Halo Effect An Unauthorized Look at the Most Successful Video Game of All Time

by Glenn Yeffeth (Editor) in stores April 1, 2007

Genres:

Non-Fiction, Pop Culture

Themes:

essays , pop culture , video games

Book Excerpt

• send excerpt in an email
• download as pdf
• add social bookmark

(Excerpt Essay)
Planetary Objects in the Rear View Mirror: Our Distorted Preconceptions of Halo
by Kieron Gillen

Long before Halo became a phenomenon, many were skeptical that a game developed by Microsoft could be all that good. This is the story of how the opinion leaders came around.

LOS ANGELES. IT’S E3, 2003. Several thousand games journalists and similar industry professionals are crammed like particularly pallid sardines into Microsoft’s press conference. The next few years of their plans are being explained on the big screen. Presentations are interrupted by sporadic whoops, because they always are. American games journalists whoop. The English element, of which I’m a part, sits back wearing a mask of cynical professionalism as a disguise for hangovers. Halo 2 footage plays, and the whooping increases in pace. And, halfway into the demo, it happens.

Master Chief picks up a second weapon and starts blowing Covenant away with it.

Dual Wield! DUAL FUCKING WIELD!

The place goes crazy. The gentleman to my left grabs the railing in front of him and gasps, “Oh MY God.” I look around, feeling like a mild-mannered vicar who’s somehow found himself at an Aztec blood sacrifice. Dignity has left the building, the crowd doing everything short of throwing handfuls of ejaculate at the stage. My colleagues are just as bemused by this mass display of breast-beating. It’s the sort of reaction that would be a tad extreme for the announcement of world peace.

If you asked me for my least favorite memory related to Halo, that would be it: abstract adults acting in such a manner, all because of such a basically meaningless improvement; the sort of improvement that looks great on the box but ultimately means nothing. Halo’s expansive charms had nothing to do with such simple crowd-pleasing, and to see people—my peers!—en masse seem to forget it, was just embarrassing. Didn’t they get it? Or, alternatively, didn’t I get it?

You see, it wasn’t always like that. There was a time no one outside of Bungie cared about Halo. Or if they did, they cared for no reason at all. Or the wrong reason. Or jumped to some reason from the slightest of evidence. Or for a reason they made up inside the warped mush inside their heads. Or hated it, due to one of the same reasons.

Elsewhere in this book, I’d imagine someone will be talking about Halo’s prehistory as an SF RTS and similar. That’s essential and concrete, but it’s also what’s been documented. That’s history. But there’s another history of Halo: a history of conceptions. More than any other cultural form, video games are hyped massively in advance of releases. Games will be part of the general conversation for years before anyone gets to play them. This is a history of Halo told through rumor and expectation—the forgotten parts of what we all said to each other in message boards and in pubs and defended to the death for no good reason. It’s worth remembering that before it was the sort of modern classic that could provoke mass ecstasy by showing its lead character fire two guns at once, it was—at different times—the fresh-faced new contender, the sell-out, the castrated wreck of a game, and the subject of bribery conspiracies.

I’m a games journalist, if you’ll pardon the phrase. I make most of my money from writing about video games. I’ve been doing it forever. I’m old enough to know better, but—alas—not smart enough. Back in 2000, I was working for the UK’s PC Gamer as reviews editor. Sitting in an E3 hotel room with a margarita for company, I wrote the world’s first cover feature on Halo. Now, if you put aside the small issue of it being a PC magazine, with Halo’s current standing, you’d think it was entirely natural to appear there. After all, which magazine wouldn’t want the bragging rights of saying it did the world’s first cover on one of the premiere games of its generation? But Halo only got a cover via a fluke.

Games magazines’ covers are generally arranged far in advance. Game makers and editors barter editorial space for access. “We will give your magazine first access to review code, in exchange for the cover,” says one half. “Okay, mate, you’re on,” says the other. It’s a mutually equitable operation. It’s also a mutually equitable operation that can go tits up with alarming regularity. And in the British press, covers really do matter. That sales are overwhelmingly via newsstands rather than subscriptions leads to a constant fight for audience on an issue-by-issue basis. What happens when you’ve promised the cover to three games? Well, the weeping art editor struggles to work out a way to create a collage of a race car, a marine, and some licensed, purple fruit into something that won’t elicit disgusted vomiting in newsagents. It goes the other way just as often, when all the deals fall through and we’re left with a blank space where a cover should be.

The space must be filled or else we die.

It was the E3 issue. The cover game—Grand Prix 3, which would proceed to drift back through the year, causing a series of scrambles to fill the space—had disappeared. Halo had been shown behind closed doors at E3. Clearly, from the first impressions, everyone knew it was going to be a perfect cover.

No, not really.

“My personal recollections—as I didn’t see it—were of this very dull character in a game with a crap name. I was completely under advisement from the enthusiasm you and Matt had for it, and the newsgroups online,” notes James Ashton, editor of PC Gamer at the time and now Future Group publisher, when asked about his decision, “and I think it was picked up on primarily on graphics rather than anything in the actual game.”

“It’s weird to think about it now, in that it’s such a famous Xbox title, but before when we were looking at it...well, it wasn’t even announced for that format yet,” notes Ashton. “I remember before we went and saw it, and we were talking about it in the office, a lot of it was based around Bungie and their track record on the Mac. I remember looking at the company name for the first time and going, ‘Hang on...what have they done?’” Bungie had a reputation. It was just a reputation that didn’t really reach England. Marathon was as respected as a shooter could be on the Mac. Alas, for many PC games fans, that isn’t actually very much. Their fantasy RTS myth in Europe was seen very much as a side-show to the main RTS events of Westood (Command & Conquer et al.) and Ensemble (Age of Empires).

Ashton’s preconceptions were right in at least one way: what was primarily attracting people to Halo was a graphical kick. “I remember seeing the actual game demo at the time, and being completely blown away,” remembers Matt Pierce, deputy editor of PC Gamer magazine at the time (now a publisher of Future). “I remember not believing that what we’d seen was actually real. And thinking—like pretty much everyone did with the Playstation stuff at last year’s E3—that it was target footage rather than actual in game stuff.” The demo was particularly spectacular. Forget the fact that I had six pages to fill from a twenty-minute interview with Bungie, where both tape-recorders died and we were reduced to scribbling notes in proto-shorthand; clearly, I was going to over-elaborate any fact I had to just to hit the word count. I was a little bit taken with Halo’s graphics. To my embarrassment, it’s the text-based version of the crowd’s excitement that Halo 2’s dual-wield provoked.

You want to hear some quotes, don’t you? Bollocks:

“Every second of the game I’ve seen drips with silicon sex, sleek like a vi nyl Concorde,” I rant. “It’s an orchestrated phallic über-assault, thrusting through your optic nerve to burst every one of your neurons with sheer pleasure. It’s a luscious cruise missile launched from Bungie’s headquarters, jetting across the Atlantic, into your flat, down your esophagus to explode your heart into a million fragments of love. In motion, Halo makes everything you’ve ever gazed upon lovingly tawdry. It raises the bar of excellence through the ceiling, leaving its fellow competitors straining their necks at the heavens. After seeing Halo, the world looks ugly.”

There’s another paragraph of it, too. I was young. Also, as mentioned earlier, drinking a margarita. Also—my only real defense—I believed it. At E3 2000, Halo was so ahead of anything we’d seen, hyperbole was the only way to be honest. “It’s weird,” notes Matt Pierce, “we see things so far ahead of its time at E3, and we’re blown away. We think… Christ, if only you could release it now.”

(Excerpt Essay)
Halo Science 101 by Kevin R. Grazier, Ph.D.

Several years ago, after I’d performed a pair of planetarium shows at Santa Monica College, several of the audience members and I retired to a local restaurant to prolong our evening of astronomical fellowship. The topic of conversation turned from the stars and planets to a round-robin discussion of movies—in general, what kind of movies everyone enjoyed and, specifically, what we had seen lately. By the sheer fact that these people chose to spend their Friday evening attending planetarium presentations to learn more about the universe, they obviously enjoyed exercising their gray matter in their spare time. It was no surprise, then, that the movies this crowd chose to see also tended towards the intellectual.

Because of our seating arrangement and the order of the topic’s progression, I would be the last to speak. Since I was the only person at the table with a Ph.D., there was an elevated air of expectation. What would he say? Would he reveal a little-known documentary? Perhaps a stimulating foreign film? Would he list one of the classics as his all-time most cherished movie? In retrospect, the collective disappointment to my less intellectual—and more “blue collar”—reply was astoundingly amusing. I simply said, “You know, I get enough intellectual stimulation at work, so when I go to the movies, I want to see things explode.”

Given my taste in movies, it isn’t much of a stretch to imagine that I’m quite a fan of many of today’s first-person-shooter video games. I’m a big fan of Doom and all its incarnations, for example. So, when Halo: Combat Evolved arrived on the scene—a video game that appeared on the surface to be a cross between Ringworld (one of the first science fic tion books I ever read) and Aliens (my all-time favorite “shoot-’em-up” SF movie), I was all over it.

In fact, the case has been made—on several Halo-related Web sites, for example—that there isn’t much about Halo’s plotline that is original. There are elements of numerous science fiction books, movies, classical mythology, and even biblical references. Halo is an amalgam of all of these. In fact, we can find allusions to the Alien movies when the game is barely underway: the sergeant “motivating” the soldiers on the UNSC Cruiser, Pillar of Autumn, is remarkably similar to Sgt. Apone from Aliens, and if you look closely enough at the bulletin board behind the bridge on Pillar of Autumn, you can even make out a flyer for a missing cat named Jonesy. Whether or not the Halo games are the epitome of originality or not, who cares? Just as with my movies, I want my video games to be rampant escapism with an overdose of adrenaline. If I’m vicariously thrown into scenarios that just happen to be reminiscent of favorite SF movies, and lots of things explode, then all the better!

While science fiction can be used to examine the human condition and to make social commentary—the original Star Trek, Starship Troopers, and even Battlestar Galactica v. 2.0 are excellent examples here—science fiction can also serve as unbridled escapism. The viewer or reader or game player—the participant—isn’t preoccupied with day-to-day problems if the story successfully transports him to distant worlds or future times. Of course, the participant has a role in this as well. It is the duty of the author to create a situation interesting enough to be worthy of the time invested in a visit, but it is incumbent upon the participant to be amenable to be taken on the journey. The term is “willing suspension of disbelief,” originally coined by Samuel Coleridge in 1817.

Fans of science fiction media willingly allow ourselves to believe that the Enterprise can transport people by converting them to energy and subsequently reconstructing them, that Galactica has artificial gravity,and that the Millennium Falcon can, in fact, make the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs. We accept a measure of unproven (faster-than-light travel), or even highly implausible (light sabers), science and technology if it’s interwoven with a ripping good yarn. At the same time, if the science fiction work includes too many obvious technical gaffes—especially if they are easily circumvented and the story equally as entertaining if done accurately—the participant is “taken out” of the story, suspension of disbelief itself suspended, and the dramatic impact lessened or lost. With millions of computers in service today, coupled with the accessibility of the Internet, we have an increasingly tech-savvy population: a population that largely appreciates technical accuracy in stories and which, more to the point, notices when things are amiss. To this end, Hollywood is increasingly using technical advisors in science fiction television and cinema to ensure that the science part of science fiction is depicted as accurately as possible and that the audience stays within the action.

If the universe, characters, or story is particularly compelling, one might choose to wander that universe of his or her own accord. The Internet is full of bulletin boards where members compare and contrast the capabilities of the Viper Mark II with the Mark VIII, or debate whether or not they would take the blue pill or the red one. Of course, this is just a high-tech version of science fiction fellowship and escapism that has already existed at science fiction conventions for decades. Succinctly put, it can be fun to play in somebody else’s sandbox. The Halo universe, detailed in the video games, novels, and upcoming movie, is a richly detailed one and lends itself well to such musings. An entire book could be written about the science and physics, both explicit and implied, within the Halo universe, but with only a little scientific knowledge we can have a lot of fun simply musing about a spinning ringed megastructure—suspended between a planet and its moon—that doubles as a research facility and a superweapon.

This Is the Way the World...Begins

The term “megastructure” refers to a huge artificial structure for which one of its three special dimensions is 100 kilometers or greater. Both SF and speculative science have contemplated large-scale constructs for years, such as the Dyson Sphere and Star Trek’s Borg Unimatrix; even the planet Earth, as represented in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, would qualify. The first literary use of a ring-shaped megastructure occurred in Larry Niven’s 1970 Hugo and Nebula award-winning novel Ringworld. Niven elaborates on the details of such a Ringworld, also known as a Niven Ring, in his 1974 book A Hole in Space:

I myself have dreamed up an intermediate step between Dyson Spheres and planets. Build a ring 93 million miles in radius—one Earth orbit—which would make it 600 million miles long. If we have the mass of Jupiter to work with, and if we make it 1,000 miles wide, we get a thickness of about a thousand meters. The Ringworld would thus be much sturdier than a Dyson Sphere.

Although Forerunner Halos are also huge ring-shaped habitats, they are comparatively smaller by several orders of magnitude: the radii of the Halo megastructures are a “mere” 5,000 kilometers—more similar to Earth’s average radius, 6,371 kilometers, than that of a Ringworld. In fact, because the Halos we have seen to date orbit gas giant planets instead of encircling stars, they are less ring worlds than they are ring satellites.

A 5,000 kilometer radius would yield a circumference of roughly 31,400 kilometers. If the Halos had a width-to-radius ratio similar to that of Niven’s Ringworld, they would be approximately 5.37 kilometers wide. They are significantly wider, though, at 320 kilometers. The Halos, then, would have a surface area of 10 million square kilometers— slightly larger than the surface area of Canada, and approximately 2 percent of the surface area of Earth. Of course, since we know that there are lakes, seas, and rivers on the Halos, the livable surface area would be fractionally less.

What raw materials would it take to construct a Halo, and in what quantities? In order to determine the amount of raw materials required, and what elements may exist in the necessary abundances, we first must calculate the volume of the structure. While a Halo is proportionally wider than a Niven Ring, it is thicker in absolute measure. Niven proposed that a Ringworld be 1 kilometer thick, whereas the Halos are quite a bit sturdier at 22.3 kilometers thick. The total volume of a Halo would be roughly 224 million cubic kilometers, a bit more than 0.02 percent of the volume of Earth.

Of what would a Halo be composed, then? Almost since the genre began, science fiction authors have resorted to the invention of new and exotic materials to endow their structures/spacecraft/armor with the desired combinations of weight, strength, and other material properties. The practice is so common that a term has even been coined for fictitious substances that have such improbable combinations of material properties: unobtanium. If we dare to imagine how a Halo might plausibly be built, one constraint must be that we shy away from unobtanium and consider only materials that exist in practical abundances in the real universe. In the book Halo: Fall of Reach, however, spectroscopic analysis of the composition of Installation 04 is “inconclusive,” which seems to imply quite strongly that the Halos are, in fact, composed of unobtanium. Let’s go out on a limb, then, and assume that the Halos have a thin outer protective sheath composed of a super-strong, heretofore unknown, alloy that envelopes an internal structure composed of more universal elements.

Iron, in addition to being the principle component of the cores of terrestrial—or Earth-like—planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars), is also common in asteroids. In fact, in the solar system many asteroids are composed almost entirely of iron and nickel. Carbon is a fairly common element as well. Then it would be a reasonable assumption that the primary Halo structure is composed of steel—which is an alloy of iron and carbon—with perhaps other elements in smaller amounts. Although less universally abundant, nickel and magnesium, also common in steel, exist in amounts abundant enough to create a very strong and comparatively light steel alloy.

We now know the approximate volume of a Halo and the density of its principle component (a reasonable average density for steel is 7.7 grams per cubic centimeter). Normally, these values would be enough to calculate its approximate mass. We need still one more quantity, though. Views of the exterior surfaces of Installations 04 and 05 clearly reveal direct-vision ports (read: windows) and what appear to be docking hatches. The obvious implication is that the inner surface of the ring is not the only habitable portion of a Halo—obviously a fraction of the ring structure itself is hollow and used for living space, laboratories, even the hardware, maintenance, and pulse generator spaces for the Halo’s weaponry. If we assume that the primary ring structure is roughly 50 percent empty space, then we end up with a total mass of a Halo of about 1.7x10 ¹⁷ kilograms, or 1,700 million billion kilograms.

In A Hole in Space, Larry Niven calculates that it would take the mass of Jupiter to build his Ringworld. A major complication, however, is that jovian, or Jupiter-like, planets represent the bulk of the mass of a planetary system like ours, yet they are composed largely of very light materials such as hydrogen and helium. Each has several Earth masses worth of solid material (rock and metals) at their core, but the sum total of all the rock and metal in the solar system—that of the inner planets, the asteroids, the jovian planets, and moons—would equal less than one-sixth of one Jupiter’s mass worth of potential construction materials. The mass calculated for a Halo is approximately twice the mass of Ceres (the largest asteroid in the solar system’s Asteroid Belt), a bit less than the Pluto’s moon Charon, or the mass of a sphere of solid iron roughly 57 kilometers in radius. The entire asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter would have just about enough mass to construct one Halo.

The Neighborhood: A Halo’s Place in Space

Though it is likely that Halos heretofore unseen may exist in different environments, Installations 04 and 05 were both in orbit around jovian planets. In Halo: Combat Evolved, Installation 04 orbits the superjovian gas planet Threshold (Earth Survey Catalog B1008-AG), which, in turn, orbits the star Soell. Like Jupiter, Threshold is a gas giant with clouds of ammonia (white) and ammonium hydrosulfide (reddish brown) crystals. Unlike Jupiter, though, the diameter of Threshold is given at 214,604 kilometers, exactly half again as large as Jupiter (it is unlikely this is a coincidence, more likely a conscious choice on the part of the game designers).

The Halo game designers have exhibited an amazing attention to detail throughout the games. It is therefore likely that this is a result of recent astronomical discoveries more than any other reason, but jovian planets like Threshold are unlikely to exist in the real universe. Jupiter is about as large as a jovian planet can be. If increasingly more mass were added to Jupiter, it would begin to contract, collapsing under its own weight—becoming smaller even as it increased in mass. If a gas planet the size of Threshold did exist, and it had approximately Jupiter’s density, it would “weigh in” at a bit less than 3.8 Jupiter masses…

send this excerpt to a friend (or yourself)