Halo is undoubtedly one of the most popular video games of all time. And, with just a week until the release of the TV series inspired by the gaming juggernaut, the showrunners have revealed that didn’t look at the game while producing the show.
“We didn’t look at the game,” says Season 1 showrunner Steven Kane. “We didn’t talk about the game. We talked about the characters and the world. So I never felt limited by it being a game.”
Halo (the TV show), is scheduled for release on March 24th, 2022 via Paramount Plus and is an adaptation of the extremely successful Xbox game. Speaking to Variety about the connections between the game and the series, executive produce Kiki Wolfking said that the team decided to take a new direction with the show.
“Early on, we were thinking about doing something that could tie very closely with the game,” Wolfkill says. “What we were finding was, trying to verbatim stay with everything that’d come before wasn’t serving the medium. It also wasn’t serving the creative teams and their need to express a story and build the world through their eyes.”
Halo executive producer and director Otto Bathurst echoed Wolfkill’s sentiment, explaining that a TV series couldn’t directly reflect the Halo game.
“There’s no way I was ever going to grasp the whole thing, so there was a lot of phone-a-friend,” he said, “they were extraordinary in their acceptance of the fact that they couldn’t just try to square-peg-round-hole their 20 years of history. Gaming is a completely different medium.”
Bathurst then went on to say that he hadn’t played Halo prior the landing the job to direct the pilot, leaving him at a loss on how to translate the video game to a show.
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“I was nervous,” he says. “How do you take a first-person shooter and expand it?”
Despite the confirmation that the new Halo series will take a different path than what appears in the game, Jen Taylor, who has voiced Cortana since the first game and plays the Halo character in the TV series, is hopeful that the audience will embrace the new direction.
“It feels familiar and different at the same time,” she says. “I hope people will be excited about that. Do you want it to be exactly the way you’ve already played it and already seen it? I’m not sure. It will be interesting to see how the fans respond to that.”
While showrunners openly spoke about the artistic decision to make the TV show branch away from the game, one of Amblin Television president’s Justin Falvey said that the team studied dozens of tie-in novels, comic books and exhaustive guides and encyclopedias to correctly capture the essence of the brand.
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Watch the trailer for Halo:
