This guest post is written by Tiago Svn.
Editor’s note: Microsoft is under boycott for its complicity in the genocide against the Palestinian people.
2001 inhabits my mind as if it were yesterday, and I’m fortunate to say it’s mostly for good reasons. Waking up from the dramatic crash landing spot to the beauty of the titular place in “Halo: Combat Evolved” remains one of the most memorable moments in gaming, a sight of such grandeur even Halo’s biggest detractor could only hope to complain that it doesn’t belong in a game about brutalizing dozens of sentient lifeforms working together.
And the pleasantness of that world wouldn’t have had such a lasting impact if not for its contrast with the mostly silent, ever-mysterious, and cool presence of the main character, the Master Chief. The remake more than succeeds on the beauty side of things, but for incredibly dumb reasons only, it failed the main character harder than any other popular series ever has.
When they first showed the remake of the original “Halo,” now “Halo: Campaign Evolved,” I was immediately on board. My reasoning, perhaps to excuse years of hating on remakes, was that it was going to look beautiful, fantastic for screenshots, even if they’d end up missing what made the original’s gameplay so addicting and would ultimately end up inexplicably messing it up, as they always do. Cautious optimism was the best a remake of a brilliant game’s announcement had ever gotten out of me, and this announcement had gone way over that.
Sadly, Microsoft, through the company’s very own stupidity and inaction, ended up ruining a lot of that for no reason. I’m obviously talking about how both the DHS and White House itself co-opted the Halo brand, and the Master Chief especially, to make their vile, rampant militaristic approach to immigration policies look cool.
This immediately raised red flags in the minds of many fans who immediately identified both a straight-up evil act in the real world, and an abominable appropriation and corruption of a beloved character in the video game world and collective memory. It’s hard to imagine Microsoft expected anyone cool would’ve been drawn in by such messaging, and that they’d want the nightmare that’d be having to deal with a fanbase composed entirely of people who like this kind of thing and those who just couldn’t care less. And yet, we’re yet to see any meaningful pushback from Microsoft against this misuse of the Halo brand, so I’m guessing we’re not about to see one.
And this sucks for one more reason, as it might reveal to so many blissfully unaware fans of the Master Chief’s deeply dumb origin story from the Halo novels. You see, Master Chief’s great at dealing with armed and dangerous alien threats, so, by sheer video game logic, you’d assume he was trained or “built” for just that. In a universe with so much more to tell, that’s all we really needed to know from Master Chief, but the Halo novels decided to explain that the Master Chief wasn’t like the Doom Guy, a guy that you just knew was good at killing demons and liking rabbits (yes, it’s true), but something both way more complex and somehow dumber.
The Spartan project, which gave us Spartan John 117 aka Master Chief, actually involved the kidnapping of human children that would be replaced by clones suffering from deadly ailments in a way to make it look like they hadn’t been kidnapped at all, merely that they died in awful but natural ways. The real children, which now belonged to the good government of Earth, were subjected to treatment that amounted to the extreme physical and psychological torture seemingly required to make a super soldier.
That’s all extremely grim, even when you don’t realize most people playing “Halo” when it came out were probably around, well, the age of the kids that got kidnapped to make little Spartans, but it gets even worse. Turns out that they did all that not because they wanted a warrior capable of challenging space-faring foes — humanity didn’t even know about the Covenant or the Flood back then — but because the UNSC, aka the world government, wanted to create a unit strong enough to crush possible rebellions.
Yes, that’s right, the book version of the Master Chief was something created through immense suffering of the population to quell the fight of people that I’m guessing are probably very right about not liking their awful authoritarian government. The books tell readers that the Master Chief isn’t the Earth’s appropriate response to a large-scale alien invasion, but a very cruel tool of Earth’s very own empire that also works very well against pretty much any other crushable living organism.
The original books never really questioned the UNSC’s many atrocities, which would at least have made for a cool arc where the Master Chief realizes who the bad guys really are and gets them some cathartic comeuppance. They merely present it all as shocking lore that they think we really needed to know about.
Halo brand owners and job enders Microsoft never seemed to care much about the character as they let bizarre Halo novel after bizarre Halo novel come out, so I probably shouldn’t be too surprised that they wouldn’t care any more just because real human lives were now at stake, but I couldn’t help but be even more disappointed than before upon seeing those repugnant tweets.
And please don’t think I haven’t thought about the silliness of it all.
Why, just why, is a fictional character being canceled in my mind like a once-great musician whose awful deeds had just come to light? Especially when the video game version of himself, the only one I really care about, hasn’t really done any of that? Only the bizarre extended book universe Master Chief, and the White House-corrupted Master Chief, are to blame, so why should I care?
Oh yeah, maybe it’s because regardless of who’s behind the Master Chief Mask, it’s always the inexplicably spineless trillion-dollar corporation pulling his strings — or letting others pull them — filling its pockets off of my hunger for nostalgia, hunger that could so very easily be getting fed right now, if Microsoft had had the guts to protect the image and integrity of the character that remains their most iconic, despite all the years of gross mismanagement.
Image Credit: “Halo: Campaign Evolved”
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