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John-117 Master Chief Petty Officer
Halo character
Master Chief as he appears in Halo Infinite (2021)
First appearance	Halo: The Fall of Reach (2001)
First game	Halo: Combat Evolved (2001)
Created by	Bungie
Portrayed by	Daniel Cudmore (Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn) Pablo Schreiber (Halo)
Voiced by	Steve Downes (video games) David Wald (Halo Legends) Alex Puccinelli (Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn)
Motion capture	Bruce Thomas (Halo 4, Halo 5: Guardians and Halo Infinite)

Master Chief Petty Officer John-117, or "Master Chief", is a character and the protagonist in the Halo multimedia franchise. Master Chief is a playable character in the series of military science fiction first-person shooter video games Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo 4, Halo 5: Guardians and Halo Infinite. The character also appears in Halo books and graphic novels – including Halo: The Fall of Reach, Halo: The Flood, Halo: First Strike, and Halo: Uprising – and has minor appearances or cameos in other Halo media.

The Master Chief is a towering supersoldier known as a "Spartan", raised and trained from childhood for combat. He is almost faceless as he is rarely seen without his green-colored armor and helmet. He is commonly referred to by his naval rank rather than his given birth name. The character is voiced by Steve Downes, a former Chicago disc jockey, in the video games in which he appears, while in alternate media outside the Halo games, he is portrayed by other actors, most notably Pablo Schreiber in the live-action Halo TV series. Downes based his personification of the Chief on an initial character sketch, which called for a Clint Eastwood–type character of few words. With each new appearance, the character's visual design underwent revamping or updates.

The Master Chief serves as a mascot for Halo and the Xbox brand. The character has received a generally positive reception; while some critics have described the Chief's silent and faceless nature as a character weakness, other publications have suggested these attributes better allow players to inhabit the character. Criticism of the Master Chief's lessened role in Halo 5 led to the developers at 343 Industries refocusing on him for Halo Infinite.

Character design

Art direction

When game studio Bungie began developing Halo: Combat Evolved (2001), the design of Master Chief was led by art director Marcus Lehto with support from artist Robert McLees. Shi Kai Wang was later hired as a concept artist, who created a sketch that became the basis for Master Chief. When the sketch was translated into a three-dimensional model, the team felt that it looked too slim and anime-inspired, and Lehto asked for a bulkier character design that felt more like a walking tank. The Chief's armor went through various changes, such as green tint, and the addition (and later removal) of an antenna. The character's two-prong visor, intended to convey speed and agility, was inspired by BMX helmets. For much of the game's development, the character had no name. The Chief was always intended to be a soldier in a difficult war, and the team first referred to them as the "Future Soldier" or "The Cyborg". Eric Nylund established the character's forename as "John" in the tie-novel Halo: The Fall of Reach, but Bungie did not want to use that in the game itself. Looking to military ranks for inspiration, naval ranks grabbed the developers as "different" from other game characters. McLees, insisting on accuracy, wanted to make sure the character still had a plausible rank for his role. "Master Chief" was the highest non-commissioned rank where the character would still be considered "expendable". McLees also felt the shortened "Chief" sounded more colloquial and less like a modern military designation. Though "Master Chief" was intended to be a placeholder, and drew some internal disagreement, the name ended up sticking.

Halo was considered a success. Story writer Joseph Staten recalled that early on in Halo's development, they had not considered how to engage players in the world, and Master Chief's character was what drew people in. The success of the game led Bungie to develop a sequel, with the developers deciding to "tone down" the character's design, according to Mclees. In the story, Master Chief's armor receives an upgrade, and the character received a new design for Halo 2 and Halo 3, with residual damage illustrated in the high-definition graphics of Halo 3.

For Halo 4, Bungie spun off from Microsoft as an independent company, with Microsoft assigning development duties to 343 Industries. Art director Kenneth Scott aimed to find "sweet spot" where Master Chief's armor remained familiar but still new. The armor was redesigned to feel futuristic and heavy, weighing hundreds of pounds, with details inspired by real-world military vehicles. In contrast to newer characters, the armor of Master Chief and his fellow elder Spartans was intended to look more tanklike and utilitarian. Despite the visual differences between the character's armor in Halo 3 and Halo 4, the developers intended it to canonically be the same armor. Halo 4 also made extensive use of motion capture for character animation, with Bruce Thomas portraying Master Chief while interacting with multiple actors in studio. Even without his face or voice appearing in the game, Thomas was credited by creative director Josh Holmes for conveying Master Chief's physicality and emotions, and for his influence on the other performers.

Actor Bruce Thomas returned to provide motion capture for the character, as he had in Halo 4 and Halo 5. With the development of Halo Infinite, 343 Industries redesigned Master Chief's armor once again, while drawing inspiration from the character's previous looks.

Voice acting

Bungie designed Master Chief as a man of few words, similar to Clint Eastwood. The game designers crafted the first game's experience as lonely, to reinforce the backstory that Chief's friends had been largely killed. Master Chief rarely spoke in the early Halo games, making him an almost-silent protagonist. Joseph Staten felt that a focus on immersion was key to developing Master Chief's personality in the games, as "the less players knew about the Chief, we believed, the more they would feel like the Chief." Even with the tie-in novel The Fall of Reach, some at Bungie were against its release because they felt that Master Chief should remain less characterized.

Master Chief is voiced by actor Steve Downes, with previous experience as a disc jockey. He was recommended by Bungie musical director Martin O'Donnell, based on their rapport from working together on Septerra Core: Legacy of the Creator. Septerra was the first time Downes had performed as a voice actor for a game, and otherwise had never played a video game until Halo. Downes described being accepted for the part of Master Chief over the phone, without an interview or audition. Actor Steve Downes noted that he was given creative freedom to develop the Chief's personality during recording. Still, many of the character's lines in the first game were eventually cut, as Bungie felt that the more the character spoke, "the more chances there are that we’ll get it wrong for you, whoever you are."

When Halo became a widely successful series, Bungie considered recasting a celebrity for the role before deciding against it. By Halo 4, 343 Industries wanted to treat Master Chief as less of a vessel for the players, and more of a fully realized human being experiencing difficult events. Downes believes he came particularly close to losing the role for Halo 4, feeling that his audition for the role demanded more emotional weight. Downes became more involved with the Halo 4 sessions, giving input on advance scripts, and recording in longer sessions. Where Master Chief began the game series with an artificial intelligence companion named Cortana, designed as a gameplay tool to guide the player, Cortana later evolved into a narrative tool to reveal the protagonist's humanity. As such, the Halo 4 production had Downes interacting with actress Jen Taylor (Cortana) in the same space for the first time. Creative director Josh Holmes cited the video game Ico as an inspiration for the Chief-Cortana relationship in Halo 4, noting that it emphasized how to tell a story without dialogue, while noting the challenge of balancing the protagonist's character development with his stoic nature.

For years Downes never appeared at Bungie or Microsoft events and believed the Master Chief was left masked because " is really in the eye of the player." He has called the role the most rewarding of his voice acting career.

Appearances

In every Halo game, the Master Chief is rarely seen without his armor. Cutscenes never reveal the character's face, to aid players in identifying with the character. Games are known to tease a reveal, with the Chief removing his helmet out of the camera's sight at the end of the first game, or a brief reveal of the character's eyes if the player wins Halo 4 at the highest difficulty. O'Connor said in an interview that revealing the face of the Chief is not as important as revealing the events going on around the character.

In Halo: The Flood, the Chief is described as tall with short brown hair, serious eyes, and strong features. His skin is unnaturally pale as a consequence of spending most of his time in his armor. The Master Chief stands about 7 feet (2.13 m) tall and weighs 1,000 pounds (450 kg) in armor; without it, he stands 6 feet, 10 inches (2.08 m) tall and weighs 287 pounds (130 kg).

The Master Chief's backstory is revealed in the 2001 novel The Fall of Reach. Born "John" in 2511, he is covertly taken from the human colony world of Eridanus as a child, and conscripted into the SPARTAN-II supersoldier project by the United Nations Space Command (UNSC). John proves a natural leader and leads his peers over eight years of grueling training and dangerous physical augmentation. A new threat emerges: the Covenant, a collective of alien races determined to exterminate humanity. Though the Spartans prove effective against the Covenant, they are too few to turn the tide in the UNSC's favor.

Main game series

Master Chief first appears in the games with Halo: Combat Evolved. Master Chief and the crew of the UNSC ship Pillar of Autumn discover an alien ringworld, called Halo. Master Chief is entrusted with safeguarding Cortana, the ship's artificial intelligence, from capture. While fighting the Covenant, Master Chief and Cortana learn that an ancient race known as the Forerunners created Halo as a last line of defense against an alien parasite called the Flood, which begins to spread across the ring. Learning that Halo's activation would contain the Flood by killing all life in the Galaxy, the Master Chief and Cortana detonate the Pillar of Autumn in order to destroy Halo, escaping in a fighter spacecraft.

Master Chief returns to Earth in Halo 2 (2004), defending the planet from an invasion by the Covenant. Pursuing a fleeing Covenant vessel, Master Chief and the crew of the human ship In Amber Clad discover another Halo ring. Master Chief is captured by a Flood intelligence known as a Gravemind, who forges an alliance between them and the disgraced Covenant commander known as the Arbiter. The Gravemind sends them to stop the Halo's activation, with Master Chief arriving at the Covenant space station High Charity, near the Halo's orbit. Cortana remains behind to ensure the ring is destroyed if activated. Master Chief pursues the remaining Covenant leader, the Prophet of Truth, who heads to Earth with the invent of activating the Halo Array from outside the galaxy.

The events continue in Halo 3 (2007), when Master Chief reunites with the Arbiter to stop Truth. Master Chief and Arbiter pursue him through a portal to the Ark, a place located beyond the Milky Way. On the Ark, the Flood-controlled High Charity crashes into the installation. Master Chief stops the Halo Array from firing and battles through the wreckage of High Charity to rescue Cortana. Together, they activate replacement Halo being built on the Ark, stopping the Flood while sparing the galaxy at large. Escaping aboard the UNSC ship Forward Unto Dawn, the section of the ship with Master Chief and Cortana is set adrift in space while the Arbiter reaches Earth.

Master Chief returns as the playable protagonist in 2012's Halo 4, after his omission from Halo 3: ODST, and a brief cameo easter egg in Halo: Reach. Halo 4 begins with Cortana awakening Master Chief from cryonic sleep, while the Forward Unto Dawn approaches a Forerunner installation, Requiem. Hoping to prevent the UNSC ship Infinity from being drawn into Requiem like them, Master Chief and Cortana attempt to activate what they believe is a communications relay; instead, Master Chief awakens the Didact, a Forerunner who hated humanity and intended to resume his war against them. Master Chief and Cortana pursued the Didact, and Cortana sacrifices herself to stop his attack on Earth.

In the events of Halo 5: Guardians (2015), Master Chief is contacted by Cortana, presumed to be destroyed in the previous game. She directs him to the human colony of Meridian, and he leads his Blue Team squad to the planet against UNSC orders. This leads to a pursuit from a rival group of Spartans, Fireteam Osiris. Blue Team board a buried Forerunner construct known as a Guardian, which transports them to the Forerunner planet Genesis. Cortana reveals that she survived thanks to the Domain, a repository of ancient Forerunner knowledge. Cortana reveals her authoritarian plans for the galaxy, and imprisons Master Chief and his team in stasis. They are rescued through the efforts of Fireteams Osiris, but forced to retreat as Cortana rallies human AIs and Forerunner Guardians as her enforcers.

Master Chief returns as the main protagonist in Halo Infinite (2021), where he works with the Weapon, an AI modelled after Cortana, to stop a faction of space pirates known as the Banished from activating a Halo ring.

Other media

The character made his live-action debut in the 2012 film Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn, portrayed physically by Daniel Cudmore, with voice acting from Alex Puccinelli. In the 2022 Halo television series, the character is played by Pablo Schreiber. Master Chief takes off his helmet in the series, as part of an effort to make the audience empathize with the character. Master Chief would have also appeared in a cancelled Halo film, with Director Neill Blomkamp intending a faceless depiction in support of other major characters.

The Master Chief is also a major character in the novels Silent Storm (2018), Oblivion (2019), and Shadows of Reach (2020), written by Troy Denning. The character also appears in the 2010 animated anthology Halo Legends, as well as the comics The Halo Graphic Novel, Halo: Uprising, Halo: Collateral Damage, and Halo: Tales from Slipspace. Peter David's graphic novel Helljumpers contains a cameo by the Master Chief "before he actually was ".

The character appears in games outside Halo canon, including a guest appearance as a playable character in Super Bomberman R for the Xbox One, and a cosmetic outfit in the battle royale game Fortnite. Fable II includes a medieval variation of the Master Chief's armor, worn by a legendary hero named "Hal". The character is referenced in Rooster Teeth Productions' Halo-based machinima parody series Red vs. Blue. When Team Ninja approached Bungie to use the Master Chief in Dead or Alive 4 (2006), they declined due to storyline restrictions, resulting in the inclusion of another Spartan supersoldier named Nicole (Spartan-458).

Influences and analysis

IGN saw in the Master Chief elements of Jon 6725416, a character in Christopher Rowley's novel Starhammer. Other reviewers have suggested that the name John-117 could be a Biblical reference. Michael Nitsche of the Georgia Institute of Technology found similarity to Gordon Freeman, the protagonist of Valve's Half-Life series of FPS video games: " are the independent, individualistic, and often lonely heroes that gain admiration by constantly proving their superiority ... in technology-driven, hostile, often closed spaces."

Roger Travis, associate professor of classics at the University of Connecticut, compared Master Chief to the epic hero Aeneas, in that both superhuman characters save a civilization by defeating strong enemies in a martial setting. The audience is intended to identify with the protagonist similarly in both stories. Matthew Stover compared Halo to the Iliad, saying both stories share the meta-theme that "war is the crucible of character". As military science fiction, Halo further raises the issue of being human. Stover argued that, since players are to imagine themselves as the Master Chief, the character is correctly presented as a cyborg, neither a flawless machine nor fully human. Players would be unable to empathize with the former, and the latter would be too specifically developed. This immersion has facilitated the use of the Halo series' multiplayer mode for live digital puppetry, as in Chris Burke's machinima talk show This Spartan Life.

Cultural impact

Merchandise

BusinessWeek listed the Master Chief among several video game characters who have been branded beyond their respective video games, "helping them transcend the very medium in the process". The Master Chief has been used in marketing on a variety of products, from 7-Eleven Slurpees to T-shirts, controllers to Mountain Dew, and costumes to motorcycle helmets. Several action figures of the character have been created to market of the Halo series, including lines by McFarlane, Jazwares, 1000toys, and Mega Bloks. One2One collectibles produced 1:2 scale busts of the Master Chief.

Marketing for the video games focused heavily on the character of the Master Chief, including "The Museum", part of Halo 3's "Believe" campaign, the Halo 4 live-action trailer "Scanned", Halo 5's Hunt the Truth, and Infinite's "Become" campaign. The heavy merchandising was considered necessary for the game franchise; Ed Ventura, director of Xbox's worldwide marketing, said, "We want to be in the hearts and minds of our fans as much as we can."

Reception

In an article in Time, Lev Grossman said the Master Chief represents a "new kind of celebrity for a new and profoundly weird millennium" and was a symbol of the increasing legitimacy of video games as an art form. IGN, Kotaku, Glixel, GamesRadar and The Sydney Morning Herald described the Chief as "iconic". Master Chief has been called the de facto symbol for the Xbox console, Microsoft, and for a generation of gamers. The recognition of Master Chief has spread to mainstream culture; Madame Tussauds in Las Vegas has developed a wax sculpture of the Chief. At the ceremony, Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy called the Master Chief a hero of the times as much as characters like Spider-Man and Luke Skywalker were for previous generations. Downes realized his character was such a huge hit only after children lined up around the block for his autograph a year after the game shipped.

The character has appeared on lists of the best video gaming characters by UGO, Empire, GamesRadar, Guinness World Records Gamer's Edition, Complex, and Time. IGN suggested that the dramatic death of the character could be one of the most powerful events in gaming. The faceless nature of the character has alternatively been praised and criticized, with the character called overrated. Writing for The Artifice, Sam Gray argued the character uncomfortably straddled the divide between silent and active protagonist, and the lack of character conflict made him uninteresting. O'Connor noted that given players invest the character with much of his meaning, there is a tension between players who prefer more personality and those who prefer "a sort of paragon of useful emptiness".

The more character-focused portrayal of Chief in Halo 4 was positively received. Todd Martens of the Los Angeles Times called Halo 4 a more introspective Halo game, and the first to explore the motivations and emotions of the Master Chief. Reviews that found the game's story otherwise hard to follow praised the focus on fleshing out the character and Chief and Cortana's relationship.

Halo 5 received backlash from fans about Master Chief's reduced role in the story, as he appeared in fewer story missions compared to Fireteam Osiris. Kotaku's Stephen Totilo wrote that the confrontation between Locke and Master Chief felt "under-cooked", and the plot point of a rogue Master Chief more effectively explored in Hunt the Truth. O'Connor promised the studio would refocus on Chief in future media.

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External links

• The Master Chief's profile at Bungie.org
• The Master Chief's profile Archived November 12, 2020, at the Wayback Machine at Halowaypoint.com
• John-117’s profile at halopedia.org

• Cryonically preserved characters in video games
• Cyborg characters in video games
• Fictional chief petty officers
• Fictional gunfighters in video games
• Fictional special forces personnel
• Fictional super soldiers
• Halo (franchise) characters
• Male characters in video games
• Microsoft protagonists
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• Fictional characters with superhuman strength