Development on the Halo TV show continues to progress at a steady rate, and it sounds as if Microsoft has some pretty lofty ambitions for the Showtime produced sci-fi series.
We’d previously heard that Orange is the New Black’s Pablo Scrieber will be playing Master Chief, while Black Mirror and Peaky Blinders alum Otto Bathurst has signed on to direct the ten episode series, but we’re still not entirely sure what the overall tone of the Halo show will be.
343 Industries transmedia boss Kiki Wolfkill (awesome name) recently shed a little more light on what we can expect from Halo, revealing that the upcoming show is aiming to be like Game of Thrones – at least in some respects.
That doesn’t immediately mean we’re in for a fantasy story full of dragons and disappointing payoffs, to be clear. I mean, that’s obviously not what Halo is or ever has been. Wolfkill made it clear that when they look to Game of Thrones for inspiration, they’re simply examining the themes of HBO’s hit show.
She said during The AIAS Game Maker’s Notebook podcast:
It’s hard to find an analog. We talk about Game of Thrones a lot in terms of scope and scale and complexity of relationships. A lot of the background of Halo is this sort of political drama. It’s something that [is touched on] really lightly in the games and you see more of in some of the other mediums. Some of that [Game of Thrones-style] complexity is interesting.
As Wolfkill says herself, the Halo games aren’t exactly known for telling gripping political dramas, but the extended universe in the comic books and novels have certainly proved that there’s an interesting story to be told there. That’s not to say that past Halo games haven’t displayed an impressive level of depth, of course.
Wolfkill did admit that one area where Halo will definitely deviate from Game of Thrones is incest. She confirmed that anyone looking for incest “won’t find it” in Halo. I don’t know who goes looking for incest, but I mean, a general lack of it in any TV show is fine with me.
She also explained that she doesn’t think a genuinely strong video game adaptation is impossible:
It’s not because you can’t, it’s because it’s a really hard challenge, and everyone is still trying to figure it out. There isn’t something inherent in the format of video games that makes it impossible to adapt; it’s just a hard challenge. Literally day to day we are making decisions on what can change, what shouldn’t change, what we can we bend.
Halo’s ten episode first season is scheduled to start production later in the year, and Wolfkill believes that even if the show fails, the team working on it are proud of what they’re doing so far, and it’ll be a solid step forward for video game adaptations.
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Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.