Editing Behind the Scenes: Making of Halo 2

{{Title|''Behind the Scenes: Making of Halo 2''}}
{{Status|RealWorld}}
{{#widget:YouTube|id=0q69Msy8ttM|width=550|right}}
{{Article quote|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]]{{Ref/Site|URL=http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20041117005309&newsLang=en|Site=BusinessWire|Page=FilmOasis Creates Halo 2 Limited Collector's Edition DVD of Behind-the-Scenes Footage of the Making of Halo 2|D=15|M=10|Y=2014}} on [[Development of Halo 2|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.{{Ref/YouTube|0q69Msy8ttM|Bungie|Behind the Scenes Making of Halo 2|D=1|M=5|Y=2012}}

==Transcript==
'''''Note''': Unofficial section names for ease of access.''
===Opening===
*'''[[Joseph Staten]]:''' ''[[Halo: Combat Evolved|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 [[Halo: Combat Evolved storyboards|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:'''<br/>
'''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 [[Early Halo 2 script|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 [[UNSC Pillar of Autumn|it]] not destroyed, with the rest of [[Epsilon Eridani Fleet|their fleet]]?!

*'''[[Thel 'Vadam|Arbiter]]''': It fled, as we [[Fall of Reach|set fire]] to [[Reach|their planet]]. But I followed with [[Fleet of Particular Justice|all the ships in my command]].

*'''[[Prophet of Regret]]''': When you first saw [[Installation 04|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 Array|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 [[H2:Sacred Icon|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 [[Sentinel wall|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'''<br/>
'''//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 Green|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):''' [[Halo 2 E3 demo|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 [[M7 SMG|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 [[Jiralhanae|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 (gameplay mechanic)|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-
*'''[[Avery Johnson|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!

''[[Wikipedia:The Reason (Hoobastank song)|The Reason]] by [[Wikipedia:Hoobastank|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 [[Karo'etba-pattern Ghost|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'''<br/>
'''//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===
''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 Jarrard|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===
*'''[[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 [[BR55 battle rifle|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 [[MA5B assault rifle|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 ba