Halo.

Before 2001, most people in my generation associated the word “halo” to the ring above an angel’s head. Fast forward ten years and I guarantee that a majority of those same people now associate “halo” with a video game that involves blowing up inter-galactic space ships or killing your friends online for hours on end. Ironic no?

I first stumbled upon the Halo video game franchise when my brother and I finally convinced my parents to buy us an Xbox. It took us years to eventually goad our parents into buying a video game system. Several honor roll report cards later, the parents gave in to our demands. At first it wasn’t too bad. My brother and I would sit for several hours a day playing video games. At a reasonable hour we would then turn off the Xbox and go about doing our homework or studying for our test.—but that was before Halo 2 came out. Opening the CD case that held Halo 2 for the first time was like opening Pandora’s Box, there was no turning back. My brother and I spent days playing Halo 2. We would play to the sun came up, take a two-hour nap and do the same thing over again. We would invite our friends over—and do the same exact thing. We were hooked since day one, and we still are.

The storyline of the original Halo trilogy involved the last individual of a cybernetically enhanced generation of super-soldiers. Master Chief, as he is known in the game, is the last of his kind. He is awoken from a cryogenically frozen sleep to defend humanity from an unknown alien species. Throughout the original trilogy he is faced with great challenges, from having to destroy an alien starship with his bare hands or destroying an intergalactic weapon that will not only destroy humanity, but all life in the galaxy, Master Chief has a full plate of fun stuff to explode.

This undying passion to kill aliens wasn’t just limited to my brother and me; thousands of people love Halo, and Bungie (Halo’s developer) hopped on this bandwagon like a sticky grenade on a Grunt. Bungie did not only begin to release a franchise of video games, Bungie remediated the video game into several different genres. Neil Blomkamp, the director of District 9, released a short film, several novels were released based on the video game, a comic book series was created, action figures, posters, and even a table top board game was created after the release of the third video game in the series.

The Halo Short film

Halo Action Figures

One of the many Halo novels

Halo evolved from just a video game into the wider known realm of pop-culture when people began to recognize what Halo represented without laying hands on a video game controller. Halo became much more than a video game, it began to represent a generation. Before our time, older generations were able to talk about their video games that defined a generation. The 80s kids had Super Mario, the 90s had Zelda and Golden Eye, but up until 2001, there wasn’t a game that existed to define my generation. But Halo appeared on the map, redefined video gaming for the new millennium, and left us with a game that we were allowed to call our own.