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Remaking the Legend

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Remaking the Legend - Halo 2: Anniversary is a documentary from 343 Industries on the development of Halo 2: Anniversary. [1] The documentary was announced on October 18, 2014 on YouTube and released on October 31, 2014.[2] The documentary was available for free download on the Xbox Video Store and is included as an extra on the Halo: The Complete Video Collection Blu-ray from Shout Factory.[3]

The documentary was preceded by two trailers: a teaser and an official trailer both released in the buildup to the documentary's release.

Transcript[edit]

Opening[edit]

343 INDUSTRIES PRESENT

  • Dan Ayoub: They created something spectacular.
  • Tina Summerford: You got so emotional about it.
  • William "Chip" Beaman: Oh my god, this is the holy grail.
  • Larry Hryb: It was a watershed moment for the industry. It all of a sudden just took everything you knew and mixed it all up.

A DOCUMENTARY FILM

  • News clip (archival): Video gamers across the country are anxiously awaiting the midnight release of a game called Halo 2.
  • Dan Ayoub (archival): November marks the 10-year anniversary of Halo 2. And I am excited to tell you that Halo 2 is getting the full anniversary treatment.
  • Lennie Moore: The puzzle becomes: how do you honor the material? How do you keep it fresh and interesting for a new generation?
  • Larry Hryb: Halo is about this incredibly powerful hero, Master Chief, and his AI sidekick Cortana, and their journey to save the Earth.
  • Greg Hermann: We've always been very, very concerned with maintaining that gameplay to just feel authentic.
  • Kevin Pereira: Duh-duh-duh-duuh. Duh-duh-duh-duuh. The moment that kicks in, you're like, "Yes, let's go!"
  • Brian Fieser: We decided to go out and capture new source material this time around.
  • David Mertz: It's just an absolute home run. It's probably some of the best fun I've ever had in Halo, and that's a pretty major statement.
  • Dan Ayoub: At the end of the day, everybody has one thing in common, and that is a love for what we're doing and a passion to make this the best it can be.

REMAKING THE LEGEND
HALO 2: ANNIVERSARY

Ancient, Epic, & Mysterious[edit]

ANCIENT, EPIC, & MYSTERIOUS
HALO COMBAT EVOLVED & HALO 2

  • Joseph Staten: So when I joined Bungie in 1998, I got hired to work on the Myth II team. As I was working on Myth II in one room. there was this other room with a smaller number of guys in it working on something else—which at the time was called "Blam," this totally top-secret codename game. But at first, it was a lot like Myth; it was an RTS. But it slowly evolved over time into a third-person game that was on the Mac and PC, and then it became a first-person game that all of a sudden—bam—was on the console when we got bought by Microsoft. But Halo went through lots of different permutations along the road before the first version came out.
  • Max Hoberman: When we were working on Halo, it was actually the first time that we were developing a game first on Windows. And people don't know that because Steve Jobs got up at MacWorld and showed off Halo for the first time and said, "And it's being developed first for the Mac." It actually wasn't true. We had to scramble to do a Mac port of the game at the last minute before that MacWorld conference.
  • Steve Jobs (archival): And this is the first time anybody has ever seen it; it's the first time they've debuted it.
  • Martin O'Donnell: I remember Joe Staten, our writer, came to me and said, "Yeah Marty, we need something. We're doing it on Tuesday." This is Friday, so I'm like, "Oh my gosh." So I said, "Okay, so it's just gonna be music. I'm gonna give you a CD. Somebody hits play on the CD. Jason is gonna go up on stage and hit the space bar on the scripted demo, and we're just gonna cross our fingers and hope that all this stuff comes together." I asked Joe, "Alright, what's the emotional tone? What's the story we're trying to tell?" He goes, "I don't know, but it needs to be ancient, epic, and mysterious." I'm like, "Okay, okay. Ancient, epic, mysterious." So I called up my partner Mike, and I said, "Mike, I'm going to come over. We need to figure out a way to do music. We're going to record on Monday with an orchestra and some singers, but I don't know what we're recording yet." So this is, I believe, a Saturday, and we're recording on Monday. So on the way to his house and driving over, I'm like, "Okay, ancient, epic, mysterious. Well, ancient... Gregorian chant. Monks singing." So I made up a melody while I was in the car. [Hums the Halo theme]. No... Yeah! I came up with a whole melody in about the half hour it took me to drive to Mike's house. I walk in and I said, "Mike, okay, we're going to do like a big epic orchestra, but we're going to start with monks singing and we're gonna end with monks singing. And that'll give us this nice epic, ancient feel." And Mike's like, "Yeah, cool."
  • Michael Salvatori: He's like, "Mike, I got this idea and we got to be done with it by Tuesday." And I was like... It was just another thing to me. It was just another thing to do. And I'm like, "Yeah, okay. We'll do it. Okay. And what is this thing about monks? Really? Okay, cool."
  • Joseph Staten: Jason got up and pressed the button to start it. If you watch the video very closely, you can watch Jason take a massive inhale of breath right before he hits "Okay," because there was one bug that would have just really been bad if it happened at that moment. So it was a heart-wrenching, exciting time for everybody. But literally, that was the first time we'd shown it to anybody. It was on stage at the Javits in New York, this huge public forum.
  • Joseph Staten: This was a time where big, expansive environments weren't seen too often, certainly in the shooter space, which had been very corridor-focused for a long time. If you remember the demo, it started off indoors—pretty typical—but right in the middle of the demo, we took you outside. In that moment of transition, the camera panned up to show you the sun and the vista, and I think at that point everybody who was watching and afterwards realized, "Wait, this is a step-change in what we expect from a typical shooter." And in short order, we were out in Redmond getting it up and running on what was to become the Xbox.
  • Bill Gates (archival): Let me now unveil... Xbox.
  • Phil Spencer: If you thought about gaming on consoles back then, there had been some big hits in the first-person shooter space with things like GoldenEye and Perfect Dark, but there wasn't a long track record of shooters being a healthy genre and a big genre on console.
  • Ted Price: Halo got it right. Halo figured out how to make the controls, how to make the balance work for first-person shooters. And I specifically remember back then people saying, "This will never work. You cannot put a decent first-person shooter on a console."
  • Phil Spencer: So when we're looking at forecasts, and how the marketing team and the sales team thought games would sell, Halo was somewhere down on the list. It was pretty bleak, and people weren't sure it was going to make it. Frame rate was bad. "Shooters—are they really going to work on console?" But it definitely became the hallmark of the original Xbox.
  • Bonnie Ross: Not only did it bring the FPS to the console, it brought story in an FPS, which I think is a huge, important part of Halo.
  • Larry Hryb: Halo is about this incredibly powerful hero, Master Chief, and his AI sidekick Cortana, and their journey to save the Earth. I mean, that's it. I mean certainly, there's a lot of battles along the way and there's a lot of drama with the Covenant, but that story takes twists and turns, but your goal is to save the Earth.
  • Kevin Pereira: Being the standout launch title for the Xbox, Halo single-handedly put that piece of hardware into millions and millions of homes.
  • Isaac Christian: When the Xbox first released, it went to my neighbor's house. I didn't get one; my neighbor got one for Christmas. And then he got Halo, and I spent the next six days, I think, just at his house the entire time. We just kept playing Halo, and that's all we were doing. And then eventually, I ended up buying an Xbox just so we could play Halo.
  • Eric "Ghost" Heweitt: I played Halo at my friend's house and instantly loved it. I mean, we were throwing plasma grenades at each other for probably three hours. And after that, I immediately went home to my twin brother and said, "Alright, we got to pool our money and get an Xbox."
  • Ted Price: Everybody back then knew what Halo was, and as a result, a lot more people who probably weren't hardcore gamers at the time began to dive in and made the decision to buy an Xbox.
  • Commercial (archival): When it seems like all is lost... when it feels as if you have no hope...
  • Phil Spencer: I don't think Xbox survives if Halo wasn't there. If you looked at the other launch games that we had—Project Gotham was a nice game—there were a lot of games that proved that we could actually ship games on a gaming console, and Microsoft kind of had no business in doing that. It was our first time trying to do that. But Halo was the thing that I think made people look, and that gave us credibility in creating a console. We didn't sell a lot of the original Xbox if you go back to the sales figures, but we sold a lot of Halo.
  • Joseph Staten: When we shipped Halo 1, we had doubt about whether the game was going to be successful, but we also didn't know if the Xbox was going to be successful, frankly. But we really didn't spend too much time thinking about what we would do next, because the odds were stacked against us. Of course, when it hit and hit big, well, that's when we had to scramble. Our early plans for Halo 2, to be completely honest, were pretty disorganized. But what everybody felt very intensely was: we have a hit. We can't just ship another game like that; it has to be bigger and better. It has to have more features, more weapons. We knew that our ambition had to be greater, but frankly, we had no idea how to fill those shoes. So we struggled for a long time. Once we figured out in general—great, we're really going to go after the "virtual couch," we're really going to go after matchmaking and a party system—that team went heads down and ran. "Okay, we're going to try to tell a more complicated, hopefully intriguing narrative where the Covenant is a playable character. Okay, story team go." And for a while, each team was off in the wilderness figuring out, "Well, how the hell are we going to do all this stuff?"
  • Jason Jones (archival): 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, you have to ship a game, but certainly, you can go too far.
  • Max Hoberman: Even though I was on the project and sitting in the trenches with the other guys, I kind of had blinders on. You know, what I knew about the campaign was... they probably cut at least a third of the total game, maybe as much as half, I don't honestly know. And that's why Halo 2 ended up with such a jarring ending.
  • Joseph Staten: One of the things I thought about really early on was, imagine that there was a Covenant commander who was in charge of events in the first Halo game. How would he have felt when he fell flat on his face, when he completely failed? What if you were that guy who got your ass handed to you by the Master Chief? What would your bosses think of you? And that's really the genesis of the Arbiter. I had the—well, either good or bad idea, depending on how you look at it—to suggest: What if you actually played as this guy? Would that be pretty cool if you could put yourself in his horseshoe boots and walk around with his mandible jaws and talk to other Covenant and really get the other side of the story?
  • Larry Hryb: When they switch the story around and you're playing as the Arbiter, you're like, "Whoa." It all of a sudden just took everything you knew and mixed it all up. It was an interesting way to innovate on interactive storytelling.
  • Joseph Staten: Ultimately, that turned out to be a lot more work and made us make some hard choices at the end. We were going to go to Earth, go into the Prophet of Truth's ship, rescue Cortana, do battle with the Gravemind, and button everything up. It was extremely challenging to wrap all those different ambitious angles into one nice, smooth, polished product. And especially at the end for the campaign, it just... there wasn't enough runway to land what we really wanted to land.
  • Martin O'Donnell: So it was not until 2002, a good probably six months after we had finished the music, I finally was called into a meeting room at Microsoft. And sitting around the table with all these guys, there was one guy in the room who had dreadlocks and a white beret and a white suit. His name is Nile Rodgers. I think he was working with Maroon 5 in New York, and they wouldn't stay in the studio with him. They kept taking breaks, and he found out they were taking breaks and wasting time playing Halo,