19 Astounding Facts About the Halo Series You May Not Know
1. Halo wasn’t originally a shooting game
Conceived as a real-time strategy game in the same vein as Command & Conquer and Warcraft, gamers would still control Spartan units, but not as a first-person shooter.
2. The plot started out much smaller
Unlike everything else in entertainment, Halo was not originally envisioned as a trilogy. Now we’ve seen nearly a dozen Halo titles.
3. Master Chief is, like, old
The Master Chief, like another popular video game star, Solid Snake, was an older hero by video game standards. The Master Chief is in his 40s as the Halo Trilogy begins.
4. James Cameron has some bragging rights
See any similarities between Halo’s world and that of the Alien franchise? Not an accident. Gamemakers have said they were influenced by Aliens in particular.
5. Master Chief has a major influence … punk
The original personality template for Halo’s main protagonist? Clint Eastwood, a tough guy of few words. And like one of Eastwood’s iconic characters, Master Chief is essentially a man with no name.
6. Halo was supposed to have 25 levels, not 10
The first Halo title was going to be a lot longer. Heck, we’d still be playing the original if it were 2.5 times longer.
7. The phrase "Noob Tube" was inspired by Halo 2
Back in 2004, a user named 67thRaptorBull complained about a Class-2 Projectile Cannon that he described as a Noob Tube. The term is now used to describe weapons in lots of games, from Battlefield to Call of Duty.
8. A Halo TV series is on the way
Steven Spielberg is executive-producing and developing a live-action Halo series for Showtime, after District 9 director Neill Blomkamp's big-screen version stalled.
9. Cortana almost cried once
Jen Taylor, the actress who voices Halo’s famous A.I., is not a gamer. But she once became so attached to her character that a few of her lines “nearly had me in tears."
10. There are 11 million Halo books out there
Sure, Halo is a video-game franchise. But it makes for good reading, too; more than 11 million copies of Halo books, comics and strategy guides have been sold worldwide.
11. Cortana was almost British
Of course the actor who was cast to play her is an American, but you can still catch the occasional British colloquialism in her lines.
12. It took a lot of pizza to make a game this good
In the three years it took to develop Halo 3, Bungie Studios employees consumed more than 20,000 pounds of pizza, 24,000 gallons of soda and more than 1,000 pounds of bananas.
13. 20 billion campaigns waged
According to Bungie (the game’s original developer), from Sept. 2004 to 2010, a ridiculous 20 billion games of Halo were played online. That’s the equivalent of more than two billion hours of play time, or 235,000 years.
14. Ron Perlman is in it
The former Sons of Anarchy star voices Lord Hood in Halo 2 and Halo 3.
15. The Master Chief is a deejay
Steve Downes, who voices protagonist Master Chief, is a morning radio deejay in Chicago. Really.
16. Cortana has a sister ... sort of
Cortana is also the name of Microsoft’s AI personal assistant on the Windows 8 phone.
17. She also has a mom … sort of
Cortana’s original physical form is inspired by the ancient Egyptian queen Nefertiti.
18. Each installment has gotten chattier
Halo 2 had 14,000 lines of dialogue. But the third had 39,000.
19. And speaking of billions...
The Halo franchise is such a moneymaker that the games alone have raked in more than $3.4 billion.
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