Buzz kill

Master Chief Petty Officer John-117, seen here in screen shot, is the main character in the videogame Halo 3. (Bungie Studios/Canadian Press)

His name is Master Chief. He is the most renowned pixelated character in the gaming universe. Over the course of a storyline that’s positively Wagnerian in scope, he has battled the fundamentalist Covenant and pumped a variety of high-calibre ordnance into his grisly enemies. He has done this everywhere from Mombassa, Kenya, to High Charity, the Covenant’s massive Holy City-cum-space-station complex. Gamers last saw Master Chief at the tail end of Halo 2, stowed away on a ship heading back to Earth, where he engaged in an exchange that has, for the past three years, led to a crescendo of anticipation. When asked what he’s doing on board, Master Chief growled, “Sir, finishing this fight.”

And boy, what a fight it’s been. Halo 3’s success may be guaranteed — more than one million games have already been shipped to retailers across the continent — but Master Chief’s real mission is to bring Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console, and the attendant LIVE internet platform, to the forefront of the gaming universe. Hyped with a fervour best described as messianic, Halo 3 aims to lure gamers away from the current champ of game-console brilliance: the Nintendo Wii (the Atari 2600 of our era). It’s also supposed to coerce female gamers away from free PC puzzle games and mobile-phone Tetris, while convincing skeptical stockholders that the Xbox 360 can move the tens of millions of consoles Microsoft insists it can.

If this fight has so far incurred any genuine casualties, it’s the people who have worked an astonishing number of hours to create the three-quel to what many in the industry regard as the most successful videogame franchise of all time. In a year lousy with three-peats (The Bourne Ultimatum, Spider-Man 3, Rush Hour 3, ad nauseam), there is perhaps no more anticipated third at-bat than Halo 3. The hysteria has reached proportions matched only by the release of, well, Halo 2, in 2004. But despite the fanfare, there’s one niggling fact that should get in the way of all the good cheer. As popular as the Halo franchise may be among console gaming’s hardcore base, Master Chief and Co. elucidate everything that’s wrong with the videogame industry.

The story is legendary, at least in gaming circles. In 1991, two University of Chicago seniors named Alex Seropian and Jason Jones founded Bungie Software. Three years later, they made a seismic impact on the burgeoning first-person shooter genre, in which the player wields a weapon and fires at humans or beasties from their character’s perspective, a brilliant iteration of cinema’s point-of-view shot. Bungie’s Marathon (1994), programmed for the Macintosh system, was universally acknowledged as a watershed moment in the medium’s history, even though it was not particularly well known outside hardcore Mac circles. Presaging Halo — there are lengthy online disquisitions on how the games are linked plotwise — Marathon built the mould. Both storylines are set in the distant future, both refer to eponymous dystopian spacecraft, and in both the bad guys — the Pfhor in Marathon and the Flood and Covenant in Halo — are hell-bent on enslaving humankind. The original was a superb use of the medium, plunging the player into the depths of the action and laying down the ground rules that have now, sadly, become uniform and stale. Gaming critics decry the lack of character, the sameness of the plotting, the mindless violence of the genre. (The recent BioShock, with a richly imagined universe that rivals the best of sci-fi cinema, is the rare exception).

Canadian gamers seen playing Halo 3. (Microsoft XBox Canada/Marketwire/Canadian Press)

With the release of Marathon Infinity in 1996, Seropian et al. were poised for gaming superstardom. Three years after that, Bill Gates and Microsoft poached the Bungie boys from Steve Jobs and Macintosh, on the basis of Halo: Combat Evolved, which was still in development. In 2002, the game rolled out on the new Xbox platform and helped establish Microsoft as a genuine competitor to Sony’s Playstation and the Nintendo platforms. For the uninitiated, Halo: Combat Evolved might have seemed like any number of first-person shooters, but what made it special was an incredible attention to detail, an obedience to the rules of the game’s universe (gamers call this “physics” — how the character moves through different gravitational fields and environments) and a solid story arc. If Doom cemented the first-person shooter as a gaming standard, Halo framed it within cinematic narrative possibilities.

On paper, and certainly in financial terms, Halo has been an out-and-out success. At first glance, it casts gaming in a glowing light. Halo 2 earned $125 million US on its first day in stores. Released in North America on Sept. 25, Halo 3 has moved an estimated $180 million US worth of games and associated merchandise, making the series “a cultural touchstone, a Star Wars for the thumbstick generation,” according to Wired magazine.

Oh, really? Run the math, and you find a cultural phenomenon that isn’t all that popular. Conservatively, a Halo fan will spend an average of $110 getting up to speed with the new release. (The regular edition of the game costs $69.99; the Legendary Edition, which comes with a Master Chief helmet, costs $149.99). That works out to about 1.7 million North American punters, not counting bootlegs. A better indication of the game’s popularity may be the figures for the people who play Halo 2 online using Xbox LIVE: Microsoft puts the number at five million unique players. These are good numbers — and they have made the franchise a lucrative one — but as a communal popular cultural experience, using Star Wars as a comparison is ludicrous.

The gaming industry’s bluster belies the fact that its pundits are consumed by the following conundrum: Why has gaming never managed the sweeping, across-the-board popularity of film or television? This problem — one of “market penetration” — is vital. The trouble seems clear, and can in large measure be summed up by the Halo franchise: Games are too difficult to play, they are too violent and they are designed and marketed to teenaged boys. Gaming consoles must become entertainment staples, used by everyone in the home. Master Chief will never be a “cultural touchstone” for a broad section of the population, because he is — despite the marketing hysteria — a niche product.

And Microsoft knows it. This year, they are pushing titles like Guitar Hero 3 as aggressively as they are their ubiquitous, tent-pole sports and shoot-’em-up releases. At a recent holiday release junket in Toronto, all they would show critics was a game called Scene-It, a movie-trivia title with dedicated buzzer controllers meant to replicate the “game-show experience,” and a new Viva Pinata title, with 60 mini-games that don’t require a four-week investment to play. “We want to make sure people realize that gaming is for everyone,” the PR representative assured me. No one mentioned Halo.

Games like Scene-It are attempts at creating the “date game” or a game the whole family can play, a way for the Xbox to insinuate itself into every aspect of the home entertainment universe and establish itself as a genuinely popular cultural experience. The fanboys (and girls, here and there) who lined up for Halo 3 may provide the industry with its bread and butter, but the gravy must come from elsewhere.

Richard Poplak is a Toronto-based journalist.

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