We liked some of the elements you get with a class, but we’re not changing your base model or locking you into that choice. You drop in with your preferred play style, but if you decide your chosen loadout isn’t working, the next time you spawn you can select something different.” While some players were surprised at these new features that radically changed how Halo multiplayer worked, the beta was a phenomenal success, attracting 2,700,000 players for a total of six million hours of play. Microsoft even decided to extend the beta by a whole day, eventually closing it on May 20. Fans were champing at the bit, and at Microsoft they were already sure that the game would blow all the records set by Halo 3 out of the water.

At E3 2010, Microsoft and Bungie revealed a gameplay sequence featuring frenetic action, in which Noble Team’s Spartans were assaulting a beach in order to get to a building under Covenant attack. Players did not yet know it, but what they were seeing was a draft version of Long Night of Solace, which closed the first half of the game. It was the second part of the demo that contained the biggest surprise for players: Noble Six climbed aboard a small combat ship and joined the UNSC forces in orbit above the planet, where they would take part in an all-out space battle. This was all new for Halo. Unfortunately for those who were hoping to see a multiplayer mode based on this sequence, Bungie soon made it known that this sequence belonged only to the single-player campaign and that there’d be no space battles in multiplayer. Not even the unveiling of a new Firefight mode, padded out with more features, could soothe fans’ disappointment.

But that was nothing to worry Microsoft, who continued rolling out its marketing plan. Microsoft had already been broadcasting a commercial entitled Birth of a Spartan since April 28. The video depicted the chemical augmentation process for a young Carter-A259, turning him into a Spartan-II. In fact, Birth of a Spartan was part of a wider viral marketing campaign which, in the summer of 2010, was accompanied by new videos following the same format: it was a way to introduce Reach and its different characters as they were before the battle, and therefore before the events of the game itself. In substance, the new marketing campaign was similar to the one played in Halo 3, insofar as Microsoft and Bungie were once again working with 215 McCann, the communications agency they had contracted to make the various Believe videos. But in its form, Remember Reach was very different, because it placed the focus on the human drama rather than the Spartans’ heroic actions. The intended purpose was clear to see: to tap into players’ emotions by presenting Reach not as a battle, but as a real genocide. The soldiers would die, of course, but so would the millions of civilians living on the planet. The title of the marketing campaign reflected this intention, and players had already seen it in Halo 3: ODST, graffitied on different walls throughout New Mombasa. It was as much a rallying cry as it was a reminder of the duty of remembrance. Remember Reach would be accompanied by four more videos over the summer of 2010. Directed by Noam Murro (Smart People, 300: Rise of an Empire), who was also behind Birth of a Spartan, they were entitled New Life, Spaceport and Patrol, and depicted three snapshots of life on Reach.

The first showed a young couple living in a small house in a place called Visegrád; the man wanted to move to Manassas, while his partner wanted to stay where they were, because their family had been living in that area for generations. As they are finishing their conversation, a patrol of soldiers rushes past their home.

As the title implies, Spaceport was set on a spaceport, in this case the one above Manassas. A mother needs to take a short trip off-planet for work, and she’s comforting her child. She kisses her husband and then heads towards the boarding gate.

Patrol begins with three soldiers talking about Noble Team’s most recent mission. That morning, the Spartans had intercepted a group of insurgents who were trying to hijack a supply convoy. While they’re joking about it, a radio transmission asks them to get to the Visegrád communications relay, which is no longer responding.

The three videos all ended in the same way: the slogan “Remember Reach” appeared on the screen, while in the background Reach’s sun could be seen setting behind the planet, leaving it in the shadows. What the videos showed was everyday life as it was happening shortly before the events of Halo: Reach, and it was precisely by heading to the Visegrád communications relay that Noble Team would, in the first moments of the game, discover that the Covenant had invaded the planet. At the end of summer 2010, the videos were edited together to form one longer film. It concluded with the three following sentences:

“Remember when there was a tomorrow. Remember where it all began. Remember Reach.”

But it was on August 26 that the marketing campaign’s most memorable video was released. Entitled Deliver Hope, it focused on the character of Catherine-B320 as she crossed a battlefield carrying a nuclear device under her arm. The scene was an impressive one, because it featured a lot of different characters–including each member of Noble Team–and it didn’t skimp on pyrotechnic effects. While she was traveling towards a Covenant ship just above the city where the fighting was taking place, she was attacked by a Banshee. It dropped a plasma bomb that detonated a matter of inches from the Spartan; she spun through the air before falling to the ground, severely wounded: her helmet’s visor was broken, her vision blurred, and she was rendered unable to move. Just then, another Spartan appeared alongside her, and saw the gravity of the situation. He picked up the bomb and used his jet-pack to take flight towards the enemy ship. When he reached inside, he only had a few seconds to deploy the bomb, and the monstrous ship exploded, felled by the nuclear weapon. The Spartan had no time to escape. The music, limited to just a few notes of piano and then a faint female voice choir, was filled with sadness. The fans understood: this was a scene that took place a few months before the Battle of Reach, and the Spartan who gave his life to complete the mission was Thom-A293, the same one the player would replace as part of Noble Team. They also guessed that this was the mission that saw Kat lose her right arm, since in the various images fans had seen from the game, it was noticed that she had a bionic prosthesis. The tone was set: Halo: Reach would not be the story of a victorious battle; it would be the story of how the Spartans were wiped out. This wasn’t news to fans, but with this series of videos, the awful truth became much more real.

In Bungie Towers, they were ready for the game’s release. The development had been completed without any major issues. Most of the developers’ ideas had made it onto the final disk, which was delivered to Microsoft on August 4, 2010, ready for printing. In the end, only a single mission was cut from the final game: taking place just after New Alexandria, the level would have seen players crossing a city as it was being glassed by Covenant forces, before seeing them board and gain full control of a Scarab. The designers had a lot of fun with the idea, and managed to create a working prototype, but the mission was ultimately dropped: instead, Noble Team would flee New Alexandria aboard a Pelican. No big deal, then, even though many fans would have loved the opportunity to control a Scarab.

A few plot elements were also cast aside: for a while, Bungie had given a more important role to Sára Sorvad, Professor Sorad’s daughter, who the player meets in the game’s first mission. She was supposed to be something like Halo: Reach’s Cortana, accompanying Noble Team on its missions, and giving the Spartans the benefits of her scientific knowledge. The idea was soon abandoned.

“None of the Halo games were very easy,” summed up Marcus Lehto, the project’s director. “But, the smoothest run was our final game in the series, Halo: Reach. By that time, we’d become more of a well-oiled machine as a studio and were more confident producing such a large project.” This production capacity was all the more surprising given that the last few months of development took place in unique circumstances: it was a transitional period for Bungie, who were gradually moving out of 434 Kirkland Way. Over the course of the year, the staff had begun moving out and preparing a new studio in Bellevue, on 106th Avenue. To make Destiny, its first game as an independent developer, Bungie had been on a massive recruitment drive and the Kirkland premises just couldn’t accommodate that many people. The board of directors got their hands on former multiplex movie theater, which they converted into a studio. As staff finished their work on Reach, they joined the rest of the team in Bellevue, while others, like Lehto and O’Donnell, oversaw the last few weeks of work. The composer and his team would be the last to leave the old studio: “Usually the audio team is the last one to finish, and we couldn’t build up a new recording studio and change our tech in the middle of finishing Reach. So we were the last ones in the old building at Bungie. Everybody else was over in the new building, starting to gear up for the big Destiny push.” Bungie Towers, though, wouldn’t stand empty for long. In the following months, 343 Industries would start moving in, and push on with their development of a game that was, at that time, top secret: Halo 4. 434 Kirkland Way would ultimately be left behind in 2015, not long after the release of Halo 5: Guardians, when 343 Industries would join the rest of the staff at Microsoft Studios on the Redmond campus.

Upon its release on September 14, 2010, Halo: Reach outperformed Halo 3, just as Microsoft had predicted. In the United States, on its first day on sale it brought in $200,000,000 for Microsoft, some $30m more than its predecessor. One month later, 3,300,000 copies of the game had found a home in the United States, and it became the third game in history, after Halo 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 to exceed three million sales in a single month. A feat that was all the more impressive given that Reach, like Halo 3, was only available on the Xbox 360, unlike Activision’s shooter. And just like Halo 3 did in its time, the release of Halo: Reach breathed new life into the Xbox itself, with 483,000 consoles being sold in the same period. At the time of writing, no figures are available to assess the total numbers of copies sold, because Microsoft, strangely, stopped publishing them. However, it can be estimated that these sales would be in the region of eight million copies. One week before 343 Industries released Halo 4, Microsoft claimed that 46 million games had been sold across the entire franchise. This is a statistic that includes Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, Halo Wars, Halo: Reach and Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, a remastered version of the first game in the series produced by 343 Industries.

While Microsoft then began to keep quiet on the matter, it is because despite the initially excellent sales and the gushing reviews in the press, a few months after its release Halo: Reach was subjected to a lot of criticism from players themselves, and saw its community shrink considerably. Because deeper beneath the surface, the game contained a number of defects that could only be noticed after spending a few dozen hours playing the game.

LOTS OF NEW FEATURES, FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE

When Halo: Reach came out, the fans went wild. The single-player campaign was probably one of the best in the series thanks to its well-written story and plenty of standout moments. Whether through its epic battles or moments of pure tragedy, Halo: Reach made an impression and to this day it remains one of fans’ favorite installments. Because in addition to its campaign, Firefight and its countless customization options were also a clear success, while a new community also took shape: the Forgers. Halo: Reach shipped with a new version of Forge mode, named Forge World, that was far more advanced than the minor feature it had been in Halo 3. This time, it was no longer restricted to just changing the location of particular weapons, or which vehicles featured on the multiplayer maps; here, players could build entire maps using components ready-made by Bungie. “God bless Steve Cotton for Forge World,” Marcus Lehto would state a few years later. “He gave himself the task, like ‘Hey let’s create the ultimate Forge experience.’” Cotton was firmly convinced that a full level editor that players could use to make multiplayer maps from scratch would be a huge success. And he was right: fans quickly seized on the tool, despite it not being particularly user-friendly, and recreated a number of highly popular maps like Sanctuary and Blood Gulch. The sharing feature that came with it left them rapturous. Two weeks after the game came out, Bungie announced that two million files were already hosted on the content-sharing system set up by the studio. To play a map, players just needed to visit a given player’s profile, see what they had shared, and download the file they wanted. It was a seamless process and did a lot to enrich the experience of playing the game. In the first few weeks following its release, and even for months thereafter, Halo: Reach was a monumental success. Some even considered it to be the best game in the series, the cherry on top of a giant cake that Bungie had been baking for more than a decade. Proof of its popularity can be seen in that fact that, in 2017, it was one of the most played backward compatible games on Xbox One, ranking in fourth place behind Call of Duty: Black Ops, Rayman Origins and Skate 3. According to Microsoft, Halo: Reach still boasts a lively community to this day; this means that there are still enough players to keep the publisher interested in the game and looking after it. For proof, look no further than the fact that it would not be until January 30, 2018 that the advanced statistics tool Halo Waypoint, 343 Industries’ community website, removed its Halo: Reach tab. To explain this decision, Microsoft and 343 Industries point out the aging technology and code, as well as changes in their privacy policy.

And yet, a few months after its release, the popularity of Halo: Reach would take a sudden nosedive. Unlike Halo 3, which kept drawing new players for almost two years, the community of active players on Halo: Reach would begin to stall, and then shrink. A year after its release, its multiplayer servers were hosting between 50,000 and 70,000 players per day; in the same time frame, Halo 3 was hosting at least double. All around the internet, loyal fans of the franchise were pointing out a few defects that were causing them to step back from the game. Top of the list: the initial multiplayer maps worked quite poorly. And with good reason: they were all taken from the single-player campaign. Wanting to tie the different parts of the game together, Bungie designed these levels to enable them to extract some segments to turn them into battlefields, be that for multiplayer or Firefight. Since Halo 2, artists like Carney and Cotton had always tried to make it so that players recognized the location as soon as they saw a map. That was achieved through the artistic direction and the inclusion of particular components in the environment. A map like Sandtrap, for example, was obviously set in the desert on the Ark that Master Chief crossed when he arrived on the Installation; Standoff was probably set in Kenya, not far from New Mombasa; and Construct couldn’t be far from the Ark’s Cartographer, the destination for both Master Chief and the Arbiter. The result was that the Halo universe gained some internal consistency. Halo: Reach would take things much further in that direction, but the idea was soon found to contain a number of flaws. In non-objective based games, the lack of symmetry, in particular, tended to create strong points where players grouped together and that served as the focal point of the action, a tendency that made other parts of those particular maps less interesting. Players discovered lots of weaknesses in the level design which they exploited as much as they could, much to the despair of beginners and hotshots alike. There was also the issue with “bloom.” This affected several weapons, including the DMR which, like the BR in Halo 2 and Halo 3, was favored for its versatility and its accuracy. The term “bloom” refers to a specific action of the weapon’s reticle, which expands for a fleeting moment after a round is fired. On paper, this little touch was supposed to imitate the loss of accuracy caused by the weapon’s recoil, which forces players to reposition themselves properly before firing again. Of course, when firing round after round it results in a clear loss of accuracy, which might not be an issue for newbie players, who are happy to fire wildly and hope that some shots hit home. But it added a random factor to battles, which proved extremely unpopular with longtime fans of the series. Even though it was a console FPS, Halo had nevertheless amassed a community of hardcore gamers thanks to its demanding gameplay that was almost completely devoid of aim assist, a standard feature on FPS playable with a controller. In principle, this meant that good players, and especially those who had spent long hours practicing, had a significant advantage over beginners. The bloom mechanic narrowed this advantage, much to the annoyance of the most demanding players. It caused such an uproar that in September 2011, 343 Industries, which had taken over management of Halo: Reach, would release a series of updates that initially let players download settings to apply to custom games. The idea was for players to try out Halo: Reach without bloom. The setting’s success soon forced 343 Industries to begin gradually imposing ZB (standing for Zero Bloom) on some playlists, but for many players the damage had already been done.

Another detail that turned many players off was the lack of bleed through, which meant that as long as an opponent Spartan had some shield left, they would suffer no additional damage. In Halo 3, after three shots with the BR, opponents could be finished off with a melee attack: it was powerful enough to destroy the remnants of the shield and completely wipe out their life bar. In Halo: Reach, the same strategy did not work, because the melee attack no longer broke through the shield: it destroyed only the remaining shield, forcing the player to attack again. The lack of bleed through had an effect on every fight, causing imbalances by making the needle rifle and magnum far more powerful than they were supposed to be, for example. Players once again voiced their displeasure, because this small change had a huge impact on how Halo was played.

But bloom and the removal of bleed through were nothing compared to the main complaint from players: the loadout system and the introduction of power-ups into the game. Halo had always been based on the same idea: that all players began the game on a level playing field. It was only once the match began that roles were assigned, according to the opportunities encountered or the strategies of the two teams. With the introduction of power-ups–like the sprinter ability, being able to form a healing bubble, or becoming invisible– matches were turned on their heads. Indeed, power-ups would come to serve as the focal point for all the hatred felt by players. These included Armor Lock, which enabled the player to become invincible for a few seconds, in return for being unable to move. Rapturously received by the public when it was first revealed in the single-player campaign, Armor Lock was quickly deemed to be “for noobs,” due to it being extremely popular with beginner players to whom it offered some very reassuring cover. It was far less popular with seasoned veterans, however. Using Armor Lock tended to put duels between two players on pause, sometimes providing enough time for an ally to come to their aid and defeat the opposing player who was already weakened by their first battle. It created an imbalance in how combat was conducted, and slowed the pace of the matches. In short, then, it corrupted the very nature of the game. In the world of esports, the game was very quickly shunned: after just a single season, Halo: Reach was removed from the MLG circuit, even though it had been Halo 2 that enabled MLG to make a name for itself and carve out its own corner of the video game industry back in 2004.

The result of all of this was that many fans abandoned Halo: Reach. Halo was certainly known for its single-player adventures, but it was the multiplayer modes in Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2 and Halo 3 that had enabled the series to become a video-gaming mainstay and make such a lasting impression. Halo 2 had defined what online gaming should be like on consoles, and Halo 3 had elevated it into a fine art. Halo did this so well that it drew huge numbers of players and became a phenomenon in its own right, both within the small world of video games and far beyond its boundaries. The lukewarm success of Halo: Reach, and its gradual abandonment by some of the most dedicated players, would herald a long fall from grace for the franchise, that in the space of just a few years went from being a video-gaming monument to a relic of days gone by. So it was that when 343 Industries revealed Halo 4 for the first time at E3 2011, they were all too aware that a very delicate task lay in front of them. But that’s a whole other story.

WORKING WITH 343 INDUSTRIES

Throughout the development of Halo: Reach, Bungie ended up working regularly with 343 Industries, who would be taking over the franchise once the game had been delivered to Microsoft. Bungie did not always find this to be a straightforward experience, all the more because it had already seen some of its staff resign. Those included Frank O’Connor, who left to join 343 Industries in May 2008, where he became creative director of the franchise. It was a role that he was perfectly suited to, as over time O’Connor had become a living encyclopedia of the Halo universe. He joined 343 Industries with a desire to make sure that the series’ lore remained internally consistent as it grew. With his charismatic and endearing character, O’Connor was an extremely popular member of staff at Bungie, and his departure hit a lot of people hard. “I didn’t know Frankie had made his decision to go to 343,” O’Donnell tells us. “I found out on a weekend. He had told Harold Ryan on Friday, and Harold told me that afternoon, and then I called Frankie and said, ‘Let’s get together for coffee.’ I spent two hours trying to convince him, asking: ‘What can I do to have you stay with us, rather than go to them?’ But there were tons of reasons why 343 was better for him at the time, and I couldn’t convince him to stay with Bungie. In the long run, he probably was right. I think he might’ve seen some things that I wasn’t seeing.” But while several members of staff at Bungie made the move over to 343 Industries between 2008 and 2010, the flow ran in the other direction, too. But it did so for very different reasons: some staff from 343 Industries joined the team working on Reach to learn how the studio worked. This was the case for Josh Holmes, who would go on to be the creative director of Halo 4; he served as an executive producer on Halo: Reach, and paid close attention to how Bungie operated. Holmes knew Halo, of course, but it was with Reach that he truly discovered the series. He used it as an opportunity to learn all he could. But while Holmes was accepted into the production team without any misgivings, the relationship between Bungie and Microsoft had cooled considerably, and discussions were often fraught. The Redmond firm was trying to oversee a major transition in the handover between the two partner studios. It wasn’t just about entrusting development of future Halo games to a new studio, but also making sure that the transition went smoothly enough for the entire Halo ecosystem to emerge intact, without players being aware of any real difference. And for that, Microsoft needed to get hold of some data owned by Bungie on its website, Bungie.net.

343 Industries was already working on a website to replace Bungie’s platform that contained all the latest news from the studio and about Halo, as well as its forums and, most importantly, individual stats for each player. These were very popular with fans because they were extremely detailed, and often a source of pride. To build this new community platform, 343 Industries would seek out an old acquaintance: Max Hoberman, a former member of Bungie and founder of Certain Affinity. “At some point, the nascent 343 group reached out to us at Certain Affinity, and I’m fairly certain it was at Frank’s [O’Connor] bidding. They were interested in doing a Halo digital download game. So we pitched a bunch of ideas, we had some really cool ones–I still have one to this day that I’m dying to make–and we all locked onto one that we were super excited about. We got really close to putting a contract in place, and then the Halo Waypoint website came along and it had become a priority. So, the other stuff we were thinking about doing got canned, and we ended up going on to Waypoint. I won’t lie, I was pretty bummed. But it did rekindle this relationship with Microsoft, and then we got pulled on to work on a multiplayer map pack for Halo: Reach. Halo Waypoint, the new reference website for all fans of Halo, went online on February 22, 2009, but it would not be until March 31, 2012, that it would play its full role, when it began hosting player stats that had been transferred over from Bungie.net.

Bungie and Halo’s separation was a difficult one. Yes, the studio had spent more than a decade working on the license, and it had gone through some very hard times when making particular installments. But Halo was still its very own, its baby, and in-house the farewells were hard to take. “It just was hard,” Martin O’Donnell recalls. “This was our baby that we never owned. And we were going to give it over to a bunch of strangers.” So while some members of the studio were in regular contact with 343 Industries to facilitate the handover, O’Donnell withdrew to his recording studio: “I had no desire to talk to 343, because I was 100 % Bungie, and 100 % Destiny. I mean, essentially at that moment we were competitors, right? We were trying to make the Halo-killer and they were trying to make Halo. It’s not like we had any animosity, but there was just no way that was going to happen.” And as surprising as it may seem, even Jaime Griesemer started having doubts in those final days. He had given his all to Halo, and after working on the third game he had had enough of the franchise to last a lifetime. So when Project Tiger evolved into something that was looking more and more like Halo, it irked him. It was as if he was unable to step out of Master Chief’s shadow. And yet, while Master Chief was getting ready to leave Bungie behind, Griesemer was on the fence. “I considered going over to 343 for a while. I thought, well, I definitely know how to make a Halo game better than those guys, so maybe I’ll go over there. But my heart wasn’t in it, so I wouldn’t have done a good job over there, either. And they had their ideas for where they wanted to take it as well.”

Bungie bid its final farewell to Halo on July 8, 2011, just after the studio had celebrated its 20th anniversary. It was through a long message from Eric “Urk” Osborne, one of the studio’s community managers, that Bungie revealed its plans for the immediate future. It would be a new chapter in its already-long career. The project didn’t yet have a name, at least not in public. But that hadn’t stopped a few mischievous developers from hiding a clue in Halo 3: ODST, in the form of a poster stuck to a wall in New Mombasa. It showed the Earth looming large beneath a smaller white sphere. The image was accompanied by a short slogan: “Destiny awaits.” It would be two more years before Destiny made its first public appearance, and Bungie would experience many more challenges before then. But Bungie was under no illusions. Osborne concluded his message with the following few lines which in hindsight seem almost prophetic:

“This isn’t a goodbye. It isn’t The End. Instead, it’s the very beginning of a new journey that will stretch the limits of what we are capable of. Ancient engines are now rumbling deep within the heart of our studio, and their energy will power us through the upcoming darkness. Like all dark times, ours will be broken first by a single strand of light–a tether reaching out to bind us all together again. One day, we will awaken in a wondrous new place and we will remember just what it was that drew us together at the beginning of it all. We will look up to the heavens, and find hope.

Thank you for everything.

See you starside.”

The letter, even just its last line, echoed the last message Bungie had sent its fans, including those who never visited Bungie.net. For many players, it was their last contact with the studio that had kept them dreaming for an entire decade. It can be read at the very end of Halo: Reach, the last Halo game developed by Bungie. As the Pillar of Autumn disappears off into the distance, towards the first ringworld, a message appeared on the screen:

“To all our faithful fans–

Thank you for playing Halo: Reach.

Over the past decade, we’ve shared some of our most memorable experiences together, inside the far-reaching expanses of the Halo universe. It’s been one hell of a ride. And we couldn’t have done it without you.

As we continue marching toward our ultimate goal of World Domination, Bungie remains inspired and fueled by you, our passionate fan community. So Play. Forge. Film.

We’ll see you starside.

<3 Bungie.”

Part II
THE GAME UNIVERSE

NOT MANY SERIES in video-gaming history are based on a universe as meticulously thought-out as Halo’s. That’s a fact, but one that many players remain unaware of. And this ignorance is completely understandable: with rare exceptions, shooter games put far more effort into the curation of breathtaking action sequences than into developing complex lore.13 More often than not, and with varying degrees of success, the plot serves as a pretext to link different shooting sequences together and guide players towards their final objective. But some studios have seen that by crafting an internally consistent game world, they can elicit more emotional involvement from the people playing the game. And more emotional involvement makes accomplishing the game’s objectives all the more satisfying. This is something that Jason Jones, Bungie’s co-founder, understood very early on. It can be seen in Pathways into Darkness, but it would not be until Marathon that it found its fullest expression. Bungie’s fans fell in love with the first Marathon game for its gameplay and impressive graphics, but it was its captivating universe that enabled the game to become a trilogy. In a sense, Halo merely followed the trail it had broken; but thanks to Microsoft, the formula adopted in Marathon could become that much deeper. From its conception, Halo never remained within the confines of the video game industry: its stories were told via many more media, and traditional and graphic novels in particular. This is probably the main reason why so few players know just how deep the game’s universe is, and most of what you will read over the course of the following pages comes not from the games, but from the various transmedia products that today make up the Halo galaxy.

Of course, some may complain that many of the stories and much of the information contained in this section of the book were added after the fact, once Bungie had left Halo in the hands of Microsoft. And they’d be right: 343 Industries did so much to enrich the game universe, and continues to do so to this day. So while these additions were not made by Bungie, they are nevertheless part of the Halo universe canon, and are essential reading for anyone who wants to fully understand the events taking place in Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo 3 ODST, Halo Wars and Halo: Reach. We nevertheless made a decision to focus on a particular time frame, so that this section of the book is consistent with the first. Indeed, this section will go all the way back to the origins of the Halo universe, and will end with the events that followed the disappearance of Master Chief at the end of Halo 3. This means you won’t read anything about the awakening of the Didact in Halo 4, or the Created conflict in Halo 5: Guardians.

A second important point is that this section of the book is an attempt to summarize–as clearly and comprehensively as possible–events, battles, and encounters spanning several million years. It describes the lives of dozens of characters, the histories of uncountable planets, and presents the political structures of several alien civilizations. Truth be told, a single book could never cover all the details of the Halo universe; it would take an entire series. This means that over the following pages, I have tried to recount the greatest moments in the saga and give you the knowledge you need to gain a general understanding of this lore that has kept me fascinated for almost a decade and a half. It was no easy task, and I had to make some difficult decisions. Indeed, some characters go unmentioned, and some events were set aside. Often this was in the service of clarity and readability, and to avoid drowning the main storyline beneath a landslide of secondary stories of lesser importance. I hope the purists will forgive me if I’ve omitted some of their favorite facts or characters. Thus forewarned, all that is left for me to do is to wish you happy travels through the Halo universe.

13 The word lore (tradition, knowledge, customs) describes the body of stories, information, and knowledge that forms a fictional universe. In the video game industry, the term is generally used to refer to anything beyond the primary storyline, which is covered by the main plot of the game.

Chapter 1 – In the Beginning, There Were the Forerunners

To truly understand the Halo universe, we need to go very far back in time. Several million years before Master Chief was even born, in fact. As anyone who has played a Halo game will know, the world as experienced by the UNSC and the Covenant Alliance would be a very different place if Forerunner society had not existed, hundreds of thousands of years before man ever set foot on the Moon. It was the Forerunner civilization that built the Halos and developed many more kinds of extremely advanced technology before it disappeared. Less common knowledge is that the Forerunners themselves were not the first civilization to have dominated the Milky Way. Just like the Humans, they were created by another alien civilization: the Precursors.

THE PRECURSORS

Not much is known about the precursors. These creatures lived for billions of years in many different forms, eventually becoming so advanced that they were able to transcend the laws of physics. As they spread out across the universe, the Precursors became its masters. Having reached the Milky Way via the Magellanic Clouds, they used our galaxy as a repository for all of their knowledge, storing it on a neurophysical network known as the Domain. The Domain could also be found within an artifact known as the Organon, which was accessible to any organism that was sufficiently evolved to reach it through their subconscious. Indeed, there exists no physical interface providing access to the Domain, and anyone wishing to extract particular information from it must undergo training and first obtain wisdom. The Precursors also established an ideology, which they called the Mantle of Responsibility: having reached such an advanced stage of evolution, they believed themselves to be custodians of the universe and all of the life it contained. With the power to create galaxies just as they could living beings, the Precursors acted in the name of the Mantle to ensure that the biosphere was preserved and balance maintained across every single galaxy they controlled. This sometimes forced them to take radical decisions, such as wiping out entire living species if, once it had reached a sufficiently advanced level of evolution, it became a threat to the balance of the universe. But the Precursor’s wisdom forbade them from acting as judge, jury, and executioner, which is why they often appointed another species to serve as guardian of the Mantle. The guardians were then tasked with ensuring that the principles of Precursor ideology were adhered to throughout the galaxy. This, though, was a role that could corrupt those who fulfilled it, and the Precursors were eventually forced to annihilate the different species they charged with defending the Mantle of Responsibility. A violent act, but one that enabled balance to be maintained, and so the cycle repeated itself again and again throughout billions of years.

WAR BETWEEN PRECURSORS AND FORERUNNERS

Among the many species created by the Precursors, one stands out from all the rest: the Forerunners. Hailing from a planet named Ghibalb, not far from the Orion Nebula, the Forerunners were always destined to become guardians of the Mantle, having been created by the Precursors for this exact purpose. With an average height of around nine feet, the Forerunners were an extremely tough anthropomorphic species with a life expectancy measured in millennia, and sometimes even longer. They designed armor that they wore at all times and that protected them from injury, harsh weather, and illness. The armor had built-in artificial intelligence known as ancilla that assisted the wearer in their everyday tasks and enabled them to perform any task efficiently. Just as their creators had hoped, over time the Forerunners built a powerful empire that spanned the Milky Way. Able to develop technological wonders of the kind the universe had never known before the Precursors, the Forerunners gradually grew into worthy heirs to their progenitors. But their incredible evolution began giving the Forerunners ideas of their own, and they grew distant from the Mantle’s precepts. As a result, the Precursors turned their attention to another species that had risen in another corner of the galaxy. Boasting advanced technology that could almost equal that of the Forerunners, this species soon established a presence throughout the galaxy, reaching as far as the fringes of the Milky Way. It is no longer possible to be sure of their homeworld, but it was most likely a planet known as Erde-Tyrene. Today we know that planet as “Earth” and the species in question Humanity itself. The Precursors created Humanity at the same time as the Forerunners, and humankind was also destined to become a potential guardian of the Mantle. As the Forerunner civilization had proven itself unworthy of the role, the Precursors made Humanity their chosen ones. It was a decision that signed the death warrant of the Forerunners, as their existence now threatened the balance that the Mantle required.

Predictably enough, the Forerunners refused to accept that the Mantle be passed on to the Humans and, aware that their days were numbered, they decided to declare war on their creators. It was a situation that found the Precursors unprepared, and they were defeated despite their clear technological superiority. The Forerunners hunted them down to the four corners of the galaxy, pushing them back into a corner in Path Kethona, as the Forerunners referred to the Magellanic Clouds. Launching an attack with an immense armada, the Forerunners massacred the Precursors. The creators could only look on in dumbfounded amazement at the power wielded by their creations. This is how most of the Precursors came to be wiped out at the edge of the known world, around 10,000,000 BCE. The Forerunners were now masters of the galaxy, and their civilization could flourish without the fear of being one day eradicated by a superior force. In 150,000 BCE, they formed the Forerunner Ecumene, and controlled three million worlds spread across the entire Milky Way. By this time, the Forerunners’ days as warmongers were in the past. Their civilization now focused on applying the principles of the Mantle, and the story of how the Precursors had disappeared was forgotten. They even came to believe that the Precursors had left of their own free will, tasking the Forerunners with responsibility for maintaining balance within the galaxy.

FORERUNNER SOCIAL AND POLITICAL STRUCTURE

The Forerunner Ecumene can be difficult to understand, as it was based on a social and political model that’s very different from what we (real!) humans have known throughout our history. Their society was structured around different castes, with each caste having its own place in the hierarchy, its own role, and even a distinct physical appearance. To enable each individual to fulfill the roles dictated by its caste, the Forerunners used biochemical modifications and genetic engineering to shape their bodies. Indeed, over the course of its life, a Forerunner would undergo a series of mutations that would transform its body, making it a perfectly honed tool for meeting its obligations within Forerunner society. Before undergoing its first mutation, a Forerunner was classed as a Manipular, but once the first transformation was complete, they could join one of the following castes:

j Builders: a very powerful caste within the Ecumene. They were something akin to the empire’s architects, tasked with designing artificial worlds, spaceships, weapons, and ancilla. Organized into guilds, the Builders’ popularity grew in line with their technical prowess, earning them an increasingly important place in the Ecumene’s political landscape. They even had their own language, which allowed them to maintain a certain degree of secrecy around their activities. They followed the orders of the Master Builder who, as the leader of the most important caste, was therefore the most powerful figure within the empire.

j The Miners: this was the most common cast, and paradoxically one of the most prestigious. The Miners’ role was to source all the materials the Builders needed for their projects. Big and strong, they were also highly disciplined, obeying rules, laws, and protocols without question.

j The Juridicals: their role was to ensure that laws were applied and the principles of the Mantle followed. The Juridicals also served as investigators and judges. To assist them in their work they could count on the Domain, where everything was stored: reports, important information, and anything else of import. Naturally, they were sticklers for the rules and followed procedures to the letter. They were led by the Master Juridical.

j The Lifeworkers: particularly large and elegant in appearance, the Lifeworkers were nevertheless seen as an inferior caste within Forerunner society. They were their civilization’s scientists, overseeing medicine and life sciences. They followed the orders of the Lifeshaper.

j The Warrior-Servants: as their name implies, these served as the Forerunner army, but were seen as an inferior caste. That had not always been the case, however: before the Precursor war, the Warrior-Servants were the leading caste in the Ecumene. But once the war was over, and the Forerunners were unrivaled throughout the galaxy, they saw their importance diminish, and were eventually renamed the Warrior-Servants. As you might well imagine, these were the most physically intimidating Forerunners, measuring up to 12 feet in height. They had six fingers. The most important Warrior-Servants were known as Prometheans: these were elite warriors and also military leaders.

j The Engineers: the Engineers occupied the lowest rung in Forerunner society, where, contrary to what their name may imply, they served as laborers for the Builders. Despite their role as workers, some of them were powerful and talented enough to control and harness the growth of stars.

There was no emperor to lead the empire. Instead it was governed by a Council, on which sat representatives of each caste mentioned above, with the exclusion of the Engineers. Dominated for a long time by Warrior-Servants, after the Precursor war the Council fell under the dominance of the Builders, who accounted for most of the 500 councilors seated on the Council. Indeed, the Council was led by the Master Builder, who dismissed most of the Warrior-Servants and Lifeworkers, leaving only a few Prometheans and Lifeshapers with their seats. The Council resided on Maethrillian, the empire’s capital planet. Often referred to as the Capital, the planet was in fact a giant artificial structure composed of vast discs each connected to the other by a central pillar. The middle section was the widest, with a diameter of 100,000 kilometers. Even on the inordinate scale of the Forerunner civilization, Maethrillian was a particularly amazing sight to behold: visitors might well believe that its inhabitants had cut a planet into slices before connecting each piece with a giant pylon and leaving each section with enough space to support life.

Chapter 2 – War with Humanity

Around 110,000 BCE, the Forerunners entered their golden age. Their civilization spanned the entire galaxy, and they were harnessing the full power of the Domain. This source of infinite knowledge that dated back to the Precursors was constantly expanding, being enriched with Forerunner discoveries and history. But darker days were coming, and around 13,000 years later the Forerunners had all but disappeared. As is often the case, it was war that heralded the beginning of the end.

HUMANITY ON THE OFFENSIVE

Although the galaxy had been at peace for millions of years, a number of Forerunner colonies fell victim to sudden attacks by the Humans and their allies, the San’Shyuum.14 Entire worlds were razed to the ground, rendering them temporarily uninhabitable. Millions of Forerunner men, women, and children–mostly civilians–were wiped out without warning. Stunned by the Humans’ capacity for violence and barbarism, the Forerunners were united in the need for action: the Council strongly condemned the attacks, and in 110,553 BCE they declared war on Humanity in the name of the Mantle of Responsibility. And so began a long war in the Orion Arm, part of the galaxy containing many human colonies, and with them many civilians. Humanity, though, boasted considerable military power and the two species–originally created as sibling races–would wage a terrible war against each other for 53 years.

At first, the battles generally ended in the Forerunner’s favor as they brutalized their enemies. Despite this, the Humans managed to hold their own thanks to two figures in particular: Forthencho, the Lord of Admirals and one of the leading commanders of the human armies, and Yprin Yprukushma, a scientist and politician who had long been an adversary to the Lord of Admirals. Yprukushma analyzed Forerunner technology, discovering many solutions that would enable the Humans to withstand their enemy’s constant attacks for more than a decade. At that time, the Forerunners were led by a number of powerful Prometheans, such as the Strategos, the Confirmer, the Grammarian, and the Didact. It was the Didact in particular who would lead a series of victories to become Forthencho’s prime adversary, engaging him in a series of battles that would mark the history of the war.

Despite their strong resistance and a renewed energy after ten years of Forerunner offensives, the Humans would gradually begin losing ground. One of the main human planets, Erde-Tyrene, had fallen, and the war was now limited to a few small sectors. At that moment, it appeared clear that Humanity could not win the war. The San’Shyuum saw this and decided to surrender in the hope of escaping more severe punishment. And that turned out to be a wise move, because the future was looking particularly grim for Humanity. Now cornered on its capital planet, Chakum Hakkor, Humanity staged one last stand against the Forerunners. The siege of the planet would continue for three years thanks to the military prowess of the Lord of Admirals, who managed to hold the Didact in check. For now. The Didact then decided to launch an all-out assault and invade the planet with a huge fleet, accepting the heavy losses this would involve. What the Forerunners then discovered was a planet rich in Precursor artifacts, but that was still heavily occupied by fighting forces who were refusing to surrender. The invaders eventually won, but not without paying the price: a great many Forerunners died in the attack on Chakum Hakkor, including all the Didact’s children. But the war was over. Or at least, this war was. Because another, even more terrifying war was about to begin.

DISCOVERY OF THE FLOOD

The Forerunners did not know it when they declared war on the Humans, but the Humans had already been at war with another species for several years. On the fringes of its empire, mysterious ghost ships had crash-landed on a few human colonies. When the Humans explored the ships, they found them filled with millions of transparent tubes containing a strange powder. They analyzed the powder and discovered that it was composed of short but complex molecular sequences. They decided to take a sample with them off the ship. Little did they know, but their actions would create the greatest threat the galaxy had ever known: the Flood. To understand the origins of the Flood, we need to go back to the end of the war between the Forerunners and their creators, the Precursors. Although most of the Precursors had been massacred at the hands of their creations, a few survived and took refuge in the Tarantula Nebula in the Magellanic Clouds. It was here, far from any civilization, that they hatched their revenge. The survivors turned themselves into a very fine powder that they loaded on to ships programmed to one day journey towards the Milky Way. The powder continued to evolve over thousands of years, eventually becoming the seed of a terrible disease.

The Humans were ignorant of the powder’s origins, but they discovered that it had some interesting properties: in low doses it produced a psychotropic effect that could tame the behavior of certain animals, such as the pheru, a small animal that was very popular with both Humans and the San’Shyuum. The pheru were already popular pets even without the powder, but after consuming it they grew more docile and easier to live with. Better yet, over time they underwent some mutations, like the appearance of a lovely thick fur covering their backs. These small animals were also a delicacy, and dishes made using modified pheru became popular in human colonies. This was how the Humans and the San’Shyuum unwittingly helped spread the infection, because the powder’s genetic code was constantly evolving, and before long it started having additional effects on the pheru. Some of them became more aggressive, going as far as eating other pheru or attacking their masters. More physical mutations were also triggered, with pheru being born with hideous mutations that meant they no longer bore much resemblance to the parents, who were ordinarily so very cute. When the Humans and San’Shyuum decided to release any animals considered abnormal back into the wild, it was already too late: the Flood had already spread across their worlds in the form of spores. The Humans and their allies began to mutate, and in a very short space of time the Flood underwent a rampage of evolution: it could now attack hosts itself, and gradually began infecting more than a dozen systems.

In an attempt to better understand what exactly they were facing, they turned to a creature they knew almost nothing about: the Primordial. Discovered inside an asteroid by Yprin Yprukushma and her teams, the creature could not be identified with any certainty, but the scientific community agreed that it was the oldest form of life known to man. On Chakum Hakkor, they created a special prison for their discovery, where they attempted to communicate with it. The Primordial was supremely intelligent and could access infinite knowledge, a fact that led the Humans to treat it as an oracle, regularly seeking its answers to complex issues. But once again, the Humans would pay for their ignorance, because the Primordial was not just another alien being: it was the last of the Precursors, and the species’ only ‘whole’ survivor. Unlike its peers, the Primordial had not transmuted itself into a powder, instead modifying its body to increase its chances of survival and locking itself away inside an asteroid, but not without first making sure that the Forerunners stood no chance of finding it. When the Humans freed it from the asteroid, it was happy to provide vague answers to their questions; but when they asked about the Flood, it answered in much more detail. So much detail, in fact, that its explanations of the Flood’s origins traumatized those who heard them: some went mad, while others decided to take their own lives. The Humans came to the conclusion that it was not, as they had suspected, a true Precursor, but a corrupted form of these powerful creatures, and decided to isolate it. The prison in which they were holding it was placed in stasis, and access to the Primordial was prohibited.

Unfortunately, the Flood had continued to spread. When the Humans fully grasped the scale of the threat, they decided to take action: from now on, any planet infected with the Flood would be bombarded from orbit, with the Humans preferring to see entire worlds burn than risk letting the infection spread any further. They soon discovered many Forerunner planets that were showing the first signs of infection. They subjected these planets to the same fate, without warning, thereby annihilating all their inhabitants. The war between Humanity and the Forerunners, then, was triggered by a terrible misunderstanding. For a decade the Humans would fight on two fronts, fleeing the Flood’s advance on one front, and pushing back Forerunner offensives on the other. The war against the Forerunners was reaching a status quo when, bizarrely, the Flood retreated until it had almost completely disappeared from the galaxy. The Humans credited this success to one of their discoveries, a cure that turned the Flood’s infection mechanism against itself. But in actual fact, the Flood had itself chosen to withdraw, deciding to wait until the Forerunners were at their most vulnerable before launching its attack. The human cure was ineffective. But nobody would ever find out.

FORERUNNER RETRIBUTION

With Chakum Hakkor fallen and the Humans defeated, the Forerunners would now exact their revenge on Humanity, which had destroyed so many of their worlds. The Didact was one of the voices in favor of the punishment being proportionate to the heinous crimes that had been committed, but the Council was far from reaching a consensus. Some were aware of the Flood’s existence, including Faber, the Master Builder who led the Council. However, he chose to keep this knowledge to himself and many Forerunners were convinced that the Flood was a Human invention, created as a pretext to attack the Ecumene. And yet, on Chakum Hakkor, the Didact would make a horrible discovery: he came upon the Primordial, which revealed its identity and explained the origins of the Flood. Faber decided to hide this information from his wife, the Librarian and a powerful Lifeshaper, but he did enlist her help in trying to find a way to defeat the Flood. His first move was to torture Forthencho and Yprukushma, because he knew that the Humans had already found a cure. The two Humans, though, believed that the cure actually worked and refused to share it with their torturer. The Didact then decided to use a Forerunner machine, known as the Composer, on his human prisoners. The machine could turn living beings into AI constructs, at the cost of destroying their body of flesh and blood. The “essence” obtained in this way could then be stored or transplanted into another vessel. The Composers had originally been intended for another purpose: they were designed by the Builders and Lifeworkers in their efforts to achieve immortality. Alas, as they would soon discover, life essence could not be transferred into another living body. Indeed, the only solution was to inject the essence directly into the DNA of a living subject, bestowing them with the essence’s memories and some personality traits, and in some way shaping their future. When the first Flood appeared, the Forerunners thought that the Composers could be an effective tool against this new threat. The Didact used them to compose Forthencho and Yprukushma, along with the thousands of human prisoners taken on Chakum Hakkor, in the hope of finding a solution to the Flood within all these essences.

But the Forerunners didn’t stop there, because they fully intended to punish the Humans for their crimes. First, they dealt with the San’Shyuum who, despite the fact that they had capitulated before the Humans, had nevertheless had the audacity to take up arms against the Ecumene. When their punishment came, they were demilitarized and saw all their possessions across the galaxy confiscated. They were sent back to their homeworld, Janjur Qom, where their civilization would enter a slow decline. At the end of the war, the San’Shyuum were refined, elegant beings, but over time their appearance would come to bear the scars of the Forerunner retribution. This was how the species came to evolve into the form we know today, as they first appeared in Halo 2.

As might be expected, the punishment meted out to the Humans was orders of magnitude more severe. While some Forerunners, including the Didact, believed that the Human species should be eradicated from the galaxy in accordance with the principles of the Mantle, in the end they would receive a fate that was perhaps even worse: their empire was dismantled and the entire species sent back to the Stone Age. Every surviving human was transported to Erde-Tyrene, but not without the Librarian first injecting some of them with the essences of powerful ancient Humans. Indeed, the Didact’s wife had grown fond of these creatures, whom she had spent a long time studying. Over time, the Human species would splinter into a variety of different subspecies, each with different physical characteristics:

j The Chamanush, also known as the Florians, who were half the size of standard Humans. They had very large skulls, no chins, and large lips. Their faces, hands and feet were covered in a thick fur. Of all the ancient Humans, they have the longest lifespans and can live for several thousand years.

j The B’ashamanush, who live in the tropical regions of Erde-Tyrene.

j The K’tamanush, who would become the Neanderthals.

j The Hamanush, with a darker, hairless skin. This was the subspecies with the closest resemblance to modern-day humans.

Having regressed to such an early stage of development, Humanity lost all knowledge of its illustrious past, and the few Forerunners who visited the planet were seen as gods. This was particularly true of the Librarian, who would come to spend ever more time on Erde-Tyrene over the coming centuries.

14  The San’Shyuum is the real name of the Prophets, future leaders of the Covenant. At its peak, the Covenant included the San’Shyuum, Sangheili (Elites), Jiralhanae (Brutes), Unggoy (Grunts), Kig-Yar (Jackals), Yanme’es (Drones), and the Lekgolos (Hunters). The Covenant regularly employed the services of Huragoks (Engineers), creatures designed by the forerunners to conduct maintenance on various installations. They were living beings, but generally seen as military hardware rather than conscious beings.

Chapter 3 – War Against the Flood

With the Humans defeated, the Forerunners now had to contend with an even greater threat: the Flood. The Flood returned to the galaxy soon after Humanity had lost the war, and began infecting one Forerunner world after another. In the beginning, the Ecumene applied the same strategy as the Humans had done, and cleansed a number of its planets. But this scorched earth policy would not work against the Flood, something that the Forerunners soon came to understand. This new war could not be waged using their conventional methods. And so the Council met on Maethrillian to determine the tactics it would use to curtail the invasion.

SWORD AND SHIELD

Around 101,000 BCE, the Forerunner Council needed to reach a decision, and it was presented with two plans to defeat the Flood. The first plan was proposed by the Builders, led by Faber, the Master Builder. They planned to create a series of gigantic weapons of mass destruction which they would name the Halos: when activated these rings would emit a powerful beam capable of disintegrating all forms of highly evolved life. The Builders reasoned that even if a few Flood spores survived, they would ultimately die of starvation. The Didact also proposed a far less violent solution based on the creation of shield worlds. These artificial worlds would be built around stars, where they would serve as a refuge for the galaxy’s living beings, as well as research centers and military outposts. The Didact was openly critical of Faber’s plans, which went against the precepts of the Mantle, resulting in Faber adjusting the plans for the Halos, designing them so that they could also serve as a sanctuary when the ringworlds were activated. In the end, the Council would approve both projects: they would build the Halos, and also the shield worlds, which would be designed so that they could protect their inhabitants from the effects of the Halos. To lead the war effort, the Didact worked with Faber to create a new form of artificial intelligence, which they named the Contender. More highly evolved, smarter, and more powerful, the first Contender class AI was baptized “Mendicant Bias” by the Didact. Mendicant Bias would be responsible for leading the entire Forerunner fleet, as well as for studying the Flood and its central intelligence–the Gravemind–in particular. Despite this cooperation, the Didact remained critical of Faber’s plan. This left the Didact politically marginalized, and the entire Warrior-Servant caste suffered as a result. Refusing to work with Faber and his Builders, the Didact instead chose exile and shut himself away in a Cryptum, a stasis module, where he would remain in hibernation for one thousand years. The Librarian then decided to store the Cryptum in the Djamonkin crater on Erde-Tyrene, where it would be guarded by War Sphinxes, those formidable combat machines that the Warrior-Servants used in times of war, and which could also operate independently. Into these Sphinxes the Librarian transferred the remaining memories of their children who had died in battle. And so it was that the Didact would remain in slumber on his enemy’s homeworld for one thousand years, protected by what remained of his children.

Meanwhile, work quickly began building the Halos. The Forerunners’ first task was to build the construction platform that would enable them to build the rings. They called it the Ark, and they built it in the void beyond the Milky Way, so that it was far from the clutches of the Flood. This giant structure, shaped like a six-petaled flower, would be used to build the Halos as well as to repair and replace them. It would also serve as a control center, a single location from where the Forerunners could activate all he Halos simultaneously. It wouldn’t be long before the Halos were complete: there would be 12 in total, each with a diameter of around 30,000 km. When activated, they would have the power to cleanse the galaxy of the Flood, and even beyond: the Halos were positioned so that when they fired, the beams they produced would merge, increasing both their power and their range. In theory, the Halos could even strike surrounding galaxies.

Faber liked to have guarantees, so he also built a second Ark, which was smaller than the first, measuring only 127,530 km in diameter. This smaller Ark featured a range of improvements that the Builders designed based on what they had learned from building what was now known as the Greater Ark. Just like its larger sibling, the Lesser Ark was also kept out of harm’s way on the fringes of the Milky Way. Faber had no doubt in his mind: the war against the Flood would be without mercy, and the Forerunners would never emerge victorious without adopting the utmost prudence.

THE CONSERVATION MEASURE

The Forerunners did not implement the Halo plan with no thought of the future. When beginning work on designing the Halos, the Librarian made sure to also create a great conservation plan, known as the Conservation Measure, so that every living species in the galaxy would know life on the other side of the ringworlds’ activation. The idea was a simple one: the Lifeshaper and Lifeworkers would spend years inventorying and collecting specimens of every lifeform in the Milky Way. They returned with thousands of lifeforms from every outing. They would be stored on the Halos, as well as on the two Arks and the shield worlds. Once the Halos had completed the task for which they were built, the planets would be repopulated using keyships: fully automated vessels that could ferry every species back to its home planet. On paper, the plan was straightforward enough, but in reality, the war would soon cause it to become more complicated. While the Flood was conquering planet after planet, the Lifeworkers tried to save what they could, and traveled the galaxy on keyships, picking up ever more DNA samples and specimens as they went. But their efforts would not be enough: the Flood was advancing at breakneck speed, and the Lifeworkers were forced to abandon many worlds before they were able to gather all the species living there together.

THE PRIMORDIAL REDISCOVERED

While war continued to rage across the galaxy, the Forerunners decided to put one Halo to the test to verify its power. So it was that in 100,043 BCE, the Council handed one of the Halos over to Mendicant Bias. This Halo was unique in that it was chosen as a home for a large population of humans as part of the Conservation Measure, many of whom unwittingly carried the essences of ancient human warriors who had fought against the Forerunners during that fratricidal conflict. This caused some Forerunners, like Faber and the Librarian, to hope that they would find the famed “cure” that the Humans had used against the Flood. The Council, and Faber in particular, wanted to conduct a test strike to verify the Halo’s power, but also to scare the Flood by proving that the Ecumene was ready to sacrifice itself in order to defeat it. The Halo controlled by Mendicant Bias was sent to the Chakum Hakkor system, and its power was set to minimum so that its beam would not carry beyond the edge of the system. The experiment was a total success: every planet touched by the Halo’s beam was left intact, with only the lifeforms placed there by the Forerunners being wiped out. The Halo’s power, however, damaged the prison containing the Primordial, which seized the opportunity to make a break for freedom. It was immediately spotted and captured by the Forerunners, who decided to send it to the Halo controlled by Mendicant Bias for further investigation by the AI. The Forerunners debated what exactly the Primordial was at length, but they understood that its existence was linked to the Flood in some way. Like the Flood, the Primordial had retained the Precursors’ instinct for creation: infection with the Flood was nothing more than a way to unite all lifeforms in the galaxy, to create new species, and to wipe out any that posed a threat. In a sense, the Flood was carrying on the work of the Precursors by bringing balance back to the universe.

THE DIDACT AWAKENS

On Erde-Tyrene, the Didact was roused from his long slumber by a young Forerunner named Bornstellar Makes Eternal Lasting. This Manipular hailed from a family of wealthy Builders, and had his sights set on great things. He was seeking the Organon, the Precursor artifact that contained the Domain. Not many in Forerunner society knew that the Organon was more than just a legend, and what’s more, that it could be found on Maethrillian, the Ecumene capital planet. On Erde-Tyrene, he encountered Chakas and Riser, two Humans who carried the essences of Forthencho and Yprukushman, and together they traveled to what Bornstellar believed to be the location of the Organon, finding there instead the Didact’s Cryptum. Not knowing what was contained within the sphere, he roused the Promethean from his thousand-year sleep, and the Didact woke up in an unfamiliar world. Once the Didact had regained his strength, the small band set off for Chakum Hakkor, because the warrior wanted to ensure that the Primordial was still imprisoned there. But when they got there, they discovered that the planet had been cleansed by the Halo many years ago, and the creature the planet held captive was nowhere to be seen. Still eager to discover a cure for the Flood, the Didact flew to Janjur Qom, the San’Shyuum homeworld, where he hoped to find someone who could point him in the direction of the Humans’ famous cure. While they were traveling, he allowed Bornstellar to go through his first mutation: the young man was now able to access the Domain, as well as the Didact’s own memories, which had also been shared with him. The old Forerunner stored part of himself in Bornstellar, who gradually mutated into a hybrid being that was both Builder and Warrior-Servant. When they were preparing to land on Janjur Qom, the crew was detained by men under the command of Faber, the Master Builder, who suspected the Didact would travel to this planet once he had awakened. They were brought before Faber, who informed them that he planned to test the Halo’s effect on Janjur Qom, because the San’Shyuum had revolted against the quarantine measures being enforced on their planet. Faber decided to send Bornstellar home, but had a different fate in mind for the Didact: he took him back to Chakum Hakkor, where he questioned him at length about the location of his shield worlds and about Contender class AI, like Mendicant Bias. The Promethean, though, refused to cooperate and did not give up any information. Faber then decided to condemn the Didact to death: he stripped him of his armor and imprisoned him, along with many other political opponents, on a decommissioned Forerunner ship. The ship was then sent drifting towards an area of space controlled by the Flood.

BETRAYAL BY MENDICANT BIAS

Now rid of the Didact, Faber put his plan into action: he used his Halo against the San’Shyuum homeworld, wiping the species out in one fell swoop, with the only surviving specimens being those that the Librarian had collected for conservation. His actions did not go unnoticed, however, and he was immediately recalled to Maethrillian, where he would be tried before the Council. The Council had approved the test on Chakum Hakkor, but on Janjur Qom the Master Builder had acted alone and outside the chain of command. The Council had gathered all the Halos around Maethrillian, and planned to destroy them once the trial was over. Every Halo was there apart from one: the one controlled by Mendicant Bias. What the Forerunners did not know was that the AI had been studying the Primordial for several years, exactly as it had been asked to do. But over the course of those 43 years, the Primordial slowly and insidiously corrupted the ancilla. To do so, it used a strategy known as Logic Plague that enabled it to subvert the AI’s moral and philosophical directives, turning it against its creators. Mendicant Bias now served the Flood and the Primordial, and on the Primordial’s orders, it conducted a series of experiments on the tens of thousands of Humans that lived on the Halo, exposing them to the Flood to analyze how the corruption progressed. Faber himself had conducted such experiments in the past, and the Halo’s ecosystem had wasted away. But the Master Builder had no inkling of the evil that consumed Mendicant Bias.

On Maethrillian, the Council heard from Bornstellar, who was an eyewitness to the events that had taken place. His testimony was damning for the Master Builder. But the final verdict would never come: the trial was interrupted by a sudden attack by Mendicant Bias, who had arrived in the system with its Halo in tow. As panic spread, the AI managed to take control of the other Halos. The Forerunners scrambled their fleet, determined to destroy the Halos before Mendicant Bias could use them. Their task was suddenly made easier when some of the Halos escaped the ancilla’s control. Meanwhile, the Librarian had opened a portal to the Greater Ark, enabling a number of Forerunners to make their escape, including Bornstellar. The Halos that had broken free of Mendicant Bias’ control tried to use the portal to travel to the Ark, but the Forerunner fleet intercepted them: of the seven Halos that attempted the escape, six of them were destroyed. The only Halo that made it through to the Greater Ark was the Omega Halo, and it was in a sorry state. While it was being repaired, all the species it housed were transferred to the Ark to guarantee their survival. On the other side of the galaxy, the battle raged around Maethrillian. Seeing that the Halos may all soon be destroyed, Mendicant Bias activated those that were still under its control: the devastating beam of the Halos swept the system, wiping out every Forerunner found there. In the end, despite a few bumps in the road, the AI’s plan was proceeding exactly as intended, because it had struck a blow to the very heart of Forerunner society. Now, the entire Ecumene was threatened with destruction.

THE FORERUNNERS MEET THEIR END

On the Ark, Bornstellar met the Librarian, who recognized in him the presence of her husband. This triggered the memories that the Didact had buried within Bornstellar to rise up and take over, transforming the Forerunner into a new Didact: the IsoDidact. In this new form, he became the supreme commander of the empire’s armies, and declared war on Mendicant Bias. Still aboard its Halo, Mendicant Bias had sought refuge in a distant corner of the galaxy, where it planned to repair its ringworld. The IsoDidact was now in command of a huge fleet, and managed to flush out the Halo and capture its AI and its master. Mendicant Bias was imprisoned, while the Primordial was completely obliterated. But the Forerunners had arrived too late: the Primordial had long ago transcended its physical body, and it was now in union with the Flood. It was the Ur-Didact, as the original Didact was called, that first discovered this: the ship within which he was imprisoned had been drifting through space, and had now reached a sector completely controlled by the Flood. Taken prisoner, the Ur-Didact was brought before a Gravemind in which he could recognize the personality of the Primordial. The Gravemind drove its prisoner into total madness, before releasing him to rejoin the rest of the empire. This was in no way an act of goodwill on the part of the Flood: it knew that the return of the original Didact would destabilize the power structures within the Ecumene.

As for the fate of the Halo controlled by Mendicant Bias, it was fully refurbished: it was repaired and made smaller, so that it bore more similarity to the new Halos built at the Lesser Ark, becoming Installation 07. Indeed, the Forerunners now had seven new Halos which, though smaller in size, were still powerful enough to purge the galaxy of the Flood. Each Halo was assigned a monitor, an AI tasked with keeping the ringworlds running smoothly and according to Forerunner plans. The IsoDidact was forced to use a Composer on his friend, Chakas, who had been injured during the battle on Mendicant Bias’ Halo. He transferred Chakas’ essence into the husk of a monitor, therefore turning him into 343 Guilty Spark, the guardian of Installation 04.

Just as the Gravemind had predicted, the original Didact’s return sowed confusion within Forerunner command, with the two Didacts disagreeing on the best strategy to defeat the Flood. The IsoDidact’s authority was called into question by the empire’s other great generals: some favored the Ur-Didact’s strategy and refused to allow the Halos to be used. This discord left the Forerunner armies weakened and disorganized. The Ur-Didact took advantage of the confusion to travel to Requiem, one of his shield worlds. In the utmost secrecy, there he invited an army of Prometheans, those most loyal warriors, who pledged him their allegiance. With their permission, he subjected them to a Composer and transferred their essences into combat armor of his own design. This was how he came to create the first Promethean Knights, which he saw as the only way to really take the fight to the Flood: because they were machines of metal rather than flesh and blood, they were immune to infection and therefore to being turned against the Forerunners. These knights, however, were very different to the army of Sentinels that the Ecumene had been using for thousands of years already, because they were controlled by Forerunner essences. What the Didact had in fact created was an aberration that did nothing to improve his reputation within the empire, even while the Promethean Knights were winning one victory after another and pushing back the Flood. But they were too small in number and, despite achieving conclusive results on the battlefield, would prove unable to reverse the course of the war. The Flood continued to spread across the galaxy, generating ever more Graveminds: this meant that the enemy grew both in number and intelligence, becoming a more organized adversary. As it continued its expansion, the Flood managed to retrieve Mendicant Bias, whom the Forerunners had broken up into different pieces and scattered all around the galaxy. But the worlds that served as the final resting place of the ancilla’s fragments all fell into the hands of the Flood, which pieced the AI back together. Once again, Mendicant Bias was ready to do battle. This time, however, it would be facing a powerful enemy in the shape of a new Contender class Forerunner AI by the name of Offensive Bias. Designed at the request of Faber, who had leveraged the political instability within the Ecumene to rise to a leadership position, Offensive Bias was, from the outset, designed to combat Mendicant Bias and, more importantly, be immune to the Logic Plague. It was soon given command of the Greater Ark, which it was tasked with defending at all costs. And with good reason: the Ark now served as a sanctuary for every remaining Forerunner in the galaxy. Meanwhile, at the Council’s request, the Librarian had transported every living species collected as part of the conservation measure to the Omega Halo. Together, these two installations formed the Forerunner’s last hope of survival. Unfortunately, in 98,448 BCE, the Flood discovered the Greater Ark’s location and sent all its ships to converge on its position, triggering what would be the last major battle of the Forerunner-Flood war.

The Ur-Didact, meanwhile, was incandescent with rage: the tide was turning on the Promethean Knights and he realized that the war was now unwinnable. Not in that way, at least. His mental instability would eventually begin to affect his physical appearance: his skin grew jaundiced, his eyes turned red, and vicious canines sprouted from his upper jaw. No longer did he resemble the wise, enlightened warrior that once he had been. His heart filled with hatred, he traveled to the Omega Halo, which was then home to a few hundred thousand humans. He subjected them to a Composer, using their essences to raise a new army of Promethean Knights. This was a step too far for his wife, who tracked him down to Requiem, where she confronted the Didact and sealed him in a new Cryptum. The Librarian hoped that there he would take time to reflect on his actions and learn from them. She was, in fact, relying on one of the properties of a Cryptum, which enabled closer communion with the Domain. This was not an insignificant advantage at this stage in the war, because the Forerunners were finding it increasingly difficult to connect to the Domain for one simple reason: during the battle for Maethrillian, the Halos had damaged the Organon, from where the Domaine emanated. Not even the wisest Forerunners were aware of this Precursor relic which, like all the others, was susceptible to the effects of the Halos. It was not until the final moments of the war that the Librarian and the IsoDidact became aware of just how important the Organon was. But for now, the Librarian had other things to worry about: she placed the Cryptum containing her husband in the core of Requiem, and tasked the Promethean Knights with protecting it.

So it was that while battle raged around the Greater Ark, the Librarian was putting the final touches to her plan. She asked the IsoDidact to take all the species she had collected to the Lesser Ark, and ordered a Lifeworker named Chant-to-Green to take a keyship to Erde-Tyrene to pick up any surviving Humans. During this time, Offensive Bias was tasked with holding out against Mendicant Bias’ repeated assaults for as long as possible. This was no mean feat: before combat had even begun, the Forerunners had noted an unusual concentration of star roads around the Greater Ark, which limited visibility. Star roads are a Precursor construction, and take the form of extremely hard-wearing, thin ribbons just a few miles wide that the Precursors used to travel between the most distant planets in their empire. They were also used when the Precursors wanted to wipe out a species that was disrupting the balance of the Mantle: when used for this purpose, the star roads became powerful weapons that could destroy entire planets, and even move galaxies. These superstructures were well known to the Forerunners, who had been studying them for thousands of years. It is, however, unlikely that they expected the star roads to one day be turned against them. And turned against them they would be, at the Battle of the Greater Ark, and before Faber had time to activate the Omega Halo, it was destroyed by the star roads. And while the IsoDidact made his escape, they turned on the Greater Ark, rending it asunder. It would be here, then, at the Greater Ark, that the Forerunner civilization met its end. There now remained no more than a handful of Forerunners scattered across the galaxy, and their days were numbered because the only hope of stopping the Flood lay in activating the Lesser Ark’s Halos.

In 97,445 BCE, the IsoDidact deployed the seven remaining Halos from the Lesser Ark, now without its larger sibling. In an effort to win him some time to activate the Halos, Offensive Bias decided to seek out the Flood’s forces, and formed its defenses around Jat-Krula, a Forerunner space fortress made up of a series of outposts. These outposts formed a highly effective defensive line, but one that became useless once the enemy had broken through. It was for this reason that they were known as the Maginot Line, or the Maginot Sphere, in reference to the shape of its primary fortress. With what remained of the Forerunner army, he waited there for the Flood to attack, knowing full well that the battle was already lost. But then Mendicant Bias committed an error: on the approach to Jat-Krula, it was overcome with rage against its creators, and decided not to overrun Offensive Bias’ defenses. Instead, it attacked its various bases in an effort to infect the last remaining Forerunners. Offensive Bias guessed the intentions of its adversary, and concocted a ruse to make it believe that there was a weak spot in its defenses. Rather than attacking on several fronts at once, Mendicant Bias concentrated its forces exactly where Offensive Bias had planned, and the latter was able to repel the first wave of attacks. And the second. And the third. By the time it had driven back seven waves, Offensive Bias had managed to destroy 80 % of the enemy fleet, which was made up of millions of ships. In the end, Offensive Bias would even accomplish its mission.

Because while Mendicant Bias was launching one assault after another and being beaten back, it gave the Halos time to disperse across the galaxy. When they had all reached their destinations, the IsoDidact did all that was left to do: he activated the Halos, and they opened fire. The waves they emitted fanned out around the whole galaxy in a matter of minutes, fulfilling their terrible purpose: all forms of life were immediately extinguished as the waves reached their planets. Billions of living beings disintegrated in the blink of an eye. On the Maginot Line, Mendicant Bias’ forces evaporated in a matter of moments. The remaining ships which had, just a few minutes ago, contained armies of Forerunner troops, suddenly drifted off course, their pilots having simply ceased to exist. Offensive Bias took advantage of the confusion to capture Mendicant Bias. As unlikely as it had seemed, and after thousands of years of war, the Forerunners had won. They had defeated the Flood, and liberated the galaxy from its corrupting influence. But their victory came at the cost of their own existence.

On the Lesser Ark, the last remaining Forerunners–whose number included the IsoDidact and Chant-to-Green–decided the fate of Mendicant Bias: it would be sealed within a thick sarcophagus, and buried deep inside the installation. Before it was imprisoned, the Didact deactivated its abilities and forced it to reflect on its past mistakes. He also used it as an opportunity to collect and store everything that was known about the Flood, so that it could be used in the future if that evil menace ever resurfaced. Before disappearing forever, the survivors set off on one final mission: to travel to Maethrillian and find a way to repair the Domain. Before she perished, the Librarian was able to get a message to the IsoDidact informing him of how the Domain was connected to the Organon, as well as the Organon’s location on their former capital world. With Chant-to-Green and a handful of other Forerunners, the Didact traveled to the ruins of Maethrillian where he encountered Abaddon, the AI that lived in the Organon’s core. It was only through the sacrifice of one of their number that the Organon could be repaired.

Firm in his decision to leave this world behind, Bornstellar cast off his other personality and left the galaxy, accompanied by Chant-to-Green. After discarding their armor, they settled on a distant planet where they would live out their existence together. And so ended the Forerunner civilization… or so it seemed.

THE RESEEDING

Not long after the Halos had done their job, the Librarian’s conservation measure entered its second phase: reseeding. In this phase, the lifeforms rescued by the Forerunners needed to be returned to each of their respective planets. Keyships fanned out across the galaxy, repopulating every planet with its original life. On Erde-Tyrene, the Humans gradually achieved a stable population, which grew over the centuries. But unlike the other species rescued by the Forerunners, Humanity’s evolution was governed by the work of the Librarian, who had implanted them with additional sequences of DNA taken from ancient Humans. Her plan was to allow Humanity to one day return to its former glory, so that it could replace the Forerunners and take on the Mantle of Responsibility. This was why she had asked the IsoDidact to repair the Domain, and also why she had given them the ability to interact with Forerunner technology: she bestowed upon them the status of Reclaimers, the heirs to the Forerunners. This decision would have weighty consequences, and unfortunately not all of them were foreseen by the Librarian.

Chapter 4 – Humanity Begins its of the Stars

On Erde-Tyrene, history took its course. The official version of history unfolded, the one we all know from our history books. Modern man came out of Africa, the cradle of humanity, and conquered the planet, which today we know as Earth. 100,000 years after the Forerunners meted out their punishment, and with no knowledge of its glorious past, mankind lifted its eyes to the stars for the very first time, and dreamed of a future among them. In the space of just a few centuries, Humanity would set off to conquer the stars and build an empire spanning a significant section of the galaxy. But its old demons would soon rear their ugly heads.

THE INTERPLANETARY WAR

In the 20th century, Humanity was at last capable of taking to the skies. The Second World War, a devastating conflict that lasted six long years, saw millions of humans die, but it also served as the catalyst for developing new technologies. Long-range missiles, nuclear bombs… These deadly weapons provided the foundation upon which brilliant minds would imagine the technology of the future. On July 20, 1969, for the second time in its history, Man set foot on the Moon, Erde-Tyrene’s satellite, completely unaware that they had already accomplished this feat hundreds of thousands of years in the past. It would not be until 2080 that Earth’s different nations would start working together to colonize not only the Moon, but also Mars and a few more of the solar system’s inhabitable planets and moons. What followed was an unprecedented boom in industry, enabled by the bountiful resources shipped back to Earth from its colonies. However, it would not be long before the people living on these distant worlds made known their discontent: just as the American colonies had risen up against the English crown in the 18th century, some on Mars could no longer bear the yoke of rule from Earth. These included one Vladimir Koslov, who lived in the city of Oenotria. With the aid of his family, he incited some Martian miners to rise up against the Earth-based corporations that controlled the planet’s economy. The activists called themselves Koslovics and took up arms, attacking many strategic Martian locations and taking control of the planet. Their success inspired others throughout the solar system, and especially on the Moon, which was exploited in the same way and for the same reasons as Mars. On Earth, the United Nations wasted no time in responding to the attacks, naming the Koslovics as a terrorist organization. The UN was in no position, however, to engage the Koslovics. The soft response from the UN emboldened other movements to form. Humans had colonized a number of Jupiter’s moons, including Europa, and it was on this moon that another resistance network was forming. Known as the Frieden15 movement, the group sprang into action with a series of attacks: in 2158, they attacked Earth’s embassy in Katreus, one of the largest cities on Europa. Like the Koslovics, the Frieden movement was named a terrorist organization by the UN, but once again, no sterner response was forthcoming: Earth was content simply to send an advisor to enter talks with the organization, hoping that this would enable it to maintain order throughout the Jovian moons. This approach was a failure: in 2160 a series of armed conflicts broke out between the Frieden movement and the Koslovics, who were unable to find common ground. The first battles took place mainly on Europa and other Jovian moons, but the conflict soon spread to encompass the entire solar system, even reaching Earth in February 2162. When the Frieden leader was assassinated in November 2163, the conflict worsened and the UN founded the United Nations Space Command. Earth deployed its armies to enforce peace on the warring planets, triggering what would become known as the Interplanetary War in 2164. Eager to bring the conflict, which was paralyzing its entire economy, to a speedy end, the Earth commander made ready use of heavy weaponry in a ceaseless bombardment of Koslovic positions on Mars. The UNSC’s attacks were merciless, and as is always the case it was the civilians who bore the brunt, tarnishing the image of this new military force. But it had the desired effect: in August 2167, Vladimir Koslov and his entire family were killed in a bombardment. UNSC forces used the ensuing confusion to launch an invasion of the Jovian moons, and the Frieden movement was quickly brought to heel. In 2170, the UN signed the Callisto Treaty, which put an end to the war. But that was not all. Under the treaty, Earth’s space colonies were brought under the jurisdiction of the UNSC, while on Earth the UN created a new government authority: the Unified Earth Government (UEG). The UEG brought all of Earth’s nations together under a single banner. The planet was now a single faction, and became the seat of power overseeing all current and future colonies. The UNSC, which had proven to be a highly effective fighting force during the conflict, was retained as the armed branch of the UEG.

COLONIZATION CONTINUES

When the UEG was formed, it accelerated Earth’s colonization of space, as it installed military infrastructure throughout the entire solar system. The Moon was home to a military academy, Callisto had a shipyard, and Io a listening post. Science advanced in leaps and bounds after a center for xenobiological research was opened on Europa, while laboratories specializing in solar research were opened on Mercury. Every planet within Earth’s reach was exploited for its resources: Jupiter and Saturn delivered gas throughout the colonies, while new mines and factories multiplied on Mars, Titan, and Mercury. This new golden age for mankind was not without consequences: the population was visibly growing, and a demographic crisis would soon be looming.

In 2291, a team of scientists led by Tobias Fleming Shaw and Wallace Fujikawa, found the key to Humanity’s long-term survival: a new reactor technology that would enable the vessels equipped with it to travel in slipspace. Slipspace had been known to the Forerunners and to Ancient Humans, who both used it for faster-than-light travel. But to the new Humanity, it was an unprecedented discovery. Initially known as Shaw-Fujikawa Space, or simply as hyperspace, it was actually a whole new area of space-time within which many dimensions were folded together. It could be used to transport objects, as well as information, which accelerated the time it took to exchange data between different parts of the galaxy. Colony ships and UNSC vessels were then equipped with Shaw-Fujikawa Translight Engines, leading to a tidal wave of colonization beyond the solar system known as the Domus Diaspora.

It began in 2362, with the first ever journey by slipspace. A colony ship christened the Odyssey set off from the Moon and traveled for several weeks before reaching the Epsilon Eridani system. Once there, it found the first planet outside the boundaries of the solar system that would be colonized and populated by Humans. Initially known as Epsilon Eridani II, its first colonists later renamed it Reach. The colonists, who mostly hailed from Eastern Europe, and from Hungary in particular, terraformed the planet and founded many cities across the globe in Reach’s verdant valleys. The UNSC also quickly established a presence there, turning Reach into a human stronghold 10.5 light years from their home planet. In 2490, Reach was the biggest manufacturing center for military vessels and colony ships, and was also home to the first UNSC training center. The training center would soon be accompanied by the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), the UNSC’s secret service, that built its own complexes far from prying eyes.

Many more planets were colonized in the same system as Reach, but nothing could quench humanity’s thirst for conquest as it expanded ever further. By the 25th century, Humanity was spread out across 800 worlds between the Inner Colonies–planets like Reach that were close to Earth and densely populated–and the Outer Colonies, which were further away and where life was more challenging due to the less developed human activity. There were a few exceptions to this rule, however, on planets like Arcadia and Harvest. Discovered in 2492, Arcadia became a highly popular tourist destination for its luxuriant jungles and vast oceans, despite lying 11.41 light years from Earth. Harvest, meanwhile, was the furthest colony from Earth, but that didn’t stop it from being home to a population of three million people. The planet’s soils were abundantly fertile, enabling a fully fledged agricultural industry to develop. As its name implies, Harvest soon became the breadbasket of human civilization, exporting huge quantities of corn and wheat. Both planets had something else in common which in part explained their appeal: both had once been inhabited by Forerunners. But this historic fact would prove to be their undoing just a few decades later.

To better manage its colonies, the UEG formed the Colonial Administration Authority (CAA), which had its own armed forces in the Colonial Military Administration (CMA). But the CAA and the CMA would both prove powerless in the face of the conflicts that were already brewing. Because towards the end of the 25th century, discontent was growing among the colonies. Earth had created new enemies of its own.

INSURRECTION

In 2475, a number of far-flung human colonies began to rebel against the authority of the CAA, and of Earth more generally. In their eyes, only one solution was possible: independence. Of course, the UEG turned a deaf ear, and left the CMA to resolve the problem. So it was that in the period leading up to 2483, several uprisings were put down, often through bloodshed. At first, these strong-arm interventions had the desired effect, and the rebels fell back into line. This, however, did not solve the problems encountered by the people living in the colonies, who had to deal with a cumbersome and sluggish bureaucracy that was needlessly authoritarian. The CAA struggled to deliver an effective response to the endless stream of requests from the colonies, which all had very specific needs. It was accused of hindering their development and therefore indirectly maintaining their economic dependency. On the planets themselves, many colonists lived in difficult conditions, which only stoked their anger. In 2487, two new factions emerged that both favored independence: the People’s Occupation and the Secessionist Union. Both submitted an official demand to the UEG, signed by more than a dozen colonies, all of whom were demanding their independence. Earth’s government ignored their demands, which led to another wave of tension sweeping through the most distant colonies. One after another, the colonies took up arms and launched a series of attacks against the CAA and CMA. In 2492, in Far Isle, the rebellion had reached a sufficient scale for the UNSC to be forced to intervene, and after being held in check by the insurgents, the army decided to level the planet with a series of nuclear strikes. To stop this barbaric act being used against it, the UNSC would twist the events in its favor, pointing the finger at untrue insurrectionist propaganda and completely denying the events that had occurred. All this achieved was to ratchet up tensions between the UEG and the various groups of insurgents. In particular the Secessionist Union, led by one Robert Watts. Watts was a figure that was very familiar to the UNSC, having served until very recently as a colonel in Earth’s army. Disgusted by having been forced by his mission objectives to kill waves of insurgents, Watts deserted the UNSC in the 2480s, before reappearing in the Eridanus system in the mid-2490s. Using Eridanus II as a base, he launched a series of successful operations: hijacking convoys, targeted assassinations, destroying targets… Watts was hitting Earth where it hurt most, again and again. The government on Eridanus II was completely outmatched and decided to call in the UNSC, who launched Operation CHARLEMAGNE in January 2496: battle raged for a whole year, but the rebels were ultimately driven back and forced to beat a retreat. Watts’ troops left the planet, setting up a base in the Eridanus system’s asteroid belt. They named their base–which was carved out inside a huge asteroid 2 km in diameter–Eridanus Secundus, and it was from here that Watts was able to continue waging war against the UEG with complete impunity. Indeed, the conflict had now grown into a war in the proper sense of the word, following what some called the “Callisto incident,” in 2494. That year, a small corvette class UNSC ship named the UNSC Callisto was patrolling around a planet known as Leviosa, where the Office of Naval Intelligence suspected that rebels were taking stolen convoys of selenium and technetium, two materials needed to manufacture Shaw-Fujikawa engines. The issue here was that these engines could very easily be converted into powerful weapons that could rival even the biggest nuclear bombs. This was how the Callisto came to be tasked with halting suspect ships and inspecting their cargo. They fulfilled their mission with zeal, at least until one of its inspections went wrong: no sooner had the crew boarded a cargo ship that they were preparing to inspect than they were ambushed and massacred. The rebels boarded the Callisto, finished off its crew, and took control of the ship. And in doing so, they provoked the fury of the UNSC. The UNSC quickly deployed three destroyers, the UNSC Las Vegas, the UNSC Buenos Aires and the UNSC Jericho, that tracked the Callisto into the asteroid belt. But the destroyers were manned by inexperienced crews, and the UNSC fell victim to yet another trap: a nuclear bomb had been planted on one of the asteroids, and it detonated as the Buenos Aires passed by. The destroyer was vaporized, and the Jericho and Las Vegas took heavy damage. Only one member of crew remained alive on the bridge of the Las Vegas: this man was Preston Cole, a name that would go down in history. He decided to activate the Las Vegas’ distress signal, and when the Callisto powered down its weapons and approached to provide assistance to the Las Vegas, Cole launched a missile at the renegade ship. The resulting damage enabled troops from the Las Vegas and the Jericho to seize the Callisto, but it was a decision that would soon have serious consequences. By attacking in this way, Cole had violated the Common Space Laws, which governed acceptable conduct in space combat and during surrenders. Up until that point, these laws had always been followed to the letter by both the UNSC and the insurgents. Cole’s actions, then, were seen as a betrayal, a cowardly act, and one that left the UNSC not knowing whether to decorate the soldier or send him before a court martial. In the end, nothing would come of it. But for the rebels, the Callisto Incident was the straw that broke the camel’s back: this time, it was war.

The conflict quickly spread throughout Earth-controlled space. Whereas before now, the Inner Colonies had been spared most of the horrors of war, that would soon change when Robert Watts decided to launch bigger attacks on UEG-controlled territory. Finding itself unable to cope, the CMA was replaced by the UNSC across the galaxy, but that did nothing to stop the Insurrectionists from committing atrocities, especially in the Outer Colonies. The UNSC then launched Operation KALEIDOSCOPE, whose objective was to find and eliminate every leader of every known insurrectionist movement. By the end of 2502, the operation was a success: all the leaders were taken out, including Jerald Ander, head of the Secessionist Union. Out of all the major figures of the Insurrection, only one remained: Robert Watts. The former colonel did not lay down his arms, instead deciding to unite all the rebel groups under a single banner, and founding the United Rebel Front (URF) in the process. Now better organized, the Insurrectionists were better able to take the fight to the UNSC, and the battles intensified. The atrocities, too. In 2511, a group known as Liberty and Liberation managed to detonate an improvised nuclear bomb on a planet named Mamore, at the very heart of the Haven arcology. Two million innocents died in the attack, and millions more would die as a result of the nuclear fallout. Within the UNSC, some thought it only a matter of time until nuclear war broke out, and the events on Mamore only served to confirm the UEG analysts’ worst predictions. Their number included a young scientist by the name of Catherine Halsey, and she would soon come to change the destiny of Humanity, for better and for worse.

TECHNOLOGY OF THE HUMAN ARMY

Before we go any further, it would be useful to understand the technology available to the UNSC–and Humanity more broadly–at the dawn of the 26th century. Because while mankind was now able to colonize space and wage war on distant planets, it still had a very long way to go to catch up with the technology it possessed more than 100,000 years ago.

From a strictly military standpoint, Humanity had achieved very little progress. While it was true that the UNSC could now travel through slipspace, the weapons at its disposal would not be unfamiliar to soldiers of the 21st century. Troops still used conventional weapons, from handguns to precision rifles. They could nevertheless count on protection from a few plates of light armor that protected their torso, forearms, and shins, and a helmet to protect their heads. The helmet was equipped with various sensors, and a built-in mic meant that soldiers could quickly and easily share tactical information with their squad. While these Marines formed the backbone of the UNSC, there was another corps of elite soldiers tasked with the most dangerous missions. The Orbital DropShock Troopers, or ODST, as they were more commonly known, were founded in 2163 as the modern version of airborne troops. The ODST were deployed from orbit above a planet, traveling in drop pods that enabled them to land and attack behind enemy lines. This extremely dangerous method of insertion earned them the nickname of Helljumpers. More heavily armored than the Marines, they also wore full-face helmets that gave them a menacing appearance, their faces hidden behind a thick black visor. All these ground troops used vehicles that were not too dissimilar to those we know today, from tanks to armored 4x4s. The best known was probably the Warthog, designed by AMG Transport Dynamics in 2312. A wide variety of different Warthog models would be produced, with the vehicle becoming a common sight in all human-controlled territories.

It goes without saying that the main difference between 21st century weaponry and that used by humankind in the 25th century lay in the vast fleet of combat ships that could cross huge volumes of space in the blink of an eye. The UNSC had greatly diversified its fleet over the years, tailoring its vessels for different operational and tactical applications.

j Transporters: without a doubt the biggest ships used by the UNSC. Heavily armed, they could be up to 3000 m long and carry thousands of people. They came in different sizes and specifications depending on their class: Epoch, Orion, Phoenix, etc.

j Cruisers: probably the best-known class of UNSC ship. Often used as command ships, their outline made them immediately recognizable: around 1100 m long and 300 m wide. They boasted thick armor that could absorb a lot of damage. There were many different classes (Marathon, Halcyon, Autumn, Valiant) depending on the year in which they were commissioned.

j Destroyers: heavily armed combat vessels. They were fully specialized in naval combat. Several classes were in use: Hillsborough, Diligence, and Halberd.

j Frigates: the most common kind of ship. Smaller, faster, and more maneuverable, they were also less hardy than other ships in the fleet. Divided into light and heavy frigates, a number of classes were in existence: Strident, Paris, Anlace, Charon, Stalwart.

All these warships were fitted with Shaw-Fujikawa engines that enabled them to create a rupture–or wormhole–and enter slipspace. These ruptures opened in front of the ship and closed once it had passed through into slipspace. The technology enabled them to travel at faster-than-light speeds, and travel from one side of the galaxy to the other in just a few months. As the Shaw-Fujikawa engines were used only for traveling through slipspace, every ship was also fitted with one or more fusion reactors to provide its everyday power supply.

The ships had multiple weapons systems: missile launchers, cannons, machine gun towers… Some even featured nuclear missile and air-to-surface missile silos that could lay down fire on a given area with pinpoint accuracy. All the ships described above also had at least one Magnetic Accelerator Cannon (MAC). These were cannons wrapped in a series of magnetic coils. These coils activated one by one as the projectile traveled past them along the barrel, exponentially increasing its speed. Upon leaving the barrel, the projectile (which weighed some 600 tons) was already traveling at 30,000 m/s. Almost nothing could withstand its impact. It was a formidable weapon, and one of the most powerful Humanity had ever designed, but it was not without its faults. First of all, the MAC came with no automated guiding systems, meaning that the ship had to be aligned with its target and carefully configure its trajectory; secondly, it had long reloading times due to the fact that the crew had to warm up each individual magnetic coil before it could be fired again. As a result, it produced a low rate of fire. This was why Halberd-class destroyers and Marathon-class cruisers had two MACs, so that they could fire one while the other reloaded. It is also worth noting that because longer ships could be fitted with longer cannons, they could accelerate the projectile to higher velocities, thereby rendering it more powerful.

While UNSC ships were controlled by a human crew, they also boasted on-board AI. Developed and refined over the course of centuries, part of their matrix was made from a human brain, often harvested just after the death of its original owner. These computer programs had now evolved to the point that they could project a holographic image of a physical form. Most AI opted for a human appearance, which made it easier for them to work and get along with humans. There were two kinds of AI: “Dumb” AI, and “Smart” AI. The former were unable to learn anything outside their area of expertise, the purpose for which they were created. Aboard UNSC ships, their applications included maintenance and the implementation of combat protocols, as well as slipsace travel calculations. Contrary to what their name implies, Dumb AI were highly intelligent and often just as efficient. For Smart AI, there were no limits to their abilities. Able to learn and adapt their ways of thinking and analyzing to incorporate new knowledge, their potential was infinite. However, this came at a price, with an active life expectancy of seven years. They had an exponential need to learn, and over time their code corrupted itself. In the final moments of their lives, they experienced a state of general dysfunction known as Rampancy: at peak Rampancy, AI lost control of their faculties and could become aggressive and even dangerous. Sometimes, AI could experience memories belonging to the donor of the brain used to create their matrix, which only made matters worse. Both the UNSC and the ONI, of course, took precautions to ensure that AI displaying the initial symptoms of Rampancy were deactivated as soon as possible, to prevent the operational security being compromised. It is important to note that ancilla (Forerunner AI) were also susceptible to Rampancy, albeit for different reasons. While Human AI were susceptible to Rampancy due to a defect inherent in their design, the more polished Forerunner AI could fall victim to it when they developed an awareness of the limitations imposed by their condition.

15 “Peace,” in German.

Chapter 5 – The Spartan-II Program

With the war against the Insurrectionists raging across the galaxy, the UNSC was concerned that the conflict may escalate. By the early 26th century, millions had already died, and the conflict showed no signs of ending. The UNSC and the ONI began looking for the best way to end the war, and that is precisely why, in December 2510, they enlisted a very special asset. This asset was a young doctoral student aged just 18, and named Catherine Halsey. Her work would profoundly shape Humanity’s destiny… and save the human race from extinction.

CATHERINE HALSEY

Born on Endymion, in the Outer Colonies, in 2492, Catherine Halsey was earmarked by the colonial education system at a very young age. She studied at a school for gifted students, before leaving her home planet in 2501 to enroll at Koletre-Browning University, on a planet named Circumstance. At the age of 15, she was already working on her second thesis and moved in academic circles, where she met many other scientists, including Elias Carver. In 2491, Carver had authored a long study in which, via a series of simulations, he predicted that the Insurrection would grow in power, with the result being a galaxy-wide conflict. Carver soon became one of the most highly regarded scientists in the eyes of the UNSC and CMA, both of whom took his forecasts very seriously. The CMA and ONI then decided to relaunch an old project to create supersoldiers that had been abandoned in 2321 due to insufficient funding. They christened it the Orion Project and selected 65 subjects taken from UNSC special forces. The candidates underwent training followed by a series of biochemical augmentations that boosted their strength, endurance, and even their vision. The tests would not go entirely smoothly, however, with many subjects rejecting the augmentations or failing to assimilate them as planned. Some emerged with uncurable degenerative diseases, while others suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. These events, however, did not stop the successful participants in the Orion Project from being deployed in different theaters of operations as early as 2496. With Robert Watts’ various victories throughout the Eridanus system accelerating the CMA’s replacement by the UNSC, the Orion Project was canned in 2506, but the 300 or so supersoldiers that had already been created continued to fight. A number of them were used on successful missions as part of Operation KALEIDOSCOPE, which set out to eliminate the rebel leaders.

Halsey met Carver for the first time in 2507, at a social event for academics where he was explaining his theory on the “matrix mechanics of the socio- and politico-economic vectors of human expansion” to several guests. Disagreeing with his findings, the young doctoral researcher interrupted and contradicted his results, correcting all Carver’s calculations in her head. According to the model, she corrected the figures and predicted that around five billion people could die in a conflict lasting for 30 years. Her absolutely breathtaking intervention impressed one of those present, Captain Hyeronimus Michael Stanforth, enough for him to immediately recommend Halsey to the UNSC. From 2508, she regularly worked as a consultant for the army before enlisting full-time in 2510. She was assigned to Section 3, the scientific division of the ONI, and in February 2511 she began working on a new supersoldier project. Halsey began studying the Orion Project and soon identified where it had gone wrong: the subjects were too old to receive appropriate augmentations, their genetic lineage was sometimes incompatible with their roles, and their loyalty to the UNSC or even their cause was not always ironclad. As Halsey saw it, there could be only one solution: Orion-II should be conducted on children, screened in advance for their physical and intellectual ability. Their young age would make their indoctrination more straightforward, turning them into extremely loyal soldiers. The project nevertheless presented both ethical and moral constraints, but Halsey dismissed these concerns out of hand.

SACRIFICED YOUTH

The attack on the Haven arcology in 2511, in which 2 million died, would see work on the program pick up pace. From ONI’s Castle, its bastion on Reach, she sketched the outlines of a new supersoldier program. The ONI refused to reuse the code name “Orion” because it was associated with a failure, so Halsey settled on the name of Spartan, and in memory of the Orion Project’s soldiers, she decided to call her project the SPARTAN-II program. Stanforth, who had now risen to the rank of vice-admiral and director of Section 3, approved her proposals. With the assistance of the CMA, the UNSC arranged a bogus vaccination plan in every school throughout the galaxy, which it used to obtain the DNA of millions of children. These genetic samples were analyzed, and in early 2517 one hundred and fifty children, with an average age of six or seven, were selected for the quality of their genetic heritage. According to Halsey, in another life these children could have been “Alexander the Greats, Cleopatras, Hannibals, or Genghis Khans.” They were gifted children, more intelligent and stronger than average, and who were destined for great things. But the ONI had other plans for them. After studying and numbering each of the 150 children, Section 3 sent out a number of teams of researchers to take a closer look. Catherine Halsey was one of the researchers sent out into the field. Accompanied by Lieutenant Jacob Keyes, she traveled to Eridanus II where she would analyze a first child, named John. He was number 117 and just as Halsey had predicted, he was exceptional. She met him on a playing field where he was messing around with some other kids in a particularly violent version of King of the Hill. Firmly entrenched at the top of the little hill, John was repelling all his opponents’ attacks. He had difficultly controlling his strength and ended up injuring several of his playmates. Halsey decided to approach him, and after a short chat she was impressed by the boy’s keen intelligence. She then decided to conduct a little test: she tossed an old coin up into the air and asked John to guess which side would land face up. After several tries, the result was indisputable: John had given the right answer every single time, sometimes while the coin had barely left Halsey’s hand. Satisfied, Halsey gave the coin to the boy to keep and returned to Keyes. The Lieutenant knew nothing about the nature of his mission, and could never imagine that he had met the boy that would become Humanity’s savior.

Back on Reach, Halsey was forced to reduce the number of subjects that would join the SPARTAN-II program. Of the 150 candidates, in the end she retained just 75. In September 2517, ONI agents began kidnapping the chosen children, often sneaking into their homes and stealing them from their beds under the cover of night. The Spartan-II were then replaced by identical flash clones. But Humanity was yet to master the cloning of human beings and these clones suffered from many genetic defects, and within two years they would all be dead from degenerative diseases. The result was that many families across the human colonies would watch their children slowly die, often in unbearable suffering. This, was Catherine Halsey’s darkest secret, and for many years she would hide where she had found these children, as well as the fact that they had been replaced by clones. Even Margaret Parangosky, the admiral at the head of the ONI, remained unaware of the exact circumstances for many long years.

BRUTAL TRAINING

The 75 subjects, then, were forcibly conscripted and transferred to Reach, where they were soon introduced to Dr. Halsey. She explained why they were there, and despite some complaints from a few of the children, they all quickly learned not to talk back to the soldiers overseeing their training. The children were immediately confronted by the brutality of the UNSC’s military system. Despite their young age, they were subjected to exhausting physical training and regular punishments when they fell short. The only form of affection they received came from Senior Chief Petty Officer Franklin Mendez, who was in charge of their physical training. This battle-hardened soldier was extremely demanding of his new recruits and never shied from pushing them around, but as he was a good listener who gave solid advice, within a few months he had become the father figure the young recruits were missing. They could also count on Déjà, a Dumb AI designed especially for the program, and who delivered all the military strategy and tactics classes. But the Spartans’ training left little place for emotion, all the more so because it was a matter of raising obedient warriors. The children were slowly indoctrinated, and over time they came to forget who they really were. They were told that their parents had voluntarily sent them to the UNSC, while the Insurrectionists were gradually portrayed as murderous, power-hungry war criminals. They were told that they were there to stop even more people dying. By the time they were nine years old, the young Spartans were already perfectly honed killing machines. Because they were now their own family, the children supported each other and came to rely on a few natural leaders, who led by example. These leaders included Kurt-051, Jerome-092, Frederic-104 and, of course, John-117. On July 12, 2519, Halsey and Mendez appointed John-117 leader, making him the de facto leader of the Spartan-II. Within a few years, the Spartans had mastered multiple forms of combat and had become experts in the use of the many different weapons and technologies employed by the UNSC, from handling precision rifles to piloting Longsword fighter craft. They were also outstanding strategists, able to develop and execute complex strategies, enabling them to operate with an independence that was unrivaled within the human army.

Growing up in such close proximity encouraged the Spartan children to form strong bonds with each other, enabling some of them to maximize their chances of success while on exercise and in practice, both of which could be dangerous. This was how many Spartans came to rely on each other, forming groups of friends that operated as extremely effective teams. The best known is probably the group that would become Blue Team, made up of Frederic-104, Linda-058, Kelly-087 and John-117, the group’s leader. As Spartans, the four friends were all well rounded, versatile operators, but each of them nevertheless had their own specialisms: Frederic was unparalleled in hand-to-hand combat; Linda was a sniper, and mastered the sniper rifle; Kelly was incredibly fast; John shone through his sense of analysis and ability to make solid decisions on the fly. It was the strength of these bonds that would enable the children to overcome the ferocious challenges that lay ahead.

THE AUGMENTATION PROCESS

On March 9, 2525, the Spartans, then aged around 14 on average, received the augmentations intended to turn them into supersoldiers. Halsey had designed the process, personally supervising it, and she knew the risks that came with this new phase of life for the Spartans. A few weeks earlier, she sent a document that she presented as a hypothetical experiment to Ysionris Jeromi, the chief medical officer in the UNSC. After analyzing the experiment, Jeromi’s verdict did not mince its words: the procedures proposed in Halsey’s experiment were extremely dangerous, and he refused to provide her with the chimpanzees she needed for the trials. The primates were now an endangered species, and the admiral could not allow them to be needlessly sacrificed. What Jeromi did not know was that his young protege had no intention of running these experiments on animals. All she wanted was his opinion on the procedures she was preparing to conduct on the children. Jeromi’s warnings did nothing to stop Halsey, who was already aware of the risks. The children were all brought to a lab in low orbit above Reach, where they would undergo the operations and injections away from prying eyes. A series of procedures on their brains would drastically enhance their reflexes and their memories; their bones would be reinforced with carbide ceramics, designed to make them unbreakable; their muscle tissue was strengthened, one effect of which was to enable their hearts to pump more blood; they were fitted with an implant that would allow their muscles to develop greater power; their eyes were operated on, to improve their low-light vision. Combined, these augmentations were supposed to transform these already outstanding children into supermen and superwomen. But just as Halsey was expecting, the process was not well-tolerated by all the children, and the survival rate was just 53 %. Out of the 75 children, only 33 were suitable for the next phase of the Spartan-II program. 30 children died in the hours and days following the operations, and 12 were left permanently disabled. Those who were not traumatized by their experience were taken in by the ONI, which valued their uncommon intelligence. These children included Serin-019, who would be better known, 30 years later, as Serin Osman; now an admiral, in March 2555 she replaced Admiral Parangosky as head of the ONI. Osman had the dubious fortune of her body rejecting the very first augmentations, which prevented her from receiving the more lethal treatments. Indeed, when she left the station that was still home to her teammates and friends, she was in perfectly good health. Others were not so fortunate.

But after enduring weeks of terrible suffering, the children were ready: the UNSC now had 33 Spartan-II, elite soldiers who would soon prove their worth. But first, the UNSC wanted to try its new toys out, occasionally in scenarios they had not properly thought through. On April 22, 2525, when John-117 was preparing to leave the training room, he was jostled by a small group of ODST, who provoked him into a brawl. But they had not counted on the Spartan’s newfound strength, and John-117 would kill two of them with his bare hands, despite not intending to do so. This incident was a wake-up call to the UNSC, who then limited its tests to a series of exercises and practice scenarios that posed less danger to its personnel. The results were mind-blowing: never before had anyone seen soldiers that were so strong, so fast, and so intelligent. And for Halsey, the Spartan-II were not just supersoldiers: they embodied the next stage of human evolution.

THE SPARTANS: A SOLUTION TO THE INSURRECTION

On September 12, 2525, the Spartans were assigned their first mission: the assassination of Robert Watts, leader of the Insurrectionists. When a mole was rooted out within its ranks, the UNSC was able to learn the location of Watts, who was still lying low in his asteroid, Eridanus Secundus. John-117 was promoted to the rank of Petty Officer First Class, and left Reach accompanied by Kelly-087, Frederic-104, Samuel-034 and Linda-058. The small team traveled on a ship named the Laden, where they posed as members of the crew. The ship’s cargo was destined for the Eridanus system, and the UNSC suspected that it was delivering military equipment to the Insurrectionists. And indeed, the Laden was flying on a direct course to the asteroid belt. By studying its cargo and the delivery points within Eridanus Secundus, the Spartans were able to identify the likely location of Watts’ private quarters, and they proceeded to infiltrate the asteroid. When they reached his apartments, they launched their attack. They made short work of the few soldiers protecting Watts, but John-117 had been wounded. As team leader, he had tried to protect Samuel-034, and instinctively moved to use his own body as a shield. But his injuries were not severe enough to stop him from knocking Watts unconscious and hiding his body in one of the delivery boxes. For this was no simple assassination mission: the UNSC and ONI wanted Watts brought in alive. The team left the building and, under a hail of enemy fire, managed to reach a Pelican. While they were making their final preparations to take off, the Spartans returned fire, killing a number of their pursuers, before detonating a bomb. As planned, the bomb created a breach that enabled them to make their escape. The Spartans’ first mission had been a total success: five of them had been all it took to infiltrate the Insurrectionists’ biggest base, capture their leader, and make their escape without taking any losses. In the following weeks, the Spartans would complete several successful missions, like the one in October 2525, in which they eliminated the entire Insurrectionist presence on a planet named Jericho-VII. While some in high command still had their doubts about the Spartans, very soon they would change their minds.

THE MJOLNIR PROJECT

The Spartans, then, were a formidable fighting force, but they were still far from realizing their full potential. But that day was coming: after all, the Spartan-II program was just one part of Catherine Halsey’s plan for saving Humanity from outright civil war. The other part of her plan was known as the MJOLNIR project, and its aim was to design an exoskeleton for the Spartans, a kind of armor that would exponentially increase their abilities. The technology used to create the Mjolnir armor was vastly superior to anything Humanity had ever before designed: it amplified the wearer’s strength, speed, and reflexes, while simultaneously providing enhanced protection. Mjolnir armor was designed as follows:

j The armor’s first layer was actually a black bodysuit designed to hug the form of the wearer. It was made up of several layers, one of which was made from reactive metal liquid crystals, an innovation of Halsey’s own invention. The crystals boasted piezoelectric properties, and were able to use the Spartan’s neural interface to interpret the movements of the wearer and adjust their alignment, which in turn increased their force. The role of the layer in direct contact with the Spartan’s skin was to regulate the armor’s temperature, to keep the wearer comfortable at all times. Of course, the armor was a sealed system that enabled Spartans to survive in hostile environments, and particularly in the vacuum of space, with the armor containing enough oxygen to keep the wearer alive for around an hour.

j The armor’s plating, which covered almost every inch of the bodysuit, was made from an extremely hard-wearing titanium-A alloy. The armor was hardened against radiation and electromagnetic pulses, thereby protecting the various electronic systems it contained. In practice, the Spartans controlled the armor with their thoughts, via their neural interface. A number of different helmet models were made, all of which contained a communication system and a HUD with motion sensor, camera, and a variety of tactical data, including mission objectives, the medical statuses of teammates, and more. In total, the armor weighed almost 500 kg.

Unbeknownst to the Spartans, Dr. Halsey had been working on Mjolnir armor for years already. She had already begun laying the foundations of the project back in 2511, and the following years would see the development of several different versions of the armor. As part of their training, the Spartans had been involved in exercises against soldiers equipped with Mark I Mjolnir armor, but they were easily able to best the soldiers despite their added protection. The first models of Mjolnir armor were too cumbersome and relatively immobile, and they were never deployed on the battlefield. Instead, the UNSC preferred to use them in the loading bays of its astroports. The Spartans would not receive their first suits of Mjolnir armor, the Mark IV, until November 27, 2525, when they accompanied Dr. Halsey to the Damas test center on Chi Ceti IV. The equipment was manufactured by Material Groups, which had been working with the ONI for many years already. When they reached the testing facility, the armor and a variety of helmet models were there waiting for them. The first few minutes testing out the armor were difficult, as the Spartans struggled to get to grips with the new equipment, and John-117 completely crushed his helmet when simply trying to pick it up. It is interesting to note that only Spartans are able to wear Mjolnir armor thanks to their augmentations that enabled them to withstand its incredible power. Indeed, during the initial testing of the Mark IV armor, a number of researchers were crushed to death.

Despite these teething problems, it only took the Spartans a few hours to become one with their Mjolnir armor. And just as Halsey had predicted, the results were phenomenal: Kelly-087, already known for her speed, was clocked traveling at speed in excess of 60 km/h in the test center. The Spartans were now able to shatter huge blocks of reinforced concrete with their bare hands, and rip the insides out of armored vehicles. Over the coming years, the MJOLNIR project would undergo a number of significant evolutions, but for the time being, the Mjolnir MarkIV marked the culmination of 15 years of work by Dr. Halsey and the ONI. At long last, the Spartans were ready for battle. And it was just as well, because the UNSC would soon be facing a new enemy, and the Insurrection would be the least of its worries.

Chapter 6 – First Contact

Finally, the moment that every UNSC scientist knew would occur sooner or later had arrived. Even Catherine Halsey herself was convinced that it might happen one day. But she had no idea of how just bad it would turn out to be. In 2525, Humanity discovered that it had not been alone in the universe. Harvest, Earth’s most distant colony, was no longer responding to communications. At first, it was believed that the Insurrectionists were to blame, but when the first UNSC ships reached the planet they realized at once that no human army boasted such destructive power. This was Humanity’s first encounter with the Covenant, the alliance against which it would wage war for almost 30 long years.

THE ATTACK ON HARVEST

Located in the Epsilon Indi system, Harvest may well have been the most distant of Earth’s colonies, but it was also a farmer’s paradise, producing huge quantities of cereals, fruits and vegetables thanks to its bountifully rich soils. From the moment it was first colonized, in 2468, Harvest had become Humanity’s breadbasket. It was largely spared the ravages of the conflict between the UNSC and the various separatist groups, and it was not until January 2525 that a series of incidents would disrupt its calm, when several cargo ships disappeared from the planet’s orbit, worrying the UNSC. They feared that the Insurrectionists had decided to target Harvest, which could have severe consequences. To find out what was going on, on January 17 the ONI dispatched a corvette captain named Jilan al-Cygni to the planet, accompanied by two soldiers named Avery Johnson and Nolan Byrne. The trio was tasked with placing a cargo ship in orbit around Harvest to bait the Insurrectionists into an ambush. Following their orders, Johnson and Byrne took up positions inside the cargo ship, armed with the UNSC’s latest prototype assault rifle, the XBR55. Shortly thereafter, the ship was boarded by unknown assailants. Everything was going according to plan, right up until the two soldiers realized, much to their alarm, that the boarding party was not made up of Insurrectionists. In fact, they were not even human: what they were seeing was a group of Kig-Yar, which Humans would soon come to know as Jackals, owing to their appearance. Byrne and Johnson opened fire and managed to take out a few of the aliens, but one of them had time to trigger a series of explosions inside the ship, forcing the two soldiers to beat a retreat. Fresh from their experience, the two soldiers submitted their report, much to the concern of ONI high command: their mission was classified top secret, and they were strictly prohibited from speaking a single word of it.

But the gagging order would prove to have been unnecessary. Leadership within the UNSC believed that the aliens would be back before too long, and decided to prepare Harvest for this eventuality. The local CMA received extra training under the pretext of an upcoming official visit. And visited they would be: on February 11, 2525, a group of Covenant troops led by a Brute named Maccabeus landed on Harvest. He was accompanied by a several more like him, including Vorenus, Licinus, and Tartarus, as well as dozens of Grunts. Despite this show of force, Maccabeus came in peace: he and his clan met with the Humans in good faith, and the Humans brought gifts of fruits, and attempted to explain who they were and what business they had there. But the conversation was extremely difficult, as neither party could understand the other. As Jilan al-Cygni, Avery Johnson and Nolan Byrne looked on, Jiralhanae Vorenus drew his weapon and killed Rol Pedersen, one of the members of the Ministry of Justice delegation on Harvest. The Brute had gotten spooked after hearing a distant gunshot, and panicked. Unfortunately, it was too late for any explanations: the Humans opened fire on the aliens, forcing them to flee. Now, the government on Harvest feared that the aliens would return for vengeance, and issued statements to the planet’s population warning them to beware. The recommendations included a general withdrawal back to the city of Utgrad, to facilitate defense of the civilian population. But the warnings were ignored, with nobody believing the story of an alien invasion.

Just as Harvest’s governor had predicted, the Covenant returned on February 22. Aboard the Rapid Conversion, Maccabeus destroyed the cargo ships in orbit above the planet, and then launched his assault. The Humans very soon learned the Covenant’s favorite battle tactic: glassing. Like others in its class, the Rapid Conversion was fitted with a huge plasma cannon that ran along the belly of the ship: it rained down a steady stream of plasma for hours on end, destroying and melting everything it touched. The city of Glasheim was the first to suffer this fate. News soon spread around the planet. The civilians realized that the governor had not been lying, and they all took flight for Utgard. Despite attempting to mount a resistance, the local militia simply did not have the weaponry to repel a Covenant cruiser, and there was nothing to stop Harvest being glassed. Before the arrival of the invaders, the planet had been home to 3 million people. None survived.

On April 20, 2525, the UNSC grew alarmed at the lack of communications from Harvest, and sent a CMA reconnaissance ship, the Argos, to travel to the planet. On July 10, the Argos had still not filed a report. Convinced that the Insurrectionists had taken over Harvest and destroyed the Argos, the UNSC dispatched a battle group of three ships: the Heracles, the Arabia and the Vostok. The ships reached Harvest on October 7. There they found the charred remains of the planet, before spotting an unknown purple ship in orbit. In line with first contact protocols, Captain Veridi, who commanded the battle group, attempted to open communications with the aliens. But his attempts fell on deaf ears, the enemies only response being to open fire. In the space of a few minutes the Vostok and the Arabia were destroyed, while the Heracles took critical damage. Their enemy remained unharmed, with a strange energy shield absorbing the missiles launched by the Humans. Faced with such ferocious power, Veridi was forced to beat a retreat and fled into slipspace, hoping to make it to Reach. His eyewitness account would prove valuable indeed.

ADMIRAL COLE

The images that Veridi provided struck fear into the hearts of UNSC high command, who decided to keep the events on Harvest quiet. In fact, the entire war against the Covenant was to be kept secret: nobody could know. Beyond the top admirals, the first Humans to learn of the conflict were the Spartans. On November 2, 2525, they were all briefed by Admiral Stanforth, who showed them Veridi’s video footage. The attack on Harvest and the looming war did, however, have one silver lining: they accelerated the deployment of the MJOLNIR project, and Catherine Halsey’s vision would be complete. When the Spartans traveled to Chi Ceti IV to collect their armor, the aliens were not far away, and while the Spartans were training, an enemy ship approached the planet. The Spartans only just had enough time to familiarize themselves with the Mjolnir armor before they were sent on their first mission against Covenant forces: the enemy ship must be destroyed before it could leave the system. Unfortunately, the ship that had carried them to Chi Ceti IV was simply not up to the task. So it was that John-117 decided to destroy the alien vessel from the inside. He got hold of a nuclear warhead and, along with Kelly-087, Frederic-104, Samuel-034 and Linda-058, launched himself into space to board the alien vessel. After breaching the vessel, they soon fell upon their first enemy: a Kig-Yar armed with a strange energy shield. The Spartans made short work of the Jackal, but in the firefight Samuel-034’s breast plate was damaged. The plasma fire had barely touched the man himself, but it had pierced his bodysuit, compromising its seal. This was a death sentence, because he was now unable to leave the Covenant ship in the same way he had arrived. Samuel-034 decided that he would arm the bomb himself and remain with it while his comrades made their escape, in order to prevent the aliens from deactivating it. This was a harsh dose of reality for the young Spartans, the first time one of them would die on a mission since they received their augmentations. At first, they refused to allow Samuel to sacrifice himself, but reason quickly won through. There was no other way, and they all knew it. And so they made their way out while the injured Spartan remained behind, drawing the enemy crew to his location. He waited until his friends had gained enough distance from the ship, and then detonated the nuclear warhead, destroying the Covenant ship. The war had barely begun, and the UNSC was already down to 32 Spartan-II.

On Reach, plans to retake Harvest were being drawn up. It was Preston Cole, now a vice admiral, who was assigned to lead the battle group tasked with pushing back the Covenant. On November 1, 2525, he set off from Reach at the head of the biggest fleet the UNSC had ever assembled, with a total of 40 ships under his command. The fleet reached Harvest on March 1, 2526, where it found only a single Covenant warship. Despite their crushing numerical superiority, the Humans were cut to pieces, the cruiser targeting them with a hail of plasma balls, projectiles against which the UNSC ships were utterly defenseless. It was then that Cole had an idea: he had read the report of the Spartan mission in Chi Ceti IV, and learned that the enemy ship’s energy shields could be temporarily overloaded if they were forced to stop an overwhelming quantity of fire from energy weapons. At his command, the UNSC ships used their MAC, which they followed up with several volleys of missiles. The MAC fire destroyed the Covenant shield, enabling the missiles to reach their target. This time, the UNSC was victorious! But the victory came at a heavy cost: in order to defeat a single Covenant ship, the UNSC had lost thirteen of its own, mostly destroyers.

Cole’s victory would be used as propaganda by the UNSC who, in the following months, could no longer conceal the existence of the Covenant. The Covenant invaded one planet and system after another, in a period spanning 2525 to 2535 now known as the Massacre of the Outer Colonies. As the first planets to be attacked were unaware of the aliens’ existence, they were found defenseless, and the people living there had no idea how to respond to the Covenant attacks. The terror this induced made the aliens’ work easier, even when they were attacking military installations. This was precisely the case for the students at the Corbulo military academy on Circinius IV: when the Covenant invaded on April 26, 2526, nobody understood what was happening. A handful of students, including a young Thomas Lasky, survived only thanks to the efforts of a team of Spartans led by John-117. Lasky was one of the three individuals who made it off the planet alive. Then, in an effort to maintain the people’s morale, the UNSC showcased the exploits of Vice Admiral Preston Cole, who had stood up to the aliens. Better yet, he had proven that it was possible to defeat them. Exaggerated the tales of his exploits may be, but Cole was not unworthy of the accolades. On December 24, 2530, he was on Groombridge-1830 where he managed to capture a Sangheili, whom he brought back to his ship, the UNSC Everest. The Elite was interrogated over several hours, which was no easy task given that he spoke a language that the human translation programs were unable to decipher. But Cole was not fooled so easily. Like many high-ranking UNSC officers, he knew that the Covenant had studied its enemy, and many of them were able to speak and understand English. Cole got the Elite to talk by threatening it with his handgun, and listened in horror as the Elite told him that the Covenant had launched a holy war against Humanity, one that would end only once every human in the galaxy was dead.

This discovery of the Covenant’s true intentions would drastically reshape UNSC strategy. Cole drafted a report which he sent to high command, and in which he described all of the precautions that must be taken to stop the aliens from learning the location of Earth. The report was approved by the UNSC, and the Cole Protocol was adopted. It was now clear that the Covenant were able to use data retrieved from ships or colonies to learn the locations of other human planets. When the Cole Protocol was adopted in 2535, it required all data stored in human facilities to be destroyed as soon as it became clear that the Covenant would be able to gain access to it. Ships fleeing battle through slipspace had to use random vectors to avoid being followed. The protocol’s measures were largely effective, stemming the advance of Covenant ships and winning the UNSC some precious time.

Chapter 7 – The Covenant

Humanity first learned of the Covenant in 2525, but the Covenant civilization had already been in existence for almost 3400 years. Having risen at the other end of the galaxy, it was a heterogeneous alliance of alien races united around a common cause, a cause that they were all willing to fight to the death to achieve. And one event in particular made their goal achievable: the escape of Mendicant Bias who, by trying to help the Humans, would inadvertently hasten their downfall.

MENDICANT BIAS’ MISTAKE

Tens of thousands of years after the activation of the Halos, the ancilla named Mendicant Bias managed to break free from its prison on the Ark, where the IsoDidact had left it to languish. It had had a lot of time to think about the mistakes it had made, and was now filled with regret. Now, it had only a single goal: to find the Humans and help them to achieve Reclaimer status. Mendicant Bias wanted to make Humanity the new bearers of the Mantle of Responsibility. If he could achieve this, its thinking went, then its mistakes would be forgiven, at least in part. Its first step was to install a fragment of itself aboard a keyship, and set a course for the Milky Way. But in its current condition, it was unable to properly pilot the ship and, feeling that it would not be able to reach Erde-Tyrene, it changed course and set out to find Janjur Qom, the San’Shyuum homeworld. After all, before they were defeated by the Forerunners, the San’Shyuum and Humans had been allies for millennia. Mendicant Bias reasoned that they would be able to help it in its quest. When it had almost reached the planet of the Prophets, Mendicant Bias lost control of the ship and crashed into one of the seas in the planet’s northern hemisphere.

The ancilla could not have known it, but the San’Shyuum were a very different species to how they had been in the past. With no knowledge of their past, they had developed new religious beliefs, central to which were the Forerunners. Or rather, the relics left behind by the Forerunners. Janjur Qom was littered with them, and the sudden arrival of a keyship on their planet only served to strengthen their faith. They believed that the Forerunners had left relics scattered all over the galaxy to guide their loyal followers towards a kind of divine transcendence. This the San’Shyuum named the Great Journey, believing that by reaching its destination, they would be able to stand shoulder to shoulder with the gods they worshipped. The arrival of the keyship would stir up a lively–and divisive–debate within San’Shyuum society. On the one side were the Reformists, who thought that they should explore the vessel and find ways to use the technology it contained. On the other were the Stoics, pious believers in whose eyes the slightest violation of the artifact would be an atrocity. At first, the Reformists found themselves outnumbered, which prevented them from taking action. But within a few years they had grown in number, and in 2200 BCE the inevitable happened: civil war broke out on Janjur Qom. The bloody war raged for almost a century, and ended in a way that was completely unpredictable: one thousand Reformists managed to get on board the keyship, and after resisting a siege lasting 40 days, they figured out how to activate the monstrous vessel. As the Stoics looked on in terror, the keyship emerged from the sea and took flight. The Reformists had achieved their aims: they were now in possession of an important Forerunner relic, and they had learned how to operate it.

Better still, while on board what they were now calling the Dreadnought, they discovered another relic, the Luminary. The Luminary could detect all traces of Forerunner technology. The San’Shyuum would use the Luminary to guide their path through space on a journey to discover ever more Forerunner technology. What they wished to find most of all were the Halos, which they called “holy rings.” They had only a limited understanding of Forerunner glyphs and were unaware of the Halos’ true purpose. Quite the opposite was true, in fact, because they believed that if they could find and activate the Halos, they could begin the Great Journey and ascend to the status of gods.

THE SANGHEILI-SAN’SHYUUM WAR

The San’Shyuum’s travels led them to Ulgethon where, in 938 BCE, they encountered the Sangheili for the very first time. The Sangheili were already a highly advanced, flourishing civilization, a fact that did not stop them from devoutly worshiping the Forerunner objects in their possession. Their homeworld, Sangheilios, was home to many of these, and it was their desire to find more that drove them to begin exploring outer space. When foreigners arrived on Ulgethon, seemingly in search of their own relics, it provoked a violent reaction. The San’Shyuum were no longer the ferocious warriors they had once been, but they could count on the power of the Dreadnought and the many technological advances it had made possible for their armies. Among the Sangheili, an aptitude for combat was in their nature, and their society had quickly fallen into a hierarchy based on the feudal model, which produced a steady stream of prodigious warriors. But they had always refused to harness the power of Forerunner technology. As a result, the war soon turned in favor of the San’Shyuum, who used the Dreadnought to invade and destroy many Sangheili planets. Showing proof of some pragmatism, the Elites decided to renounce their most deeply held beliefs, and began using the many Forerunner relics that had been in their possession for centuries to their own advantage. Thanks to them, their technology advanced leaps and bounds in just a few years, and the war became more even-sided. The two sides had reached a stalemate, and they knew it. So it was that in 821 BCE, the Sangheili and the San’Shyuum signed a provisional ceasefire, which would evolve into a binding alliance between the two peoples. The roles of each civilization were quickly defined: the San’Shyuum became the alliance’s political and religious leaders, while the Sangheili served as their armed forces, leading expeditions and seeking out new Forerunner relics. The Sangheili embraced all of the San’Shyuum’s spiritual principles, and began to dream of undertaking the Great Journey themselves. To cement their alliance, the San’Shyuum decided to stop using their own language and adopted that of the Elites, a gesture that the Elites deeply appreciated. Together, they constructed an immense space fortress named High Charity, that would become the Covenant’s political center. The San’Shyuum installed their Dreadnought at the heart of High Charity, and its infinite energy source powered the citadel. All without exception worshipped the Oracle, a Forerunner Monitor discovered aboard the keyship. Although they did not know it, the Monitor in question was in fact none other than Mendicant Bias, or at least the fragment of itself that it had dispatched to find the Humans. The ancilla kept silent, but that was no issue for the San’Shyuum, who made up fake pronouncements from the Oracle in order to shore up their considerable political power. It was, then, upon these shaky foundations of lies and manipulation that the Covenant was formed.

THE COVENANT EXPANDS

The Prophets and the Elites would not be alone on High Charity for long. Over the course of their constant expeditions, they encountered the Lekgolo, small ruddy worms that could join together to form larger, more powerful creatures, named Mgalekgolo. When Humanity encountered them 3000 years later, they would come to call them the Hunters, because these creatures with limited intellect were nevertheless indefatigable trackers. The Lekgolo had another particularity, and one that would displease the Covenant: they fed on rocks and minerals, which meant that over the centuries they had damaged many a Forerunner ruin. For the San’Shyuum, this was an act of heresy: they declared war and the Elites were sent to destroy the Lekgolo. But this would prove no easy task, as the worms began using Forerunner artifacts as shields. What’s more, they had no fleet of their own, nor any kind of organized army. This meant that there was no real frontline, nor any real battlefields, and the Covenant was forced to hunt down its enemies without being able to leverage its military superiority. In the end, they thought it better to invite the Lekgolo to join the Covenant, and the worms agreed in 784 BCE. Within a short time, they had benefited from the technological advances of the Covenant, developing powerful armor for the Mgalekgolo that was equipped with a shield and a giant plasma cannon. They would also be used to pilot Scarab tanks.

In 1112, the Covenant made the acquaintance of a new species: the Yanme’e. There were no Forerunner relics on Palamol, their homeworld, and they were discovered somewhat by chance. Despite the Covenant’s military and technological superiority, it struggled to repel Yanme’e assaults, with the aliens proving themselves to be highly aggressive. To resolve things, the San’Shyuum offered the Yanme’e the opportunity to join the Covenant, seeing them as gifted technicians and particularly frustrating foes. This is a lesson that the UNSC would also learn to its detriment during the first Battle of Harvest. Soldiers at the battle began calling them Drones, a name that was soon adopted by all UNSC forces.

Two centuries later, the Covenant welcomed another new species into its ranks, the Kig-Yar. These part reptilian, part avian creatures hailed from a small moon named Eayn, which featured very low gravity. Throughout their history, the Kig-Yar had made piracy a habit, and one they took with them once they were able to explore space. They soon gained a local reputation as feared space pirates, drawing the Covenant’s attention. After a few skirmishes, the Covenant made them a unique proposition: they were invited to join the Covenant not out of religious fervor, but for the money. Vicious and highly intelligent creatures the Kig-Yar may be, but they knew a good deal when they saw one. In 1342, they entered the pay of the Prophets and joined the Covenant. Their status as mercenaries, their thirst for profit, and their lack of honor (according to how the Sangheili defined it), soon earned them the disdain of the Elites, who tolerated their company mainly due to their skill as snipers.

Deployed as foot soldiers, the Jackals were next joined by the Unggoy, who joined the Covenant later in 2142. The Unggoy saw the arrival of Covenant ships as a gift from the gods, living as they were on their hellish homeworld of Balaho, which had been ravaged by an industrial disaster. They joined the ranks of the Covenant army, but their small size and physical weakness earned them the unenviable role of cannon fodder. Their treatment would change for the better in 2462, when a conflict broke out between the Unggoy and the Kig-Yar, in what the Covenant came to call the Unggoy Rebellion. The diminutive aliens put up as fierce a fight as they could against the rest of the Covenant, but their struggle was in vain: the Sangheili attacked Balaho and glassed part of the planet, forcing the Unggoy back into line. Nevertheless, their courageous rebellion had impressed the Elites, who were better disposed towards the Grunts from then on.

The final species to join the Covenant would not be admitted until 2492, when the Jiralhanae arrived in High Charity. Of all the species that made up the Covenant, the Jiralhanae, or the Brutes, as they were more commonly known, had experienced the most difficult history. For many, many years, the various Jiralhanae nations had been striving towards unification, without much success: every time they met, their talks resulted in war–war that saw the Brutes tear themselves apart. So much damage had they wreaked on their own civilization that when the Covenant discovered Doisac, their homeworld, the Jiralhanae civilization had regressed. They slavishly agreed to join the Covenant, but tensions soon arose between them and the Sangheili. Out of a belief that the Brutes would one day usurp their role, the Sangheili commanders attempted to limit their access to Covenant technology. The San’Shyuum, though, had other plans. They saw many useful qualities in the Jiralhanae, who were as easy to manipulate as they were powerful. Their size and physical strength made them excellent warriors, and in the early 26th century, they dismissed the Sangheili’s recommendations and armed their newest recruits. They would even turn a blind eye when one of them committed a crime. Because from the earliest days of the Covenant, the San’Shyuum had been focused on a single goal: to be rid of the Elites, who had massacred so many of their own during the war between the two species.

COVENANT POLITICAL STRUCTURE

Political circles within the Covenant were preponderantly dominated by the San’Shyuum who, under the Writ of Union signed at the end of the war with the Sangheili, had obtained the keys to executive and legislative power. The Elites nevertheless had a voice in the decision-making process, because the Covenant’s highest political body–the High Council–was made up of equal numbers of Sangheili and San’Shyuum. However, the High Council was chaired by three Hierarchs, all of whom were San’Shyuum. It was this triumvirate that truly led the Covenant, and the San’Shyuum were omnipresent in the Covenant government. These included Prophets, whether High Prophets (Hierarchs) or ordinary members of the High Council, and who could also be found in the top position of the many Covenant ministries. It’s important to note that the Covenant weren’t averse to holding several different job titles. As the Humans would say: a prophet can also be a priest. The exact number of Covenant ministries is unknown, and their roles can sometimes be obscure. Here are a few examples:

j The Ministry of Concert was responsible for resolving conflicts between the different species that made up the alliance.

j The Ministry of Conversion, as its name implies, was responsible for converting species encountered by the Covenant on its travels across the galaxy.

j The Ministry of Fortitude was responsible for distributing Forerunner relics within the Covenant, so that everyone had access to the same technology. As this was an important vector for technological progress, the Ministry of Fortitude had many enemies, and assassination attempts were not uncommon. The various ministers having served in this position took full advantage of their power to gain influence amid the Covenant’s political landscape, and never shirked from trading relics for their own gain.

j The Ministry of the Inquisition was responsible for rooting out and punishing heretics. As Covenant society was based on a body of religious beliefs, non-believers were synonymous with social and political agitation, meaning that they were severely punished. And the Covenant used torture and issued death sentences without qualms, so criminals faced an unenviable fate.

j The Ministry of Tranquility oversaw the search for Forerunner artifacts. This made it a key component of the Covenant apparatus, and the series of ministers who served at its helm also leveraged their position to inflate their political power. This was the only ministry within which Unggoy could serve, even if they were restricted to the role of Deacons. These clergy were responsible for spreading the good word and maintaining the faith of Covenant forces.

The Covenant was built on a belief in a higher power (the Forerunners) and the quest for the Great Journey, so the clergy occupied an important place within the alliance. The most eminent of their number was the Philologist, who was the only member of the Covenant to converse with the Oracle. Part of its role was to bring newly retrieved relics to the Oracle, so that it could bless them and offer guidance. Mendicant Bias, of course, remained mute, and it was the Philologist who fabricated its responses, often with help from the Hierarchs.

The Covenant army, which the Writ of Union entrusted to the Sangheili, nevertheless fell under San’Shyuum authority, because the Hierarchs were still the alliance’s top decision-makers. Furthermore, the Council of Masters, the Covenant’s highest military institution, was composed of Sangheili and San’Shyuum in equal number. This meant that the military authority of the Elites was more limited than it may at first appear. They did, however, command the Covenant’s warships, even though some battle groups belonged to ministries controlled by the San’Shyuum. One Sangheili in particular boasted a very special status: the Arbiter. This honorific title from Sangheili history was awarded to particularly gifted warlords, and the San’Shyuum had learned to fear the word during their war against the Sangheili. Such was its aura and the fear it inspired that they decided to retain the title of Arbiter once the Covenant had been formed. For a long time, the Arbiter was also known as the “Prophets right hand,” or even “the will of the Prophets,” in expression of the fact that the Arbiter answered only to them. But in 2150, the Arbiter Fal ‘Chavamee learned the true nature of the Great Journey and discovered that the Prophets were lying to the Covenant. The San’Shyuum then accused him of heresy, and had him assassinated. After his death, the Prophets decided to change the meaning of the word “Arbiter”: now, it had come to signify shame and punishment. It was given to Sangheili whose military value was too high for them to be sentenced to death. In return, the Arbiters were assigned increasingly dangerous missions and tended to die in the attempt to clear their name.

AN UNCOMFORTABLE DISCOVERY

It was in 2524 that the Covenant learned of Humanity’s existence, when a group of Kig-Yar discovered a human cargo ship. Aboard their small shuttle, the Minor Transgression, they approached the freighter and the Jackals, intrigued, decided to board the unknown vessel. They massacred the crew, and when they inspected the on-board computers, they discovered the cargo’s destination. It was heading for Harvest. And so the piracy around the planet began. A number of ships disappeared, and the UNSC grew concerned. In the end, the Minor Transgression was destroyed, leading the Covenant to send Maccabeus the Brute to Harvest. Even though the encounter between the Humans and the Jiralhanae went awry, the Covenant nevertheless obtained some valuable information: Harvest was home to many Forerunner relics, and thanks to Maccabeus the San’Shyuum discovered new Forerunner glyphs that they had never before seen. Two Prophets, Ord Casto and Lod Mron, sought out the Philologist Hod Rumnt so that he could present their discovery to the Oracle. Much to the surprise of Rumnt, Mendicant Bias awakened for the first time in centuries. The ancilla had never spoken up to correct the Covenant’s misinterpretations of Forerunner symbols and relics, but this time there was one glyph in particular that caught his attention. It’s meaning? “Reclaimer.” Mendicant Bias then explained to Rumnt that the Covenant had always mistaken the meaning of this glyph. It referred to both the creators of the Oracle–the Forerunners–as well as the Humans, who were destined to inherit their role. Mendicant Bias wanted to find the Humans and help them to find the Ark, so it activated the Dreadnought and prepared to leave High Charity. The vessel, though, would not lift off: many Lekgolo had infested its structure, causing it to malfunction and remain stuck on the ground.

The revelation was devastating for Casto, Mron, and Rumnt, as they realized that the Humans were better qualified than the Prophets in guiding the Covenant to the Great Journey. Terrified at the thought of losing their power, the three San’Shyuum plotted to usurp the Hierarchs and seize power over the High Council. Of course, they said nothing of Mendicant Bias’ revelations, and presented the Humans as the main enemies of the Covenant: if they were to achieve their Great Journey, the Covenant had to hunt down and eradicate the Humans. Thanks to the status endowed by their “discovery,” Casto and Mron, who were the Minister of Fortitude and Vice Minister of Tranquility, respectively, were appointed Hierarchs, and along with Rumnt they became the High Prophets of Truth, Regret, and Pity. It was these three San’Shyuum, then, who would become Humanity’s most fervent enemies. But the triumvirate would not last long, because one of the three Hierarchs was already plotting to establish himself as the one true leader. This was Ord Casto, the High Prophet of Truth. It was he who, for years now, had been favoring the Jiralhanae at the Sangheili’s expense, and who, in the following months, would use subterfuge to establish himself as leader of the Covenant.

A MILITARY SUPERPOWER

From the opening moments of the war between Humanity and the Covenant, there was never any doubt that the aliens were orders of magnitude more powerful than their enemies. But how did the San’Shyuum, Sangheili, and even the Kig-Yar come to achieve such advanced technological development? Why were they so far ahead of the Humans? Both of these questions have the same answer: their homeworlds were littered with Forerunner technology which they proved able to exploit. Erde-Tyrene, as Earth had once been known, was home to enemies of the Forerunners, meaning that the Forerunners had never colonized it. The only relic to be found there was the giant portal they built in Africa, not far from where the city of Mombasa would one day stand, in Kenya. The portal was not built by the Forerunners themselves, but rather by Forerunner Sentinels, machines. And it was not long before it was buried, disappearing from the consciousness of the few primitive Humans who had, without understanding, seen the Forerunner machines devastate the planet.

By exploiting Forerunner technology, the Covenant had evolved to the extent that they were able to achieve space travel thousands of years before mankind. Following first contact in 2525, the UNSC was regularly surprised by the technological resources available to their enemy, which they sometimes struggled to even understand.

To begin with, the Covenant boasted an impressive fleet: their size and firepower were far superior to anything the Humans could design. Just like their Human counterparts, Covenant warships were organized into a several different classes which determined their size, armament and, of course, their strategic role.

j Carriers, which generally served as capital ships. A number of different classes were used (carriers, assault carriers, and supercarriers), all of which were extremely long vessels. A carrier was around 3000 m long, an assault carrier 5300 m, and the supercarriers almost 29 km. They all boasted apocalyptic firepower.

j Cruisers formed the backbone of the Covenant fleet, and also came in various classes. These were light cruisers (around 300 m long), the armored cruiser (around 1000 m long), battlecruisers (around 1700 m long), and heavy cruisers (around 3000 m long).

j Destroyers were the Covenant’s smallest, lightest warships, with a distinctive silhouette. While they may be among the smallest Covenant warships, they were nevertheless three times longer than their Human counterparts. They were also divided into two classes: light destroyers (around 1500 m long) and heavy destroyers (around 1600 m long).

j Frigates were extremely commonplace. Measuring around 1000 m long, they were used to support larger ships like destroyers and cruisers. Just like corvettes, they were often seen in low atmosphere, using their weapons to pummel enemy defenses.

j Corvettes were small ships, generally used for clandestine missions and raids. That didn’t mean that they were any less intimidating, at least on a human scale: a light corvette measured some 485 m long, while heavy corvettes measured 950 m.

While human weapons (rifles, missiles, bombs, etc.) were relatively similar to those we know today in the 21st century, the Covenant had been using another technology for a long time already: plasma. Humans had knowledge of plasma (it was part of lightning and the aurora borealis), but the Covenant had learned to harness it. Over time, they developed an extensive arsenal of pistols, rifles, and cannons that fired plasma projectiles. Every Covenant ship was equipped with plasma cannons, and was also able to fire plasma torpedoes. These torpedoes found their targets almost without fail, and because UNSC ships were not equipped with energy shields, the projectiles made short work of the titanium-A armor plating that protected human ships. In fact, they melted it. For short-range battles, the Covenant could also count on pulse laser towers that could inflict considerable damage.

However, the most impressive weapon on a Covenant ship was probably its energy projector, a huge plasma lance that was capable of continuous fire. Rarely used in combat, their main purpose was to glass worlds under Covenant attack. When the Covenant wanted to cleanse a planet of its population, one or more of their ships joined in a constant surface bombardment: their plasma burned everything it touched, torching the planet and instantaneously filling its atmosphere with ash. This had the effect of blocking out sunlight and causing a drastic planet-wide drop in temperature. It was the resulting thermal shock that caused the “glassing.” In some cases, the beam could be channeled for precision fire on excavation missions.

However, the energy projector was an extremely cumbersome piece of equipment, and consumed huge amounts of energy. This was a blessing for the Humans, because it meant that not all Covenant ships were equipped with ventral beams. Their biggest ships, however, could accommodate several of them. While the Covenant fleet boasted far superior firepower to the Human fleet, it would turn out to be their ships’ defensive capabilities that proved most troublesome for UNSC command. Covenant ships were all equipped with energy shields that could stop any weapon at the UNSC’s disposal, from MAC cannons to missiles with nuclear warheads. However, the UNSC soon learned that a series of simultaneous MAC shots could temporarily disable the shields, as could nuclear bombs which, at the moment they detonated, produced an electromagnetic pulse that temporarily froze the energy shield. The only Human weapons able to pierce the energy shields and damage the ships they were protecting was the Super MAC cannon. These giant cannons were fitted to orbital combat stations, or could be positioned in emplacements on the surface of the planets they were defending. They were 800 m long and fired the same projectiles as the standard MAC cannons, only much bigger, with a weight of around 3000 tons. When the Covenant saw how effective these weapons were, they designated their emplacements as priority targets, taking them out first on every invasion. Only one human ship was equipped with a Super MAC: the UNSC Trafalgar, the fleet’s only supercarrier. Seen as the UNSC flagship, it was initially designed to put down the Insurrection, but the Covenant invasion forced the admiralty to change its plans. The Trafalgar possessed two Super MAC cannons, accompanied by a number of standard MAC cannons, making it a real force to be reckoned with, even for the Covenant.

In addition to their weaponry, Covenant ships could also travel through slipspace with a lot more precision than the humans. This gave them a significant strategic advantage, allowing them to emerge at the last moment within firing distance of their target. The UNSC soon learned to take this into account, but that didn’t make its effects any less devastating: a supercarrier could charge in from deep space and join the fight within a matter of minutes. Many human planets paid the price.

As for the ground forces, assault troops could count on plasma weapons, which came in all different varieties for different applications, as well as several vehicles that could hover a dozen or so inches above the ground. This gave them enhanced mobility, making them more effective in combat. Their most impressive technology was no doubt found in the armor of the Elites: it enabled them to become invisible and kept them safe behind an energy shield using a similar system to that found on Covenant ships. The Kig-Yar made use of this technology in their own way, using a projector secured to their arm that created a small, solid energy shield. Orange or blue, they provided solid protection against human projectiles or the blast from an explosion. It was after one of these projectors was brought back to Catherine Halsey that she came up with an idea to adapt this technology for the Mjolnir armor, enabling it to provide additional protection. This was what resulted in the Mjolnir Mk. V, as worn by Master Chief in the events of Halo: Combat Evolved.

Chapter 8 – A Lethal Game of Hide and Seek

The Battle of Harvest in 2525 only marked the beginning of the war between the Humans and the Covenant. Fully aware of the aliens’ superiority, as well as the genocide they intended to carry out, the Humans waged a long and painful war of survival. Because at first glance, it seemed like nothing could halt the Covenant’s advance. But the course of the war would change once the Humans came to better understand the true motivations of their enemies and learned of the existence of their illustrious predecessors, the Forerunners.

PLANETS OF GLASS

While it would not be until 2530 and Preston Cole’s capture of a Sangheili that the Humans learned more about the Covenant’s intentions, the UNSC immediately understood that any planet the aliens discovered was condemned to die. After glassing Harvest, the Covenant warships struck Green Hills and Second Base, subjecting them to the same bleak fate. The war had begun just a few short months ago, and millions had already died.

At first, the UNSC decided to keep this new war a secret: officially, the UNSC was still at war with the Insurrection. When Robert Watts was captured by the Spartan-II, it struck a severe blow to the rebels who, in response, launched a series of attacks across the galaxy. They had lost popular support, and the populations of UEG-controlled space wanted only one thing: that the hostilities cease, even if it meant giving the separatists what they wanted. With public opinion already wavering, the ONI feared that the announcement of a new war, against a more highly evolved enemy, would only sow more discontent. So it was that while one human world after another was glassed, the UNSC chose deceit. Covenant victories were played down, and portrayed as Insurrectionist attacks. As for the Insurrectionists, they had not yet encountered the alien invaders and pointed the finger at the UEG. But despite this, the secret stayed a secret. Just like the existence of the Spartans. While many soldiers had by now fought alongside them, the ONI preferred to keep the details of the Spartans to themselves, out of a fear of having to explain where they came from. If the colonies ever learned the truth, it would only give the rebels more reasons to keep fighting. Even within the UNSC, the existence of the Spartans remained a mystery. In 2626 Michael Sullivan, a cadet at the Corbulo military science academy, discovered a series of extracts of a top secret video, and attempted to piece the document together in its entirety. He settled down with a few colleagues to watch the video, and was astonished to see armored soldiers fighting alongside the Insurrectionists against an unidentified foe. Around this time, the first rumors began to circulate about the existence of the Spartans, but few really knew what they were. Sullivan, one of the only people to escape the Covenant attack on Circinius IV, was one of the few living humans to have seen two Spartan-II (Frederic-104 and Kelly-087) without their helmets. They had a strange look in their eyes, their faces covered in scars, but more strikingly still, they seemed to be very young. Even younger than himself. But when he asked them how old they were, the two Spartans replied that this information was classified top secret. Just like everything else about them, in fact. When other soldiers served alongside the Spartans, they never really attempted to learn more about them: in their eyes, they were simply elite soldiers, probably former ODST, who had been equipped with high-tech armor.

It has to be said that at that time, the Humans had bigger things to worry about. On March 1, 2526, the UNSC won its first victory against the invader. The man who led it was Preston Cole who, in command of a fleet of more than 40 ships, returned to Harvest to take it back from the Covenant. When he arrived, he successfully destroyed the only enemy ship still in the system. The UNSC used this victory to make the war against the Covenant official. While for a few weeks, part of the public remained skeptical about the existence of this alien invader, the horrors of war would quickly change their minds. Because the Covenant was still working its way through the Outer Colonies, and the death tally was rising. On April 13, 2526, forty Covenant ships appeared within reach of Bliss, but distant enough to give the planet time to prepare its defenses. But these were limited: when the Covenant fleet approached the planet, there were only three UNSC vessels there to meet them: the Weeping Willow, a heavy cruiser; the Matador, a cruiser; and the Purpose, a frigate. The battle lasted barely three minutes. In the aftermath, the Covenant would completely glass the planet. News quickly spread throughout Human-controlled space: Bliss had been home to 500 million people… before the Covenant arrived. It was one of the most heavily populated planets in the Outer Colonies. But the Covenant gave the people living there no chance to survive. After overwhelming the UNSC defenses, the Covenant destroyed the evacuation shuttles and imposed a cordon around the planet to prevent the colonists from leaving. So while tens of millions of humans gathered in the major cities down on Bliss, the Covenant cruisers proceeded to glass the planet. A few days later, nothing of it remained.

Faced with this kind of horror, the small victories eked out by the UNSC paled in comparison. They were too small in number, and generally came at a very high cost. On October 21, 2526, for example, the Humans won the Battle of Alpha Aurigae: with over one hundred ships under his command, Admiral Cole engaged twelve enemy ships encountered near the asteroid belt in the Alpha Aurigae system. Despite their numerical superiority, 37 UNSC ships were lost in the ensuing battle. February 13, 2528 was the date of another battle between Human and Covenant forces, this time in the Xi Boötis A system, where a fleet of 70 Human ships attacked eight Covenant vessels. This was another victory for the UNSC, at the cost of 30 ships.

2530 marked the year in which events would take an even more dire turn for the Humans. The Hierarchs believed that the Humans posed a genuine obstacle despite their less advanced technology, and decided to send more ships and warriors to take part in their crusade. Eridanus II, John-117’s homeworld, was the first to suffer the consequences. The planet was quickly invaded and its inhabitants massacred before the glassing process began. Meanwhile, on Harvest, battle was raging once again.

HUMANITY REDISCOVERS THE FORERUNNERS

Preston Cole may have earned a victory at the first Battle of Harvest, but the Covenant had no intention of abandoning the planet. It was still home to a number of Forerunner artifacts, and leaving them for the Humans to find was simply unthinkable. Battle raged across the entire planet. The UNSC had not been expecting the Covenant to return in force to a planet that had been almost entirely glassed, and the few battalions stationed on the planet were quickly overcome. They launched a desperate effort to evacuate the planet, assisted by the Spartan Daisy-023, who would meet her end trying to protect an evacuation Pelican. Once most of the Human presence had been eradicated, the Covenant resumed their digs and found a Forerunner structure buried beneath the ice at Harvest’s north pole. Informed of this discovery, the Hierarchs sent an Arbiter named Ripa ‘Moramee to the planet to supervise the excavation work. But the UNSC was not ready to abandon Harvest yet. Admiral Cole dispatched the UNSC Spirit of Fire, commanded by Captain James Cutter. When he reached the planet, Cutter supported the remaining ground troops and sent Sergeant John Forge down to the surface on a reconnaissance mission. When he made it back to the ship, the sergeant had some big news: the Covenant had uncovered a vast archaeological site of an unknown origin. The discovery immediately caught the interest of Ellen Anders, a xenobiologist traveling with the Spirit of Fire to study the Covenant. A student of Catherine Halsey, Anders was convinced that a number of Human planets were home to traces of life before Humans, remnants of a civilization that had disappeared thousands of years ago. Anders wasn’t far off the mark… But just like every other Human, she had never heard of the Forerunners. And yet, Humanity had been in contact with Forerunner technology for decades already.

The most notable discovery dates back to 2491, the year in which the UNSC landed on a strange black planet that they came to name Onyx. Despite its appearance, Onyx featured the perfect conditions for a Human-inhabited world. But the planet concealed strange secrets, and the UNSC postponed the arrival of the future colonists. Indeed, they never would make it to Onyx: in 2511, the discovery of underground structures of unknown origin forced the UNSC and the ONI to take over control of the planet. Onyx was soon blanked out of maps and redacted from reports, with the secret services preferring to conceal its existence. The ONI established a small base there for a team of scientists, but their research remained inconclusive. The same occurred in 2512 on Sigma Octanus IV, when geologists discovered a strange rock bearing unknown designs. Unable to learn anything from it, the scientists made it the main attraction at the natural history museum in Côte d’Azur, the main city on Sigma Octanus IV. The Humans had difficulty interpreting these Forerunner relics, and ended up paying them little mind. To a handful of scientists, though–like Professor Laszlo Sorvad, on Reach, and Ellen Anders–they were intriguing. When she learned that the Covenant had uncovered something on Harvest, she persuaded Cutter to take the site back from the aliens. The military agreed. With the assistance of Red Team, led by Jerome-092, the marines from the Spirit of Fire led the assault, and the troops led by Forge gained control of the site. While the Covenant forces of ‘Moramee had not been able to learn anything from the site, Anders was immediately able to interact with the artifact, which unfurled a huge map of space before her very eyes. The map featured a planet that was already well known to Humanity: Arcadia. The Arbiter, still on the planet, decided to head for Arcadia and before the Spirit of Fire could react, he set off to attack the planet. When they reached Arcadia, the Covenant made short work of the few UNSC vessels defending it. They destroyed the Belfast and the Texas, before damaging the Armstrong and the Pillar of Autumn, which were forced to beat a retreat. When the Spirit of Fire finally caught up, the Covenant had already disembarked a whole army onto the planet. Worse still, during the fighting the Arbiter had captured Anders and taken her to an unknown world, where the Prophet of Regret was trying to interact with Forerunner technology. Regret knew exactly what he was dealing with: Forerunner warships. His intention, of course, was to add them to the Covenant fleet and use them to crush the Humans. ‘Moramee and the Prophet had realized that the Humans could activate Forerunner relics, and they were counting on Anders to show them how.

Aboard the Spirit of Fire, confusion reigned: Anders’ disappearance was a cause of great concern for Cutter and Forge. Jerome-092 thought that they should set off in pursuit of the vessel carrying Anders without delay and destroy it, as the things she knew would be dangerous if they fell into enemy hands. Cutter, however, preferred to go to her rescue. Tracking her location, they arrived at a mysterious planet that they decided to explore. To their great surprise, there they were attacked by creatures who were nothing like the Covenant: the Flood. The men of the Spirit of Fire could not imagine the importance of this encounter, and even less just how dangerous these creatures were. The Flood forced the Humans to retreat and, while they were busy putting some distance between them and the threat, the ship was suddenly pulled into an abyss that had opened on the planet’s surface. Inside they discovered that while the bottom of the chasm may be natural, its structure was entirely artificial. After flying for several minutes, the Spirit of Fire reached the bowels of the planet: what they had in fact just encountered was one of the Didact’s shield worlds. The interior was inhabitable, but more than that, it was packed with Forerunner technology, technology that the Prophet of Regret’s fleet wanted for themselves. The technology was now starting to come online, after the Arbiter had forced Anders to touch the control panel that remained unresponsive to the Prophet. Responding to the human presence, the terminal lit up and initiated the launch of the Forerunner ships before Anders was able to make her escape and find her way back to Forge and the Spartans. In the meantime, she had formulated a plan: they needed to destroy the planet using the Spirit of Fire’s Shaw-Fujikawa Drive as a bomb. When modified, the reactor could be fired towards the artificial sun found at the heart of the shield world. This would set off a chain reaction that would destroy the planet, the fleet, and the strange creatures Cutter’s men had encountered on the surface in one fell swoop. The plan worked perfectly, almost. Forge was forced to sacrifice himself in order to detonate the bomb at the most timely moment. The plan was not without its downside: the Spirit of Fire was now light years from the nearest Human planet, and it had just jettisoned its FTL16 Drive. Serina, the ship’s AI, activated the distress beacon, and while the ship drifted towards UNSC-controlled space, the team entered cryosleep. On the other side of space, the Spirit of Fire and its entire crew were declared missing in action. It would be 25 long years before anything was heard of them again. Anders’ discoveries, though, were without precedent, as it was the closest Humans had been to active Forerunner technology in 100,000 years. They had discovered a shield world, but also Forerunner warships, and with them proof of the existence of a civilization that had since disappeared. But the crew was unable to share these discoveries, or any warning of their most ominous find: the Flood.

On the other side of the galaxy, war continued to rage. The UNSC was fighting and losing a series of battles, while one UEG planet after another was left scorched. In the year 2535, the Covenant finally reached the Inner Colonies, moving ever closet to Reach and to Earth. Jericho VII was the first Inner Colony to fall. The planet wasn’t home to a large population, but that did not stop the UNSC from putting up a fierce fight. John-117 and Kelly-087 were there, along with a number of other Spartans. Splitting into two teams, the Spartan-II would lead several successful operations on Jericho VII, singlehandedly massacring hundreds of Unggoy. But in the face of the enemy’s overwhelming numerical superiority, the Spartans were forced to fall back: Jericho VII was lost. As soon as the fighting was over, the Covenant glassed the planet. Up until 2552, the conflict could be summed up as follows: the UNSC had won some small victories and the Spartans were performing miracles, but when all was said and done, the Covenant were winning the war. And heroes were beginning to be in short supply. On April 18, 2543, at the Battle of Psi Serpenti, Admiral Cole was killed in action. By 2547, Human optimism was fading. In an effort to boost the morale of its troops, as well as the civilian populations they protected, the UNSC made the Spartans’ existence official. Nothing was said of their origins, of course, nor their identities. Military propaganda focused on the merits of these immensely courageous men and women equipped with cutting-edge technology who could hold off entire waves of Covenant invaders without any support. This was when the UNSC also created the myth that the Spartans were immortal. The idea came from Section 2 at the ONI, which implemented Directive 930: this directive banned combat loss reports from recording instances of Spartans being killed in combat. Instead, they were reported injured or missing in action.

But many Spartans would indeed die during this war, especially from 2537 onwards, and it would all be down to the plans drawn up by Colonel James Ackerson.

16 “Faster Than Light”: another term used to describe the reactors that enabled travel through slipspace, and therefore faster than the speed of light.

Chapter 9 – The Spartan-III Program

After just a few years’ active duty, it was clear to both the UNSC and the ONI that the Spartan-II were achieving miracles on the battlefield. Unfortunately, they were too few in number, and they could have only limited impact in a war of this scale. Catherine Halsey’s selection methods, as well as the scale of the costs incurred by equipping each soldier with Mjolnir armor, gave the UNSC less room for maneuver, and it was forced to be satisfied with the 30 or so Spartan-II that Halsey and Section 3 had delivered in 2525. But within the ONI, one man had an idea to get more Spartans for the UNSC. This man was one James Ackerson, and he would create a new generation of Spartans who would join the battlefield in their hundreds.

LOW-COST SPARTANS

In 2531, Colonel James Ackerson was a man without many friends in the ONI. Arrogant and scheming, he soon came to be Catherine Halsey’s main rival, taking great pleasure in spying on her. Militarily gifted, he carved out a reputation in the early years of the war by taking part in around a dozen successful clandestine operations. He rapidly climbed the ranks until he joined Section 3 of the ONI, also earning a seat on the UNSC Security Council. Just like some of his colleagues, Ackerson had taken an interest in Dr. Halsey’s SPARTAN-II project, and he was able to use his AI, Araqiel, to get his hands on Halsey’s most confidential data. These included her selection methods, which he saw as too restrictive. On October 24, 2531, he decided to present his own supersoldier program to Vice-Admiral Margaret Parangosky, Captain Aaron Gibson and Rear Admiral Ned Rich. He named it simply SPARTAN-III. This new generation of Spartans was designed to be easier to produce than the previous one. The children were not selected for their outstanding natural ability, but rather because they had nobody looking out for them, no family. Ever since the war against the Covenant began, there had been no shortage of orphans, and planets that had been attacked by the aliens were filled with children trying to survive in the shadows. This meant that their hatred of the Covenant would be easier to exploit. These new Spartans would, however, undergo the same training (even slightly more advanced), the same indoctrination, and the same augmentations as their older cousins, but now making use of the latest science: Ackerson believed that losses caused by the augmentations would be practically nil. Halsey’s Mjolnir armor, which was far too costly, would also be cast aside. The ONI would develop armor for the program that was more affordable, but that also benefited from several years of research into Covenant Technology. Unsurprisingly, Ackerson’s plan was approved by Parangosky, Bigson and Rich. All that was left to do was to start the process.

Ackerson quickly turned to Senior Chief Petty Officer Franklin Mendez, who had overseen the training of the Spartan-II. Mendez agreed with Ackerson’s appraisal of how the Spartan-III should be selected: in his eyes, there was no need to select only extremely gifted children. Mendez was convinced that with the right training and appropriate methodology, any child would become an elite soldier. However, Mendez would be unable to do it all alone. But Ackerson already had a solution to that. Shortly after the meeting with the ONI brass, Ackerson had sent three Spartan-II out on a mission: their job was to board an old space station and verify whether it was under Insurrectionist control. Frederic-104, Kelly-087 and Kurt-051 were dispatched to the station, but upon their approach, Kurt’s thruster pack malfunctioned. While he was trying to regain control, the Spartan was catapulted off into space, unable to arrest his travel. He disappeared out of sight of his two comrades, who were forced to complete the mission without him: Kurt-051 would be declared missing, as Spartan tradition dictated. But in actual fact, the mission–and the equipment malfunction–had all been fabricated by Ackerson: Kurt-051 had been contacted by ONI agents to take over the education of the Spartan-III. However, the colonel didn’t want to draw attention to his project. And so the Spartan hung up his armor and became Lieutenant Commander Kurt Ambrose. With Mendez, he was stationed on Onyx, where a new training camp had been erected for them: Camp Currahee. The camp stood to the south of Zone 67, an ONI prohibited area, which meant that it could be built and equipped away from prying eyes. As the planet itself no longer featured in any official reports or maps, the Spartan-III program could be conducted in total privacy. Ackerson knew it all too well: even though he had not had to kidnap the candidate children, the Spartan-III faced a much less enviable fate than the Spartan-II. Because unlike Halsey’s elite supersoldiers, Ackerson’s Spartans were designed to be expendable: they would take part in a few missions to cut their teeth, before being used in larger scale operations against strategic Covenant positions. These were suicide missions that would be a waste of Spartan-II troops, and that regular UNSC forces could not complete. Not even the ODST.

SPARTANS ALL THE SAME

Despite these particularities, the Spartan-III would nevertheless be fully fledged Spartans. Indeed, they would face even tougher, more severe training than the Spartan-II. Kurt Ambrose and Franklin Mendez were going to make sure of it. Ambrose himself had been spotted by Halsey, who saw in him a quality leader of men. He was one of the very best Spartans, and the one that John-117 chose to join his team after the death of Samuel-034. As demanding as he may be, Ambrose would soon show a more human, more paternal side when the first Spartan-III recruits arrived. After several months spent training at Camp Currahee, 497 candidates were brought before Mendez and Ambrose: the children were all examined and 300 of them were selected to join Alpha Company, the first company made up of Spartan-III. The training was incredibly hard on the children, who nevertheless dug deep and pushed through their trials. As planned, many of them felt a fierce hatred of the Covenant, and had only one desire: to exact revenge on the aliens. They accepted Mendez’ brutal exercises, being beaten with cattle prods, and hours of training in military strategy without complaint. The 300 Spartan-III received their augmentations and despite having to endure several weeks of suffering, they all emerged alive. They were now ready to serve in the UNSC.

Before being assigned to their first mission, they were given their armor. It was a brand new model known as Semi-Powered Infiltration (SPI) armor. While Mjolnir armor was designed to make the Spartans more powerful, the Spartan-III placed the emphasis on stealth. The engineers at Watershed Division drew inspiration from Covenant technology to make it, particularly the Sangheili armor with its cloaking technology. The solution developed for the SPI armor was less advanced, being based as it was on photoreactive panels that served as the armor’s paneling. It provided camouflage that was valuable, but imperfect, and anyone who knew what to look for could spot a Spartan-III in motion. Cheaper than the Mjolnir armor, it only provided a slight boost to the strength of its wearer, but it did contain all of the software technology required to complete combat missions. The helmet, for example, featured digital zoom as well as infrared, thermal, and electromagnetic imaging.

By November 2536, Alpha Company was ready for combat, and was deployed on several missions, where it encountered some success, proving that Ackerson’s program was a sound one. Their first assignment was to Mamore, after the Insurrectionists had taken up arms against the UNSC. Their rebellion was bloodily put down. It would not be until January 2537 that the Spartan-III first saw action against the Covenant, when they fought in the Battle of New Constantinople. This was another victory for Alpha Company, who would again cross swords with the enemy a few months later, this time in the Bonanza asteroid belt.

But in late July 2537, the ONI assigned them the mission for which they had been created. On July 27, they were deployed to K7-49, a huge asteroid that the Covenant used to house major shipyards, making shrewd use of the space rock’s volcanic activity. The aim of Operation: PROMETHEUS was a simple one: the Spartan-III were to destroy the shipyards’ plasma reactors to bring the production of Covenant ships to a halt and slow its war effort. But this was no mean feat: K7-49 was home to a total of thirty reactors, with plenty of Covenant troops to defend them. And yet, on July 31, the Spartan-III successfully shut down 20 generators. Just as the UNSC had expected, they suffered high losses, but Alpha Company kept working its way through the asteroid. Two days later, only three generators remained operational, rendering the facility unusable. The mission had been a success for the few surviving Spartans, who then attempted to make their extraction. But the Covenant had no intention of allowing them to do so, and they were all killed before reaching their extraction point. Despite suffering 100 % losses, the ONI deemed Operation: PROMETHEUS to be a success, and decided to begin creating a second company of Spartan-III.

And indeed, in 2539, 418 new children were transported to Onyx. Once again, Ambrose and Mendez retained only 300. Beta Company’s training was slightly different, because now both instructors clearly understood the kinds of missions the Spartans could expect. They placed the focus squarely on teamwork. Losing every last member of Alpha Company on Operation: PROMETHEUS had had a profound effect on them, and both hoped that when the next major offensive came, more Spartan-III would come back alive. Their hopes would be answered when, on May 30, 2545, every member of Beta Company returned victorious from Operation: CARTWHEEL. The more specialized training, as well as SPI Mark II armor, may have had a role to play. But the joy experienced by Ambrose and Mendez would not last long: in early July, Beta Company was assigned to its “real” mission–Operation: TORPEDO. And just like for Alpha Company, this was a mission from which there was no coming back. Beta Company was tasked with infiltrating a deuterium-tritium refinery, a substance that the Covenant used as fuel. The refinery was based on Pegasi Delta, on the outer reaches of UNSC-controlled space, which made it a strategic point for the Covenant who could replenish their supplies there before setting off to battle. If the Spartans could manage to destroy the refinery, they would win the Humans valuable time by slowing the advance of Covenant ships, which would need to make a long detour to resupply. On July 3, the whole of Beta Company was deployed onto the planet in individual drop pods. It was a risky approach, and one that cost the lives of nine Spartans. Despite this less than encouraging entrance, the Company managed to group together and form into squads. Progress towards the refinery was, however, no easy task: the Spartans were constantly harassed by concealed snipers, while their positions were bombarded by Seraphs, small Covenant combat aircraft. By the time Beta Company reached the refinery at long last, more than 100 of their number lay dead. Worse still, just when they thought the hardest part was behind them, seven Covenant cruisers appeared in the skies above Pegasi Delta. The UNSC vessels who had remained at a safe distance to evacuate the Spartans sent a warning signal, but by then it was already too late. As they fought swarms of Kig-Yar, the Spartans were attacked from the rear by enemy reinforcements, and were cut to pieces. After fighting for hours, Tom-B292 and Lucy-B091 were the only Spartans left alive. Together, they managed to overload the refinery’s reactors and make a hasty escape. The refinery exploded, killing all remaining Covenant forces which enabled the two Spartans to escape their enemy: after throwing themselves off the top of a cliff, they dived into the ocean of Pegasi Delta and were successfully exfiltrated. In a way, Mendez and Ambrose had succeeded. This time, two of their young proteges had returned from battle.

Once again, the ONI deemed Operation: TORPEDO to be a success, encouraging them to release more funding to create a new company of Spartan-III. This time, the company would have 330 members. Gamma Company, however, would face a somewhat different fate: Tom-B292 and Lucy-B091 were involved in their training, which included all of the children who had not made the final selection for Alpha and Beta company. They were given a huge dose of growth hormones to accelerate their development, so much that by the age of 12, the Spartans of Gamma Company already lived in adult bodies. As Ambrose expected, this sudden transformation came with negative side effects, and it took time for the soldiers to get used to their new bodies. They had a hard time controlling their movement, were extremely clumsy, and something as simple as running was a huge challenge for them. Despite these teething problems, on February 19, 2551, they were ready to receive their augmentations. It flew in the face of the law, but with the permission of the top brass in ONI, Ambrose decided to add new compounds to the substances injected into the Spartans when receiving their augmentations. These illegal drugs would become effective in stressful situations and limit activity in the brain’s frontal lobe. The result was that when a Spartan-III was injured or in a hopeless situation, they would discover enhanced strength, concentration, and accuracy. They’d be harder to kill, in short. But this method had its downside: it meant that the young Spartan-III had to take another drug twice a day to limit its effects. This was a constraint that Ambrose was willing to accept because, now more than ever, he refused to see the Spartans he trained massacred in their hundreds. In the long term, however, these new drugs would have negative effects on the Spartan-III and Gamma Company. Fortunately, they were never deployed on suicide missions on the scale of Operation: PROMETHEUS and Operation: TORPEDO. But they would have other battles to fight, mainly on Onyx itself…

NOBLE AND HEADHUNTERS, TWO ELITE UNITS

Kurt Ambrose was a smart man: when he began training the Spartan-III of Alpha Company, he immediately realized that these soldiers would not be deployed on run-of-the-mill missions. Before Operation: PROMETHEUS was launched, he selected a number of Spartans, including Carter-A259, Emile-A239, Thom-A293, Rosenda-A334 and Jun-A266. In his eyes, these were the best soldiers in the company, and he did not want to sacrifice them. This small group of Spartan-III would receive special treatment: Ambrose would set them up further away on Onyx where they could hone their training, gradually transforming them into elite soldiers, worthy of being a Spartan-II. In 2545, they were joined by two more Spartan-III, this time from Beta Company. Once again, Ambrose preferred to keep them out of Operation: TORPEDO, because they were the best assets in the company. The UNSC would use these assets to form special units dedicated to achieving the kind of tactical objectives that ordinary soldiers could not.

The first unit was named the Headhunters. They worked in pairs and, as the name implies, they were tasked with infiltrating behind enemy lines to hunt down and assassinate specific targets. But their role was not limited to assassination missions: the Headhunters were also deployed ahead of major offensives to sow confusion and disorganize the Covenant troops to make their UNSC comrades’ jobs easier. They used different equipment to the rest of the Spartans: because the Headhunters were infiltration specialists, they were given an improved version of SPI armor and an entire arsenal of stealth weapons equipped with silencers and flash suppressors. Placed under the command of Beta-5 Division, a secret division within the ONI’s Section 3, the Headhunters were a small group: there were six squads, for a total of 12 Spartans, as well as around 15 replacements to take the place of any Headhunters killed on a mission.

The other unit was better known to the general public: Noble Team. Deployed in action from 2545, Noble Team was commanded by Carter-A259, and its members included a number of Spartan-III: Catherine-B320 (more commonly known as Kat), Jun-A266, Emile-A239, Thom-A293 and Rosenda-A344. The latter was a replacement for if Noble Team ever had to conduct a mission against the Insurrectionists. If that was the case, she would take the place of Emile-A239 who had a visceral hatred of the rebels, which could be problematic in certain situations. Noble Team was joined by a Spartan-II, Jorge-052, who brought his experience to the team. Each member of the team had a code name: Carter-A259 was Noble One, Catherine-B320 Noble Two, Jun-A266 Noble Three, Emile-A239 Noble Four, Jorge-052 Noble Five, and Thom-A293 was Noble Six. The Spartan-III were all equipped with Mjolnir armor to maximize their chances of success and survival. Kitted out in this way, the squad was ready for battle.

Noble Team soon got people talking, on Reach and beyond. They engaged the Covenant as much as the Insurrectionists, racking up a series of victories. Each member of the team was a specialist in a particular field, which gave Noble Team a lot of operational flexibility, enabling it to conduct any kind of mission. Particularly worthy of note is that on November 24, 2551, every Spartan on Noble Team was equipped with the new Mjolnir Mk. V armor. This was a prototype version of the Mark V armor, because it would not be until the following year that John-117 would test the armor for the first time. There were, however, no notable differences to the armor given to Noble Team. This new Mjolnir armor came with a major new feature: it was protected by an energy shield similar to that used by Covenant ships and in Sangheili armor.

UNSC scientists had been trying to replicate this Covenant technology for almost 20 years, and prototypes had been around since as early as 2531. But it was in 2536 that they made their major breakthrough, when the body of a dead Kig-Yar was brought back to Dr. Halsey. It was still wearing its shield emitter on its wrist, providing Halsey with an opportunity to study it in depth. She took advantage of the opportunity to equip the Mark V with all her latest discoveries: in addition to the energy shield, which significantly improved the Mjolnir armor, she created an interface so that the armor could house an AI. The AI then became as one with the wearer and could provide all of the information they needed in real time, or even boost their reflexes. Mjolnir Mk. V represented the culmination of nearly 30 years of work for Halsey who, in this version, managed to achieve the vision she had in 2511 when she laid the foundations for the MJOLNIR project.

This futuristic equipment certainly helped Noble Team achieve such success, but it did not make them immortal. On April 22, 2552, Noble team traveled to Fumerole, which the Covenant had just invaded. The Spartans joined the battle with a very specific objective: to board the enemy cruiser above the city, and blow it up with a tactical nuke. Kat-B320, the team’s technophile, was carrying the nuke; Jun-A266 had occupied a strategic position to provide cover with his sniper rifle, while the other Spartans cleared the way. But just as she was getting close to the alien ship, a Banshee descended upon her and dropped a plasma bomb. It detonated in close proximity to Kat, sending her flying through the air before landing heavily on the ground. Severely wounded, she was unable to stand, and therefore unable to complete her mission. With no time to spare, Thom-A293 acted without hesitation: he picked up the nuke, powered on his jet pack, and boarded the cruiser. Unfortunately, he would not have time to exit the ship, which exploded with the Spartan still on board. The mission was a success, but Noble team had lost one of its longstanding members. The team took his loss hard, and they were given some R&R. Back on Reach, Kat-B320 underwent surgery: despite her augmentations, her right arm had been broken beyond repair. It would have to be amputated, to be replaced with a bionic prosthesis. Stationed on Reach, Noble team was champing at the bit waiting to go on operations once again. It was involved in many actions on the planet, including when a group of insurgents managed to hijack a shipment of military equipment. It goes without saying that the rebels did not last long against the Spartans, which brought no end of mirth to the UNSC soldiers who heard about it, mocking the idiots who had thought they could stand up to supersoldiers.

On July 24, 2552, the team had a new Noble Six: this was Spartan-B31217, one of the Spartan-III selected by Ambrose in 2545. B312 had been kept apart from most Spartan combat groups, instead joining the UNSC special forces where he completed a number of solo missions. Before joining Noble Team, he was part of Sabre, an experimental program to design space shoes that could lift off from a planet’s surface. It was in these unusual circumstances that, in April and May 2552, he took part in action on Mamore, during an Insurrectionist rebellion. The new arrival received a cool welcome when he joined the squad, who had still not gotten over the death of Thom-A293. But there was no time to take offense: as soon as Noble Six arrived, the team was back in the briefing room. Colonel Urban Holland had received several worrying reports. The communication relay in Visegrád was no longer responding, and the patrols sent to investigate had never returned. Holland feared that local insurgents were trying to cut communications on Reach, using it as an opportunity to commit acts of violence. And so, the new Noble Team set off for the Visegrád communications relay, which stood around 50 km from the city whose name it shared, ready to face off against Insurrectionists once again. But when they arrived, it was an entirely different enemy that was lying in wait.

17 In Halo Reach, this is the Spartan controlled by players. To make them easier to identify with, Bungie decided not to give them a name. Nevertheless, because it was the same Spartan as that used in multiplayer, players could choose their own gender and change the appearance of their armor.

Chapter 10 – The Fall of Reach

In 2552, the UNSC won a series of major victories against the Covenant, but the situation remained critical: only a dozen or so worlds remained that had not yet been discovered, and therefore destroyed, by the aliens. The UNSC thought it only a matter of time before the Covenant rooted out the last surviving Human planets, but nothing had prepared them for the devastating attack on Reach, Humanity’s biggest colony. The battle, which soon turned into a bloodbath, proved to be a decisive one for Humanity, because while the fighting was taking place, the UNSC made some vital discoveries.

SIGMA OCTANUS IV

On July 17, 2552, Captain Jacob Keyes was in command of a Halberd class destroyer named the UNSC Iroquois when he intercepted a report from an observation post on Sigma Octanus IV. The outpost had spotted an abnormal mass in slipspace, and he immediately realized the possibility that it could be a Covenant ship. The officer in command of the outpost, however, was lacking information and opted not to cry wolf: instead, he compiled an extremely detailed report, the very same one that landed on Keyes’ desk. The Iroquois was at that time patrolling the Sigma Octanus IV sector, but it was alone. The report worried Keyes, who preferred to call in reinforcements. He got lucky, because two frigates–the Gettysburg and the Allegiance–were located not far from his position. While he was waiting for them to arrive, the Covenant appeared: four ships, including a carrier, the largest of Covenant vessels. Keyes was on the front line, because the Gettysburg and the Allegiance were still too distant to attack. This meant that the Iroquois found itself alone against four enemy ships, but Keyes was as ingenious as he was strategic: thanks to a deft series of maneuvers, the Iroquois managed to dodge the guided plasma missiles fired by two Covenant frigates. He wove his way towards the destroyer, colliding with it so that the impact deactivated its shields, and then returned to his original course. The plasma torpedoes which were still pursuing the Iroquois then struck the destroyer. They destroyed its shields and caused severe damage, giving Keyes the opportunity to go in for the kill: he fired a salvo of missiles at the enemy ship, destroying it. The two Covenant frigates froze, incredulous, for several seconds. It was the first time a Human ship had demonstrated such daring tactics and destroyed a Covenant ship so quickly. Once they had recovered from the shock, the Covenant ships set a course for their enemy, but in doing so they walked right into the trap set by Keyes: before ramming the Covenant destroyer the Iroquois had launched a nuclear warhead that detonated as the two frigates passed by. Keys used Sigma Octanus IV’s gravity well to slingshot back around in the direction from which he came, now confronting the two enemy frigates who, following the nuclear blast, were no longer protected by their shields. This meant that the Iroquois was able to finish them off with MAC cannons and missiles. Now finding itself alone, the carrier chose not to engage in combat, instead launching dozens of landing craft that headed for the surface of Sigma Octanus IV. The next phase of the battle, then, would be fought on the ground.

The Covenant troops took the city of Côte d’Azur, the biggest on the planet, but the UNSC launched an immediate response: this Covenant army was there only to pave the way for the invasion of Sigma Octanus IV proper, so it had to be destroyed as quickly as possible. Much to the UNSC’s surprise, the Covenant forces split up and began attacking different regions of the planet rather than consolidating and forming a bridgehead. In actual fact, the aliens were looking for Forerunner artifacts that had been identified by their Luminaries. One of their primary targets was the natural history Museum in Côte d’Azur, where a stone of unknown origin was on display after being discovered by scientists in 2512. The UNSC forces received reinforcements on July 18, in the form of a Spartan-II team. Led by John-117, now known to all as “Master Chief,”18 the Spartans would help defend the planet and investigate what the Covenant were doing there, as the ONI was well aware that the Covenant had not come to the planet just to wage war; they were looking for something.

While the troops on the ground were fighting Covenant forces all over Sigma Octanus IV, hostilities recommenced up in space. Vice-Admiral Stanforth, in command of the UNSC Leviathan, had heard Captain Keyes’ distress call and arrived in the vicinity of the planet with 48 other vessels in tow. The Gettysburg and the Allegiance, who had tried to pursue the Covenant carrier, were now back and ready to defend Sigma Octanus IV. And their presence would prove valuable, because no sooner had they taken up positions than more than 20 Covenant ships emerged from slipspace. The Human armada immediately opened fire, dousing the alien fleet with MAC cannon fire. When the Covenant returned fire, the UNSC Cradle dashed ahead to “intercept” the enemy plasma torpedoes. Its sacrifice bought the UNSC time to perform its standard evasive maneuvers and prepare to fire another series of MAC cannon fire. The two attacks were so fast, and so violent, that the Covenant forces had no time to react: more than half of their ships were destroyed, and only eight were still combat operational.

Down on Sigma Octanus IV, the Spartans were making solid progress and had reached the Côte d’Azur natural history Museum, where the Covenant troops had dug in. They managed to find a way inside via the sewers, planting a nuclear bomb along the way. Once they were inside the museum, however, they came face to face with two Hunters who seemed to be guarding the artifact. John-117 immediately understood what was going on: alongside the relic stood a laser transmitter. The Covenant forces were in the process of sending data from the museum up to the ships in orbit. After defeating the two Lekgolos, the Spartans destroyed the transmitter and made their escape. All of the UNSC forces then withdrew from Côte d’Azur, enabling John-117 to detonate the nuclear warhead planted in the sewers beneath the city: the resulting explosion wiped out every Covenant soldier still in the vicinity.

Up in space, the battle was nearing its conclusion. The Covenant warships had destroyed half of the reinforcements brought by Stanforth, but the UNSC was holding on. While on the ground the Spartans were fighting the two Lekgolos guarding the museum, Captain Keyes spotted a furtive enemy ship that was clearly receiving transmissions from the surface. When it was destroyed, the rest of the Covenant fleet took flight. Sigma Octanus IV was the UNSC’s first major victory since Harvest, and was celebrated as such. What the UNSC did not yet know, however, was that they had another reason to be celebrating: by holding off the Covenant forces, the Humans had prevented their enemy from taking possession of an extremely valuable Forerunner relic, for it contained the coordinates for one of the Halos. The stone, retrieved by Kelly-087, was brought before the ONI, who were perplexed: the secret service was completely unable to understand what it did, nor why the Covenant wanted it so much. In the end, a holographic copy was sent to Catherine Halsey, in the hope that she could learn something from it.

WINTER CONTINGENCY

One month later, Noble Team was sent to the vicinity of the little village of Visegrád, on what appeared to be a routine mission: the local communications relay was no longer transmitting, and the men the UNSC sent to investigate had never returned. All indications pointed to the Insurrectionists having taken over the relay, and the Spartans were sent in to investigate. On approaching Visegrád, Noble Team discovered that all the communications outside the area were being scrambled by a system that they could not manage to identify. This was surprising, as the Insurrectionists were rarely able to use new technologies. After a few minutes spent exploring the area around the village, they found the bodies of two UNSC soldiers presenting clear signs of torture. Noble Team thought that they had found those responsible when they happened upon a few villagers, all of whom were acting strangely. Jorge-052, who spoke their language, then understood that they were not in fact lying in ambush: they were hiding. The people of Visegrád were terrified, because over the past few days strange creatures had been attacking their homes. It was as they approached the relay that the Spartans began to understand what they were dealing with: ten minutes later they encountered a group of Kig-Yar, who were soon accompanied by Unggoy and then some Elites. It was the aliens that had cut the communications relay. After eliminating the Covenant forces, Noble Team reactivated the relay and hurried to contact Colonel Holland to announce the disastrous news: the Covenant had found Reach. The UNSC did not know it, but it was their own forces that had led the Covenant to Reach. During the battle of Sigma Octanus IV, the Covenant had attached a beacon to the Iroquois, and were using it to track the Humans. As Reach was a bastion for the UNSC and the Spartans, the Covenant decided to try a different approach: they first sent down light infantry to infiltrate the planet and sever the communications network to make the invasion easier. The Winter Contingency was then declared: the Covenant had found Reach and the UNSC had to take all necessary precautions to prepare for the planet’s defense and evacuation, as well as the protection or destruction of key data. And so began a terrible race against the clock.

Over the next few days there would be a series of small-scale skirmishes on the surface of Reach, as the main Covenant forces were still far away. On July 26, ONI’s Sword base was attacked by an enemy corvette, but the fortress was defended by Noble Team who repelled the assault. The corvette was then destroyed by the planet’s orbital defenses that brought it down with a Super-MAC shot. After the battle, Noble Team met with Dr. Halsey, who was also on the base: the scientist was shocked to meet several Spartans whom she did not know, but she hid her reaction. She knew that the Spartans had found something in Visegrád, and indeed: Kat-B320 had gotten hold of data from Laszlo Sorvad, an expert in xenoarchaeology. Before he was assassinated by the Covenant, Sorvad had informed Halsey that he had made a major discovery, and she hoped that the data brought back by the Spartans had something to do with it. On the inside, Halsey was filled with rage: she realized that someone had attempted to copy the Spartans, and she immediately began looking for who was responsible. Her search soon settled on her rival, James Ackerson, and over the following days Halsey would hack his systems and learn the truth about the SPARTAN-III project. She also found something even more interesting: proof of a Forerunner complex beneath Castle base, one of the ONI’s biggest installations on Reach. It came as no great surprise to Halsey: she had already been studying another Forerunner artifact herself for a while, this time located beneath Sword base. It was the wreck of a Forerunner ship whose remains were scattered across the continent.

But Noble Team’s victory at Sword base did nothing to slow the escalation of the conflict. While the Covenant were still too few in number down on Reach, the UNSC soon discovered that the initial Covenant forces were stationed in a little-populated sector of the planet. There they had established a “blackout,” inside of which the UNSC had no visibility. Jun-A266 and Noble Six were sent in on a reconnaissance mission. They infiltrated the Covenant positions by the cover of night, and learned that the aliens had already formed a full invasion force, and that they were preparing a landing zone to receive even more ships. This news forced the UNSC to launch an offensive on August 12 when Noble Team, supported by a sizeable contingent, launched an attack on the Covenant-controlled territory. When they destroyed the jammers that were creating the blackout, they roused the Covenant forces who then leaped into battle. Despite the ferocity of the alien attack, Noble Team was able to destroy the alien anti-air defenses as well as a number of installations, enabling the UNSC Grafton frigate to launch an attack. But after firing an opening MAC shot, the Grafton was suddenly brought down. Without any warning, a Covenant supercarrier, the Long Night of Solace, had appeared in the skies above Reach, and dashed any hopes the UNSC had had of victory. Despite being 28 km long, the ship had been able to use its cloaking system to remain hidden within striking distance, and waited until the very last moment to reveal its presence and surprise the Humans, who immediately understood that the battle had taken a dramatic new turn.

In revenge, the UNSC launched Operation: UPPER CUT, and Noble Team was sent to board and hijack a Covenant corvette and take it back to Long Night of Solace as if for resupply. But Jorge-052 and Noble Six were not the only weapons to board the corvette: they carried with them a Shaw-Fujikawa reactor that had been rigged as a bomb. Once they were aboard the supercarrier, the Spartans would be forced to repel several waves of enemies while the reactor was readied to blow. Unfortunately, it had been damaged in the fighting and the remote detonator was no longer operational. Jorge-052 decided to sacrifice himself for the mission, and after pushing Noble Six out into space, he activated the reactor. The chain reaction created a huge rip in space-time, which split the Long Night of Solace in two. The mission was a success.

But the UNSC had no time to celebrate: as the Long Night of Solace crashed into Reach, dozens of Covenant ships emerged from slipspace and fell upon the planet. It was the first major fleet to launch an assault on Reach, but it would not be the last.

OPERATION: RED FLAG

UNSC’s high command was under no illusions: they knew that sooner or later the Covenant would discover the location of Reach, probably before the end of 2552. On July 26 of that same year, two days after the events at Visegrád, Dr. Halsey came to Admiral Stanforth with an idea: to force the Covenant to sign a peace treaty by taking one of their High Prophets hostage. It was an extremely high-risk mission, to be used as a last resort, and one that would mobilize more than 20 Spartans. The UNSC would need to draw a large Covenant ship, such as a carrier, to a colony where the Spartans would board it and use it to break through the defenses of High Charity. Once there, the Spartans could attack the city and take one of the High Prophets hostage in order to force the Covenant to sign a ceasefire, or even a peace treaty. Stanforth liked the plan: if Reach fell, then the Covenant would have all but won the war. Desperate times call for desperate measures, he thought. He took Halsey’s idea to Vice-Admiral Parangosky, who gave it the green light.

But it would only be possible to take control of a capital ship and infiltrate High Charity if the Spartans were accompanied by an AI powerful enough to understand and operate Covenant systems. The good news was that Halsey had just the thing in her new smart AI: Cortana. Cortana was the first thirdgeneration AI and was probably Halsey’s masterpiece. Unlike other AI, who were designed using brain matter taken from a deceased human, Cortana was built using brain tissue taken from Dr. Halsey herself. But because the brain matter used was destroyed when creating an AI’s neural schematics, Halsey had broken the law: she had used equipment from the SPARTAN-II program to create flash clones of herself, and then removed their brains. Immoral it may be, but it had the desired result. Cortana was the most powerful AI ever designed by mankind. It very quickly began assisting Halsey in her research, in particular around the Forerunner artifact located beneath Sword base. This, then, made her the logical choice to accompany the Spartans on their mission. In actual fact, only a fragment of Cortana would go with them; the other would remain with Halsey to continue her research.

The Spartan-II, who had only just returned from Sigma Octanus IV, were immediately remobilized for the operation, and kept out of the war on Reach. They needed to prepare for the assault, and to that end they were all given Mjolnir Mk. V armor. The armor had already been available for a while, but as these Spartans had been deployed on various planets far from Reach, they had not yet been able to try it out. John-117, meanwhile, had to undergo a special procedure: because he was the one who would carry Cortana, his neural interface needed to be updated. This required minor surgery, which was supervised by Cortana herself. The AI wanted to make sure that the interface exactly met her needs, so that once inside the armor, she and the Spartan would become one. On August 29, 2552, the duo was put to the test for the very first time. Bundled up inside his Mark V, Master Chief had to fight ten ODST, cross a minefield and, as a climax, bring down a SkyHawk drone. The SkyHawk was an unintended addition, sent by Colonel Ackerson to disrupt the exercise. But Cortana brought so much to the table that when the drone fired one of its anti-tank missiles, the Spartan was able to parry the projectile with his forearm: Cortana just needed to calculate the speed of the missile and decide where and when to strike it for Master Chief to carry out the action and hit the mark. The test was a resounding success: not only did the recharging shields provide peerless protection, but the coupling between the Spartan and the AI exponentially boosted the supersoldier’s abilities.

While the Spartans were getting ready, the UNSC was working on the refitting of the Pillar of Autumn, Captain Keyes’ new command. The old Halcyon class cruiser had been chosen by Cortana herself to carry the Spartans towards the Covenant ship they were to board. It had its armor reinforced, its reactors replaced, and its weaponry bolstered. After weeks of work, the Autumn was once again ready for battle. A battle it would not see, as the ONI preferred to keep it out of the conflict. Just like the Spartan-II, the Pillar of Autumn was being reserved for one single purpose: Operation: RED FLAG. But that operation was hanging by a thread. The UNSC had missed an opportunity to capture a Covenant carrier during Operation: UPPER CUT, in which two members of Spartan Team had destroyed the Long Night of Solace. On August 30, 2552, Operation: RED FLAG was scrapped when a new fleet appeared within striking distance of Reach. This was the Fleet of Particular Justice, whose supreme commander was Thel ’Vadamee. ’Vadamee had hundreds of ships at his command, in the biggest war fleet ever assembled against Humanity. The vice was closing around Reach, and within days the planet would be lost.

THE FALL OF REACH

Even before the arrival of ’Vadamee’s fleet, the situation on Reach was not looking good. Noble Team, in particular, had suffered many losses. Jorge-052, but also Catherine-B320. By August 29, only four of the team remained. Noble Six, accompanied by a number of ODST, was sent to secure a landing zone near Sword base which had fallen into enemy hands. Their orders were clear: they had to destroy the facility before the Covenant got their hands on critical data. But the mission actually concealed another: they had been sent to find Dr. Halsey.

The scientist showed them the remains of a Forerunner ship that she had been studying for years, and begged them to protect the building the ONI had erected nearby while she finished extracting her data. After dealing with a few Covenant troops that assaulted the complex, Carter-A259, Emile-A239, June-A266 and Noble Six made their way back to Halsey. There, she gave them the fragment of Cortana that she had kept, and that had been analyzing the Forerunner ship. The AI had learned all it could about the ship, and it was now in possession of vital information. Now, their mission was a simple one: to make it to the Pillar of Autumn so that both fragments of Cortana could be reunited. This mission would be Noble Team’s last. On August 30, Carter-A259, Emile-A239 and Spartan-B312 left Sword on board a Pelican, while Jun-A266 set off with Halsey back to Castle. Cortana was given to Noble Six, just as she had requested. The three Spartan-III immediately set off Aszod demolition yard, where they found the Pillar of Autumn. But their journey was a hazardous one, and Carter-A259 would be fatally wounded. Knowing that he would not survive, he ordered Noble Four and Noble Six to bail out before crashing the Pelican into a Covenant Scarab. The path was now clear, but Aszod was still a long way off.

In space, the UNSC bravely engaged the Fleet of Particular Justice, which had now been joined by all of the other Covenant ships already in space around Reach. Admiral Roland Freemont ordered all UNSC ships in the vicinity to come and defend Reach, and they heeded the call. The Pillar of Autumn, which had up until now been kept out of reach of the Covenant, also had to enter the theater of operations. In total some 150 ships, supported by the Super-MAC cannons on the orbital defense stations, would do battle with the alien armada. Protected behind Reach’s defenses, the UNSC fleet survived an initial salvo of Covenant fire, issuing an immediate response: all of the ships as well as the 20 Super-MAC cannons unleashed a steady hail of fire, managing to wipe out over ten Covenant ships. But they would not wait long for the Covenant’s retort. And it was lethally ingenious. A supercarrier used its ventral cannon to destroy the UNSC Minotaur, in an unusual strike whose violence and effectiveness shocked the Human commanders. No sooner had they realized what had happened than a swarm of plasma projectiles ripped into them, decimating more than 50 ships. That was when the Covenant decided to divide its forces: some set a course for the orbital platforms, while others engaged the remaining UNSC ships. ’Vadamee moved his pieces methodically and with an implacable precision, taking out one line of the Human defense after another.

Down on reach, things weren’t going much better. The Covenant fleet had launched countless landing craft at the planet, all filled with fresh troops ready for action. They targeted Reach’s strategic installations, beginning with the generators for the planet’s Super-MAC cannons. Aboard the Pillar of Autumn, the Spartan-II had orders to defend the planet, and boarded their Pelicans. They split into two teams: Blue Team, commanded by Master Chief, and Red Team, led by Frederic-104. The two squads set off in different directions: the enemy was now all over the planet and the supersoldiers were inundated with competing priority objectives. Red Team had to defend the Super-MAC generators at all costs, which is why they set off with most of the available Spartan-II. But while their Pelican was traveling down to the surface, the pilot was killed by enemy fire: the Spartans tried to bail out, but the landing proved fatal for four of them. Six more of their number were injured before they had fired even a single shot. Arriving within range of the generator they were tasked with defending, Frederic-104 took stock of the situation and decided to divide his team into four squads. The first would be tasked with protecting the generator; the second with attacking a Covenant encampment; the third, flying to the rescue of Admiral Whitecomb; and the final team, containing the injured and a handful of Marines saved by the Spartans, was to head towards Castle and secure the area. But the Spartans were too few in number, and before long they were dying in combat one after another. The squad protecting the generator was wiped out when, up in the sky, three Covenant corvettes were taken out by the MAC cannon of the UNSC Majestic. The debris rained down on the Spartans’ positions, who had no time to seek cover. Meanwhile, Frederic-104, Kelly-087 and Joshua-029 were faring better: they had managed to destroy the fortified Covenant position and the cruiser stationed above it, but Joshua-029 was missing in action, and the nuclear bomb detonated by Frederic-104 to bring down the cruiser set the entire area ablaze, leaving no chance of finding the Spartan alive. In line with Frederic-104’s orders, Li-008, Grace-093 and Anton-044 found Admiral Whitecomb, but while the original plan had been to bring him back to the generators, that had to change because the area was no longer secure. After a quick discussion with Frederic-104, the three Spartans decided to hold fast at Camp Independence. Hidden up in the Highlands at the back of a vast cavern, the Camp was hard to spot, hard to reach, easy to defend. They may as well hole up there. The remaining team had made it to Castle. When they arrived, William-043, Vinh-030 and Isaac-039 found Dr. Halsey, who began treating the injured; before long they were joined by Frederic-104 and Kelly-087 who, out of better options, had decided to fall back to the base. They didn’t really have a choice, because Kelly-087 was in a sorry state: she had been hit by several plasma rounds, and it was a miracle she was still standing. She owed her survival to the brains of Dr. Halsey, who cloned one of her lungs as well as her liver to replace the damaged organs.

On the other side of the planet, Blue Team was engaged on a very different mission. They had been asked to destroy a small ONI ship, the Circumference, as a matter of the utmost urgency. The ship was currently moored at Gamma station, and orbital facility that the Covenant had recently captured. The Circumference had been involved in many missions for the secret service, who had neglected to apply the Cole Protocol. Indeed, the ship hosted a large amount of critical intelligence, and under no circumstances could it be allowed to fall into Covenant hands. For the time being, the UNSC had gotten lucky: the ship’s tactical camouflage was active, and the aliens had not spotted it. Not yet, at least. John-117, Linda-058 and James-005 boarded Gamma station and found several soldiers, including Avery Johnson, holed up there. Together they were able to destroy the Circumference and make their escape, but they were soon caught by Covenant forces, who fired on their transporter. Linda-058 was severely wounded, and James-005 was ejected into space. When he arrived on the Pillar of Autumn, Master Chief handed his friend’s body over to the ship’s doctors, who declared her clinically dead: she had taken several hits of focused plasma fire which had passed through her body and carbonized many of her bones. They nevertheless decided to place her in a cryo module, which stabilized her condition: perhaps someone with the right knowledge and equipment would be able to save her at a later date.

The Pillar of Autumn set a course for Aszod, an arid uninhabited region, known only for its ship graveyard. The demolition yard had not yet drawn the attention of the Covenant forces, leaving the Autumn free to land and moor while waiting for Noble Team to arrive. Arrive they did before too long, but they were being tracked closely by the Covenant, who deployed troops between Noble Team and the Autumn. So while the Spartans were riding flat out towards the shipyard, Scarabs were let loose on their path. They managed to avoid them and continued on their way, dodging incoming plasma fire. As they were approaching the RDV point, Keyes was unable to reach them: the Covenant were already there, and if he were to send a Pelican it would immediately be shot down. They needed to make Cortana’s transfer secure at all costs, but their options were limited. Fortunately, Aszod was equipped with a mass driver (a small magnetic acceleration cannon) which was used to break up ships in the yard. Emile-A239 climbed inside and managed to take down the many Covenant Phantoms pouring into the area. On the ground, Noble Six was tasked with singlehandedly securing a landing platform, but he was outnumbered by the Covenant. For many a long minute, the two Spartan-III repelled wave after wave of aliens attacking Aszod. Between two attack waves, Keyes climbed aboard a Pelican and flew towards the platform. While Emile-A239 kept the enemy transports at bay, Noble Six finally managed to hand Cortana over to Keyes, who invited him to go with him. But the Spartan refused. He’d rather stay on Reach and fight, even if it meant his death. Captain Keyes sighed, but did not argue. While he hurried back to the Pillar of Autumn, Covenant forces kept up the attacks: a Phantom hovered over the mass driver and two Elites killed Emile-A239. Before they reached him, Noble Four had time to draw his shotgun and take out one of the two Sangheili. But while he was trying to exit the cannon’s control cabin, the second Elite stabbed him from behind with its energy sword. In one final flourish of rage, Emile-A239 turned around and drove his favorite knife straight into his murderer’s throat, taking him down with him. Noble Six had no time to mourn his friend’s fate. The Phantom that had carried the two Elites to the cannon came from a Covenant cruiser that had just appeared in the skies above Aszod. Keyes knew that the ship would be trying to destroy the Autumn before it could take off. He then ordered the Spartan to regain control of the mass driver and cover the ship’s escape. This was the last official order that Noble Six would receive: after taking out all of the Covenant forces that stood between himself and the cannon, he pulled off the perfect shot, hitting the cruiser in its ventral cannon just as it was itself preparing to fire. The chain reaction destroyed the cruiser, enabling the Autumn to take off and flee from Reach. Noble Six would die shortly thereafter, overwhelmed by wave after wave of enemies who were gradually gaining control of the yard.

The Pillar of Autumn, was not out of the woods yet: the Fleet of Particular Justice had decimated the UNSC fleet, and the few remaining ships still able to fly opted to sound the retreat. As it left Reach’s atmosphere, the Autumn found itself all alone and left to face the alien armada. Unwilling to engage in any combat, Keyes asked Cortana to calculate a random vector, as demanded by the Cole Protocol. The AI, however, did not carry out the order to the letter. Using the Forerunner data obtained while she was studying the artifact hidden beneath Sword base, she had been able to decode the symbols on the stone brought from Côte d’Azur: they provided the coordinates of a major Forerunner installation. Without knowing it, Cortana had just led the UNSC to Installation 04, the first Halo to be discovered by mankind. On Reach, a few sparse pockets of resistance kept up the fight for several days, but August 30, 2552 would go down in history as the date used to mark the end of the battle, and the fall of Reach. For many, it also marked the end of the Spartans, with the vast majority of Spartan-II and Spartan-III still active in 2552 meeting their end on the planet. Reach had been their home, and now it was their final resting place.

18  John-117’s official rank is Master Chief Petty Officer.

Chapter 11 – War of the Halo

A few weeks after the Fall of Reach, Humanity encountered its first Halo. The Pillar of Autumn, tailed by several Covenant ships, was forced to execute an emergency landing on the ringworld, an event that triggered the start of the Battle for Installation 04. It was during this battle that the Humans would come to learn more about the Forerunners, and about another terrible menace lying heavily over the whole galaxy. Because in the bowels of the fortress world, creatures that were thought to have long since disappeared were lying in slumber.

HALO: TURNING POINT IN THE WAR

On September 19, 2552, after three weeks spent traveling through slipspace, the Pillar of Autumn emerged into the Soell system, in the sector of a planet named Threshold. As it approached the gas giant, the crew discovered a gigantic ringworld some 10,000 km in diameter. It was immediately obvious that the structure was of no natural origin. While its inner surface was similar to the landscapes found on planet Earth, with oceans and continents, the outer surface of the ring seemed to be made of metal. Captain Keyes and Cortana had no time to talk it through: the Covenant forces had tracked them from Reach, and the Autumn was now under attack from a contingent from the Fleet of Particular Justice. In truth, the Covenant was just as surprised as the Humans to have found the Halo. The Hierarchs had been prophesizing its discovery for centuries, but never before had any members of the Covenant laid eyes on one of the Halos. They saw the presence of Humans in the vicinity of the Halo as a sacrilege, which only served to strengthen Thel ’Vadamee’s determination to destroy UNSC forces as soon as he could. The Pillar of Autumn, however, would not be making that an easy job, and managed to destroy a number of Covenant ships on its way to the Halo. It was badly beaten up, though, and the ship was losing its advance on the Covenant, who managed to board it. Keyes was then forced to activate the Cole Protocol: he brought Master Chief out of cryosleep, entrusted him with Cortana and, as fighting broke out on the decks of the ship, the crew and soldiers present on the Autumn began boarding the evacuation pods and leaving the ship for the surface of the Halo. The ship itself crashed some distance away on the Halo, leaving the Humans stuck: they were poorly equipped and scattered around the Halo. They would have to organize their defenses as quickly as they could, but their small number forced them to begin a campaign of guerrilla warfare. While exploring the Halo, Cortana learned more of its history and discovered that it was actually a weapon. She also learned more about the Forerunners and, more importantly still, the Flood. The installation had also served as a site for studying the Flood, and specimens still remained sealed in a quarantine zone, which Covenant forces then invaded. This was how the evil that was the Flood came to be freed and began spreading rapidly around the Halo, much to the consternation of 343 Guilty Spark, the local Monitor. The ancilla told Master Chief of his status as a Reclaimer, and that the only way to destroy the Flood was to activate the Halo, but Cortana stopped the Spartan from completing this course of action, telling him that it would wipe out all forms of life in the galaxy. The battle, then being fought between the Covenant and the UNSC, intensified as the Flood began engaging in combat, a turn of events that caused the Halo’s many Sentinels to awaken. During the conflict, Captain Keyes was captured by the Flood, which used his body and that of a number of other prisoners to create the seed of a Gravemind. But John-117 had dire need of Captain Keyes if his plan was to work: he wanted to blow up the Pillar of Autumn in order to neutralize the Halo, render it useless to the Covenant, and destroy the Flood all in one fell swoop. And even with 343 Guilty Spark trying to stop him, Master Chief once again completed his mission: he caused the Autumn’s reactors to overload before making haste to the safety of a Longsword. Before the ring was blown to pieces, he managed to flee a sufficient distance to escape the explosion. A number of Covenant ships still in orbit were not so lucky. John-117 and Cortana were finally safe.

However, they were stranded far from any Human presence, and their fighter was not able to travel through slipspace. Cortana used the Longsword’s equipment to scan the surroundings in search of a solution. Her first find was three UNSC cryosleep chambers: they had been ejected from the Pillar of Autumn when it was boarded by the Covenant, as the Cole Protocol dictated. Master Chief decided to retrieve them, while Cortana continued probing the surrounding space. At last she detected a Pelican floating among the debris from the Halo. Once on board, the Spartan was surprised to find Sergeant Johnson along with three of his men. Together they hatched an audacious plan: to sneak up on a ship from the Fleet of Particular Justice and seize control before traveling back to a Human planet. It would not be wise to head for Earth in light of the prevailing circumstances, so the group decided to set a course for Reach once they had seized their new ride. They set their sights on the Ascendant Justice, the biggest Covenant ship still in the sector. The carrier had managed to escape the blast from the Halo by sheltering behind Threshold. Thanks to Master Chief and Cortana, the small squad managed to board the ship and gain the executive bridge. After a brutal firefight, the Ascendant Justice was theirs. And so they set a course for Reach, hoping to find survivors there. While the carrier sailed through slipspace, John-117 decided to inspect the cryosleep chambers he had rescued: the first two contained the bodies of soldiers who had not survived the ejection into space. But the last one contained Linda-058. His fellow Spartan was still in critical condition, but the cryosleep had done its job, as her vitals were now stable. With a bit of luck, she might just be saved.

On September 23, 2552, the Ascendant Justice arrived within range of Reach, and just as Master Chief had suspected, the planet had been almost entirely glassed and most Covenant forces had left the area. The UNSC, thinking the planet was lost, had not even tried to send reinforcements: they were alone. Well, not exactly. Cortana picked up a distress signal that John-117 instinctively recognized: it was from Spartans who were still alive down on the surface of Reach. He decided to go to their rescue, and was reunited with three of his friends: Anton-044, Grace-093 and Li-008, who were still down there with Admiral Whitecomb. Together, the four Spartans detonated a Nova bomb, one of the UNSC’s latest prototype nukes. Such was its power that when it went off, nothing and no-one on Reach would be safe. It was set to explode in 20 hours, which gave the Spartans some narrow room for maneuver. So it was that they decided to set off in search of Red Team. Or at least, what was left of it. Because Frederic-104 and the rest had not been sitting twiddling their thumbs for the past three weeks. Thanks to the files she had obtained after hacking Ackerson’s computers, Halsey had learned of another Forerunner facility beneath Menachite Mountain, upon which Castle base had been built. She had set off with the Spartans to explore the complex and found at its center a strange crystal. But their activities drew the attention of the Covenant forces, and in a series of firefights, Vinh-030 and Isaac-039 were killed. Stuck in a dead end, the small group was saved by Master Chief and his comrades, but the aliens were returning in force: against seven Spartans, close to 1000 Covenant troops were pouring through the installation’s corridors. The resulting battle was characterized by extreme violence, and Kelly-087 was hit several times while trying to protect Dr. Halsey. Cornered, the Spartans opted to beat a retreat and boarded a Covenant dropship. They reached orbit above the planet, where they were supposed to rendezvous with Cortana.

But while the Spartans were doing battle on Reach, Cortana had taken the Ascendant Justice into the Oort Cloud on the edge of the Epsilon Eridani system, from where she intercepted waves of Covenant comms. Now able to analyze and translate them, Cortana learned that the aliens had amassed a fleet to attack an unknown Human planet: all they knew was that it was home to a Forerunner artifact. Their discovery was an alarming one, because the planet in question was Earth. The fleet had to be stopped before it could start its journey. Cortana then set off back to Reach. While in orbit, she explored the space battlefield: she was looking for an operational vessel that she could merge with the Ascendant Justice so that it could draw on the additional energy supply. Amidst the graveyard of broken ships, she found one that was still working, the Gettysburg. Thanks to the Huragoks on the Covenant carrier, she was able to weld the two ships together in no time at all. Whitecomb, Halsey, the Spartans, and the soldiers then came aboard, and while they were preparing to leave a small Covenant fleet appeared. They engaged it in combat before being trapped in a subspace bubble, opened by Halsey’s crystal. This relic, which seemed impenetrable to modern science, was an extremely powerful object: the Forerunners had learned how to harness its power, and it enabled them to travel through slipspace with unrivaled precision. But for now, it was hindering the Ascendant Justice, which was trapped in an enclosed space with 14 enemy ships. Battle raged, but the Covenant carrier’s power was overwhelming, and it struck down a number of enemy ships. It did not escape unscathed, though, taking hits that included damage to the reactor’s power conduit. To repair it, John-117, Anton-044, Li-008 and a marine named Polaski boarded a shuttle and attempted a repair mission, but just when they were finishing off their work, a plasma torpedo hit their vessel. All were killed apart from Master Chief, who found himself knocked unconscious. Despite it all, he was brought back aboard and the Ascendant Justice continued the fight. It destroyed two more enemy ships before managing to return to normal space. When he awoke, Master Chief learned that they were now in the Eridani system, close to the asteroid belt where he had conducted his first mission as a Spartan. He found out that the Covenant forces were regrouping around the Unyielding Hierophant, a mobile combat station that was traveling towards Earth with an accompaniment of 500 Covenant ships. But the Ascendant Justice had taken on too much damage to consider attacking such a devastating fleet. They hoped to find a solution on Eridanus Secundus, the old Insurrectionist base, and after helping the Insurrectionists deal with a number of Covenant ships that had been harassing the station, they were towed into the base. Meanwhile, Master Chief had been talking to Dr. Halsey, who informed him that Johnson was once an Orion supersoldier, and that like many of those men, the augmentations he had received had degraded his nervous system. What was a handicap had now turned into an advantage, because on the Halo the Flood had been unable to take over his body. Perhaps this situation contained the seeds of a solution to fight the Flood, if ever it resurfaced.

The rebels showed some goodwill towards their saviors, and together they repaired the Ascendant Justice which had now moored on Eridanus Secundus. Halsey used this time to operate on Linda-058, replacing a number of her organs. In just a few days, she was back on her feet and had joined the other Spartans who, along with Admiral Whitecomb, were preparing to launch Operation: FIRST STRIKE.

If they were to stop the Covenant armada, there was only a single solution: to destroy the Unyielding Hierophant. To do so, the Spartans would have to infiltrate the station and overload its reactors which, when they detonated, would destroy the station and any ships in its vicinity. While they were preparing, Kelly-087 left to find Halsey, who could treat her. But the doctor had an entirely different plan: during the operation, she took advantage of the fact that the Spartan was sleeping to place her in a cryosleep module and sneak her on board an Insurrectionist ship. With only Kelly-087 for company, she left Eridanus Secundus without telling a soul. Taken by surprise, the other Spartans had no time to run after her: they had a mission to complete. The Gettysburg and the Ascendant Justice were now separate ships once again, and together they set off to find the Covenant armada.

When they got there, Operation: FIRST STRIKE went almost exactly according to plan: the Spartans boarded the Unyielding Hierophant and reached the heart of the station, but it had not been an easy task. They found that the entirety of the army assembled by the Covenant was made up of Jiralhanae. Strangely, the Elites, who usually led Covenant armies, were nowhere to be seen. The Humans could not have known, but within the Covenant, the High Prophet of Truth was making moves of his own: he fully intended to be rid of the Sangheili and started putting his plans into motion. The Brutes were not as intelligent as the Elites, but they boasted devastating combat strength and the Spartans were soon struggling against the hundreds of Jiralhanae falling upon them. When they had almost reached the reactor room, Grace-093 was killed, but the Spartans nevertheless managed to achieve their objective. They overloaded the station’s reactors and made their escape on stolen Banshees. They sped towards the Gettysburg, and when they climbed aboard, they were stunned to see the Ascendant Justice rushing towards the Unyielding Hierophant. On board, Admiral Whitecomb had sent a message to the Covenant: he had with him a Forerunner crystal. The aliens were enraged, because the crystal was a particularly valuable relic, and one that must be brought back to the Hierarchs at all costs. The entire fleet had set a course for the Ascendant Justice, falling into Whitecomb’s trap: when the station exploded, every Covenant ship within range of the explosion was consumed in flames. Through his sacrifice, the admiral had wiped out an entire, and massive, enemy fleet. Finding themselves alone, John-117, Frederic-104, Linda-058, William-043 and Sergeant Johnson set a course for Earth aboard the Gettysburg. They were in possession of vital information: the Covenant now knew Earth’s coordinates and while they did not yet know that it was the cradle of Humanity, sooner or later they would invade the Sol system. Earth’s days were now numbered.

THEL ’VADAMEE: FALLEN FROM GRACE

On the other side of the galaxy, while the scattered remnants of the Halo were still burning, the Covenant was faltering. They had found one of the sacred ringworlds for the first time in their millennia-old history, and it had been destroyed before their eyes. It was absolutely unacceptable, and the High Prophets hastened to find a scapegoat. They pointed the finger at the supreme commander of the Fleet of Particular Justice: Thel ’Vadamee. Militarily gifted, a respected leader, and a devout believer, ’Vadamee was nevertheless subjected to ice cold justice when he was brought before the High Council on High Charity. The council was clamoring for his death, finding him guilty of heresy. ’Vadamee was a believer, but a pragmatic one, and he had been forced to focus on a much bigger problem: the Flood had invaded a number of his ships and spread across the Halo. But the High Council would hear nothing of his excuses. ’Vadamee would be publicly tortured before being brought before the Prophet of Truth, and the San’Shyuum would make him a new Arbiter.

The Prophet of Truth, though, had plans of his own: he wanted to send the Arbiter, accompanied by a small detachment of Sangheili, to Threshold, the gas giant in whose orbit the Halo had been. During the battle, the Covenant had discovered a strange platform floating in the planet’s atmosphere. Thinking that the structure was likely of Forerunner origin, the Prophet of Stewardship sent in a task force against ’Vadamee’s advice. It was a Sangheili by the name of Sesa ’Refunee that led the mission, and the mission would save his life because, unlike many of his comrades, he would not be on the Halo when it was destroyed by Master Chief. It would also be how he came to meet 343 Guilty Spark. The Monitor had fled the explosion to seek refuge on the old gas mine, where he encountered ’Refunee’s troops. Brought before the Elite, he saw that the Covenant was very wrong indeed about the role of the Halos. He decided to enlighten them. Taken aback, ’Refunee realized that the San’Shyuum had been lying for centuries, and decided to cut communications with the Covenant. After taking some time to think, he broadcast a series of messages denouncing the Hierarch’s lies, causing turmoil back on High Charity. Of course, the High Prophets caught wind of his accusations, and they could not risk seeing their authority defied by a small band of soldiers. And so they denounced them as heretics and they were condemned to death by the High Council. Carrying out the sentence fell to the Arbiter, who was given the mission of assassinating ’Refunee and all his followers.

’Vadamee landed on the gas mine with a team of Elites, and while he was completing his mission he discovered that part of the facility had been infected by the Flood. The station contained a number of research labs where living specimens had been preserved. In an attempt to slow the intruders’ advance, ’Refunee didn’t think twice before releasing the creatures. When the Arbiter tracked him down, ’Refunee revealed what he had learned from 343 Guilty Spark, but before he had finished speaking, he opened fire. The fight didn’t last long: the Arbiter killed ’Refunee and, to kill off the Flood, set the station on a course into Threshold. But although his mission had been a success, ’Vadamee was racked with doubt. With his faith now called into question, he returned to High Charity and decided to trust the Hierarchs.

GHOSTS OF ONYX

On the other side of the galaxy, most of the Spartan-III of Gamma Company were still stationed on Onyx. Still under the command of Lieutenant Kurt Ambrose, they continued to train and conducted a series of minor reconnaissance missions across the planet. This was what led the Katana, Saber, and Gladius teams to be attacked by mysterious drones that they had never before encountered. It was clear that the drones were not of Covenant origin, but they boasted a firepower that far exceeded the UNSC’s conventional weapons. In fact, these were Forerunner Sentinels that had awoken following the destruction of Halo Alpha. Gladius Team was wiped out, and with Katana no longer responding to communications, Saber decided to beat a hasty retreat back to base. Ambrose decided to gather all of the Spartan-III present together and enter Zone 67, where Katana Team had disappeared. While they were preparing to leave, an unknown vessel landed nearby: on board were Catherine Halsey and Kelly-087. Halsey had learned of Onyx by digging through the files she had stolen from Ackerson, and decided to travel to the planet with the Spartan-II in tow. Kidnapping a Spartan was a serious infraction, because she had taken her away from her primary role without the UNSC’s permission. In these very unusual times, with the Covenant heading for Earth, it was a still more serious offense.

The arrival of Kelly-087 came as a relief for Ambrose and the Spartan-III, because she quickly found a way to take out the Sentinels that were attacking them, proving that they could be destroyed if the right tactics were used. The small group then decided to head into Zone 67 in an effort not just to find the missing Spartans, but also, and especially, because it was home to one of the ONI’s rare Slipspace COM launchers, an extremely valuable piece of kit that could send small probes through slipspace to deliver messages across the galaxy in a matter of days. Officially, only Reach and Earth had access to such communication tools, but Onyx’s special status had afforded it certain advantages. It was the only way to quickly get word to the UNSC so that they could send reinforcements. The Spartans made it to the launcher, enabling Halsey to send a distress signal, but that was not all: she used the opportunity to hack Endless Summer, the AI that ran the various bases on Onyx, and obtained important information. The information brought her to understand that the planet was of Forerunner origin, and that it was in fact a shield world. This meant that within Onyx there was a bounty of Forerunner technology, which was an extremely enticing opportunity for Halsey. She decided to contact Admiral Terrence Hood, Chief of Naval Operations back on Earth, asking him to dispatch some Spartan-II to Onyx without delay, in order to secure the Forerunner artifacts she was determined to find. A short while later, the little black planet would be home to the biggest concentration of Spartans the galaxy had ever seen.

Chapter 12 – War’s End

Once Halo Alpha had been destroyed by John-117 and Cortana, events began to pick up pace. The Covenant had finally located Earth, but the sudden appearance of the Flood, as well as the eruption of a civil war, had weakened the alliance. The UNSC’s remaining forces pounced on this weakness: Master Chief, rallying the hopes of Human soldiers wherever he went, won a series of decisive victories which, step by step, led to the outcome nobody had dared dream of. The Covenant would begin to fall apart, in the process losing the war they had been waging against Humanity for almost 30 years now.

INVASION OF EARTH

Still on board the Gettysburg, the Spartans and Sergeant Johnson eventually reached Earth and sounded the alarm: the Covenant now knew the planet’s location. They may not yet know exactly which planet was Earth, but that was only a matter of time. And time was something that the UNSC now had, thanks to the Spartans. Earth’s defenses were mobilized and a vast fleet assembled around the planet, which was also guarded by the biggest orbital defense station network. Even for an adversary such as the Covenant, taking Earth would not be easy.

Admiral Hood was happy to see the Spartans arrive, including the illustrious John-117. There may only be four of them, but their presence raised the morale of the troops and their legendary combat effectiveness could tip the balance in their favor. Initially they were sent to Cairo Station, one of the orbital defense stations, where they were kitted out with the new Mjolnir Mk. VI armor. This was a more advanced version of the Mark V: its shield was more durable, and it featured an automatic biochemical foam injection system. This foam, traditionally used as a spray to provide first aid to injured soldiers, closed wounds, accelerated clotting, and could even hold organs in place in cases of serious injury. The Mark VI applied the foam itself, enabling the wearer to receive immediate treatment and maximizing their chances of survival. More than a mere iterative improvement, Mjolnir Mark VI armor would prove decisive to the war effort, especially during the defense of Earth.

On October 20, the Covenant arrived. Ten days earlier, they had been detected near Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons. When they were spotted near Io, Master Chief was on Cairo Station, accompanied by Sergeant Johnson. They were both decorated in recognition of their actions on Halo Alpha and the Unyielding Hierophant. By their side was another individual: Miranda Keyes, the daughter of Captain Keyes and Catherine Halsey. Halsey had been involved in a turbulent relationship with the captain, but their very different temperaments had led to an inevitable separation. A distant mother, Halsey had watched her daughter grow up from afar, entering the same career as her father. In 2552, she was the captain of a frigate and commanded her own ship, the In Amber Clad. Admiral Hood gave her a posthumous decoration for her father, and no sooner had he thanked Cortana than the alert was sounded: the invasion was underway. To the UNSC’s great surprise, the Covenant had not shown up in force. There were a dozen or so ships, no more. But Admiral Hood was wary. They had identified a large number of small landing ships, which were all heading towards the orbital defense stations. They were attempting to board. He ordered Master Chief to defend Cairo Station, while the other Spartans were sent down to Earth to protect a number of strategic objectives. While the UNSC was preparing for battle, the first station was destroyed, and the explosion had come from inside. Cortana understood that the Covenant was boarding stations to destroy them with bombs from the inside to rob Earth of its Super-MAC protection. John-117 traveled across the station, repelling several waves of enemies before finding the bomb intended to blow up Cairo Station. Unfortunately, a second station was then destroyed and two enemy carriers managed to break through on a direct course for Earth. The Spartan calculated his strike and launched himself into space, grabbing the bomb along the way: he landed on one of the cruisers and planted the bomb, before jetting off towards the In Amber Clad. The carrier was destroyed, depriving the already small Covenant force of one of its primary assets.

The Battle of Earth began in earnest when another carrier, the Solemn Penance, landed on the planet. A wave of landing ships had used the opening to follow it down and land assault troops all over the planet. Most of their forces, though, congregated around New Mombasa, in Kenya. This was where the Solemn Penance had landed. On board the carrier was the Prophet of Regret. The Hierarch had been plotting against Truth and Pity for years by this point, and when he learned that Earth was home to a powerful artifact, he headed straight there, hoping to embark upon the Great Journey without the other High Prophets. But in his haste, he had never imagined that his course would take him to Humanity’s homeworld, and that he would be exposed to such danger. And the top threat, of course, was Master Chief. Over the course of the war, the Spartans had earned a reputation among the Covenant: the Sangheili referred to them as the Demons, a word that was, in their language, tinged with disgust, fear, and respect. The whole Covenant had learned to fear the Demons, and the Spartan leader in particular, the most renowned of them all. When the Prophet of Regret learned that Master Chief was in New Mombasa and that he was currently wiping out all Covenant forces that lay between him and the Solemn Penance, the Hierarch panicked, and decided to flee. Once his ship was hovering just above the city, it created a breach in slipspace into which he fled, closely followed by the In Amber Clad. When the breach closed, it created a huge energy wave that devastated the city and brought down its space elevator. The elevator’s column, several kilometers long, crashed down into the Kenyan savanna, causing catastrophic damage.

Emerging from Slipspace, the crew aboard the In Amber Clad were horrified: what they saw was another Halo. The Prophet of Regret had discovered the Halo’s location a short time earlier, and uncertain of which course of action to take, used it to seek refuge. But in doing so, he had led the UNSC right to it. Up until that point, Humanity had believed that Halo Alpha, destroyed by Master Chief, was the only weapon of its kind. But now, they were forced to see the truth: there were probably a number of Halos in existence, scattered around the galaxy. And so the battle began down on the Halo, led by John-117. After making his way through several ancient Forerunner structures, he found Regret deep inside a Forerunner temple. It would be there that the Hierarch met his end at the hands of Master Chief. But there was no time to celebrate, because High Charity, the Covenant’s holy city, was emerging from slipspace accompanied by an infinite fleet of warships. Not even on Reach had the Covenant deployed such a vast force. The Covenant had already lost one Halo, and they had no intention of ceding this one to the Humans. Fleeing the bombardments, Master Chief threw himself into the sea, only just avoiding a destroyer’s plasma ray. But he had jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire: as he dived deeper into the Halo’s waters, he was captured by a Gravemind. The Flood had been contained on the Halo in order to be studied, but it had escaped confinement hundreds of years ago. It had infected vast expanses of the structure, and grown strong enough to form a new central intelligence. Like others of its kind, this Gravemind carried the memories and knowledge of its predecessors, and it had every intention of leading their plans to fruition and ruling the galaxy. The nightmare was only just beginning.

THE SHIELD WORLD

Back on Earth, Frederic-104, Linda-058 and William-043 were keeping up the fight. After leaving Cairo Station, they were deployed to a number of theaters of operations: Antarctica, Yucatan and Cuba. Havana was under Covenant attack because it was home to one of the planet’s many space elevators. The aliens had landed in force and captured the city. In very little time, they got hold of several nuclear warheads stolen from the Humans, and used the space elevator to send the bombs up to their allies. On November 3, 2552, the three Spartans were called in. They boarded one of the Covenant destroyers, armed the bombs that lay inside, and made their escape. The ship was destroyed, but the space elevator was also caught in the explosion: it collapsed onto the city, below. This was yet another victory for the Spartans, but they had no time to stand down as they were immediately contacted by Admiral Hood. He assigned them a new mission right away: they needed to get to Onyx as soon as possible and lend aid to Dr. Halsey. Given the urgency of the situation, Frederic-104 was forced to improvise: his squad boarded another Covenant destroyer, killed its crew, and entered slipspace to travel to Onyx.

No sooner had they arrived in orbit around the planet than the Spartans were attacked by several Sentinels. The trio dashed down to the surface of Onyx, reaching it just before their ship was destroyed. Despite this difficult landing, they managed to give their attackers the slip and, exploring further into a planet that had become extremely hostile, linked up with Ambrose’s group. It was an unexpected reunion for Frederic-104 and his teammates, who still thought that their brother, Kurt-051, was dead. But while they set off in search of the Forerunner installations mentioned by Halsey, a Covenant flotilla emerged from slipspace on a course for Onyx. Sangheili had intercepted their communications sent back to Earth and, having successfully identified the source, dispatched some ships. However, their mission became more complicated when two destroyers were targeted by Sentinels as they tried to land on the planet’s surface. They did not last long under the Sentinel assault. As a result, the fleet’s commander, Voro Nar ’Mantakree, opted to keep a safe distance and sent troop transports straight down to Onyx. But even at a distance from the planet, his hands were full: several UNSC ships had reached the system and were now launching their first attack. The battled turned to the advantage of Admiral Carl Patterson: an initial enemy destroyer was destroyed, while the second seemed to be fleeing, seeking shelter on the other side of the planet. Emboldened by this opening success, Patterson set off in pursuit of the enemy ship, and in the process fell into its trap: the destroyer had led them straight into the main Covenant fleet, and it cut the UNSC ships to pieces. Only the Admiral’s ship was still intact once the alien riposte was over.

On the ground, things weren’t looking good for the Humans: hundreds of enemies were swarming upon their positions, and Frederic-104 was injured during the contact. Nevertheless, thanks to Dr. Halsey, they managed to escape using Onyx’s teleportation system, a Forerunner transport network similar to that found on Halo Alpha. Having learned how it worked, Halsey was able to move the entire squad to the Sentinel production facility, so that they could deactivate the drones. In doing so they were reunited with Katana Team, which had been missing in action for several days. The five Spartan-III had been placed in Forerunner modules similar to the UNSC’s cryosleep chambers, but that fulfilled a different function: they were held captive in a slipspace bubble and Halsey had no idea of how to break them out. Unable to make a decision, the small group decided to take the modules with them, and headed towards the portal leading to the center of the planet. No sooner had they found the famous portal than they were attacked by a large Covenant force; overwhelmed, the Spartans began to fall. Ambrose was fatally wounded, while William-043 and Holly-G003 fell trying to protect Kelly-087. The Humans were forced to step into the portal while Ambrose, near death, decided to remain behind to cover their escape: when the portal closed, he detonated the nuclear charges that the Spartans had been carrying, taking the Covenant army out with him.

However, the resulting explosion had an unpleasant side effect: the shield world of Onyx was a bit different from the rest, due to it actually being a slipspace bubble, inside of which Halsey and the rest discovered a truly gigantic world, with a surface area 500 million times that of Earth. The only way to reach it was through the portal they had just used, but it had been vaporized when Ambrose detonated the bombs. This meant that there was no longer any way in, or out. Halsey, Frederic-104, Linda-058, Kelly-087, Senior Chief Petty Officer Mendez, Lucy-B091, Tom-B292, Ash-G009, Olivia-G291, Mark-G303 as well as the five members of Katana Team, all found themselves trapped inside a shield world. From the outside, it appeared as a slipspace anomaly no larger than 23 cm², which would only serve to make the search harder. It would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Worse still, Halsey realized that time flowed more slowly inside the shield world. For every minute that passed inside, just under 20 minutes passed outside. If any help was coming, it might be a very long wait. Refusing to lose heart, Halsey decided to use the time to carry on with her research. As they explored the vast expanses of this new world, the group discovered that many Huragoks lived there. Thanks to them the Spartans were able to contact the ONI, which came to their rescue four months later in February 2553. The shield world then fell under the domain of the secret services, who would set up a base there to study it. This was when the “planet” was named Trevelyan, after the true surname of Kurt-051.

THE GREAT SCHISM

When the High Prophet of Regret died, it enabled Truth to put his secret plan into motion: under the pretext that the Sangheili had been unable to stop the destruction of Halo Alpha nor the death of a Hierarch, the High Council stripped the Sangheili of their privileges, transferring them to the Jiralhanae. When the Arbiter returned to High Charity, he couldn’t believe his eyes: the honor guard in the Council Chamber had all been replaced by Brutes. But he gritted his teeth and accepted a new mission: to travel to the Halo and return with the Index that would enable it to be activated. As it happened the UNSC, already on the Halo, had exactly the same idea, and soldiers led by Miranda Keyes and Sergeant Johnson were searching the Library, the building that was home to the relic. The Arbiter was taken there by Tartarus, leader of the Brutes, and he made his way towards the Library. Unfortunately for him, Forerunner Sentinels were defending the installation, and the Flood was everywhere. When he reached the room containing the Index, he found Keyes and Johnson had beaten him to it: the Arbiter charged and knocked out his two enemies, making away with the Halo’s activation key. Unfortunately, this was the exact moment in which Tartarus carried out Truth’s final orders: to take the key from ’Vadamee and push him into the pit.

Meanwhile, the Prophet of Truth had freed many Jiralhanae prisoners, and confirmed the permanent replacement of the Sangheili by the Brutes: command of the Covenant fleets was entrusted to the Brutes, stripping the Elites of any kind of responsibility within the alliance. This was a serious attack on the Writ of Union, signed thousands of years ago: the Sangheili initially reacted with dignity, satisfied with threatening to leave the Covenant. None of that mattered to Truth: he had already ordered the assassination of several high-level Sangheili that he had summoned to the Halo. On High Charity, acts of violence against the Elites grew into a battle in the holy city: this was the beginning of a civil war within the Covenant, also known as the Great Schism. The Elites soon joined an alliance against the Covenant, even if it meant cooperating with Humans.

RETURN OF THE FLOOD

On the Halo, the Arbiter was ultimately captured by the Gravemind, which still had John-117 in its grasp. The creature destroyed the Sangheili’s final illusions as it explained what the Halo was for, but ’Vadamee refused to believe it. The Gravemind offered the Spartan and the Elite a deal: they must both stop the Halo from being activated, an event that now seemed closer than ever before, with the Index in Covenant hands. The Spartan was sent to High Charity to take out the High Prophet of Truth, while the Arbiter was teleported to the vicinity of the Halo’s control room. This was how he came to learn of the San’Shyuum and Jiralhanae betrayal, when he saw several corpses of his fellow Elites. With the aid of Sergeant Johnson, ’Vadamee assaulted the control room, where Tartarus and his men were already waiting. They had with them Miranda Keyes, as well as 343 Guilty Spark, who in turn revealed the sinister truth of the Halos. This time, the Sangheili’s faith was shattered. The Prophets had lied, and worse still, the Gravemind had been right. Tartarus refused to listen and took advantage of ’Vadamee’s confusion to launch the Halo’s firing sequence. The Arbiter drew his sword and entered a duel to the death with the Jiralhanae. After a bit of thrusting and parrying, he defeated his adversary while Keyes grabbed the Index, halting the Halo’s activation. But now they had another problem: this irregularity in the process triggered a countermeasure, and all the Halos were now on standby. 343 Guilty Spark revealed that now, all the Halos could be activated from the Ark.

On High Charity, Master Chief was speeding across the city, seeking the Prophet of Regret. The civil war had distracted the Covenant forces who were too busy fighting among themselves to notice the Spartan. As such, he encountered little opposition and, thanks to Cortana, whom he had connected to the fortress’ systems, he managed to find his way. With not far to go until he reached his target, the In Amber Clad, Miranda Keyes’ ship, crashed into High Charity. From the ship’s smoking ruins emerged many forms of the Flood, which had taken over control of the ship that had been abandoned on the Halo. Within the space of a few minutes, the Flood had invaded High Charity and corrupted large numbers of Covenant forces, who were unable to repel the creatures. Some distance away, even the two Hierarchs were under attack, but the San’Shyuum were protected by their Jiralhanae guards, who so far were keeping the Flood in check. The Prophets were preparing to board the Dreadnought and head for Earth when a creature of the Flood grasped Pity by the throat. Truth stopped the guards from going to his aid, yet another betrayal which would enable him to become the sole power at the top of the Covenant: the plan he had been working towards for centuries was about to reach its fruition. All he needed to do was to activate the Halos. With his army, he boarded the Forerunner keyship that was still at rest in the heart of High Charity, determined to reach Earth. There he hoped to find a relic that would enable him to communicate with the Halos, and begin the Great Journey. When the Dreadnought took off, Master Chief was forced to leave Cortana behind, managing to scramble on board the keyship at the last moment, and joining it on its trip to Earth. When the imposing Forerunner ship entered the planet’s atmosphere, it leaped into the unknown and landed in the Kenyan jungle, a few dozen kilometers from New Mombasa.

On High Charity, the Gravemind was reforming after having achieved a complete victory. Not only had it successfully prevented the activation of the Halo, but it now had a base that could travel through space, with anywhere in the universe now within reach. Better yet, it was stocked with fresh meat, Covenant citizens who it could infect and transform into killing machines. It also found Cortana, infecting her with the Logic Plague to obtain her knowledge and turn it against her masters. Tenacious, the AI held out for as long as she could.

On Earth, John-117 was back in action and repelling Covenant assaults side by side with the Arbiter. The Sangheili had joined forces with the UNSC and this new alliance would be a beneficial one: the Gravemind had sent a destroyer to Earth from High Charity, and traveling with it was the Flood. The Flood was now infecting Erde-Tyrene for the first time in its history. To contain its spread, a Sangheili fleet began glassing the area, but they suddenly had a bigger priority. Around the city of Voi, the Covenant had excavated a huge Forerunner structure: this was the portal leading to the Lesser Ark, which lay far, far beyond the galaxy. The keyship’s arrival meant that it could now be activated, opening a breach in slipspace. All ships present, enemy and ally alike, thrust into the breach. When they arrived at the Ark, the battle between UNSC and the Covenant would continue, with both sides needing to assume control of the installation. Another belligerent joined the conflict when High Charity emerged from slipspace. The Gravemind had a sole objective: to kill the High Prophet of Truth. When the Hierarch reached the Ark’s control room, the Flood offered a new deal to John-117 and ’Vadamee: together, they would defeat the Covenant. Supported by many combat forms of the Flood, they reached the top of the Ark’s control tower and attacked the many Covenant forces that were protecting the corridor leading to the activation terminal. At the other end of the vast room, the Prophet was holding his two prisoners: Keyes and Johnson. Because Truth knew that he couldn’t activate the Halos, he was counting on these two Reclaimers to do so for him. But this was easier said than done: the two Humans resisted and Keyes managed to get hold of a revolver and a shotgun. She was put down in cold blood, and Johnson was forced to place his hand on the terminal. This time, it worked: the Great Journey could soon begin.

When the countdown began, the Flood arrived and fell upon Truth and his allies. A few minutes later, they were joined by the Arbiter and John-117, who stopped the Halo launch sequence. As he approached the body of Keyes, the Arbiter confronted the Prophet of Truth, ending his life by driving the blade of his energy sword into his back. The Hierarchs were no more, and the Covenant went with them.

Of course, there would be no immediate return to calm: the Gravemind may well have acted in their favor, but now it no longer had any need of the Spartan or the Sangheili. It didn’t need anyone, in fact. It was now set up on High Charity and its rancid armies were spreading throughout the Ark. John-117, ’Vadamee and Johnson were forced to flee. In any case, as always, the Spartan had a plan. The Ark had built a new Halo to replace the one that had been destroyed two months earlier. It had just left the Forge, an area found at the center of the Ark, and it was not quite complete. With a bit of luck, activating the Halo would cause a chain reaction that would cause it to explode, taking the Ark and High Charity down with it. That should be enough to put a permanent end to the Flood, which had all of its forces concentrated here.

To complete his mission, Master Chief needed Cortana. Two months earlier, she had obtained Halo Alpha’s Index, the key used to activate the Halo. The Spartan thought that the Index had to be compatible with the new installation. He found a Pelican and took flight for High Charity, and after beating back ceaseless waves of the Flood, he managed to find Cortana just where he had left her. She was extremely fragile but, at least in appearance, still uncorrupted by the Logic Plague. Together they went back the way he had come, stopping to destroy the main generators on High Charity: with its reactors out of action, it would be unable to move away from the Ark, or even escape into slipspace. Accompanied by the Arbiter, they flew towards the Halo. Johnson, meanwhile, had boarded the UNSC Forward Unto Dawn, the ship Miranda Keyes had commanded during the attack on the Ark. When the trio reached the Halo, the Flood was already there, and it was enraged. The Gravemind had guessed what they were planning and was ready to do anything to prevent them from reaching the Halo’s control room. But it was not enough to stop the Spartan and the Arbiter who, remotely supported by Johnson, managed to gain access to the building containing the activation terminal. Already there, 343 Guilty Spark entered a state of Rampancy when he saw their intentions, and fatally wounded Johnson. It then attacked the Arbiter and Master Chief, but Master Chief managed to destroy the Monitor and put it out of its misery.

While Master Chief heard Johnson’s last words, Cortana connected the Index, which worked exactly as expected. It activated the Halo, but because the Halo was not yet complete, the procedure failed and it began to break up. Forced to leave Johnson’s body behind, John-117 and Thel ’Vadamee mounted Johnson’s Warthog and tried to make it to Forward Unto Dawn, moored some distance away. Escaping the flames, the pair rushed into the Forward Unto Dawn’s loading bay, and Cortana took control of the ship. Within a few seconds, they were heading towards the portal and back to Earth. Unfortunately, while the ship was traversing the portal, it closed as the Ark went down in the Halo’s explosion. The Forward Unto Dawn was broken in two. The Arbiter, who had made it to the ship’s helm, managed to complete the journey to Earth, but without John-117 and Cortana, who were still in the loading bay. Lost at the other side of the universe and with no means of contacting the UNSC, the two friends could only wait. The Spartan put down his weapons and climbed into a cryo-chamber, leaving the AI to program a distress signal. His slumber would last four years, seven months, and ten days.

THE WAR IS OVER

With both the Ark and High Charity destroyed, the Flood had been eradicated, and the Sangheili quickly sterilized all traces of infection still on Earth. They used their ships to glass half of the African continent. It caused colossal damage, but it meant that every trace of the Flood was wiped from the surface of the planet, putting an end to this new invasion. With regard to the war between the Humans and the Covenant, the death of the High Prophet of Truth at the Battle of the Ark struck a heavy blow to the alliance, which had been crumbling since the departure of the Sangheili. On the Ark, Truth had not been the only one to die, and most of his command had also fallen, either in battle or when the installation exploded. The official end of the conflict came in February 2553, when Admiral Hood and several members of UNSC high command traveled to Sangheilios, the Elites’ homeworld. There they quickly negotiated a ceasefire which, after 28 years of bloodshed, put an end to the war. A new era was beginning, for Humanity and for the whole galaxy.

Chapter 13 – Consequences

The Battle of the Ark ended the war that had raged between Humans and the Covenant since 2525, but it also marked the beginning of a new era, and one that brought its own challenges. Within the former Covenant Empire, tensions between the different factions ignited, while Humanity was left to face its own demons. But the discovery of many artifacts and a better understanding of the Forerunners and their technology would enable Humanity to make significant technological progress. Just as the Librarian had wanted.

CIVIL WAR AMONG THE SANGHEILI

After the fall of the old Covenant alliance, civil war loomed: the San’Shyuum were no longer there, and what remained of the Covenant forces had no real leader. The situation on Sangheilios was particularly complex: not everyone accepted the peace that the Arbiter had signed with the Humans, and his authority was called into question. Worse still, some extremists remained attached to the old beliefs. The Arbiter, though, was trying to rebuild the planet and bring the Sangheili together by creating a high council of which most of the planet’s feudal lords would be members. For him, this was a time for unity, not division: the Sangheili had been taking orders from the San’Shyuum and the Covenant for thousands of years. Now it was time for them to find themselves and build a new society. Believing that good Humans existed, ’Vadam19 espoused a message of peace, and became Humanity’s main proponent on the planet. Not all shared his vision, unfortunately, especially a group of extremists known as the Servants of the Abiding Truth. Their origins lay with a group of monks that worshipped the Forerunners. The Arbiter’s rhetoric, based on a rejection of old beliefs, was anathema to them and their leader Avu Med ’Telcam, was attracting ever more new believers. ’Telcam and his men would launch a series of attacks on Sangheilios, never shying from targeting those close to the Arbiter. This was, of course, an escalation, and civil war broke out between those loyal to the Arbiter, and those who thought he dishonored the Sangheili and affronted the gods.

One Sangheili in particular stood out during these events: Jul ’Mdama. Commander of a cruiser during the war against the Humans, he was consumed with hatred for them and refused to lay down arms. He rejected the peace negotiated by Thel ’Vadam, and after making himself heard at a gathering of Sangheili lords, he rebelled against the Arbiter’s power. To ensure he had allies, he acted as a religious fanatic, winning support from the Servants of the Abiding Truth. Within a few years, he would be Earth’s main enemy, seeking to reform the Covenant and return to war.

EARTH VS. ITS COLONIES

Although the war against the Covenant ended at long last in 2553, there was another conflict that was not yet officially over, the one fought for decades between Earth and its colonies. In reality, fighting had never really stopped even during the Covenant invasion, with the UNSC having to engage rebel colonies on several occasions. During the war, many communication relays were destroyed and a number of colonies found themselves entirely cut off from the rest of Humanity. The rebels leveraged the post-war period to obtain weapons, finding it easy to raid the arsenals of UNSC bases that had been attacked by the Covenant and then abandoned with nobody to keep watch. They also traded with Kig-Yar pirates, for whom money trumped loyalty, and were able to obtain Covenant weapons.

Within a very short time, many planets became hubs for an extremely dangerous black market, while others wasted no time in declaring their independence. Many colonies felt that they had been abandoned by the UEG and UNSC during the war, which made it easier for the Insurrectionists to foment dissent. They had no trouble converting the populations of these planets to their causes. The ONI was keeping an eye on these worlds, of course, where it had several embedded agents, but the context of the post-war period meant that the UEG had other priorities.

A NEW SPARTAN PROGRAM

This protest movement would take on a whole new scale when the true origins of Catherine Halsey’s SPARTAN-II project began to be known. Even within the UEG, the story was spreading: the scientist had kidnapped children, mostly from the colonies, to turn them into killing machines. While the UNSC tried to suppress the scandal, it nevertheless decided to arrest Halsey, who responded to these accusations by highlighting that the Spartans had saved Humanity. In the colonies, meanwhile, some had been asking questions since before the rumors began to spread. Back in 2517, the kidnapping of children and their replacement with flash clones had not gone completely unnoticed, and some parents had harbored suspicions of their own. Their number included one Staffan Sentzke. Living on Sansar with his family, he was the proud father of a little girl called Naomi, who was as beautiful as she was intelligent. One day, though, she disappeared, and could not be found until a few hours later. Much to his surprise, Naomi was calm, as if nothing had happened, and was displaying some strange behavior. He could not know it at the time, but his real daughter had been kidnapped by the ONI, and he was now father to her clone. In the days and weeks that followed, Sentzke would grow suspicious about exactly who this new Naomi was, whom he found to be very different from the girl he had known. When she died 18 months later, Sentzke’s world came crumbling down around him: his wife committed suicide a few months later, and he was convinced that it was part of a plot orchestrated by the UEG. The authorities tried telling him that it was caused by a genetic condition, but Sentzke didn’t believe a word of it and began looking for evidence of similar cases. And evidence he found. Lots of it. There were more parents whose children had suddenly started acting differently, before dying in strange circumstances. Unable to uncover the truth of what had really happened, Sentzke left Sansar after it was attacked by the Covenant, and would develop a deep hatred of the UNSC. With no idea that his daughter and the other children had been kidnapped to be trained as Spartan-II who would soon earn a glorious reputation, Sentzke settled on a planet called Venezia and, accompanied by others, he turned the planet into a bastion of the Insurrection, even becoming the leader of the colony’s rebels.

Within the UNSC, the many ethical problems that the SPARTAN-II and SPARTAN-III programs raised, as well as the small size of the Spartan forces, led to a series of reflections. Even before the war had ended, the UNSC and ONI were planning to launch a new program that would be directed by Colonel Ackerson and Dr. Halsey. But the death of Ackerson–who was captured, tortured and killed during the invasion of the Moon–changed their plans. It would be Margaret Parangosky, Director of the ONI, who was tasked with developing the program. For a while, they thought about dropping the armor (for reasons of cost) to create a new series of augmentations that would enable future Spartans to be as strong and enduring as those who wore Mjolnir armor. But the initial trials were a failure and the idea was soon abandoned: of the nine test subjects, all consenting adults, only a woman by the name of Ilsa Zane survived. Officially, she was the first Spartan-IV, but the augmentations affected her badly, gradually driving her into a destructive madness that led her to rebel against the UNSC.

The SPARTAN-IV program was officially launched on July 7, 2553, eight months after John-117 had destroyed the Ark. Parangosky then settled on two Spartans to help complete her work: Musa-096, a Spartan-II who had rejected the augmentations in 2525, and Jun-A266, the only surviving member of Noble Team. The Spartan-IV would not be formed of children, but rather consenting adults: they were recruited from the best soldiers in the UNSC, and they received their augmentations, supervised by Catherine Halsey. Next, they were equipped with a new generation of Mjolnir armor, known simply as Mjolnir GEN2. The UNSC was working with a number of private partners to develop a range of new armor variants, which enabled the Spartan-IV to choose a model that suited both their individual abilities and their combat roles. The first soldiers to join the program included a member of the ODST, Corporal Sarah Palmer. Soon promoted to the rank of Sergeant, Palmer was appointed commander at the head of the many divisions of Spartan-IV that would be trained up over the coming months and years. These Spartan-IV, however, would never have the same effectiveness as earlier generations: because they wore more effective armor, they did not all need to be gifted at birth like the Spartan-II had been. Furthermore, they received lighter augmentations, and because they were already adults when they joined the program, they had not received the long indoctrination that had transformed the Spartan-II and Spartan-III into ice-cold killing machines. These were human heroes, just like Musa-096 wanted.

THE RECLAIMERS

With the war over, the UEG now had several issues to deal with: the rebuilding of Earth and its colonies, and diplomacy with the Sangheili and the Insurrectionists… But the question soon arose of what to do with the many Forerunner relics found throughout the galaxy. Now fully aware of their importance, the UNSC and ONO would launch a wave of military operations to get their hands on these relics, but in February 2553, the discovery of Shield World 0006 would change everything. Once the ONI had released Catherine Halsey, Franking Mendez, Frederic-104 and the other Spartans, along with a whole host of scientists, were sent to investigate, and would make some striking discoveries. Discoveries that would result in new technologies that the UNSC soon put to use, especially on its ships. The first to take advantage of them was the UNSC Infinity, the inaugural carrier in the Infinity class. 5600 m long, it was the biggest ship ever designed by Humanity, as well as the most powerful. Work started building the ship in 2544, when the war against the Covenant had reached the Inner Colonies. In 2553, its Shaw-Fujikawa reactors were replaced with new ones designed by Dr. Halsey: they were built around a slipspace core, technology once used by the Forerunners to travel through the galaxy with extremely high precision. More imposing than any Covenant ship, when it entered service on February 21, 2557, the Infinity became the flagship of the UNSC fleet. Commanded by Captain Andrew Del Rio, before he was replaced by Thomas Lasky, his executive officer, the Infinity would serve as HQ for the Spartan-IV. It was tasked with traveling the galaxy looking for Forerunner worlds–and Halos in particular–so that Humanity could set up research stations there.

19 When the Covenant fell, most Sangheili dropped the suffix -ee, which up until then had denoted that an individual belonged to the Covenant Army. Thel ’Vadamee then became Thel ’Vadam.

PART III
ANALYSIS

IT HAS BEEN MORE THAN TWENTY YEARS since Halo: Combat Evolved was released on the Xbox, and yet its legacy seems to be little known and poorly perceived. Perhaps a victim of its status as a console FPS in the eyes of some video game historians, Bungie’s game and its sequels are often overlooked when listing the franchises that have left their mark on the evolution of first-person shooters. It would be simplistic to describe Halo as a simple popcorn FPS, and just plain wrong to minimize its impact on the genre. And on the video game industry as a whole, truth be told. In fact, if the release of the first installment in the series was a hit, it was precisely because it had managed to do what few FPS had been able to do before then, especially on consoles. The impact of Halo: Combat Evolved and its sequels can still be felt today: just launch any modern FPS to see it. But there’s so much more to what Halo contributed to the video game industry. After all, the things we take for granted today weren’t necessarily a given back in 2001. Through its success, Halo: Combat Evolved established new standards, just like games such as Doom, GoldenEye 007 and Half-Life had done before. From the controls to its health system, and including its weaponry and online modes, Halo revolutionized an entire genre, and that is precisely what we will be exploring in this section of the book.

Space Opera, the Bungie Way

Bungie had always had a thing for sci-fi. The company’s history is littered with games featuring armored soldiers, alien civilizations, and artificial intelligence… But as its storytelling techniques evolved, Bungie gradually moved into a sci-fi subgenre: space opera. And when people talk about the big names in space opera video games, Halo is often mentioned alongside titles like Mass Effect, Wing Commander, Starcraft and even Ratchet & Clank. But is this reputation justified?

For some, it’s undeniable: the Halo franchise is one of the standard-bearers of the space opera video game genre. And upon first inspection, it seems hard to say otherwise. The series contains most of the tropes of this sci-fi subgenre: space travel, interplanetary conflict, the discovery of alien civilizations, the use of known if not legitimate scientific concepts… But is that enough to make Halo a space opera? Maybe not. Because in truth, as we are going to see, the series focuses mainly on one of these elements, and conceals the others.

While the various Halo games are certainly set in space, the actual journey through space is largely absent. The first installment all took place in a single location; the second did a bit better, with the action beginning on Earth before moving to another ringworld, and then High Charity. Halo 3 was set on Earth and then the Ark, while Halo: Reach was set on a single planet, and one that remained recognizably similar to our own blue Planet at that. The feeling of travel and exploration, of discovery and the unknown, is not actually very present in the story. With a few notable exceptions. The most important of all is, of course, the setting for Halo: Combat Evolved, because it is in this game that players take their first steps in this new universe. Without knowing what they would find there, they landed on one of the ringworlds that gave the series its name. It’s a setting that comes with its own unique atmosphere, and exploring the Halo is part of what makes the game so much fun. There’s something familiar about this strange world, with its verdant plains and wide expanses of water. And indeed, the topography of the in-game locations is not so different from that found on Earth. That might be enough to limit the feeling of being on a strange new world, if not for the game’s environments that provided a constant reminder of how far outside the norm it was. Too perfect. Too artificial. Then there’s the structure of the Halo itself, with its unique shape and gargantuan scale being apparent everywhere you go. Not to mention that throughout the adventure, players discover many Forerunner structures, with their unusual geometric architecture. Cold and sterile. The ringworld is a tomb, a memorial to the grandeur of a long-since disappeared civilization that sacrificed itself to save the galaxy. There’s something magical about this place that players get to know better as they progress through the levels. This is doubtless why that same feeling is missing from Halo 2 and Halo 3. Because just like Alpha Halo, Delta Halo and the Ark are also Forerunner structures. While the scale of the Ark may be surprising, the way it works and the installations found there are the same as those in Halo: Combat Evolved. As for the Halo in the second game… well, it’s another ringworld and, by definition, similar in (almost) every way to the Halo explored in the first game. It’s true that players visit a few unique ruins, but the feeling of discovering the unknown is less pronounced: players are on familiar ground. The same is true of the Ark in Halo 3. Halo: Reach, it’s set on a planet that isn’t too dissimilar to Earth: other than a few mountains with surprising silhouettes, there’s nothing to suggest that players are, in fact, on a planet far, far away. Reach had been colonized for years and no longer contained anything wild, anything exotic. It’s almost the perfect twin of humanity’s homeworld. Nor does the game really take any time to introduce the location, nor shine the spotlight on anything that makes it different: it focuses almost exclusively on the main plot, i.e. the invasion of the planet and the battle against Covenant forces.

Another key component of the space opera genre is the discovery of alien civilizations, and in Halo, there are three of them: the Forerunners, the Covenant, and the Flood. The latter is seen only as a faceless enemy with no real identity of its own. As for the Forerunners, they have completely vanished, and we learn more about them only through the artifacts they have left throughout the galaxy, beginning with the Halos. But most of what we know about the Forerunners comes from the novels Halo: Cryptum, Halo: Primordium and Halo: Silentium. In its games, Bungie opted to play on mystery, revealing little about the Forerunners themselves. They are a distant presence, which is paradoxical given the size of the relics they left behind. They are revealed on a drip, and serve mainly to progress the plot in the first three games in the series. Then there’s the Covenant. This is by far the civilization we learn most about when playing Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, Halo 3 and Halo: Reach. It has to be said that the second game went to a lot of trouble to teach players more about the Covenant from the inside, through the Arbiter’s narrative arc. This was how Bungie revealed some of the Covenant’s inner workings: its leaders, its beliefs and political structures and, especially, its center of power. Across the entire trilogy, this is the only time that players get to learn more about the Covenant. The Gravemind sends Master Chief to High Charity to eliminate the Prophets, and he gets the opportunity to see the city over the course of his mission. But it’s a flying visit. This is a moment of true space opera, in which the Spartan finds himself trapped in the lair of his enemy. He is forced to cross the city that he knows nothing about at a breathless pace. Just like the player, he has entered the heart of the Covenant Empire. It’s an exposition sequence delivered at breakneck speed, because once again he is there on a mission and the stakes couldn’t be higher: he needs to find and take out the two Hierarchs that are still alive. To slay the hydra’s many heads once and for all.

And this is where the Halo series as a whole diverges from space opera in the purest sense, and takes a turn into a much more conventional video game genre: war games. Despite containing clear space opera elements, ultimately Halo is not that different from Call of Duty, Battlefield, or Medal of Honor. However, because it’s sci-fi, the conflict in question is not set in a single country, on a single continent, nor even on a single planet, but spans an entire galaxy. This epic scale shouldn’t let us overlook the very foundations of the story told in Halo: the story of the final events in a war that has been raging for 27 years. If we take an objective look at each game one by one, we’ll see that Halo: Reach is just a story about a battle; Halo: Combat Evolved, a skirmish, another battle, this time for control of a weapon of mass destruction. Halo 2 and 3 cover the invasion of Earth and the battles that take place there, before the final battle on the Ark. Indeed, the discovery of Forerunner installations and even the trip to High Charity are only consequences of the conflict’s progression, because it is the conflict that directs the plot and dictates the actions of the various characters. Unlike a series like Mass Effect, Halo is not an invitation to explore the mysteries of the universe: it’s a call to arms. It’s an order to mobilize, and one that sends the player to defend Earth and its colonies throughout the galaxy. And this is a very deliberate choice from Bungie, which for a decade had played with the conventions of war games, even in the way it communicated about its games. And how it marketed them. Halo 3 had its “Finish the fight,” while Halo: Reach had “Remember Reach”: the first is a propaganda slogan, while the second recalls the duty of remembrance. Halo is the war of the future, as imagined by Bungie. It may even be prescient.

But nevertheless, care must be taken: it would be wrong to reduce Halo to this single dimension. And in truth, it’s hard to pigeonhole the series as a whole, so much it plays with the tropes from many different genres and subgenres. While the war narrative composes the main body of the plot, it is joined by other components. The game takes the time to develop its universe, to introduce new characters, and to gradually add layers to its story. You see, Halo is not the story of just one war: there’s the conflict between Humans and the Covenant, of course, but there’s also the dissent that is eating away at the Covenant from the inside, before it implodes in Halo 2. What we then witness is the crumbling of an empire and the decadence of its leaders who have lost all sense of reason. And in the background, there’s the fight against the Flood, which comes to the fore in Halo 3. It’s a war that is about so much more than the rigid principles that bring the Humans and the Covenant into conflict: this time it’s a battle to save the entire galaxy, the entire universe. Here, the issue is protecting life itself, and what could be more important, more fundamental? It is probably all these layers and this blend of genres and themes that made Halo the success it is today. Because each player is free to seek and find what they care about the most. This is one of the guiding principles behind the series, as imagined by Bungie over 20 years ago: to let players have fun as they understand it.

A Console FPS That Works

Upon its release in 2001, Halo: Combat Evolved fascinated the gaming community through its game world, and seduced players with its rich multiplayer mode. The game’s success encouraged Microsoft to back one sequel, and then another, and within a few years Halo had become a video game institution, and Master Chief one of the defining characters of the 2000s. But none of that would have been possible were it not for the fact that, from the very first installment, the series was built on a foundation of impeccable gameplay. At the time, it was a minor revolution: Halo: Combat Evolved was the first console first-person shooter that was just as much fun to play and boasted the same precision as the biggest FPS for PC. This exploit was pulled off by Bungie’s game designers who, in adapting Halo for the Xbox, had a single aim in mind: to make it possible, and enjoyable, to play with a controller. And this desire can be seen in every aspect of the game design.

GAMEPLAY DESIGNED FOR CONTROLLERS

In order to understand the impact that Halo: Combat Evolved was able to have on the FPS genre, it’s important to understand what this section of the video game industry was like before 15 November 2001, the date the game was released in the USA. Because Halo: Combat Evolved wasn’t the first FPS to be released on consoles, nor even the first to encounter real critical and commercial success. In fact, the first installment in the series was the result of almost ten years of experimentation, as well as of the progression made possible by the slow evolution of controllers and the more widespread use of 3D graphics. FPS are a product of pure PC gaming, and almost from its inception they were designed to be played with mouse and keyboard: the weapon that appears on screen is a logical extension of the player’s right arm, and each click let players fire revolvers, rifles, and machine guns. The genre exploded in the early 1990s: Wolfenstein 3D and then Doom were each a minor revolution that enabled an entire genre to carve out a space on the PC gaming scene. Together they set the standard and caused the genre to flourish. In the second half of the 1990s, games like Quake and Duke Nukem 3D made FPS, then known as Doom-like or Quake-like, a very popular style. More than enough to give food or thought to publishers eager to reach a wider audience and release games on more platforms. This is why some of the most popular FPS were ported over onto the consoles of the day. Duke Nukem 3D was given a series of ports onto the Saturn, PlayStation, and Nintendo 64, while Doom established itself on Nintendo’s console with Doom 64. In their wake, other games would try to break into the market. The best known include Medal of Honor, released on November 11, 1999 as a PlayStation exclusive, and the highly controversial Soldier of Fortune that caused a stir in March 2000 with its ultra-realistic dismemberments. The result was, at best, adequate, but it was far removed from the comfort and precision afforded by playing with a mouse. When playing Duke Nukem 3D, PlayStation owners had to use the D-pad to move, aim up and down with L1 and L2, and fire with X. It was a cumbersome and hardly intuitive setup. But as there was nothing better, everyone just made do.

Fortunately for them, the second half of the 1990s was marked by the arrival of new controllers, with consoles now able to display games in three dimensions. It was Nintendo that ushered in the biggest change for these peripherals: in 1996, the Japanese brand released its Nintendo 64, and it came with a strange controller with three handles. The center handle enabled players to use an analog joystick, the first of its kind. It was designed for 3D gaming, and it would soon become the new standard. SEGA released a new controller for the Saturn (the 3D Control Pad) the next year, and PlayStation went one better, releasing a controller with two joysticks. This gave the PlayStation a considerable advantage for shooting games, because with two joysticks developers could use the first to control movement, and the second to aim. It’s the standard today, but back then it was far from an obvious control scheme, and many studios overlooked it. It would not be until 1999 and the PlayStation port of Quake II that this configuration would be available to players, and even then it was not a given: Hammerhead, the company that developed the port, didn’t offer that control scheme by default, and players had to dig around in the menus to change the control layout. It was only in November 2000 that Alien: Resurrection made the leap, and in thanks received a trashing from reviewers. The press, who struggled to master this new way of playing, thought that it was unnatural and lacked precision. In the defense of journalists at that time, there were plenty more issues with the game’s controls, most notably catastrophic management of the joysticks’ dead zone, as well as patchy detection of joystick movement. The result could only ever be annoying.

Strangely, it was the Nintendo 64, with a single joystick on its controller,20 that served as the platform for the first two great console FPS in history. Two games that are still very popular today. The first, GoldenEye 007, was released on August 25, 1997, and was developed by Rare, who had already made the Donkey Kong Country games for Nintendo. Based on the film of the same name, GoldenEye 007 featured controls with a surprising precision. It was easy to hit targets and, as the game came with an extremely comprehensive multiplayer mode, it soon became one of the favorite games among owners of the Nintendo 64, providing the occasion for many a game between friends. And Rare wasn’t about to stop while the going was so good. In March 2000, they pulled it off again with Perfect Dark, an original license this time, that adopted and improved everything that had made GoldenEye 007 such a great game. The two games used quite similar controls: players moved with the little joystick, while using the Up and Down buttons on the D-pad (or the C buttons) to look up and down. It was a weird setup, but one that was accepted and even applauded: upon its release, GoldenEye 007 quickly established itself as the best console FPS ever made, an opinion that many gamers still hold today. Nostalgia? Maybe. Because in reality, while it’s true that these two Rare games were fun to get to grips with, that is primarily because they did a lot to help the player. This is particularly apparent in Perfect Dark which, unlike GoldenEye 007, made use of crosshairs. The crosshairs recentered automatically and, whenever an enemy came within range, focused on them so that players could land hits more easily. In 2000, the first TimeSplitters game, released on the PlayStation 2, used the same technique. And that was absolutely normal: Free Radical Design, who developed the game, was mostly made up of ex-Rare employees, all of whom had worked on GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark. They just decided to copy what they had learned in making those two games. TimeSplitters made use of both joysticks on the Dual Shock 2, the PlayStation 2 controller. It got rid of the crosshairs, but retained the aim assist that had helped make its predecessors so successful.

If the fun of the game was built upon this assistance from the software, it’s because the FPS released on consoles were still designed as if they were being developed for PC: movement was very fast and combat took place in a series of corridors and other restricted spaces. The levels were densely populated with enemies, which forced the player to always be on the move so that they were more difficult to hit. The enemies had to be killed as soon as possible to thin out their number, and therefore lessen the threat. A correlation was at play: the more enemies there were, the greater the chance of dying. That created a sense of urgency that rewarded players who could react quickly and accurately. These were the standards defined by Doom and the many fast-FPS it would go on to inspire. When playing with a controller, though, this kind of game design generated plenty of problems, because it was not easy to combine accuracy with speed of execution. In games like those made by Rare and Free Radical Design, it meant a few adjustments had to be made: movement was a bit slower, there were fewer enemies, and those present were often less dangerous. But the main thing was the aim assist, which meant that players never had to spend too much time trying to take out a single enemy. For any fan of PC FPS, GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark were a bit like a shooter for kids: easy to control but stripped of any appeal for gamers who liked a challenge.

Contrary to what many may think, even to this day, it absolutely is possible to make good console FPS. Perhaps there was still some work left to do to find a new way of imagining the console FPS, and move away from the trail blazed by id Software. And that is precisely what a little studio that Microsoft had just acquired was about to do. From June 2000, when Bungie was contractually bound to turn Halo into a game that worked on consoles, the designers would begin reviewing all of their work, so that the game was not just a port of a project designed for PC. Even before the studio moved to Redmond, Jason Jones, the game’s lead designer, already wanted his game to move away from some of the conventions established by Doom and the rest like it. He wasn’t a fan of the super-fast movement in these games, which he found unrealistic. In fact, the first prototypes of Halo, when it was still a TPS, placed the focus firmly on the tactical side of combat: the game’s pseudo-open-world enabled players to approach combat in many different ways, with the freedom to develop their own strategies. Despite the game being transformed into a tightly scripted FPS, Halo: Combat Evolved, just like its sequels, would retain the traces of this distinctive heritage. When it was released, the press discovered an FPS that was very different from anything that had come before. The game was a success, because unlike its predecessors, Halo created its own game design conventions instead of looking to Doom, conventions that were designed for consoles and a controller with two joysticks.

The immediately striking thing was the way that the controls were distributed across the Xbox controller. Like Alien: Resurrection and TimeSplitters before it, Halo: Combat Evolved made use of both of the controller’s joysticks: the left joystick was used to move, with the right being used to aim while moving by pointing the weapon in any desired direction. A little click of the joystick activated the weapon’s scope, if it had one. Like TimeSplitters, Halo made it so that the player didn’t have to move their thumb too much: they used the right trigger to shoot, and the left to throw grenades. The front buttons were used for other actions: jump, reload, change weapon, and melee attack. It was the first time that grenades or melee attacks had buttons of their own, which meant that they could be carried out quicker. In most other games in the genre, players needed to scroll through all of their weapons to select “grenade” or “melee attack.” Necessarily, that made things more difficult, especially melee attacks, which were then seen as an attack of last resort when the ammo for all other weapons had been depleted. What Halo actually did was to create a golden triangle made up of the firearm, grenade, and melee attack, enabling players to quickly respond to the situation they were facing. If we overlook management of the two joysticks, which took gamers of the time a bit of practice to get used to, the rest of the controls were immediately appreciated for their simplicity: Halo was very easy to get to grips with.

Then there was the aiming system. Bungie decided to display a visible crosshairs on the screen, which was not something that was taken for granted back then. When playing on a console, the lack of crosshairs made it possible to mask some of the aim assist, while on PC, some studios preferred to do without it for a greater sense of realism. Halo: Combat Evolved was not the only game to use one, but what was different here was that the crosshairs were round. Up until then, crosshairs were generally the shape of a cross (as the name implies), like in Counter-Strike, because that shape provided accuracy to the nearest pixel. Bungie made the decision to change the shape for a number of reasons: firstly, it matched the shape of the joystick, making the sights its extension. Secondly, with weapons like assault rifles, the main weapon in the game, it would provide some assistance to the player in that when the circle was positioned over an enemy, you would score a hit. The solution encountered by Jaime Griesemer was to give players a 5 % margin of error: enough to help a bit, not enough for players to feel like the game was holding their hand. Likewise, rather than allowing the crosshairs to move and “stick” to an enemy that moved within range, Halo: Combat Evolved opted for a new kind of system: when players moved the crosshairs and it passed over an enemy, the movement was slowed slightly. In fact, the game interpreted the motion of the controller’s right joystick, understood what the player was trying to do, and reacted according to this analysis. In itself it was a form of aim assist, but it was a subtle one: it would not do anything to improve a poor player’s aim. Scoring a clean hit on a target, especially with the magnum or sniper rifle, required practice just like any other PC shooter. And all without ever sacrificing a comfortable game experience. It is in this sense that Halo: Combat Evolved was a real revolution for the FPS genre.

Beyond these purely technical considerations, Halo: Combat Evolved, like the other games in the series, was based on a unique kind of game design, and one that distanced itself from the many Doom-like games that proliferated back then. The first obvious difference was the way that the game’s different levels were designed: Halo scrapped corridors and claustrophobic mazes and opted for a linear experience in which players were led through a series of “sandboxes,” as Bungie called them. These were larger areas within which one or more groups of enemies could be found. The scenarios changed depending on the kinds of enemies, their weapons, and the vehicles that were available. Lastly, the design of the area itself came into play, because players could use its size and topography to determine their strategy: a frontal assault, an attack from a distance, flanking, or stealing a vehicle… That gave players some freedom of action, as well as an interesting level of replayability, making it worthy of the name “sandbox.” The game designers made a conscious decision to deliver action that was slower-paced and less frenetic, but primarily more deliberate: this meant that the controller was no longer a handicap. Movement was also slower (making it more realistic in the eyes of Jason Jones), while jumping had a floaty quality. The floaty jumps, a hallmark of the series, actually served a purpose: they enabled players to dodge incoming fire while remaining precise enough to aim while in the air. Of course, the speed and height of the jump were balanced so that successfully aiming while in the air demanded a bit of practice.

Because despite these differences, Halo: Combat Evolved was still an FPS, where the main aim was to shoot and kill the AI-controlled enemies. But yet again Bungie, and Jason Jones in particular, had some very specific ideas of what they wanted. The different Covenant troops were designed with a very clear intention, and always with the same idea: to make players feel like they were having fun. The first game, just like its sequels, rewarded precision shots, shots that hit an enemy’s weak spot. Most of the time, this was the head. Not every weapon in Halo could achieve a headshot: in the first game, only the magnum and the sniper rifle could do so. In Halo 2 and Halo 3, the battle rifle (more commonly known as the BR) was added to the list, while Halo: Reach replaced it with the DMR and also introduced the needle rifle, a Covenant weapon. This is an important distinction because, while new players are generally satisfied with using the weapons that are easiest to use–like the assault rifle–more experienced players would go for weapons that could pull off precision shots, as these inflicted the most damage and could take down a handful of enemies in the space of a few seconds. The enemies were designed as follows: the Grunts, for example, were designed so that their head was at the same height as the crosshairs, enabling players to move from head to head and quickly execute a series of headshots. This idea came from Jason Jones, who wanted some of the enemies to be easy to kill. As the series progressed, the sound designers also added a little sound effect, a kind of “pop!” similar to the sound of a cork popping. There’s a certain joy in executing a series of frags21 against Unggoy, a similar sensation to the one felt when skimming a stone across a pond. The Grunts, then, played the role of cannon fodder, and they were there only to elicit a sense of fun within the player. But players still had to be wary, because in large enough numbers they could pose a real threat. This was especially true when they were carrying more powerful weapons, like the fuel rod cannon, which fired extremely lethal balls of green plasma…

RECOGNITION FOR TALENT

Readers in the know will have noted that in the above paragraphs, we have often made a distinction between beginners and more experienced players. This is not by chance: Halo has always done things in such a way that it could reach as many gamers as possible, no matter their level. It’s a key component of the Halo experience, because it means that everyone can have fun playing the game their own way. But of course, talent and experience are meaningful assets, because they let gamers show off and are therefore a source of joy. Games like TimeSplitters, Perfect Dark and GoldenEye 007 could be challenging in many ways, but Halo had something extra: it rewarded players who took the time to perfect their technique. Unlike the three games mentioned above, Bungie’s games did not use any aim assist system, or none that was as obvious as those, in any case: this made it important to learn to aim true, and to master the more powerful weapons that would let players execute headshots. The battle rifle, introduced in Halo 2, was the perfect illustration of this: it was able to execute precision shots and had a powerful scope, enabling players to pump enemies full of lead from a distance. This meant that it could be used to fight at a distance and kill enemies without taking too much risk. However, this was counterbalanced by its firing system: the BR spewed out bursts of three bullets, and their spread could be problematic. If players fired their shot too quickly, they may well miss their target. Using the battle rifle properly has become a real science among fans of Halo, who learned to compensate for the spread by slightly shifting their weapon towards an enemy during the burst of fire. It’s a technical action that would let players kill several Grunts with a single pull of the trigger. But for beginner players, the BR was often a less reliable weapon than the assault rifle, the plasma rifle, or even the SMG that was introduced in Halo 2: these were automatic weapons where players just needed to hold the trigger down and hope to kill an enemy. It was easier, but took much more time: in Halo 2, it only took three bursts from the BR to kill a common Elite, but it would take the SMG half a clip to do the same, and even then players had to be close enough.

Learning to use a piece of kit like the BR, as well as the other precision weapons, was all part of the fun elicited by Halo, because unlike in earlier console FPS, finding a true aim was no piece of cake. It took practice and once players were able to do it all the time, they got a real sense of achievement: they were now more effective and could call on a wider toolkit. And it’s important to remember that these weapons were not always available, so players had to learn to make proper use of every weapon in the game. With time, players learned that each weapon had its own special abilities, or was particularly suited to one or more tasks. The little plasma pistol, which appears to be pretty harmless, was soon being sought out by experienced players when they found themselves up against one or more vehicles: its charged shot created an EMP effect upon impact, temporarily paralyzing the target. In Halo 2 and the games that came after it, this enabled players to board and hijack a vehicle, before turning it against the enemy. It was also extremely effective at disabling the shields on Sangheili armor, enabling them to be finished off with a bullet in the head. Some nuances also had an important role to play: Covenant plasma weapons, for example, were very useful for quickly disabling an enemy shield, but for unshielded enemies, human firearms were more effective.

Halo actually turned out to be very demanding on players, because they needed to aim properly, learn the qualities of the many existing human and enemy weapons, and make proper use of the unique features in each sandbox. Indeed, the sandboxes are what determined which weapons were used, and how.

THE SANDBOX

Sandboxes represent the core of Halo’s gameplay. Although all the games in the series are ultimately rather linear in nature (excluding Halo 3: ODST), the structure of the different levels was quite different from anything that had been seen before its release, and even after. These large open areas in which players were free to do what they wanted represented a break from the long corridors that guided progression in most FPS. These corridors dictated the action and made it easier to manage the pace of a game. Halo opted to do things a completely different way, with players having the freedom to use their wits and imagination to overcome the challenges they faced. There were always limits, however: players could only carry two weapons, which forced them to choose their equipment wisely according to the situation in hand, as well as to bear in mind what could be coming next. This unique mechanism, introduced in Halo: Combat Evolved, was widely copied. Up until that point, most FPS allowed players to carry up to ten weapons, but Bungie chose to bank on believability. It also avoided a pitfall common to many Doom-likes, in which the weapons used at the start of the game became obsolete a few hours in, once more powerful alternatives had been found. In Halo, each weapon fulfilled a specific role, so they continued to serve a purpose throughout the whole game, in line with Jason Jones’ vision. Furthermore, the scale of these sections of levels, as well as Master Chief’s more realistic speed of movement, created a steadier pace for the game, one that was less frenetic than the Doom-likes. This was a fundamental difference that was often perceived as a weakness by those who grew up with id Software’s shooters and their many clones.

Sandboxes were introduced into Halo: Combat Evolved near the very beginning of the game: once the first level was over, players landed on the ringworld and set off exploring, trying to find survivors. As players progressed through the game, they encountered ever more large, open areas, but their number was probably limited by the tight development deadlines. The sandboxes got bigger from Halo 2 onwards, whether they were set on Earth, Delta Halo, or even within High Charity, but it was in Halo 3 that they would find their ultimate expression. Because the Xbox 360 was a more powerful console than its predecessor, Bungie was able to create bigger sandboxes, and more of them, with no loading times between them. They were packed with enemies and ever more vehicles, which enabled the developers to create an increasingly varied selection of sandboxes.

Over time, this variety became a key feature. The new games gradually introduced more weapons and options, providing players with a constantly growing array of possibilities. From Halo 2, the ability to hijack enemy vehicles or use machine gun emplacements provided new tools that had to be used in the right situations. When approaching one of these sandboxes, it’s important that players quickly assess the situation: what enemies lie ahead? What weapons do they have? Are there any vehicles? What weapons does the player have? How much ammo is left? Plenty of questions, then, but the analysis was made easier by the design of the different enemies, as well as their equipment. It enabled players to set a list of priorities, the series of actions that must be taken to win the fight and move on to the next level. It’s the player’s ability to observe and find the best solutions that make Halo the game it is. And of course, more choice means more fun.

To illustrate this clearly, we’ll use the level Tsavo Highway, one of the first missions in Halo 3, as an example. It contains a number of very interesting sandboxes. When approaching Voi waterworks, players need to repel a group of Covenant troops: there are some of the omnipresent Grunts, of course, but also several Brutes. At this point in the game, players are generally equipped with a BR and an assault rifle, unless they have found and picked up the shotgun found at the very start of the level. The shotgun would then replace the assault rifle, because they fulfilled the same role: they were the ideal shortrange weapon, and good at killing Brutes. In any case, the intro phase of this sandbox is nothing out of the ordinary, but things get tougher when Master Chief is tasked with defending his position while waiting for a Warthog to arrive by airdrop. The area is designed so that players naturally head towards the sandbox’s high ground, where there are a number of military buildings that offer good cover. From up there, they will also have a good view of the battlefield and can allow the waves of enemy to approach, as they certainly will. Next, the player has a few decisions to make: how are they going to repel the attackers? The buildings on the high ground are filled with many weapons, including a sniper rifle, a mine, and a machine gun emplacement. It is therefore possible to place the mine below and then climb back up to a position on the high ground, and settle in with the machine gun emplacement or the sniper rifle. In fact, here Master Chief is a more deadly version of the young Kevin McAllister as he prepares to defend his home in Home Alone. While players are finishing their preparations, the enemy appears: there are a number of Brutes, including one with a fuel rod cannon, as well as a Wraith, a Covenant tank. In general, players opt to remain on the high ground: the best solution is to take out the Brutes with a sniper rifle when they reach the hill, taking care to kill the one carrying a fuel rod cannon before the rest. Once that’s done, the next job is to take out the Wraith, which is unable to make the climb up to the hill. Getting close to it is no easy task thanks to the Brute positioned in the turret, but a well-aimed shot from the sniper rifle provides an easy solution. To demolish the armored vehicle, players could use the fuel rod cannon, or sneak up on it from behind and stick a grenade to its engine. This is just one way of doing things among many others, but in some ways it dictates what happens in the next sandbox: a more open space with a hill at its center that leads players to the road they need to take to reach the next level. But it’s a well-defended point: there are two Wraiths, an armored tower, and several Brutes riding Choppers. These Jiralhanae vehicles are equipped with two machine guns and can flatten any opponent beneath their giant wheels. This makes traveling on foot a risky endeavor. Normally, players find a Warthog in this sandbox that was a reward for achieving the objectives in the previous one: its weaponry and ammo levels vary with players’ earlier actions. If the player decided to stay at the top of the hill with a sniper rifle, they might only have a few rounds left in their magazine, and the fuel rod cannon will almost certainly be empty. This means players need to find a solution to approach the area occupied by the enemy to find new weapons, without being killed by deadly fire from the Wraiths, nor from Chopper attacks. A few watchtowers generally enable the soldier occupying the Warthog’s gun emplacement to damage, or even kill, one or two Choppers, but the Wraiths are not so easy to take out. This leaves players with several options:

j Use the last rounds of the sniper rifle to take out the most troublesome enemies, like the Choppers and/or Brutes in the Wraiths’ turrets.

j Sneak up on a Wraith without being seen to hijack or destroy it.

j Obtain some Covenant weapons, such as a plasma pistol, to paralyze the Wraiths and then destroy them.

j Drive around in the Warthog to take out as many Brutes as possible, and once that’s done, attack the Wraiths with grenades one by one.

This list is by no means exhaustive, of course: the idea is to show that there are many ways of approaching a given situation, particularly as players can never truly discount random factors. For example, sometimes in the first sandbox, the tower at the top of the hill has been destroyed, forcing players to rely on the sniper rifle to take out the Brutes. This then means that once players reach the second sandbox, they won’t have enough ammo left for the first strategy listed above to be viable. Before leaving the first sandbox, players might choose to drop the sniper rifle and fuel rod cannon, and opt to use weapons that may be less powerful, but more useful in the long-run. A BR will let them take out some targets from a distance, while a plasma pistol could be used to disable any enemy vehicles. The choice is entirely up to the player, depending on the tools that are available to them, or at least those that they have been able to find. It is precisely this concept that gives Halo such depth: each player can play according to their own abilities and their own favorite combat techniques, with a constant need to improvise according to the context.

Story-Driven FPS

It may come as a surprise to those who came to Halo: Combat Evolved later, but upon its release, the game caused a buzz thanks to its story. We can’t deny it: it is well paced and, as it unfolds, it serves up a number of slick reversals. But the story as a whole is pretty conventional. So why all the love? In order to grasp the reason for its success, it’s important to understand the context in which Halo: Combat Evolved arrived on the video game market. This is particularly true of the FPS genre, one that had been rapidly evolving since 1998 and the first game from Valve Corporation. Let’s take a trip down memory lane.

IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WAS THE VOID…
AND THEN THERE WAS HALF-LIFE

When they were first invented, FPS earned a reputation for their frantic action and the impressive game engines that allowed them to run. The first successful FPS, Wolfenstein 3D, kept the story as simple as possible: players controlled an American spy, William Joseph Blaskowicz, as he tried to escape from Castle Wolfenstein. Along the way, he would do battle with the many Nazis occupying the castle, before discovering that they were trying to create mutants. The game concluded with a fight between Blaskowicz and Adolf Hitler. It was simple, effective, and very clear: there was a good guy, there was a way out, and there were plenty of enemies standing between them. In-game text was almost non-existent, and there were no cutscenes to provide any kind of dramatization. Things evolved somewhat the following year, with the 1993 release of Space Hulk. An adaptation of the board game of the same name, it was set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, and revealed the story between each mission through a little briefing. This is a model that would soon be adopted by many subsequent shooters.

Doom, as revolutionary as it was upon its release in December 1993, didn’t make much more effort than Wolfenstein 3D, its spiritual predecessor: the main character was a nameless space marine who had landed on a Martian moon to do battle with hordes of hellish demons. But things could have been different. Initially, id Software’s creative director, Tom Hall, wanted to tell a more complex story and use the world of cinema as inspiration for the storytelling. Unfortunately for him, the idea wasn’t a popular one with John Carmack, the studio’s co-founder and lead programmer. Carmack had designed a powerful game engine, and what he wanted more than anything was to showcase the engine by creating huge levels for players to explore. That wasn’t ideal for storytelling. Hall found no more support from John Romero, the other co-founder. Lead game designer on Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, he stood fast alongside Carmack. First and foremost, he wanted to make a game that was fun to play, and not risk confusing players. Hall, then, was forced to bend to the will of the two co-founders.

A new video-gaming icon, Doom would establish the benchmark, and not many FPS would take the trouble to tell any real kind of story. Those that did tell stories tended to be adaptations of movies or universes that were already known to players. Examples include Terminator: Future Shock, released in 1995, and Star Wars: Dark Forces, released that same year. LucasArts’ game, just like Bethesda’s, used mission briefings and a few text boxes to provide players with some context. Without those components, the games wouldn’t really be that much different from Doom: players had to explore mazes and find keys and the doors they opened in order to kill ever more enemies. Looking Glass Studio was the only one that dared venture into this unexplored territory. With System Shock, Doug Church and Warren Spector were trying to mix genres to create an action-adventure game combining exploration, shooting sequences, and RPG elements. It was a completely different kind of game, one that took the time to lay the foundations of its story and develop its characters. Although it was a limited success, System Shock would leave a lasting mark on an entire generation of game developers.

But that mark took time to become apparent. In the second half of the 1990s, a new era dawned for FPS with the advent of the internet and network gaming. Previously confined to the bedrooms of thrill-seeking gamers, within the space of a few years, shooter games would become the favorite pastime for fans of virtual competition. Once again, it was id Software that would lay the foundations for an entire genre with Quake, released in 1997. The following year, Epic Games brought out Unreal, cementing the trend. Prior to 1998, some three years before the release of Halo: Combat Evolved, FPS could generally be summed up as Doom-likes, in which players progressed through mazes shooting anything that moved, or as Quake-likes, where human players faced off against each other in deathmatches with no pretense of a story, other than the battle to be the best player in the game.

Looking back, it seems like 1998 was the year in which things really took off, when a wave of story-driven FPS hit the shelves. It got off to a very strong start right from the beginning of the year, with the first Star Wars: Jedi Knight, a sequel to Dark Forces. Kyle Katarn was back, now a Master Jedi, and he was trying to form a new Republic following the fall of the Empire. While on a mission, he learned of the existence of a Sith world and decided to visit it. As everyone knows, the Star Wars universe is fertile ground when it comes to telling new stories. The link between the LucasArts studio and Lucasfilm, George Lucas’ production company, and the latest technical advances enabled more refined storytelling. Jedi Knight adopted the conventions of the universe created by Lucas, opening with the theme by John Williams playing as text in yellow letters scrolled up the screen, just like in the films. Jedi Knight even contained a few cutscenes which were actually little vignettes performed by real flesh and blood actors. Better yet, during the game, players would take part in a few conversations, with characters offering advice or new information. The story, then, was revealed to players through different channels, which helped create pace and keep players invested in the plot development. It was far from perfect, but it did enough to further the sense of immersion, and Star Wars fans wanted more. And this franchise wouldn’t be the only famous one to be exploited that year, which also saw the birth of the Rainbow Six series. The first installment, developed by Red Storm Entertainment, was based on the novel of the same name by American author Tom Clancy. Clancy was known for his spy novels, popularizing an entire genre: techno-thrillers. With their secret paramilitary organizations and international conflicts, Clancy’s novels were well suited for adaptation into an FPS. The game began with a short cutscene introducing the context of the time in which the game was set, as well as the formation of Rainbow Team. From then on, the storytelling became a more timid affair, with the heavy use of dense and lengthy pre-mission briefings. It was a way of telling stories about war that would influence many developers over the next decade, especially Infinity Ward (Call of Duty: Modern Warfare) and Treyarch (Call of Duty: Black Ops).

Still in 1998, but in a very different genre, Monolith Productions released Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, an FPS that was heavily inspired by Japanese anime, more specifically the real robot genre and titles like Mobile Suit Gundam and Appleseed. The player controlled Sanjuro Makabe, a mobile combat armor pilot swept up in a brutal war between the official government of a planet named Cronus and a terrorist organization. The game focused on the human drama and the harm inflicted on the main character, who lost his whole family in the war. It was a story of revenge, of a character tormented by both their past and the emotions they felt for Kathryn, his deceased partner’s sister. The narrative progressed through short cutscenes, as well as frequent dialogue sequences during the playable phases of the game. Sanjuro received messages from his allies and shared progress reports on his missions, which provided some staging for the various reversals, or shone the spotlight on dramatic events. Featuring imperfect gameplay, Shogo was nevertheless a showcase for the expertise of Monolith Productions which, in 2005 would make F.E.A.R., no doubt one of the best story-driven FPS ever made.

However, the real revolution exploded on November 19, 1998, when Valve released its first game: Half-Life. Today regarded as one of the most important games in video-gaming history, Half-Life proved that it was indeed possible to tell a rich and engrossing story by focusing on characters who were more than just action movie archetypes. It paved the way for many other studios, including Bungie, who would learn a few lessons from the game. Because there was something unique about Half-Life’s storytelling. Like some of its glorious predecessors, it opted for minimalism: no long cutscenes, no endless exposition. Everything was seen through the eyes of the player character, Gordon Freeman. While traveling to the Black Mesa research center one morning, life within the center is subtly revealed to the player over the course of a train journey as Freeman commutes to his place of work. The NPC22 chat among each other, revealing valuable information, and a few discarded documents scattered here and there enable players to learn even more. What this achieved was to form an almost intimate relationship with Black Mesa, Freeman, and the rest of the characters: within the space of a few minutes, players already felt like part of the game world. Black Mesa became their home, and Freeman’s colleagues their friends. Half-Life achieved the feat of creating a rich and consistent world while remaining relatively laconic. It was left up to players to make an effort to understand what was going on around them, to pay attention and watch. And the only eyes and ears through which they could do so were those of Freeman. This was the only point of view available to witness the events of the game. Some of these characteristics can be found in Halo: Combat Evolved and its sequels, as Bungie’s storytelling matured.

BUNGIE’S TRACK RECORD

That said, Bungie had wanted to tell stories even before the arrival of Half-Life: while the studio was still a fledgling, telling stories was one of the main aims of Jason Jones, one of the co-founders. His all-consuming passion for sci-fi and fantasy would guide Bungie’s games throughout the 1990s and beyond. It’s apparent from Pathways Into Darkness, of course, but it was with Marathon that things took on a whole new dimension. AI that rebelled and then believed themselves to be gods, age-old conflicts between alien races… Marathon had many stories to tell, but the means available to the studio to tell them were limited. Or at least, they were limited to a single channel. Marathon told its story exclusively through terminals spread throughout the game’s various levels. When players interacted with them, they might get in touch with their allies or discover more about the motivations of their enemies. But they still had to make the effort to activate those that were placed conspicuously along their path… and seek out the rest. Indeed, it was possible to progress through several levels in a row and miss most of the terminals, and therefore the pages of text they contained. Text that was, moreover, often cryptic. This was the main defect in the Marathon trilogy: yes, the plot was a complex one, but its depth was only revealed to those who took the time and effort to seek it out. And Bungie never managed to make it come alive on-screen. It was too laborious, too disordered. What was beyond any doubt, though, was that the studio liked sci-fi and, across three games, had created an expansive universe. But it was composed with its very own grammar. It was too personal, too self-contained, and unless players knew what to expect, it was hard to grasp the full subtlety it contained.

This is a criticism of Marathon and Bungie’s method that would, no doubt, resonate with gamers familiar with the studio’s latest project, Destiny. Released in 2014, the game has since corrected (some of) its mistakes, but upon launch it suffered from similar problems. The fact that its story had been completely rewritten one year before its release certainly didn’t help. But it still retains, even today, its love of riddles, enigmatic messages, and sparse information. The universe does not immediately reveal itself to the player. Instead, it’s up to players to join the dots as and when they appear. Some players love doing that. Others, less so.

While these faults can be found in Bungie’s most successful games (yes, including Halo, as we’ll see), there is one that avoided these pitfalls. Myth: The Fallen Lords and its sequel, Myth II: Soulblighter, provide a surprising counterpoint. Both of these were strategy games, a major first for the studio that nevertheless managed to deliver a story that was as solid as it was clear. To tell it, they used many different channels: voiceover narration, cutscenes, summaries of the events of each mission… It was a method made possible by the success of the Marathon trilogy, which filled Bungie’s coffers. The high production values in Myth: The Fallen Lords were clear to see. Seropian and Jones had allocated $2 million to its development, the biggest budget assigned to any of the studio’s projects so far. This was more than enough to create the animated sequences that formed the cutscenes, and to arrange recording sessions with the voice actors from Total Audio who played the various characters in Myth. One year before the release of Half-Life, Bungie had already acquired much of the skills it needed to bring a game’s story to life. But there was a world before Half-Life, and a world after Valve’s game, even for Bungie.

A NARRATIVE MODEL

With Halo, Bungie never hid its intentions: to create something that was qualitatively similar to what sci-fi movies did best. Not so much in form as in substance, truth be told. Even before Half-Life was released, the FPS world still had a lot of progress to make, a lot of things to prove. Valve had served up an interesting proposition with its game, but it was also an outlier. Joseph Staten, who was responsible for directing Halo’s cutscenes, perfectly understood what Jones wanted to do with his project. Halo: Combat Evolved was to be an epic adventure, with moments of doubt, moments of joy, and moments of pain. And most importantly of all, it had to be fast paced. And that’s exactly where the adventure really shines. Although some levels may seem a bit repetitive, or even completely empty, in the case of The Library, the narrative set a benchmark for the genre in 2001. It had everything people like to see in blockbuster action movies: memorable characters, menacing enemies, a desperate fight, and the mysteries of an ancient alien civilization… And it all moves along at a breathless pace, delivered through a variety of channels, and even involving players in the exposition sequences. The game is packed with cinematic scenes, and characters are always talking to each other… Master Chief doesn’t say much, but that’s counterbalanced by Cortana, who travels with him everywhere. Indeed, players are constantly receiving new information that’s easy to take in. The great idea in Halo: Combat Evolved, was to not provide lots of different points of view: the adventure is experienced through the eyes of Master Chief, and that’s more than enough. This was one of the lessons learned through Half-Life: the sense of immersion is greater for players if they don’t know everything. Like Freeman, Master Chief speaks very little, and not even Cortana knows the whole story. The person holding the controller discovers the events of the game at the same time as the character they are controlling, and the opposite is also true. It’s not for nothing that the most memorable scene in Halo: Combat Evolved is the one in which the Spartan discovers the Flood. After several hours progressing through the game, Master Chief is sent to a weapons cache to find a group of soldiers who had recently disappeared. But when he gets there, he finds nothing other than a helmet dropped by one of the Marines. He then decides to watch the video feed recorded by the helmet, which then appears on the screen: just like the Spartan, the player sees the last moments of life recorded by the built-in camera. This is how the Flood is introduced into the game and, for the first time, the player and Master Chief find themselves together in the face of the unknown. Because unlike the player, this isn’t the first time that the Spartan has fought against the Covenant. That instills a certain feeling of trust, of superiority: the player is controlling a supersoldier who has spent his entire life killing aliens. In contrast, the Flood is a new, unidentified threat. It represents fear, the unknown. The Spartan’s attitude is turned on its head by the time he finishes watching the video. The soldier who came into the room so nonchalantly stands up and points his weapon around the room, suddenly on high alert. It’s the first time he has seemed so serious. Almost on the back foot. The entire tone of Halo: Combat Evolved changes in the wake of this scene, and the transition works masterfully.

Had Bungie gained maturity? Without a doubt. The developers had refined their techniques; Myth was a real turning point for them. Fresh blood had joined the team–people like Joseph Staten and Martin O’Donnell–bringing with them their own knowledge and experience. However, the arrival of these new recruits was not enough to do away with some old habits which, at this stage, had become the studio’s hallmark: references to events or characters that players had never heard of. In Halo: Combat Evolved, this begins within the first few seconds of the game, even before Master Chief has woken up: Captain Keyes and Cortana are talking about the situation on Reach, without ever mentioning its name or the details of the battle. Players do not know what the Pillar of Autumn is fleeing, nor for how long the Humans have been at war with the Covenant. Nor even why, in fact. Unless they had read The Fall of Reach, players needed to fill in the gaps for themselves. In one sense, this brought a bit of depth to the Halo universe, as players were fully aware that they were boarding a train that was already in motion. In Halo: Combat Evolved, there were ultimately not that many references, of course, but over the course of the series they would become more commonplace.

And yet, at the same time, a game like Halo 2 absorbed more of the lessons learned from Half-Life. While it followed in the footsteps of its predecessor with ever more dialogue and cutscenes, its camera played a less active role. It was noticeable throughout the game, but perhaps more so in the very first level on Cairo Station. While Master Chief was pushing back assaults by Covenant commandos, he was hearing UNSC communications over the radio, and all of the information that was exchanged. A neighboring station had been destroyed, a Covenant ship had broken through… Everything was described, but never shown. On the other hand, most of the fighting took place in rooms with windows out onto space, meaning that players could watch the developments in the battle raging outside. Malta station, which was boobytrapped and destroyed by the Covenant, explodes before their very eyes. But the camera never focuses on this minor event. This technique is also used in Halo: Reach when, while boarding a Covenant corvette, the UNSC Savannah is destroyed not far from the Spartans. Here again, the camera never moves: it’s left up to players to look outside to see what is happening. This does, of course, amplify the sense of immersion, but it also gives the world a bit more texture. The levels in Halo 2, Halo 3 and Halo: Reach feel alive for this very reason. Of course, they used many scripts to trigger actions and micro-events when a player interacted with something in the world or passed a geographical threshold. Examples include the arrival of reinforcements or the destruction of a Warthog carrying Marines. But everything else took place organically; when the Covenant sent in reinforcements, they get out of a Phantom and make their way towards the combat area on foot, even if the Phantom was outside the field of view. Whether or not an action happens does not depend on whether the player is there to see it: it happens anyway. Within certain limits, of course, but when this was combined with the pretty robust artificial intelligence of the game’s NPC, it could produce some funny or even completely unforeseen situations. The consequence of all this was that each sandbox told one or more capsule stories. The enemies the player encountered were not there by chance, there was a reason for their presence, a story behind why they were in that particular area. This made the combat a more personal affair.

When Halo 3 came out on the Xbox 360, the franchise had already worked its magic: following the release of the first game, and especially after the release of Halo 2, the entire industry had evolved. There was now a real market for narrative FPS on consoles. And every game publisher wanted a slice of the action. Better yet, a number of them were looking for a “Halo-killer,” an expression that was very much in vogue at the time, used to describe a game that could knock Microsoft’s golden goose off its nest. Strangely, that would never really happen: the only console FPS games to sell better than Halo did so due to their multiplayer modes, rather than their single-player campaigns. Here, of course, we are talking about Call of Duty, from Activision, and Battlefield, from Electronic Arts. In 2009, Take-Two encountered some success with Borderlands, but never on the same scale as Halo. Bungie’s series still represented the gold standard for the genre, despite its third installment being tainted by several obvious flaws. While its multiplayer mode was genuinely excellent, the single-player campaign was bogged down in the studio’s bad habits. The storytelling lacked clarity, and the dialogue was often confusing… The discovery of a portal leading to the Ark is a good illustration of this. As the player progressed, sandbox by sandbox, towards the location of the immense Forerunner structure, the dialogue–and one retort from Miranda Keyes, in particular–revealed that the structure in question was the Ark, and that the Covenant had excavated it in the heart of the Savanna. Players could even see it as they made their way along Tsavo Highway. When they finally reached the area, a cutscene was triggered when they destroyed a Covenant cannon: UNSC vessels attacked the keyship found at the heart of the Forerunner site, before it gradually begins to move and light up. Shining with thousands of lights, the Dreadnought sinks into the ground, and then emits a powerful energy beam. The shockwave rocks the UNSC ships, as well as the Spartan and the Arbiter, knocking them to the ground. Players then thought that the Covenant had succeeded in activating the Ark, and the Halos along with it, but no: a slipspace portal had opened above the structure. Over the radio, Sergeant Johnson and Miranda Keyes cannot understand what has just happened, and offer no new information to the players, other than that the supposed Ark wasn’t working as they had thought. Total confusion, then, because nobody knows what has just happened, nor had the true nature of the structure been revealed. But players didn’t get much time to reflect: as the Prophet of Truth’s fleet was swallowed up by the portal, a Covenant ship showing clear signs of being controlled by the Flood crashes down in Voi. In the next level, players would have to repel its attack. This was an inopportune reversal of fortune, because it presented a major problem: with Master Chief too busy to fight the invader, the level provides no answers about the Forerunner artifact, and even less about where Truth was going. The player’s attention was taken away from the main plot, the game did not answer any of their questions and, worse still, it added a new problem and one which, moreover, would soon be solved without much ado: the Flood that had landed on Earth would be wiped out by the Sangheili. Another event that was also poorly explained. This meant that Halo 3 failed to properly tell the story of several major plot developments, from the discovery of the Ark to the turnaround for the Sangheili. These were all major events that deserved to be expanded upon so that players were given all the information they needed to understand them. Telling a story means taking the player by the hand and traveling along with them, all the way to their destination. But in Halo 3, the storyteller was miles ahead and traveling at a frenetic pace. As a result of this eagerness, they repeatedly lost the person they were supposed to be guiding. This was a flaw that was heavily criticized upon the game’s release.

Out of all the Halo games developed by Bungie, there’s one that steers clear of most of the criticism leveled at the first three games in the series. This was the last installment developed by Bungie–Halo: Reach. Here, the storytelling was more traditional because it was built around lots of cutscenes that introduced each level. It gave players a chance to take stock of how the conflict was progressing and, more importantly, to learn their new objective. The sequencing was somewhat mechanical, but it worked extremely well, especially because this time players could “play” as several Spartan-III. These were more human supersoldiers, with more to say than Master Chief. This enabled storytelling effects that were totally new to the series, which was now reaching maturity. Halo: Reach was a darker tale than its predecessors, because it told the story of a defeat. This was a theme that Bungie liked: the studio had always displayed a certain talent for depicting the terrible consequences of the Covenant’s slow but inexorable victory. When playing Halo, it’s clear that the UNSC is only buying time. Whether it’s through certain dialogues or artistic choices, Bungie is always reminding us that Humanity is losing this war, that it is on its way to annihilation. Of course, then, in making a game like Halo: Reach, which tells the story of a defeat, the developers were in their element. While the camera can seem too involved at certain points, players are mostly left to witness the agony of the planet’s invasion, and its destruction, for themselves. The Exodus mission, for example, is filled with micro-events, little scenes that are not necessarily revealed to the player. It’s up to the player to look in the right direction to see a group of Brutes running down a group of civilians, or a few soldiers trapped on top of a building being bombarded by Banshees. Most of the time, their sad fates are only suggested, but sometimes their inevitable death is thrown in the face of the viewer. While Noble Six is trying to track down his teammates, he crosses a city that’s almost deserted and where death is everywhere. There’s no need for pints of virtual blood or piles of pixelated bodies to show players that life suddenly stopped when the Covenant invaded. Residents had had to leave their homes and workplaces, often in a hurry. It can be felt on every street corner, where the Spartan helps out a few stragglers. The next level offers a different look at the same city: this time, Noble Six is mostly up in the air. He flies between skyscrapers to complete a series of rescue missions, and in the background players can see Covenant ships as they begin to glass the planet. And all the time new war machines come screaming through the night and joining the deadly procession. In desperation, New Alexandria has been abandoned to the invaders, who are wiping out any form of human presence with an unbearable tenacity. This is without a doubt the reason why the campaign in Halo: Reach is still one of the player favorites to this day. If not the favorite. It managed to elicit a wide range of emotions, and did so with some finesse. Not just because, for the first time, the player sees Spartans failing and paying the cost of failure with their lives, but also because by glassing Reach, the Covenant were attacking the entire Human civilization. Our civilization. The ruins left by ancient tribes, found everywhere on our small blue planet, led us to believe that a little piece of us would always exist. It was a reassuring thought, as it hinted at the immortality of our species. And that’s precisely what is so terrifying about glassing: it was not being used to simply kill people, but to erase every trace of mankind’s existence. An idea that could only cause the deepest unease.

Must-Play Multiplayer

While it is, of course, the adventures of Master Chief that drew players in when Halo: Combat Evolved was released, it was another part of the game that secured their long-term loyalty. Halo’s multiplayer mode quickly established itself as the benchmark, following in the footsteps of GoldenEye and Perfect Dark while perfecting the formula they had created. With just two games, Halo would set the course for the decades to come, and its influence can still be felt today everywhere in the FPS genre. Because it was here that the real revolution was to be found: more than creating new conventions, the series defined and established a new way of playing.

THE NEW STANDARD

Before the release of the first Halo game, gamers who didn’t own a PC but were looking for a multiplayer console FPS had two quality titles to choose from. We’ve already mentioned them on several occasions: GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark, two games by Rare released on the Nintendo 64. We could also add TimeSplitters to the list, which stood out upon the PlayStation 2’s launch in Europe, even though TimeSplitters 2 and its sequel, TimeSplitters: Future Perfect, left a more lasting impression, for the simple reason that the first game still had plenty of room for improvement. But anyway, there was hardly a wide selection to choose from. It was a situation that generally benefited the two Nintendo 64 games: not only were they very good, but in their sector (console multiplayer), they were practically the only show in town. Somewhat by default, they became the ultimate standard for many of us, for whom Rare’s games, and GoldenEye 007 in particular, were synonymous with having fun with friends. And it has to be said that there were indeed a lot of good things about them, especially when playing with a few friends. The character selection was fun, there were lots of maps, several different game modes, and players could even customize the rules. And then the Nintendo 64 had another little asset: it came as standard with four controller ports, which made playing on a split screen so much easier. The two games were consistent with Nintendo’s publishing strategy, because GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark could be consumed as party games. In the late 1990s, Nintendo was focusing on multiplayer experiences, making its console very popular with fans of game nights with friends. Super Mario Kart, Super Smash Bros., Mario Party, Diddy Kong Racing, Bomberman 64… Rare’s two games fit right in this list. Quick and easy to pick up and play and with lots of game modes, they were consumed in the same way. This was quite far removed from the FPS philosophy that so enamored PC gamers. Games like Counter-Strike, Quake and Unreal placed a premium on both teamwork and individual talent. And yet, it is these two diametrically opposed worlds that Hardy LeBel, the designer behind multiplayer in Halo: Combat Evolved would attempt to bring together. He wanted to make a game that offered the simplicity of a Nintendo party game, the kind of game you get out when you have friends over for a bit of fun. But as a fan of Counter-Strike and Unreal, he also wanted the most talented players to be able to express themselves.

With Halo: Combat Evolved, LeBel hit the nail on the head, because that’s precisely what he managed to create. The game was based on instinctive gameplay and a wide variety of modes that were easy to understand. Anyone could grab a controller and start having fun after learning the straightforward controls. Beginners needed to get to grips with the basics: the ability to shoot, throw grenades, and inflict melee attacks. Each of these three actions had their own button, which made them easier to learn to use. Within just a few matches, the newcomer would understand the role of each of their attacks: grenades were used to damage the shield of an enemy Spartan; the primary weapon could inflict serious damage or finish off opponents; melee attacks could be used to deliver the killer blow during hand-to-hand combat. This mechanic soon became instinctive when playing against experienced gamers where newbies paid the price: they learned through example. Their next job was to understand the different weapons in the game. In most of the multiplayer modes in Halo: Combat Evolved, players spawned armed with two weapons: the assault rifle and the magnum. The assault rifle was the logical favorite: with its automatic fire, its rate of fire, and more than adequate range, the automatic rifle was a highly effective weapon in any situation; for beginners, they just needed to pull the trigger and keep the crosshairs on their target for long enough. Other weapons worked in much the same way, like the Covenant plasma rifle or Needler pistol, with its homing crystal needles. The speed of these weapons produced quite a sustained pace to the game, which was helped by the map design and the game’s overall balancing. The height of the jumps, for example, is a very important element here because, with the right timing, jumps could be used to avoid an exploding grenade. However, if the jumps were too high, grenades would lose their interest, and if they were too low, grenades would be too effective. This balance, which applied to every aspect of the game, was very important in Halo, because within it lay all the fun of the game. Although it was refined from one installment to the next, reaching its apotheosis in Halo 3, the foundations were already laid in the very first game.

Even–and most importantly–the little subtleties. In line with LeBel’s vision, Halo: Combat Evolved introduced a small selection of weapons that were harder to use, but boasted greater destructive power. In the first game, this was the case with the magnum. Firing single rounds, it demanded greater accuracy, but it could inflict a lot of damage when aiming at an enemy’s head. With its rate of fire and its range, it was the favorite weapon for experienced players. This was somewhat ironic if you know a bit about the FPS world: in Halo: Combat Evolved, the weapon considered to be the most powerful was also the smallest out of all of them. Traditionally, handguns were relegated to a defensive role, to that of a sidearm, but not here. The magnum’s versatility, and especially its ability to inflict headshots, made it the weapon of choice for hardcore gamers, and the subject of recurring gags. This is exactly why, for Halo 2, Bungie would design a new weapon that played the same role. Accurate and useful in many situations, equipped with a scope to target distant enemies. Except that this time, its design needed to match its role. And so was born the battle rifle, which made its debut in the sequel. Initially, the BR worked along the same lines as the magnum, firing single rounds with a high rate of fire. However, it was modified to add an additional layer of difficulty: in its final version, the BR fired bursts of three rounds, which meant that players had to manage to concentrate their fire on a single spot. This was clearly problematic when firing at long-range targets, because opponents had a habit of moving while fighting, and the extra distance only enhanced the risk of the bullets spreading. It was a smart way to curb the effectiveness of the battle rifle, and therefore bring some balance into the game. At long range, this spread made the BR less useful than a sniper rifle, while at short range, the shotgun, SMG, or assault rifle did a lot more damage. And yet, the battle rifle would soon establish itself as the mark of the most talented players, even in the Halo 3 era when the series’ weaponry had been significantly expanded. Because, unlike the other weapons in the game, the BR was not designed with a single role in mind: it was a versatile weapon that was reliable in any circumstances. This meant that mastering it afforded a significant advantage, and all the more so given that many game modes assigned it as the default weapon.

Then there’s the design of the maps themselves. Those in Halo: Combat Evolved are generally well made, but players can sense the hesitation and lack of experience of their designer, Hardy LeBel. It was primarily with Halo 2, and then Halo 3, that they attained a whole new dimension. The maps were subjected to a lengthy period of playtesting, which meant that they could gradually be refined. And it shows: nothing is left to chance. Every door, every stone, and every wall are positioned with a specific aim: to direct players’ movement, provide them with some cover, and also create flashpoints for conflict. Their locations are often dictated by two factors:

j The location of a powerful weapon, usually a rocket launcher or sniper rifle. In Halo, players spawn with two weapons, determined by the game mode’s settings. They can find weapons on the map, and their spawning point is strategically placed so that every team has the same chance of reaching them. This means that there are always several ways to reach them, so that the movements of the opposing teams aren’t too predictable. When a weapon has been picked up, players need to wait a while before it reappears at its spawn point. How long they wait depends on the weapon, with the more powerful weapons naturally taking longer to reappear. This means it is important to gain control of the different power weapon spawn points.

j It is precisely for this reason that these areas provide good lines of sight, meaning a good vantage point over the rest of the map. The player or players who hold this position gain a significant advantage, but those same lines of sight can work against them, too. These are positions that are difficult to both attack and defend, and that is why they tend to be the focal points of the fighting.

It is without a doubt in these two things that Halo 2 and Halo 3 shine the most. Beyond their artistic direction and the clear desire for the maps to tell a story, the maps are designed well enough to be free of any real weaknesses that could be exploited by the craftiest players. For beginners, that means less frustration and more fun, while for more experienced gamers, it means that they need to develop a successful strategy to take control of the map on which they are playing. The strategy takes shape gradually as the teammates get their hands on the power weapons (shotgun, sniper rifle, rocket launcher, Covenant energy sword, etc.) and take control of the map’s various areas of influence. The aim is to successfully channel the movements of the opposing team and force them into the spaces that are easiest to defend. A good game of Halo is a bit like building a dam against the crashing waves of a stormy sea, and trying to make it hold just long enough to win. That’s easier said than done: a well-designed map should also enable the other team to reverse their fortunes, and no total lock should be possible. For beginner players, that means that even they can take advantage of the situation to land a few hits from time to time. Here, the matchmaking system created for Halo 2 and reused in Halo 3 shows its true worth. Players are grouped according to their ranks, which is itself calculated based on their individual stats as well as their numbers of wins and losses. On paper, that should bring players together that have the same way of “consuming” Halo multiplayer. Some players are just there to have fun, while others are there to win. Bungie clearly understood this fundamental difference, and with its matchmaking system it managed to create a multiplayer mode that would be fun for as wide a range of players as possible. This is probably the reason why Halo 3 remained one of the most popular games on Xbox Live for years after it was released.

XBOX LIVE

The video game industry has undergone many transformations over the course of its history. One of the most decisive, the effects of which can still be felt today, is the spread of online gaming through a console. While historically, the SEGA Dreamcast was the first to offer such a feature, it was the first Xbox, with the launch of Xbox Live on November 15, 2002, that made it an everyday feature. For the very first time, players could, at the press of a button, access a whole host of features and play against other gamers from all over the world. An interesting tidbit is that it was Bungie that defined most of the basic features of Xbox Live, features that today are the very foundation of any good online gaming service. Group voice chat, messaging system, direct invitations to join a game… This was what Bungie needed for Halo 2, and it was at their request that Microsoft incorporated these features. Both parties wanted to create a “virtual sofa” that would enable players to forget about the distance separating them, and feel as if they were playing there together, in the same room. While Halo 2 was only released two years after Xbox Live was launched, it comes as no surprise that it was able to get the most out of the features of Microsoft’s service. Although online gaming was already a genuine social phenomenon in the United States, the possibility of playing an enhanced version of Halo: Combat Evolved online left many players salivating at the prospect, creating massive expectations. Fortunately, upon its release Halo 2 lived up to all of its promises, paving the way for other titles to do the same, whether they were published by Microsoft or not.

It’s important to understand that before Xbox Live, or even before Halo 2, online gaming was largely an affair for the PC market. Fans of Counter-Strike, Quake, and Unreal Tournament… got together though aftermarket chat solutions like TeamSpeak, the first public version of which was released in October 2001. It was a perfectly adequate solution, but it had its limitations in terms of accessibility and practicality. With Xbox Live, gamers could now speak to each other very easily, before teaming up in small groups and doing battle with other players via the matchmaking system in Halo 2. Doing so was also much more straightforward than it ever had been up until that point, with players having to join the same server, hoping that there was enough space to accommodate all of them. Here, everything was done automatically. It was easy, flexible, and extremely effective. A multiplayer aficionado could find players to play against at any time of day and in any game mode they liked–be that Team Slayer, Big Team Battle, or Capture the Flag–and then enter the desired game time, any available friends, and the equipment. All they needed to do was to turn on their console and launch Halo, and they were ready to play. This was a radical change in the approach to multiplayer gaming, and a radical change in how people engaged with it. Within a few years, it evolved from an occasional pastime on evenings spent with friends, into a whole new way of imagining video games. Halo 2 was the game that normalized online gaming on consoles, paving the way for Call of Duty and many more games, including titles that were exclusively for PC gaming. Today, games like Overwatch, Rainbow Six Siege and even Destiny owe a great debt to Halo.

Halo and America’s Wars

Halo’s popularity grew in parallel to a series of much darker events. On September 11, 2001, two months before Halo: Combat Evolved was released, the terrorist organization al-Qaida attacked the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York. As a result, the United States would find itself embroiled in a series of wars in the Middle East, conflicts that would leave an imprint on many game studios. Including Bungie?

Well, not really, if we believe what we hear from the horse’s mouth. Joseph Staten, the series’ main writer and cutscene director, has often denied that the wider geopolitical context had any influence. And yet, it isn’t hard to draw parallels between the stories told in Halo and the conflicts of our time, especially those entered under the Bush and Obama administrations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The clearest link can be found in the motives for the war between the Covenant and the UNSC. Like al-Qaida, the Covenant was based on a body of religious beliefs, and waged war on anyone it deemed to be heretics or infidels. Like al-Qaida, the Covenant made no distinction between civilian and military targets. While the UNSC’s primary aim was pure survival, on the Covenant side the war was a genuine crusade. On one side of the conflict there was the noble participant, attacked for no reason, and on the other, pure evil. However, the foundations of the Halo universe and the outline of the story told in Halo: Combat Evolved were created long before Osama bin Laden ordered his followers to attack the United States. In the end, these similarities can only be put down to a somewhat clumsy reappropriation. On the other hand, and perhaps unconsciously, it is clear that the studio’s developers, and especially its artists, were inspired by images of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq when designing some of the levels in Halo 2. These include Outskirts, the first mission in the Halo franchise to take place on Earth soil. When Master Chief and a group of Marines are making their way through Old Mombasa, it’s hard not to recall the footage filmed by war correspondents on the streets of Baghdad. All of the same imagery is found here: the exotic location, the palm trees, the sand that dominates the color palette, damaged homes, burnt-out cars… and hidden snipers, which force the player to proceed with caution. Strong imagery that could also be seen in many FPS and TPS of the time, from Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare to Spec Ops: The Line. This sequence in Halo 2 seems almost timeless, so much does it contrast with the rest of the artistic direction. If it weren’t for the Covenant, you’d never think that this was a sci-fi game. That was not, however, the effect that Bungie’s artists were trying to procure: in the collector edition of Halo 2, they explain that they were inspired by photos of the real Mombasa. Then they added a few visual details to age the city and make it appear to be 500 years older. When questioned about this at the time by a number of American media outlets, Bungie always denied that its games were a sci-fi retelling of the war in Iraq, and avoided taking sides. Even when that meant cutting some sequences from the game. This is what happened to a level called The Great Journey, in which several human prisoners captured by Brutes were forced to kneel before being beheaded. The scene was cut from the final version of the game as it was too similar to recent events like the execution of Nicholas Berg, an American businessman who was kidnapped and murdered by al-Qaida in May 2004. Bungie preferred to avoid any political messages. Halo was a work of fiction, and should remain that way.

But like many others, Bungie’s staff was influenced by the abundant footage that made it back to the United States. In Iraq, the missions undertaken by American soldiers were filmed day and night, with the footage being shown widely on the country’s various TV news shows. The American government was at pains to show that the war in the Middle East was a responsible one, one characterized by precise–and effective–strikes. This was the message that was maintained for years, even after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the country’s former leader. But this overexposure in the media would allow a strong current of symbolism to form, and one that would provide natural inspiration for many artists, including games developers. And including Bungie. While Halo 3 managed to keep its fiction in place, without drawing in the real world, the war in Iraq is a glaring presence in Halo 3: ODST. It can be seen in almost every aspect of the game, from the choice of the character controlled by the player, the context, and some gameplay mechanisms. The game moved away from the large sandboxes for a more intimate setting composed of small-scale skirmishes in an urban environment. This time, the main character was no armored supersoldier, but just a normal soldier, despite the fact that he serves in an elite unit. This was a fundamental change for a Halo game, because ODST troops were, by nature, more fragile than the Spartans who could simply wade into the action. The heroes in Halo 3: ODST had to rely on stealth, and use more realistic, more rational combat tactics. Lonely and lost in a hostile environment, players were forced to move carefully through the streets of New Mombasa. Most of the adventure takes place at night, so the ODST had to make regular use of their helmets’ night vision system. All of these little differences, when taken as a whole, recall the many videos of military operations conducted by American forces in Iraq. The same exotic setting, the same feeling that the soldiers were operating in an environment over which they had no real control, the infrared cameras, the tactical movements. But once again, Bungie denied any link. Halo 3: ODST was not in any way inspired by the war in Iraq, Joseph Staten swears. It was the ODST and the missions they regularly conducted in the Halo universes that guided the developers. “We honestly didn’t really think about current day things at all,” he explained to Kotaku in September 2009. “What we did was look inside the Halo universe. We know the kinds of problems Master Chief solves. He goes to ancient, alien ring artifacts, fights galaxy-consuming parasitic alien monsters and destroys alien empires with their vast military industrial complexes behind them. The ODST, they maybe take small parts in that larger struggle. But the kind of fights they usually get into are usually the kind of fights they can tackle in a day. They drop into a city and try to secure a sector of it. They take out an installation. They really are special forces guys. For us, it was trying to narrow down the scope of the larger war and pick a specific place that ODST felt right operating in. For us, an urban environment made a lot of sense.”

This, however, leads to the question of how and when Bungie created the concept of the ODST, and what influences were at play. But that would be to overlook that from the outset, the studio had always tried to make the UNSC believable, and that for that reason it was based on a number of real-world examples. All Bungie did was project them into the future. The UNSC is ultimately a futuristic take on the regular armed forces as we know them today. As a result, we will always be able to draw parallels, make comparisons, and find similarities. Especially with the American army, the primary model that Bungie used when designing the human army in Halo. By keeping one foot in the real world, Bungie created a bridge between it and its own fictional one, even if that was never its intention. And in doing so, they opened the door for every possible interpretation.

20  For GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark, Rare found a workaround: players could use two controllers at the same time so that they could use two joysticks.

21 A shot that kills an enemy.

22 NPC: Non-Player Character. Used to describe any character controlled by the game’s AI.

WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

BECAUSE THEY ARE THE REAL HEROES of this story, we thought it might be nice to share a bit about the careers of the people who made Halo and worked at Bungie before the franchise was handed over to 343 Industries. The list is not, of course, exhaustive, as we decided to focus on the people most often quoted throughout this book in the Origins of Halo chapter. They are listed in order of appearance as they joined Bungie and worked on the various Halo games made by the studio.

ALEXANDER SEROPIAN

After he left Bungie in September 2002, Alexander Seropian moved back to Chicago, where he started a family and founded a new studio named Wideload Games. In 2009, Seropian sold Wideload Games to Disney. This was how he came to join Disney Interactive Studios where he quickly rose to the rank of General Manager, overseeing video game adaptations of Disney, Pixar and Marvel franchises, such as Epic Mickey and Disney Infinity. In 2012, he left Disney and founded another new studio, Industrial Toys, to make games for smartphones. Today, he lives in California with all of his family.

JASON JONES

The other Bungie co-founder, and one of the main creative forces behind Halo. In 2014 he brought us Destiny, the studio’s first game in the post-Microsoft era. Despite its many flaws, the game quickly carved out its own space on the video-gaming landscape, hosting tens of millions of players at its peak. Today, he is still working at Bungie, and credited on Destiny 2. It is not known what is currently keeping him busy in the studio, but we know that Bungie has at least one other project in the pipeline. He was recently featured in a video published by the studio to celebrate 30 years of Bungie. In the video, Jones extolled the merits of augmented reality.

MATT SOELL

One of Bungie’s first employees, Soell followed the career of the man who offered him a job at the studio, Alexander Seropian. He joined Seropian when he founded Wideload Games, then worked as a writer at Disney Interactive Studios. They ultimately parted ways in 2013 when Soell joined Max Hoberman’s studio, Certain Affinity. He has worked there ever since as a writer and narrative designer.

DOUG ZARTMAN

Like Soell, Zartman was another of Bungie’s first employees, and like Soell, he chose to follow Alexander Seropian on his new ventures. In 2004, Doug Zartman joined Wideload Games as a game designer, before moving on to work for Disney Interactive. In 2012, he was hired by Spooky Cool Labs, a small mobile gaming studio based in Chicago. Spooky Cool Labs quickly earned a reputation and was acquired by Zynga, the mobile gaming giant, in 2013. Zartman now works for Electronic Arts, but also works as a social media consultant for Industrial Toys, Alex Seropian’s new studio.

ROBERT MCLEES

The mysterious Robert McLees only grew more secretive as the years progressed. He can, however, be seen in the credits for the first Destiny game, to which he once again contributed his talents as a writer. His more recent contributions, though, remain unknown. Officially, he is still working for Bungie.

MARCUS LEHTO

The father of Master Chief left Bungie and its board in 2012, after helping create the visual universe for Project Tiger, the project that would become Destiny. He then founded his own studio, V1 Interactive. Unfortunately, the release of the studio’s first title, Disintegration, didn’t go as well as planned, and Lehto was forced to shut down V1 Interactive in March 2021. In October 2021, he announced via Twitter that he would be working for Electronic Arts, where he would spearhead a new development studio in Seattle. The new studio had the by-no-means easy task of developing the new Battlefield, which up until that point had been tied to its creators at DICE. Halo’s artistic director still lives in the region that had provided him with so much inspiration when designing the landscapes of Halo: Combat Evolved.

SHI KAI WANG

“Shiek” is still working for Bungie, where he continues to bring the studio’s unique visual style to life. Responsible for the 3D modeling of characters in the first Destiny, he was then appointed artistic director for Destiny 2, a job that he still holds today.

MARTIN O’DONNELL

In April 2014, the world was astounded to learn that Bungie’s longstanding composer had been fired without any reason. Disagreements between O’Donnell and other members of the board had been festering since 2013, with the musician believing that Activision, publisher of Destiny, was getting too involved in the game’s creative process. O’Donnell then sued Harold Ryan, Bungie’s CEO, to force the studio to pay what he was owed, a case that he won. Still president of Total Audio, he has nevertheless remained in Seattle where he founded Highwire Games in 2014. The studio has since released Golem, a PlayStation 4 and PSVR exclusive, before making the headlines when it was announced that it would be taking over the development of Six Days in Fallujah, a game whose development was canceled by Konami in 2009 due to the controversy the game provoked.

MICHAEL SALVATORI

Although he initially decided to stay in Chicago, Michael Salvatori ultimately made the move to join Bungie, where he made a major contribution to making Halo’s music the phenomenon that it was for ten years, and Bungie has never forgotten it. After Halo, Salvatori co-wrote the soundtrack for Destiny, alongside his associate Martin O’Donnell and one Paul McCartney. Despite his friend getting fired, he stayed there working on Destiny, Destiny 2 and every expansion. Modest and discreet, today he is one of the most respected and most well-liked members of staff.

JAIME GRIESEMER

Like Martin O’Donnell, Jaime Griesemer was also let go by Bungie in late 2010. The exact circumstances are unknown. He joined Sucker Punch Productions, another studio based in Bellevue, in 2012, where he worked as lead designer on Infamous: Second Son. In 2014, following the departure of Martin O’Donnell, he left Sucker Punch to help O’Donnell found Highwire Games. Today he works for the company as creative director.

JOSEPH STATEN

The main writer behind Bungie’s Halos, Joseph Staten worked on the storyline for Destiny until 2013. Working with a team of writers he had selected himself, they laid the foundations of the game’s lore. But the Bungie board, and Jason Jones in particular, were not happy with their work, finding the plot proposed by Staten to be too linear. Tired of all the disagreements and Bungie’s desire to start again from scratch, Joseph Staten preferred to resign. A few months later he returned to Microsoft, where he spent some time working as a creative director. He wrote Halo: Shadow of Intent, a novella published on December 7, 2015, before joining the development team working on Halo Infinite as project lead for the campaign mode.

CHRIS BUTCHER

The talented Chris Butcher still works for Bungie, where his skills as a programmer and engineer were vital when designing Destiny. He can also be seen in the credits to Destiny 2, on which he served as engineering director. Today, he is one of the longest serving and most important members of the studio.

LORRAINE MCLEES

Responsible for designing all of Bungie’s marketing visuals before the studio was acquired by Microsoft, Lorraine McLees was offered the same role in Bungie’s new marketing department after it had regained its independence. Since then, she has been busy overseeing the creation of goodies for fans, as well as art books, and is involved in the design of live-action advertising spots.

PAUL BERTONE

After establishing a number of the design fundamentals for Destiny, Paul Bertone decided to leave Bungie in 2012. After a few months’ downtime, he joined Industrial Toys after it was founded by Alexander Seropian. He worked there for three years, before resigning and spending several years working as a freelancer. Bertone recently joined Probably Monsters, where he would be reunited with many of his old Bungie colleagues, like Harold Ryan, CJ Cowan, Sage Merill, and C Paul Johnson. In April 2020, he joined Highwire Games, the studio founded by Martin O’Donnell and Jaime Griesemer, where he worked as lead designer. On July 6th, 2022, Joseph Staten announced via his Twitter account that Bertone was back working on Halo, as 343 Industries’ new Studio Technical Design Director.

CHRISTOPHER BARRETT

The artist that brought us many of the environments in the Halo games made by Bungie, Christopher Barrett replaced Marcus Lehto as the studio’s official artistic director, a position he held throughout the development of Destiny and its expansions. He then co-directed Destiny 2 with Luke Smith. Today, he is the head of an as-yet-unannounced project from Bungie. All we know is that it is a competitive shooter.

PAUL RUSSEL

After 12 years of loyal service, the man responsible for the name Halo took a well-earned break before joining Max Hoberman at Certain Affinity. He worked there for a whole year before leaving to open his own company in Austin named spazdesign. There, he designs logos, business cards, and promotional materials. His clients include Industrial Toys, Alexander Seropian’s studio.

HARDY LEBEL

The father of multiplayer mode in Halo: Combat Evolved has always had a lot going on, and shows no signs of stopping. Officially, LeBel left Bungie one month after the first Halo game was released, but he kept working for Microsoft and Bungie until 2004. One noteworthy role was as a consultant for certain design decisions in Halo 2. Next, he worked in a series of roles, including a spell at Crystal Dynamics and, like many ex-Bungie employees, Industrial Toys. Today, he wants to share his knowledge and is the author of a number of successful books, such as The Video Game Careers, a guide for young video game developers. While doing all of that, he also opened the Video Game Careers Academy, where he intends to share his knowledge and experience with the next generation of video game professionals.

MAX HOBERMAN

Max Hoberman still lives in Texas, and is still the CEO of Certain Affinity. The studio has maintained close relationships with Microsoft and Halo, because after developing the Defiant Map Pack for Halo: Reach, Certain Affinity still regularly works with 343 Industries. Hoberman’s staff was therefore involved in developing the multiplayer mode for Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary Edition, Halo 4, and Halo: The Master Chief Collection. But Hoberman has also acquired other clients, like Activision and id Software. Certain Affinity has worked on several DLC for Call of Duty: Black Ops, Call of Duty: Ghost, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered and co-developed the multiplayer mode for DOOM, released in 2016.

HAMILTON CHU

The executive producer on Halo 2 has had a turbulent career since he left Bungie in 2004. Following a stint at Electronic Arts, he regularly changed employer before landing at Blizzard as a director. He gradually climbed the ranks within the company, with his work including big names like World of Warcraft, until he became vice president and executive producer for the team working on Hearthstone. A popular figure in the gaming community, his departure in April 2018 left many gamers feeling lost. Hamilton Chu then founded Second Dinner, his own development studio.

FRANK O’CONNOR

The first member of Bungie to join 343 Industries, “Frankie” still works in the same role as creative director for the franchise. His role is to enrich the Halo universe and ensure that it stays internally consistent as new novels, comics, and video games are made. He has also authored several novellas, like Midnight in the Heart of Midlothian and Halo: Saint’s Testimony.

HAROLD RYAN

Bungie’s CEO and leading member of its board left Bungie in January 2016, with no-one knowing why or under what circumstances. It was Ryan who, in 2014, suggested that Martin O’Donnell be fired, providing ample grist for the rumor mill when Bungie announced his departure in a particularly terse press release. Shortly after his departure, he founded Probably Monsters and became CEO, attracting several former Bungie employees to his company.

PETE PARSONS

A Microsoft employee, Pete Parsons chose to make the move to Bungie permanent after the studio regained its independence. He worked as operations director before being appointed CEO in the wake of Harold Ryan’s departure.

TYSON GREEN

After overseeing all of the level design for the campaign in Halo 2, then multiplayer mode in Halo 3, Tyson Green joined the team of designers working on Destiny, alongside Jason Jones, Jaime Griesemer and Paul Bertone. But unlike Bertone and Griesemer, Green is still working for Bungie and is one of the lead designers on Destiny 2.

CHRIS CARNEY

Chris Carney is one of the main architects behind the multiplayer maps in Halo 2 and Halo 3, and it will come as no surprise that Bungie entrusted him with a similar role on Destiny: to oversee and design the different worlds visited by the player in the studio’s new game. After working on the design of the various campaign missions in Destiny 2, Chris Carney left Bungie in 2015 to join Riot Games, where he was reunited with his first true love: designing multiplayer maps. In 2020, he joined Raid Base, new studio that is currently working on a game that combines PvE and PvP.

STEVE COTTON

The other man behind the multiplayer maps in Halo 2 and Halo 3 was promoted during the development of Destiny, heading up the team responsible for the artistic direction of the game’s various destinations. After working as lead designer on the different worlds in Destiny 2, Steve Cotton served as director for the game’s biggest expansion, Forsaken. This was no easy task, but one that he pulled off with aplomb, with the expansion quickly establishing itself as a favorite among fans of Destiny.

CONCLUSION

TWELVE YEARS HAVE NOW PASSED since Bungie delivered Halo: Reach, its final contribution to the game universe it created. Twelve years since the studio bid Master Chief and his ringworlds farewell, to set off and explore new horizons. Today, Bungie is exploring another universe, the one belonging to Destiny, and things have been going well for the studio since it regained its independence. Yes, it has been a rocky road at times, and several of the studio’s big names who have featured prominently in this book have left for pastures new. Paul Bertone, Martin O’Donnell, Marcus Lehto, Jaime Griesemer, Joseph Staten… they all left the studio sooner or later. Not always in the same circumstances, and not always of their own desire. But today, Bungie is doing well. What about Halo? Well, the situation is not quite as rosy.

In 2012, 343 Industries cast the first brushstrokes of its own on the immense canvas painted by Bungie. It was a brave, innovative, and extremely individual first attempt. A different approach, with a clear determination to revive the series and then lead it onwards to new heights. But that determination was in vain. Despite recording very good sales, Halo 4 was soon facing criticism from players due to some narrative decisions, as well as the game design in its multiplayer mode. Halo 5: Guardians, despite its many qualities, received the same feedback.

The handover from Bungie to 343 Industries was a trying one, then, and still today there are some fans who regret that Bungie ceded the license to Microsoft. There are a lot of things to be lauded about 343 Industries’ Halo, that much is clear. But what they are missing is that little touch of Bungie magic. Jaime Griesemer said, fairly, that nobody else could make a new Halo, for the simple reason that the game was never the result of one person’s work. It was born of a long creative process, the essence procured from a still that had, drop by drop, distilled the ideas and ambitions of a whole group of artists. Even on the scale of AAA titles, video game design remains an eminently personal affair: each developer brings a little bit of themselves to the game. As imperceptible as that may be, that’s what gives a game its character. It is in this way that Bungie’s Halo games and 343 Industries’ Halo games will always be very different, a fact that is not necessarily a bad thing. And it’s also why Halo will never be Halo again. Is that a death sentence for the series? No. Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST and Halo: Reach aren’t going anywhere. They can still be played today. The new vision brought by 343 Industries does nothing to erase all of Bungie’s work. Indeed, they are only adding to the canvas.

Bungie’s Halo games had something unique about them. The studio’s staff, past and present, like to talk about Bungie’s secret sauce, a magic ingredient that gives their games that little something that makes them leave a lasting mark. Personally, I’ve never quite been able to put my finger on exactly what that ingredient is. It took me until 2015 to understand that, beyond Halo and its game universe, there was something about Bungie’s games in general that always drew me in. That was the year I made my first foray into Destiny, almost one year late–for reasons that I don’t really understand. I was annoyed by the game’s flaws, the weakness of its content, and the balancing issues in the Crucible. So when Halo 5: Guardians hit the shelves, I automatically put Destiny back in the cupboard, even though, in the meantime, it had received the excellent expansion, The King of the Corrupt. And, in truth, there’s always something magical about rediscovering Halo with every new release. It’s the same every time. Meeting Master Chief again, fighting his enemies and then, once the campaign is over, facing off against other players online. Again and again. One of the many pleasures is the thrill you feel when a match’s first countdown begins, always signaled by the same sound since 2004. Four notes are enough! I had an intense affair with Halo 5: Guardians. I put hundreds of hours into the game. Then, after just a few months, I realized that something just wasn’t right. There was something missing. Unable to find out exactly what was missing, I put the game down and went back to Destiny and its rickety Crucible. And it was there, among the many obvious flaws, that I found what was missing. Something that is unique to Bungie, and that I’ll never find anywhere else. Not even in Halo. At least, not in the games made by 343 Industries. That Bungie secret sauce very much exists. It’s not just a catchy slogan used by overenthusiastic developers. It’s real. Now it’s up to 343 Industries to tap into their own. Because that’s what separates good games from unforgettable ones.

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Anonymous. Halo 3 vide les cinémas US. (16/10/2007) Available at <http://www.jeuxvideo.com/news/2007/00022827-halo-3-vide-les-cinemas-us.htm>

Anonymous. Lancement record pour Halo 3. (27/09/2007) Available at <http://www.jeuxvideo.com/news/2007/00022544-lancement-record-pourhalo-3.htm>

Anonymous. Xbox 360: des chiffres qui parlent. (04/01/2008) Available at <http://www.jeuxvideo.com/news/2008/00023829-xbox-360-des-chiffres-qui-parlent.htm>

CHAVEL, Miguel., ERRERA, Claude. Alex Seropian interview. (26/04/2004) Available at <http://nikon.bungie.org/misc/seropian.042604.html>

FAHEY, Mike. How Halo and Destiny’s composer got fired from Bungie. (05/09/2015) Available at <https://kotaku.com/how-halo-and-destinys-composer-got-fired-from-bungie-1728943410>

FAHEY, Rob. Better than Halo: The making of Halo 2. (10/04/2010) Available at <https://www.primagames.com/games/halo-2/strategy/better-than-halo-the-making-of-halo-2-1041160#ampshare>
<https://www.primagames.com/games/halo-2/strategy/better-than-halo-the-making-of-halo-2-1041160>

FRITZ, Ben. ‘Halo 3’ fuels Xbox win over Wii. (18/10/2007) Available at <https://variety.com/2007/digital/features/halo-3-fuels-xbox-win-over-wii-1117974304/>

G., Andrew. An oral history of the Halo 2 E3 2003 Demo. (30/07/2016) Available at <https://medium.com/@Oozer3993/an-oral-history-of-the-halo-2-e3-2003-demo-700d978b92dc>

G., Andrew. The making of Halo: How Combat Evolved from Blam! –Part 1. (15/11/2016) Available at <https://medium.com/@Oozer3993/the-making-of-halo-how-combat-evolved-from-blam-part-1-f6b58fcc4ade>

G., Andrew. The making of Halo: How Combat Evolved from Blam! –Part 2. (19/03/2017) Available at <https://medium.com/@Oozer3993/the-making-of-halo-how-combat-evolved-from-blam-part-2-6bfeabde0f90>

GALLAWAY, Brad. Interview with Halo 3 Lead 3D artist: Shi Kai Wang. (28/06/2008) Available at <https://gamecritics.com/brad-gallaway/inter-view-with-halo-3-lead-3d-artist-shi-kai-wang/>

HANDRAHAN, Matthew. Bungie’s 13-year battle with crunch culture. (04/08/2017) Available at <http://www.gamesindustry.biz/amp/2017-08-04-bungies-13-year-battle-to-kill-crunch-culture>

HASKE, Steve. The Complete, Untold History of Halo. (30/05/2017) Available at <https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/xwqjg3/the-complete-untold-history-of-halo-an-oral-history>

JUSTICE, Brandon. IGN Xbox interviews Bungie’s John Howard and Joseph Staten. (27/04/2001) Available at <http://www.ign.com/articles/2001/04/27/ign-xbox-interviews-bungies-john-howard-and-joseph-staten>

KIETZMANN, Ludwig. Half-Minute Halo: An interview with Jaime Griesemer. (14/07/2011) Available at <https://www.engadget.com/2011/07/14/half-minute-halo-an-interview-with-jaime-griesemer/>

KUCHERA, Ben. Despite lack of gaming vision, Jobs angered when Microsoft bought Bungie. (26/10/2010) Available at <https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/10/jobs-lack-of-gaming-vision-led-to-lost-opportunities-for-apple/>

KUCHERA, Ben. Jobs turned down Bungie… at first: how Microsoft burned Apple. (27/10/2010) Available at <https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/10/jobs-turned-down-bungie-at-first-how-microsoft-burned-apple/>

LIEBERMAN, Jonathan. Alain Roy Interview. (07/04/2003) Available at <http://marathon.bungie.org/story/Alain_Roy_interview/alain_roy.html>

LOPEZ, Vincent. Heavenly Halo announced from Bungie. (22/07/1999) Available at <http://www.ign.com/articles/1999/07/22/heavenly-halo-announced-from-bungie>

MCCAFFREY, Ryan. Bungie co-founder, Halo and Destiny creator Jason Jones breaks 11-year silence. (07/07/2013) Available at <http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/07/07/bungie-co-founder-halo-and-destiny-creator-jason-jones-breaks-11-year-silence>

MOLDRICH, Curtis. Halo Xbox video game franchise: in numbers. (12/11/2014) Available at <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/video-games/11223730/Halo-in-numbers.html>

O’CONNOR, Franck. The origin of Halo. (09/04/2004) Available at <http://halo.bungie.net/News/content.aspx?cid=630>

OSBORNE, Eric. Forest for the trees. (04/02/2010) Available at <http://halo.bungie.net/News/content.aspx?type=topnews&link=Guardian_Postmortem>

OSBORNE, Eric. Excavating the pit. (27/05/2010) Available at <http://halo.bungie.net/News/content.aspx?type=topnews&link=Pit_Postmortem>

OSBORNE, Eric. Sense of scale. Postmortem (11/03/2010) Available at <http://halo.bungie.net/News/content.aspx?type=topnews&link=Sandtrap_Postmortem>

PITTS, Russ. The Birth of Xbox Live. (11/11/2013) Available at <https://www.polygon.com/features/2013/11/11/4849940/xbox-live-millennium-e>

PITTS, Russ. Bungie Co-founder Alexander Seropian: The Interview. (31/07/2013) Available at <https://www.polygon.com/features/2013/7/31/4513284/alex-seropian-interview>

REMO, Chris. Why Halo’s Multiplayer Almost Didn’t Make It. (10/10/2008) Available at <https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/111483/InDepth_Why_Halos_Multiplayer_Almost_Didnt_Make_It.php>

ROMANO, Benjamin J. Microsoft, “Halo” maker Bungie split. (06/10/2007) Available at <http://old.seattletimes.com/html/businesstech-nology/2003928945_bungie06.html>

ROUSE, Richard. IMG Interview: Bungie’s Jason Jones. (oct. (1993) Available at <http://pid.bungie.org/IMGjasoninterviewOct93.html

SCHREIER, Jason. The Messy, True Story Behind The Making Of Destiny. (20/10/2015) Available at <https://kotaku.com/the-messy-true-story-be-hind-the-making-of-destiny-1737556731>

SKETCH. Jason Jones Interviewed By You. (18/12/2001) Available at <https://halo.bungie.net/News/content.aspx?cid=6>

SMITH, Luke. Post-mortem: The Halo 3 Public Beta. (13/06/2007) Available at <http://halo.bungie.net/News/content.aspx?type=topnews&cid=12542>

SWENSON, Rob. The Nathan Bitner Interview. (25/09/1999) Available at <http://halo.bungie.org/misc/interviews/halonews.nbitner.092599/>

SZABO, Brooke. Bungie Artist Lorraine McLees. (09/10/2003) Available at <https://halo.bungie.net/News/content.aspx?cid=85>

Thompson, Clive. Halo 3: How Microsoft labs invented a new science of play. (21/08/2007) Available at <https://www.wired.com/2007/08/ff-halo-2/?currentPage=all>

TOLITO, Stephen. How and why Halo 3: ODST was made in 14 months. (08/09/2009) Available at <https://kotaku.com/5354944/how-and-why-halo-3-odst-was-made-in-14-months>

TUNCER, Deniz. Interview: Bungie’s Alexander Seropian. (19/06/2000) Available at <http://halo.bungie.org/misc/interviews/img.seropian.061900/>

TUNCER, Deniz. Interview: Bungie’s Alexander Seropian. (10/12/2001) Available at <http://www.insidemacgames.com/features/view.php?ID=93>

TUNCER, Deniz. Interview: Halo’s Jason Jones. (1999) Available at <http://web.archive.org/web/20000815110240/
<http://www.insidemacgames.com/features/99/jones/jones.shtml>

TUTTLE, Will. Bungie’s lead designer Jaime Griesemer talks about the vehicles in the game. (01/11/2004) Available at <http://xbox.gamespy.com/xbox/ halo-2/562654p1.html>

TUTTLE, Will. Halo 2: Everyone loves a good story. (02/11/2004) Available at <http://xbox.gamespy.com/xbox/halo-2/562962p1.html>

TUTTLE, Will. Halo 2: Of music and sound. (04/11/2004) Available at <http://xbox.gamespy.com/xbox/halo-2/562861p1.html>

WU, Louis. Marty O’Donnell discusses Halo’s sound. (06/07/2000) Available at <http://halo.bungie.org/news.html?item=1840>

Books

BEAR, Greg. Halo Cryptum – The Forerunner Saga. Paris: Milady, 2011, 384 p.

BEAR, Greg. Halo Primordium – The Forerunner Saga. Paris: Milady, 2012, 359 p.

BEAR, Greg. Halo Silentium – The Forerunner Saga. Paris: Milady, 2013, 336 p.

BUCKELL, Tobias S. The Cole Protocol. Paris: Milady, 2015, 432 p.

FARKAS, Bart. “The Making of Myth” in Myth: The Fallen Lords – Strategies & Secrets. Alameda: Sybex, 1999, pp.262–271

FRANCOIS, Yann. Half-Life – Le FPS libéré. Toulouse: Third Éditions, 2016, 223 p.

MOSS, Richard. The Secret History of Mac Gaming. London: Unbound, 2018, 416 p.

NYLUND, Eric. Halo: Ghosts of Onyx. Paris: Milady, 2014, 451 p.

NYLUND, Eric. Halo: The Fall of Reach. Paris: Fleuve Éditions, 2004, 469 p.

NYLUND, Eric. Operation: First Strike. Paris: Fleuve Éditions, 2005, 504 p.

SCHREIER, Jason. “Halo Wars” in Blood, Sweat, and Pixels. Paris: Mana Books, 2018, pp.167–201

SCHREIER, Jason. “Destiny” in Blood, Sweat, and Pixels. Paris: Mana Books, 2018, pp.271–308

SMITH, Luke., MCLEES, Robert. The Art of Halo 3. Roseville Prima Games, 2008, 166 p.

STATEN, Joseph. Halo: Contact Harvest. Paris: Milady, 2014, 431 p.

Takahashi, Dean. Au cœur de la Xbox. Paris: Pix’n Love Editions, 2013, 348 p.

Takahashi, Dean. The Xbox 360 Uncloaked. Milton Keynes: Spider Work, 2006, 389 p.

TRAUTMAN, Eric. The Art of Halo – Creating a virtual world. New York: Del Rey Books, 2004, 161 p.

EASTERLING, Jeff., PATENAUDE, Jeremy., PETERS, Kenneth. Halo Mythos – le guide de l’histoire de Halo. Paris: 404 Editions, 2016, 208 p.

Videos

BUNGIE. “Behind the scenes making of Halo 2” [30 April 2012] on YouTube. [52 min 45 s] Available at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0q69Msy8tt-M&t=1002s

BUNGIE. “Halo. Combat Evolved: Developer Commentary” [2007] on YouTube. [55 min 38 s] Available at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ6ReuY6eA>

BUNGIE. “Halo2: Developer Commentary Playthrough” [2007] on YouTube. [81 min 15 s] Available at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBi_xx26ClM&t=4254s>

BUNGIE. “Halo 3 ViDoc: Cinema Paradiso” [2007] on YouTube. [7 min 28 s] Available at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YH-e-xq12ac&list=PL96EB8EEBE8BD1B23&index=13 >

BUNGIE. “Halo 3 ViDoc: Et tu, Brute?” [2007] on YouTube. [6 min 59 s] Available at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPOlLH8p8u8&list=PL96EB8EEBE8BD1B23&index=11>

BUNGIE. “Halo 3 ViDoc: Finish the Fight” [2007] on YouTube. [7 min 16 s] Available at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14VuexP9UYE&list=PL96EB8EEBE8BD1B23&index=10>

BUNGIE. “Halo 3 ViDoc: Quisnam Protero Damno!” [2007] on YouTube. [7 min 13 s] Available at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG9fh74D-_M&list=PL96EB8EEBE8BD1B23&index=12>

BUNGIE. “O Brave New World” [August 4, 2011] on YouTube. [55 min 7 s] Available at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtG6--4r_qk&list=PL96EB8EEBE8BD1B23>

BUNGIE. “Once more unto the breach” [2010] on YouTube. [7 min 44 s] Available at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0_jiB2hqeQ&t=136s>

BUNGIE. “The making of Halo 3” [2007] on YouTube. [62min43s] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWNxfarEo3o&t=1s>

IGN. “Halo and Destiny Composer Marty O’Donnell – IGN Unfiltered Interview” [March 24, 2016] on YouTube. [123 min 37 s] Available at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwugLKltVqo&t=1s>

IGN. “Halo Fest: Bungie Hatching the Cosmic Halo Egg” [Sunday, August 28, 2011] on YouTube. [61 min 54 s] Available at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afXrOIpwz4M&t=281s>

HALO. “Remaking the Legend – Halo 2: Anniversary” [November 3, 2014] on YouTube. [62 min] Available at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9-Wk_R3SPw>

MACGAMESHISTORY. “Interview with Bungie Software 1995” [Saturday, July 8, 1995] on YouTube. [10 min 58 s] Available at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwLCwkcQEZA&t=17s>

MACGAMESHISTORY. “Bungie in 1996” [January 3, 2009] on YouTube. [10 min 3 s] Available at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFbrfmqOtbE&t=513s>

MARTIN O’DONNELL. “Steve Vai Halo 2” [Saturday, August 25, 2018] on YouTube. [27 min 8 s] Available at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=RUUa112HA78>

SACHARAFIED. “Halo Reach Legendary Edition – Developer Commentary Part 1” [September 21, 2010] on YouTube. [15 min] Available at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GpmmyrmhJc&list=PL5DE6FA4D9FBD6126>

THE ACT MAN. “Interview with the man who created Halo’s multiplayer” [February 7, 2017] on YouTube. [53 min 28 s] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OheqVrMGPv0&t=270s>

Websites
http://halo.bungie.net/
http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Halo_Nation
http://marathon.bungie.org/
https://wiki.halo.fr/Accueil

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS BOOK IS THE RESULT of a boyhood dream. Even as we are putting the final touches on the book, I still can’t believe how lucky I am or the scale of the work we have put in. What I can believe, though, is just how many people have helped make this book possible. These are people to whom I owe so much, for many different reasons, and without whom I am certain you would not be sitting with this book in your hands today.

A million thanks to:

j Mehdi and Nicolas, for giving me this opportunity, for trusting me, and for supporting me at every stage of the process.

j To all the team at Third Éditions: the proofreaders, desktop publishers, graphic designers, and illustrators who have done a great job on my book.

j Cédric Mallet, Christophe Henner, Frédéric Fau, Frédéric Goyon, and Gwendal Lerat, without whom I wouldn’t have worked at jeuxvideo.com.

j Frédéric Goyon and Yannick Le Fur, chief editor and deputy editor at jeuxvideo.com, for giving me the green light.

j The entire team at jeuxvideo.com for the unwavering support. I owe them so much, both those who are still there and those who have left: I learned a lot from them and they pushed me to do more and to do better every single day.

j Martin O’Donnell, for his attentive ear, his patience, and all the information he so freely gave me. I would like to give a special mention to his father, Robert O’Donnell, who passed away while this book was being written. He had loaned his voice to many secondary characters in Bungie’s games, and in Halo 2 in particular.

j Alexander Seropian, for being available despite an extremely busy personal schedule. His replies were vital in bringing a sense of chronological order to the sketch of the pre-Halo days I had formed.

j Marcus Lehto, for his in-depth responses and the many personal anecdotes he so freely gave. Without him, this book would have a different flavor.

j Genevieve Waldman, who manages PR for Bungie on behalf of Activision. She was my shining light in the darkest, most discouraging times.

j Shon Damron, PR manager at 343 Industries, at Microsoft. Unfortunately, we couldn’t do everything, but he gave me a lot of his time and for that I am very grateful.

j Alexis Demurger, PR at Activision France. Without him I would have had a much harder time getting in touch with Bungie.

j Hugues Ouvrard, Olivier Barreteau and Mathias Bugeon, the French Xbox team, for having secured me certain contacts and vouching for me with people who had absolutely no idea who I was.

j Emma, my partner, for her encouragement, and especially her patience. An entire year spent listening to the same interviews on a loop, watching the same videos again and again, hearing me go to bed at 3 am, and spending many weekends alone. Not to mention the new computer she bought me so that I could work properly. She’s the best there is.

j All my friends at our Harry Potter RPG table, who I kept waiting for so long. We’ll be playing again for good soon, promise!

j Oscar Lemaire, Erwan Lafleuriel and Benoît Reinier, for their advice.

j Aymeric Lallée and Cyril Berrebi, for what they told me about a time I only experienced as a reader and gamer.

j And, of course, my parents. Who, in hindsight, handled my internet and video game addiction very well. Without them, I may never have played Halo, or been able to become a video game journalist.

And one last word of thanks for all the people who have ever worked on a Halo game, no matter how large or small their role. Thanks for all these incredible moments, as well as for inspiring me to do the job I do today.

Also available from Third Éditions

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– Dark Souls. Beyond the Grave – Volume 1

– Dark Souls. Beyond the Grave – Volume 2

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– Zelda. The History of a Legendary Saga – Volume 2: Breath of the Wild

Copyright

Halo. A Space Opera from Bungie
by Loïc “Epyon” Ralet
published by Third Éditions
10 Rue des Arts, 31000 Toulouse
contact@thirdeditions.com
www.thirdeditions.com

Follow us:
: @ThirdEditions
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: thirdeditions_us

All rights reserved. This work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form, in whole or in part, without the written authorization of the copyright holder.

Copying or reproducing this work by any means constitutes an infringement subject to the penalties stipulated in French copyright protection law no. 57‑298 of March 11, 1957.

The Third Éditions logo is a trademark of Third Éditions
registered in France and additional countries.

Publishing Directors: Nicolas Courcier and Mehdi El Kanafi
Publishing Assistants: Ken Bruno, Ludovic Castro and Damien Mecheri
Text by: Loïc “Epyon” Ralet
Copy preparation: Anne‑Sophie Guénéguès
Proofreader: Zoé Sofer
Layout: Julie Gantois
Standard Edition Cover: Johann Blais
First Print Edition Cover: Paul Renaud
Translated from French by Paul Harrison, ITC Traductions

This informative book is Third Éditions’ tribute to the Halo game series.
The author presents an overview of the history of the Halo game in this one‑of‑a‑kind volume that explores the inspiration, context and the content of different games in the series through original analysis and discussion.

Halo is a registered trademark of Microsoft. All rights reserved.
The cover art is inspired by the work of Bungie artists in the Halo games.

English edition, copyright 2022, Third Éditions.
All rights reserved.

e-ISBN : 9782377843572

© 2022, digital version Primento and Third Éditions

This book was produced by Primento, the publishers’ digital partner

Table of Contents

- Couverture
- Page de titre
- Foreword
- Preface

- Part I: The Origins of Halo

- Chapter 1 – Bungie: a Two-Man
- Chapter 2 – The Rising Stars of
- Chapter 3 – A Studio in Metamorphosis
- Chapter 4 – Halo Is Born
- Chapter 5 – Bungie: A Microsoft Studio

- Chapter 6 – Halo: The Path of Game Development Never Runs Smooth

- Chapter 7 – The Xbox Hit Game

- Chapter 8 – Halo 2: The Most Eagerly Anticipated Game of Its Generation

- Chapter 9 – Xbox and Bungie Evolve

- Chapter 10 – Halo 3: the Game That Made the Xbox 360

- Chapter 11 – Microsoft and Bungie Part Ways

- Chapiter 12– Halo: Reach, Bungie’s Farewell to Halo

- Part II: The Game Universe

- Chapter 1 – In the Beginning, There Were the Forerunners

- Chapter 2 – War with Humanity

- Chapter 3 – War Against the Flood

- Chapter 4 – Humanity Begins its of the Stars

- Chapter 5 – The Spartan-II Program
- Chapter 6 – First Contact
- Chapter 7 – The Covenant
- Chapter 8 – A Lethal Game of Hide and Seek
- Chapter 9 – The Spartan-III Program
- Chapter 10 – The Fall of Reach
- Chapter 11 – War of the Halo
- Chapter 12 – War’s End
- Chapter 13 – Consequences

- Part III: Analysis

- Space Opera, the Bungie Way

- Where are they now?
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Acknowledgments
- Copyright