Image credit: Bungie / Robert McLees & Penguin Random House / Gustaf Tenggren
It was the 20-year anniversary of Halo 2 at the weekend, which saw the shooter’s modern counterparts celebrating with classic multiplayer maps and long-lost levels. But also emerging from the dust of time are insights to the sequel’s development back in 2004. Rolling Stone interviewed two key designers of the game and made a fun discovery. The Flood (the sickly pale alien infestation that briefly turns Halo into sci-fi horror) was partly inspired by a colourful and innocent children’s book about a nice elephant.
Halo and its sequel had a smaller development team than an equivalent blockbuster today might have. This meant some designers would have to do odd jobs outside of their wheelhouse. This is what led Lorraine and Robert McLees, a husband and wife who worked at Bungie during Halo 2’s development, to create various things for the game beyond the requirements of their job description.
Although Robert was a weapons designer, for instance, he was also made responsible for coming up with concept art for the Flood. And he particularly remembers creating the infection form of the creature (the little creepy bug-bois that burst and infect their victims with spores).
The first concept “looked like a cross between a house centipede and a blood sausage,” he told Rolling Stone. “That was disgusting, but didn’t look very mobile.”
Unhappy with the first pass, the artist discovered the perfect shape for the alien creature in time for another attempt. And it turned out to be an image that had been “skittering around in the shadowy parts of my brain” since childhood.
“When my daughter was born, I gathered up all those Golden Key books I remembered from my own childhood so I could read to her before she went to sleep at night. And there it was, in The Saggy Baggy Elephant, a palm tree launched into the air by dancing elephants — the weird shape that had been haunting my subconscious mind for thirty-odd years. That was the basis for the Flood Infection Form.”
You can see the exact palm tree he mentions in this YouTube reading of the book. And sure enough, the tree’s roots do evoke the unmistakable tendril legs of a Flood critter. The trunk also looks a lot like that ugly conical appendage that crowns the alien larva’s head. So I guess we all need to thank children’s illustrator Gustaf Tenggren for inspiring a horrifying monster. Neat.
The interview is interesting reading if you’re a Halo head. The two designers talk openly about how crunch at the studio affected their life, even as they dealt with a newborn baby. Lorraine, who was responsible for the game’s cover art, was also the person who designed the Pillar Of Autumn, the human spaceship from the first Halo. That’s cool. If I am ever asked to imagine “human military spaceship”, to this day I would instantly summon that vessel to mind.
A lot of the crunch suffered by Bungie devs is well-documented already. One engineer at the studio said the brutal environment “almost killed Bungie as a company.” Another lead engineer, Chris Butcher, once told our sister site Eurogamer that they worked seven day weeks for months on end. Or as he put it:
“The crunch on Halo 2 was, ‘Oh my god, we’re f***ed. We’re all going to die.’ Months and months of that emotional, negative tone was really hard to deal with – but at the same time, we did a lot of awesome work.”
The Rolling Stone interview basically confirms a lot of that history.
“Bungie, up to then, never had good managers,” said Robert McLees. “They had creatives that were forced into managerial roles while still remaining in their creative roles — basically working two jobs. This kinda worked when there were 12 of us. It worked less well when there were 30 of us. It collapsed when there were 60 of us.”
“At the time, we really didn’t know what was going to happen,” added Lorraine. “If we were going to make it or not. It was the make-it-or-break-it period for the young Bungie crew. So much burn-out.”
Crunch continues to be a problem for game developers today. The management of the studio working on Star Citizen recently imposed a mandatory seven-day week on its employees, for example. Diablo IV workers have also complained about unsustainable work demands.