“You get rewarded at any level that you approach the game from,” HALO executive producer Steven Kane said during a TCA press conference for the Paramount+ original series, which debuted today. “If you're a HALO deep lore fan, there are going to be Easter eggs there. There will be characters you may have only heard about in a book, in one of the seventeen or so books that were written. Some characters don't exist in the games at all, they're only in the back story. Some are brand new. We worked very hard to collaborate with 343 in every department to be able to reward the true HALO fan. And if you’re absolutely new to the game or don't know anything about it, it's still a great story. It's a great war story, love story. It's a story of intrigue and a story of characters who are just reaching for something, and they're all yearning for something that's just beyond their grasp. And the heroism comes in the trying, not so much succeeding. So, we feel like it's a reward for people who could play every game a million times, and people like some of us who couldn't figure out their way through the first level.”
(Adrienn Szabo/Paramount+)
Whether you’ve been playing the games since they first launched in 2001 or are curious to see what all of the excitement is about, the TV series is accessible to everyone. “When you have a piece of IP like this, when you have such massive scale and scope, it takes some time to get it right,” executive producer Justin Falvey said about the length of the show’s development. “One thing that is a constant, and if you look at the partners in this project, from us at Amblin, and Kiki and her team at 343, and our partners at Showtime, there's been a constant of the same people in the same positions that have been seeing this through and have stuck with it and been patient. I can't say that's the case at many of the companies, many of the different production entities that we all deal with on a daily basis and is part of the reason we're here today and to take our time and be thoughtful about it and make sure you have all the right pieces in place. And you have one chance to launch this as a scripted series. And the bar is incredibly high. It's a remarkable franchise and deserves that.”
Steven Spielberg and Amblin Television got involved with the project almost a decade ago in 2013. “That was really always something that came from Steven, was the sort of privilege to work on this IP,” executive producer Darryl Frank revealed. “We always treated it as though it was really a legacy project of Steven's and one of Steven's IP. He was given the opportunity by Don Mattrick, who was at Microsoft and was in charge of HALO and Xbox back in the day. And he always said, ‘Look, we have to treat this with respect and responsibility. It's such a huge project.’ And Steven sort of god-fathered it in terms of reading every script, helping choose showrunners, writers, director, cast, production design, visual effects. Every aspect of it he looked at, and really asked us to look at it as though it was one of his properties.”
“Adapting a beloved video game, with twenty years of history and story and character development, it's a daunting task,” executive producer Kiki Wolfkill explained. “But it's also really gratifying. We really looked at this as ‘How do we take the essence of the game experience and really express it in our own voice, the show's unique voice?’ And, so, with that, we set out to build a huge, epic sci-fi 26th-century world, with brutal aliens, with spartan super-soldiers, artificial intelligence, military politics, and ancient mystery. But at the same time against that backdrop, to really try and tell some very personal stories and explore the humanity, or lack thereof, and the complexity of our characters. And in particular, the Master Chief, who is the very best of us but also has had a lot taken away from him. So, I think really for us, with the season, with so much at stake, we really tried to explore how much of our humanity are we willing to sacrifice in order to save it?”
“I play Master Chief, who everybody knows about from the games,” actor Pablo Schreiber said, stepping into the role that video game players know all too well, the POV of the game franchise. “One of the biggest things that we have to deal with here is the difference in making a video game versus making a TV show. And we're very squarely in the HALO universe. It's a show for people who love the HALO universe, and it's a show for people who are just discovering the HALO universe.” While the actor has had military training, he was actually new to the video game. “The story is the entry point, and I studied all the cinematics for the game. Obviously, anything that's been established in terms of lore in the video game universe I looked at. And then the expanded literature, with the books and the graphic novels and a lot of the other media that's been made. The amount of material that we have to draw from going forward is unprecedented.”
Whether you’ve been a fan of HALO since the game first launched or are curious about the allure, the new television series provides an easy access point to the story for everyone on Paramount+.