Halo (franchise)

• 1. Introduction

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  Halo is a military science fiction franchise, and in 1997 its earliest form went by a codename its own programmer was too embarrassed to say aloud. Bungie's team first called the project "Monkey Nuts." Jason Jones could not bring himself to say that name to his mother, so the team moved on to "Blam!" The project was then a science fiction real-time strategy game, set on a hollowed-out world called Solipsis. That planet eventually became a ringworld called Halo, and the ring gave the game its title. From that unlikely start came novels, comics, animated films, a television series and a place at the center of Microsoft's console ambitions. This documentary asks how a small studio that built games for the Macintosh ended up making the signature game of a new console. It asks why that studio later walked away from the series it created. It asks what happens to a franchise when new hands take over, and where a story about ancient ring-shaped weapons found its ideas.

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• 2. From Macs To Xbox

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  Bungie was founded in 1991 in Chicago, Illinois, by Alex Seropian. The following year he partnered with programmer Jason Jones to market Jones' game Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete. The pair aimed at the Macintosh because that market was smaller and easier to compete in. Bungie became a leading Mac developer, with successful releases including Myth and Marathon.

  Realistic vehicle physics pulled the Halo project in a new direction. As the team experimented with vehicles, the distant third-person camera crept closer to the action. Bungie decided that controlling units was more fun than directing them, and the strategy game became a third-person shooter. Halo was announced on the 21st of July 1999 at the Macworld Conference and Expo. Its final title was settled only days before.

  A debate inside Bungie over the lead character's personality shaped the story. Writer Joe Staten did not want a player character who was an "empty vessel" like Gordon Freeman in Half-Life. So the team wrote the character with a sense of humor. They chose to refer to him by his naval rank, and he became Master Chief.

  Halo: Combat Evolved shipped on the 15th of November 2001, after a difficult and hectic schedule. Xbox marketing featured it heavily, and its green color palette suited the console's design scheme. It was a critical and commercial success, and copies sold alongside half of every Xbox sold. By July 2006 it had sold 4.2 million copies and earned $170 million in the United States.

  The game introduced habits the series still carries. Players fight on foot and in vehicles across a mysterious alien landscape. They may carry only two weapons, which forces a choice of armament. Ranged attacks, melee attacks and grenades made up what Bungie called the "Golden Triangle of Halo." Health is counted in hit points restored by health packs, while an energy shield recharges on its own.

  Halo had not been intended as a franchise. Yet Bungie was surprised by how many fans used the System Link feature to network consoles together and play multiplayer in LAN parties.

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• 3. Pressure And Play

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  Halo 2 was announced on the 8th of August 2002 at Microsoft's X02 press event. A demo at Electronic Entertainment Expo the following year showed off dual-wielding weapons and the hijacking of enemy vehicles. Behind the scenes, development was troubled. Bungie scrapped its ambitious graphics engine because it would not run effectively on Xbox hardware. Leadership changes brought more infighting, and artists and designers spent time on assets that never shipped.

  A planned massive multiplayer mode was cut entirely. Developer Max Hoberman's smaller-scale local mode became the only multiplayer offering. As the release date slipped, the studio entered a sustained period of crunch. Other Bungie games were canceled and their staff absorbed into the Halo team. The final act of the story had to be cut in the rush to finish.

  Players had been making their own competitions since the first game. Impromptu Halo tournaments and local parties sprang up after release, and Bungie took their success as inspiration for the online multiplayer in Halo 2. In August 2002, the channel G4 hosted the Halo National Championship Finals, a free-for-all with sixteen players from across the country, hosted by Wil Wheaton of Star Trek fame.

  The Associates of Gaming Professionals focused solely on Halo and held its first event in November 2002. Mike Sepso and Sundance DiGiovanni, inspired by friends betting on their Halo matches, formed Major League Gaming the same year. Microsoft and 343 Industries launched their own Halo Championship Series in 2014 in partnership with the Electronic Sports League, and its first two seasons ran on The Master Chief Collection.

  In August 2015, Microsoft raised the series prize pool to US$1 million for the Halo World Championship, the debut event for Halo 5. Crowd-funding lifted the pool to US$2.5 million, the largest console esports prize pool to that date.

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• 4. The Independence Deal

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  Halo 3 began with no one definitively in charge. Frustrated by Halo 2 and eager to start non-Halo projects, Bungie wanted to wrap the series up in a satisfying way. Burned out, Jason Jones went on an extended sabbatical. Designer Paul Bertone recalled that a large staff of 70-80 people meant more meetings and less efficiency. Several people left, including Max Hoberman, who founded Certain Affinity after building the online systems for Halo 3. Even so, development ran more smoothly than it had for Halo 2.

  Bungie announced its independence in October 2007. Lingering dissatisfaction with the 2000 acquisition, and a wish for more favorable profit-sharing on Halo 3, had produced a deal. Bungie would go independent after shipping a set number of new Halo games, and it was contractually bound to make two more. One became Halo: Reach. The other was first planned as a production with Peter Jackson's Wingnut Interactive, and when that was scrapped, Bungie put the prototyped elements into a smaller Halo 3 expansion titled Halo 3: Recon.

  Recon was built on the Halo 3 engine and assets by only around 20 full-time employees. Later renamed Halo 3: ODST, it was conceived as a noir detective story in which clues in a hub world trigger playable flashbacks. Players could tackle missions in any order. Bungie staff recalled that resources were hard to secure because most of the studio's attention was on Reach. Players took the role of Orbital Drop Shock Troopers, weaker than Spartan supersoldiers, and the game brought back health packs and scoped pistols.

  ODST also added Firefight, a cooperative survival mode where players face waves of enemies with limited lives. The game released on the 22nd of September 2009 and was positively received, though some criticized charging a full game price instead of a cheaper expansion's. It was the top-selling title of the month in the United States and sold more than three million copies worldwide. Eurogamer pointed to the experimental work as an influence on Destiny, Bungie's first post-Halo game.

  Tired of focusing on Master Chief, Bungie made Halo: Reach a prequel set on the doomed human world of Reach as the Covenant attacks. Gameplay stepped back too, with more open environments, exploration and returning health packs. Persistent armor abilities replaced single-use equipment and enabled sprinting, jetpacks or temporary invincibility. A beta preceded launch to help balance the game and catch bugs. Reach released on the 14th of September 2010, made $200 million on its first day and sold more than 4.7 million units by September 2011. The rights to the franchise stayed with Microsoft.

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• 5. A New Studio

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  Bonnie Ross, then an Xbox general manager, recalled that her colleagues saw Halo as a waning property and wanted to outsource new games. Ross argued for an internal studio, and her vision won. She was put in charge of 343 Industries, named after the character 343 Guilty Spark. The studio started with a small staff in late 2007.

  Its first project was Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, a remaster made with Saber Interactive. The studio handled creative work while Saber handled engineering, and Saber had just one year to meet the original's tenth anniversary. Players could switch between original and updated visuals with a button press. Both versions ran in high-definition 16:9 widescreen, compared with the original's 480i resolution and 4:3 aspect ratio. Certain Affinity helped build multiplayer maps, beginning a long collaboration between the two studios. Critics disagreed on whether the unaltered gameplay held up to modern standards.

  The studio grew to nearly 200 people for the next major game. Ryan Payton was first offered the role of creative director, but his ideas did not mesh with the expected first-person shooter focus. He was replaced before prototyping finished and left in 2011. Josh Holmes took over, and the result was a safer, more straightforward sequel to Halo 3. Holmes wanted the story to explore Master Chief's relationship with Cortana, who would break down into a dementia-like state.

  The team struggled to make that plot accessible to new players and considered dropping it. Holmes drew on his own mother's battle with dementia and insisted it stay. Halo 4 was announced at E3 2011 and released on the 6th of November 2012. Master Chief and Cortana arrive at a Forerunner world called Requiem, where they fight the Covenant and then a new threat. The game set first-day sales records for the franchise. Reviews were generally positive, but critics found the story incomprehensible to casual players and reliant on knowledge of the wider franchise media.

  The Master Chief Collection grew from a plan for a tenth anniversary edition of Halo 2. 343 Industries, Saber Interactive, Certain Affinity and other studios packed Combat Evolved Anniversary, Halo 2 Anniversary, Halo 3 and Halo 4 into one collection for the Xbox One. The launch was marred by glitches and matchmaking issues that needed numerous patches. Ross apologized to fans and promised that future Halo games would have public betas. Reach and ODST were added later, and the collection came to PC with enhancements for the Xbox Series X.

  Halo 5: Guardians was announced in 2014. It spans many worlds, mainly the Elite homeworld, and follows Spartan Locke hunting the rogue Master Chief, who is trying to find a still-living Cortana. Halo Infinite was announced during E3 2018 as the third part of the Reclaimer Saga. It returned the focus to Master Chief on the new Zeta Halo, with the Banished as enemies, and released in December 2021.

  On the 6th of October 2024, 343 Industries unveiled a seven-minute video confirming several new games built in Unreal Engine 5 rather than the proprietary Slipspace Engine. The studio rebranded as Halo Studios. Studio head Pierre Hintze described the change as a "clean break," like the move between Bungie and 343. Phil Spencer teased the franchise's return at the Xbox Games Showcase in June 2025. A Halo Waypoint blogpost that month said a new project would be unveiled at the Halo World Championships in October.

  That project was Halo: Campaign Evolved, a full remake of the Combat Evolved campaign, set for 2026 on Windows, Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5. It marks the franchise's debut on Sony consoles. Community manager Brian Jarrard called it a new era that should welcome players arriving from PlayStation, and he said future entries would also release on Sony's consoles.

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• 6. Spin-offs And Lost Projects

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  Halo Wars, developed by Ensemble Studios for the Xbox 360 and released in 2009, took the series back to its real-time strategy roots. It is set years before Combat Evolved. Ensemble spent six months on a control scheme that felt simple and intuitive, since console strategy games were traditionally considered inferior to keyboard-and-mouse computer ones. Reviews were generally positive, and an estimated 2.6 million units sold, a massive success for the genre on consoles.

  In 2013, 343 Industries partnered with Vanguard Games to bring Halo to mobile devices with Halo: Spartan Assault. This twin-stick shooter first appeared on Windows 8 tablets and phones, and later reached Xbox and iOS. It was the first Halo game on Steam. Halo: Spartan Strike followed in 2015.

  Halo 2600 is a game for the Atari 2600 that Ed Fries, a former Microsoft vice president of game publishing, wrote in 2010. Players control Master Chief through 64 screens of varied enemies. Other spinoffs include a virtual reality experience, Halo Recruit, and Fireteam Raven, a coin-operated arcade game from Raw Thrills and PlayMechanix. It arrived in 2018, starting at Round1 USA and Dave & Buster's arcades, and puts up to four ODST members against the Covenant during the events of Combat Evolved.

  Some projects never shipped. Halo: Chronicles, an episodic game announced in 2006, was to be built by Peter Jackson's Wingnut Interactive. It was canceled in January 2009 as part of budget cuts tied to layoffs. Ensemble Studios developed a Halo-themed massively multiplayer online game called Titan, which Microsoft canceled internally in 2007-2008 after losing interest in a PC-based game.

  Certain Affinity was slated to make its own Halo title, but the team was needed to build the Halo Waypoint online portal instead. A Mega Bloks-branded game in the style of Lego video games was prototyped for the Xbox 360 but not pursued. Footage of it leaked in 2017.

  Halo Online was a free-to-play multiplayer game for Windows PC, announced by 343 Industries in 2015. It was built with Saber Interactive on a modified Halo 3 engine and published by Innova Systems. A closed beta limited to Russia launched that year, and the project was canceled in August 2016. Players then modified the game to get around the region limits and add new content. This "ElDewrito" project drew legal takedowns from Microsoft for violating its game usage rules. The modders claimed its popularity hastened Microsoft's plan to release a Windows version of The Master Chief Collection, which later included content from Halo Online.

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• 7. Rings, Flood, And Influences

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  Millions of years ago, a powerful species called the Precursors seeded the galaxy with life. One of the races they created, the Forerunners, turned on their former masters and drove the Precursors to near extinction. A few Precursors turned into dust, hoping to regenerate in the future. That dust became defective and infected organisms, twisting them into a parasitic species joined by a hivemind. This was the Flood.

  Spacefaring ancient humanity, also fighting the Flood, came into conflict with the Forerunners. After defeating humanity, the Forerunners reduced its technology and its species to a primitive level so they could concentrate on the Flood. Their last resort was the Halo Array, ring-shaped megastructures that would destroy all sentient life in the galaxy to stop the Flood spreading. The array could be activated from the Ark, a repository of sentient life outside the range of the Halos. After other options failed, the Array was fired and the outbreak ended. The surviving Forerunners reseeded life and left the Milky Way.

  Nearly a hundred thousand years later, in the 26th century, humanity colonized many worlds under the Unified Earth Government and its United Nations Space Command. Faster-than-light travel through slipstream space made this possible. Tension with colonies seeking independence turned violent, and the Office of Naval Intelligence created the SPARTAN-II Project to build enhanced supersoldiers to suppress rebellions.

  In 2525, a theocratic alliance of alien races called the Covenant attacked human worlds. Its leaders declared humanity an affront to their gods, the Forerunners. Covenant technology and numbers proved decisive, and the Spartans were too few to turn the tide. After the Covenant invaded Reach in 2552, Master Chief Petty Officer John-117 was one of the few Spartans left.

  The rediscovery of the Halo rings set off a desperate battle against the Covenant, who saw the rings as instruments of transcendence rather than destruction. Master Chief and his artificial intelligence Cortana helped destroy a ring to stop the Covenant and the Flood. Learning the Array's true purpose split the Covenant into civil war. The Arbiter, a disgraced former commander, and many of his species helped humans stop the Covenant leadership from activating the Array through the Ark. The Human-Covenant War ended.

  In the post-war era, the UNSC trained a new generation of Spartans, and tensions with rebels resumed. Master Chief and Cortana accidentally freed the Forerunner commander Didact, who briefly asserted supremacy over humanity. They halted his plans, though Cortana was at first believed dead. She survived through the Domain, broke with the UNSC and asserted a new hegemony in which artificial intelligences, the Created, were in control. After two years of scattered war, Cortana attacked the Banished, a mercenary organization of former Covenant races. The Banished won, terminated Cortana and fought the UNSC for control of Zeta Halo.

  Larry Niven's Ringworld and Iain M. Banks' Culture series fed the idea of ring-shaped megastructures, Bungie acknowledged, with Consider Phlebas and Excession said to be particularly influential. Jaime Griesemer said Ringworld's influence lay less in how the rings look than "in that feeling of being somewhere else. That sense of scale and an epic story going on out there." He also named John Steakley's Armor: "One of the main sources of inspiration was Armor, in which a soldier has to constantly re-live the same war over and over again. That sense of hopelessness, a relentless battle, was influential."

  The Flood were influenced by the assimilating alien species in Christopher Rowley's The Vang. It has been speculated that the name "John 117" may refer to a character called Jon 6725416 in Rowley's Starhammer, or to John Spartan in Demolition Man. An IGN article saw echoes of Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game in the SPARTAN Project and the design of the Covenant Drones. Bungie has also acknowledged James Cameron's film Aliens as a strong cinematic influence.

  A report by Roger Travis in The Escapist compares Halo with Virgil's Latin epic the Aeneid. Travis casts the Flood and Covenant in the role of the Carthaginians and Master Chief as Aeneas. The series also draws heavily on religious iconography. The Flood and especially the Gravemind serve as demonic figures, and Master Chief's first encounter with the Flood can be likened to a journey to hell. Academic P.C. Paulissen notes that the name Flood suggests the biblical deluge, with the Forerunner Ark as shelter from its destructive and cleansing power.

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• 8. Beyond The Game

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  Gregorian chant gave Halo its first sound. Martin O'Donnell and Michael Salvatori wrote the soundtracks for Bungie's games, and Bungie asked O'Donnell for something ancient and mysterious. He chose chant and joined other singers to perform the vocal parts. The music was designed to change dynamically with events in the game. For a better listening experience on soundtrack releases, O'Donnell arranged it into standalone suites.

  Each sequel changed the sound. Halo 2 paired an orchestral score with licensed music from Incubus and Breaking Benjamin, and Steve Vai contributed guitar solos. Halo 3 brought back themes from the original game. Earlier scores had leaned on computer synthesis, but Halo 3 was recorded with a 60-piece orchestra and a 24-voice chorus. ODST added saxophones and other jazz and noir touches, and O'Donnell wrote more somber music for Reach.

  Audio director Sotaro Tojima began looking for a Halo 4 composer in 2010 and chose Neil Davidge after a year's search. Davidge expected scoring a game to resemble scoring a film, but found its dynamic nature demanded a different approach. At home he sometimes sang melodies into a dictaphone for later transcription. Kazuma Jinnouchi added music to Halo 4 and was sole composer for Halo 5. Halo Infinite's score came from Gareth Coker, Curtis Schweitzer, Joel Corelitz, Alex Bhore and Eternal Time & Space, and its soundtrack was released digitally on the 8th of December 2021.

  The Halo 2 Original Soundtrack became the first video game soundtrack to break the Billboard 200. The theme became a gaming anthem, and in the late 2010s it led to videos of teenagers gathering to sing it.

  Eric Nylund wrote the tie-in novel Halo: The Fall of Reach in seven weeks, and it was published in October 2001. William C. Dietz novelized the game in 2003 as Halo: The Flood. Marvel Comics published The Halo Graphic Novel in 2006. Halo: Uprising, by Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev, was planned to end before Halo 3 but its final issue slipped to 2009. Dark Horse's Halo: Escalation ran for 24 issues from 2013 to 2015.

  In 2005, Columbia Pictures president Peter Schlessel began working outside the studio system to produce a Halo film. Alex Garland wrote a script, and couriers dressed as Master Chief pitched it to studios. Microsoft's terms required $10 million against 15 percent of gross, and most studios passed. 20th Century Fox and Universal partnered, paying $5 million to option the film plus 10 percent of grosses. Peter Jackson was to be executive producer and Neill Blomkamp director.

  In 2006, Universal gave Jackson and Schlessel an ultimatum to reduce their large "first-dollar" revenue deals. Both refused, the project stalled and the rights reverted to Microsoft. Blomkamp instead made live-action shorts titled Halo: Landfall to promote Halo 3.

  Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn was shot as a feature but first released as a webseries of five episodes between the 5th of October and the 2nd of November 2012. It follows Thomas Lasky, a young cadet at Corbulo Academy of Military Science, and his relationship with Master Chief. Halo: Nightfall, with Ridley Scott as executive producer, introduced Agent Jameson Locke, played by Mike Colter, and shipped with The Master Chief Collection in November 2014. Steven Spielberg is executive producer of the Paramount+ series, announced on the 21st of May 2013 and premiering on the 24th of March 2022.

  Halo Legends, announced at Comic-Con 2009, gathered seven short anime films from six Japanese production houses, with Shinji Aramaki as creative director. Warner Bros. released it on DVD and Blu-ray in February 2010. Toei's entry was intended as a parody of the universe, and the other six are part of the Halo canon.

  Game sales passed 81 million by 2021, and franchise sales were reported at $6 billion, of which non-game merchandise accounted for $1.8 billion. Variety called Halo "the equivalent of Star Wars." Characters and elements have appeared in Dead or Alive, Guitar Hero, Killer Instinct, Forza and Fortnite. In 2007, IGN listed Combat Evolved as the top Xbox game of all time, and Time magazine named Halo 3 its "Game of the Year." GamesTM said Combat Evolved "changed video game combat forever."

  Journalist Anthony John Agnello likened the impact of Halo 2 to the asteroid hit that killed the dinosaurs, remaking the gaming landscape and creating the modern idea of games as shared social experiences. Game Daily called its launch "easily comparable to the biggest in other sectors of the entertainment industry." It was the first time a video game launch became a major cultural event in the United States.

  Fans made films inside the games too, a genre called machinima. Rooster Teeth Productions' comedy series Red vs. Blue reached an unparalleled level of success for Halo machinima, and for machinima in general. Microsoft updated its user license agreement to allow noncommercial distribution of such films. Other series include Arby 'n the Chief and The Codex, plus the in-game interview show This Spartan Life.

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