Weta Workshop's life-sized Warthog for the as-yet-unproduced Halo movie 

Having finally decided to publish our two-part August 2007 Q&A with Bungie writing director Joseph Staten, there's a bit of scoop that's so good, we couldn't wait until tomorrow's installment to share it with you, so we're excerpting it today. In the middle of an exchange with Staten about the fine line that Bungie must walk between making Master Chief a proper character and leaving plenty of space for the player to feel as though he or she is the Spartan warrior, we threw in a question about how the planned-but-aborted Halo movie would tackle the problem of a lead character whose face was hidden by his helmet. To our surprise, Staten not only answered the question, but offered up the fascinating revelation that Master Chief would have in fact been something of a supporting character in Halo film. For the first time, the normally tight-lipped folks at Bungie give some insight into how the Halo movie might have played out, which we present to you exclusively here at Level Up. Enjoy.

I know you can't talk about the movie very much. But on a high sort of level, those same things that you said make Master Chief work for the game--the transparency of the character; the fact that while the character is iconic, he doesn't have a face that you see--did that pose a challenge in the conversations that you were having about how to make something as cinematic as Halo work well as a movie?

Uh-huh.

And do the fans really want to see the face? How do you deal with something like that?

Back in August, we conducted a series of interviews with Bungie for a Newsweek magazine story about Halo 3 that for a variety of reasons never came to fruition. One of the people we spoke with was Halo 3 writing director Joseph Staten, whom we first met when we began seriously writing about videogames back in 1999. In Part I of our two-part Q&A with Staten, who also authored the novel "Halo: Contact Harvest," Staten discusses how the story for Halo 3 emerged from the ashes of the truncated final act of Halo 2, the interplay between a games script and the game itself, and how the writers' room at Bungie operates. Enjoy.

From the interviews I've done with folks from Bungie, people seem to be all saying that the problems that arose at the end of Halo 2 didn't originate in the story or the script, that they were technical instead, which then had script ramifications. Can you talk about what that was like for you as a writer? And since you're being held blameless, did anything have to change in how you approached writing the scripts during the long pre-production process on Halo 3?

Got you. Well, just to give you a little bit of the history of Halo 2, I think from a writing point of view, we of course set out to tell a story with an ending. A cohesive story. Set it all up so there was a great third act where everything got wrapped up. The Master Chief and the Arbiter came together to fight against all the bad things in their world and emerged as heroes side by side together. The reality of the situation is that we ran out of time on the single-player campaign and we basically ended the story at the end of the second act, and we didn't have time to produce the third act.

The really sad thing about that was that we had time to write a pretty good cliffhanger. And what I mean by that is we knew early on, with however many months to go--four months to go--that this was going to happen. We made the painful decision to cut early, and we had time at least to write something that wasn't horrible. It certainly wasn't what we wanted to do. We knew it was going to be painful for the fans and for us as well but we had time to make it not completely horrible. And that's no fun to write when you know you're writing something that isn't the best way it can be and you're writing to solve a problem and a fairly big problem. So that's the basic way that it went down.

There's certainly things that could have been written better as far as Halo 2 went, so I don't know why people hold me blameless. They just must like me, N'Gai. I guess they think I'm a stand up guy. But no, I mean that was the basic story. It wasn't anything we set out to do. We certainly didn't set out to write a cliffhanger.

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