Lead producer Jason Pace discusses the future of Microsoft's most important series.

[  1 | 2 | Next Page »  ]

Halo 3 screenshot

Microsoft reckons Halo, its most important first-party franchise, can eventually be as big as sci-fi behemoth Star Wars. Sound like a story beamed in from far, far away? Halo Studio lead producer Jason Pace, a man we caught up with at a recent Halo Wars event held deep within the bowels of Westminster's Cabinet War Rooms, is as serious as the Master Chief himself. Read on for a glimpse into the future of one of gaming's most beloved and popular franchises.

VideoGamer.com: You're the lead producer at Halo studio. What's the role of Halo studio at Microsoft Game Studios?

Jason Pace: Microsoft owns the Halo IP and the Halo franchise. The Halo studio within Microsoft floats above all of our projects, whether it's the Bungie first-person shooters or Halo Wars with Ensemble, or the novels that we do, or any of the other projects that we have going on, they're all centrally managed by that agency. We're charged with guarding the integrity of the story and franchise.

VideoGamer.com: What led to the decision to make the first non-Bungie Halo game a console strategy game? It seems like a move that's not immediately obvious.

JP: Ensemble is very passionate about Halo and they had some really great ideas for how it could happen. We are always as a franchise looking for new ways to tell Halo stories. Super convenient that we had Ensemble handy! I would say that the Halo universe and the Halo FPS games actually set the stage fairly well for an RTS. Think about it. You have a number of different units all with very specific skills and abilities. And so taking all of them and moving them over and letting folks experience it in another way is really interesting. Also, Halo fans love to blow things up, they love firepower, they love to experiment with weapons, they like giant explosions. If you think about, in the Halo FPS games you're playing as one person with one weapon, imagine what you can do when you're playing with 40 people with 40 different weapons and you're seeing massive explosions all over the place. It lends itself very well to the Halo fan.

VideoGamer.com: What led to the decision not to have Master Chief in the game? Is there a danger that because he's not in it that some fans are going to say, well I'm not going to bother?

JP: Certainly there are Halo fans that identify very strongly with Master Chief just like there are Halo fans that identify very strongly with online first-person shooter multiplayer play. I don't believe those folks represent the majority of the fans of the franchise. I think the fans of the franchise, we've seen time and again that they want to go out and they want to read the books, they want to experience everything they can, they write their own fan fiction, they take their own movies and make their own stories. And so I think they'll be very open to experiencing the game in the new way.

VideoGamer.com: So this game really is for fans that like the story and lore.

JP: I think if we accomplish the goals we set out to you're going to see new people coming to the franchise who haven't experienced it before. It's certainly my hope that we're going to have lots of Ensemble fans and lots of RTS players try us out to see if we've succeeded. So I believe that that's a critical segment of our audience. By and large as the Halo studio, our first duty is to the millions and millions of Halo fans that we have, so we're very excited about bringing them over as well. But I think we're definitely going to see a blend. And certainly as we went through development of the project we considered RTS players absolutely equal, in terms of wanting to give them a great experience, to the Halo FPS fan.

VideoGamer.com: You've said Halo is the most important first-party franchise Microsoft has. In terms of endurance, is Halo going to be around for many, many years to come? Is it something we're going to see on Xbox consoles for decades?

JP: We as a studio view Halo as our Star Wars. We want it to become that culturally pervasive. Our vision for what the franchise can be extends far beyond just first-person shooters that are appealing to a certain kind of audience. This is a vast universe, it extends back thousands and thousands of years, it's huge, many different worlds, races that we haven't even met yet. And so we view the future of the franchise in the same way that we would view any cross-cultural entertainment franchise property, which is we hope to tell many different stories in many different ways, capture the hearts and minds of new generations as we go forward. So absolutely we are committed to this franchise.

VideoGamer.com: To get that real mainstream appeal you're looking at a movie. What's the latest on that?

JP: We haven't committed to anything specific yet so there's nothing I can really talk about at the moment, but certainly you can think of, we're open to any great way to tell the Halo story, whether it's movies or television or multimedia in some other way, that's something we would determine given time and opportunity. We're certainly looking at ways to make the franchise as relevant as possible to the widest number of people.

[  1 | 2 | Next Page »  ]