STACK #132 Oct 2016

GAMES

FEATURE

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The Lore Makers

Frank O'Connor is the man in charge of all things Halo lore related at 343 Industries. We pulled him out of the archives and threw some questions at him.

pile of paper and printouts is now a digital, navigable reference guide to everything in the Halo universe, with links to the associated game assets, music, 3D, cross-references – you name it.   Has there ever been an occasion when you’ve been caught out in terms of lore? Inconsistencies?What happens then?  Yes. It happens all the time. Sometimes

What was involved in changing/discussing lore when the development shifted from Bungie to 343 Industries?  One of the last things I did as a Bungie employee was to finish collating and wrapping up some story bible assets and requests for Bonnie Ross, who had been charged with handling the transition. One of the things that really excited me, and perhaps was the seed of why I ended up [moving to] 343, was Bonnie’s passion for the story.  She knew the bible was kind of a hodgepodge of ideas that had and hadn’t made it into the games and lore, but she was determined to make it a foundation on which future Halo games and stories could be built. So her original idea was to expand and enhance what we already had. In the end, the hand-off spanned the development of ODST and Halo: Reach, so the material was growing even as the baton was being passed to Bonnie. And when I decided to follow that baton, I took

with the best intentions – cleaning up an unlikely statistic that doesn’t bear scrutiny, fixing scale on spaceships in cinematics, or stuff like the date and geography mismatches between Halo: Reach the game, and The Fall of Reach novel. Ultimately the games drive the story more powerfully than any other aspect, and their needs have to take precedence. But now that we have all of our game and extended fiction under one roof, we can better avoid inconsistencies, or at least take responsibility for when spack

the opportunity to build the bible and its content into something much more fundamental. Thanks to Corrine Robinson, Jeremy Patenaude and the franchise squad, what once was a big

filler has to be applied. As the universe gets bigger and more complex, there are more areas for inconsistency and errors to emerge. So all we can do is clean it up and put measures in place – including several staff devoted to just that – to prevent it from happening again at a granular level, and make smart choices to stop it from happening at a higher, planning level.

The Number of Halo Units Sold as of July 2015 • Halo: Combat Evolved - 6.43 million

• Halo 2 - 8.49 million • Halo 3 - 12.04 million • Halo 4 - 9.49 million

OCTOBER 2015

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