Remaking the Legend

Remaking the Legend - Halo 2: Anniversary is a documentary from 343 Industries on the development of Halo 2: Anniversary. The documentary was announced on October 18, 2014 on YouTube and released on October 31, 2014. 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.

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

Transcript

Opening

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.

• Keith David (as the Arbiter): My friend's trust is not the issue today, Spartan Locke.

• 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

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.

• Joseph Staten (archival): The year is 2552. After a long fight, our colonial defense has failed and the Covenant have made their way to Earth.

• 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, this new game. And they said, "Yeah, Nile, you got to see this game, it's so cool." And Nile looks at them playing and he goes, "Yeah, but what's that music?" He was the first guy who said, "I want to have a company that releases game soundtracks," and he wanted Halo to be the first one.

• Kevin Pereira: I remember loving that soundtrack so much that I bought the soundtrack to a video game. Who does that? Nobody does that. Nobody goes like, "Oh, I want to hear the MIDI music from old PC games." No! But Halo was so iconic that you could release a soundtrack and I would buy it, and I would listen to it in my car... while not getting laid, ever. I love that song. Duh-duh-duh-duuh. Duh-duh-duh-duuh. The moment that kicks in, you're like, "Yes, let's go!"

• Graeme Boyd: You know, that score is just—you hear that and just immediately you're there. You're in Master Chief's helmet and you're living it.

• Tommy Tallarico: It immersed you, and you felt like you were put in this world, and that's why there's such an emotional connection. That music became your music.

• Eric "Ghost" Heweitt: I believe it's something like... [Singing the theme]

• Malukah de los Santos: [Singing the theme]

• Kevin Pereira: [Singing the theme] No, that's not it.

• Burnie Burns: [Singing the theme] Oh, but then the Halo 2 one's got the rock at the end like... [imitates guitar]. Yeah, that's... I was dating a girl at the time and whenever she heard the Halo theme, I could hear every door in my house slam, because she knew I was gonna be playing Halo for four hours.

• Martin O'Donnell: As good as I liked Halo 1's soundtrack, he came back after the success of Halo 1 and he said, "Marty, for Halo 2, I can get you anybody you want. I'll get you Steve Vai, Jeff Beck, I can get you P!NK." P!NK? What? Well, I hadn't really thought about guitar per se and yet.... but Steve Vai or Jeff Beck? Sure! Are you kidding? There's one other guitar player who was a huge fan of Halo and went outside of his agent, he went outside of everybody else. We didn't even bring it through Microsoft; I never got a contractual written permission to work with him. And that's John Mayer. John Mayer plays guitar on two very distinct pieces in Halo, and you hear it on the soundtrack, but I never revealed that it was him because he didn't want his agent to yell at him. He just wanted to be able to tell his friends, "Yeah, that's me playing on Halo 2."

• Frank O'Connor: Halo is one of the few games where we still have people playing the 10-year-old game. And Halo was, I think, really special, especially in the United States, as far as how it introduced a lot of people to multiplayer gaming. With the first Halo, it was a very social experience—physically carrying your Xbox to someone's house, carrying TVs—heavy CRT TVs back in the day.

• Kevin Pereira: Pre-Halo and Halo 2, you had to make do with what you had. It was like, "Okay, we've got these modems which are tin cans and strings, now we need to connect them to somehow communicate with each other and then play this game against each other. Now we need a way to talk to each other to set up the playdate, so that we can murder each other." And it was all these disparate technologies and forums and modems and drivers and operating systems. It was a delicate nerd dance. You would have to do a 25-minute geek ballet just to get a game synced up to be able to play with someone else. Then when Halo 2 came along, it was really as easy as pushing a button, seeing your friends, and saying, "Okay, I'm going to shoot you now."

• Frank O'Connor: With Halo 2, it changed radically, because we were able to put people together without having them in the same room. We used Xbox LIVE, obviously.

• Commercial (archival): Introducing the next arena. Butt-kicking just went global. Xbox LIVE is here.

• Frank O'Connor: Max Hoberman, who designed a lot of those systems, had a really simple philosophy, which was to try and recreate the fun aspects of being together in that basement with those TVs, but do it online. And I think that's one of the reasons why it was so successful, because it kept the social, cultural aspect of that connection, and didn't really make it all about technology. It made it all about fun and connecting, and just sort of being around your friends.

• Larry Hryb: I was in a meeting and they were explaining it to me and I was like, "Wait a minute, what? You're gonna do what? You're gonna have people on a virtual couch, where we don't need to be with each other? Wow." I said, "That sounds cool." And then, of course, it came out and it was cool.

• Tina Summerford: It just felt great to kill people around the world in a video game. Kegitimately. I mean, you were used to doing it on your couch. Now we saay, "When I played games, if I can't kill something, I don't really have a desire to play it." That's just the way I am, I just love FPSs. It comes down to the last kill and you get this voice like "Double Kill!" "Killing Spree!" You got so emotional about it. You strove to get those small moments of awesomeness.

• Andy "Bravo" Dudynsky: Not only was it a way to kind of hang out with your friends, whether in person or online, but it was also a legitimate form of competition. If you're in school, there's a question of "What level is that guy in Halo 2? How good is he?"

• Tina Summerford: It was fun. At the end of the day, it was entertaining. It was just so fun.

• Phil Spencer: The history is between Halo and Xbox LIVE. I don't think you can really separate the two. Even today in terms of the stuff that we're trying to do with Halo 5 and innovating on Xbox LIVE, there's a long history there. But we all knew that when Halo finally came to Xbox LIVE, that would be the time that would define the success or failure of Xbox LIVE.

• Frank O'Connor: think if you're a game player who hasn't tried Halo and you're playing things like Battlefield and Call of Duty, there are a lot of things that you take for granted. When you start up a game, you'll go on a matchmaking playlist. You'll be matched with players of the same skill and the same interests—obviously, they want to play the same game mode as you do. There's an even number of players that are evenly matched, so that each game is fun, each game is close, and each game is exciting. So when you finish a game, you either won or you lost, but not by a huge margin, which made it fun, made it challenging. I got to give credit to Max for that; that was his baby, and that's probably his biggest impact on the industry today—he's kind of changed the way that we play console games online.

• News clip (archival): In a few hours, one of the most eagerly awaited video games finally goes on sale.
• News clip (archival): It is preparing to rewrite retail history.
• News clip (archival): The video game is expected to have bigger first-day revenues than any movie has ever had an opening day at the box office.
• News clip (archival): Biggest retail launch in entertainment history.
• Jimmy Kimmel (archival): Dozens of grown men—and probably about three women—have crawled out of their parents' basements tonight to be first in line to buy the new video game Halo 2.
• Marc Brown (archival): Video gamers across the country are anxiously awaiting the midnight release of a game called Halo 2.
• News clip (archival): Thirty-five minutes and counting for Halo 2 to go on sale.
• News clip (archival): The line right now is probably about 100 yards long.
• News clip (archival): It is the most anticipated game in entertainment history.
• News clip (archival): Well, if you're an Xbox gamer, there's a good chance you're pretty tired right now.
• News clip (archival): Halo 2 sold 2.4 million units in 24 hours.
• Jon Stewart (archival): Now, I understand there's a few more states to put in the red and blue columns; we're going to go back to the map and Rob Corddry. Rob, looking at the...
• Rob Corddry (archival): Yeah, yeah? Suck it! Where's your alien plasma rifle now, bitch?
• Jon Stewart (archival): Rob! Rob! Are you playing Halo?
• Rob Corddry (archival): ...No!

• Phil Spencer: The anticipation around that... Halo 2 is gonna land. That was just a kind of magical moment.

• Dan Ayoub: Bungie created something spectacular, right? And I mean, I think that the game Bungie created is why 343 exists today and why many of the fans are here. So 343 was created to kind of take that universe and carry it forward.

• Kiki Wolfkill: There was never any question as to whether we should do a Halo 2: Anniversary in terms of—I think we all kind of had that very romantic notion of going back to Halo 2.

• Frank O'Connor: Halo 2 for a lot of people is that sort of perfect snapshot in time, the perfect moment. So there was always a really rousing demand for it. This is the tenth anniversary; this is the right time to do it.

• Bonnie Ross (archival): This is about Master Chief's journey, his past and his future, questioning authority and searching for the truth.

• Phil Spencer (archival): The Halo franchise is the reason Xbox is here today.

• Dan Ayoub (archival): Now as many of you know, 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.

• Dan Ayoub (archival): Halo 2's multiplayer was special for a lot of reasons, and Halo 2: Anniversary will contain the original Halo 2 multiplayer exactly as it shipped 10 years ago.

• Bonnie Ross: When we were thinking about anything for the anniversary, the game has to be exactly the same. Some of the things that people loved about Halo 2 were the glitches, and those were all in. So for us, it's: "How do you keep the gameplay the same but raise the graphical fidelity?" And then: "How do you just have new ways to play the whole game?" It's the same game, but new ways to play that game. So I think kind of mixing that new with that old is hopefully something that will be refreshing to new and old fans.

Keeping Nostalgia Alive

KEEPING NOSTALGIA ALIVE
_CAMPAIGN

• Dennis Ries: So for Halo 2: Anniversary, Saber is really focusing on the campaign, on remastering all the graphics and making everything look wonderful on the Xbox One. They're also—because they're so tech-savvy—really helping to push the resolution as high as possible and hit that 60 frames per second mark that we're stretching to hit.

• Andrey Iones: Doing an HD remake to those older Halo 1 and Halo 2 games makes a lot of sense, because those games stand the test of time. The storytelling component of those games is great, the gameplay experience is great, so it makes a lot of sense to bring it to the new hardware.

• Matt Karch: People remember Halo 2 as a beautiful-looking game, and so our objective really is to let people feel that the game they're playing now is the exact experience that they played 10 years ago. Only when they switch back will they realize the tricks their mind was playing on them, because of the lapse of 10 years of time.

• Greg Hermann: There's something that's just so instinctual about how that game feels and plays to you that I don't think it's something that you can identify directly. So we've always been very, very concerned with maintaining that gameplay to just feel authentic. That authenticity is something we didn't want to lose, and something we know that it's very easy to just miss.

• Matt Karch: That back-and-forth switch was something that came about primarily because Dan Ayoub and I were going back and forth during the original Halo about how we really wanted to maintain that gameplay, and we really wanted to show people, "Look, look what we've done, right?" And so now it just works. It works seamlessly and you can just see it yourself in the game; it's very cool.

• Dennis Ries: In addition, you know, just like we did with Halo 1 Anniversary, we want to add different elements. Different things that the fans can relive how the game played, and keep that same nostalgic experience alive, but we want to add different elements to it so they can change it up too. So Skulls is what we do in the Halo franchise, and these are things that are hidden throughout the levels. Once you find the skull, you can turn it on and change the gameplay. Some of those might mean, "Oh, if you turn the Grunt Birthday Party skull on, anytime you headshot a Grunt, sound of the laughter of children and confetti comes out of the Grunt." Things like that are added all throughout the game, and Saber is handling all that work. They've been a huge asset to us and they're really remastering the game, making it look great.

What's Better than a Mongoose?

WHAT'S BETTER THAN A MONGOOSE
_MULTIPLAYER

• Dan Ayoub: When we started Halo 2 and we got greenlit, we had the conversation with Bonnie and Phil, all that stuff. They're like, "Yeah, we want to do this." My first call was to Max Hoberman. I walked out of that meeting room with Bonnie, walked to my desk, and called Max and said, "Max, this is happening. We're doing it."

• Max Hoberman: Had some talks with Dan Ayoub at Microsoft, and he threw out the idea of doing a Halo 2: Anniversary, to which I was like, "Yeah, awesome, that'd be fun!" So I was super excited. But even committing to doing six maps for Halo 2: Anniversary was a huge commitment, and it really sort of put a lot of pressure on the team. I think if you just asked our producers, the safe bet was four. We got started on that—super exicted—and immediately we had some very difficult discussions. "Alright, we only get six maps. Which ones are we gonna make?"

• David Mertz: We needed to take it down from 23 or 25 down to 12. Now we had to take it down to six. There were a lot of really tough discussions. Eventually, the decision was: let's have two small, two medium, and two large.

• Max Hoberman: Turned out some of the really small maps were some of the best maps. Maps like Lockout—top of the list, right? Where it's just kind of a no-brainer. That was really easy.

• Dennis Ries: Every single map seemed to outdo itself. Ascension is incredible to me. One of the best skyboxes I think I've ever seen in any Halo map. You can go up and just stand on the edge and sort of look out this Halo ring and just see all this movement out there; it just feels so lifelike. I've actually just jumped off the edge, and to my death. It felt like I was falling. It's really cool, so the maps are really coming to life.

• Max Hoberman: On Ascension, adding that bubble shield in the middle is very deliberate, because we want more variety than the map just turning into a sniper fest. That shield adds that variety; it gives you moments where close-range combat matters, and you have some more cover and some more protection, that sort of thing. But how do you do that in a way that doesn't fundamentally break what works, and doesn't make it so it isn't any fun for snipers pn the map, for instance? I think we hit the nail on the head with that one.

• Frank O'Connor: There's more dynamic elements in maps; there are more interactive elements. You're able to change the way the flow and the nature of the map works. There's certain things you can shoot, for example, that will close gates or change the paths through the level, and those things are going to add a fair amount of variety to the experience.

• David Mertz (archival): So what you guys are seeing here is a piece of concept from a map we haven't announced yet. Any ideas what map? That's right guys, Coag is back!

• Max Hoberman: We showed off what turned out to be almost everybody's favorite announcement, which was the Gungoose. That was kind of fun. We knew we'd have a good reception, but we didn't anticipate quite how positive the reception would be.

• David Mertz (archival): What's better than a Mongoose? A Mongoose with guns.

• 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, because I've had a lot of fun with Halo.

• Dennis Ries: The art treatment and everything that Max and his team at Certain Affinity have been doing has really been true to the original, just keeping it updated and adding cool new features and awesome skyboxes. They knew it was great when it launched ten years, so they didn't want to change it.

Clack, Clack, Clack, Clack

CLACK, CLACK, CLACK, CLACK
_{SOUND EFFECTS}

• Brian Fieser: There's generally a lot of work involved with an anniversary edition. There's a lot of people who are attached to the sound of Halo, myself included. I really like the sounds that they did in the original, but I feel like they can be touched up and modernized and brought into a higher fidelity for the game environment.

• Jeffrey Wilhoit: I think some of the best challenge I have found in this is knowing that the fans are so big on this game, and trying to find new tone and new texture, but still simulate the old feel. I'm going through a bit of a detective process; I'm listening to the old sounds and breaking them down into as small bits as we can. And then I have to find all the different ingredients that might be in there that I can re-simulate to sound similar, but be a little brighter, better sound quality. Starting with larger characters, we try to build a base to get that resonated sound. How do we get the weight? How do we make it sound heavy? We'll play it and it's like, "Oh, it sounds really big, it's got good energy, but it's missing the metal." So then we'll find the right metallic tone and re-perform it the same way, with a new flavor. We play those two together—sounding big, sounding metallic—"what's missing now? Some body movement." Now we got to find a new texture, maybe it's leather, maybe it's skin. That would be a third layer, and then we continue until we end up with six or eight different sounds for one movement in a character.

• Brian Fieser: One of the cool things that we ended up recording this time around, which is totally experimental, are tuning forks. We thought that would go really well with the energy sword, but it needed a little bit more. The energy sword is a sleek, sort of elegant weapon, but it's also a killing machine. So we actually bought some dry ice and we were thinking, "Hey, what might sound good with this dry ice?" We just started randomly dropping objects on it. What we really thought was cool was when we dropped ball bearings on it. So we ended up using the ball bearings on the dry ice—the sizzling and the burning and the screaming. What we did was that we had an engineer room actually feed that back to us in the room through loudspeakers in the foley room. Then we set up a microphone, and we actually made the sword motion from the game. That allowed us to capture more of a natural and unique sound.

• Paul Lipson: Here is what shipped in the game 10 years ago. [Classic sound] We wanted something with a little more body. We wanted something with a little more musicality. We wanted something with more power. Here's the direction we're going now. [Remastered sound]

• Brian Fieser: We decided to go out and capture new source material this time around. Obviously, you can't go out and record a battle rifle; you can go out and record things that are similar to it. What we wanted to do is choose weapons that had unique characteristics. For example, the Thompson machine gun—it's got a unique "clack-clack-clack" sort of sound, and that's a unique characteristic we wanted to carry over into some of the newer weapons. Each gun had king of felt different. The M1 Garand obviously is the big, beastly .30-06 large-caliber gun. It really packs a punch; you can really feel it in your chest. And then, there's the silent submachine gun, the MP5, that really has a unique "thwack" sound. You let it fly, and you can hear it thump downrange. It's pretty cool

• Isaac Christian: My personal shotgun is the shotgun in Halo 2: Anniversary. I completely forgot about that, but that was a fun day.

Worlds We haven't Talked About Yet

WORLDS WE HAVEN'T TALKED ABOUT YET
_TERMINALS

• Corrinne Robinson: The terminals started in Halo 3. They had little easter eggs, a text document you could read to get deeper into the story. They expanded that with Halo 3: ODST, but Halo 1 Anniversary was when we really stepped it up—hired The Sequence Group to come in and do all the painterly style terminals. So that was a new addition for Halo 1 Anniversary, and then we decided to do it again in Halo 2.

• Kevin Grace: We sized up what things fans have always wanted to know more about. It's this relationship between the Prophets and the Elites, the situation in the Covenant—kind of the "Big Lie" really, that the Prophets have held over the rest of the Covenant for who knows how long. That leads to the events of Halo 2, the breaking of the Covenant, the war between the Elites and the Brutes, and what role the Arbiter plays in all of this. These are questions fans have been asking for a long time. Thinking towards the future: "What do we think fans will want to know more about a year or two from now?" We're pretty sure they're going to want to know a lot more about Spartan Locke, or Agent Locke as we meet him.

• Ben Cammarano: The terminals form a connective tissue for this world, and we are getting a chance again to realise this in a much more vibrant, effective, pointed way that users would appreciate.

• Ian Kirby: A lot of the stories within the Halo terminals are additional narrative and backstory. A lot of it is exploration even further than some of the novels. And so we're saying, "Okay, well, this one shot where it's post-Halo-ring-exploding... does this tie into this novel? Does this make sense for this one-to-two-second shot?" Because it's got to fit the entire Halo universe. That's a big challenge.

• Jay Prochaska: Halo has had a very definitive style from day one, and it's evolving over time. It keeps growing and growing, but one of the unique things about what Sequence brings is its own style. It's much more of a painterly look to it; it makes it feel like it's a graphic piece versus a 3D piece.

• Jeremy Patenaude: To see what Sequence has done from a visual standpoint is breathtaking. The terminals that I've worked on... they did some amazing stuff with High Charity's interiors. They did some incredible stuff with worlds that we haven't talked about yet, and I think fans are really going to get a kick out of that.

I think I'll have an Earl Grey

I THINK I'LL HAVE AN EARLY GREY
_VOICE-OVER

• Corrinne Robinson: When we were doing the voice acting for all the terminals, we had people in Redmond on Skype, listening into the session in LA with the guys from Vancouver—all these pieces have to come together.

• Dan Sioui: It's amazing to get to see the voice talent, because obviously they are such an integral part to what we do with the terminals. To be able to go to the studio and actually see them perform is amazing, because we're able to show them the rough drawings and the animatics, and they're able to feed off our work as well. So to be able to go down and see what they do, and really appreciate, and also contribute. It's great to be involved in that.

• Kevin McMullan: I really am glad that they're revisiting it, giving it new life. Take a 10-year-old game and then actually tie it into the future of the Halo franchise as well. That's really cool. Honestly, that's really one of the coolest things we did during these sessions.

• William "Chip" Beaman: Everybody here just lit up. It was like, "Oh my god, this is the holy grail. This is, you know, this is Halo. This is huge!"

• Keith David: My name is Keith David and I play the Arbiter. When it came up and they were looking for this character, the Arbiter, and I got the first script and read it, I was like, "Wow, I like this guy. I like this character." And you see what it looks like, you know, it's very different. Through the different incarnations of the game, I love the way it's evolved. I love these stories.

• Keith David (as the Arbiter): My friend's trust is not the issue today, Spartan Locke. It is my trust you must earn. You are a hunter, yes? A seeker of things? And now you hunt other Spartans.

• Kevin McMullan: Getting to meet somebody like Keith David—somebody's character I know... I know him through his character in the Halo series really well—it is a really cool thing to see that in real life.

• Kevin McMullan: I'd like to be on the other side of the glass and be the first ears that hear these performances, and get giddy and excited about it, knowing where it's going to go, knowing what millions of people are going to enjoy.

• Paul Lipson: It's a huge deal bringing back Keith David and having the Arbiter, and then adding this new character of Spartan Locke, and having this story be more complete and more connected in the fiction. That's an amazing start to a journey that I think Halo fans will be thrilled with.

• Ian Kirby: A lot of the narrative work we do is best done with actual VO and narrative storytelling. If people watch something without the audio, you realize it is fifty percent of what you're doing. It sets the feeling and the tone before anything else can. It is extremely powerful, so it is a big part of our work.

• Mike Colter (as Jameson Locke): The following is a target profile of Thel 'Vadamee, Supreme Commander of the Fleet of Particular Justice, compiled by Lieutenant Commander Locke.

• Mike Colter: I like to think of him as a career soldier in a sense that he has a lot of tools, he has a lot of pedigree, and he's been in the forces for a long time. He's not really old, but when you start very young, you have a lot to learn. So I look at him as a career soldier in the sense that whee he came out, he was a cut above the rest; he was really good from the start. He's a leader, and he's learning on the job, but he has the tools, the know-how, and the temperament to get it done.

• Paul Lipson: Bringing back Tim Dadabo, who's the voice of Guilty Spark... I mean, it's just an evergreen character and an evergreen sound. It's so incredible to hear him come back and just instantly be Guilty Spark.

• Tim Dadabo (as 343 Guilty Spark): Greetings! I am 343 Guilty Spark. I learned a small amount about your Covenant before that Reclaimer blew up my installation.

• John DiMaggio (as Sesa 'Refumee): But Oracle, I do not understand. We were told the rings are salvation, a gateway to paradise. Communications; shut down all lines to the fleet.

• John DiMaggio: He's got that presence. He's been there, he's done that. He's not of the Earth though, so there's something otherworldly about him. So... when he approaches something, it's from a very different viewpoint than mine. That texture comes from knowing and from a lifetime of experience and what he's been through.

Could You Run More, But not Move?

COULD YOU RUN MORE, BUT NOT MOVE?
_CINEMATICS

• Franck Balson: So... Microsoft came to us like, "Okay, we have this Halo 2 project where we basically have to recreate those cinematics that we had before, but now we want to pump it up, up-res it." But the thing is, it's 50 minutes worth of footage. "Oh, okay".

• Tim Miller: A lot of times people come to us and they say, "Hey, here's our game, here's what's cool about it. Make something great." We go off and do it. This time, the structure was already there. We're using the same timing, the same story, and because that structure was there, it really gives us time to focus on the visual fidelity and the performance of what was already there.

• Franck Balson: So yeah, we couldn't say no. After, it's more: "Okay, now that we've said yes, how do we do it?"

• Franck Balson: For the choice of actors, we actually found the perfect mix of people that could do mo-cap, that had the facial features that we wanted, and that were also great lip-syncers. They could perform all their facial, and be very technical to hit all these facial expressions in the right amount at the right moment.

• Tim Miller: The actors look like their digital counterparts in the film and we're really capturing their performances and keeping all the nuances that are really hard to animate.

• Tim Miller: There's a large chunk of the human brain whose sole purpose is to decode the content of the human face. Oddly enough, women do it twice as fast as men. But, that piece of your brain is there to look at faces and understand what's going on. A lot of people—even if you're not an artist—will be able to look at a CG-generated face and say, "There's something wrong with that. I don't understad... It's off-putting." They may not be able to tell you what's wrong, but they know it's wrong and it makes them feel uncomfortable. There's something with the deep primal monkey brain sort of thing going on there. This process kind of circumvents that. All those little subtle nuances that are really hard to put in there by hand—if you are an animator—come for free, because we're capturing everything. All those little things are there. The computer doesn't miss it, even if we did.

• Beckie King: Playing Cortana was really unique, because in this particular version that we are doing, using the Mova, you're in such a small space to work with. As an actor, it's really fun and challenging, you know, creating this new character, but having to match a voice that's already there, and making sure I gave the performance that matched not only the mo-cap, but then going back and matching it with your actual movement on your face... and you can move this much!

• Courney Munch: And then there's the action sequences, which were nuts, because it was literally Frank being like, "You jump! You run, run, run, run! You fall! Ahhhh, land! Look up, oh no! See the arm, go go go go! Get it! Ah... Buzzers, buzzers, buzzers! Look around!" It was that kind of thing, and you're doing it all with just this kind of movement with your head, because you can't do anymore than that.

• Franck Balson: We got to those really funny moments where the comments would be like, "Could you run more... but not move?" It was really funny.

• Damion Poitier: One of the great things about games is you can play multiple roles in the same production. Being the Arbiter and being Johnson—there are actually scenes where I'm fighting myself! So that's actually very cool, and it was a lot of fun to figure out how to portray that and watch how they figure out what we are going to do to make that work.

• Franck Balson: The big focus of this has been like working to the facial performance of the actors, and trying to really translate what they've done into the CG world.

• Isaac Christian: The first time that we saw a picture of Johnson, we thought it was a real dude. We were like, "Okay, so who's this guy and why are we seeing a picture of him?" And then when we started seeing it moving, we're just like, "Okay, this is animated, but it's really good." You start to see the aliens, the Covenants, the Brutes, all these different species—it's phenomenal. And to have I think it's 56 minutes, more-or-less an hour of content, as a Halo fan, that gets my blood going.

Tucking the Baby into Bed

TUCKING THE BABY INTO BED
_MUSIC

• Paul Lipson: We're at Skywalker Sound, and we just concluded a long week of recording for Halo 2: Anniversary.

• Tom Salta: Halo was the reason that I was inspired to get into the video game business. Before that, I was making records for 15 years, and 2001, when Halo came out, it just changed my whole world. That's when I finally saw the world of video games, which was my other love from when I was a kid. We're talking about pre-Atari 2600 days... I am aging myself. Halo just opened up my eyes to a whole new possibility of this is what I need to be doing.

• Lennie Moore: Being a composer, I have my own sensibilities as far as how I would approach any given project, but ssince this is a project where the music's already composed and what we're really doing is revisiting the material, the puzzle becomes: "How do you honor the material? How do you keep it fresh and interesting for a new generation?

• Paul Lipson: It's a cool process to record large-scale orchestral music. I mean, let's just take the orchestra for a second. You've got 85 very highly trained musicians and you've got Wataru, who is the conductor. The amount of trust we have in him to emotionally convey and coax out of the players the performance we want is incredibly high.

• Wataru Hokoyama: Millions of people love this game and they are so heavily attached to the music. For me, to be able to be a part of it as a conductor, to throw in my interpretation, to get the orchestra together, and work with this team—you know, as one of the team members, to create this gigantic soundtrack is just so rewarding.

• Paul Lipson: He will take our direction and Wataru just has a way of expressing that back to the orchestra in a language that they just completely understand. I mean, on the first Anniversary, he said something that all of us in the booth still remember: "Act as if you are tucking the baby into bed." And suddenly the orchestra was like, "Oh!" and the notes would just go to play, and the notes would just float up, through the roof, and out into the universe.

• Wataru Hokoyama: This music is not only in the classical style, but it also has elements of rock... and also it's very earthy at the same time. It's very out there in the space. Taking those elements together gives me an idea of what expressions are like. The phrasing... it sounds like an Irish dance, this one phrase, but it's not really Irish; it's more like a "Space Irish." It's like an "Alien Irish dance." It's a hybrid score. I would share that with orchestra, and this orchestra... they are so wonderful that they would get an instant idea of what we're aiming for.

• Leslie Ann Jones: I mean, if I could put him in my pocket and carry him to all the gigs I do, I would. He's so expressive, and he really gets the best out of the orchestra. He understands the essence of what he's supposed to do and finds the best way to bring out what some have characterized as "perfection on demand."

• Dwayne Condon: Music from Halo 2 is really attractive from a choral conducting standpoint and a choral singer standpoint, because so much of it is vocally based. One of my favorite styles is Gregorian chant, and you hear that influence throughout the score.

• Paul Lipson: So when you take the full breath of the symphony, and then you take the full breath of the opera chorus, and then the boys' choir just singing perfectly—it's just that incredible, beautiful sound. It's visceral. I mean, it's an emotional experience.

• Leslie Ann Jones: To add to that, somebody like Steve Vai, which was a fantastic experience. We just had a great day.

• Tom Salta: Halo 2 introduced Steve into the mix and that was also another iconic move. I mean... that was... Steve Vai is Steve Vai, right?

• Misha Mansoor: To those who don't know, Steve is basically God on guitar. I don't know if you get any bigger than Steve Vai in terms of "I'm a guitarist and I have my own sound. You can recognise me from a mile away." He's a legend.

• Steve Vai: Because of my contribution on the last one, I received the call. I thought about it and I said, "Yeah, I kind of enjoyed that." I always wanted to come up to Skywalker, and work and record here. It's a gorgeous studio, and work with such creative people. They really pulled a tremendous team together, so it was a pleasure and an honor to be invited back.

• Misha Mansoor: That dude can just go. I'm more like a composer, I like to take my time. He's just like, "Oh, I've got a guitar? Okay, awesomeness is about to happen now. Let's pick which version of awesomeness we're gonna go with."

• Steve Vai: I had no idea what would happen 10 years from the date that I did the original guitar part in the soundtrack for the first Halo 2. But I had a blast doing it then. My friend Nile Rodgers called me. He was producing the soundtrack. You know, I have two boys and they loved the game; when I told them I was playing on the Halo 2 soundtrack, they couldn't believe it. It was like I finally impressed them.

• Misha Mansoor: So yeah, I might quit guitar tomorrow because of what I saw today.

Magic Happened

MAGIC HAPPENED
_{THE MASTER CHIEF COLLECTION}

• Kiki Wolfkill: There was a lot of energy and momentum around doing a Halo 2: Anniversary. I think with a new platform coming out, we went back and forth on what was really the right thing to land on the platform for the first time as Halo. So I think we went back and forth between is Halo 2: Anniversary as a standalone enough? But Dan, who runs the publishing org and is a notorious sandbagger, came back with, "Well, we can do Halo 2: Anniversary, but we might also be able to do 1, 3, and 4." So that obviously became a pretty amazing prospect. It really was just a question of whether we could pull it off.

• Dan Ayoub: It's a challenging process. We had a few things in our favor. These are partners that we've worked with before, but 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.

• Kiki Wolfkill: The idea of being able to play all four of them on the same platform—which we have never been able to do—as well as get the anniversary edition of Halo 2, was sort of a no-brainer once that actually became a realistic production reality.

• Bonnie Ross: And then like magic happened, and I think we all got really excited. We felt like that was really the way to start our journey on Xbox One. Going into E3, I think everyone knew we were going to announce Halo 2. I think we waited a long time. Typically we would have announced before E3. Everyone knew we were going to announce Halo 2.

• Dennis Ries: No one really believed that we would do something as ambitious as the Master Chief Collection.

• Dan Ayoub: The simple fact that nobody believed that it was going to be what it was was actually great momentum for us to ride into E3. We've been rehearsing this forever and I've got the points that I want to hit with everything that's coming. I get up there. Bonnie does the intro, I get up on stage and I start talking about the collection. We hop into the multiplayer and the multiplayer stuff looks great, but then the closing is really where the punch is going to be, tight? The closing is where we're going to say: it's all four games, it's 60 frames per second, it's 1080p, it's quite literally every multiplayer map that has ever been made. And I'm getting to that point and then I just start to hear it. People are cheering. As I'm going down the points, now the room's going nuts. We got the energy from the room. When I walked off the stage, there's just this wash of pride coming over me. It's like, "Yeah, we were right. This is what people want.

• Bonnie Ross: We know where Master Chief is going with Halo 5, and I think it's a super interesting story and it does have to do with his past. For us, being able to tell that story and lead into the future story was super exciting. We thought about what we wanted to do with 1, 2, 3, 4... It's the Halo 2 anniversary. It does deserve special treatment.

• Max Hoberman: When I heard what the 343 publishing team was planning as far as all these different games, and being able to flip-toggle between these up-res versions, and this unified UI, and unified matchmaking, and everything else... I thought they were insane. I thought they were crazy, honestly. Such a massive undertaking.
• Kiki Wolfkill: I'm not just passionate about Halo, but I'm passionate about what Halo can be and what it can become. I think for all of us, we are so invested in Halo for the long term, right? It is a universe we believe in. It is a universe that we want to continue to evolve, and grow, and innovate with. I think that level of dedication and passion is pretty standard at 343.

• Frank O'Connor: When the games launch and we go to these midnight events—where the games are finally on sale—seeing how excited people are, seeing that people actually came to a store at midnight in the freezing cold to pick up a game they could just as easily have ordered from Amazon the day before... it's exciting, because they want to share that joy with us and we get to share it back with them.

• Jeremy Patenaude: The thing that I'm most excited for with Halo 2: Anniversary—and with the Master Chief Collection in general—is going back with my friends from ten years ago and playing 3v3 One Flag on Lockout or classic CTF on Midship. For me, at least, that's gonna be the place that I'm gonna spend the most time. It's playing those classic maps with friends from ten years ago. Calling people up that I haven't spoken to in so long and asking them to get online. It'll be weird conversations. "Hey, are you getting on Halo 2 tonight?"

• Dan Ayoub: The universe is a big place, right? I mean, I think this franchise can go anywhere, and I think we're all honored to be part of that process of charting where this thing can go. But again, the universe is a big, big place, and I don't think there are any limits to how big this can go.