Canceled Halo Chronicles is finally detailed in epic Halo oral history

Also, Peter Jackson totally made a working Warthog, and a Bungie staffer crashed it.

The Halo game series received its first-ever comprehensive oral history on Tuesday, courtesy of Vice Waypoint contributor Steve Haske. The post includes a whopping 35,000 words on the series' history told by 16 major members of the Bungie and Halo development teams.

It's a juicy warts-and-all read, which I recommend whether you're a Halo fan or not, but it also includes the most detail ever revealed about the biggest cancellations in the series' history: the game Halo Chronicles and its attached Peter Jackson film.

Chronicles began life for Bungie as a contractual obligation, which former Bungie music producer Marty O'Donnell described as one of "three buckets" (the others being Halo 3 and Halo Reach). The game would go on to be co-produced by Jackson's new video game studio, Wingnut Interactive, with key Bungie staffers helping with planning, writing, and prototyping.

This became Bungie's first Halo project in which Master Chief was not the lead controllable character. Bungie staff writer Joe Staten had a slogan for Halo Chronicles: "Be the bullet." Players would have controlled a standard marine who had no guns, but instead became infused with alien technology discovered over the course of the game. As Bungie's Paul Bertone put it, "Not modified in the sense that you just put on power armor, but where there’s biological shit actually happening to you." The control scheme included melee, stun, and "push" attacks, along with double-jump and dash mechanics—which sounds as close to "Mega Halo Man X" as the series may ever get.
Five Halo 3 missions were rebuilt with this control and ability scheme, along with a "kung fu" AI system that made enemies crowd around this weaker-than-Chief character but only attack one or two at a time. (This eventually became a standard in modern beat-'em-up games like the Batman Arkham series.) Later in the game, you'd transform into a space-sailing missile and "target specific parts" of Covenant cruisers.

“Joe had trouble seeing that movie”

Meanwhile, Halo staffers repeatedly visited filmmaker Peter Jackson's production headquarters in New Zealand to develop ideas and scripts for a Halo movie. Principal filming never got off the ground, but that didn't stop Jackson's Weta workshop from building a fully drivable Warthog—and revealing it to the Bungie team in a weird way.

"We were sitting in his big conference room, Peter talking away, and I look out the window and, all of a sudden, the Warthog drives by," Bertone told Waypoint. "I was just like, 'I'm sorry, the Warthog just drove by.' Peter was just as excited. He was like, 'Oh yeah, we should go check that out now.'"

Bungie staffers were then invited to hop in and drive the Warthog, which Bungie Producer Chris Creamer proceeded to crash into the side of a building.

Staten says the film never crossed the threshold of full-on development because "we never landed on [a script] that was solid enough." Staten praised Jackson for being receptive to Bungie's story requests and had kind things to say about people who'd worked on scripts, including eventual Game of Thrones showrunner Dan Weiss. But he admitted that studios were hesitant to pull the trigger on a $150 million budget for a video-game movie. The game project languished while waiting for scripts and stories to be approved, and once the film was formally canceled, its companion game was scrapped entirely.

O'Donnell confirmed what has long been assumed, that Halo's original film director, Neill Blomkamp, funneled as much of that project into the movie District 9 as he could. "You actually see some of the props that were made for the Halo movie repainted white" in District 9, O'Donnell told Waypoint. "To Joe [Staten, who had worked heavily on the Halo film project], it was like, wow. I love District 9, I think it’s great. But Joe had trouble seeing that movie, let me just say that."

The piece goes on to talk about how Halo 3 ODST sprang from Halo Chronicles' ashes, along with tons of information about Halo's life before, during, and after Bungie's tenure with Microsoft. (Sadly, Waypoint doesn't go into too many details about the bungled launch of the Halo Master Chief Collection.)
The next big Halo game may not be announced for some time. The series' handlers at 343 Industries recently confirmed that Halo will only offer fans "a little something" at next month's E3 Expo. Thus, consider this giant oral history a way to fill your Halo appetite while you wait for more of Chief 'n friends.