Real World

Behind the Scenes: Making of Halo 2

From Halopedia, the Halo wiki

Behind the Scenes: Making of Halo 2 is a documentary film on the development of Halo 2, released by Bungie and produced by Film Oasis. Originally included on the Halo 2 Limited Collector's Edition, the film was later uploaded to Bungie's YouTube channel on May 1, 2012.[1]

Transcript[edit]

Note: Unofficial section names for ease of access.

Opening[edit]

  • Joseph Staten: Halo 1 was a pretty good game, not just gameplay-wise. I mean, it was fun. Halo 1 was fun. I think we spent years, frankly, at this point saying, "How do we ratchet the bar across the board up for Halo 2?"
  • Jason Jones: In a lot of ways, Halo 2 is just the extension of all the excitement we felt at the end of Halo 1 that we didn't get to express.
  • Chris Butcher: Just in every way, we've really increased the scale and the scope of the game.
  • David Dunn: It's exploring huge environments—ten times the size of Halo 1.
  • Michael Wu: It's about kicking ass in as many ways as possible, in as many different bodies as possible.
  • Eddie Smith: Halo 2 is about guns and more guns. That's what it's about.
  • Jason Jones: There's a lot of the story that we didn't get to tell. There are characters that we had conceived of and, in some cases, even modeled. And it's also the same group of people too, and they all still want to do what they're doing.
  • Marcus Lehto: We want our game to look like a movie; we want it to look like something that's just unbelievable to experience.
  • Martin O'Donnell: I guess we're sort of feeding off each other. It’s a really creative group of people that trust each other.
  • Jason Jones: The really important thing to do now is to take all these different disciplines who are all working on their own things and take all those pieces—take the AI code, the physics, and the guys working on the levels—and bring all those pieces together at the same time. And then you keep doing that. You keep colliding things together until it's a game.

BEHIND THE SCENES:
MAKING OF HALO 2

  • Joseph Staten: This process began with the end of Halo and realizing all the stuff that we had left out. Jason and I and Jaime and a few other people sitting down, and thinking really hard about, "Wow, what did we really want to tell?" And then Jason locked himself in a room for a while and organized his core ideas, and then came to me and said, "Hey, these are my thoughts about a story for Halo 2. What do you think?"
  • Jason Jones: Yeah, I don't know if we're crazy or stupid or we just like good stories or what, but we certainly worry about that a lot more than you might think we'd have to in a game that's mostly just about action and about not thinking.
  • Jaime Griesemer: In Halo 1, there was maybe 30 seconds of fun that happened over and over and over and over again. So, if you can get 30 seconds of fun, you can pretty much stretch that out to be an entire game. Encountering a bunch of guys, melee-attacking one of them before they were aware, throwing a grenade into a group of other guys, and then cleaning up the stragglers before they could surround you. You can have all the great graphics and all the different characters and lots of different weapons with amazing effects, but if you don't nail that 30 seconds, you're not going to have a great game.
  • Joseph Staten: This is the copy of the script, the cinematic script for Halo. This document needs to talk to programmers and artists and animators and everybody. This is 160 pages worth of cinematics. That's kind of crazy if you just think about it on its own, but when you look at a game which is 15 levels long, with a couple of protagonists and a fairly complex story arc—when you need to drive the player's experience for 20 hours of gameplay—say, 120 minutes of cinematics doesn't really seem that out of proportion. But just to look at it prima facie, it's pretty daunting. You think, "My God, you're making a feature film."
  • Jason Jones: It's not about making it complex, and it's not about playing movies for you—two hours of movies between every five minutes of gameplay. But the more you can make somebody believe that they're in this cool place, that they're on Halo fighting the Covenant instead of sitting in their living room at two in the morning trying to finish some stupid video game...
  • Arbiter: I will continue my campaign against the humans.
  • Marcus Lehto (B-roll): There's a lot of complexity here up in this geometry, but look down now... there's very little of that down here. I think we should flip flop some of that.
  • Marcus Lehto: We start with the story first of all. We get a good background to the entire game, just a foundation for things, and then we start building levels off of that. This particular level that I'm looking at right now is called the Sentinel Headquarters. The Sentinel is this hovering character. They don't need a floor; they can fly up through the ceilings, they can fly through portals that are 20 feet up. But you as the character will have the challenge of traversing this interesting terrain inside the structure, up and across beam-work and through these little portals throughout the space. So it's going to be really interesting for the player to explore.

E3 demo[edit]

  • Hamilton Chu (B-roll): Alright, we made it, huh?

APRIL 2003
//21 MONTHS TO SHIP

  • Hamilton Chu (B-roll): Alright, Michael is going to talk about the engineering and stuff.
  • Michael Evans (B-roll): It's amazing to me how good stuff look and how much progress we had, but something I've been thinking about is E3.
  • Jaime Griesemer: E3 stands for the Electronic Entertainment Expo, and it's the biggest event in the video game world where all the developers and all the publishers and all the gaming press all get together for almost a week-long carnival, practically.
  • Jason Jones: Trade shows are useful because they make you get your shit together.
  • Michael Evans: It's important for us to get excited about what we get done for E3, because we need to build that excitement up and go, "Boom."
  • Michael Evans (B-roll): God damn it, we have a lot of work to do between now and E3.
  • Jason Jones: I think it's really important to be ambitious. I think it's important to have more balls in the air than you can catch at the end when it all comes down to it and you have to ship a game. But... certainly, you can go too far.
  • Joseph Staten: Of all the people on the team, Tyson and I are probably the people who are the most frightening for Jason and the programmers. We are the most crazy, scripting, crack-smoking, "This would be so cool, damn the frame rate, let's pound the code and make these crazy things happen!"
  • Joseph Staten (B-roll): E3 demo, from the start to finish! Woohoo!
  • Tyson Green: Yesterday, before the demo, we had all this stuff that we were just throwing in, and finally, something began to catch and we started moving. But all this stuff that didn't exist two hours earlier is all of a sudden in the demo and ready to show people. That's when it's the most rewarding and most fun to be doing this sort of stuff—is when it clicks.
  • Joseph Staten (B-roll): You will continue fighting. I don't think this part is going to work, but at this point, you and your ODST buddies will jump down. You will have two SMGs at this point, one in each hand, and you will begin tearing into the Grunts with your two SMGs.
  • Jaime Griesemer: In a lot of things that you see at E3, they are movies so that they can fake the sound or pre-render it even, so that the frame rate is solid. But what we're doing is we're playing it in front of people live.
  • Joseph Staten (B-roll): The sign will come crashing down on the dropship! Boom! Master Chief will be chased by Brutes. This is all fucked up and horrible, but all of sudden another shadow of a dropship passes over you! And Cortana says, "Oh Lord, look out!" Because it's raining Brutes, baby!
  • Cortana: Brutes! Look out!
  • Nathan Walpole: This is for a scene where the Brute jumps down onto the hood of the Warthog, surprising the driver and the Master Chief in the back for Joe's demo at E3. We always want to try to put a bit of ourselves in the character. At least what I'm trying to do with the Brute as well. We've been playing around with the idea of characters boarding other vehicles. So here you see a cycle of the Brute swatting the driver and the passenger out of the way. It's a pretty rough cycle, it's about 70% complete. Still got a lot more work to put into it.
  • Marcus Lehto: What we are doing now for animation is so much more in-depth. We're bringing so much more character to each one of the entities in our game. So, creating an environment that is visually compelling and beautiful from all vantage points is such a huge challenge.
  • Jay Weinland (B-roll): Look how cool that weapon is.
  • Jaime Griesemer (B-roll): Yeah, I don't care about that. I don't care about that.
  • Jason Jones: This group of people is great. I'm sometimes pretty awestruck by how smart these people really are and the good decisions that they're making. I'm really proud of those guys.
  • Joseph Staten (B-roll): Okay. We should try that scene with Chief ejects out the tunnel door now, which was never slow before, but is...
  • Marcus Lehto (B-roll): But slow.
  • Joseph Staten (B-roll): ...but slow.
  • Joseph Staten: Everybody here works really, really hard. It doesn't take that pressure to get them to jump it up to the next level.
  • Marcus Lehto (B-roll): Jason... help.
  • Jason Jones (B-roll): I think we should find a different way to do that... 'cause the whole fucking Pelican was generating these immense shadow volumes that make the screen this giant fuckbomb...
  • Jason Jones: We are the most cynical people. We are the jaded crowd who, if a game doesn't entertain us in five minutes, we stop playing it.
  • Marcus Lehto (B-roll): Oh no. Shit.
  • Jason Jones (B-roll): What?
  • Marcus Lehto (B-roll): This light is like... world relative, isn't it?
  • Jason Jones (B-roll): Fuck.
  • Marcus Lehto (B-roll): Yes. I'm fucked.
  • Marcus Lehto (B-roll): What I had hoped to achieve in about a half hour, now I am looking at a good night's worth. So yeah, hopefully by tomorrow morning, we'll have something that works.
  • Jason Jones (B-roll): The Pelican is so expensive.
  • Joseph Staten: The small group of people who work to the very, very end—you're going to sit down and feed off that adrenaline and fix the nitty gritty details, and ship the really polished thing.
  • Joseph Staten (B-roll): Ooo... that's gotta hurt.
  • Martin O'Donnell (B-roll): There it is. Boom!
  • Joseph Staten (B-roll): Oh no, but what's that from above?
  • Martin O'Donnell (B-roll): It's a new thing!
  • Martin O'Donnell: We're just throwing everything we can at it. Joe keeps pushing more and more. The programmers will come through with some spectacular thing. The particle effects guy will create something that just looks beautiful, but then the frame rate goes down. If frame rate goes down, then my music is no longer in sync.
  • Martin O'Donnell (B-roll): There it is.
  • Cortana (B-roll): Betcha can't stick it.
  • Master Chief (B-roll): You're on.
  • Martin O'Donnell (B-roll): What was that?
  • Joseph Staten (B-roll): That's something for the fans.
  • Martin O'Donnell (B-roll): I like that. That's the first time I've seen that. The little glowy plasma grenade.
  • Joseph Staten (B-roll): That's for the... That's for the really hardcore like, German press corp. Up to that point, they're like, "We don't believe it's good!" Then after that, they're like, "Wow!"
  • Pete Parsons: The most important thing is what comes out of this E3. For all the business reasons, this is an important moment for retailers in terms of making their decisions on the games they are going to get behind. And it's also really important to the fans. I think this is a great moment for them to see what this game really could be like.
  • Hamilton Chu: We've been pretty quiet about what we've been doing, so in a lot of ways, I think fans are coming in with no expectations, right? No preconceived notions about what they're going to see.
  • Joseph Staten (B-roll): Come on in!
  • Joseph Staten (B-roll): So, we're going to show you Halo 2 today. This is uh... I'm actually going to playing it, as best I can. But before we start, I just need to go over some safety regulations in case of fire, or electrical storm, or earthquake, something like that. Just to make sure you're safe-
  • Sergeant Johnson (B-roll): "Stow it, son! These folks didn't wait in line to hear your lips flippety-flap! Knuckle up, and get ready to dance, you pasty bastard!
  • Joseph Staten (B-roll): Yes, sir, sergeant!
  • Sergeant Johnson (B-roll): What you good people are about to see, is an operation in progress. This is a real-time feed; no smoke-and-mirrors pre-recorded bullshit! Elements of the Covenant fleet have made landfall and occupied one of our cities. We will link up with our forces in-theater, engage the enemy, and boot their sorry behinds back into the stratosphere!
  • Sergeant Johnson (B-roll): Yo! Demo biatch!
  • Joseph Staten (B-roll): Uh... sir!
  • Sergeant Johnson (B-roll): You got anything?
  • Joseph Staten (B-roll): I need to talk about the-
  • Sergeant Johnson (B-roll): Didn't think so. Kill the lights!
  • Sergeant Banks: Take my weapon. You'll need it!

The Reason by Hoobastank plays in background over E3 demo montage.

  • Joseph Staten (B-roll): Thanks for coming, everybody!
  • E3 attendee 1: I mean, when I'm watching the demo and you climb up on the cruiser and kick the guy off, I lost it.
  • E3 attendee 2: Master Chief jumped up the Ghost, kicked the enemy down, and got on it. It was over. It was game over after that.
  • E3 attendee 3: Jumping on the Ghosts definitely surprised everyone the first time, 'cause everybody remembers getting run over by those things.
  • E3 attendee 1: You blow something up and the guy crawls out, and he's still alive! I mean, it doesn't get much better than that as far as I'm concerned.
  • E3 attendee 4: It seemed like a war, like a real battle.
  • E3 attendee 5: I went to see it twice just to make sure that it wasn't the exact same thing, and it was totally different this time.
  • E3 attendee 1: I don't say the word "awesome"; usually "dude" doesn't come out of my mouth. But the truth is, the game is awesome, dude!
  • E3 attendee 6: How the hell are we going to beat this game?
  • E3 attendee 7: Hurry it up, let's get it out here.
  • E3 attendee 2: No, you know, we can't wait another year. I'm sorry, we can't wait. This game has to come out now!

Montage of Penthathlon.

  • Joseph Staten: Now you know, listen—we spend day in, day out indoors under fluorescent bulbs, slaving away. This is the first sun we've seen in months. If you look, you can see just by our bulk and our musculature that we're not only top-notch game developers, we're also star athletes.
  • Event Emcee (B-roll): Okay, everyone. Today we got our first event of the day: the Pentathlon! Wooo!
  • Martin O'Donnell: The Pentathlon is five different sports.
  • Michael Evans: We split up into four teams: Grizzled Ancients, which are the cool people.
  • Joseph Staten: It's by tenure. How long you've been at Bungie deterimines which team you're on.
  • Martin O'Donnell: Old School, Middle School, and Newbies. Grizzled Ancients, of which I am not, are grizzled ancients.
  • Michael Evans: Five events. Tug of War, the old classic that everybody hates, you end up with red hands.
  • Martin O'Donnell: Volleyball, Dodgeball, Bocce Ball, Wacky Race... and Tug of War.
  • Joseph Staten: Let me tell you the secret to Tug of War. The team with me as the anchor isn't going to win. The team with Michael as the anchor, well, they got a shot.
  • Michael Evans: The team with Nathan over there as the anchor? They got a real good shot.
  • Joseph Staten (B-roll): Everybody's got to start with both bumcheeks on the line! Apparently, your team is like the Flood; you are all one body, one mind. This game is about throwing balls at other people!

Montage of Pentathlon.

  • Joseph Staten: See, the key to winning at the Pentathlon is non-alcoholic. You appear drunk, and yet you drink root beer.
  • Michael Evans: The key to enjoying the Pentathlon? Beer.

Montage of Pentathlon.

  • Event Emcee (B-roll): Pentathlon for 2003 is officially... done.
  • Joseph Staten: I'm enjoying the sunset, the last rays of light, because the next five months or so, I don't think we're all going to see very much sun. As a matter of fact, I don't think we're going to see any sun at all for the next five or six months. So enjoy it while it lasts.

Halo 2 announcement trailer plays.

  • Joseph Staten: We had a vision in our mind about what Halo 2 would look like, and that vision is really easy to see in the Halo 2 announcement trailer. Stencil shadows on everything, real-time reflections in the Master Chief's visor—this very crisp, well-wrought image. And we thought, "Well, that's what we're going to show for E3." When we got to the actual implementation of some of the choices we had made, we realized that it's impossible. And we went around and around on that and other questions for... perhaps too long.
  • Jason Jones: I don't think anybody in this world has ever done anything worthwhile without being their own worst critic. Especially when you talk about any creative enterprise, if you somehow believe that what you're doing is the greatest thing ever all the time, it's absolutely not going to be the greatest thing ever.
  • Joseph Staten: We came back from E3 with actually less than what we wanted. We came back from E3 with a demo; we did not come back from E3 with a playable part of a level. That was really bad, actually. That wasn't the goal.
  • Jaime Griesemer: What E3 gave us was the sense that we still didn't have the target that we were aiming at. So after E3, instead of being able to jump into all of our levels and go right into it, we're still trying to figure out where we're going and what the quality bar is going to be. Because right now, the game is not fun.

AUGUST 2003
//15 MONTHS TO SHIP

  • Joseph Staten: We've got 50, 60 guys now on the Halo 2 team. They're waiting to be told, "Hey, what do we do? What do we—this massive, smart, talented, hardcore, devoted group of guys that are going to stay up really late—what do we do? Tell us. We want to do it."

LAN Fest[edit]

Montage of LAN games.

  • Claude Errera (B-roll): The deal is, every two hours, there will be two 16-player games starting. Four o'clock, six o'clock, eight o'clock.
  • Claude Errera: I do these LAN fests like every six months or so. Some of the people that are showing up are regulars. There's always new people. It's just Halo that ties it all together.
  • "Blackstar" (B-roll): Yes, hello, I'm Blackstar, the one you know and love.
  • "CyberFreak" (B-roll): CyberFreak, from Arizona.
  • Chad Armstrong (B-roll): I'm Shishka. Nice to meet you all.
  • Mr. Smiley (B-roll): Mr. Smiley.
  • "Blackstar" (B-roll): Brian from Bungie! We got someone from Bungie here!

Montage of LAN games.

  • Community member 1: There's 35, 40 people here and they're all about Halo. They all post on these online forums, and they're all like these internet beings that we finally get to shake hands with.
  • Claude Errera (B-roll): There's like fourteen of them inside the base!
  • Community member 2: We have this game going here, which is 16. Downstairs, it's just down there—they probably by now have at least a 16-player game going. They keep on bringing in more stuff and it seems to be expanding.
  • Claude Errera: We set up 10 Xboxes, actually. That meant 10 TVs or screens of some sort. It turned out we had four LCD projectors. All of the wiring in the house runs into one room and into a pair of switches and then goes out again. All running off my house in the Connecticut suburbs in the winter.
  • Claude Errera: There were people willing to spend next month's rent to fly across the country to play in a game at my house.
  • Community member 1: What it comes down to is getting together with people, being able to yell at them, being able to talk about, "Oh, it was so great when you killed me with that rocket, I didn't even know it was coming!"
  • Chad Armstrong (B-roll): Shishka's aim is horrible!
  • Community member 1: Being able to reflect on the gameplay afterwards.
  • Chad Armstrong (B-roll): I got the most kills, so I get a prize.
  • Community member 1: D'Olbek got the most kills. Kingpin got one death, because he just sat around like a pansy. If he's watching this, he's a pansy. He knows.
  • Community member 2: Yeah, they probably think we're a little strange.
  • Community member 3: What do you mean a little?
  • "Blackstar": It's a hobby like any other, and every hobby has its own level of obsession or level of interest.
  • Community member 4: We're a social group getting together.
  • Claude Errera: Gaming used to be the domain of the geeks, and it's not really anymore. Are we too old? Nah.
  • Community member 5: To Halo 2.
  • Community member 1: To Halo 2.
  • Community member 5: And Bungie.
  • Community member 1: And Bungie.

Weapons[edit]

  • Robert McLees: What do I do? I make guns. Use that button, use it like a pistol, and you'll be able to have one in both hands. So you walk around with these two bullet hoses. There's the Battle Rifle, right? If you're like me, it'll be the weapon that you fall back on throughout the entire game, because it's the go-to gun. It'll hopefully actually behave more like a rifle than the Assault Rifle did from Halo, which was more of a submachine gun. It suffered from the same things that all video game weapons suffer from, and that is: they do not behave like their real-world counterparts.
  • Nathan Walpole: South Carolina. It was a trip for reference—to see basically how Marines moved, how they reacted in combat situations, formations. We show up on a farm and we're kind of like, "How serious could these guys actually be?" And then we turn the corner and see a table full of guns. Not only one table, but two picnic tables full of guns. Actual military issue service weapons. It ranged from pistols to machine guns, fully automatic, silenced. You're talking the deadliest type of guns. These guys were pretty serious. It was kind of intimidating.
  • Demonstrator (B-roll): Gun comes up. Gun doesn't work.
  • Demonstrator (B-roll): And now I will take up a good shooting position. I will follow him all the way into the ground.
  • Demonstrator (B-roll): When I try to take him down, I will just barrel-point him like that.
  • Robert McLees: During the development of Halo, whatever, we made mistakes.
  • Nathan Walpole: We definitely got some criticism from actual people that were in the military.
  • Robert McLees: We had a smaller team, right, and a very short time to make the game.
  • Nathan Walpole: We did a lot of research, but there's only so much that books can teach you. You've got to get a lot of research hands-on.
  • Robert McLees: It isn't very often where you get to see guys who really know what they're doing. Being able to stand back and observe brass ejecting from the weapon.
  • Nathan Walpole: The most surprising thing for me was basically the communication between a two-man unit. Touching your partner's back when he's in front of you. Marines going into combat formations—how they'd handle certain situations, how they'd handle multiple opponents, single opponents. We're trying to go far and above what we've done in Halo 1.

Audio[edit]

  • Jay Weinland: This is our audio playground, which has evolved greatly since the last time. We now have virtually every surface in the game in these large rooms that allow us to kind of mess around and do what we want. I'm going to show you one of my favorite rooms, which is the Dirt Room. An awful lot of dirt in Halo. I could listen to this stuff all day. A voice is a point in space that is creating audio, and that audio gets mixed and then gets put out the speakers. If I turn on one more debug thing here, it'll actually show us just how many "voices" are in use for an event like this. So the screen is filled with the amount of sound calls we're getting. What this is telling us right here is that we have about 17 or 18 voices in use when this chaingun is firing. And we can have 64 unique things happening in surround sound space at a time. We almost call it the "Matrix of Doom", because of the amount of surface types that we have in the game versus the amount of objects that we have in the game colliding with each other and against the environment. We will be generating hundreds and indeed thousands of sound effects to try to cover up this matrix. There's nothing we can't put in the game, and all we're waiting for is the assets to go in there for us to tag to them. So we're in good shape, I think. Ask me again in two months when I have bloodshot eyes and I haven't bathed in three days, and I'll probably tell you something different.

Cut content[edit]

  • Joseph Staten: So we had a game that was nine levels. It took us, started at Earth, brought us out into the galaxy, and then brought us back to Earth for this grand conclusion. Well, right about at that moment, Pandora's Box was opened and decisions which were "engraved in stone" were not what we thought.
  • Paul Bertone: We messed up. We didn't have the design down; we didn't have the story down. Once we actually started to see how long the missions were taking to produce and how long they were taking to design and script, it just wasn't going to work.
  • Marcus Lehto: And then everything that wasn't essential—all these things that we'd just love to see in the game—they all get put on the bottom of this list and we start hacking them off.
  • Joseph Staten: Here comes the knife! Out of the script! What's important that isn't essential? Goodbye, my lovely child.
  • Martin O'Donnell: The Bungie process of making cool games has worked up until now, but is it possible that there's an amount of pressure or an ambition that's beyond what we can actually do? I don't know. We haven't finished it yet.
  • Joseph Staten: These levels behind me, they are commitment. These whiteboards—all they are is commitment. This is what we're going to do.
  • Pete Parsons: The time for constructive feedback is done, and it's time to work.

Red vs. Blue[edit]

  • Church: Have you paid attention at our enemies for one second?
  • Caboose: I beg your pardon?
  • Church: First of all, that guy? He's not yellow. He's orange. And since when was there a girl on the Red Team?
  • "Donut": My favorite thing is pretty dresses.
  • "Sarge": Arr... I got termites in me legs.
  • Church: And that is not a Southern accent.
  • "Sarge": Arr...
  • "Donut": Do you have any tampons?
  • Church: Seriously, what is the matter with you people?
  • Gus Sorola: At the time we started the series, we thought we were the first people ever to do this. We thought we were such creative geniuses.
  • Burnie Burns: We made two little five-minute... no, they were about two minutes each, and we put them on the web. They were just funny little sketches that we wrote, and then we used Halo to animate them.
  • Church: All right, O'Malley, this is it. I got half a mind to kill you.
  • Tex: That's ridiculous.
  • Church: And the other half agreed!
  • Burnie Burns: I think the first week we had 2,000 hits, and then we had, I think, 3,000 hits in a day. We realized it was kind of starting to take off. Then the next day we had 50,000 hits, so we started doing a weekly series pretty quickly.
  • Sarge: This is the M12 LRV. I like to call it the Warthog.
  • Matt Hullum: A lot of the jokes are just things that you and your buddies would say to each other while you're playing Halo.
  • Simmons: Why Warthog, sir?
  • Sarge: Because M12 LRV is too hard to say in conversation, son.
  • Matt Hullum (B-roll): Ready?
  • Gus Sorola (B-roll): Ready.
  • Matt Hullum (B-roll): Action.
  • Gus Sorola (as Simmons) (B-roll): Would electrified be okay? Would electrified be okay? Hmm, eould electrified be okay?
  • Matt Hullum (B-roll): Great!
  • Gus Sorola: Well, as you can tell, we are in the old closet for this bedroom out here. We still have the wooden bars for you hanging your clothes. "When is it going to be Simmons's turn? When?!" When I do the yelling, I hold onto the bars up here where we hang the clothes, otherwise, I get a little too excited.
  • Geoff Fink (B-roll): That's pretty good, but it sounds like you're reading from a script.
  • Gus Sorola (B-roll): Alright. I can do that.
  • Matt Hullum (B-roll): Do it a little faster.
  • Gus Sorola (as Simmons) (B-roll): Aw, come on, Grif. You're more like a shitbag than a douchebag.
  • Geoff Fink (B-roll): I'm wearing a training bra. I'm wearing a training bra.
  • Matt Hullum (B-roll): Try emphasizing "I'm".
  • Geoff Fink (B-roll): (Belch)
  • Burnie Burns: There's a really weird feature in Halo—I won't call it a bug out of respect. The position a character is normally in when playing the game, they have their gun up, they're looking around for somebody else to shoot them. And then as you lower the gun, the character looks down, but at the last minute, their head looks back up. And we can make them bob their head to talk, to show who's talking. Movement. We can have them turn to face people.
  • Church: Well, looks like Caboose has hurt himself!

Burnie Burns: This is the bug that makes it possible. You know, without this, we couldn't do it.

  • Church (B-roll): Has Caboose get his head stuck in the freezer again?
  • Burnie Burns: It's a beautiful game. I don't think there's a better-looking game for the Xbox since it's come out. No, I'd like to keep doing it basically as long as Bungie and the fans will put up with us.

Crunch[edit]

JUNE 2004
//5 MONTHS TO SHIP

  • Chris Butcher (B-roll): We're here today, we're on the 8th of June today. We're roughly halfway towards finishing the project since this went up. Four weeks from now, we'll have coded everything in the game. Another four weeks from now, we'll have put all of the pieces of content in the game. Two weeks after that, we'll have literally everything—all of the audio, all the cinematics, everything. Then there's six weeks after that where all we do is play it, and we fix any bug where we absolutely could not ship it, and then we release it.
  • Marcus Lehto: I'm still scared shitless right now, to be honest with you.
  • Adrian Perez (B-roll): The problem is... the bug I have is...
  • Adrian Perez: The problem is the gap between "good enough" and "awesome" is so big. And I mean, there's this standard set by everyone here that "good enough" sucks. Can't do "good enough."
  • Adrian Perez (B-roll): You fire the bullet and the bullet comes about maybe four or five pixels below where the crosshair says it's going to.
  • Adrian Perez: It’s a hard kind of thing to live up to, but the game's going to be better for it.
  • Joseph Staten: We're actually pretty good at slamming stuff in right at the end. As a matter of fact, I think we do some of our best work that way.
  • Curtis Creamer: We're seeing big chunks of the game being fun and playable, and so I think that's a huge corner that we've turned.
  • Steve Scott: Right now, I'm working on polishing the blood splatter decals.
  • Bill O'Brien: The Bugger evolved into this model right here. He has independent little hips, which kind of give them "buggery" movement, which is cool.
  • Jaime Griesemer: We're trying to add certain specific weak points to a Banshee, like on the anti-grav pods on the wings.
  • Marcus Lehto: We've got a huge amount of work to do in this very, very compressed time period. That's scary. These guys are—everybody here is scared.
  • Michael Wu: More time would be welcomed.
  • Marcus Lehto (B-roll): CJ doesn't need this until...
  • Nathan Walpole: If we could have some more time, that would be great, but the fans are screaming!
  • Dave Dunn: Yeah, we could use a lot more time.
  • Bill O'Brien: If you can invent a 75-hour day, you'd be my best friend.
  • Michael Wu: We're not asking to work shorter days; we're asking to work as hard as we're working right now, but just two weeks.
  • Jason Jones: It's an amazing thing to be part of—that many people want something so bad that they're willing to spend that time and that effort, seven days a week. It's tremendously hard. It's a cool thing to be part of. Halo 1 wouldn't have been what it was if we hadn't done that, and this game sure wouldn't be what it is going to be if we had worked eight hours today. And maybe that sucks 'cause we didn't plan right, and maybe there's a way to do it all on a 9-to-5 schedule, and maybe one day we'll even find that. But it's sure not the way it's going to be this time.

Audio[edit]

  • Joseph Staten: We've undertaken this really massive task. I think that we had two or three thousand lines of unique combat dialogue in Halo 1, and now we're talking more than 14,000 lines of combat dialogue. So the end result is that Marty and I—Marty more than me—are spending a bunch of time in the studio getting a lot of voices.
  • Jen Taylor (as Cortana): Let's see... fairly robust security algorithms. I could crack them, but... side-step, cover my tracks, and voila! Top-side hull schematics.
  • Joseph Staten (B-roll): See Jen, you just made like all the dorky techno-geeks... there's nothing hotter than a woman that can infiltrate top-side hull schematics.
  • Joseph Staten: What's it like working with Marty? That's a good question.
  • Martin O'Donnell: Joe? Oh well, I mean, it's the best.
  • Joseph Staten: Working with Marty is an effort in patience and restraint.
  • Martin O'Donnell: He's hilarious, he's funny, he's sharp.
  • Joseph Staten: He gets to bitch like nobody's business about how much work he has and how little time there is.
  • Martin O'Donnell: We work together really well. He's...
  • Joseph Staten: The two of us together are the most unlikely couple for a variety of reasons.
  • Martin O'Donnell: He... um... I hate him, actually. (Laugh)
  • Jen Taylor (as Cortana): Chief, whatever you're going to do, make it quick!
  • Joseph Staten (B-roll): I think Cortana might just be genuinely...
  • Martin O'Donnell: Basically all you want to do is say "Louder, faster. Now you're sad." But Joe is like, "Well, you see, back in the first centuries of spaceflight, the Covenant..."
  • Joseph Staten (B-roll): So, right, the Covenant fleet which arrived at Earth is now attacking. There's an engine core, and if we destroy the reactor that powers the core that—
  • Martin O'Donnell: Actually, I can see the actors' eyes start to glaze over. They have no idea what that means. So they'll say, "So you want it faster?" And then I'll go, "Yeah, faster." (Laugh)
  • Orlando Jones: I'd say Marty's direction is incredibly intuitive, sometimes—and I'm smiling even as I say it—I don't know what I'm going to say, but Marty does, and he's already written out exactly as I'm going to say it.
  • Orlando Jones (as Banks): "Oh, it's coming in! Sweet Lord! It's raining aliens! Oh Jesus, why you do this to me? Aliens everywhere!"
  • Martin O'Donnell: Number one, you want to have someone who "gets it." Especially if they've played the game, or if they're really good actors and they've improvised a lot.
  • Joseph Staten: That's the kind of performance we're looking for. I just don't want the actor to blow through the page and give me exactly what I want. I want the actor to go through the page, give me what I want, be inspired, and then launch off into some crazy realm.
  • Michael Wincott (as the Prophet of Truth): The moment of salvation is at hand!
  • Steve Downes (as the Master Chief): This place is falling apart!
  • Steve Downes (as the Master Chief): I need a weapon.
  • Dee Bradley Baker (as the Gravemind): This is not your grave...
  • Kevin Michael Richardson (as Tartarus): (Growl)
  • Dee Bradley Baker (as the Gravemind): ...but you are welcome in it.
  • Kevin Michael Richardson (as Tartarus): Kill the others.
  • Keith David (as the Arbiter): I have come to kill you!

Montage of voice actors screaming.

  • Tim Dadabo (as 343 Guilty Spark): Oh my, where am I being taken?
  • Voice actor 1: Hold on to your potato!
  • Michelle Rodriguez (as Female Marine #2): I'll stick my foot so far up your ass you'll be talking shit for weeks!
  • Voice actor 2: Eff you!
  • Voice actor 3: Denied!
  • Laura Prepon as (Female Marine #1): Oorah!
  • Julie Benz: I love holding these highlighters!

Montage of voice actors laughing.

  • Michael Wincott (as the Prophet of Truth): The hopes of all the Covenant rest on your shoulders, Chieftain.
  • Joseph Staten: That was really wonderful to see these actors come in who we really didn't know what was going to happen with them, and they worked really, really hard and they did a really great job.
  • Joseph Staten (B-roll): Works for us, and away we go! Weee!
  • Joseph Staten: If only Marty would work that hard, we'd be set.

Montage of musicians performing music in studio.

  • Martin O'Donnell: There's always a point, like when I'm all by myself composing—and this just happened like within the last 24 hours—where I'm thinking, "Is this anything? Is this idea going to be interesting to anybody?" You have these whole series of self-doubts, and then there comes a point where I get over the hump. Like I add some instrument or I play some melody and it's like, "Oh! Oh, okay. That's what this was meant to be."
  • Martin O'Donnell: If I'm involved in the development of the game and I actually enjoy the game and I'm talking with Joe and I'm talking with Tyson, I'm understanding emotionally what they're trying to do—then my product will be better because I'm that deeply involved in it.
  • Jason Jones: Marty's pretty amazing. Marty makes pretty much everything we do twice as good, and that makes me really angry 'cause he's just about the only individual who has that level of contribution to the team. But I would never say that to him.

Ending[edit]

  • Josteph Staten: It's really nice to see something which needed an epic effort to put it together and make it really great. So we're coming together now.
  • Frank O'Connor: We're at a stage in the game development where a lot of things that were broken or unfinished are really coming together. It certainly wiped out all my expectations. I was hoping for Halo 1.5 or 1.6, you know, and a few new features, a couple of new weapons. But just seeing how it's exploding, it's really incredible.
  • CJ Cowan: It's really great to have this deadline that we can't move at all, because it forces us to kind of finish it. When the producers come over and pry our hands from the keyboard and say, "Okay, you can't touch it anymore, we've got to start manufacturing these discs," I think that's the point where we're going to have to stop and that's going to be the end of it.
  • Michael Evans: We were like, "God damn, it's so cool to fight the Hunter! Except then this Grunt guy came over and, would it be cool like if he could jump up on the Hunter's back and do this or that?" And you're like, "Can do."
  • Paul Bertone: It feels to me like the excitement is coming back. Getting the missions together is pretty huge. It's something that people haven't seen for three years. All the designers are here, programmers are here, environment artists seem like they haven't gone home since about April anyway. So I think everybody's kept focused and I think that's something that's really important.
  • Dave Dunn: We're seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. So that's good.
  • Justin Hayward: There's glorious, bright light at the end of the tunnel.
  • Marcus Lehto: I see the light. It's this little pin-prick, but it's coming fast!
  • Lorraine McLees: I'm married to the guy who actually got to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and he says it's glorious!
  • Marcus Lehto: Every day I see something brand new that blows me away. I'm like, "Gosh, how did you guys do that?" It’s really neat stuff. It excites me, makes me do better work, makes all these other guys do better work. They're really excited about it.
  • Jaime Griesemer: Jason has this phrase that he uses for how things come together at the end, and he says that it's like assembling a cathedral out of a hurricane.
  • Shi Kai Wang: Best part of working on Halo 1 was at the end when the game is done, you come in and play the game and you know that's your work. You come in and you actually are able to test the game and I'm just telling him that I can't wait to do that. I can't wait to see all the work that we've done, put it in the game and play it. At the end of the game, it's just... it's going to be awesome.
  • Jaime Griesemer: I would describe it as barely pulling out of the dive in time to make a perfect three-point landing. And I think we're... every... if the plane holds together, we're going to land itopkay.
  • Jason Jones: I'm often amazed by the shit that we can pull off. This group of people is great.
  • Pete Parsons: It's about believing you're the best and that there's nothing that you can't overcome. It's about showing everybody else that you rule the world. And it's also about having fun. I mean, as hard as it gets, it's still the best fucking job in the world.
  • Jaime Griesemer: I'd like to think of it as jumping out of an airplane with some silkworms and a needle, and having to make your parachute on the way down. It always comes together right at the very end.
  • Joseph Staten: It's always this thing that happens at the end where all these disparate pieces come together and make this glorious game. And to a certain extent, you just have to keep your hands on the keyboard like it's a steering wheel of a race car and type really quickly as all this stuff falls into the hopper, because very quickly what's going to come out the other side is something which is really good. We're not sure yet, but it's looking like it's going to be good.

Montage of Halo 2 campaign.

  • Arbiter: There was nothing I could do.
  • Master Chief: We got a problem.
  • Arbiter: I will continue my campaign against the humans.
  • Rtas 'Vadumee: Warriors! Prepare for combat!
  • Pelican Pilot: 30 seconds out. Stand by to- Whoa.

Sources[edit]

  1. ^ YouTube - Bungie, Behind the Scenes Making of Halo 2 (Retrieved on May 1, 2012)

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