Behind the Scenes: Making of Halo 2

“

An insider's look at Bungie Studios & the building of their epic game.

”

Behind the Scenes: Making of Halo 2 is a documentary film produced by Film Oasis 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.

Transcript

Note: Unofficial section names for ease of access.

Opening

• 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."

• Prophet of Mercy: Why was it not destroyed, with the rest of their fleet?!

• Arbiter: It fled, as we set fire to their planet. But I followed with all the ships in my command.

• Prophet of Regret: When you first saw Halo, were you blinded by its majesty?

• 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

• 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!