BTS: Anniversary Campaign

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BTS: Anniversary Campaign is a 343 Industries Behind-the-Scenes documentary video that offers a look at the developmental process of the remastered campaign experience featured within Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, and was first released on YouTube and Halo Waypoint on October 17, 2011. It features exclusive interviews with both 343 Industries and Saber Interactive employees.

Transcript

• Phil Spencer: " I remember sitting this conference room and watching this purple and blue FPS game on console, and scratching my head wondering 'was this going to be it; was this going to be the game which defines Xbox?' And obviously, ten years later that proved to be the seminal moment for us, as the beginning of Halo on the Xbox game."

• Bonnie Ross Ziegler: "Halo didn't just bring an FPS to the console; it also brought a story. That combination kind of established a new genre of FPS story expectations."

• Frank O'Connor: "Halo did a lot of conventional storytelling through cinematics, and cool voice acting, and great music obviously. But I think some of the storytelling that happens in Halo for me is the storytelling that happens through the environment and sandbox."

• Greg Hermann: "While you were hit with all of this great fiction which you could really delve into and learn about; you could just pick it up and play."

• Chad Armstrong: "All of that kind of came together to make a game which was not necessarily completely different from what previous shooters had done; but got all of its individual formulas so excellently perfect that you had this incredible First-person shooter experience that I don't think anyone had come close to before."

• Phil Spencer: "Halo was beginning of me playing console game with my friends and that's how I always think about it."

The Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary and BTS's logo appear.

• Chad Armstrong: "I think people have been asking for a remake of Halo 1 since Halo 2 was announced."

• Frank O'Connor: "I like to go back all the way to when Xbox LIVE first came out. The demand for Halo 1 and to play as a co-op over Xbox LIVE started. It built up over the years and over the years."

• Chad Armstrong: "It was the perfect timing since tenth anniversary was coming up."

• Dan Ayoub: "It occurred to us that there's this entire generation who never player the original game. If you're an eighteen year old gamer today, you were eight when Halo came out."

• Frank O'Connor: "We did do diligence on a number of partners."

• Bonnie Ross Ziegler: "The number one requirement was that it didn't impact gameplay at all."

• Greg Hermann: "You have something that's just classic; something that's just magical. If you go and tinker with that, you're just going to lose that magic."

• Frank O'Connor: "What we wanted was someone who could work with our existing physics and gameplay engine."

• Dan Ayoub: "Saber popped up really quickly."

• Chad Armstrong: "They were like 'Yeah, we can make this look like a current generation game and we can do while using the original Halo engine.'"

• Andrey Iones: "The gameplay in Halo 1 is what we call 'deterministic', in other words, if you feed the engine the game will behave the same way. If you can apply this principle perfectly, you can have both mode work in sync."

• Frank O'Connor: "Rather than simulate Halo 1's actual gameplay and actual physics; we're actually able to use them completely."

• Andrey Iones: "So the car is nice and shiny. The engine is very old, so we have to make sure that it all fits together. Unless, we would have to speed up the engine to make sure it works in today's world."

• Frank O'Connor: "We've done some deliberate things. The Library is now much easier to navigate. We've used light and textures to make it a little bit simpler."

• Chad Armstrong: "The pillars are covered in Holograms one one side, they're more decorated on the other side. It actually seems to help people who are not familiar with The Library and figuring out were they're going."

• Dennis Ries: "The Truth and Reconciliation is one of the best examples. If you come to that first interaction, and then make your way to the cliff, and look up to see this unbelievable skybox. And so, having all of these updated game for me has made the game much more immersive."

• David Ellis: "I remember when I first saw someone switch the graphics; I didn't know that was going to be a feature."

• Greg Hermann: "In a lot of ways, it was a fine balancing act because we were running all of the original Halo animations. So it was the original Halo skeletons for those characters. It needed to be rebound into the updated meshes that we had brought over from Halo: Reach and Halo 3. For example, the Elites had an elongated neck, so now they're a little more squat and compact."

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