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. Read on.

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.

We didn't think we were necessarily going to make Halo 3. I mean, we made Halo 1 not knowing we were going to make Halo 2. So we started out designing Halo 2 not thinking that we were going to make a Halo 3. And so when we had to cut the final act....Well, we felt better because we had a pretty good idea that we were going to make a Halo 3, but it still sucked, because we knew it wasn't going to come out for a couple of years. I mean a cliffhanger with a couple years is--I remember how I felt, you know, as a little kid watching "The Empire Strikes Back," and as great as that film was, it was hard to wait. So I certainly empathize with our fans, how they felt at the end of Halo 2.

To answer the second part of your question, what we did at the beginning of Halo 3, like we often do at Bungie, is we take all the good ideas that we didn't have a chance to execute on in the previous game and really try to knock them out of the park this time around. Just one example, in Halo 1, we always wanted to have a mission where you--I'm talking about where you kill the prophet, where you found a prophet character and you killed him--that of course didn't happen in Halo 1, but it did happen in Halo 2. I think that was one of the more satisfying moments in Halo 2: jumping on the Prophet of Regret's throne and beating him up while he's yelling at you. That was something we always wanted to pull off in the first game, but didn't have a chance to do that. So there were certainly ideas like that for Halo 2 that we really wanted to do well in Halo 3 and we invested a lot of time from the art point of view and every other discipline--writing too--to make those cool moments pay off.

So that was one thing we did at the beginning of Halo 3 is try to figure what things we hadn't done yet that we really wanted to do. But also we wanted to, in Halo 3, really--we now knew we were making the final game in an unintended trilogy, and there were certain things we needed to wrap up. Certain answers we needed to provide. Give people a really solid, satisfying finish. Pay homage to the previous games. Do a little bit of hopefully good walks down memory lane. But mainly tie things up in a satisfying way. There could be no cliffhanger. There had to be a great rousing third act and that's what we set out to do.

So since Halo 2 had been truncated, was there a sense that you could take the third act of Halo 2 that you didn't get to use and say "All right, let's take that and we can just blow it out now"? Or--

Absolutely, yeah. Across the board from art and writing and cinematics, even dialogue. I mean, I took dialogue from Halo 2 and without ruining any surprises, a lot of the dialogue from the same climactic scene in Halo 2 is the same dialogue in that climactic scene of Halo 3. There are certain people that you must come to terms with in our story and put them down like the dogs that they are. And dialogue if it's good it's fairly portable. So yeah, a lot of those moments worked out the way that we wanted to have them work in Halo 2, but as you said, we definitely blew them out for Halo 3. I mean they're bigger, they're better

At the same time though, we did take that sort of third act from Halo 2, we stretched it across a much longer game, adding elements as we went. Certain things are in there now which were never planned to be in Halo 2, for example, Halo 2, we always planned to leave the Master Chief [separate] from Cortana. You were never going to get her back at the end of Halo 2. Now it's not to say you actually do get her back in Halo 3 but the search for her and finding out what happened to her is a big new part of Halo 3. So while we are taking those big moments from Halo 2's second act, and stretching them out, we're injecting a lot more hopefully interesting stuff in there for players to experience story-wise.

Got it. Now, when I did my first major tour of the game industry back in '99, Bungie was the first stop on my tour, in Chicago. And--

Yep, I believe my wife set up that interview with you.

Yes, she did. Back then, I had no idea how games were made and I just assumed it was kind of like these are TV shows like where a script gets written, or in this case, a design document, and then it goes and gets made.

Right.

And you guys were the ones who informed me, "Uh, no, that's actually not the way it is."

Right, right.

So can you talk about the writing process and the interplay between the writing and the gameplay development, from pre-production through to closing up the game.

What happens in movies is you write a script and for the most part, you try to just stick to script as much as possible. There's improvisation and such, but the script is a big deal. You budget from it; you plan your shots; you do all the stuff in a film based off of the script.

In games--let me see if I can come up with an analogy that's in any way interesting. I mean, in a movie you basically write the script, you set up your set, you hire the actors and you shoot it. Well in games, you sort of write the script, you hire the actors, you set up the sets and then you let a thirteen-year-old kid onto your set with a paintball gun and tell him to start shooting whatever he wants; move the camera around; tell you if it sucks--then get a bunch of his friends on your movie set and start shooting up with his friends. All the sudden, you've introduced this thing called gameplay, interactivity, which radically changes the way that you have to tell a story.

What we did a little bit differently for Halo 3, which wasn't necessarily intended, but what ended up happening was that we came up with a bunch of core ideas for the story; wrote an early version of the script; and then we just let the team bang on it for a while, and the writing took a back seat for a little bit. People started thinking about missions, started thinking about new gameplay ideas. Then we came back to the script about six months, nine months later and essentially tried to true it up to those decisions that had been made while the story just sort of sat for a little while. That was really great because what ended up happening is, from a writing point of view, you could go back in and look at it and say, "Wow, okay, so that's how the Arbiter's going to be handled in this game."

For example, in Halo 3 the Arbiter is not a playable character. He's playable in co-op but if you're just playing the game by yourself, you will only play as the Master Chief. That wasn't a decision that had been made when we wrote the first draft of the Halo 3 script. We were still operating in a world where potentially the Arbiter, you would play him sometimes and the Chief other times.

Right.

Well the designers decided, "Ah, it's going to be more fun for that not to be that way." So as the writer, you need to go back and say all right, "Okay, if every experience is told from the Master Chief's point of view, well how does that change? Well, actually that's probably better in this way and we'll have to fix that." So, long story short, what we did differently this time is we wrote, we took a break and just focused on what was fun, and then we went back and rewrote. And I think what ended up happening is you're going to get a story which is much more in tune to the gameplay experience. It's not fighting the gameplay experience; it's actually supporting it in a really nice way. At least that's our hope.

How many people are on the writing team?

Well there's me, there's Frank O'Connor, there's Rob McLees and there's Luke Smith now. So we got four guys on it.

I can't speak for all studios, but there are a lot of studios that don't have writers on staff.

Right.

And there are other studios that hire a couple of writers to form a small writing team. In some ways, that makes it more like the writing on a TV show. than a movie, which tends to be sort of writers working sequentially. What's the writers' room like at Bungie?

The great thing about the Bungie writing team is we all sort of have our specialties, the stuff that we really focus on, but at the same time we all sit, like you say, in the same little writers' pit and we're always turning around in our chairs and asking questions and shooting stuff back and forth. So while I tend to focus more on the game writing--meaning the cinematic scripts and the mission dialogue scripts for the actual games--Rob McLees tends to focus more on the stuff we're doing with our licensing partners, like the comic book writing. He maintains the story bible. Luke Smith is our web editor, so he's mainly in charge of external communication with our fans and putting stuff up on Bungie.net. And Frank is sort of a jack of all trades. He does a lot of stuff, writing for the website, but he'll also jump in and do--he did all the combat dialogue for Halo 3, for example, wrote all of that. We all sort of have our own specialties but we all do write, bat ideas around and make sure they're going to work across all the things that we're doing from a writing point of view.

But yeah, I mean it's true that most studios don't have that. In Halo 2 I did the writing and I directed the cinematics just like I did for Halo 1. And my experience at the end of Halo 2--and I don't think this is unique, I think a lot of people felt this way--is that everybody was just trying to do too many things and we really needed to focus in on doing the thing that we were really good at, really well. And at the beginning of Halo 3 I said, "You know, I think I want to write. I want to do that well. I want to make sure it's the best we've ever done."

That's when we--we didn't have a writing team before Halo 3. That was something we formed at the beginning of the project because we knew internally and externally we just needed to get out house in order. We wanted to communicate well with our licensing partners. At the same time we were trying to get the Halo movie done, right? That was a big writing task to oversee. So there was a lot of things we needed to take on and we needed multiple people to do that. But there's been flexibility too. I'm sitting here with the proofs of the first Halo novel that I've written because that's coming out pretty soon. I'm making sure that's all cleaned up for the printer. So the writing team is doing a whole bunch of different tasks, which is a lot of fun.

In terms of the combat dialogue, how do you approach something like that? Is there a trick to writing it? I'm trying to think what other medium that would correspond to where you would have that much combat dialogue. How do you approach that?

Well, it's kind of like writing jokes. You know combat dialogue really is one of those things where you try to get into the voice of a character and write a bunch of stuff which is informative, but at the same time it needs to be engaging, not repetitive, hopefully a little bit funny. Basically you have a list of 200 triggers or more which are basically things the AI cares about: I'm injured; I'm searching for an enemy; I'm throwing a grenade. And your job is to write the combat dialogue to fill in those triggers with up to eight permutations per trigger, multiplied by how many characters we have in the game. So you can see that when you're trying to write unique lines for "I am throwing a grenade," and make them funny at the same time, it gets very challenging very quickly. And this time around I think what we did for combat dialogue is really tried to leave a lot of that work for the actors; give them a good sense for what they were trying to talk about and then let them improv things that they themselves thought were interesting and entertaining and funny and in character. So the combat dialogue task was really a lot about giving people fodder for good performance, if that makes sense. I think Frank did a really good job this time around, and we hired really good actors to do combat dialogue.

Next: Staten explains why Master Chief intentionally has more personality than Half-Life's Gordon Freeman, discusses the stalled Halo movie, and explains how Bungie responds to early assessments of their works-in-progress from journalists and gamers alike.