OVER THE TOP

FIVE WAYS HALO HAS REDEFINED GAMING

Brian D. Crecente, Rocky Mountain News

Friday, September 28, 2007

Believe.

It's been the rallying cry for Halo 3's ad campaign, but it's also Microsoft's mantra about the power and promise of the most hotly anticipated video game of the year.

Microsoft believes.

It believes that the final video game in their Halo trilogy won't just make gaming history, but also entertainment history. They aimed not just to top Halo 2's $125 million launch-day record, but also to eclipse the $155 million payday that Spider-Man 3 earned in its opening weekend.

After all, merely toppling gaming sales records has become old hat: Halo made sales history when the game launched in 2001, and Halo 2 eclipsed those records when it launched in 2004. And since then, gamers have spent more than 5 billion hours playing the game online.

Those Halo trilogy sales figures are a sign of something larger, a following that goes beyond just gaming and reaches into comics, movies, toys and books.

This Halo zeitgeist, like the game itself, is a thing greater than the sum of its parts, the product of myriad things including apt storytelling, refined technology and good timing.

Frank O'Connor - content manager for Bungie, the Halo developers owned by Microsoft - guides us through some of the ingredients that helped Halo transcend its medium:

Iconic character

Now that the Master Chief's visage

is all over Mountain Dew bottles, it's

understandable that everyone would think he's the hero of the franchise. Wrong, says Bungie. The hero is you, the gamer. The

Master Chief is tomorrow's Everyman, a gold-visored anonymous representation

of everything we wish we could be.

"It's not about the character, it's about

the way he enables you," O'Connor

says. "You never see his face. When

you look at his face you see

your face."

Object fetishism

We love gadgets, gizmos and tech toys,

and Halo doesn't just show them to us but actually lets us play with them. From the all-terrain, chain-gun armed Warthog

personnel carrier, to energy swords, battle rifles and bubble shields, Halo is chock-full of goodies. "In Star Wars there's Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, but there's the X-Wings and light sabers and they're just as important.

We make really cool tools that people can have fun with, and our objects let you

do things. We put all of this stuff in the

game and say, 'Here's a big

environment - go and

explore it.' "

Artificial intelligence

It might sound like science fiction, but video

game characters have long had a mind of their

own. Video game artificial intelligence is essentially

a set of rules that characters use to make decisions

on the fly. Fans of the shooter say that one of the things that Halo does best is breathe life into its characters with complex AI. "The Xbox 360 lets us turn up the artificial intelligence. You never know what's going to happen in a game. It's never the same," O'Connor says. "I've seen Brutes decide to not use their shields to protect themselves, instead protecting the weaker Grunts because they think of themselves as

the heroes of the battle. When the Brutes

are about to die, they change their

behavior and become kamikazes

and charge you."

Killer app

The original Halo game launched on

the same day as the original Xbox,

proving that the upstart console from

Microsoft could game with the best of them. With its streamlined controls and subtle auto-aiming feature, it also proved that the traditional first-person shooter genre could be both accessible and interesting to casual gamers. Says O'Connor: "It wasn't that we did anything new. When Halo arrived it made first-person shooters approachable. We didn't invent anything; we innovated and expanded in many ways."

Epic story

With all of this talk about storytelling,

you might think that the Halo trilogy was

written by Faulkner or Hemingway. But it's

probably closer to something written by Lucas or

Heinlein. It would take several books to outline the story (they're out there) but essentially it revolves around an armor-clad supersoldier who's trying to save humanity from the Covenant aliens after landing on a planet shaped like a ring. But the Bungie team says it's not about what they've written, but what the gamers are allowed to

write themselves. They say they set out to craft a

narrative canvas on which gamers could find their

own stories in the nuance of battles. "It's your story

and you're controlling the narrative, you are

influencing the narrative," O'Connor says.

"You go back and watch what you did in

campaign and it's different every time.

Every single replay plays

differently."