Image: Edelman

This is Part II of the interviews my son (John Luke) and I conducted at 343 Industries with Frank O’Connor, Franchise Development Director; Dan Ayoub, Executive Producer of Publishing; and Josh Holmes, Studio Creative Director and Creative Director, Halo 4. For Part I, click here.

GeekDad: The Halo community is very vocal about changes to the franchise. How has it reacted to the changes to the original Halo?

Frank O’Connor: Strongly. I think there’s been a lot of hugely positive reaction and a lot of negative reaction that we predicted about the specificity of the multiplayer engine. So, if you can predict these things then you can ameliorate them. As we mentioned before, we did the title update for multiplayer so we’ll be able to add Halo classic game-play features back into the Reach engine. I think they’ be really happy about some of the philosophical approach we’ve taken to it. You think about something like the re-release of the Star Wars movies, where they change things and fans get completely bent out of shape about Guido shooting first, and where it’s the exact movie — everything is now perfect. So, they’ve fixed bad special effects, they cleaned up some of the shots, they didn’t touch anything. They left it completely intact. And then they added things: you can watch alternate endings, you can watch all these cut scenes and deleted scenes and so on. That was the philosophy that we went for. Don’t change what’s good about it. Just add, add, add and give people options and a wealth of content.

One thing, I mean, we really don’t deal with the fiscal side of the business, but we wanted this thing to be a bargain as well. And it is. It’s forty dollars compared to sixty dollars, and it’s effectively a AAA game. I think that the reason we were pushing for a lower price point is that a lot of people already have a version of the game in their library, whether it’s the PC version or the original Xbox. When they’re spending forty dollars, they should feel like they’re getting at least forty dollars of new stuff out of this experience. I think we did that and we went above and beyond. People I think have been overall very happy. Where they’ve been cynical or questioning our decisions, we know about those things and we’ve predicted them and we’ve takens steps to make sure that even those people are going to be happier than they think they are when they do eventually get it. I think we’re feeling really good about it at this point.

Image: Edelman

Dan Ayoub: The community is extremely vocal, which is fantastic. And it’s been great, because they’ve been vocal since the beginning and in some cases we’ve been able to make real-time changes to the game based on the fan feedback. The audio is probably the best example. Halo had that very iconic music. We worked with Skywalker Sound and rerecorded all that stuff. It was just going to sound really fantastic and big. And you know we kind of announced that and people are like, “It’s kind of crappy — that’s neat and I love that, but even though it’s over ten years old, but I’d like to play it in the original.” And we were actually at the point in our development cycle where so many people were saying, “It’s a good point. Let’s do it.” And, you know, we figured out a way to do it and we actually made that change. That’s a very good example that I like to call out. We obviously can’t be reactive to everything that people say, but that was a great example of something that people are very passionate about. And we were kind of like “yeah, we could see that, that makes sense.” We were very happy, as this was a case where we were able to react to that feedback in real ​time, which you don’t generally get to do on a disk product, right? — which was fun for us.

FO’C: The design of the Master Chief himself is another great example. We knew that wasn’t solved. So we started rolling out footage and screenshots and we showed early versions of what our redesigned Chief would look like. Now, the Chief looks the way he does in Halo 1 because of the number of polygons, shaders, surface materials and technology that was available at the time. He definitely, obviously has an aesthetic look, but some of it was limited by technology, so we were trying to update it in a way that was respectful to the design. We got down into pixel-height discussions about the height of his face-plate and stuff. We did actually take a huge amount of feedback from fans, unbeknownst to them, as they started to complain or like. Eventually we try not to work with anecdotal data because it’s dangerous. But, on something that was as subjective as that, it was some pretty telling reactions that we were getting from fans. But, of course what you don’t get is the 95% of people who aren’t vocal, right? That’s why anecdotes are always dangerous, and that’s why it’s always a tricky balance listening to the community and looking at the data. You have to figure out, you know, where that balance lies.

DA: Yeah, overall, I found the community really supportive, and I guess “relieved” is the word I use in many ways to describe the reaction I’ve seen from fans. “We’re so glad you’re doing it this way. This is the right way to do it. Thank you for not changing the gameplay.” I think it’s been a great experience.

GD: I’m throwing a doozy in here for you both. How do you feel about father-son gaming’s potential as a creative activity? It’s something that’s been a trend in the news. I’ve done some posts on the subject on our Wired blog before. And what would you say to critics of video game violence and “M”-rated games and how that relates to father and son gaming together?

FO’C: So, Halo sits in a strange spot. First off, we’re a “Mature” rated game. We were given a Mature rating for Halo 1. And it’s a violent game. Any game where your agency in the universe is to destroy things is naturally and intrinsically violent. However, in Halo’s defense, you’re blasting brightly colored aliens a lot of the time who’re shooting lasers at you. The worse curse word that I think we have, and you should cover your ears for this one, is I think “bastard.” And that’s sort of a natural evolution for the series.

Nobody sat down with a list of criteria and said “Don’t do this, don’t do this, don’t do this.” But there’s no reason in our universe to have excessive gore or lots of human blood. The only time you see human blood is when you or your compatriots are [makes guttural dying sound], in fact. But the ESRB who defines these things, you know, they had some pretty stringent rules at the beginning. And, we were around near the start of their process. I feel personally, and this is not to reflect Microsoft or the ESRB’s opinion, that, I think, if we launched this game today, you know, with the Call of Dutys of this world and so on, we’re just not compared in the same breath. Those games are much more visceral and realistic in their portrayal of human-on-human violence, and that’s of course, one of the biggest concerns for the ESRB.

As a parent myself, I feel like we’re fairly “soft” mature, and I’d be happy to play it with my teenage kid. Certainly, all parents have a responsibility to supervise what their kids are playing and doing and seeing. And that’s the number one job, ​right? Like, forget the ESRB, forget what corporate responsibility is. Parents have a responsibility to shield or expose their children to the things that they’re comfortable with doing that. But, again, our game is lasers and needle shards and spaceships. And we also don’t force you down any particular paths to do things, like we don’t force you to kill people necessarily. You do have to kill a lot of aliens. But we let you solve problems by driving around them, for example, and coming up with smarter solutions than that. But, ultimately you’re shooting.

I know when I was a kid, and this is going back a long time, we we would play like, cowboys and Indians and soldiers and stuff, and do and say infinitely more violent things than ever happened actually in our game. But we of course didn’t have high resolution graphics and y’know hours and hours of game-play to immerse ourselves. So, again, I always put the onus squarely on the parents, but obviously Microsoft and the ESRB and all of our competitors all take that responsibility very seriously, so when you see a Mature rating on a game, we’ve all thought about it, we’ve all talked about it, we’ve all discussed it, and we all feel that it’s appropriate. Otherwise we’d change the game, or we’d change the rating by changing the elements of the game so it can be re-rated. So, yeah, it’s up to parents, and again, my perspective as a parent is that our game is the kind of shooter that I would want my kids playing. And I wouldn’t necessarily want little kids playing any type of shooter without, you know, fairly serious supervision.

DA: Yeah, obviously, I agree with what Frank said, and all the same caveats. In terms of the father-son gaming. The first fact that I have is that gaming has existed in our cultures forever, right? It’s a very basic premise about these games, it’s a fact of life. The fact that we have the technology now, that it’s digital, rather than moving pieces on a board, or you know, rocks and sticks and stuff, for me, that’s just a natural evolution of our business, and I just think it’s digital now, and that’s what it’s like. And, on a personal level as I said, when we were talking earlier, I grew up playing video games with my dad. It was a bonding experience for us. My dad would come home. He’d been at work all day, I hadn’t seen him. We’d sit down and play games on the Intellivision together, and he’d ask me what I was doing at school, and he’d laugh at me when I crashed the plane and stuff like that.
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FO’C: B-17 bomber?
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DA: It was actually Triple Action on the Intellivision.
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FO’C: That was your answer to combat?
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DA: Exactly! [laughs] That was the game that we played together all the time. Now, I look back at some of my favorite memories with my dad, and it was playing video games with him, because it was time where it was just the two of us. My mom and sister wanted nothing to do with it. It was just great, ’cause it was the guys alone just playing, and it was some of the best time I spent with my father.
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FO’C: Well, Halo is interesting in that regard as well in that it’s somewhat inter-generational. It may sound like only ten years, but that’s long enough for your kid to have gone from being a toddler to a teenager, for example. We have a lot of parents who were young men when ​Halo first came out, and now they’re fully fledged parents with kids in high-school even. And, it gives them a chance to connect in a very nostalgic way, but with new, better graphics that their kid will actually put up with, for example. But also there’s the Kinect functionality, [which] lets you do a very literal, game-sharing experience. If your kid sees you just running out of ammo, he can just say ”Reload!” which might get annoying, if there’s no agreement in place as to whether [laughter] uhm, and the library function as well, where you can curate the elements of the universe and explore the Halo universe in a way that is non-violent and is non-confrontational and you can just go through and you can explore the fiction and the factions in the universe that way. So, it definitely gives you tools to play around with that relationship.
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GD: What’s your most important technical achievement with Anniversary and the one that meant the most to you in meeting the bar?
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DA: I would say it’s kind of twofold and they’re inter-related. Probably the biggest one for us was interweaving the original Halo code with the new graphics and audio engine. I mean, that was to solve a very specific problem, as I’ve said, which was to make sure the game played exactly the same way as it did. And the best way for us to do that was to actually use that original code, but we needed a way to make it look modern. And interweaving that code for us was a very hard, very tricky process, because you’re taking code that’s ten years old and interweaving it with a very modern code and be able to get some great performance out of that. But the benefit of that, and that led to the feature that I personally find the most rewarding on this is Classic mode, that ability to switch back and forth. Because, initially, we wanted to do that since the beginning, but it was a menu item. So we were going to let you, when you started the game, choose to play in original graphics or new. And while we were figuring out this problem, for a period of time we could do it in real time. And we all looked at that and said, ”no, no, no” this has got to be a feature. You’ve got to be able to do this at any point during the game. So, solving that technical problem actually gave birth to this feature, which I would argue, has turned into one of, if not the most popular feature of the game.
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John Luke Venables: What do you guys do on a typical day?
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FO’C: This. We just sit around. No, I mean it depends.
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DA: More yelling [laughter].
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FO’C: Today’s a good example for me. Today I had a meeting with a story group, who’s working on the story for Halo 4 and some other things. I had a bunch of meetings with our marketing department, who are coming out with an outline for Halo Anniversary and we were just going through the footage and saying ”This guy’s uniform looks wrong, you know, the space is too big, the audio is wrong here, ‘Let’s change that to cellos.’” It’s really fun, but my job in particular is very scattered and it’s all over the place and I could come in on a day and all I talk about is the size of heads on ​action figures, or I could come in on a day and discuss the fate of Cortana, for example. My job is usually fun, but it can be really dry and really granular for such a sort of ostensibly exciting universe, it can get really – we can make it seem really dull. But, I’ve enjoyed most of my jobs to be fair. But, of all the jobs I’ve ever had, this is the one where even if I’m mad about something, I’m excited to come to work during the day, because there’s genuinely always a creative challenge to be solved during the day.
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DA: Yeah, I mean, my day varies a lot too, right? Because we work with a lot of external partners, as well as internal ones, I can spend a lot of time either on the phone or on email with our partners in Texas or Russia or Canada or something like that. Yeah, and if I use today as an example, a lot of time today was spent shepherding Anniversay through manufacturing, right, so we’re where we need to be and our Kinect stuff is all ready to go. And talking about other projects that we have in development, and it could go from working on schedules to playing stuff and saying, ”no, this doesn’t feel right” to working with our marketing team to come up with features that we think are going to be exciting to people. No, it’s again, like Frank says, it’s a lot of fun coming in in the morning. The franchise, I think, and the love of the franchise, is what keeps a lot of us motivated. And, you know, at the end of the day, I always say, like, we’re making games, it should be fun. You need to want to get up in the morning and come and do this because of the love of your craft, and that’s one of the things that make 343 a lot of fun. It’s that people have that passion for what they do.
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JLV: Why do what you do? What drove you to choose to do this?
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FO’C: I’m gonna date myself, but I got, I can’t remember, it was like a birthday gift or something like that. I got some money, and I decided to get a word processor, because I want to be a writer, and I went and bought a Brother electric word processor [laughter] which had a narrow, one line LCD screen [laughter], and all it let you do was basically type what you wanted to type until you got to a period, and then you could change it before you hit Go. And, then it would print out like a typewriter. Because I was fresh out of college and I had no inspiration for what I wanted to write, and I was reading a video game magazine, which I read a lot of, and they actually had a classified ad in the back saying”Do you want to write about video games for a living?” and I said ”yeah, I sure do!” and they asked for a sample review of a game. So I wrote a review of Strider on Genesis and I sent it in. And, I completely forgot about it. I mean, it wasn’t a career move at all. I had just graduated college doing media studies, which is journalism, radio, the whole gamut. But I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, and I was two weeks out of college at the time. Then I got a call saying, ”Oh, we’d love to have you come and interview for that job.” And, I’m like, ”What job?” I had sent out a bunch of resumes, like to insurance companies and stuff. And that was that. So that was it. That was my first ever real job. So, that’s why I’ve never had a miserable job yet.
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DA: In terms of why, I think a lot of it is that there are few industries that let you express yourselves in certain ways, and I think what always makes me excited about games is … I mean, I’ve been designing games in one form or another, most of them, and I was terrible at that, when I was a kid, designing board games and stuff like that. But this is ​an industry that is exciting to me not just because I love the games and the background and stuff like that, but you get to create something — you’re on the edge of technology, because you’re forced to kind of stay up-to-date with what’s going on, and I’m passionate about technology as well as games, and for me this is just the perfect marriage of those two things. And, when I was growing up, I’ll date myself a little bit, there was no school you could go to for games or anything like that. I designed role-playing games and board games and stuff like that with my friends, but never really read… I think when I was eleven, I sent a game pitch to Activision, with some very crude hand drawings and they sent me the most nice ”Really, kid, don’t waste our time” rejection letter. But it was phrased actually very nicely and very politely and I was encouraged. But I just never thought you could make a career out of games at the time. And, I think I was working at a railway in Canada at the time when Ubisoft came to Montréal and it was brand new. Nobody knew who they were. And I’m like ”Oh, this is cool, I’m gonna give this a shot’ and that was fourteen years ago and I never looked back. And I don’t think there is any other industry I could be happy in.

With the constraints of space, the last segment of the interview has been included here in MP3 form. My son and I also spoke with Josh Holmes, Studio Creative Director and Creative Director, Halo 4. He shared his creative approach to continuing the expansion of the Halo universe, why he’s glad he’s not an actor anymore and why playing Halo can be a fantastic, creative mechanism for kids.

[Listen to the Josh Holmes Interview]

I would like to personally thank 343 Industries for their warm welcome and for our studio tour. My and my son’s heartfelt thanks are extended to Bonnie Ross, Frank O’Connor, Dan Ayoub, Josh Holmes, David Ellis and all the many developers we played with during our game-play multiplayer sessions. We were honored to witness the level of dedication and hard work on the game. The Halo universe is in good hands. But, I still refuse to put away my gravity hammer.
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Image: Microsoft

My son John Luke and I had the opportunity to visit with the main dudes who have taken over the development and care of the Halo franchise at 343 Industries. Fair warning, though — the studio head honcha is Bonnie Ross, who graciously brought me a cup of coffee before our interview sessions. We spoke with Frank O’Connor, Franchise Development Director, Dan Ayoub, Executive Producer of Publishing, and Josh Holmes, Studio Creative Director and Creative Director, Halo 4 . They shared their thoughts on taking over the Halo franchise from Bungie Studios, the pits and falls of developing a legend, the reaction of the fan community and why they are motivated to continue doing what they do.

This is Part 1 of the interviews my son and I conducted at 343 Industries.

GeekDad: Briefly introduce yourself and what your responsibilities are at 343 Industries.

Frank O’Connor: Hi, I’m Frank O’Connor, and I’m Franchise Development Director at 343 Industries. I work on all aspects of the franchise and fiction on everything from the game story to licensed goods like action figures, comic books and so on.

Dan Ayoub: My name is Dan Ayoub. I’m Executive Producer of Publishing. So I manage all external development, Halo Anniversary being the most recent game coming out of our group.

GD: What is your approach to the future development of Halo’s legendary franchise that is built mostly on a Bungie-created code base?

DA: I can speak certainly to [Halo] Anniversary. One thing we wanted to do with Anniversary is a celebration of ten years of playing Halo. I mean, I think we are very conscious that people have very, very fond memories of when they first played Halo, and that’s not something that we wanted to mess with. In fact, that’s something we wanted to celebrate. So it was important for us to make sure that the game played exactly the same way as it did in its original version. And the way we actually did that is that we went so far as to use the original code in the game. And that actually ensures that the game plays exactly the same as it did ten years ago. So for us it was all about celebrating that ten year legacy with the fans and being very, very conscious of the fact that people did not want to see the game-play change. So, I joked that we shipped the game “warts and all,” like we didn’t actually change bugs in the original game, because for many people that was so core to the original game-play. So we resisted the temptation to make those changes in core game-play and we focused on other things, and you know it felt part and parcel with not just wanting to do another remake, right. So, obviously the celebration but we wanted to do more than just an HD remake, so we took that philosophy and added a ton of extra features to it, and turned into an all out celebration of that ten-year anniversary. Do you want to add to that, Frank?

FO’C: Just to compound what Dan said, the magic of Halo and the “secret sauce” is the game-play, and if you moved it to a different engine, if you moved it to a different technology you’d lose that essence. One of the funniest things about it is the dichotomy. It meant that it was one of the simplest problem spaces for us because we weren’t going to change it. But it was also a difficult technical challenge to get the new graphics layer working on top of the existing game-play engine and graphics layer. So it was a mixed blessing: the one thing, once we had that resolved, we didn’t have to worry about whether it would play well. And you have a lot of other franchises in game development cycles where they literally don’t know until the last couple of weeks of development before that thing goes to gold master if it actually plays well. I mean, you can’t quite be sure until everything’s optimized, until everything’s tested. After a certain point, we didn’t have to worry about that. Often now I have to go play through the game several times just to unlock levels so I’m ready for a demo, or just work-related reasons. But in doing that I realize: one, that I’m having fun doing that and it should be a chore, right, and two, that it hasn’t dated in the slightest, that it holds up after ten years and it feels like it came out yesterday.
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DA: Yeah, some of the best compliments we got when we started demoing this to press and fans was they picked it up, and the two great comments I loved to hear was “wow, this game could have released last month” and ironically, “wow, this feels exactly like it did ten years ago,” which I think is a testament to just great that original game felt, that people are able to remember it ten years after playing it for the first time.

GD: When did you decide to change the original Halo with the Reach multiplayer engine?

FO’C: When did we actually start having conversations about the content of this game?

DA: Yeah, I would say about eighteen months ago. I would say it’s hard to pin it down to a date. I mean, we were close after the Reach launch.

FO’C: As Dan says, about eighteen months ago, we started discussing what the content was going to be, and we had a sort of idealized visions of what it would be. It would be everything to everyone, blah, blah, blah. We also had discussion of a very pared down, literally just an HD remake, where everything is just upscaled to 1080 and so on. Eventually we realized that, given that we were now shooting for a very, very artificial date, and not a natural one at all, which was the November the 15th date. We wanted to make this the ten-year anniversary — that there were some things we were able to do, some things we wouldn’t be able to do. We ended up doing a lot more than what we ever thought we could. But the hardest part of that decision making process was: do we remake the multiplayer component with the original multiplayer engine, add a networking layer and keep it exactly as what it was verbatim?

One of the production realities is that, that might not have been possible. In fact, it probably wouldn’t have been possible. The original game-play engine doesn’t support real latency field networking in any real way. It uses system link, which in itself was an evolution of kind of Apple Talk. It’s just a very simple system, and it would have taken a tremendous amount of engineering. And then, we don’t know how Halo would really have played online. We don’t know how those weapons, how that balance, how those levels would have played so we’d have gotten to a test situation before we really knew.

So early on, we looked at another factor, which was Halo Reach had just come out, and these things rely on a population to make them fun. So, if we arrived in it with another game in the middle of Reach’s lifespan, we’d have a negative impact on that population by taking people away from Reach and into this new game, as it were, in terms of the remake. And so we made a decision at that point to stick with the Reach engine and we have to do something meaningful with the types of map and the collection of maps we add to it. And at that point we had a discussion about the title update, which is some code that we added to the Reach engine to give us the ability to manage more classic feeling playlists, and pay homage to the original Halo game-play features like the three-shot kill pistol. So we made that decision — we know that the end results would be good. We know that now — we’re doing testing and we’re very, very happy with it. We know that the Reach fans will be happy with it because it gives them a huge amount of content. But we did know that people who are fans of the original game-play were not going to be super happy with that. And we knew that was going to be a huge ​compromise right off the bat. But, I think if they just stick with us, I think they’ll find that it’s the right decision.

DA: Yeah, I think Frank nailed it all on the head. The one thing that I would add to that that’s interesting, that I can get from that decision, is all of the armor abilities that come from Reach. So because we’re using that engine, those armor abilities you’re now able to bring into your new multiplayer experience. And the example I give all the time is Beaver Creek, right? It’s amazing how a level like that changes when you factor in things like jet packs for example, and all of a sudden, like, people are rocketing all over the place. So it added a great, new dynamic element. ‘Cause it’s kind of like taking these maps you know and putting a new spin on them, which has been really rewarding. And, you know, the flip side to that, going back to the philosophy of wanting to maintain that game-play. If you want, of course, you have the opportunity to play those maps without those armor abilities. But that’s just another bonus we got from using the Reach engine — is just giving another kind of face to these maps that you know and just see how they change with some of the new Halo elements that we get from Reach.

FO’C: There’s some fairly significant features that Reach adds to it. I mean you have things like saved films, the ability to take screenshots, and forgeable environments that you can customize and change yourself. We probably could have added some of that functionality, but not all of it had we started with the original Halo gameplay engine. So, ultimately, it was certainly the best thing to do, knowing what we know now.

DA: So, there are actually two engines. The campaign engine is a hybrid of the original Halo code, and some new graphical and audio engine stuff that we’ve done and we’ve married those two together. The multiplayer portion is Reach. So the campaign version and the multiplayer engine are running on different vehicles.

FO’C: That experience will be seamless to the player. You can see behind you on the menu screen it just launches from one menu. You won’t be aware of all that stuff going on under the hood. It’ll be seamless.

GD: Would you like to mention any other significant game-play elements that have been changed?

DA: We were very mindful that we didn’t want to change that game-play. So the features we approached were things that would be additive. Classic mode is a great example. That’s the feature that at any point during the campaign game-play, you hit the Back button, and the graphics revert to how they were ten years ago. And then you hit it and it comes back. You can go back and forth as much as you can. That’s fun, that’s awesome — it lets you relive some of the nostalgia, but it doesn’t change your game-play. That core game-play remains the same. You know, the 3D implementation, again, if you have a 3D TV and that’s technology you want to take advantage of it looks fantastic, it looks awesome. In fact, we did a custom 3D solution — we didn’t use something off the shelf. That looks awesome, but it doesn’t change your game-play.

So, we kind of focused on those kinds of experiences that would be additive and help ​you learn a little bit more about the history. Terminals. We did a new terminal approach where they’re more graphical, so you find them and you unlock these really fancy, slick motion comics that give you more history about the ring and the universe. Awesome, but it doesn’t change your game-play experience. So all of these features were built around maintaining that game-play while giving these cool, new features to the fans.

Look for Part 2 of our interviews with 343 Industries tomorrow.

Master Chief, my son, and me.
Photo: Michael Venables/Wired.com

I still remember the first time I saw the Halo: Combat Evolved videogame, 10 years ago. There was a lot of buzz around about the game, and Peter, my 11-year-old nephew, had purchased it. He was playing it at the family Thanksgiving get-together.

Most of the talk that other parents were repeating to each other centered around the “terrible violence in the game” and how it should be banned. Admittedly, this kind of social anxiety had gnawed a hole of doubt in my opinion of violent videogames and kids playing them. Peter, meanwhile, was furiously making progress and racking up achievements in the basement of my sister’s house, when the dreaded question was posed to me.

“Daddy, can I play… Halo… with Peter?”

I thought, “Whoa, isn’t this the controversial game I’ve been hearing about with the blood sucking aliens and scary shock troops shooting at them in a pool of blood in a fog of war like the Apocalypse?”

The searching, hopeful eyes of my 5-year-old took in every pixel of my expression like a optical thought scanner.

“Hey, Ann,” I asked my sister, “isn’t this game really bloody?”

“I have no idea — just ask Peter, he’s downstairs.”

I descend the stairs. “Hey, Peter, isn’t this game really bloody?”

“Nah, it’s not too bad. You’re just a Spartan defending Reach from alien bad guys.”

“Oh, how bad can it be,” I thought, ruminating on it a while.

Somewhere, in the middle of that thought, I allowed my son to become a Spartan recruit. It later turned out the aliens didn’t suck blood, and the Spartans were pretty noble soldiers. As for the violence, well, I explained to my son that it wasn’t real, that it was just a game. He never made a big deal about it, because it wasn’t a big deal for me. And he never looked back.

I took up the cause against the Covenant, too — as soon as the controller was free.

Now, 10 years later, we both had the fantastic opportunity to tour 343 Industries, the Microsoft division that took over the development of the Halo franchise, still housed in the former “Bungie Bunker” in Kirkland, Washington.

We were both pumped at the prospect of reliving our first contact with Halo through the new Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary edition for Xbox 360. We were looking forward to playing the campaign in co-op mode and also playing the multiplayer against all the developers on the team. We were both very excited, as several of the top people of 343 Industries and the senior staff involved with the Halo franchise were there to greet us. We did some great interviews, including a few questions from my 15-year-old Spartan vet about breaking into the videogame industry.

Image courtesy Microsoft

Playing games in co-op mode is a tremendous experience as a family. To be good at what’s happening in the game, you have to be communicative and supportive at what’s happening outside the game. Unless you want to lose, you have to acknowledge each other in the course of the game, weigh in on each other’s decisions and share your emotional investment throughout the gameplay with your child.

I feel that gaming with your son or daughter is a fine way to practice and improve healthy ways of communication with your children, and even test out new ones. If we are worried about what our kids are playing (and as good parents, we always should be) what better way to show our concern and monitor their videogame play than by playing with them?

But, back to the story. After being distracted at how radically well-rendered the visuals were, we found a few Covenant invaders who had shown up on our Halcyon-class cruiser uninvited. We were in no mood for trifling, and our assault rifles nailed them all. It seemed like this father-and-son unit kicked Covenant butt pretty bad.

Image: Microsoft

We then played several Team Slayer matches with about 10 developers. They warn you never to play against devs, as they know the game better than anyone. But we were playing together, father and son, army of one. Well, most of the time, we were randomized to different teams, of course. Much to my chagrin, one particular player on the red team seemed to take unusual delight in pummeling me repeatedly with his gravity hammer.

We had so much fun playing the matches that we went over our scheduled studio visit time by an hour. I guess that’s what happens when you play with family, and when you play with the community of gamemakers.

We’ve played all seven games in the Halo story now, up to and including Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary. Our blood-sucking aliens and scary shock troops were still there. And, judging from my son’s proud, beaming face, he hasn’t suffered any salient trauma from the violence. Letting my son play Halo 10 years ago has worked out just fine. In fact, he now wants to be a game developer when he grows up. I guess that’s just what awesome games do: inspire our kids to do constructive and creative things with their lives. So I’m glad I let him join the cause.

Image: Microsoft

The son’s perspective, by John Luke Venables:

Playing the original game at 5 years old and now at 15, I’ve learned a lot in the 10 years that have passed about some of the finer aspects of what makes a great videogame. It’s no longer just big explosions and cool cinematics. It needs a thought-out story, developed characters — and obviously big explosions.

I feel that Halo delivers all of these aspects in the most unique way. So, when my dad told me that I could come meet with some of the guys behind the Halo franchise, I was overjoyed. Being able to interview the people that have made one of my favorite games gave me the opportunity to see first hand, what goes into making games, and the real passion that these people have for what they do.

Playing the game was a whole other experience. Not only was I able to play with developers of Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, but I also got to play against my dad. Being able to play games with my dad is a real bonding activity for us. It’s a way for us to let off steam, relax and kick each other’s butts. There’s no greater sound than hearing your dad shriek from across the room as you destroy him with a gravity hammer. It was certainly an experience that I’ll remember, and I’m grateful that I was able to share it with my dad.

Please stay tuned for my in-depth interviews with the 343 Industries creative team behind Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary on making the game, relating to the fans and leaving the old bugs intact.

Like Toy Story did for rendered animation, Disneyland Adventures Kinect translates technological potential into creative reality. By doing so, it turns disinterested onlookers in my family into interested participants with a surprisingly human experience.

Kinect, like any new technology, divides opinion. But contrary to much of the debate I’ve heard, the real argument for the hands-free controller is not its innovative infrared grid projection and detection, its impressive technical specs or even its creative real-world uses. No, it’s the magical moments Kinect can create that are the best argument for the controller. It’s gaming theater in which the player is both actor and audience. Disneyland Adventures is the perfect case study of this.

While I’d really enjoyed the prowess of Kinect Sports 2, the novelty of Leedmees and the theatrics of The Gunstringer, my kids still wouldn’t choose these games over their old favorites like Mario Strikers Charged and Just Dance. This was true until now. Disneyland Adventures is the first Kinect game that they want to play as much as I do.

Sure, it doesn’t always work perfectly, and it can be a challenge to get working for the youngest players in our family (age 4). But the kids don’t get frustrated by these slight foibles — which means, neither do I. Disneyland generally does a stalwart job of seeing the player’s gestures (even when they are flailing round with minimal accuracy), and even when it does struggle, my kids are happy to put in a bit more effort to make it work because the game itself has them so enraptured.

Disneyland Adventures.

Disneyland Adventures is from the people behind the equally ambitious Kinectimals games. It’s no great surprise that it features an electronic version of the Disneyland theme park. What is surprising is the level of detail, and that this is the first Kinect game where you can freely explore an open space — previous adventure games have kept the player on preset rails. To turn, you twist your torso and then simply point forward with one hand to walk in a direction. It’s simple and effective.

Around the park is a host of Disney characters to meet, interact with and collect autographs from, all with simple gestures that even our four-year-old was able to execute. As you explore the world you are given a variety of tasks to complete: meeting people, taking on missions, delivering and collecting items around the park.

The mission elements form a series of chaptered stories, each with a particular play style and Disney theme. The Peter Pan levels, for instance, drop you into his story and teach you to fly around the city rooftops before heading off to Never Never Land. To fly, you just put your hands out like wings, lean to swoop and flap to gain height. Once you make it to Never Never Land, you are tasked with defeating Captain Hook with a playful sword-fight and fireworks battle.

My kids could jump on and play this with very little help or instruction. The youngest, 4, found the park navigation a bit too complicated (and hit and miss in terms of the controller seeing his gestures) but the story games themselves had no problems. He could join his sister, 8, or brother, 7, and hurtle around the London landscape, collecting coins and hidden Mickey tokens as he went.

Disneyland Adventures.

Perhaps best of all in terms of accessibility are the voice-controlled menus. The hardest part of many Kinect games is picking the level/song/character you want with a precise hand gesture. Disneyland Adventures lets you control nearly all these choices by just saying them out loud. A parent can stay out of sight of the Kinect controller (to avoid confusing it), and use their voice to help a young player pick the option they want. My kids also liked being allowed to shout at the Xbox.

The Kinect controls feel like an improvement over Kinectimals, but it’s the instinctive nature of the required gestures that made the biggest difference for my kids. “It really feels like I’m flying,” my six-year-old explained, arms outstretched and a massive grin on his face.

There is more variety here than other Kinect games we’ve played as well. My daughter relished the chance to dance with the various Disney princess characters. “I think I might faint,” she exclaimed when she first encountered the rhythm action choices; such was her excitement. I could her having a similar reaction to actually being there in the park, which one day I suspect we will do, even though we really aren’t (or don’t like to think of ourselves as) a “Disney” family.

If you are sharp-eyed you might have noticed I’m talking about my four- and six-year-old playing this game when it has a E for Everyone 10+ rating. While it is true that I would normally adhere to this advice, particularly as we are quite sensitive to violence and shooting as a family, here I was happy to compromise. It seems that the rating largely relates to the sword play and cannon sections. While these are indeed quite violent, for us they are playful enough not to represent an issue. Also, it’s interesting that the Disney film of Peter Pan contains just as much physical contact, but is rated G.

Disneyland Adventures.

I wouldn’t normally draw these sorts of comparisons but find myself doing this here because Disneyland Adventures is such a filmlike experience. The visuals move seamlessly from cut scenes to player-controlled action that you really do feel like you are controlling a movie. This is underlined by an orchestral score that swells and crescendos perfectly in time with the action.

With so much to do in Disneyland Adventures — collecting autographs, completing missions and following stories — it looks like this will be dominating our family game time up to Christmas and beyond. If you are looking for a reason to buy a Kinect, this is it. If you have bought Kinect and not got the most out of it with your family, Disneyland Adventures is the game you have been waiting for.

Images: Disney

Microsoft Partners in Learning Global Forum Winners (Image: Microsoft)

This week, November 7th through the 10th, Microsoft hosted educators all over the world in Washington, D.C. for the annual Partners in Learning Global Forum event. Educators got the opportunity to network, attend keynote speeches from educational leaders and present their own innovative projects that leverage technology in the classroom. The event is a great complement to the Microsoft Imagine Cup, with an emphasis on inspiring and addressing world-wide education concerns.

On Tuesday’s keynote, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, along with Microsoft Vice President of Education Anthony Salcito, announced that the DOE’s TEACH campaign will be taken over by Microsoft. This site, a marketing effort aimed at recruiting new teachers, will be moved from its current home at teach.gov to a new site, teach.org. Going forward, Microsoft will be forming a coalition of private-sector companies to support these efforts. Secretary Duncan’s full remarks can be read at the ed.gov website.

This is an interesting move by the Department of Education. Teach.gov launched a little over a year ago and aimed to help show people what teaching was really like. It also provides resources on how to get started in this career including directing access to financial aid scholarships or federal grant programs that can help.

Out of curiosity, I took the existing survey to become a teacher and while the links to further information were good, there didn’t seem to be a lot of targeted information for me for finding a job in Wisconsin. I did enjoy seeing how easy it was to import new job data, with plenty of helpful XML syntax. For a site that wants to be the clearing house for teaching-related job information, both on the recruitment side as well as the employer side, that openness is welcome. I’m hopeful that Microsoft will recognize that need for that openness and ease of use while simultaneously increasing the depth of information there, which quite frankly, can use some work.

But the event is more than just a place where education leaders can make policy announcements. Educators showcased innovative ways they’ve integrated technology into their classroom curriculum, whether that involved programming, data analysis, or online collaboration. These projects are judged by a panel of education experts and awarded prizes at the end of the event. There were a number of U.S. educators present among the 115 world-wide educators competing in Washington DC. The below video shows some of these educators talking about their projects.

After reading through the descriptions of these projects, there’s one I find that stands out. Conceived on a two-day US Forum event that asked participants to create a virtual “Learning Excursion,” this game brought computer science, business and economics, and fine arts disciplines together to emulate the Pike Place Fish Co. in Seattle, WA. Designed for Microsoft Kinect on the Xbox and developed in the classroom, their game called When Fish Fly “incorporates the business process, customer interaction and physical energy across multiple content areas. The completed project will support dynamic interaction using the Kinect system and will serve to facilitate an active learning model of education in the targeted curricula.” Or maybe, it’s just a fun way to engage students in some iconic fish throwing!

In all, Microsoft’s event seems like a great showcase and celebration of what educators world wide are doing to inspire their K-12 students with technology. With the U.S. Government handing over the recruitment effort for the teaching profession within the States to Microsoft and their private coalition, I’m hopeful that they can attract even more teachers who want to be just as innovative. Prospective teachers need to only look at their potential peers to know that a 21st century education can be full of creativity using collaborative tools that not only engage but prepare students for their future in an equally advanced job market and economy.

A full list of the winners of this year’s event, including descriptions of each of their projects, is up at Microsoft’s website. Check out more about each of the U.S. entrants and read more about the Microsoft Partners in Learning Global Forum at their website.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

William Henry Gates, III was born on October 28, 1955 in Seattle, Washington. Like him or loathe him, Mr. Gates possesses all of the qualifications needed for birthday well-wishes on this blog: He is a Dad (a father of three) and he is definitely a Geek.

Gates founded "Micro-soft" with Paul Allen in 1975. (The hyphen was dropped a year later.) Throughout the early years of the company, he oversaw business details while continuing to write code. It is widely reported that Gates would review all of the code the company put out line-by-line, and would make changes to it as he saw fit.

Microsoft got its start by creating a BASIC interpreter for the Altair computer. It then formed a partnership with IBM to provide the PC-DOS operating system in 1980. In 1985, Microsoft Windows was first released to the retail public, and the rest, as they say, is computing history.

In 2000, Gates announced that he was stepping down as CEO of Microsoft, in order concentrate full-time on philanthropic endeavors. He and wife Melinda (nèe French) established the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which helps fund many charitable organizations and scientific research programs. The foundation reported in 2007 that it had an endowment totaling $38.7 billion USD, and that it had paid out over $2 million USD in grants, in just that year alone.

Please join all of us at GeekDad in wishing Bill Gates a very happy 56th birthday, and many more!

[A version of this article was published on GeekDad on this date in 2008.]

As the first major change in Microsoft’s operating system platforms, it was not well perceived in the beginning. XP was bashed by many major IT magazines who said that “Windows 2000 significantly outperformed Windows XP”.

Today XP is the most popular of the Windows platforms because of its speed and stability. It has been released in 25 languages and three editions including Windows XP 64 bit, Media Center Edition and Tablet PC edition. The release of XP also brought awareness of viruses and suspicious attachments to the common user. I remember being in high school and loving XP over Windows 2000. It’s the geek in me that saw it and went “Ohh…shiny thing. I want to play with it.” In terms of the overall look, XP delivers a much more appealing interface than its predecessors.

[Will you miss XP when it's gone? Comment on Dakster Sullivan's post over on GeekMom!]

Oh, and also how to use use parental controls on your game consoles to restrict the games your kids play, for how long they play them, and whether or not they can access the internet. He may get off-topic a bit here and there, but the message gets through with a little help from his director, seen mostly in window-reflection. Take a look:

Cookie Monster is currently featured in the just-released Xbox 360 Kinect game Sesame Street: Once Upon A Monster. You can find out more information about digital safety and the Xbox 360 at GetGameSmart.com.

While hunting through the release lists for my Hot 3DS Christmas Games, I stumbled upon quite a few interesting Kinect games. These titles are being called Kinect’s second wave because they each extend the use of the controller in some way — or fix issues they had at launch…

Dance Central 2 bolsters its technical perfection with proper two-player mode, more characters and better post-dance feedback.

Dance Central 2

With three other Kinect dance games available (Just Dance 3, Dance Evolution and Dance Paradise) the pressure is on Dance Central to retain its hardcore dancing crown is growing. Dance Central 2 looks to set straight some omissions from the launch title’s line up as well as include another very strong set of tracks.

Best of the new modes is “It’s Party Time,” which lets you team up with friends to dance the new simultaneous multi-player features. Two players can drop in or out at any point, something that families and tired-limbed enthusiasts will no doubt appreciate.

Just Dance 3 brings accessible dancing to Kinect with its four-player simultaneous entertainment. The big question is whether the Kinect controller can cope with all those sweaty bodies.

Just Dance 3

Coming late to the full-body, controller-free dance game party has benefits for Just Dance. Rather than trying to match Dance Central’s exacting requirements, as Dance Paradise, Dance Masters did at launch, Just Dance 3 has been able to stick with its quick and easy game-play.

The irony is that, by sidestepping (no pun intended) the need to please more hard core players (and dancers), this feels like a much better fit for the Kinect audience and controller. Just like on the Wii you can drop in and out of a dance at will and compete with up to four players dancing simultaneously. But now you are also offered modes that ask each of the four players to pull off distinct choreography — not only a greater challenge, but also much more theatrical again playing the Kinect’s theatrical strengths. And of course the dance detection is the full body, not just your hands as it was on the Wii.

Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster wraps up six episodes of storytelling with enough emotion to melt even the hardest of gamer’s hearts.

Sesame Street Once Upon A Monster

As we get closer to its release, it’s no surprise that core and casual gamers seem to agree this will be a roundly convincing Kinect title. The emphasis is on theatrical storytelling as Kudo’s hands-free controller, Tim Schafer’s joie de vivre and Jim Henson’s puppets collide in the living room.

Cookie Monster, Elmo and other Sesame Street characters are each granted there own chapter that offers a particular story and series of motion challenges. What is still being sold as an uplifting and whimsical living storybook, is probably better seen as interactive theater. As we found with The Gunstringer something magical happens when you stand in front of a controller and play with your hands alone.

Motion Sports Adrenaline will extend its Kinect rendering of hardcore sporting action. Like the original, this looks like an unusually realistic game in the Kinect cannon.

Motion Sports Adrenaline

Motion Sports was one of my favorite Kinect launch titles. It combined realistic visuals and game-play with the Kinect controller that felt much more convincing than other third party games. It also included a wide range of activities for all the family from Horse Riding, Hang Gliding and Football.

Motion Sports Adrenaline follows the original with a set of more extreme sports. While this doesn’t offer the same range of experience as the first game, a more focused version of the Motion Sports approach to Kinect game-play is an attractive offer.

Rise of Nightmares is one for the dads rather than the kids and will bring the survival horror genre to Kinect. Matching House of the Dead for schlocky scares, but will the shooting be as much fun?

Is it possible to be scared by a game while flailing around in the center of your living room floor? Sega is certainly hoping so, with Rise of Nightmares requiring players to use motion control to melee-battle zombies with pipes, knuckle dusters — and sometimes just their fists. The more straightforward controls – punching the air to, well, punch – will be accompanied by on-screen buttons and prompts for more complex actions.

Developed by Sega AM1, known for their work on the House of the Dead series, Rise of Nightmares has a similar B-movie horror approach to its storytelling, putting the player in the role of an American tourist searching for his wife in a monster-filled European castle.

In addition to these there are the following recently released Kinect games you might also want to consider:

Fruit Ninja Kinect sounded like a bit of a gimmick. Once I had been persuaded to stand up and play, I got into the silliness and found it to be quite a lot of fun.

Fruit Ninja

I’m much more comfortable playing a game on an iPhone or iPad than joining in with something in the living room. For a start there’s usually something else I’d rather do when it comes to family play time, books, films, cooking all feel like a better use of my time — particularly if I can involve the kids.

The Gunstringer matches Kinect’s theatrical controller with a western stage play full of character, bravado and audience participation. It revolutionizes Kinect — not just in terms of controls, but the untapped nature of the thespian experience.

The Gunstringer

It instantly feels different to any Wii or Move game, with only a glance at the more muted style of Carnival Games (Wii) and The Shoot (PS3). It’s different because of the genuine sense of theater it creates.

In fact the game opens with a full motion video (as we used to call them on the CDi and CD32) that takes you from a waiting taxi into a theater and starts the show. But more than these clever cinematics, The Gunstringer embraces theatrical interactions, commentary and audience participation throughout. Wii-Sports and the other first party titles from Nintendo suddenly seem rather staid and corporate next to the hijinks and hoopla on stage here.