Word: halo
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...video-game aficionados, the entertainment event of the year has nothing to do with Harry Potter or Jack Sparrow or Spider-Man. It happens on Sept. 25, when Halo 3 will be released, starring a faceless and all-but-nameless space marine called the Master Chief. He's a new kind of celebrity for a new and profoundly weird millennium...
...difficult to explain the story of Halo but that difficulty is in itself worthy of note. This isn't Donkey Kong. The Master Chief is not an Italian plumber whose girlfriend has been kidnapped by a gorilla. His story is rich and complicated in ways that we're not used to in video games. The Master Chief is a supersoldier, the only one of his kind, equipped with--encased in, really--powerful battle armor. He lives 500 years in the future, at a time when humanity is fighting a group of alien religious zealots known as the Covenant...
...Halo universe is clearly the stuff of pulpy space opera, and the Master Chief is as hard-boiled as they come. Much of the action consists of the Master Chief shooting alien antagonists while swapping Eastwoodian one-liners with his sidekick, a computer program named Cortana who appears as a sexy hologram. But the Halo games also have a curiously lyrical quality about them. They're full of literary touches and evocative phrases--the Master Chief travels in a spaceship called the Pillar of Autumn. The Halo universe is rich in lore--gamers love to be there the way some...
...face of the Master Chief is never revealed. His visor is solid reflective gold, like the faceplates of the Apollo astronauts. Halo 's designers see the Master Chief's facelessness as a dramatic device, a way of allowing players to place themselves in the game's leading role, to map their own faces onto that of a blank protagonist. "If he takes off the helmet, he should be you," says Marty O'Donnell, Halo 's audio director. "I mean, that's the big deal. Taking off the helmet is unacceptable." Engineering lead Chris Butcher agrees: "It's your experience...
...return, they give Halo most of their waking hours, which vastly outnumber their sleeping ones. For the past few months, shifts at Bungie have run from 6 in the morning till 2 in the morning. One manager confessed that he was so strung out on caffeine, he had to drink a Diet Coke just so he could kill his cravings enough to fall asleep. The Bungies bring a grinding, jeweler's meticulousness to what most people consider an unhealthy amusement for children. To give me an idea of the level of detail (which is a term of art at Bungie...