Halo Already Delivered the Perfect Master Chief Origin Story, 25 Years Ago

As Activision reportedly considers rebooting Halo around Master Chief’s origins, it needs to look at this story for the blueprint.

Late last month, Xbox announced that development of the next game set in the Halo universe would be handed off to Activision. Then, earlier this week, a leak shared by Rebs Gaming indicated that Activision is considering a hard reboot that would double as Master Chief’s origin story. But not only does this miss the point of Combat Evolved, which thrust players directly into an already ongoing future war between humanity and a messianic alien empire known as The Covenant, it also threatens to overwrite a legitimately great sci-fi story in the process.

The boy inside the armor

The Fall of Reach begins decades before Combat Evolved, in the year 2517, when Dr. Catherine Halsey identifies John as one of 150 children genetically suited for the SPARTAN-II program. These children are abducted and replaced with short-lived flash clones designed to trick their parents into thinking each child is dead. He's then subjected to years of military training under Chief Petty Officer Franklin Mendez. All of this occurs on the planet Reach which, aside from Earth, is positioned as the next most-prominent human world.

Whereas the game and virtually all of its sequels effectively present Master Chief as the last of his kind, The Fall of Reach surrounds him with dozens of Spartans. John grows up alongside Kelly, the fastest of them; Linda, an almost impossibly precise marksman; Fred, who is nearly as capable a leader as John; and Sam, John’s first and closest friend who’s also described as the strongest of them all. Together, they become a found family and tight-knit squad.

In one particularly memorable scene from the book, John is testing out the limits of his new body in the gym. Weights feel too light. Objects move too slowly. When a group of four older soldiers harass him and move to attack, he effortlessly kills two and gravely injures the other two in seconds. When John asks Mendez whether the men were enemies or teammates, his instructor refuses to give him a straight answer, which makes it seem like the whole thing was a staged test. Scenes like this represent the start of John’s legend and explain why, when he marches onto the Pillar of Autumn’s bridge early in Halo, several crewmembers turn and stare with awe. It also communicates how he fits in with the rest of human society outside of being merely looked at as a weapon.

That gets to the heart of what makes Nylund’s novel so interesting: It shows us other people who just know Master Chief as John. They tease him, challenge him, follow him, and occasionally understand what he is thinking without any need for words. These relationships make his stoicism feel less like an absence of personality and more like the emotional armor of someone who has spent his entire life losing people.

Late in the book, John meets Cortana and tests the upgraded MJOLNIR Mark V armor that he wears in Combat Evolved. The supposedly controlled exercise is secretly sabotaged, forcing John and Cortana to dodge live ammunition, mines, and an incoming missile. Other Spartans may be stronger, faster, or more naturally gifted, but Cortana recognizes the elusive quality that Halsey first saw in John when he was six: Luck.

Halo is better when Spartans fight together

That same focus on a full team of Spartans is a major reason Halo: Reach remains one of the best games in the franchise. Rather than sending another solitary supersoldier through the Covenant war, Bungie surrounded the player with Noble Team. Carter, Kat, Jun, Emile, Jorge, and Noble Six all have distinguishable specialties and personalities. Unlike with Master Chief, we also see most of them without their helmets on at different points, which humanizes the character and makes the story feel that much more personal.

Most of Noble Team consists of Spartan-IIIs, members of a later program designed to produce cheaper and more expendable supersoldiers. Jorge-052 is the exception. He is a Spartan-II like Master Chief. Even though Jorge isn’t explicitly mentioned in The Fall of Reach, there are a number of unnamed Spartans we simply never meet in the book.

Halo: Reach is the furthest thing from an adaptation of Nylund’s novel, though it does have some overlapping subject matter. What they share more than anything is an understanding that Spartans are more compelling as a family than as interchangeable armored supersoldiers. Their camaraderie gives their sacrifices meaning.

The Halo origin story that almost didn’t happen

It's remarkable that The Fall of Reach established so much of the franchise considering how quickly it was produced. Nylund reportedly wrote the novel in only seven weeks, working from an approved outline and a story bible for a video game that hadn’t even been released yet.

The book arrived on Oct. 30, 2001 — 16 days before Halo: Combat Evolved. That technically makes this tie-in novel the first released piece of Halo media. Readers could learn John’s history, meet his fellow Spartans, and witness the fall of Reach before anyone had set foot on the titular ringworld.

The novel also reportedly came close to never existing because Bungie was resistant to giving Master Chief a defined backstory. Those concerns are understandable: A mostly silent protagonist made it easier for players to imagine themselves inside the armor. But The Fall of Reach proved John could be both an effective player avatar and an interesting character at the same time.

Nylund later returned to the series for Halo: First Strike and Halo: Ghosts of Onyx, chronicling what happened to Master Chief and some of the other Spartans after the first game and through the end of Halo 2. Together, the three novels form a loose trilogy about the soldiers left outside the games’ spotlight.

The largely maligned game Halo 5: Guardians does reunite Master Chief with Fred, Kelly, and Linda. For readers of Nylund’s novels, seeing Blue Team together in a game is monumental. But for anyone who had only played the mainline series, it’s a plot development that feels half-cooked. That disconnect was one of Halo 5’s fundamental storytelling problems.

A new game about John’s origins has the chance to do something similar. Activision doesn’t need to discard The Fall of Reach or assume that its audience has already read it. It can bring the novel’s best ideas into the games properly: John learning to lead Kelly and Sam as a child, the devastating augmentation process, his first missions with Blue Team, the emergence of the Covenant, and the moment Cortana chooses him not because he is the strongest or fastest Spartan, but because he is the bravest and the luckiest.

If Activision really is developing a Master Chief origin story, The Fall of Reach should be its blueprint. Nylund understood that the most interesting question was never how John-117 became strong enough to save humanity. It was how a kidnapped little boy held on to enough of his humanity to become its greatest hero.