Inside Halo's Secret Lab

One morning in August, when an unfamiliar car pulls into the parking lot of the video-game developer Bungie Studios, it is quickly greeted by no fewer than three uniformed guards. Bungie is best known for creating Halo, a "first-person shooter" set in the year 2552 that has become one of the most popular video games of all time. It's only a month before the September 25th release of Halo 3, which has been three years in the making, and security is tight at Bungie's headquarters just outside of Seattle.

Inside the anonymous, hangarlike building, only seven of Bungie's 120 employees have access to the all-important server room, which stores the game's top-secret code -- on 50,000 gigabytes of hard-drive space. The room can only be unlocked with a biometric hand scanner. "The precautions are as high as if we were printing money," says Bungie spokesman Brian Jarrard. "We're really treating the final version of the game like plates at the mint."

With Bungie competitor Rockstar announcing the delay of the much-anticipated Grand Theft Auto IV until 2008, Halo 3 stands alone as the highest-profile game this holiday season. There are already 1.2 million pre-orders, and Microsoft is predicting the game will do "Harry Potter numbers." "It's our intent to be the biggest entertainment launch of this calendar year," says Jeff Bell, vice president of global marketing in Microsoft's gaming division. Bell includes all forms of entertainment in this calculation, including Spiderman 3, which holds the record for the highest-grossing opening weekend of any film, having peaked at just over $150 million.

Now, with only six days to go before the finished game ships to manufacturing plants, there's a final-stretch sense of frenzy at Bungie HQ, tempered only by a slightly dazed fatigue. Harold Ryan, Bungie's stocky thirty-six-year-old studio manager, paces the floor with a large iced Starbucks coffee. He'd been at the studio until seven in the morning, went home, catnapped, showered and returned. It's now just after ten. Jaime Griesemer, a sallow, red-haired gameplay designer, wanders by and notes, glumly, "They locked me out of my computer last week." As the deadline approaches, Ryan is often forced to lock employees out of the system, lest they continue to tweak the game; its code is so sensitive that a minor change could have massive, unknown repercussions. At the moment, the main buzz of activity centers around the teams of bug testers, who are still furiously playing (and replaying) the game, searching for the tiniest glitches. This geek dream job is not as fun as it might sound. "You're not just playing Halo all day," says Jarrard. "You're playing this piece of this mission. For nine hours."

The Bungie headquarters was designed by one of the studio's virtual "map" architects. (They create the jungles, deserts and space stations where Halo's action takes place.) It utilizes an open floor plan, with the employees spread out across a windowless, vaguely futuristic space. The mood lighting is designed to cut monitor glare, but it creates a bunkerlike atmosphere, reminiscent of Jack Bauer's headquarters on 24. The work force is almost entirely male, with a high proportion sporting glasses, facial hair and Bungie swag; it looks like a casting call for the next Judd Apatow movie. Halo's lulling New Age soundtrack emanates from the computers of numerous other cubes, punctuated by the occasional burst of artillery fire. One cubicle's entire wall is papered with Bill Gates' face, grinning from a dozen covers of a magazine called Diversity, arranged like a Warhol series of Mao paintings. Bungie was acquired by Microsoft in 2000 -- for between $20 million and $40 million, according to the Wall Street Journal. The studio used to be based at the Microsoft campus, but after the completion of Halo 2, in 2004, the company moved to its current space. "The people at Microsoft can't even get into our building now," Jarrard notes happily.

Halo's story line pits humanity against an invading horde of alien religious zealots known as the Covenant. The original Halo, released two months after the September 11th attacks, sold 5 million copies and became the marquee game of Microsoft's brand-new Xbox console. Halo 2, released in 2004, was even bigger, thanks to a new multiplayer mode that allowed friends -- and strangers -- to do battle over the Internet. The game sold 8 million copies, earning $125 million its first day alone. The newest version, Microsoft hopes, will be the killer app that inspires millions of rabid Halo fans to upgrade their hardware to the Xbox 360 (Halo 3 won't play on the original Xbox).

Making a video game, Bungie staffers say, is a lot like making a blockbuster movie, only harder. Head writer Frank O'Connor, a shaved-headed, thirty-six-year-old Scotsman, personally wrote 60,000 lines of combat dialogue. Engineer Hao Chen, who is thirty¬?-three years old and grew up in China, spent months working on "water-tech" programming -- basically, making sure that any water appearing in the game hyper-realistically eddies, flows and creates turbulence around objects. There are graphic artists who focus specifically on designing weapons, others who specialize in armor or vehicles. Head programmer Chris Butcher (29, of Kakanui, New Zealand) develops complicated artificial-intelligence code to ensure that the marauding enemies attacking players do so in ever-increasingly devious ways.

Meanwhile, in one of the testing rooms, eleven guys sit in front of twenty-one computer monitors. Dramatic scenes flash across the flat screens in rapid succession: jeeps flying straight at a gigantic insectlike robot, alien blood spattering on a snowy landscape, spaceships hovering in a purple sky, rifle scopes zooming in and out with furious, phallic intensity. But the testers are nearly immobile, gaming fingers excepted. The players wear headsets, so the room is silent, save for the occasional offhand tester comment.

"Did you see Sam Raimi is remaking Clash of the Titans?"

"If I were Kenny Rogers, I'd have plastic surgery too."

"Why aren't those blowing up?"