Beyond the Ring: Bungie's Renegade Development of Halo's Fiction

An auditorium full of people sit at the Microsoft E3 press conference in 2006, all waiting for the same thing. It's just seven months since the Xbox 360 successfully launched, but Microsoft's big gun has yet to show for the new system. The audience expects that to change, and they're right. The giant screen goes white, and a single piano note signals the debut of Halo 3. As the camera pans across a blasted desert road, the AI Cortana speaks.







"I am your shield. I am your sword."



While everyone else is hanging on the edge of their seat to see what happens next, some hardcore fans of the Halo series hear something familiar in Cortana's cryptic message.



"I know you. Your past. Your future."



"This is the way the world ends."



The audience applauds and gaming sites report on the expected release date, but elsewhere, on forums, Bungie devotees are buzzing about something else. Conversations spring up about a series of letters seven years old, letters largely forgotten from a time before the 24-hour gaming news cycle. Why? Because by now, Halo fans know that they're as likely to learn about Halo's sweeping fiction outside of the game as they are in it. After a number of New York Times bestselling novels and arguably the first massive, mainstream Alternate Reality Game in the form of the "I <3 bees" campaign they're well trained.



Over the course of its 10-year lifespan, Halo has managed to build up a wealth of story spanning hundreds of thousands of years and numerous star systems, a story of politics and civil unrest in addition to a genocidal war waged by an interstellar religious armada against the human race. Halo's fiction is arguably among the most expansive that gaming has ever seen -- impressive, given the perceived limitations of first-person shooters.



Where shooters like Half-Life 2 have found success through an incidental, found story peppered throughout their world as well as direct narrative, Bungie has taken a different path, going outside of their games in ways both traditional and radically different. In the process, Bungie and their now former partners at Microsoft created a uniquely successful combination of merchandising, marketing, and storytelling to explore the world of Halo in a deeper way than they originally thought possible.