Making of Halo: Fireteam Raven

Making of Halo: Fireteam Raven is a video documentary by 343 Industries, covering the development of the arcade shooter Halo: Fireteam Raven. It was released on YouTube on 21 August, 2018.

Transcript

• Frank O'Connor : We have been talking about a halo arcade game for years actually, the seed of that conversation is a halo pinball machine which we still haven't made. So the idea has always been knocking around in the back of our heads.
• Kiki Wolfkill : Just what would it mean to take halo out of the console and pc world and bring it out into the wild.
• George Petro : I want to say I approached microsoft about working on a halo arcade probably six years ago.
• Frankie : The idea has been around forever but without that move from raw thrills we would have never have found the right vehicle for that was.
• Will Carlin : I just got called up to the front office and I was just asked would you like to make a halo game? And I was like ""hell yeah!" I want to make a halo game who does not want to make a halo game?

Halo: Fireteam Raven

• Petro : The number one thing that raw thrills/play mechanix pride ourselves on is that we are arcade game makers we understand arcade games. Our company creates games from concept through software, hardware, mechanical then all the way to manufacturing.
• Wolfkill : Raw thrills they bring really extraordinary expertise in making aracde games experiences which is new for us.
• Frankie : I think we get really litteral when we think about games how would you solve for an fps in a arcade game? If you go to arcades you'll find out there really aren't a lot of traditional first person shooters.
• Wolfkill : How do we take our video game and really distill it down to a fun bombastic adventure?
• Frankie : So when we hooked up with the guys at raw thrills/play mechanix they immediately felt it was a gun game.
• Carlin : The format of this game is something I've wanted to do for a very long time, so when halo showed up this bottled up idea I've been sitting on for years had a place, it had a place that made sense. The arcade game is a physical big game that sits in a location to do that it takes lots of people and lot of different, work and efforts to get to that point. See, normally I'm doing software which is mainly what I do.
• Sam Cutler : This is what the camera is going to look like.
• Carlin : And software starts first so in software we come up with the imagery of the game.
• Bob Montgomery : This is our G7 engine.
• Carlin : The ideas of the game, the tempo and the pace of the game what are the key elements that the gameplay is going to be?
• Cortana : The others, the impact, there is nothing we can do.
• Carlin : You know, we put a lot of effort into capturing all the little details of halo.
• Nate Davis : So I am currently creating the fx for the scarab in our engine. It's all recreated from scratch.
• Carlin : And it takes us a lot of effort to capture it so the players, specifically the fans can appreciate that we are really trying to give them a true halo experience.
• Davis : It was a lot of research, a lot of it I have an xbox hooked up to my pc with a capture card on it and I would capture all the different FX. Essentially make it look like it was taken out of a halo game but it's all recreated from scratch.
• John-117 : Captain Keyes.
• Jacob Keyes : Good to see you Master Chief.
• Frankie : It's set in the same time frame as Halo : Combat Evolved.
• Keyes : Im initiating the Cole Protocol, Article 2. We're abandoning the Autumn.
• Wellsley : Captain Keyes is placing the Pillar of Autumn in combat alert alpha.
• Petro : And we follow Fireteam Raven that ends up, they're on the Pillar of Autumn reckage.
• Wolfkill : And the fireteam obviously made perfect sense.
• Petro : We're really just an offshoot team that's fighting a big battle just to support master chief.
• Ethan Graves : Covenant forces are moving in on the Pillar of Autumn wreckage. Let's help push them back Raven !
• Carlin : This is our development station : We design the game on this. We make the game on this. We test the game on this. We play the game on this. You know? Our goal is to have four people enjoying the game but also have a crowd of people behind them viewing it. We position them around these two gigantic 65 inch screens. This player right here he can shoot right here or he can point the gun this way and point all the way down there, which is a 9 foot span across. So we can create an experience that will truly represent what the game will look like when it's finished.
• Wolfkill : Basically imagine the width of four players sitting on a couch and that's the cabinet with a giant screen that's right there. It's a really visceral experience.
• Carlin : Usually we get, I would say thirty, fourty percent into the game then the mechanical engineers come in.
• Petro : We have a mechanical design department that basically goes through designing the cabinetry the control works, anything like that.
• Mark Ritchie : Right now you're looking at the very close to final version of the Halo cabinet. In our world we have to make things that hold up to abuse to liquid spills, there's all kinds of things we have to deal with in the coin-op world. We have a responsibility to make these things work for large, small, everybody needs tobe able to control the gun, to control it comfortably and to be able to get in and out of the cabinet without problems.
• Petro : The video game cabinet is made out of wood so it's all these different pieces that are, cut to size, cut to shape, routed, and then glued together, and nailed together or screwed together.
• Ritchie : So all of that needs to get assembled in it's final state at the manufacturing facility. And there they will get all the hardware necessary, the I/O board, the monitors, the computer, the gun control. Our goal was to get this thing as big and bright as possible so in any location, you can't miss it.
• Larry Hyrb : I'm about to be joined by some of our Halo friends from 343 industries but first, check this out.
• Brandin Tyrrel : The unit itself is awesome.
• James Monosmith : This thing is the biggest arcade game I've ever seen.
• IGN Announcer : The Halo Fireteam Raven arcade cabinet is nothing if not imposing.
• Monosmith : It is literally like 11 feet by 11 feet by 11 feet. 130 inches 4K screens.
• Larry Hyrb : What?
• Monosmith : Four player sit down co-op.
• Miranda Sanchez : It is really neat because it is two screens but you can shoot across both of them. So having that extra space is really important when you're trying to steal kills on the other side of the screen.
• Jeff Easterling : By the way, we have some awesome pretty robust leader boards on Halo Waypoint. You can generate a QR code, You can scan that QR code. You can sign in under your gamertag at the arcade. That's really awesome. That's like super next level.
• Tom French : Yeah, I dreamt of that as a kid.
• Easterling : Yeah!
• Petro : We love to go out to the locations and watch people play.
• Player : Nice!
• Frankie : That's our pay off, it took me back to the days of Halo CE where you would have to go together to a room to play together.
• Wolfkill : We took literally the old lan couch experience of Combat Evolved and put it into a public space.
• Carlin : When people see this I want themto be shocked that someone actually built this thing and I want this game to be everything. Big. Exciting. Epic.