header is screenshot from Halo Infinite
Awake on Foreign Shores
Molly Zara-Esther Bloch

Before Halo, Bungie was known for Marathon, a trilogy of Doom-like shooters released exclusively for Apple workstations between 1994 and 1996. At the time, Apple made sensible hardware for first-person shooters, since most computer games weren’t actually 3D yet. Doom used an old system called binary space partitioning, which allowed it to render a flat map in faux-3D through a tightly controlled set of scaling and perspective tricks. This meant that Doom could be tight and responsive on a 30 MHz microprocessor from 1985, but it also meant that the game remained fundamentally 2D. It was a tradeoff: good performance came at the cost of the up/down axis, meaning players couldn’t lob grenades over cover or shoot enemies in the head.

The first Marathon game did elaborate on this somewhat, but its contributions were mainly artistic, rather than technical. Where Doom was uncannyMarathon took pains to feel grounded: you can swim in the water, you can mess with computer terminals, and the guns can be reloaded with lots of reassuring pops and clicks. There’s a sense that you’re playing as a body, navigating a place, and handling physical objectssomething that wasn’t a huge priority in your average Doom clone. By the end of the Marathon series, though, things had changed.

Marathon Infinity, the trilogy’s multiplayer-focused conclusion, launched in October 1996. Earlier that same year, Id Software released Quakea true 3D shooter+, complete with headshots and projectile physics. By 1998, this style evolved to produce landmarks like Epic’s Unreal and Valve’s Half-Life, both of which have remained household names in the decades since (in one form or another). This era would prove to be an inflection point for the games industry as a whole, anticipating the major strides of the sixth and seventh console generations, when the PlayStation 2 and the Xbox 360 were introduced. It was also a moment that put Bungie squarely on the wrong side of history.

The late '90s boom in 3D gaming was enabled by the earliest consumer-level graphical processing units, most notably the “Voodoo” line from the now defunct 3DFX. Like their modern equivalents, these GPUs were aftermarket extensions of a computer’s capabilities, which had to be slotted directly into the motherboard in order to function. It was a very modular approach to computer techthe idea that internal hardware components should be swappable and extensible by the end user. This jived well with Microsoft’s pick-and-choose approach to OS design. After all, Windows 95 and 98 were natively multiplatform. As a result, 3D gaming rapidly became a specialty for Windows machines, and Apple computers were left behind. This wasn’t a major issue for Apple (who, at the time, had other irons in the fire) but it left Bungie facing a dilemma.

Marathon had been conceived as software for Apple computers, but Apple computers no longer made sense for Marathon. Without 3D acceleration, you couldn’t go toe-to-toe with Unreal and Half-Life. The bar had been raised, but Bungie’s feet were stuck in flatland. And so, the studio moved on to greener, higher-dimensional pastures.

After one Windows release++, Bungie struck a deal with Microsoft to provide launch software for the tech giant’s then-fledgling Xbox console. That launch title, released in November of 2001, was about a war in space between a militarized humanity and an alien nemesis called the Covenant. Bungie named this game Halo: Combat Evolved.

///

When the Halo series started in 2001, it was a revelation, especially on consoles. For an end user, the Xbox was much simpler than a gaming PC, but its graphics were handled by a cutting edge Nvidia GeForce chipset. It was a platform that made Halo responsive, pseudo-real, and relatively accessible. Anybody with a TV and $300 could buy an Xbox, pop in a copy of Halo, and start perforating aliens in a satisfyingly haptic manner.

This model, balancing accessibility and realism, proved to be insanely good for sales. While the original Xbox managed to sell about 24 million units globally during its lifespan, Halo and Halo 2 sold around 14 million copies. More than half of all Xbox owners bought at least one Halo title. By 2007, about one Halo game had been sold for every resident of Pennsylvania. It rapidly became a touchstone in gaming, enjoying a ubiquity only afforded to icons like Pac-Man, Mario, and Sonic the Hedgehog before. And in North America, the game’s success was even greater. Here, Halo didn’t just sell the Xbox the way Sonic sold the SEGA Genesis. Halo sold video games the way Star Wars sold science fiction. And much like Star Wars itself, Bungie’s fictional universe lived and died by its own fictional industrial design.

The Halo franchise is filled with large and small technological artifacts, which, I’d argue, are a major part of the series’ appeal. Each artificial object in the Halo-verse seems to exist, from the titular ring-shaped space station to a single crystalline bullet fired from a Needler. Each weapon has its own heft, recoil, and rate of fire. Vehicles have distinct weights and turning radii. Environments and objects are made from recognizable (fictional) materials, and made with recognizable (fictional) manufacturing techniques.

It’s easy to tell which faction made what, and each faction’s values and origins are immediately apparent through their industrial design. Which planet produces this metal? What kind of hand was meant to fit this device? Who would build a gun to these specifications, in this form factor, with this amount of recoil, and why? Any good sci-fi story can conjure a seemingly touchable future, but in Halo, you can hold the future in one hand and use it to pistol whip somebody.

In the 2000s and early 2010s, this believability came at the cost of visible human skin. The Master Chief (Halo’s original hero) is a genetically altered super soldier called a Spartan, and he comes fully encased in a suit of boxy green power armor, his face obscured by a mirrored visor. Humans are complex, curved, and familiar—it’s easy for a 3D model of a human to seem very off. On the other hand, guns, aliens, and armor are easy: they can be angular and iridescent, and scaly alien hides can be faked with shader techniques.

Feminine silhouettes would seem to have no place in this technocentric visual universe+++, where right angles are heroic and curves are for Covenant pulse carbines. And yet they do have a place: the Master Chief’s perpetual sidekick-slash-love interest is Cortana, a sentient AI construct who manifests as a sexy hologram lady. On screen, she looks like a shimmery, translucent 3D model of a woman. And that’s exactly what she is in the game’s fiction.

There’s a genius to these aesthetic trappings—a way of sidestepping the artificiality of digital 3D by making the world synthetic. This had been done before, but never in a work aimed at adults. And as the sixth and seventh console generations wore on, it became clear that Halo’s aesthetic sensibility was by far the longest shadow the franchise would cast.

In Assassin’s Creed, the glassy Apple Store shimmer perfected in Halo 2 and would become a framing device to living history in the form of the Animus. In the Mass Effect trilogy, the bump-mapped organicism of the Covenant got wedded to the melodrama of TV sci-fi. Halo spawned imitators from franchises like Warhammer 40,000 and writers like Orson Scott Card, and quotations of its visual DNA have cropped up as recently as Denis Villeneuve’s Dune. Of course, this is to say nothing of the Xbox 360 itself, with its subtle matte/gloss texture variance and its aerodynamic beveling—useful, perhaps, if one were to throw it out a window. It looks like Covenant machinery, to the point that the console’s Halo 3 edition seems a bit on the nose. Maybe it’s a bomb, or a battery pack, or the carburetor for a Wraith.

The recently released Halo Infinite took this full circle in an odd way. The Master Chief’s new copilot AI comes on something resembling an SD card (or, perhaps, a PS2 memory card), which slots into a round bezel on the back of his helmet. A ring around this bezel occasionally flashes green, making the back of the Chief’s head resemble nothing more than the eject button on the original Xbox. One of gaming’s most famous heroes has become an increasingly literal personification of the hardware that made him famous: a kind of patron saint of the Xbox brand, and by extension, Microsoft itself.

Microsoft was pushing its connection to PC gaming before I was even born, but the Halo franchise became a special vector for this during my childhood. I vividly recall a Spartan blowing up a mini fridge in a 2011 commercial for Windows 7. “Buy a Windows 7 PC, get a free Xbox 360,” an edgy male narrator proclaimed. “All you really need for college!” This concept got another iteration, too: in a recent ad for Windows 11, the Chief is seen shooting down a Banshee with a rocket launcher, kicking up a purple dust cloud that wouldn’t turn heads as an iOS wallpaper.

As far as the Halo aesthetic might drift from its origin, though, Xbox consoles have always retained one aspect of ownership over the juggernaut they helped create. Xbox controllers have always had a pair of plastic triggers, which can be pulled to fire a gun on screen.

///

The title of this essay is a reference to the opening level of Brigador, a cult classic tactics game released in 2016. Much like Homeworld (a groundbreaking real-time strategy game from 1999), Brigador tells a detached sci-fi narrative that feels emotional and cataclysmic in the broad strokes of its presentation.

Brigador is presented in a kind of 2.5D view. Gameplay is seen from a top-down isometric perspective. Players control giant mechs, and wage a war for control of the industrial districts and suburban sprawl of Solo Nobre, a distant, extraplanetary mining colony. Like Halo, Brigador endows its world with a kind of synthetic believability. Natural gas pipelines wind past grassy cul-de-sacs filled with identical houses, the two worlds separated only by hedgerows and thin concrete walls. It seems inevitable that open war would scatter this distinction, and mix everything together like a two-part epoxy. And unlike in Halo, Brigador’s protagonists are the invading force.

In Brigador, a machine gun is the size of a studio apartment. It starts up with a sound like thirty lawnmowers, and it indiscriminately levels the environment to the edge of the screen. Stray bullets chew through suburban homes, chain restaurants, and truck stops, churning neighborhoods and infrastructure into useless hurricanes of drywall, metal, and fire. The Solo Nobre Concern is not concerned with the lives of the people of this city. It only cares about the mineral deposits beneath their feet.

The word “brigador” is never quite defined outright, but the brigadors we see are like private military contractors crossed with Uber drivers. Some have sought this lifestyle out, while others seem to have no choice in the matter. They’re people from many different walks of life who have found themselves in the cockpits of building-sized war machines, fighting to reclaim the city for a distant corporate trust known only as the “Solo Nobre Concern.” The SNC, then, is an entity so powerful that it can fight a war with clean hands, leaving the wetwork to the gig economy.

This type of war doesn’t exist in the Halo-verse, where neoliberal humans and theocratic aliens fight for control of the eponymous Halos. In fiction, a Halo is an artificial ringworld, and part of an ancient weapons system devised by the setting’s extinct Forerunner civilization. We’re frequently reminded that even a single Halo is the kind of military hardware that—in the wrong extraterrestrial claws—could take an entire galaxy hostage. And with the stakes so astronomical, it’s only logical that humanity should intervene. Could any preventative measure be too great, when failure could lead to galactic annihilation?

This is an image that would’ve loomed in the American subconscious in the aftermath of 9/11, which predated Halo: Combat Evolved by exactly two months and four days. And indeed, the development of the first-person shooter would come to parallel the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, in the same way that classic Hollywood traced the two World Wars. The monsters and space Nazis of Quake were supplanted by Halo’s alien zealots, who were then replaced by Call of Duty 4’s horde of Soviet remnants and ambiguous Middle Easterners.

But as the so-called “War on Terror” dragged on, it became ever more obvious that America’s pretense of heroism was a ghost. The American invasion of Iraq was predicated on the notion that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein controlled weapons of mass destruction, possibly even nuclear armaments. Public consent to this war was spun from America’s refusal to wait for “the smoking gun, [which] could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” But as it would prove, the gun was never even loaded: Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.

Instead, the Iraq War would be remembered as a war over a mineral resource—not for the country of Iraq, but for the petroleum reserves beneath it. But long after this became irrefutable, American media has remained fixated on wars to control weaponry. In Halo Infinite, the antagonists are digging holes, but they aren’t mining for raw materials. They’re trying to pull a fully formed weapon out of the ground.

///

We don’t usually think of it this way, but computer hardware comes from the earth. Phones and game consoles are essentially just collections of sand, petroleum, and a handful of conductive and semiconductive metals, mechanically and chemically arranged to create a machine that can scroll TikTok or play Naruto: Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 4.

The minerals used in modern electronics can vary by use case, but most computer tech is created with tantalum capacitors. Tantalum is a metal with unique conductive properties that sits next to Tungsten on the periodic table of elements. It occurs naturally as part of a shiny, black metallic ore called coltan (a contraction of columbite-tantalite), which needs to be mined, smelted, and processed before it’s used.

In 1998, a war broke out in the mountainous eastern half of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), an economically poor, mineral-rich country in Central Africa. This war was complex, and only a small part of a much larger and longer lasting armed conflict. But in Eastern Congo, Congolese and Rwandan forces fought for (among other things) control of the region’s lucrative coltan mines. And these mines were incredibly lucrative.

During this period, the price of coltan reportedly jumped from $49 per pound to $275 per pound, where it would remain for some time. This elevated price was driven in large part by the exploding demand for consumer electronics in Europe and North America, including cell phones, PCs, and game systems. Because of this, the resulting conflict in Eastern Congo would eventually be dubbed “the PlayStation War.”

Although coltan mines became sites with huge economic power, a mine needs to be worked before it can generate value. Armed conflict will often repel workers from a region, but war efforts need to be funded in order to stay viable. Because of this, the mines were often worked by prisoners of war and displaced children. Of this, former British politician Oona King remarked, “Kids in Congo were being sent down mines to die so that kids in Europe and America could kill imaginary aliens in their living rooms.”

And while this is true, it would also prove to be a debilitatingly political take on an issue that had already grown much bigger than games. The turn of the millennium was arguably the first period of ascendance for what we now know as the tech industry. The boom in electronics that drove the price of coltan was itself propelled by the American and European taste for tech with curb appeal. And while some of those devices ran Halo and Kingdom Hearts, others (especially Apple’s iPod) would form the foundations of the coming smartphone revolution. And today, the boom mineral in Congo is cobalt, a metal used in the lithium-ion batteries found in phones and electric cars. The name cobalt comes from the German kobold, meaning goblin, a reference to the toxic properties of its ore.

On an episode of the Vox podcast Today Explained, journalist Nicolas Niarchos related a story from 2014 about a former Congolese township called Kasulo, which dismantled itself (and, from a certain point of view, was dismantled) in pursuit of the rich cobalt deposits that laid in its soil. With the help of a Chinese mining firm, roads, churches, and the kitchens of rented homes were dug under in search of ore. Eventually, the town of Kasulo was demolished entirely. Former residents were either paid off or relocated to a nearby settlement called Samukinda, which lacked basic social services, and so it rapidly declined in population. Now, Kasulo is a vast, open strip mine where people—including children—dig up and pan cobalt ore by hand. This ore is sold to middlemen before it’s refined, meaning the greater part of its value will never reach the original miners.

Two decades ago, the exploitation of Congolese ores was driven by war, and by the fashionable whims of children and young adults in the Global North. But today, it’s driven in small part by the recursive sentimentality of adults, and in large part by the rectangular windows through which the Global North sees the world.

A thing about tech with curb appeal is that it almost always obscures its own cost. The phone in my pocket was sold to me on the assumption that I would see it as something almost naturally occurring—a disembodied screen—rather than an artifact produced by a supply chain. If that’s the extent of my relationship with my phone, I am unlikely to think of the person who dug it out of the soil.

And once that removal is deepened by decades of tech ubiquity, it can give rise to a weird form of artifice. The books I read, the podcasts I listen to, and the tweets I scroll are doubtlessly made by people, even if I only see them through the screen of a phone. The phone itself, though, seems to come from nowhere, fully formed—as if untouched by human hands.

The fictional guns of Halo, then, might feel more intrinsically real than the device that sits physically in my palm, and reacts to subtle changes in the position of my body. In this way, Halo’s guns are a distraction, in the way that a toy distracts, but also in the way that propaganda distracts.

For many mainstream gaming properties, this can never really change. The forever wars seen in AAA mainstays like Halo exist—at least partly—to compactify the stocks and flows of global capitalism into the simplicity of three dimensions. In its current state, the grind of modern industry isn’t a fight that can be finished. It can only evolve.

///

 + Quake is usually credited as the first true 3D shooter, but it actually isn’t. Bethesda Softworks’ Terminator: Future Shock (of all things) predates Quake by about a year, and it runs on the same full 3D engine as The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. Go figure!

++ A fantasy RTS called Myth.

+++ One of my favorite solutions to this problem is in the Metroid series, where Samus’s power armor cuts a visibly feminine figure. In Super Metroid, a game over results in her suit being vaporized, leaving her body exposed to the harsh elements of Planet Zebes in the moment before her death. The Metroid Prime series also lets us see her eyes reflected in her visor as a lighting effect.

***

Molly Bloch is a disgruntled former employee who is willfully misrepresenting the inclusive culture of our Company and its Subsidiaries (as outlined in our Guiding Principles). She can be reached for comment @guroflower.