There are few success stories in gaming quite like that of Halo, a title that has become a phenomenon and one of the few that has entered mass, popular consciousness. The franchise has sold 60 million games and with the latest, Halo 5: Guardians, due out later this year, will doubtless sell millions more. Yet when it all began in 2001, such success was far from guaranteed.

Although it may be hard to imagine, now that the console gaming landscape and in particular the first-person shooter has been shaped by what Halo achieved, at the time it was a risky venture. Microsoft had been looking for a launch title to accompany its new Xbox console, the firm’s first foray not only into gaming but into consumer entertainment. In 2000 it went after the shooter that Bungie was developing for the Mac.

Frank O’Connor is the franchise development director forHalo and the longest-serving member of the team. He joined the game’s original developer, Bungie, in 2003 and before that had covered the game as a journalist. “There hadn’t been a good first-person shooter on a console, they didn’t have the right control input. Goldeneye was good but it was limited, it was a hard thing to get right on a console,” he says. “But Microsoft saw a cool-looking universe and an interesting looking game, and thought, ‘maybe we can make it work on the Xbox’.”

Bungie was forced to adapt its game to the new control system, and the console functions were improved to suit the demands of Halo. The results were extraordinary: a epic, sci-fi romp, playable with the two analogue sticks and trigger control system that is taken for granted now.

The gamble paid off and then some. Of the original Xbox sales, more than half were purchased with Halo. A sequel followed, and when what was now a trilogy concluded on the Xbox 360 in 2007, the final instalment sold 14.5m copies. But perhaps what was most noticeable was that Bungie had created a scenario, so involving and well-crafted it appealed beyond the actual game. It had a universe and a central character in the Master Chief that people wanted to know more about.

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Halo 5’s creative director, Tim Longo, confirms the appeal of the game’s scope. “It is presented in an operatic way and that it is cinematic too means we are framing the worlds in an exciting way,” he says. “We are setting up these grand scenes but in our case you get to walk through them rather than just watch them.” These involving episodes engendered even more as books, comics, web series, toys, anime and action figures all followed.

Much of this can be attributed to the original premise that Bungie crafted. Still platform-exclusive to Xbox, Halo may be outsold by Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto now but they are titles that reinvent their characters and universe with each new iteration. The Halo team, from the moment its success guaranteed its future, chose to make the most of the future they had created. “We don’t make a game every year, so we are able to invest more in our characters without changing the universe so frequently,” says O’Connor, having moved to Industries who took the franchise on after Bungie. “We are much more like a Harry Potter series, you are learning a little bit more about the characters as you grow up with them, so it’s hardly surprising people become attached.”

They are most attached of course to Halo’s lead, super-soldier Spartan, the Master Chief, with whom the series has turned what may have appeared to be an unlikely choice into one of its strongest assets and perhaps the key element to its appeal. As the central protagonist and the character that drives the story, Chief is unusual in that his face, hidden by his visored helmet, has never been seen.



This brave decision, especially for a launch title for a brand new console, was crucial. The Chief has allowed players to inhabit the game in a unique way. “It all goes back to the Master Chief,” says O’Connor. “You’re putting yourself in this world and all these scenarios and you’re not constantly reminded that you are not the hero.

“There are these shoes that you can plant yourself in and be yourself and still enjoy the adulation and heroism that Master Chief has built up over the years.”

Here is a game that, despite a sci-fi setting and entirely fictional universe, offers a

sense of inclusion and participation that crosses boundaries in the real world. “We have girls who play; African-American kids who play,” O’Connor explains. “It is almost cognitive dissonance. They love being the Master Chief. The Master Chief might in that case be a 19-year-old girl, a college student from Iowa, but she also loves Master Chief the character, who she knows is a 42-year-old orphan who was put into this huge war machine. You get the best of both worlds with the game.”

Halo has been careful with the Chief, graphical advances aside, maintaining his look and his character from that first iteration. There is an element of Judge Dredd (another man in the shadow of a helmet) and Dredd’s progenitor, Dirty Harry, to the Chief, which is no doubt part of his appeal. He says little and achieves his ends in straightforward fashion.

“His laconic brevity has stood him in good stead because he is very seldom tripping over himself or saying anything stupid,” O’Connor confirms. “Because he doesn’t say much at all. Like John Wayne or Gary Cooper.”

It may not be particularly complex but, in a vast universe conceived some time ago now, it has made for a character that is easy for players to inhabit. “The simplicity is key,” says Longo. “He has depth but he doesn’t question. When something has to be done, he does it. Chief is always there to help humanity.”

source: The Guardian