Halo: Combat Evolved developer commentary

The developer commentary for Halo: Combat Evolved is a commentary track that can be enabled in the "Halo - Halo 2 Cinematics" menu on the Halo 3 Legendary Edition bonus DVD. It plays over the cinematics and gameplay scenes, with commentary from Bungie staff:

• Project Lead Jason Jones;
• Writer, Director of Cinematics Joseph Staten; and
• Composer, Audio Director Martin O'Donnell.

Transcript

The Pillar of Autumn

Main article: CE:The Pillar of Autumn

• Martin O'Donnell: Well, hello everybody out there in fan land. I'm Marty O'Donnell. I'm the audio director and composer for Bungie Studios. And joining me today in these developer commentaries on this evening is Joe Staten, the director of cinematics, and Jason Jones, the fearless leader of Bungie Studios. Welcome, guys. Let the fans know what your voices sound like.

• Jason Jones: Hi, Marty.

• Joseph Staten: Jason has a deep, rich, manly voice.

• Martin O'Donnell: Yes.

• Joseph Staten: Wow, do you know what?

• Martin O'Donnell: There it is. Opening scene. What do you think?

• Joseph Staten: Well, since it's been a while since I've seen this, the really funny part about all this stuff with the Pillar of Autumn in all of these shots...

• Jason Jones: ...is that Paul Russel built it in like four minutes.

• Joseph Staten: Other than that... is that the Pillar of Autumn never moves. Uh, in this cinematic and other cinematics, it's just a piece of BSP geometry that the camera always moves around.

• Joseph Staten: So, to simulate movement—

• Jason Jones: Oh my god, it's Captain Keyes.

• Joseph Staten: ...we had to do some crazy stuff.

• Martin O'Donnell: He's got at least 12 polygons.

• Joseph Staten: Now, just...

• Martin O'Donnell: Go ahead.

• Joseph Staten: ...from a behind-the-scenes point of view, the really interesting thing about Halo 1 cinematics is that probably at least 60% of all the movement of the characters is either done through AI behaviors or through "playbacks." And playbacks are just someone possessing the character and running him around the space and recording what he does—the player input—and then playing that back again. So, Keyes moving around... um, that's just a playback animation with a bunch of custom animations fired off in script, right?

• Martin O'Donnell: Right. Like this—the pipe, which you had a lot of trouble with the pipe. And I remember you having a lot of trouble with handshaking and other things like that.

• Jason Jones: What was Keyes doing just there?

• Joseph Staten: He was packing his tobacco. What do you think he was doing?

• Jason Jones: His eyes closed suggestively.

• Martin O'Donnell: You know what I love about these guys though, the crewmen, is that—

• Jason Jones: ...they all have Matt Segur's face.

• Martin O'Donnell: They all are Matt Segur. Matt Segur, who was the sound programmer on Halo 1, and my good, good, good friend.

• Joseph Staten: Now, here is a scene—one of many scenes that we'll get to—where Jason and I wrestled about exactly how much stuff we could put, 'cause you can see a couple little frame rate pitches in here when I'm spawning Warthogs and putting in Pelicans. And Jason was a stern master... a stern master with the number of things I could throw in the scene, but then I always threw in a couple more.

• Jason Jones: I don't remember any of that. I don't remember ever being a stern master.

• Martin O'Donnell: You know what I just realized?

• Jason Jones: Does this Warthog... still crash when it goes off frame?

• Martin O'Donnell: Okay, listen to it. It's going to crash as it goes off-screen.

• Joseph Staten: This is not a—no, I think it's the one that comes after this one. And again, all these guys are just running—they're either running AI or playbacks to make these animations happen.

• Martin O'Donnell: Hey, Jason, explain to me why human beings would make a jeep that big. I mean, look how big that is compared to Sergeant Johnson.

• Jason Jones: 'Cause it looks awesome.

• Martin O'Donnell: He looks like a four-year-old when he's trying to drive it.

• Joseph Staten: And I think it's Sergeant Johnson goes through these lines here written by the unforgettable Matt Soell. I think this was the moment where—wait, wait for the crash.

• Martin O'Donnell: Here it goes. It's going to go behind.

• Joseph Staten: Oh, looks like somebody fixed that bug, Marty O'Donnell.

• Martin O'Donnell: You know what? We did do that.

• Joseph Staten: This was the moment we all realized that Sergeant Johnson was going to...

• Martin O'Donnell: Here it is, this is the one that's going to crash. Listen for it.

• Joseph Staten: No, they fixed it. They fixed it.

• Martin O'Donnell: I shouldn't have fixed it. In the game, you hear it crash.

• Martin O'Donnell: Here's what I'm thinking about this whole director's commentary thing... Whatever this is called—developers' commentary.

• Joseph Staten: Designer commentary.

• Martin O'Donnell: Designer commentary. It reminds me of the famous Jaime Griesemer quote about "30 seconds of fun."

• Joseph Staten: Yeah.

• Martin O'Donnell: I think if anybody who sits through the two and a half hours, they'll probably have about 30 seconds of fun.

• Joseph Staten: ...if we're lucky.

• Martin O'Donnell: Okay, Jason.

• Jason Jones: I'll take it from here.

• Martin O'Donnell: Yeah. You're on.

• Jason Jones: I'll carry us through the next two hours.

• Joseph Staten: Look at that sync, Marty. That's good foley sync. Remember how hard we had to work to make that happen?

• Martin O'Donnell: Only in Normal is it in sync. I think it's out of sync in every other version.

• Joseph Staten: Wow. I guess we just skipped all the way to this cutscene.

• Martin O'Donnell: Oh, here we go. He's going to shake hands. Let's... look. Yeah. How hard did you work on that?

• Joseph Staten: Let me just say that those animations were not authored together. They were authored separately. So getting them to actually shake involved slightly nudging their spawning points closer and closer until it actually worked.

• Martin O'Donnell: And of course, the lovely Jen Taylor as Cortana, who we just couldn't live without. Captain Keyes is played by Pete Stacker, who's also Sergeant Stacker. He's a dual role. Steve Downes...

• Jason Jones: Oh, that looked like it hurt.

• Martin O'Donnell: Steve Downes is Master Chief. But crewman... You know who that crewman was, right?

• Joseph Staten: Did you see me just blow through like six Dutch angles there? That was awesome stuff.

• Joseph Staten: Ah, where did the pipe come from? There you go. That's the question of the day. But if you look from this point on, I believe Keyes mouth is permanently sort of turned down in the lower right corner from his bite.

• Joseph Staten: And who kept shooting Cortana from the back? That's just not right.

• Martin O'Donnell: That's why we have so many little boy fans.

• Joseph Staten: Hey, do you remember the bug where because she was transparent and the display was transparent and we went 'round? I think that was one of the last bugs we fixed on these cinematics was getting her to "sort" properly.

• Jason Jones: Oh, really? No, I don't remember anything about Halo 1. Did I work on this game?

• Joseph Staten: I think.

• Martin O'Donnell: (imitating Captain Keyes) "Earth." Oh, sorry. He delivered that so well, though. Come on. Captain Keyes also said the best line in Oni. Joe?

• Joseph Staten: "Dead, keep moving." Well, the great thing about sort of Bungie games is that we have this really cool stable of actors, right, that stick around from game to game.

• Jason Jones: All two of them.

• Martin O'Donnell: All two of them. You got to get rid of the guy that plays the Grunt, though. He's a hack. I mean, in Halo, we really didn't have that many more characters that... you had Keyes, Cortana, and the Chief and Spark, but the cast was so much... I mean, even Sergeant Johnson wasn't called Sergeant Johnson. He was just called Sniper Sergeant. But yeah, I mean, I think that that alone just made everything a little bit more simple. And you know what? Honestly, we just weren't too worried in Halo 1 about tying up loose ends.

• Jason Jones: Oh, yeah. The chapter titles were pretty—some of them were pretty good.

• Joseph Staten: Mhm.

• Jason Jones: "Shut up and get behind me..."

• Joseph Staten: "... Sir."

• Jason Jones: "...Sir."

• Joseph Staten: I think we'll see that one in a little bit.

• Martin O'Donnell: Oh gosh, we're all the way through the Pillar of Autumn already.

• Jason Jones: We're skipping all the good parts.

• Joseph Staten: Great animation by, uh, Mr. Steve Abeyta or maybe Stephan Okasaki. I can't remember which. But this is one of the few scenes where we actually had a ton of custom animation because, you know, I couldn't walk the Master Chief around in a life pod or do AI. So yeah, the Pillar of Autumn is not moving at all. Everything else is moving.

• Martin O'Donnell: Oh, and here's the famous... so I don't know how many people know this.

• Joseph Staten: Yeah. Oh, wait. This is the... this is my worst, my most... The bug that will always make my eyes bleed. If you look in the lower left-hand corner, I think you can see the edge of the matte in this next shot, where Halo's coming up and you can see a little bit of... Wait for it. Okay. Autumn, not moving.

• Martin O'Donnell: Yes. Gotcha. Oh, it looks like it's moving.

• Jason Jones: Clever camera work, Jay. Oh, wow.

• Martin O'Donnell: And actually, Brian Morden, the guy who visited us from a Make-a-Wish program, did that line: "The Autumn, she's been hit—"

• Joseph Staten: Yeah. Ah. There was the edge of the matte.

• Martin O'Donnell: Really? I still missed it.

• Joseph Staten: Am I remembering correctly that this was your favorite cinematic from Halo 1? I think... was it?

• Jason Jones: That was brilliant. I'm crying right now.

• Martin O'Donnell: Jason is crying. I can attest.

Halo

Main article: CE:Halo

• Martin O'Donnell: By the way, who's the voice of the, uh, drop ship pilot at this moment?

• Joseph Staten: Is it Jay's wife?

• Martin O'Donnell: No. Who is it?

• Joseph Staten: I forget. Who is that?

• Martin O'Donnell: That's Jen Taylor.

• Joseph Staten: Is that Jen Taylor?

• Martin O'Donnell: That's—we put a Cortana line and a Jen Taylor line right next to each other and you didn't even know.

• Joseph Staten: Interesting.

• Martin O'Donnell: Brilliant. She's a brilliant actress.

• Joseph Staten: Mhm. Now, that little snippet there of the inside the life pod thing—again, that was a playback recording, which is me sort of standing in the life pod as it's actually going in, and recording both the movement of the pod and the camera. And that gets used a bunch of different times in Halo 1 cinematics, because Halo 1 cinematics were filthy, cheap-built, duct-tape-and-bailing-wire—

• Jason Jones: ...awesomeness.

• Joseph Staten: ...cinematics.

• Martin O'Donnell: That's Bernie's bloom, right?

• Joseph Staten: Bernie's little rays-of-Buddha action.

• Joseph Staten: Rays-of-Buddha.

• Jason Jones: Halo 1 was awesome.

• Martin O'Donnell: It is!

• Joseph Staten: When we have the long gameplay sections, you got to start saying something.

• Jason Jones: Next time he shoots a Grunt, I'll start talking.

• Joseph Staten: You know, clearly Marty was filming the gameplay sequences, because they are—

• Martin O'Donnell: Oh, see, I knew this was going to come up.

• Joseph Staten: ...they are plodding but very, very helpful.

• Martin O'Donnell: They're helpful. I didn't want it to look like someone actually playing the game, but someone sort of filming the game.

• Joseph Staten: So, I can't help but notice there are a lot of waypoints. Jones, what's up with all the waypoints in Halo 1?

• Jason Jones: I had nothing to do with them. I deny everything.

• Martin O'Donnell: Oh, on cue... AI.

• Joseph Staten: Combat highway.

• Jason Jones: That's my favorite piece of AI.

• Martin O'Donnell: Unbelievable. Now, here's my favorite line in the game.

• Joseph Staten: I don't know if they show it.

• Martin O'Donnell: Yeah, we show it. Here it comes.

• Jason Jones: It's not? It's not a natural formation?

• Joseph Staten: I don't believe it.

• Martin O'Donnell: No duh. Wait a minute. It looked like a natural cave to me.

• Joseph Staten: You remember how mad you were at me before the GameStock demo that we made where the Master Chief was flying around, um, uh, Silent Cartographer, and we had the basics of the AI combat dialogue system in and one of the few things the Marines did was raise their arm and say "Woohoo!" when they went over rocks?

• Jason Jones: Uh-huh.

• Joseph Staten: And I went back in the studio and re-recorded them because they didn't sound like "Woohoo!" enough. And the Marines sounded really "Woohoo!" And you started playing the game... man, you were mad as a hooty owl when you heard that new Marine dialogue.

• Jason Jones: Wow. I seriously don't remember anything.

• Joseph Staten: Did you hit Jason over the head, Marty? He seems to...

• Martin O'Donnell: Yes. Jason has been in India.

• Joseph Staten: He seems to have collective memory loss.

• Martin O'Donnell: He is just so mellow now.

• Jason J