Halo

Halo: Combat Evolved presents an audacious opening: The game does not begin on the first level. Yes, you kill dozens of aliens – Grunts, Hunters, and Elites – aboard the spaceship Pillar of Autumn. You learn how to aim your gun, and how to fire it. You learn how to manage your body and your exosuit, how to crouch and how to jump. You are John-117, the Master Chief, a husk of humanity’s best and worst, infinite and amplified.

You escape that ship – because you must – in a triumphant crash landing, only to know that you will not be enough. It is at this moment, awash in the titular Halo, that the game begins. It is in this, the digitization of Kindred Spirits, that you see its ironic intent: God is not here. This is not His creation. You will not gaze or mingle with “fellow men”; there will be no “sweet communion” during which you are free – blessedly free – to revel.

The medpacks, ammunition, and weapons scattered from dead marines reinforce this. There will be violence, blood without regret and toil without end, and you will have to reckon with whatever Being put this Halo into being. Worship would be futile, in the face of such a creation. So forge, or perish.

A crippling insignificance is the game’s offer. And, for me, a beautiful motivation. What was beyond? How, and why, is this?

How many would I kill to earn an answer?

Though the game kept score, I already knew my answer: an infinity, and beyond.

The game, for all its brilliant gameplay designs, never lets you forget about that towering Halo above and around you. The series never established something more significant than its skyline, a vista which stands as a newfound pinnacle for human civilization. For while I’ll allow the 19th century its Kindred Spirit -s, I’ve never been to the Catskill Mountains of reality – or imagination. Yet I’ve skidded across Halo’s valleys; I’ve traversed its symmetrical innards; I’ve laid my enemies, and myself, to rest on its shores.

In the entirety of the Halo series, no enemy stalks you quite like the original Halo. It follows you and your friends into the game’s multiplayer maps, those grandiose cages. After it is destroyed in the first game, you learn that more Halos exist in the universe. So, even if your courage forced a gaze above the bloodshed, chaos, and wreckage, another Halo waited, still and anesthetized – beyond.

What a release, then, when Halo 3, the supposed end of the series’ story, finished with the destruction of the Ark, the device that controlled the universe’s remaining Halo rings. Master Chief, a savior for all kinds, could now rest eternally among the stars.

But, in their human fallibility, Halo’s game designers could not leave heroically contented. After creating their pinnacle out of history’s dust, out of pixels and mathematics and desperation and overtime and archetypes and marketing, they sought another. So they shrouded John-117 in sparkly darkness; they yet refused his rest of night. They deprived him of salvation and sleep. As the screen darkens on Halo 3, a new monolith appears, eking a light, a fire, of rage – not of giving, not of life.

And it was at that moment I was certain: Humanity does not belong among the stars.