Halo's Master Chief Was Redesigned Nine Times Before Getting His Iconic Look
"It took forever, but I wasn't going to stop," said the game's co-creator.
Bungie
Halo's Master Chief is instantly recognizable to any player now, but he could have had a different look, according to the game's co-creator Marcus Lehto.
"The creation of the Master Chief is something that I went through so many ringers to try to find the right look, the right feel, the right stature for such a character. We tried a lot of things," he told Kent State Magazine, an outlet from the university Lehto studied at back in the 80s.
Lehto's early designs were inspired by an M1 Abrams tank, an Apache helicopter, and a BMX helmet. He rebuilt the character nine times before it got the look we all know and love now. "It took forever, but I wasn't going to stop because I had learned through the program here that you don't stop when you're just on your first iteration."
You can see traces of what could have been in Shi Kai Wang's early concepts and Lehto's later ones.
Another past possibility was Halo becoming a Mac game, but Microsoft quickly snatched the opportunity:
Bungie
"We got up on stage with Steve Jobs at Macworld and we talked about it there," Lehto recalled. "Then Microsoft said, 'Steve Jobs can't have that. We're going to buy you and move you all to the Pacific Northwest, and then we're going to have you build this game for the Xbox.'"
This was "just a perfect timing, the perfect wave of excitement, and it just hit the ground running," according to Lehto. Bungie didn't know at the time that their game would become so iconic: "It wasn't until we had the first fans show up to our doors and say, you made something that changed my life. And that's when we knew that something really special had happened."
At the moment, the studio is working on the reboot of Marathon, which has faced plenty of issues and has been delayed until 2026. Bungie "absolutely cannot afford" for the game to fail, so let's hope it will be a smoother ride in the future.
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