Halo 'No Longer Just a Game' For Microsoft

News.com has a piece looking at the way that Halo has transformed from game to franchise for Microsoft and the Xbox. Despite the heavy advertising and branded products that seem to be everywhere in anticipation of next week's launch, the company is still trying to keep the IP as pure as possible. "Microsoft is wary of watering down Halo, meaning it would rather walk away from deals for Master Chief pajamas or Covenant sippy cups. Microsoft had little experience in talking to toymakers and others about how to transfer an onscreen experience to real objects. But such experts exist in the licensing arms of movie studios, so Microsoft partnered with 20th Century Fox to act as the main licensing agent for the Halo brand. Items that did not make the cut were a Halo-themed lottery ticket, lingerie modeled after a female hologram character, and toy guns based on the game's weapons. Instead, fans can expect high-quality action figures from McFarlane Toys, a tabletop game from WizKids, and replica weapons for mature buyers."

Comments

Re:"MasterChief"?

[paganizer]

It never confused me at all; I'm ex-Navy and it made perfect sense to make the main hero a Master Chief.
They are godlike characters, answerable to no one; they can not be busted in rank in any normal fashion, Officers fear them, enlisted both fear them and are protected by them.

Re:Halo Marketing - Pathetically Desperate

[cowscows]

Bungie's been doing that sort of story driven universe for a while. Halo shares a lot in common with the storyline that ran through the Marathon series, years ago when Bungie was a Mac only developer. I played the original marathon way back when, but never got around to the rest of the trilogy (I think it was a trilogy). But a few years ago I came across a website that basically listed all of the text from the game, almost as a screen play, and reading through it all was a reasonably entertaining story.

The Halo universe might not be 100% original, but it's got a lot of background and detail, and as such has a good bit of potential for future projects. A RTS game of some sort could certainly be interesting, or maybe one day an MMO that finds a way to combine individual soldier combat with large scale spaceship combat and all that. There's nothing insurmountable stopping anyone else from making games like that, but having a reasonably well known and already partially described universe to place the game in gives it more legitimacy and hopefully can give players a more immediate connection to a game.