Running from 1998 to 2001, the sixth generation of consoles marks a transitional point for the video game industry. Sega released their final console, the 1998 Dreamcast, and pivoted to making games, while their rival Nintendo started to focus on the casual market. They would launch the Wii in 2006, the Wii U in 2012, and the Switch in 2017. For mainstream consoles, the market became defined by Sony’s PlayStation 2 and Microsoft’s Xbox. Microsoft was the new player in the market. They had a powerful track record with the home computer, but this was their first console. It was launched in North America in November 2001 with an initial library of twenty-odd games – titles like Dead or Alive 3, NBA Live 2002, a Shrek platformer, and Halo: Combat Evolved.

Halo: Combat Evolved is a first-person shooter developed by Bungie and published by Microsoft Game Studios. It was released for Xbox in 2001 and ported to Mac and PC in 2003. Just as the sixth generation of consoles marks the onset of the landscape we recognise today, Halo is very much at the core of contemporary video games. It sets the terms that everything else is judged by. Its combination of narrative-driven campaign and multiplayer became industry-standard, and its sophisticated AI set a benchmark for complex enemy behaviour, showcasing how an enemy’s actions in combat can be used to communicate character traits.

On a narrative level, Halo: Combat Evolved is a prime instance of the hero’s journey. While it’s not the first game to use this model (compare Sonic the Hedgehog (1991) and Half-Life (1998)), it is potent. Pop culture explanations of the hero’s journey tend to treat it as a simple narrative structure – as just a way of building a story. A hero leaves home, is changed, and comes back different. These explanations tend to skip over the roots of the idea in comparative mythology. Joseph Campbell’s 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces offers the hero’s journey as a ‘monomyth’ – not just one narrative among many but the archetypal narrative, an underlying method or structure that is common to the whole of humanity. His argument sits somewhere between psychology and spirituality: the hero’s journey is seen as something inherent in all of us, whether a biological function of the human brain or some unifying spiritual or supernatural force. Artists, he says, are modern-day shamans, expressing a single basic psychic pattern or spiritual urge. The threshold, the ordeal, the death and resurrection – Jesus, Prometheus, and Master Chief are here all the same. The idea that the hero’s journey is just one way to structure a story misses Campbell’s most important claim: that all stories ultimately share the same structure. It’s most accurately thought of alongside Freudian or Marxist ideas, as a concept that sets itself up as the single master key able to unlock and explain human nature.

Regardless of whether you agree with Campbell’s idea (and I don’t), Halo is a powerful example of the hero’s journey. Its narrative structure reflects the typical stages of the hero’s journey, but its place in video game history – its totemic status, its reach, its influence – mean that every game that comes after it is, in some regard, built in its image. In a sense, Halo is the monomyth, the root of the well. There are times when playing Halo feels like playing the idea of a video game. Partly this is my own intrusive autobiography: Halo came out when I was a kid, and it’s one of the first games I played – so of course I imbue it with this sort of ur-status. At the same time, it does have this incredibly influential position in video game history, especially as the most successful title for Microsoft’s first console. Also, thirdly (and for our purposes most importantly), its narrative structure lends itself to a quasi-spiritual reading. The opposing forces in Halo are themed around body and soul: the earthy human United Nations Space Command (UNSC) are decked out in green and brown, while the ethereal Covenant are purple and blue. The UNSC have weapons based around kinetic energy – frag grenades and rocket launchers – while the Covenant have swords made of light and plasma grenades that burn with blue fire. The Covenant vehicles are all named after types of spirit (Wraiths, Banshees, Ghosts), while the UNSC vehicles are animals (Warthogs, Pelicans, the Scorpion battle tank). Even the name – Covenant – is itself a religious word, referring to the agreement between Abraham and God.

The game can thus be read as a cosmic battle between body and soul, between primal forces of the human self. Its tone shuttles back and forth between low humour and soft ghostliness. The UNSC (modelled closely on the USMC) have a sort of 1990s aw-shucks, yee-ha energy. When hit, Marines shout things like “Aw man!” or “Ay! The burn!” Under friendly fire, it’s “Hey, do I owe you money?” After clearing an area of Covenant, Marines will occasionally pour a few extra rounds into enemy corpses – “Yep. He’s dead.” The comedy aspects are firmly in the vein of that 90s ‘yowser!’ style. One marine can be heard to bellow at the Covenant “I would’ve been your daddy, but the dog beat me over the fence!” That coarse earthy nature is contrasted against the exotic mystery of the Covenant and the Halo installation. The overtly spiritual naming was a novelty to an audience that increasingly felt it was leaving religion in the past. Decorative markings on the Covenant ships evoke Aztec patterns, and their vehicles often make the sound of a high, whistling wind. The Covenant races speak in alien tongues – completely foreign, but clear enough in their intent. Their meaning is often felt rather than translated. The enemies who do use English, the Grunts, are notably the lowest forms among the Covenant. They are the most comprehensible, the funniest, the silliest race: symbolically they are closest to humanity, and correspondingly lowest among the spiritual hierarchy of the Covenant.

The battle between body and soul plays out tonally, then, in the tension between these awe-inspiring or sublime moments set against the low, earthy humour of the Marines. The tone is raised up and knocked down in a series of alternating movements – in the sublime-horror recording found at the first encounter with the Flood, for example, contrasted against Sgt Johnson shouting at his Marines to hurry up: “The Core ain’t paying us by the hour!” That thematic conflict also, obviously, plays out practically in the war between humanity and the Covenant. The Covenant, a religious sect, seek to activate the Halo installation as their promised path to Paradise. Humanity learns that activating the Halo installation will extinguish all life in the galaxy, and try to stop them. Halo is concerned with two interpretations of the same event – with the conflicting lenses of secular humans and the exotic religion of dangerous aliens. That framing of course took on unexpected cultural resonance when the game launched immediately after 9/11. On a higher level, however, the game’s basic political conflict is overshadowed by the existential threat of the Flood. The conflict between the UNSC and the Covenant is functionally a conflict between nations or states, between interplanetary governments. It is a battle over the right to rule. That regional political conflict is overshadowed by the discovery of the Flood, a catastrophic galaxy-ending threat, and the absurdly destructive power of the Halo installation, designed (and used) by previous species as a countermeasure. Halo essentially trades up its plot, replacing the material question of political governance with the existential threat of Halo and the Flood. The player is raised from the weeds of regional strife to consider the fate of the universe – perhaps not quite a shift between body and soul, but between local factional concerns and existential, trans-species considerations. The tensions between body and soul are here complicated again, woven into each other. The Covenant, operating under a spiritual lens, try to activate Halo, believing it will usher them into the afterlife. Humans try to stop them, but cannot communicate the actual practical implications of the Halo ring. There is no bridge between body and soul – except in the Master Chief, the game’s main character.

Master Chief represents the merging of both body and soul in a single character. On a very practical gameplay level, that merging is represented by his health bar: like all human characters, he has his normal, regular health (represented by a red health bar), but he also has a shield (represented by a spiritual blue overlay). Health must be healed by a medpack or some other material means, while the shield (spiritual, abstract, ethereal) recharges on its own. In terms of narrative, Master Chief is elevated above normal humans. He is a super-soldier, genetically modified and lifted above the level of the ordinary person. He’s still silly, sometimes (as when he deliberately crashes his ship to spite his onboard AI Cortana), but he commands the respect and awe of his human compatriots. He is the only one able to unify these different elements. The Covenant are too spiritual, concerned with the next world without understanding the one they currently inhabit. The humans, meanwhile, are focused on the immediacies of the war. Their view is too low. They arrive at the Halo ring accidentally, not knowing what it means. They have no particular history or ambition, no mythology of the gods. Master Chief has to learn the significance of Halo and the Flood before he can start to intervene.  Thus the arc of his hero’s journey. He leaves his home and descends onto the ring. He travels to its center, to its underworld, and discovers something horrific. Then he rises, repeating many of the earlier levels in a reverse order. He escapes the Flood’s chamber by retracing the route he took to get down there, and later sneaks onto The Truth and Reconciliation a second time in an attempt to rescue his captain. He ultimately escapes on the ship he came in on, rising from the ring and completing the hero’s journey, the thematic cycle of descent and ascension.

Much of Halo’s significance can be attributed to accidents of place and time. It was the flagship of the first Microsoft console at the start of the modern era of video games. It was also a game about religious aliens fighting an imagined US space-military that landed less than two months after 9/11. At the same time, those historical accidents correspond to deliberate narrative choices. Much of Halo’s success is owed to its religious imagery, and its archetypal hero’s journey. It is a coherent exploration of the tension between body and soul, between who we are today and who we are in eternity. It’s cosmic in scope, but also mythological, telling a story in the oldest style with our newest medium. All of these elements cohere to make it the herald of the video game form across the next twenty-five years and beyond.