From RTS to thirdperson, Mac to console: the unlikely development of an Edge 10
Format Xbox
Developer Bungie
Publisher Microsoft Game Studios
Origin US
Release 2001
Steve Jobs is on stage, promising “one of the coolest [games] I’ve ever seen”. He introduces Bungie co-founder Jason Jones, and his new game. “We’re gonna see, for the first time, Halo.” Perhaps you’ve seen this 1999 Macworld demo. If so, you know that it looks (and sounds) an awful lot like the Halo that would launch nearly two and a half years later. There’s a soldier in green armour, and a jeep ride with a marine on the turret, all accompanied by the monkish chants of Martin O’Donnell’s score.
OK, the character designs aren’t quite there yet, the planet they’re on is a little too bare – but there are two rather more important distinctions to note. One: the demo, as Jones announces before showing it off, “is being rendered in realtime, on a Macintosh”. Two: the whole thing plays out in thirdperson.
By the time of its launch in November 2001, Halo would undergo a serious transformation. But even before it reached this San Francisco stage, the game had changed an awful lot from where it began, with Jones and art director Marcus Lehto tinkering while the rest of Bungie worked on Myth II, the sequel to the studio’s fantasy RTS. “We knew we wanted to create some sort of sci-fi, military adventure,” Lehto tells us. “It was based on Myth – it used the same engine. It was going to be open world. It was going to be more of a realtime strategy game where you were giving orders to your ground units, as well as vehicles, tanks and troop transport vehicles.”
Steve Abeyta, who would go on to become Halo’s environment lead and animation director, remembers seeing this early prototype. “It wasn’t really my type of game. I’d played Myth, but I wasn’t crazy about Myth. But I was super-impressed with the visuals,” he says, citing the matte skybox, the lens flare, and the iridescence shaders on the insectoid carapace of the alien vehicles. His main memory, though, is of “these little characters driving around in these little jeeps”.
That’s the formative memory for many people who worked on the game, including Bungie co-founder Alex Seropian. “Charlie [Gough] started doing the suspension physics on the jeep, which would become the Warthog,” he says. “I remember seeing this tech demo of it going over 3D terrain. The camera was really close-up, and you’d have this reaction of, ‘Wow, that’s cool’. But then, when you put the camera way up high, you couldn’t really see it. It wasn’t as impressive. So, that’s when the camera started getting closer, and closer – until eventually we experimented with just making it thirdperson, with direct character control.”
