Trivia / Halo: Combat Evolved

• Acting for Two:
  • Jen Taylor voices both Cortana and the lifeboat pilot.
  • Pete Stacker voices both Captain Keyes and Sergeant Stacker (one of the generic Marine variants, specifically the other Sergeant next to Johnson).
  • David Scully provides the voices for both Sergeant Johnson and the Elites, though with his voice pitched down and reversed.
• Ascended Glitch: The infamous animation quirk in which looking straight down would keep the character model's head looking forward was a glitch that snuck into the game shortly before the final release. It proved to be highly beneficial to Machinima creators (especially one particular group in Austin, Texas), who used it to make characters appear relaxed when talking. This glitch was turned into the "alert carry" feature from Halo 2 onwards, in which pressing a secret button combo would recreate the effect.
• Breakthrough Hit: Bungie was a cult developer mainly known for the Marathon and Myth series before the release of Halo.
• Descended Creator:
  • Joseph Staten, the director of cinematics, also voices the Grunts, a role he would reprise in every Halo FPS with the exception of Halo 4.
  • Composer Marty O'Donnell's voice is used as the basis for the vocal effects of Hunters, Jackals and the Flood.
• Executive Meddling: The reason for the "Combat Evolved" subtitle; Microsoft was apparently worried about the game being taken as religious or something, or that the title wasn't indicative of the game being a First-Person Shooter.
• Killer App: Halo was the reason to buy an Xbox at launch and for several months afterwards. It single-handedly saved Microsoft from becoming a footnote in the Console Wars.
• Market-Based Title: The game's subtitle was rendered in Spanish-speaking territories as "Combat Has Evolved".
• Milestone Celebration: Anniversary was released to celebrate the game's 10th birthday. While not on the exact day, the game's 20th anniversary was celebrated through a set of updates for The Master Chief Collection that fix many of the long-standing issues with the game's subsequent ports.
• Orphaned Reference:
  • When Keyes gives you his Pistol in "The Pillar of Autumn", he mentions that he doesn't keep it loaded and that you will need to find ammo for it. This is a completely bizarre statement, as the Chief can pull out the Pistol, fully loaded and with plenty of spare ammo, as soon as the next room. The 1749 Beta makes it a bit clearer why this line exists; originally you were to grab ammo from a crewman who was killed defending the bridge, but this moment was cut from the final game to feature just the Grunts in the room.
  • Early in "Halo", Cortana comments that the cave formation used to travel the ring doesn't appear to be natural, which sticks out as odd when the cave is very obviously not natural in design. This is because the design was supposed to look more natural, but the team changed it late enough in development that the line couldn't be changed, so it remained.
  • At the beginning of "Two Betrayals", the Chief starts with a Plasma Pistol and a Shotgun, which contradicts the intro cutscene where he carries his usual Assault Rifle. The 1749 beta confirms that he originally did indeed start with an Assault Rifle instead of the Plasma Pistol during development; the Plasma Pistol was probably swapped in to help the player better fight the Sentinels at the very start of the level.
• The Other Darrin: Sesa 'Refumee, the Heretic Leader, was voiced by Miguel Ferrer in Halo 2, but by an uncredited voice actor in a Terminal in Anniversary.
• Promoted Fanboy: Brian Morden, co-founder of the halo.bungie.org fansite all the way back in 1999, gets a one-line role as a Marine ("The Autumn! She's been hit!").
• Publisher-Chosen Title: As Bungie's Jaime Griesemer explained in a retrospective Edge article, the developers didn't come up with the "Combat Evolved" part of the title:
  "Microsoft marketing thought Halo was not a good name for a videogame brand. It wasn't descriptive like all the military games we were competing with. We told them Halo was the name. The compromise was they could add a subtitle. Everyone at Bungie hated it. But it turned out to be a very sticky label and has now entered the gaming lexicon… so I guess in hindsight it was a good compromise. But the real name of the game is just Halo."
• Refitted for Sequel: The idea of Cortana being driven to a Zeroth Law Rebellion after coming into contact with Forerunner technology was originally planned for this game. Some remnants of this include Cortana's sudden attitude shift into being much more abrasive and dismissive towards Master Chief after she's uploaded to Halo's control room. However, this element would be dropped from this game, only for 343 Industries to pick it up again for Halo 5: Guardians.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: The use of the gravity lift, something that would become a Halo staple, was born out of two technical considerations: The level "The Truth and Reconciliation" was too big in its initial form to accommodate both the ship's exterior and interior, while the initial transition between the two areas (a simple ramp) would've made the low resolution of the ship's exterior very obvious. The gravity lift allowed the level to be split between two maps and was also much more visually interesting than a simple ramp could be.
• Throw It In!: The ability to switch between the classic and updated graphics in Anniversary was originally just a developer tool so they could quickly compare the two while playing the game. It was decided to turn it into an actual feature because why not?
• Troubled Production:
  • The game's development endured several upheavals and restarts due to it shifting genres and platforms multiple times. Its original concept was as a Mac-exclusive Real-Time Strategy game. Bungie then suffered a commercial blow with another game, putting them in financial trouble before Microsoft partnered up with them to produce Halo as an Xbox exclusive (which was a relief for them as they were concerned about having to code for a variety of hardware, this streamlined the development cycle considerably). The final game as we know it ended up being completed in an inordinately short amount of time, which resulted in a few things being rushed.
    • The campaign for the game was completed in five months, due to the time scale imposed by Executive Meddling, explaining the fact that it pretty much repeats backwards from the halfway mark. To put this into perspective, the first E3 demo for Halo 2 took this long to produce.
    • Not only that, but 80% of the script was still unfinished by mid-2001. After brokering a deal to get Halo: The Fall of Reach published, Eric Trautmann and his writing partner Brannon Boren of the Microsoft Gaming Division had to finish up the game's script themselves (mainly the level dialogue instead of the cutscenes). This is why there are some discrepancies between the dialogue and the action, famously the "this cave is not a natural formation" line as you drive into an obvious tunnel, which Trautmann says to this day "pisses me off so fucking much. I wrote that line. And it's so dumb. And it didn't have to be." Then when the work was done, Bungie began to hem and haw about giving the Reach novel approval, so Trautmann threatened to delete all the files he and Boren had written, and didn't let up until the publication contract had been signed by all involved.
  • Dropship animations couldn't be scripted. Instead, level designers had to fly them manually and bring them into land and insert those inputs into the code. Unfortunately, it was tricky to fly the dropships and land them without hitting any landscape elements — particularly trees — and it was impossible to make tweaks to the inputs after the fact, so the flight paths had to be run over and over again until they could nail them in one try.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Halo was originally slated to be an RTS on the Macintosh, then a third-person action game on Mac OS and Windows. The unveiling trailer was even shown at an Apple conference to demonstrate the Mac's (and OpenGL's) graphical capabilities, though the game at that state looked significantly inferior to the final product. Features that did not make it to the final game, such as wildlife, were highlighted.
  • The "Cortana Letters" (1999) suggest that Halo's story underwent a significant revision at some point, at least in regards to Cortana herself (depicted in the Letters as an expy of Durandal who was openly contemptuous of Master Chief; she even shared Durandal's desire for godhood and viewed MC and the Covenant as mere speed bumps. In fact, it would turn out that the two of them were to share base code, which would've been the source of Cortana's Rampancy). Fragments of the Letters were eventually implemented in the third game under a different context.
    • In an early, pre-Microsoft draft, Master Chief and Marathon's Security Officer were one and the same, the Covenant were formed from the scraps of the Pfhor empire, and "Forerunner" was another term for the Jjaro (who were also human). The second point would have presumably placed Halo in a later century than the final version's 26th.
    • Which draft this came from is unknown, but at one point Cortana had her own plans for Installation 04 and would have tried to take its systems for herself, to presumably disastrous consequences. (Perhaps it's worth noting that she was also envisioned with a British accent.) While she never attempts such a thing in the final, a couple of oddly-pointed comments and possible fudging of the truth make one wonder if there were some leftovers. (For the record, Halo: The Flood explains that the remaining UNSC forces on Halo were well aware of Master Chief's operation and were conducting their own evacuation plan concurrent with it. It ends with the death of all involved, more due to the incompetence of Major Silva than some nefarious plot by Cortana.)
  • The ring was initially planned to have ambient wildlife. There would be predators called blind wolves that relied on symbiosis with an insect to find food, large herbivores called thorn beasts that the player could ride, and another species of the Covenant, the Engineers, which would float around harmlessly in their ships. Each was eventually re-canonized after being cut; thorn beasts were mentioned in the manual of Halo Wars, Engineers appeared in Halo: The Fall of Reach and debuted in-game in Halo 3: ODST, and blind wolves appeared at the Ark in Halo: Hunters in the Dark. As a byproduct of this, the ring was supposed to look more "natural", which is why some of the game's dialogue talks about how odd the ring is.
  • Jetpacks were considered for the game but were eventually cut as they would have added too many complications for level design. The multiplayer level "Boarding Action" was designed with this mechanic in mind, which explains its Gimmick Level nature. The idea of jetpacks would be Saved for the Sequel, making its debut in Halo: Reach.
  • A port for the Gizmondo was cancelled after the handheld's disastrous launch.
  • The E3 2000 trailer, in addition to a number of differences to the final (as well as following the Marines instead of Master Chief), contains an intriguing exchange at the end between Master Chief and the last surviving Marine, who expresses surprise that Chief is "staying" as if he wasn't on board the Pillar of Autumn for the same reason everyone else was.
  • The "old stuff" that Sergeant Johnson listens to in "343 Guilty Spark", much to the annoyance of his fellow Marines, was intended to be "Paint it Black" before a short original track was composed in its place.
  • The in-game description of "Assault on the Control Room" seems to be describing a completely different level than what we got in the final game:
    Defend the Control Room against wave after wave of Covenant troops.
  • The level "Keyes" also had a completely different description in the beta, which appears to imply that in an earlier draft of the script Captain Keyes had already died before this level, and both the Chief and Cortana knew this and were solely aiming to recover his neural implants.
    Beta: Bring back the head of Captain Keyes
    Final: Stage a one-cyborg assault on a Covenant ship and bring back the Captain
  • A cut level would've taken part likely between "The Truth and Reconciliation" and "The Silent Cartographer" was intended to provide a more cohesive exploration of the Covenant's motives and Halo's nature as a superweapon. After being cut, its story beats were heavily condensed and exposited in the cutscene during "The Truth and Reconciliation" where Keyes is freed from the brig. Another cut level would've bridged "The Silent Cartographer" and "Assault on the Control Room", replaced by a cutscene of the Chief travelling through the ring on Echo 419.
  • The Flamethrower, made usable by Gearbox Software in Halo PC, is actually a leftover from the Xbox version where it would've appeared in all of the Flood campaign levels. It would've featured no overheating, plus unique death animations for those set on fire in which the victim drops their weapons and runs in a circle for a few seconds before dying. The Xbox version also comes with a unique crosshair (the PC version recycles the Shotgun's), both a different HUD element and Diegetic Interface, and could've been used by Flood Combat Forms. The Flamethrower was relatively complete in the game's beta, and it still exists in the final Xbox version as part of the map files for "The Library" and "Keyes", but in a noticeably Dummied Out form (it now has broken animations and does zero projectile damage) that suggests Gearbox had to reconstruct the weapon when porting the game.
  • Easy difficulty was not added to the game until very close to release.
  • The Wraith was planned to be drivable in this game before it officially would be in Halo 2. In the final game, you can drive it using mods, but the Wraith suffers from an improperly-configured camera that makes using it difficult. In the beta, however, it worked fine.
  • The original storyboards for the cutscenes by Lee Wilson display a very interesting alternate ending for the game that would have major implications for any sequels that would follow it. In The Pillar of Autumn's bridge, the Chief leaves Cortana behind so she can better fight 343 Guilty Spark's attempts to take control of the ship. The Master Chief physically destroys Guilty Spark, and has no time to rescue Cortana before he makes his escape; the last we see of Cortana is her watching an unknown intruder break into the bridge.
  • An unintentional example: In all the scripts given to Tim Dadabo (the voice of 343 Guilty Spark), the character's name was misspelled as "342 Guilty Spark," and all his lines were recorded this way, (including when Spark introduced himself). Not happy about the change, Joe Staten had Marty O'Donnell edit the line (to fit Bungie's "rule of seven" thing). Marty later said it worked out because it made him sound more robotic.
  • This is more a "funny story" than a "thing that was ever likely to happen", but Bungie were big fans of Vernor Vinge's Zones of Thought series and asked Eric Trautmann to see about getting him to write Halo novels. Trautmann, knowing there was no way a writer of Vinge's stature would write a licensed novel, told them he was dead - which he very much is not.
• Working Title: Monkey Nuts, and later on, Blam!.