Patrick halo reddit series#

military underwent not only a downsizing, but changes in how it outfitted its personnel: the U.S. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the U.S. The UNSC Marines are covered in blocky body armor that feels like a natural progression from the post-Cold War U.S. By rooting the UNSC military hardware in the familiar, we created space to explore the exotic.”Īs a result, the design of Halo’s military world feels both science fictional and familiar at the same time. Staten points to the color scheme for the weapons and soldiers as an example: “UNSC gear is mostly subdued greens and browns - colors you would expect if you’re familiar with modern military gear - whereas Covenant colors are bright purple or orange or even gold. “I used all kinds of military reference,” says Marcus Lehto, Bungie’s creative art director for the franchise up through Halo: Reach, “for the creation of many things like the Chief, Warthog, Pelican, Scorpion, and Marines.” To get that familiarity, Halo’s designers looked to the real world, pulling inspiration from then-modern military technology and design. As we launched players on an epic space adventure, we wanted them to immediately feel at home driving the human vehicle or holding the human weapons.” Joseph Staten, Bungie’s director of cinematics for Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, and Halo 3, says that while the studio drew on a variety of science fiction classics for inspiration, “the primary goals for the human United Nations Space Command (UNSC) hardware in the early games were familiarity and contrast.

The world of Halo featured not only fantastical megastructures like alien rings and ancient technologies, but the blocky human ships and weapons that were designed to look and feel like they were congruent with the world we presently live in. Banks’ Culture series, to gritty military science fiction books like Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, and to films James Cameron’s Aliens and George Lucas’s Star Wars.īut those early designers also wanted to inject a level of familiarity for players. Wells’ War of the Worlds explores Britain’s relationship with colonialism, while the advent of the Cold War and the prospect of nuclear destruction prompted Robert Heinlein to muse about citizenship and power-armored soldiers in his 1959 novel Starship Troopers.Īs such, when Halo got its start, Bungie had plenty of inspiration from the world of science fiction to draw upon, ranging from epic space opera novels like Larry Niven’s novel Ringworld and Iain M. Warfare is present all the way to the roots of the genre H.G. Military science fiction has always had a strong connection to the state of the modern-day military. The people we interviewed who were involved with the franchise say that the events of the terror attack and the wars that followed didn’t directly impact the direction of the games, but the weight of the war made its presence known around the edges, through small changes and evolutions that appear throughout the series.

Patrick halo reddit series#

The Halo series turns 20 this year, and in doing so, it brackets the War on Terror, providing a snapshot of the evolution of how the military wages war, and how that militarism has seeped into popular culture. The conflict’s impact wasn’t limited to the edges of the battlefield, and its influences can be seen in everything from our political discourse, to the clothing we wear, to the entertainment we consume every day. The War on Terror would have a transformational effect on the U.S.’s armed forces, prompting a host of changes in how the country wages war, from the weapons, systems, and equipment that the military takes onto the battlefield. While the game had been years in the making, its creators had no idea that their product would arrive on the doorstep of what would eventually become the United States’ longest-running conflict: the larger War on Terror in the Middle East, and the 20-year campaign in Afghanistan.

11 attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C.

When Halo: Combat Evolved arrived in 2001, it came on the heels of the Sept.