Inside Halo's Secret Lab

Bungie was founded in 1991 by Alex Seropian, then a math major at the University of Chicago. Inspired by the first Gulf War, he created Operation: Desert Storm, a game for Macs that sold 2,500 copies. (The final battle involved a giant Saddam Hussein head.) Around this time, Seropian met a fellow student named Jason Jones in an artificial-intelligence class. They became partners, and began writing more Mac games from Seropian's apartment. Bungie's first big hit, Marathon, came in 1994. The game, a first-person shooter set on an abandoned spaceship, was modeled after the wildly popular game Doom, which was only available for the PC.

Halo, too, was originally developed as a Mac game. But after catching a demo at a MacWorld convention in 1999, Microsoft bought Bungie and the studio reworked the game for the then-new Xbox, which needed a flagship title to help it compete with Sony's popular PlayStation. Halo's plot is fairly typical sci-fi: Earth has been overpopulated, and humans have been forced to colonize distant planets, which has resulted in conflict with the evil, garishly armored Covenant. Players control a faceless, armored cyborg called Master Chief -- a cryogenically frozen supersoldier, genetically engineered for battle, and the last hope for humanity -- who bears more than a passing resemblance to the beloved Star Wars villain Boba Fett.

As the game's story line progresses, players move through various levels of a ring-shaped space station called Halo, all of which is really just an excuse to showcase cool weapons (the S2 AM Sniper Rifle, the M19 SSM Rocket Launcher) and commandeerable jeeps, tanks and flying machines (Scorpions, Banshees and Warthogs), and to slaughter as many alien bad guys as possible. But there are also clever surprises. Halfway through the original Halo, an entirely unfamiliar alien enemy called the Flood makes a shocking appearance, forcing players to suddenly face a radically different foe and alter their combat strategy. (It's as if, several levels into a game of Pac-Man, the dots suddenly began to attack you.) Such advances in gameplay made Halo stand out from other games. "For the original Halo, we came up with this concept of 'thirty seconds of fun,' " recalls Griesemer. "We decided if we could make something fun for thirty seconds, we could just do that over and over, and it would be fun indefinitely. So you see enemies from a distance, shoot at them, have a little bit of a fight, it breaks up, they scatter. And then you keep moving and it starts over again."

The creation of Halo 3 began with eight months of preproduction, with a core story team fleshing out the game's plot. During this period, everyone at Bungie can weigh in. A graphic artist might suggest incorporating a cool-looking weapon he's created, or making a bad guy's armor green instead of yellow. (Copies of Guns and Ammo and a magazine called Vietnam are piled in one cubicle.) Animators and programmers -- who attend to details like making sure the virtual sun casts realistic shadows -- and gameplay designers will also push various action set pieces. "With Halo, you're always asking, What's the big gameplay?" says head writer Joseph Staten. " 'Well, on this level, you're going to go to a gas-mining facility and it's going to start plummeting and you'll have a fight on this thing as it's falling through the air.' So then we come up with a story to make that happen."

Eventually, a detailed outline of each level of the game ends up on a dry-erase board as gameplay designers, led by Griesemer, concern themselves with the specifics of what a player will encounter on each level: weapons, vehicles, terrain, the ease or difficulty of the mission. Griesemer was a philosophy major in college. "It's funny how many ex-philosophy majors you find in game design," he says. "You have to learn to observe yourself in philosophy. Like, 'Oh, this is a bias. I need to analyze my thoughts from another perspective.' It's the same with gaming. You have to be able to play, but also step outside yourself and say, 'Oh, that would have been more fun if that guy hadn't killed me.' "