Limited Collector's Edition Disc

Limited Collector's Edition Disc

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The Limited Collector's Edition Disc is a DVD included in the Limited Collector's Edition of Halo 2, detailing many points of the Halo Universe, ranging from deleted scenes and features to documentaries on the development of Halo 2 and the Halo storyline in general.

Menu[]

• Behind the Scenes: Making of Halo 2

//An insider’s look at the production of Halo 2//

• Developing the Game

//Visualizing the story//Designing the levels//Halo 2: Multiplayer and Live//

• Bonus Materials

//Deleted Materials//Gameographies//Art Gallery//Commentaries//

• Set Up & Credits

//Subtitles//Audio Test//

• Hidden Art Gallery

  

// Hidden art gallery containing Frankie's drawings of "Mister Chief" (To access the 'gallery hold down "Left" at the main menu. Eventually the hidden art gallery will appear.)

Behind the Scenes: Making of Halo 2[]

Intro[]

(A Gregorian chant and Halo is on the camera)

Joseph:

(While he speaks the Legendary Ending of Halo: Combat Evolved Goes on)

Jason: Halo 2 was just an extension to all the excitement we felt on the first game.

(Guitar version of the Mjolnir Mix plays)

(MC's Ghost drives through an overturned Phantom with it still firing)

(Phantom Explodes)

"In every way, we've really increased the scale and the scope of the game."

(MC flies by the CC with Longswords flying by him)

Marcus Lehto: "Exploring huge environments ten times the size of Halo 1."

Shi Kai Wang: "It's about kicking ass in as many ways as possible, in as many different bodies as possible."

Eddie Smith: "Halo 2 is about guns and more guns. That's what it's about."

"There's a lot of story that we didn't get to tell. There are characters that we had conceived of and even in some cases modeled. And it's also the same group of people, too. And they all still want to do what they're doing."

"We want our game to look like a movie. We want it to look like something that's just unbelievable to experience."

"I guess we're sort of feeding off each other, so it's a really creative group of people that trust each other."

Jason Jones: "The really important thing to do now is to take all these different disciplines, who are all working on their own things, and take all these pieces--take the AI code and the physics and the guys working on the levels--and bring all these pieces together at the same time. Then you keep doing that, you keep colliding things together until it's a game."

Joseph Staten: "This process began with the end of Halo and realizing all the stuff that we had left out, and Jason, and I, and Jamie, and a few other people, sitting down and thinking really hard about, 'Wow, what did we really want to tell?' And then Jason locked himself in a room for a while and organized his core ideas and then came to me and said, 'Hey, these are my thoughts about a story for Halo 2. What do you think?'

Jason Jones: "Yeah, I don't know if we're crazy or stupid, or we just like good stories, or what, but we certainly worry about that a lot more than you might think we'd have to in a game that's mostly just about action and about not thinking."

Jaime Griesemer: "In Halo 1, there was maybe 30 seconds of fun that happened over and over and over again, so if you can get 30 seconds of fun, you can pretty much stretch that out to be an entire game. Encountering a bunch of guys, melee attacking one of them before they were aware, throwing a grenade into a group of other guys, and then cleaning up the stragglers before they could surround you. And so you can have all the great graphics, and all the different characters, and lots of different weapons with amazing effects, but if you don't nail that 30 seconds, you're not gonna have a great game."

Joseph Staten: (holds up script) "This is the copy of the script--the cinematic script for Halo. This document needs to talk to programmers, and artists, and animators, and everybody. This is 160 pages worth of cinematic. That's kind of crazy if you just think about it on its own. But when you look at a game which is 15 levels long, and with a couple of protagonists, and a fairly complex story arc, we need to drive the player's experience for 20 hours of game play, say. 120 minutes of cinematic doesn't really seem that out of proportion. But just to look at it prima facie, it's pretty daunting. You think, 'My God, you're making a feature film.'"

Jason Jones: "It's not about making it complex, and it's not about playing movies for 2 hours between every 5 minutes of game play, but the more you can make somebody believe that they're in this cool place, that they're on Halo fighting the Covenant, instead of... whatever, sitting in their living room at two in the morning, trying to finish some stupid video game."

Marcus Lehto: (pointing at render of Forerunner structure, while speaking to other employee) "There's a lot of complexity here up in this geometry, but look down now. There's very little of it down here. I think we should try to flip-flop some of that." Cut to interview. "We start with the story, first of all. We get a good background to the entire game. Just a foundation for things, and then we start building levels off of that." Play montage of an early version of Sacred Icon. "This particular level that I'm looking at right now, is called the Sentinel Headquarters. The Sentinel is this hovering character. They don't need floors, they can fly up and through the ceilings, they can fly through portals that are 20 feet up. But you, as the character will have the challenge of traversing this interesting terrain inside this structure. Up and across teamwork and trough these tiny portals throughout the space, so it's going to be really interesting for the player to explore."

(At a meeting. Text: April 2003, 21 months to ship)

Joseph Staten: "All right! We made it, huh? All right, Michael's going to talk about the engineering and stuff." (later) "It's amazing to me how good stuff looked and how much progress we have, but something I've been thinking a lot about is E3."

Cut to interviews.

Jaime Griesemer: "E3 stands for the Electronic Entertainment Expo. It's the biggest event in the video game world, where all the developers, and all the publishers, and all the gaming press all get together for... It's almost a week-long carnival practically."

Jason Jones: "Trade shows are useful because they make you get your shit together."

Michael Evans: "It's important for use to get excited about what we get done for E3 because we need to build that excitement up and go..." (makes explosion noise)

Cut back to meeting.

Joseph Staten: "God damn, we have a lot of work to do between now and E3."

Cut to interviews.

Jason Jones: "I think it's really important to be ambitious. I think it's important to have more balls in the air than you can catch at the end when it all comes down to it and you have to ship a game. But certainly you can go too far."

Joseph Staten: "Of all the people on the team, Tyson and I are probably the people who are most frightening for Jason and the programmers. We are the most crazy-scripting, crack-smoking, 'This would be so cool. Damn the frame rate! Let's pound the code and make these crazy things happen!'"

Tyson Green: "Yesterday before the demo, we had all this stuff that we were just throwing in, and finally something began to catch and we started moving. But all this stuff that didn't exist two hours earlier, is all of a sudden in the demo ready to show to people. That's when it's the most rewarding, the most fun, to be doing this sort of stuff is when it clicks."

E3[]

Arbiter: There was nothing I could do.

MC: We've got a problem.

Pilot: Thirty seconds out- Whoa...

Rtas Vadumee: Fighters get away!

Rtas Vadumee: Warriors prepare for combat!

Bonus Materials[]

Deleted Materials[]

• Cinematics

• Weapons and Vehicles and Characters

Cinematics[]

• NOTE THIS ONLY IS THE MURAL SCENE

Weapons & Vehicles & Characters[]

Robert McLees: "I'm Robert McLees. Mainly, I make guns."

Marcus Lehto: "Hi, my name is Marcus Lehto. I am the Art Director for Halo 2."

Shi Kai Wang: "My name is Shi Kai Wang and I'm a Conceptual Artist for Halo 2."

(Concept drawing of one of the smaller Halo Dinosaurs. Title: Blind Wolf.)

Marcus Lehto: "Look, it's the..."

Others: "Blind Wolf."

Robert McLees: "Big beloved Blind Wolf.

Marcus Lehto: "That was back when you could ride it."

(Clip of early Halo 1 plays, showing Master Chief riding one.)

Robert McLees: "Yeah, yeah, you could actually mount the thing and ride it."

Marcus Lehto: "AI... Couldn't handle it on the AI side. Couldn't flock them, couldn't fit them into game play.

Robert McLees: "Oh, it's nothing on our end."

Marcus Lehto: "Oh, no."

Shi Kai Wang: "It's always the programmers."

Robert McLees: "We had it all."

(Drinol appears.)

Robert McLees: "Hey, the Drinol."

Marcus Lehto: "Hey. The Drinol was a big deal."

Robert McLees: "The Hulk."

Marcus Lehto: "A giant boss character..."

Robert McLees: "And we'd always thought the Covenant kept this thing, you know, all tied up and enraged."

Marcus Lehto: "Right."

Robert McLees: "And they would bring it out during frontline battle."

Marcus Lehto: "It would have been a cool boss character."

Shi Kai Wang: "Yeah, I think he was just too damn big."

Robert McLees: "Yeah."

Marcus Lehto: "Good vehicle smasher it would have been."

Robert McLees: "Yeah."

(Tall thin biped appears. Title: Special Purpose Sniper.)

Robert McLees: "That was the... the..."

Marcus Lehto: "Special Purpose Sniper guy, right?"

Shi Kai Wang: "We wanted him to have his arms used like a tripod, and he can actually flip left to right, like side to side, so without having to switch weapons or something."

Robert McLees: "We had him being able to hang from trees as well, and do some weird stuff like that."

Marcus Lehto: "He got pretty far, too. We actually textured him and got him into the game and stuff."

Robert McLees: "It took that long to figure out..."

Marcus Lehto: "Yeah!"

Robert McLees: "...that he was a piece of crap." (laughs)

(Engineer appears.)

Marcus Lehto: "This is the Engineer. We got this into the game."

Shi Kai Wang: "It's actually in Halo 1, yeah."

Marcus Lehto: "Fully modeled, textured. It was a technological savvy character that would rip apart technology...

Robert McLees: "Idiot savant."

Shi Kai Wang: "Yeah."

Marcus Lehto: "...and consume it for the Covenant."

(Elite concept art appears. It looks considerably different, somewhat like a Xenomorph.)

Marcus Lehto: "This is probably the weirdest character that I've ever seen in our sketch book."

Shi Kai Wang: "What the hell?"

(Alien looking somewhat like a giant centipede appears. Title: Stalker.)

Robert McLees: "Marcus said we needed a character that was more menacing because every one of our characters looked too..."

Marcus Lehto: "We needed something more monstery. Monster-like.

(Awkward-looking biped appears. Title: Alien Trooper.)

Marcus Lehto: "We were just trying to go have a physique that's like biped, but doesn't behave like a biped, so we have all these parts that are missing...

Robert McLees: "And all these limbs that are extra limbs."

(Later version, holding a gun between its legs, appears.)

Robert McLees: "Oh, this guy is cool."

Marcus Lehto: "I like this guy. He was supposed to carry his weapon under his belly."

Robert McLees: "Ohhh."

Shi Kai Wang: "Beginnings of the Hunter, I think."

(Cross between a Doberman and an alligator appears, with gator head and tail. Title: Doberman Gator.)

Robert McLees: "Hey!"

Marcus Lehto: "There you go, Rob."

Shi Kai Wang: "It's the... uh..."

Robert McLees: "Gator...

Shi Kai Wang: "Dog..."

Robert McLees: "Doberman..."

Marcus Lehto: "Doberman Gator?"

(Insect with single wing appears. Title: Keelbug.)

Marcus Lehto: "And then the Keelbug...

Shi Kai Wang: "Keelbug..."

Marcus Lehto: "...which was my idea for cleaning up bodies on the battlefield. They would-- A few of them would fly in and cut the body into sections and fly off."

Shi Kai Wang: "I like the wing where it actually distorts the..."

Robert McLees: "It made no sense."

(UNSC warplane bursting with weapons appears. Title: Strike Fighter.)

Robert McLees: (admiring) "Oh..."

Shi Kai Wang: "That's cool."

Marcus Lehto: "I think it was the Strike Fighter, right? It was like a defensive fighter for the... the... uh..."

Robert McLees: "Earth Space."

Marcus Lehto: "Well, it just didn't fit into our game play, either. We didn't have..."

Robert McLees: "Oh, yeah."

Marcus Lehto: "We didn't have purpose for this kind of thing."

Shi Kai Wang: "Unless it's cinematics."

Robert McLees: "Yeah it'd be a cinematic-only thing."

Marcus Lehto: "We need more of a Black Hawk type vehicle, which also got dropped."

(Jet ski-like vehicle appears. Title: Doozy.)

Marcus Lehto: "Dude, I so wanted this vehicle to get in the game."

Robert McLees: "The Doozy."

Shi Kai Wang: "Precursor to the Doozy. It just didn't make any sense."

(Later version of Doozy with a backwards-facing passenger seat.)

Robert McLees: "Didn't that thing wind up eventually getting a gun on the back of it?"

Shi Kai Wang: "No, no, remember? Two people. One of them got in the back."

Robert McLees: "Ah, you're right."

Marcus Lehto: "One guy facing backwards. Yeah, the nausea seat."

(UNSC hovercraft. Title: Kestrel)

Marcus Lehto: "Hovercraft were kind of a strange thing back then, especially ones that we needed to remain stationary at a certain altitude. We had a very difficult time with some of those. It would have taken a long time for us to tune the engine physics to make it work right."

(Clip of Master Chief driving the Mongoose ATV plays.)

Robert McLees: "Oh, man, this is the Mongoose."

Shi Kai Wang: "The ATV."

Marcus Lehto: "Yeah, it got cut. We had weapons on the front of it initially. We tried no weapons. The designers couldn't figure out how to integrate it into game play. It didn't work in conjunction with vehicles like the Warthog or the Ghost. This broke the model too much."

Shi Kai Wang: "Can't tune it well enough, so we had to cut it out." Image:H2 Flamethrower.jpg

(Clip of Master Chief wielding Flamethrower plays.)

Marcus Lehto: "This is disappointing is what this is."

Robert McLees: "Yeah, yeah."

Shi Kai Wang: "We have tried so hard to get this thing into the game."

Marcus Lehto: "We had effects, modeled, even reiterated it. Rob did for Halo 2."

Shi Kai Wang: "Rebuilt it."

Robert McLees: "The most difficult model to build that I did in Halo was the most difficult rebuild for Halo 2."

Marcus Lehto: "Yep."

Shi Kai Wang: "Looked beautiful too."

(Montage of all art shown plays.)

Robert McLees: "Sure it sucks, yeah."

Marcus Lehto: "It's all this good stuff we want to get in the game, but, you know..."

Shi Kai Wang: "That's part of making games."

Commentaries[]

• Halo Origins

• Halo 2: First Look

Halo Origins[]

Marty O'Donnell

//Audio Director

Paul Russel

// 3D Environmental Artist

Shi Kai Wang

// Artist

Robert McLees

// Artist

• Oh my god I love this.

• So are those like newer guys or are those the old guys?

• Those are the old super old hundred polly guys.

• Hey that looks like the back of my dog.

• Okay so this is Sheik, Rob, and Paul and Marty making sound effects.

• Now we're out on the road who thought this was going to be cool?

• This looks like Myth, oh my god!

• Well of course because that’s what it was

• This is dance and there's like one of the old busted up bunkers.

• Now, was that made out of like igloo blocks.

• No, I think it was just busted up.

• Is that the Hummer?

• Yeah the hummer.

• That’s the first version of the Warthog I guess. Huh?

• That’s the old version of the ghost.

• What year is this?

• 19 -

• 48

( Laughing )

• No seriously though; 19 -
• 18?

• We had detailed objects back then?

• Ah, that’s the old broken Halo.

• I'm just a little pray Grunt on a railroad track.

• We tried to multiplayer and it just turned into a grenade juggling act.

• Oh that’s the old disappearing fire. (From the Warthog)

( John gets out of a Warthog and walks through to the Silent Cartographer )

//1998//

//2001//

• Go into the water! Go into the water!

• Its Microsoft, we either release the game in five months or look for another job.

• Cortana: Bet ya can't stick it.

• John-117: You're on.