Halo 3

• 1. Introduction

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  Halo 3, the 2007 Xbox 360 shooter from the studio Bungie, came with a punishment attached for anyone who got it early. Players caught running a leaked copy before launch had their Xbox Live accounts banned until the year 9999.

  That is a ban measured in millennia, aimed at people who simply could not wait. Why was Microsoft so determined to protect this particular game?

  The answer lies partly with the previous Halo, which left its own makers unhappy and its story unfinished. It also lies with the people who built the third one, who were tired, divided, and still determined to get it right. And it lies with what players eventually did once the game was in their hands, from building their own maps to filming their own battles. This documentary asks what Bungie was trying to repair, how a console exclusive grew into one of the biggest launches of its day, and why it is still counted among the greats.

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• 2. A Studio Under Strain

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  Halo 2 had been a critical and commercial success, yet its rushed production left Bungie worn out. The final act of its campaign was cut, which is why that game ended on a cliffhanger. Bungie openly criticized those shortcomings and saw a third game as a chance to do right by fans. Staff also expected it to be the last Halo they would make before moving on to other projects.

  Bungie's 2000 acquisition by Microsoft still rankled. The studio wanted a more favorable profit share on Halo 3, and the result was an agreement that Bungie would become independent after shipping a set number of new Halo games.

  After Halo 2 shipped, cofounder Jason Jones went on sabbatical, and the team lost its sense of direction. Staff wrestled over who would hold the creative roles, and no clear vision emerged. Story writer Joseph Staten took a vacation after clashing with colleagues, so for a stretch nobody was clearly responsible for the plot. A committee drafted the story and presented it to senior Bungie members.

  Composer Martin O'Donnell doubted the draft would work, because it left out earlier characters and plot threads. He had recently seen the film Serenity, and he insisted that characters had to die if the stakes were to feel real. Staten came back to edit once the plot was settled.

  Designer Max Hoberman spent an entire year on repairs rather than invention. Halo 2 had popularized matchmaking, player parties and voice chat. The Xbox 360 built similar features into Xbox Live but changed the underlying system, so he had to fix broken features just to get back to where Halo 2 stood.

  Staffers later remembered the rest of the project as much smoother than the harried pace of Halo 2. That left time for extras like Forge mode. The multiplayer map team, led by Chris Carney and Steve Cotton, had room to prototype and playtest, and many early prototypes became some of the most iconic maps in the series. The team also split the game into single-player and multiplayer builds, because the smaller multiplayer files were quicker to debug and test. The enemy Brutes were given a pack mentality, so they performed similar actions at the same time.

  For a while Bungie said nothing about the project, and its weekly website updates only alluded to a "new project". The reveal finally came with a real-time cinematic trailer at E3 2006.

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• 3. War and Rings

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  The story of Halo 3 unfolds across the years 2552 and 2553, with humanity locked in war against a genocidal alliance of alien races called the Covenant. The trouble begins with the Halos, giant ringworlds that range from thousands to tens of thousands of kilometers across. A race called the Forerunners built them thousands of years ago as weapons of last resort against a parasitic species known as the Flood. Firing a ring would wipe out all sentient life in the galaxy and starve the Flood of its food. The Forerunners vanished after they activated the rings.

  In Halo: Combat Evolved, the UNSC ship Pillar of Autumn, fleeing the Covenant, stumbled upon one of these rings, Installation 04. The ring's artificial intelligence caretaker, 343 Guilty Spark, objected, but the supersoldier Master Chief destroyed the ring to stop the Flood anyway.

  Halo 2 raised the stakes. The Covenant, ignorant of what the rings really do, tried to fire a second one, Installation 05, to fulfill a religious prophecy. The Elites, one race within the Covenant, learned the truth and joined humanity to stop it. They succeeded, but the sudden shutdown triggered a fail-safe that primed every ring to fire from a single place called the Ark. The Covenant High Prophet of Truth and his remaining loyalists headed for Earth, where they believed the Ark lay buried.

  The protagonist is Master Chief Petty Officer John-117, an enhanced supersoldier known as a Spartan. He fights beside the Arbiter, a disgraced Covenant Elite commander. Human soldiers Avery Johnson and Miranda Keyes return from earlier games. So does the Flood leader called the Gravemind, who in Halo 2 escaped confinement, invaded the Covenant capital city of High Charity, and captured the human AI Cortana.

  The campaign opens on Earth in east Africa, after the events of the comic Halo: Uprising. Johnson and the Arbiter find the Chief, and together they return to a UNSC outpost where Keyes and Lord Hood plan a last effort against Truth. The Chief clears anti-air defenses so Hood can lead the final ships of Earth against the Prophet. Truth activates a buried Forerunner artifact, opening a slipspace portal that he and his followers enter. A Flood-infested ship crash-lands nearby, and Elite forces vitrify the infected areas of Earth. Following a message Cortana left aboard that ship, the Chief and his allies go through the portal, joined by 343 Guilty Spark, who has no purpose left after losing his Halo.

  On the far side they find the Ark, an immense artificial structure far beyond the edges of the Milky Way. From there Truth can fire every ring remotely. High Charity arrives carrying the Flood in full force. Truth captures Johnson, because he needs a human to operate Forerunner technology. Keyes dies attempting a rescue, and Johnson is forced to activate the rings. Gravemind then offers the Chief and the Arbiter a truce. Together they defeat the remainder of Truth's army, rescue Johnson, and halt the activation. The Arbiter kills Truth, and Gravemind turns on its former partners.

  The Chief, the Arbiter and Guilty Spark learn that the Ark is building a replacement for the Halo the Chief destroyed. The Chief decides to fire it, since it would clear the Flood from the Ark while sparing the wider galaxy. To do so he rescues Cortana from High Charity, because she holds the Activation Index of the destroyed ring, and he destroys the city. In the control room, Guilty Spark warns that the ring is unfinished and that firing it early will destroy both ring and Ark. Johnson ignores him, and Guilty Spark fatally wounds him to protect "his" ring. The Chief destroys Guilty Spark, and Johnson soon dies of his injuries. The Chief fires the ring and escapes aboard the frigate Forward Unto Dawn, but the blast collapses the portal. Only the front half of the ship, carrying the Arbiter, makes it back to Earth.

  On Earth a memorial service honors the fallen of the Human-Covenant war. The Arbiter and Lord Hood exchange a few words about the lost Chief, and then the Arbiter and his Elites depart for their home planet. Meanwhile the rear half of the frigate drifts through unknown space. Cortana drops a distress beacon but admits rescue may take many years. As the Chief enters cryonic sleep, she says she will miss him, and he answers, "wake me when you need me." Players who finish on Legendary difficulty see the wreck drifting toward an unknown planet, a scene that sets up Halo 4.

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• 4. Forge and Firefights

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  Halo 3 introduced support weapons, cumbersome two-handed guns that slow the player but hit far harder. The game plays mostly from a first-person view, with stretches of vehicle combat built around weapons, grenades and melee attacks. Some weapons can be dual-wielded, at the cost of grenades and melee. A secondary weapon now shows on the character, holstered or slung across the back. A new category called equipment adds items from defensive screens to shield regeneration and flares, though only one can be carried at a time. The vehicle roster grew too, with new drivable and AI-only machines.

  The feature that drew the most praise from players was Forge, a map-editing tool. With it, players insert and remove objects such as weapons, crates and vehicles on existing multiplayer maps. Nearly every weapon, vehicle and interactive object can be placed and moved, and several people can edit in real time. A budget caps how many objects a map can hold.

  Players can save up to 100 films of their gameplay to the Xbox 360 hard drive and replay the action from any angle and at different speeds. A form of file sharing lets them upload films, screenshots and custom variants to Bungie's official website. Anyone can browse that user-made material and tag items, which then download automatically the next time they sign in to Xbox Live on Halo 3.

  The campaign can be played alone or with up to three other people over Xbox Live or System Link. In earlier Halo games every co-op player was an identical character. Here the first player is Master Chief, the second is the Arbiter, and the last two control the Covenant Elites N'tho 'Sraom and Usze 'Taham. Abilities are the same, though starting weapons differ. Hidden skulls on each level change play when switched on, giving enemies extra health, altering dialogue, or modifying AI behavior. Skulls, difficulty and completion speed all multiply the final score, and Achievements award gamerscore for reaching score targets.

  Multiplayer supports up to sixteen players, with variations of deathmatch and Capture the Flag. Friends can be gathered through the Friends list, party invites or a LAN search, with custom rules and maps. Alternatively, the Matchmaking system picks the rules and map and groups players of similar skill from a selection of developer-designed playlists. Each playlist is ranked with a customized version of the TrueSkill system, and a separate linear measure called EXP tracks experience. For peace of mind, players can avoid or leave feedback on others through their service record, and mute voice chat straight from the in-game scoreboard.

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• 5. Sight and Sound

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  Bungie built Halo 3 on a proprietary in-house graphics engine, with high dynamic range, global lighting and depth of field in cutscenes. Motion blur was missing from the beta and added for the final game. Most dynamic objects cast real-time shadows on themselves and their surroundings, down to the plant life. Normal, bump and parallax mapping add surface detail without piling on polygons. Players can see up to 10 miles into the distance, all fully three-dimensional. The engine can render real-time reflections, but Bungie judged them a waste of resources and often left them off.

  To keep the lighting range intact without hurting the frame rate, the game uses two frame buffers instead of one. A consequence is that it renders natively at 1152 by 640 rather than 720p, and the Xbox 360 can upscale the image to 1080p. A later version enhanced for Xbox One X renders at 1920p, upscaled to 2160p in HDR, at a steady 30 frames per second.

  On the audio side, the game fully supports 5.1 surround sound and holds more than 50,000 pieces of audio. Nearly 40,000 of those are dialogue spoken by non-player characters. Halo 2 had just over 15,000 pieces of dialogue. The AI that triggers those lines is designed so exchanges flow naturally. The public beta used separate recordings for nearby and distant gunfire, and the finished game applies Waves Audio plugins to adjust dialogue and other sound to conditions. Distant gunfire that sounds like ambient recording may in fact be a real firefight happening elsewhere in the game.

  O'Donnell again composed the score, and some pieces use a much larger live orchestra than anything in the first two games. The announcement trailer music was recorded with a 60-piece orchestra and a 24-piece choir. The Halo 3 Original Soundtrack was released on the 20th of November 2007, and it includes an original composition submitted by fans. Nile Rodgers, Michael Ostin and O'Donnell judged that entry.

  Steve Downes returned as the voice of Master Chief, and Jen Taylor as Cortana. David Scully voiced Sergeant Johnson and the Elites, Keith David the Arbiter, Tim Dadabo 343 Guilty Spark, Ron Perlman Lord Hood, and Robert Davi Rtas 'Vadum. Terence Stamp took over as the Prophet of Truth from Michael Wincott, and Justis Bolding replaced Julie Benz as Miranda Keyes. Guest voices include presenter Jonathan Ross, Nathan Fillion, Adam Baldwin, Alan Tudyk, Katee Sackhoff and John DiMaggio. Members of the Halo machinima Red vs. Blue have cameo roles, among them Burnie Burns, Gus Sorola, Matt Hullum, Jason Saldana, Geoff Ramsey and Joel Heyman.

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• 6. Selling the Hype

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  Microsoft spent more than $40 million marketing Halo 3, with two goals. One was to sell more Xbox 360 consoles, and the other was to reach beyond the "Halo faithful" to casual as well as hardcore players. The campaign ran in stages that included trailers, real-time cinematics, recorded gameplay, pre-rendered CGI and live action film. On the 12th of September 2007 the "Believe" campaign began with a video called "Museum". It told the epic of Master Chief through dioramas and third-party accounts of his service, and it continued after release.

  Bungie contributed four "developer documentaries" about how parts of the game were made. A public multiplayer beta on Xbox Live reached more than 800,000 members, and entry required a Crackdown disc. It arrived four months before launch and offered three maps, High Ground, Valhalla and Snowbound. It also tested saved films and file sharing. An alternate reality game called Iris began in June 2007 and slowly revealed background information.

  While multiplayer details spread widely in the sixteen months before release, Bungie kept the single-player story largely secret to build interest. The first campaign screenshots appeared on the 5th of July 2007, a year after the announcement trailer, as a deliberate tease.

  Tie-ins reached well beyond game shops. PepsiCo launched a Mountain Dew variant named Game Fuel with the Halo 3 logo and Master Chief on the can. Some 7-Eleven stores advertised the game and sold special cups and copies. In the UK, Gamestation offered a limited edition Master Chief figurine to the first 1000 preorders.

  Secrecy proved hard to keep. The final testing build before the gold release, codenamed "Epsilon" and confirmed by Bungie as nearly complete, leaked onto the Internet months ahead of launch. Retail copies, complete with photographs of the open box, then appeared on eBay weeks early. The UK catalog retailer Argos accidentally put some copies on sale a week before release. Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices division said it was "disappointed" but would not punish Argos for an "honest mistake". The retail version was also ripped from a disc more than a week early, and the 6.14 gigabyte file was downloaded by thousands of people within 24 hours. Videos of the ending, taken from that copy, were posted on video sharing sites.

  The game finally reached stores on the 25th of September 2007 in three versions. The Standard Edition held the disc, manual and a small poster. The Limited Edition came in a metal case with a bonus disc of featurettes and a hardcover "Bestiarum" of Halo species, cultures and civilizations. The Legendary Edition added the Bestiarum on DVD, a DVD of exclusive content, and a scale replica of Master Chief's helmet serving as the case for the discs. Some Limited Editions had a defective hub that could scratch discs, and Microsoft set up a replacement program. The day before release, 4.2 million units were already sitting in retail outlets. Worldwide launch parties marked the day.

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• 7. Records and Verdicts

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  On its first day in the United States, Halo 3 took in $170 million, the highest gross for a video game in its first 24 hours. It beat Halo 2, which had earned $125 million in the same window. More than one million people in North America had preordered. Worldwide, over $300 million worth sold in the first week, which more than doubled Xbox 360 sales compared with the weekly average beforehand. More than a million Xbox Live members played online in the first 20 hours, the biggest day in the service's history.

  The unit sales climbed quickly. The United States saw 3.3 million copies in the first 12 days and 3.7 million by the 15th of November 2007. By the 30th of November, 5 million copies had sold worldwide, and Halo 3 was the best-selling game of 2007 in the United States despite being available on just one console. On the 3rd of January 2008, Microsoft announced 8.1 million copies. The game returned to the top 20 sales charts in February 2009, and Gamasutra suggested the boost may have come from Halo Wars. By 2010, Microsoft reported total grosses of $600 million, and by 2012 it counted 14.5 million copies sold.

  Hollywood noticed the launch week. Advertising Age reported that film executives were convinced the game hurt box office, as the week's take fell 27 percent from the previous year. Some pointed instead to the poor reception of films like The Heartbreak Kid. Other analysts argued that the game's audience of 18-to-34-year-olds overlapped with cinema audiences. Later research suggested that Halo 3 players still watched the same amount of television and film.

  Critics were enthusiastic, and the game holds an average of 94/100 on Metacritic. Wesley Yin-Poole of Pro-G wrote that it was "everything we hoped it would be, and much, much, more". Rob Fahey of Eurogamer, Charlie Barrett of GamesRadar and Jeff Gerstmann of GameSpot felt the formula was little changed but not worse for it. Barrett wrote, "Every type of Halo fan, from the hardcore to the casual to the brand new, will find something to satisfy them in Master Chief's third adventure." Hilary Goldstein of IGN called it "the most complete game available on any console" and said "the Forge and the replay functionality raise the bar for console shooters so high, it may never be surpassed this generation." Gerstmann and Goldstein added that equipment mattered far more in multiplayer than in the campaign.

  The campaign divided opinion. Yin-Poole found it far more satisfying than the Halo 2 cliffhanger. Gerstmann, Gabe Graziani of GameSpy and Goldstein called it too short, especially on easier settings or with three more players in co-op. Goldstein was scathing about the eighth level, saying "the penultimate chapter is so bad, just thinking about it puts a rotten taste in my mouth." Charles Herold of The New York Times called the plot "throwaway", and Total Video Games judged the single-player side disappointing. Goldstein and Steve West of Cinema Blend missed the Arbiter's larger role in Halo 2.

  Multiplayer won near-universal praise. IGN said the map lineup was the strongest of the series, and GameSpy wrote that "each multiplayer map is extremely well-tuned". Forge, saved films, the voice acting and the score were singled out too. Complaints fell on the artificial intelligence, since critics liked the enemies but found the player's allies far less capable. Bryan Vore of Game Informer called human faces and some textures "embarrassing".

  The awards followed. Halo 3 won two of its seven Spike TV Awards nominations, Best Multiplayer Game and Most Addictive Video Game Fueled by Dew. It was Time's Game of the Year, and IGN named it Best Xbox 360 Online Multiplayer Game and Innovative Design of 2007. The Visual Effects Society gave Bungie its award for Best Real Time Visuals in a Video Game. Box Office Prophets gave it the Calvin Award for Best Videogame, GameTrailers named it Xbox 360 Game of the Year 2007, and G-Phoria fans voted it Game of the Year. It won the Edge Award For Interactive Innovation in August 2008. At the 11th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards it was nominated for Action Game of the Year and Outstanding Achievement in Online Gameplay. In 2010 it was included in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die.

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• 8. Life After Launch

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  Bungie kept feeding the game after release, starting with the Heroic Map Pack on the 11th of December 2007, which held the maps Standoff, Rat's Nest and Foundry. The Legendary Map Pack followed on the 15th of April 2008 with Blackout, a remake of the Halo 2 map Lockout. It also had Ghost Town and Avalanche, a remake of the Combat Evolved map Sidewinder. Those maps added visual filters to the Forge palette, which change how a map looks.

  On "Bungie Day", the 7th of July 2008, the studio gave away Cold Storage, a remake of the Combat Evolved map Chill Out. The Mythic Map Pack, with Orbital, Assembly and Sandbox, shipped with the Limited Collectors Edition of Halo Wars and reached the Xbox Live Marketplace on the 9th of April 2009. The fourth and final pack, Mythic II, arrived on the 2nd of February 2010 with Citadel and Longshore from Halo 3: ODST, plus Heretic, a remake of the Halo 2 map Midship.

  The first version update came on the 19th of February 2008 and fixed bugs such as melee contest resolution and saved-film theater errors. A Title Update on the 23rd of September 2008 brought new Achievements, a new XP ranking system and new ways to detect and stop cheating. No further updates were planned.

  The story moved on with Halo 4, released in November 2012 and developed by 343 Industries. Halo 3 itself became a free download for Xbox Live Gold subscribers through Games with Gold in October 2013. An Xbox One version at 1080p and 60 frames per second joined Halo: The Master Chief Collection in November 2014, after backward compatibility arrived in 2017 for the original. The Windows release of the Collection followed on the 14th of July 2020.

  The online services for the original Xbox 360 version went offline in January 2022. Even so, in 2025 GameStop picked Halo 3 as the winner of its inaugural Best Game of the Year award, nearly two decades after it was released.

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