My taste in video games mostly runs to the cartoony Japanese stuff: Mario, Zelda, Katamari. But I had access to an Xbox and a copy of Halo for a while, and I couldn’t rest until I finished it. I walked around thinking about it whenever I wasn’t playing. Every aspect of it was familiar, except for the fact of all of the sources being giddily combined together without any concern for logic. It’s like a perfect nerd mixtape.
Here’s a list of all Halo’s sources, the ones I can think of anyway.
Every war movie
You play a space marine. You get dropped off in what’s basically a helicopter. You drive jeeps and throw grenades. There’s a particularly entertaining sequence where you’re driving around in what looks like an M1 Abrams tank.
Which is itself a mashup of many World War II movies. George Lucas spliced together a mixtape of dogfight scenes and then had Industrial Light & Magic recreate them shot-for-shot. One mixtape inspired another. The very first level of the game is lifted from the opening scene from Star Wars almost exactly. You fight your way off a spacecraft that’s been boarded and overrun by armored dudes shooting lasers. You make your way to an escape pod and launch it to the planet below. The only thing that’s missing is C-3P0.
Star Trek
In Halo’s universe the United Nations Space Command maps neatly onto Starfleet.
Alien and Aliens
The moody, cramped hallways with flickering lights. The helmet-mounted video cameras. The frequent sense of claustrophobic dread. The horror of humans being parasitized by aliens. One of the Covenant species looks kind of like the aliens in Aliens.
Ringworld
It’s set on a ringworld.
The Bible
Your foes are called the Covenant and the Flood. The game and the world it’s set on are called Halo.
The Song of Roland
Your holographic assistant Cortana is named after a sword.
All this borrowing and sampling is what makes Halo great. If it was “original” it would be tedious. You don’t need a ton of exposition and backstory if you’ve seen the movies or read the books that Halo is based on.
Any influences, references or outright thefts I missed? I know I must have. Hit me up in the comments.
I played Halo Combat Evolved through halo three, I thought it wasnt original
Thanks for filling that in. I wondered why the main spaceship had such a poetic name – “The Pillar Of Autumn” – in what’s mostly a mindless first-person shooter.
The style of spaceship names in Halo seems to have been taken from Iain Banks’ sf novels about the Culture: http://marathon.bungie.org/story/halo_culture.html
(I haven’t played the game, I found that link while being a Banks nerd)